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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>British “Democracy” in India – An Eyewitness Report</h1>
<h4>An Uncensored, Exclusive Story of War Conditions<br>
An American Seaman Tells Sights of Recent Trip</h4>
<h3>(May 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_18" target="new">Vol. V No. 18</a>, 3 May 1941, pp. 4 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><small><strong>For many months, British imperialism has imposed an almost impenetrable censorship over all news from India. Occasionally some brief dispatch from India appears in the American press, with the obvious imprint of the official British propaganda ministry. “All’s well,” cries the British government. “The Indian peoples are giving loyal support to the Empire’s war efforts.”</strong></small></p>
<p><small><strong>American foreign news commentators, such as Ludwig Lore of the <em>New York Post</em>, have been supplying the American people with “interpretive” analyses of what goes on in India behind the black veil of British censorship. Their analyses show a striking conformity with British government press releases, whose “optimism” grows as their “facts” shrink.</strong></small></p>
<p><small><strong>What is the truth about India? The <em>Militant</em> herewith presents the first eye-witness account to appear in the American labor press of what has been happening since the war in the greatest colony of the British Empire, where over 350,000,000 human beings are preparing to cast off the British Imperial bondage which they have suffered for three centuries.</strong></small></p>
<p><small><strong>The giver of the interview is a young American sailor who has just returned after a five months voyage to the Far East on an American freighter delivering supplies to the Burma Road at Rangoon. He spent a month visiting the principal cities and ports in India.</strong></small></p>
<p><small><strong>He observed India with a fresh and clear eye, with class-conscious understanding. This sympathy combined with a friendly and agreeable personality enabled him to meet many Indian natives – workers, students, soldiers – and to penetrate their reticence toward all foreigners, particularly those whom they have reason to suspect might be friendly toward the British rulers.</strong></small></p>
<p><small><strong>No one observer in a month can hope to catch more than the minutest segment of India. Bearing this in mind, the reader will nevertheless appreciate his account as an authentic clue to the present mood of the Indian masses.</strong></small></p>
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<p class="quoteb"><em>“If I were to give one general impression about my experiences in India, I would say: ‘This is the horrors of war, without the war.’ This thought persisted in my mind wherever I went in Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta. It was like looking at some scene of war refugees, starving, homeless, diseased. Only there Has been no war. No bombed buildings, no wreckage, no burnt homes. It’s just, how shall I explain it – as if some terrible war had passed over the country sparing everything but the people themselves.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">For a moment, the young seaman paused. A shadow seemed to pass over his face; his eyes looked off into space. He was staring back through time at unforgettable experiences.</p>
<p>At another point in the interview, he stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You know, whenever I’d get in with one of the natives – of course, after I’d broken down his natural suspicions – and we’d get on the question of the war, sooner or later I’d have the same question popped at me: ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated?’<br>
</p>
<h4>Natives Anti-British but Not Pro-Hitler</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“It’s not that they’re pro-Hitler, or anything like that. When I asked one friendly native soldier if they weren’t afraid of what would happen to them under Hitler, he just slowly swung his arms out and said softly, but with such bitterness ... ‘Look at us ...’ It was all he could say, ‘Look at us ...’ What he meant was that nothing could be worse than what they were already suffering.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“I got the impression that Hitler is something too far away from their present misery. He just doesn’t concern them. I can’t say how wide-spread the feeling is, but I came away from India with the notion that they would welcome a military defeat of Britain for one reason – it would be an opportunity for them to drive out the British and gain their independence.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>”If We Only Had Arms ...”</h4>
<p class="fst">At a further point in his narrative, the young sailor supported his impression about the widespread desire among the people of India for a British defeat by recalling that on different occasions he had heard the wish expressed among groups of workers, “If we only had arms ...”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When I heard a worker say this in Karachi, our first stop in India, I thought it might be just an isolated sentiment. But I heard it in Bombay and again in Calcutta. And always the same words, ‘If we only had arms ...’ A weakened British army and arms for themselves. That’s what many of them seem to be thinking about – and planning about.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>The speaker then told of meeting a group of workers in Bombay whose complete confidence he managed to secure. A leader of these workers in greatest secrecy drew for him a rough map of the surrounding section of the country, marking the points of British troop concentrations and arms stores. “He burned it up again on the spot. I never saw such longing in any man’s face as when he said to me, ‘If we only had arms... If we only had arms.’”</em></p>
<p>The interview with the young seaman had started in the customary fashion, with the reporter asking questions about the trip – the ship, the cargo, the length of time at sea, the ports where they stopped, how long the sailors had leave at each port, etc.</p>
<p>He had shipped on a large freighter out of New York last November. It was his first trip to the Far East. They were at sea for 31 days before docking at Capetown, Union of South Africa After only 12 hours ashore, the continued their trip around the Cape of Good Hope. They ploughed through the Indian Ocean for another 22 days, hitting Karachi, India, for their next stop.<br>
</p>
<h4>Conditions in Karachi</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Karachi was quite a shock to me. It was only after I saw Bombay and Calcutta that I realized^ that Karachi was quite a decent place by comparison.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“The first thing I noticed when we docked was the condition of the native longshoremen who came aboard the ship. They seemed so thin and scrawny that I wondered how they could lift the heavy loads they had to carry. They wore nothing but loin cloths – no shoes. I guess they have tough feet, but I couldn’t imagine an American longshoreman working around lumber and heavy steel cargo without heavy shoes and clothing for protection.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“We had two days ashore. I’ve seen some of the foulest East Side slums and been down around the Negro quarters in Baltimore and Washington. But the worst in America couldn’t equal this. The natives live in tiny shacks, some of rotted wood, others just weeds. Whole families – and several families live in a shack about ten feet square. Ten and 15 persons sleep together on the ground in one shack. Here I got my first smell of India – that mixture of dirt, dung, crowded bodies and rotted flesh, diseased or dead. And the beggars! But that was nothing in Karachi! Wait until I tell you about Bombay and Calcutta.</p>
<p class="quote">“I was taken through one area of a few square blocks in Karachi which I was told housed more people than the rest of the city. After one trip through that particular area, I was convinced that this was true.</p>
<p class="quote">“But remember that conditions in Karachi are far better than in the rest of India. It’s a comparatively new city being built up as a port. Many British officials have built palatial homes on the city outskirts.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Bombay Crowded with Beggars</h4>
<p class="fst">At this point, he seemed so anxious to tell about Bombay and Calcutta, the two chief cities of India, that the reporter switched the question’s over to his experiences in these two ports.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Bombay was our next stop. Bombay! That’s where you’ll see a real example of the true conditions in India. The first thing that hit me were the large troops of beggars everywhere. They reminded me of human beings out of a nightmare. They were in every condition of disease and disfigurement. Many seemed to be in the last stages of starvation dying on their feet. Many bore the open sores of terrible contagious diseases, small pox and, especially, leprosy. You could see their bodies rotting away. The British government does nothing to help them. Human life is the cheapest thing in India. I shall never forget the feeling of horror I had the first time a pitiful leprous beggar came up begging for an anna (2 cents American) and touched me with his hand.</p>
<p class="quote">“Here I saw tens of thousands of people, whole families, who had no homes but the streets. They sleep in the streets, amongst incredible filth. They have no place else to go, and the British haven’t got around to giving them such benefits of civilization as street cleaning departments and sewage. They lie uncovered in the streets. I saw only a few who managed to get hold of some old rag or cloth to cover themselves with. Most of the men have only a loin cloth covering. Children up to 12 go naked. I frequently saw little infants playing in the gutters amidst mud and manure. This is typical. Tens of millions live like this throughout India. It’s the normal thing. Every other native one passes on the streets seems to have the obvious signs of disease. Nine out of ten have the physical marks of acute hunger – from the emaciation of continuous undernourishment to the last stages of outright starvation.”</p>
<p class="fst">It was at this point that the speaker used the expression, “like refugees in a war zone – but worse.” He broke in with an observation summing up his entire impression.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“I’ve tried to do some reading. I’ve read some of Trotsky’s writings. I remember he once wrote about fascism being an attempt to organize the misery of the people. Well, I got the feeling that the British in India can’t do even this. The poverty just spills over into the streets like pus from a running sore.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Riots and Revolts Suppressed</h4>
<p class="fst">Was there any resistance to the British now? Did he have a chance to talk with any industrial workers in Bombay?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I had the luck to meet a British dock official who came aboard our ship in Bombay. I managed to get him to open up to me a little, although I had to be very cautious in asking him any questions. American sailors are watched very closely. The British know how well organized and how militant the American seamen are. He told me that just recently – that would be about three months ago now – there had been virtual civil war in a town north of Bombay, “uncontrollable riots” he called it. British Militia, which are mainly English troops – they don’t trust native soldiers for jobs like this – took four days to suppress the revolt using all the modern paraphernalia of war, including artillery. He said there were only 40,000 people involved.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“It immediately occurred to me what a job it would be for the British to suppress a revolution of 350,000,000 people, if it took four days for trained troops with machine guns and artillery to subdue 40,000 practically unarmed people. Incidentally, all news of this was suppressed within India itself. It’s hard to say how many similar incidents have occurred that we cannot learn about.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Workers Receptive to Revolutionary Ideas</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Another piece of luck I had was to get in with a group of workers employed at a big printing plant in Bombay. After we talked for a while, and they became assured of my sympathy for them and their fight against British imperialism, they eagerly asked me all sorts of questions about the American workers. I told them some of the things I knew about the labor and radical movements in America. When I mentioned, among other groups, the Trotskyites, they shot questions at me through a couple of workers who spoke English and acted as interpreters. It turned out that they were extremely receptive to revolutionary ideas, and, in fact, volunteered the information that they themselves were preparing for a revolutionary situation in India which they were certain was going to come soon.</p>
<p class="quote">“It was during this conversation that I again heard the question which I first heard in Karachi, ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated?’ They hastened to assure me that this implied no sympathy with Hitler, but ‘we are unarmed ...’ and they felt that a decisive military defeat for Britain would accelerate their own struggle for freedom.<br>
</p>
<h4>Underground Movements Thrive</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“It was during this conversation that I first learned of the many underground political groupings that are growing throughout India. Many of these groups believe in socialism. Most of them are becoming convinced that the British will be driven out of India only by forceful means. All of them are for national independence and. don’t want any part of the British rulers’ war.</p>
<p class="quote">“The printing plant workers were particularly pleased when I explained what I knew of the Trotskyist international outlook. When I mentioned the fact that I believed that if a workers revolution developed in America the American workers would do everything possible to aid their Indian brothers, their faces lighted up. They were so glad to hear about support for themselves in other countries. They are so isolated from the outside world, that they have felt all alone in their struggles. They did not even know up to then that an international revolutionary movement existed. After this, they displayed an almost touching effort to show their appreciation of my news by offering me little services, bringing me coffee, a chair, posting a look-out for the ‘dicks’ who infest the sections around plants and spy on every little grouping of workers.</p>
<p class="quote">“They did know a little about the Stalinists, but said the Stalinists were mainly among the students and had very little connections with the workers and the general masses. They also informed me that strikes were continuously breaking out among the various sections of the workers in Bombay, and that these strikes were bitterly fought and suppressed with much bloodshed. I was able to confirm this by a daily reading of the British papers. Every day I would see some obscure paragraph about 20 workers being killed, 30 workers being killed, in some ‘disorders.’ That’s all it would say. They don’t bother to mention the number injured.<br>
</p>
<h4>British Graft</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“There was one incident in Bombay that gave me a real idea of the graft and exploitation that operates against the Indian people. Some of the sailors from our ship wanted a day’s shore leave and were permitted to hire native longshoremen in their place. The American sailors paid the longshoremen each a dollar a day. This is enormous pay in India, longshoremen usually get around 12 annas – 25 cents – for a twelve to 16 hour day. We later found out that the British port officials had grafted two-thirds of the money paid the longshoremen away from them. We were plenty burned up, but what could we do in a British port dealing with British officials whose whole system is one big graft from the ‘dirty beggars,’ which is what British officials term the natives on whose backs they live.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Life in Calcutta</h4>
<p class="fst">The main portion of the interview dealt with the young sailor’s two weeks in Calcutta, largest city in India.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Calcutta was the worst city of all. As we tied up in the mouth of the Ganges River, the first thing we saw were human bodies and dead cows floating down the river. All waste – including dead human beings – is thrown into this river, it seems. The corpse of a cow caught in our anchor chain, and we had a little trouble in freeing the chain. Then there were the vultures. They fly all over the city, circling above dead bodies. All the signs of death, the very smell of death hangs over this city. It is impossible to escape the terrible foul odor.</p>
<p class="quote">“The docks were swarming with beggars. I thought I had seen the worst in Bombay, but the human misery which crawled and dragged itself over the Calcutta docks was beyond description.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“And then I noticed that it wasn’t merely the beggars who were begging. The longshoremen who came aboard the boat also were furtively begging the American seamen for a cigarette or a spare anna. The longshoremen, mind you, are among the BETTER PAID workers of India!</em></p>
<p class="quote">“It wasn’t, lack of self-respect that drove these workers to beg even while they were working. I soon found that out. They had to work as long as 16 hours a day at inhuman physical labor for a few annas. Among these longshoremen I met educated men, white collar workers, college students. Their food was enough to make you heave up. All it was – or looked like – was a mixture of wormy rice and dirt.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“A crust of bread, I found out, was a luxury. These longshoremen used to hang around our mess-room eager for the scraps from our tables. A piece of the most rotten food dropped on the filth of a Calcutta street is snatched up in a second. The vultures haven’t a chance against human hunger.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“When we got shore leave, we began to get a real picture of Calcutta. As you head toward the. main center of town, the conditions get worse and worse. In the center of town we saw the most revolting sights. That is where they burn the dead bodies right out in public view. The burning ghats are all along the river bank. The air reeks with the smell of burning flesh.</p>
<p class="quote">“But then, this is the only measure of sanitation permitted the Indian people. At least cremation provides a sanitary means of disposing of the dead. And the death rate is enormous.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Blessings of British Civilization</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“British civilization – in Calcutta, a city of almost two million people – doesn’t even provide inspection of city water. Only in the few places where the British and the few native rich live is there purified water. Typhoid plagues are so common, the natives think nothing of it. Hundreds of thousands are wiped out each year in epidemics.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“There are beggars on every block, some obviously dying where they sit or lie. Mothers with infants appeal to you everywhere. I saw infants lying on the ground patting their swollen stomachs. And disease, sores, rotting flesh everywhere. Little naked children of one and two will toddle up to you and pat their stomachs and say the only words of English they have learned, ‘Me dirty beggar’. Dirty beggar! They don’t know what it means. But it’s the only English they have learned from the British.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“Everywhere we went, we were swamped by hordes of beggars, mostly women and children. They stopped our taxis and even the trolleys on which we rode. Once a group of us seamen riding in a cab were stopped for a matter of 10 minutes by about 50 to 60 hungry women and children. The ‘Bobbies’ broke it up finally – and they weren’t gentle about it.”<br>
</p>
<h4>British Police Abuse the Natives</h4>
<p class="fst">What was the outward attitude of the British officials and police to the natives? Was there much open, general physical cruelty?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I just scratched the surface. But what I saw on the streets of Calcutta with my own eyes was sufficient to make me understand why the Indian people don’t jump every time the British yell, ‘Hitler!’ I saw the way the police – mainly British – customarily treat the natives.</p>
<p class="quote">“I remember one incident particularly. A group of us sailors were walking along a main street through the market place. A miserable old beggar came up and begged for an anna. A British officer approached and without warning slammed the old fellow across the knee-caps with a heavy club. From the crack, I am sure the knee-caps were fractured. The old beggar staggered away. At a little distance, he stopped and muttered something in Hindustani at the cop. For me, the expression of hatred on that old beggar’s face was the symbol of all the faces in India.</p>
<p class="quote">“I noticed that the native passers-by were looking on. Their faces bore the same look as the beggar’s.</p>
<p class="quote">“That is the way the British police treat the natives everywhere. Aristocrats in big cars drive through the swarming streets, never slackening pace. If some poor soul is knocked down and injured, that’s his tough luck. And besides, he knows better than to complain to the police. The British rob the natives right and left. In a shop, a British official will name his price for an article. The shop-keeper will give it to him even if he loses money on the sale. He does not dare to argue. One of our boys got run in for being drunk, and later told us about what he saw at the police court. The arrested natives were openly kicked about and clubbed in the court room.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Universal Poverty and Filth</h4>
<p class="fst">What else about living conditions?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Well, as an example, the closer you get to the town center, the more people you see lying in the gutters. Tens of thousands of men, women and children have no homes but the streets. There are no sidewalks in many sections, just mud and filth, including animal and human dung. At times the streets are so packed with sleeping humans that a car cannot pass without running over them.</p>
<p class="quote">“Without an adequate water supply, no cleaning materials, the British being too cheap to provide even a semblance of municipal sanitation, the dirt and dust almost blinds and chokes you on certain streets. In the market places the food is handled with hands covered with filth. Food will pass through 20 different hands before it is finally bought. Cleanliness is secondary when poverty is so acute that the masses will shop around in a dozen places to get the best bargain for an anna.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Meets Longshoremen</h4>
<p class="fst">On one occasion, during his stay in Calcutta, he had the opportunity to speak to a group of 12 to 15 longshoremen on board the ship. This was while there was an absence of officers about. He discovered a couple of the workers who could understand English, and translated for the rest.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“After I had won their confidence, I asked them what they thought about unions. ‘Very good,’ I was told. They wanted to know about American unions, because their wages were so miserable compared to that of the lowest paid American seamen. When I described something of the American labor movement, they crowded around with eager attention. One of those who spoke English expressed the keen desire of the India workers to attain to some of the conditions of the American sailors. They look up to the American workers, with much respect.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“They then told me something of the workers organizations in India. Organization among certain groups of workers, including-the longshoremen, is illegal. Nevertheless, the workers maintain an illegal organization. The longshoremen have a tradition of militancy in struggle, and are particularly suppressed by the British authorities, lest their struggles give an impulse to other workers.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“Among the jute and textile workers, there are legal unions, of rather semi-legal unions. Strikes are always breaking out. In Calcutta, as in Bombay, I was able to note in the British papers a hint of the continuous struggles taking place, despite the fact, as the longshoremen informed me, that strikes were very difficult to conduct at this time. All strikes are immediately physically suppressed. The strikers are shot down without mercy. Thousands are thrown into jail, from which they are lucky ever to come out alive. The British authorities impose 10 to 20 years at hard labor just for striking.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“A few lines at the bottom of a Calcutta, newspaper will tell that so many and so many were killed in a strike yesterday. One day I read in such a brief and casual item, of over 100 workers being killed. But the papers never mentioned anything about unions or give details.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“When I told the longshoremen that the time would come when the American workers would be able to help them in their struggles, they became very excited and enthusiastic. They stated that they were very anxious to get the aid of the American sailors and hoped that we would bring back to the American workers word of their conditions and struggles.</p>
<p class="quote">“They were all bitterly opposed to the war and to aiding the British government’s war efforts. I found this same sentiment everywhere I went, incidentally. All the enthusiasm for the war was in the controlled press. But nowhere else. The papers were carrying big ads for recruits to the army, but I heard that the results were very meager. Among all types of native peoples whom I met, from many different stations of life, I got the same response on my questions about the war. They didn’t want any part of it. I wouldn’t want to be a British official in India when the natives start demonstrating in earnest their ‘loyalty’ to the government.<br>
</p>
<h4>Opposed to War</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“From these same longshoremen I heard some significant political remarks. They seemed to feel that there was a tremendous, leftward tendency taking place in India. They stated flatly that only force would drive the British out. I asked about Ghandi. They declared, that he was losing much support among his followers. They said he was getting rich in the pay of the British. I cannot tell how widespread this idea is, but other workers I spoke to had the same viewpoint.</p>
<p class="quote">“In reference to Ghandi and the native capitalists he represents, who have aided the British in maintaining their rule, one of the longshoremen said, ‘You American workers have only one club to dodge. We have two.’ By that he meant the native and foreign exploiters combined.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Talks with Army Officer</h4>
<p class="fst">The, young sailor then related a conversation that he had accidentally struck up with a native dock official. The official was a Mohammedan and a lieutenant in the army. He was well-dressed, but was paid only one-third as much as ordinary American seamen, although he held the highest army post open to natives of India.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I soon discovered that he was an ardent nationalist and hated the British. When I told him of my own international outlook and my sympathies with the Indian independence movement, he expressed deep appreciation.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Then he told me his ideas, which amazed me, coming as they did from an army officer in the pay of the British. ‘There is no reason for this, appalling misery,’ he told me. ‘We have all the natural resources to become a great industrial country. But India can only develop after she has won her independence. In the last few years in particular, there has been little industrial development. The British have strangled it. The British say that if they left the country the Mohammedans and Hindus would turn the country into a shambles in a religious war. This is an outright lie. The British themselves are deliberately stirring up conflict between the two native groups. But we should unite. That is our only solution. Why – when we are all one in this filth and misery – should we not unite against those who strangle us both?’”</em></p>
<p class="quote">“I don’t imagine the British regard the native soldier-recruits with too much trust. I’ve told you about this high-ranking native officer. I occasionally witnessed native soldiers marching by. They were invariably led by British officers on horseback. I managed a brief conversation with a couple of native soldiers on guard near the docks. I found out they were very dissatisfied with their pay – $4 or $5 a month.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Feelings of British Seamen</h4>
<p class="fst">He recalled an interesting meeting with some British seamen off a captured French freighter.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“They had been having a pretty tough time of it. They asked us for hand-outs and spare cigarettes. I saw them pick up our discarded cigarette butts. They have been receiving as little as $20 a month pay. Although many of them are married, they get scarcely any news from home, and some of them have been away from their homes for three and four years. They have to send every penny of their pittance home, and have nothing for themselves.</p>
<p class="quote">“These British seamen told us that, there have been strikes on a number of British boats. In at least one instance, the government sent out a battleship which took over an entire ship. The leaders or ‘trouble-makers’ were shot. Other seamen were given 10 year prison sentences at hard labor.</p>
<p class="quote">“They were eager to trade ideas with us. They wanted to know all about the war bonuses which the American union seamen are getting for travelling in the war zone. They were astounded to learn that we were getting three times as much regular pay sis they. They wanted to see Hitter defeated, but they expressed quite bitter hatred for their own capitalists. They mentioned the huge profits the British corporations were making out of the war sacrifices of the common people. They were particularly angry about the taxes, and spoke of the 101 different taxes on food, etc. ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>Trotskyism in India</h4>
<p class="fst">Did he come across any evidences of an international revolutionary sentiment in India?</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“My impression was that there was no centralized or leading revolutionary organization at present in India. But there was a general revolutionary sentiment which would enable such an organization to grow very quickly.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“I did manage to meet several professed Trotskyists, but under circumstances which do not permit me to disclose any details. Suffice to say, there are Fourth Internationalists in India.</p>
<p class="quote">“I did notice, both in Bombay and Calcutta, that Trotsky’s works, particularly his <strong>History of the Russian Revolution</strong> were widely displayed in the book shops. I went into one Calcutta book-shop and asked the dealer if he had any other Trotsky works beside the <strong>History</strong>. He showed met a couple of others. Then he said that he had heard that Trotsky’s last book, on Stalin, was coming out soon, and that he had received many inquiries about it. While he was telling me this, several others in the store gathered around us and began asking when the <strong>Stalin</strong> book would be available.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Attitude Toward Indian National Congress</h4>
<p class="fst">What had he been able to learn about the Indian National Congress?</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Congress now represents; the small group of native bourgeoisie almost exclusively. And these feel more in a blind alley than during the last war. All their old privileges are being taken away, because the British no longer have any confidence in the native bourgeois leader’s ability to stem the tide of revolt. I did not come across any signs of enthusiasm for this group. Their only sign of protest at the treatment they are now being given by the British rulers is to resign, from the National Congress. But they are a miserable lot. Even when they resign, they take pains to make it clear to the masses that their actions are not to be misunderstood as suggestions for mass revolt. No one has confidence in the British promises any longer. In fact, I learned that, the papers which used to play up the British promises, don’t bother to mention them any more. The British no longer make promises anyway.</p>
<p class="quote">“I’ll tell you one thing about the people of India, though. They hate the British rule with an everlasting hate. You can feel it like a live thing in the air. I felt it by indirection, just as a foreigner, even when I was buying something at some small street store. Until I let my sympathies be known, that is.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Everywhere you go, you hear the British referred to as ‘gonametika’ – that’s as close as I can get to the Hindu word. It means ‘bastard’, – with special trimmings. I hear shop-keepers, workers, beggars refer to the British as ‘British pigs.’ I didn’t hear anything about ‘loyalty’ to the British Empire. But I did hear, wherever I went, such sentiments as these: ‘Now is the time’, and ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated’, and ‘If we only had arms ...’”</em></p>
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British “Democracy” in India – An Eyewitness Report
An Uncensored, Exclusive Story of War Conditions
An American Seaman Tells Sights of Recent Trip
(May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 18, 3 May 1941, pp. 4 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
For many months, British imperialism has imposed an almost impenetrable censorship over all news from India. Occasionally some brief dispatch from India appears in the American press, with the obvious imprint of the official British propaganda ministry. “All’s well,” cries the British government. “The Indian peoples are giving loyal support to the Empire’s war efforts.”
American foreign news commentators, such as Ludwig Lore of the New York Post, have been supplying the American people with “interpretive” analyses of what goes on in India behind the black veil of British censorship. Their analyses show a striking conformity with British government press releases, whose “optimism” grows as their “facts” shrink.
What is the truth about India? The Militant herewith presents the first eye-witness account to appear in the American labor press of what has been happening since the war in the greatest colony of the British Empire, where over 350,000,000 human beings are preparing to cast off the British Imperial bondage which they have suffered for three centuries.
The giver of the interview is a young American sailor who has just returned after a five months voyage to the Far East on an American freighter delivering supplies to the Burma Road at Rangoon. He spent a month visiting the principal cities and ports in India.
He observed India with a fresh and clear eye, with class-conscious understanding. This sympathy combined with a friendly and agreeable personality enabled him to meet many Indian natives – workers, students, soldiers – and to penetrate their reticence toward all foreigners, particularly those whom they have reason to suspect might be friendly toward the British rulers.
No one observer in a month can hope to catch more than the minutest segment of India. Bearing this in mind, the reader will nevertheless appreciate his account as an authentic clue to the present mood of the Indian masses.
“If I were to give one general impression about my experiences in India, I would say: ‘This is the horrors of war, without the war.’ This thought persisted in my mind wherever I went in Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta. It was like looking at some scene of war refugees, starving, homeless, diseased. Only there Has been no war. No bombed buildings, no wreckage, no burnt homes. It’s just, how shall I explain it – as if some terrible war had passed over the country sparing everything but the people themselves.”
For a moment, the young seaman paused. A shadow seemed to pass over his face; his eyes looked off into space. He was staring back through time at unforgettable experiences.
At another point in the interview, he stated:
“You know, whenever I’d get in with one of the natives – of course, after I’d broken down his natural suspicions – and we’d get on the question of the war, sooner or later I’d have the same question popped at me: ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated?’
Natives Anti-British but Not Pro-Hitler
“It’s not that they’re pro-Hitler, or anything like that. When I asked one friendly native soldier if they weren’t afraid of what would happen to them under Hitler, he just slowly swung his arms out and said softly, but with such bitterness ... ‘Look at us ...’ It was all he could say, ‘Look at us ...’ What he meant was that nothing could be worse than what they were already suffering.
“I got the impression that Hitler is something too far away from their present misery. He just doesn’t concern them. I can’t say how wide-spread the feeling is, but I came away from India with the notion that they would welcome a military defeat of Britain for one reason – it would be an opportunity for them to drive out the British and gain their independence.”
”If We Only Had Arms ...”
At a further point in his narrative, the young sailor supported his impression about the widespread desire among the people of India for a British defeat by recalling that on different occasions he had heard the wish expressed among groups of workers, “If we only had arms ...”
“When I heard a worker say this in Karachi, our first stop in India, I thought it might be just an isolated sentiment. But I heard it in Bombay and again in Calcutta. And always the same words, ‘If we only had arms ...’ A weakened British army and arms for themselves. That’s what many of them seem to be thinking about – and planning about.”
The speaker then told of meeting a group of workers in Bombay whose complete confidence he managed to secure. A leader of these workers in greatest secrecy drew for him a rough map of the surrounding section of the country, marking the points of British troop concentrations and arms stores. “He burned it up again on the spot. I never saw such longing in any man’s face as when he said to me, ‘If we only had arms... If we only had arms.’”
The interview with the young seaman had started in the customary fashion, with the reporter asking questions about the trip – the ship, the cargo, the length of time at sea, the ports where they stopped, how long the sailors had leave at each port, etc.
He had shipped on a large freighter out of New York last November. It was his first trip to the Far East. They were at sea for 31 days before docking at Capetown, Union of South Africa After only 12 hours ashore, the continued their trip around the Cape of Good Hope. They ploughed through the Indian Ocean for another 22 days, hitting Karachi, India, for their next stop.
Conditions in Karachi
“Karachi was quite a shock to me. It was only after I saw Bombay and Calcutta that I realized^ that Karachi was quite a decent place by comparison.
“The first thing I noticed when we docked was the condition of the native longshoremen who came aboard the ship. They seemed so thin and scrawny that I wondered how they could lift the heavy loads they had to carry. They wore nothing but loin cloths – no shoes. I guess they have tough feet, but I couldn’t imagine an American longshoreman working around lumber and heavy steel cargo without heavy shoes and clothing for protection.
“We had two days ashore. I’ve seen some of the foulest East Side slums and been down around the Negro quarters in Baltimore and Washington. But the worst in America couldn’t equal this. The natives live in tiny shacks, some of rotted wood, others just weeds. Whole families – and several families live in a shack about ten feet square. Ten and 15 persons sleep together on the ground in one shack. Here I got my first smell of India – that mixture of dirt, dung, crowded bodies and rotted flesh, diseased or dead. And the beggars! But that was nothing in Karachi! Wait until I tell you about Bombay and Calcutta.
“I was taken through one area of a few square blocks in Karachi which I was told housed more people than the rest of the city. After one trip through that particular area, I was convinced that this was true.
“But remember that conditions in Karachi are far better than in the rest of India. It’s a comparatively new city being built up as a port. Many British officials have built palatial homes on the city outskirts.”
Bombay Crowded with Beggars
At this point, he seemed so anxious to tell about Bombay and Calcutta, the two chief cities of India, that the reporter switched the question’s over to his experiences in these two ports.
“Bombay was our next stop. Bombay! That’s where you’ll see a real example of the true conditions in India. The first thing that hit me were the large troops of beggars everywhere. They reminded me of human beings out of a nightmare. They were in every condition of disease and disfigurement. Many seemed to be in the last stages of starvation dying on their feet. Many bore the open sores of terrible contagious diseases, small pox and, especially, leprosy. You could see their bodies rotting away. The British government does nothing to help them. Human life is the cheapest thing in India. I shall never forget the feeling of horror I had the first time a pitiful leprous beggar came up begging for an anna (2 cents American) and touched me with his hand.
“Here I saw tens of thousands of people, whole families, who had no homes but the streets. They sleep in the streets, amongst incredible filth. They have no place else to go, and the British haven’t got around to giving them such benefits of civilization as street cleaning departments and sewage. They lie uncovered in the streets. I saw only a few who managed to get hold of some old rag or cloth to cover themselves with. Most of the men have only a loin cloth covering. Children up to 12 go naked. I frequently saw little infants playing in the gutters amidst mud and manure. This is typical. Tens of millions live like this throughout India. It’s the normal thing. Every other native one passes on the streets seems to have the obvious signs of disease. Nine out of ten have the physical marks of acute hunger – from the emaciation of continuous undernourishment to the last stages of outright starvation.”
It was at this point that the speaker used the expression, “like refugees in a war zone – but worse.” He broke in with an observation summing up his entire impression.
“I’ve tried to do some reading. I’ve read some of Trotsky’s writings. I remember he once wrote about fascism being an attempt to organize the misery of the people. Well, I got the feeling that the British in India can’t do even this. The poverty just spills over into the streets like pus from a running sore.”
Riots and Revolts Suppressed
Was there any resistance to the British now? Did he have a chance to talk with any industrial workers in Bombay?
“I had the luck to meet a British dock official who came aboard our ship in Bombay. I managed to get him to open up to me a little, although I had to be very cautious in asking him any questions. American sailors are watched very closely. The British know how well organized and how militant the American seamen are. He told me that just recently – that would be about three months ago now – there had been virtual civil war in a town north of Bombay, “uncontrollable riots” he called it. British Militia, which are mainly English troops – they don’t trust native soldiers for jobs like this – took four days to suppress the revolt using all the modern paraphernalia of war, including artillery. He said there were only 40,000 people involved.
“It immediately occurred to me what a job it would be for the British to suppress a revolution of 350,000,000 people, if it took four days for trained troops with machine guns and artillery to subdue 40,000 practically unarmed people. Incidentally, all news of this was suppressed within India itself. It’s hard to say how many similar incidents have occurred that we cannot learn about.
Workers Receptive to Revolutionary Ideas
“Another piece of luck I had was to get in with a group of workers employed at a big printing plant in Bombay. After we talked for a while, and they became assured of my sympathy for them and their fight against British imperialism, they eagerly asked me all sorts of questions about the American workers. I told them some of the things I knew about the labor and radical movements in America. When I mentioned, among other groups, the Trotskyites, they shot questions at me through a couple of workers who spoke English and acted as interpreters. It turned out that they were extremely receptive to revolutionary ideas, and, in fact, volunteered the information that they themselves were preparing for a revolutionary situation in India which they were certain was going to come soon.
“It was during this conversation that I again heard the question which I first heard in Karachi, ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated?’ They hastened to assure me that this implied no sympathy with Hitler, but ‘we are unarmed ...’ and they felt that a decisive military defeat for Britain would accelerate their own struggle for freedom.
Underground Movements Thrive
“It was during this conversation that I first learned of the many underground political groupings that are growing throughout India. Many of these groups believe in socialism. Most of them are becoming convinced that the British will be driven out of India only by forceful means. All of them are for national independence and. don’t want any part of the British rulers’ war.
“The printing plant workers were particularly pleased when I explained what I knew of the Trotskyist international outlook. When I mentioned the fact that I believed that if a workers revolution developed in America the American workers would do everything possible to aid their Indian brothers, their faces lighted up. They were so glad to hear about support for themselves in other countries. They are so isolated from the outside world, that they have felt all alone in their struggles. They did not even know up to then that an international revolutionary movement existed. After this, they displayed an almost touching effort to show their appreciation of my news by offering me little services, bringing me coffee, a chair, posting a look-out for the ‘dicks’ who infest the sections around plants and spy on every little grouping of workers.
“They did know a little about the Stalinists, but said the Stalinists were mainly among the students and had very little connections with the workers and the general masses. They also informed me that strikes were continuously breaking out among the various sections of the workers in Bombay, and that these strikes were bitterly fought and suppressed with much bloodshed. I was able to confirm this by a daily reading of the British papers. Every day I would see some obscure paragraph about 20 workers being killed, 30 workers being killed, in some ‘disorders.’ That’s all it would say. They don’t bother to mention the number injured.
British Graft
“There was one incident in Bombay that gave me a real idea of the graft and exploitation that operates against the Indian people. Some of the sailors from our ship wanted a day’s shore leave and were permitted to hire native longshoremen in their place. The American sailors paid the longshoremen each a dollar a day. This is enormous pay in India, longshoremen usually get around 12 annas – 25 cents – for a twelve to 16 hour day. We later found out that the British port officials had grafted two-thirds of the money paid the longshoremen away from them. We were plenty burned up, but what could we do in a British port dealing with British officials whose whole system is one big graft from the ‘dirty beggars,’ which is what British officials term the natives on whose backs they live.”
Life in Calcutta
The main portion of the interview dealt with the young sailor’s two weeks in Calcutta, largest city in India.
“Calcutta was the worst city of all. As we tied up in the mouth of the Ganges River, the first thing we saw were human bodies and dead cows floating down the river. All waste – including dead human beings – is thrown into this river, it seems. The corpse of a cow caught in our anchor chain, and we had a little trouble in freeing the chain. Then there were the vultures. They fly all over the city, circling above dead bodies. All the signs of death, the very smell of death hangs over this city. It is impossible to escape the terrible foul odor.
“The docks were swarming with beggars. I thought I had seen the worst in Bombay, but the human misery which crawled and dragged itself over the Calcutta docks was beyond description.
“And then I noticed that it wasn’t merely the beggars who were begging. The longshoremen who came aboard the boat also were furtively begging the American seamen for a cigarette or a spare anna. The longshoremen, mind you, are among the BETTER PAID workers of India!
“It wasn’t, lack of self-respect that drove these workers to beg even while they were working. I soon found that out. They had to work as long as 16 hours a day at inhuman physical labor for a few annas. Among these longshoremen I met educated men, white collar workers, college students. Their food was enough to make you heave up. All it was – or looked like – was a mixture of wormy rice and dirt.
“A crust of bread, I found out, was a luxury. These longshoremen used to hang around our mess-room eager for the scraps from our tables. A piece of the most rotten food dropped on the filth of a Calcutta street is snatched up in a second. The vultures haven’t a chance against human hunger.
“When we got shore leave, we began to get a real picture of Calcutta. As you head toward the. main center of town, the conditions get worse and worse. In the center of town we saw the most revolting sights. That is where they burn the dead bodies right out in public view. The burning ghats are all along the river bank. The air reeks with the smell of burning flesh.
“But then, this is the only measure of sanitation permitted the Indian people. At least cremation provides a sanitary means of disposing of the dead. And the death rate is enormous.
The Blessings of British Civilization
“British civilization – in Calcutta, a city of almost two million people – doesn’t even provide inspection of city water. Only in the few places where the British and the few native rich live is there purified water. Typhoid plagues are so common, the natives think nothing of it. Hundreds of thousands are wiped out each year in epidemics.
“There are beggars on every block, some obviously dying where they sit or lie. Mothers with infants appeal to you everywhere. I saw infants lying on the ground patting their swollen stomachs. And disease, sores, rotting flesh everywhere. Little naked children of one and two will toddle up to you and pat their stomachs and say the only words of English they have learned, ‘Me dirty beggar’. Dirty beggar! They don’t know what it means. But it’s the only English they have learned from the British.
“Everywhere we went, we were swamped by hordes of beggars, mostly women and children. They stopped our taxis and even the trolleys on which we rode. Once a group of us seamen riding in a cab were stopped for a matter of 10 minutes by about 50 to 60 hungry women and children. The ‘Bobbies’ broke it up finally – and they weren’t gentle about it.”
British Police Abuse the Natives
What was the outward attitude of the British officials and police to the natives? Was there much open, general physical cruelty?
“I just scratched the surface. But what I saw on the streets of Calcutta with my own eyes was sufficient to make me understand why the Indian people don’t jump every time the British yell, ‘Hitler!’ I saw the way the police – mainly British – customarily treat the natives.
“I remember one incident particularly. A group of us sailors were walking along a main street through the market place. A miserable old beggar came up and begged for an anna. A British officer approached and without warning slammed the old fellow across the knee-caps with a heavy club. From the crack, I am sure the knee-caps were fractured. The old beggar staggered away. At a little distance, he stopped and muttered something in Hindustani at the cop. For me, the expression of hatred on that old beggar’s face was the symbol of all the faces in India.
“I noticed that the native passers-by were looking on. Their faces bore the same look as the beggar’s.
“That is the way the British police treat the natives everywhere. Aristocrats in big cars drive through the swarming streets, never slackening pace. If some poor soul is knocked down and injured, that’s his tough luck. And besides, he knows better than to complain to the police. The British rob the natives right and left. In a shop, a British official will name his price for an article. The shop-keeper will give it to him even if he loses money on the sale. He does not dare to argue. One of our boys got run in for being drunk, and later told us about what he saw at the police court. The arrested natives were openly kicked about and clubbed in the court room.”
Universal Poverty and Filth
What else about living conditions?
“Well, as an example, the closer you get to the town center, the more people you see lying in the gutters. Tens of thousands of men, women and children have no homes but the streets. There are no sidewalks in many sections, just mud and filth, including animal and human dung. At times the streets are so packed with sleeping humans that a car cannot pass without running over them.
“Without an adequate water supply, no cleaning materials, the British being too cheap to provide even a semblance of municipal sanitation, the dirt and dust almost blinds and chokes you on certain streets. In the market places the food is handled with hands covered with filth. Food will pass through 20 different hands before it is finally bought. Cleanliness is secondary when poverty is so acute that the masses will shop around in a dozen places to get the best bargain for an anna.”
Meets Longshoremen
On one occasion, during his stay in Calcutta, he had the opportunity to speak to a group of 12 to 15 longshoremen on board the ship. This was while there was an absence of officers about. He discovered a couple of the workers who could understand English, and translated for the rest.
“After I had won their confidence, I asked them what they thought about unions. ‘Very good,’ I was told. They wanted to know about American unions, because their wages were so miserable compared to that of the lowest paid American seamen. When I described something of the American labor movement, they crowded around with eager attention. One of those who spoke English expressed the keen desire of the India workers to attain to some of the conditions of the American sailors. They look up to the American workers, with much respect.
“They then told me something of the workers organizations in India. Organization among certain groups of workers, including-the longshoremen, is illegal. Nevertheless, the workers maintain an illegal organization. The longshoremen have a tradition of militancy in struggle, and are particularly suppressed by the British authorities, lest their struggles give an impulse to other workers.
“Among the jute and textile workers, there are legal unions, of rather semi-legal unions. Strikes are always breaking out. In Calcutta, as in Bombay, I was able to note in the British papers a hint of the continuous struggles taking place, despite the fact, as the longshoremen informed me, that strikes were very difficult to conduct at this time. All strikes are immediately physically suppressed. The strikers are shot down without mercy. Thousands are thrown into jail, from which they are lucky ever to come out alive. The British authorities impose 10 to 20 years at hard labor just for striking.
“A few lines at the bottom of a Calcutta, newspaper will tell that so many and so many were killed in a strike yesterday. One day I read in such a brief and casual item, of over 100 workers being killed. But the papers never mentioned anything about unions or give details.
“When I told the longshoremen that the time would come when the American workers would be able to help them in their struggles, they became very excited and enthusiastic. They stated that they were very anxious to get the aid of the American sailors and hoped that we would bring back to the American workers word of their conditions and struggles.
“They were all bitterly opposed to the war and to aiding the British government’s war efforts. I found this same sentiment everywhere I went, incidentally. All the enthusiasm for the war was in the controlled press. But nowhere else. The papers were carrying big ads for recruits to the army, but I heard that the results were very meager. Among all types of native peoples whom I met, from many different stations of life, I got the same response on my questions about the war. They didn’t want any part of it. I wouldn’t want to be a British official in India when the natives start demonstrating in earnest their ‘loyalty’ to the government.
Opposed to War
“From these same longshoremen I heard some significant political remarks. They seemed to feel that there was a tremendous, leftward tendency taking place in India. They stated flatly that only force would drive the British out. I asked about Ghandi. They declared, that he was losing much support among his followers. They said he was getting rich in the pay of the British. I cannot tell how widespread this idea is, but other workers I spoke to had the same viewpoint.
“In reference to Ghandi and the native capitalists he represents, who have aided the British in maintaining their rule, one of the longshoremen said, ‘You American workers have only one club to dodge. We have two.’ By that he meant the native and foreign exploiters combined.”
Talks with Army Officer
The, young sailor then related a conversation that he had accidentally struck up with a native dock official. The official was a Mohammedan and a lieutenant in the army. He was well-dressed, but was paid only one-third as much as ordinary American seamen, although he held the highest army post open to natives of India.
“I soon discovered that he was an ardent nationalist and hated the British. When I told him of my own international outlook and my sympathies with the Indian independence movement, he expressed deep appreciation.
“Then he told me his ideas, which amazed me, coming as they did from an army officer in the pay of the British. ‘There is no reason for this, appalling misery,’ he told me. ‘We have all the natural resources to become a great industrial country. But India can only develop after she has won her independence. In the last few years in particular, there has been little industrial development. The British have strangled it. The British say that if they left the country the Mohammedans and Hindus would turn the country into a shambles in a religious war. This is an outright lie. The British themselves are deliberately stirring up conflict between the two native groups. But we should unite. That is our only solution. Why – when we are all one in this filth and misery – should we not unite against those who strangle us both?’”
“I don’t imagine the British regard the native soldier-recruits with too much trust. I’ve told you about this high-ranking native officer. I occasionally witnessed native soldiers marching by. They were invariably led by British officers on horseback. I managed a brief conversation with a couple of native soldiers on guard near the docks. I found out they were very dissatisfied with their pay – $4 or $5 a month.”
Feelings of British Seamen
He recalled an interesting meeting with some British seamen off a captured French freighter.
“They had been having a pretty tough time of it. They asked us for hand-outs and spare cigarettes. I saw them pick up our discarded cigarette butts. They have been receiving as little as $20 a month pay. Although many of them are married, they get scarcely any news from home, and some of them have been away from their homes for three and four years. They have to send every penny of their pittance home, and have nothing for themselves.
“These British seamen told us that, there have been strikes on a number of British boats. In at least one instance, the government sent out a battleship which took over an entire ship. The leaders or ‘trouble-makers’ were shot. Other seamen were given 10 year prison sentences at hard labor.
“They were eager to trade ideas with us. They wanted to know all about the war bonuses which the American union seamen are getting for travelling in the war zone. They were astounded to learn that we were getting three times as much regular pay sis they. They wanted to see Hitter defeated, but they expressed quite bitter hatred for their own capitalists. They mentioned the huge profits the British corporations were making out of the war sacrifices of the common people. They were particularly angry about the taxes, and spoke of the 101 different taxes on food, etc. ...”
Trotskyism in India
Did he come across any evidences of an international revolutionary sentiment in India?
“My impression was that there was no centralized or leading revolutionary organization at present in India. But there was a general revolutionary sentiment which would enable such an organization to grow very quickly.
“I did manage to meet several professed Trotskyists, but under circumstances which do not permit me to disclose any details. Suffice to say, there are Fourth Internationalists in India.
“I did notice, both in Bombay and Calcutta, that Trotsky’s works, particularly his History of the Russian Revolution were widely displayed in the book shops. I went into one Calcutta book-shop and asked the dealer if he had any other Trotsky works beside the History. He showed met a couple of others. Then he said that he had heard that Trotsky’s last book, on Stalin, was coming out soon, and that he had received many inquiries about it. While he was telling me this, several others in the store gathered around us and began asking when the Stalin book would be available.”
Attitude Toward Indian National Congress
What had he been able to learn about the Indian National Congress?
“The Congress now represents; the small group of native bourgeoisie almost exclusively. And these feel more in a blind alley than during the last war. All their old privileges are being taken away, because the British no longer have any confidence in the native bourgeois leader’s ability to stem the tide of revolt. I did not come across any signs of enthusiasm for this group. Their only sign of protest at the treatment they are now being given by the British rulers is to resign, from the National Congress. But they are a miserable lot. Even when they resign, they take pains to make it clear to the masses that their actions are not to be misunderstood as suggestions for mass revolt. No one has confidence in the British promises any longer. In fact, I learned that, the papers which used to play up the British promises, don’t bother to mention them any more. The British no longer make promises anyway.
“I’ll tell you one thing about the people of India, though. They hate the British rule with an everlasting hate. You can feel it like a live thing in the air. I felt it by indirection, just as a foreigner, even when I was buying something at some small street store. Until I let my sympathies be known, that is.
“Everywhere you go, you hear the British referred to as ‘gonametika’ – that’s as close as I can get to the Hindu word. It means ‘bastard’, – with special trimmings. I hear shop-keepers, workers, beggars refer to the British as ‘British pigs.’ I didn’t hear anything about ‘loyalty’ to the British Empire. But I did hear, wherever I went, such sentiments as these: ‘Now is the time’, and ‘How soon do you think the British will be defeated’, and ‘If we only had arms ...’”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>America’s Sixty Families and the Nazis</h1>
<h4>The Role of the US-Nazi Cartel Agreements</h4>
<h3>(June 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi42_06" target="new">Vol. 3 No. 6</a>, June 1942, pp. 165–170.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Standard Oil officials “hampered the development of synthetic rubber in the United States and ... engaged in activities helpful to the Axis nations” through their cartel agreement with the Nazi IG Farbenindustrie, but they are, nevertheless, “personally patriotic men,” declared the Truman Senate Investigating Committee May 26 report.</p>
<p>Similarly, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, condemning the Standard Oil-Nazi cartel, added that “these arrangements were not entered into with any desire to aid or assist Germany.”</p>
<p>Neither of these claims can be denied. The American monopolies are anxious, desperately so, to win the war. They are the real masters of this country; and they would never have entered this war had they not considered it essential to their interests.</p>
<p>At the same time, however, the system of monopoly capitalism compels the monopolies individually to engage in activities that interfere with the war objectives of American capitalism as a whole.</p>
<p>The consolidation of capital, which at an earlier stage of capitalism served to expand the means of production, now tends inexorably toward opposite ends. As a means of self-preservation, the monopolies must now drive in one general direction: <em>Curtailment and limitation of production, in the international as well as domestic sphere</em>.</p>
<p>The safeguarding and increasing of profits is the sole objective of the monopolies, of course. Monopoly profit-making requires: arbitrary limits to production, restricting the output of goods which might glut the market, the elimination of competition.</p>
<p>Capitalism, in its early progressive stage, created the modern national state within which the productive forces might develop unhampered by feudal restrictions. Today, however, national boundaries have become a noose strangling the productive forces. The capitalists are compelled to reach out beyond the national borders for new markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor, and especially for new fields for the investment of their surplus capital. Hence the war.</p>
<p>But the law of monopoly rules even on the international plane. The individual monopolies of every country, while instigating wars to win more of the world’s markets and productive resources, at the same time seek to free themselves from competition and to restrict production through internation cartel agreements with the foreign monopolies which their class as a whole aims to subdue by force of arms.</p>
<p>There is not a single monopoly, in any capitalist country, which does not have international cartel agreements, and which is not attempting to continue these agreements despite the war.</p>
<p>Thurman Arnold reported on June 3 that the Department of Justice had “discovered last week” a list of 162 agreements between IG Farbenindustrie, the German chemical trust, and American corporations. In his March 26 report to the Truman Committee on the Standard Oil-Nazi patents-pool conspiracy, Arnold had to admit</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is no essential difference between what Standard Oil has done in this case and what other companies did in restricting the production of magnesium, aluminum, tungsten carbide, drugs, dyestuffs and a variety of other critical materials vital for the war.”</p>
<p class="fst">The same is true of the British, German, Japanese and French monopolies.</p>
<p>An outstanding example is the world aluminum cartel, an agreement by the American, British, German, French and Swiss interests to parcel among themselves the world markets. They pooled their resources, bought up all surpluses and withheld them from the world market, drastically limited world production and fixed the world prices.</p>
<p>The chemical and dyestuffs cartel agreement between du Pont and IG Farben also included the British Imperial Chemical Industries, the Etablissements Kuhlmann of France, and the Mitsui interests of Japan.</p>
<p>Although Standard Oil and the other monopolies now claim that their agreements with the Nazis have been “suspended” for the “duration,” the evidence indicates that the agreements are being maintained, so far as possible, during the war.</p>
<p>The American monopolists are keeping a weather eye fixed on the post-war period. They expect and desire a postwar epoch retaining all the fundamental characteristics of the pre-war capitalist era. They have no perspective other than a return to “normal” capitalist relations, to a post-war world in which German capitalism will continue to rule in Germany, and with which they will have to continue their monopoly agreements, though they hope it will be a defeated Germany – a weaker partner in the cartels.</p>
<p>Moreover, the American capitalists are not too sure about the outcome of the war. They are keeping the way open, in the event of a protracted stalemate or a failure to score a decisive victory, for resuming relations as equals with their German cartel partners.</p>
<p>As Thurman Arnold on June 3 was constrained to admit:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is another danger from the existence of these cartels which we have yet to face. It is a danger which will be felt in their influence over the peace that is to come. That danger arises from the fact that these cartels have not been terminated, they have only been suspended during the war. The small group of American business men who are parties to these International rings are not unpatriotic, but they still think of the war as a temporary recess from business-as-usual with a strong Germany. They expect to begin the game all over again after the war.”</p>
<p class="fst">So far as the monopoly rulers of America are concerned, even if Hitler must go, his masters, the German capitalists, must remain.</p>
<p>This perspective of the monopolies is shown by provisions they placed in the cartel agreements as soon as the war broke out in 1939. The American trusts hastened to implement and extend their cartel agreements with the Axis corporations.</p>
<p>The files of the Standard Oil Company have provided a typical example of such a “full marriage,” as Arnold called it, of the US-Nazi monopoly interests.</p>
<p>On October 12, 1939, the Standard official in charge of the negotiations with IG Farben wrote a letter stating:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“They [IG Farben] delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents, and we did our best to work out <em>complete plans</em> for a <em>modus vivendi</em> arrangement for working together which would operate <em>through the terms of the war, whether or not the US came in</em>.” (Our emphasis.)</p>
<p class="fst">Another example is the cable which a Standard official sent on Sept. 11, 1939 from New York to the company’s agent in Japan. This cable states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Also, as we fear United States Government in near future may have grounds for action, unfavorable to American-Japanese trade, we consider timely for us to organize with Japanese partners whose influence would be valuable later towards re-establishment after Interruption in our trade.”</p>
<p class="fst">For Standard Oil, the war with the Axis is not an ideological battle to the death. It is merely an unfortunate but necessary “interruption in our trade.”</p>
<p>According to one confidential memorandum in its files, Standard had received an offer from IG Farben, after September 1939, to purchase Standard’s German subsidiary in order to “safeguard Standard Oil of New Jersey’s interest for the duration” – i.e., to prevent its seizure as enemy property. Very likely Standard accepted the offer, since it has attempted to do as much for IG’s interests in American firms.</p>
<p>Likewise the General Electric agreement with Krupp, the German steel and munitions trust, was extended after the start of the war. A special clause was inserted into the agreement fixing the formal date for its termination as 1950.</p>
<p>That cartel agreements were to be operative, as far as possible, during the war itself, is proved by the royalty provisions under which American corporations agreed to put aside a share of the profits from American war production to be paid their German cartel partners afterward.</p>
<p>An example of this practice was revealed at the Senate Patent Committee hearings. An official of Rohm and Haas, a du Pont subsidiary maintaining a monopoly on synthetic glass by cartel agreement with IG Farben, was forced to admit that his company had continued “after Pearl Harbor” to set aside royalties on US military orders for post-war payment to the German interests. These, he belatedly assured the committee – after the facts were out! – are now being held “with the hope and expectation that they will be seized by the Alien Property Custodian.”<br>
</p>
<h4>How the Cartels Curtailed US Production</h4>
<p class="fst">The American monopolies have used every conceivable device in carrying out their cartel agreements to restrict production.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>A. Restricting the Number of Producers</em>. The primary method is to exclude any independent companies from entering the field or to rigidly limit the number of producers and the quantities they may produce.</p>
<p>This was the device used by the Aluminum Company of America to restrict American production of the vital war metal, magnesium, to one-twentieth of German production. ALCOA’s agreement with IG Farben provided that only one American company, Dow Chemical, could produce magnesium and that it could sell the metal only to companies designated by ALCOA.</p>
<p>General Electric, which controlled the patents on tungsten carbide, the finest and cheapest metal alloy for the use of cutting tools, informed the German Krupp steel trust, at the time of the signing of its cartel agreement, that GE desired to limit American licensees “to a small number, preferably not more than two.” It was actually limited to just one, GE’s own subsidiary, Carboloy, Inc. GE’s agreement even gives Krupp the right to determine what companies GE may license.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most glaring example is tetracene, the best and most easily produced chemical agent for ammunition priming. The tetracene patents are jointly owned by Remington Arms, a du Pont subsidiary, and IG Farben. According to the agreement between the two, Remington could not license the United States and British governments to produce tetracene, nor could Remington or any of its private licensees produce tetracene to be used for war purposes by the American government or “in ammunition sold to the British government.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>B. Dismantling Plants</em>. To curtail production American partners in the monopolies went to the extreme of dismantling costly plants.</p>
<p>Standard’s agreements with IG Farben covered acetylene and acetic acid, best and cheapest raw material base for rayons, plastics, paints, dyes and other important chemical products. Jasco, Inc., a holding company owned jointly by Standard and its Nazi cartel partner, had built an acetylene plant in Baton Rouge. At the behest of IG Farben, the plant had been closed down prior to the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain. Subsequently, Standard agreed to the complete demolition of the plant, through an agreement signed after the outbreak of war on Dec. 1, 1939. The Standard officials sought to cover up their tracks by pre-dating the agreement back to August 31, 1939, the day before war was declared.</p>
<p>In another instance, work on Standard’s government-financed Baton Rouge plant for the production of butadiene, basic element of synthetic butyl rubber, was impeded for several months. According to the testimony of W.S. Parish, president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, “in September 1941, the rubber corporation (division of the government Reconstruction Finance Corporation) instructed Standard to suspend all work on the government butadiene project for one year.” It was only after Pearl Harbor, Parish claims, that the government rescinded this order.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>C. Limiting Production Through Price-Fixing</em>. When independent companies seek licenses to produce commodities protected by American-Nazi patent agreements, they can secure such licenses only by agreeing to sell their products at the high price established by the monopolies.</p>
<p>Although it was manufacturing tungsten carbide at a cost of $6.50 a pound, General Electric, from 1928 until confronted with an anti-trust suit early this year, maintained a price as high at times as $453 a pound, and never lower than $200. According to the testimony before the Truman Committee of L. Gerald Firth, president of the Firth-Sterling Steel Company, a GE tungsten carbide licensee, “a large number of firms never used it because of the price.”</p>
<p>In accordance with its agreement with IG Farben, du Pont has fixed prices so high as to prevent any independent production of vital dyestuffs. Speaking of this conspiracy, Thurman Arnold stated that “it not only resulted in high prices to the American consumer, but has also restriced the full development of the chemical industry which is essential to our war effort.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>D. Prohibitive Royalties</em>. Sometimes the monopoly simply refuses, on one pretext or another, to license any other manufacturer. More often, however, independent producers are discouraged by the exorbitant royalties demanded by the monopoly.</p>
<p>When Goodrich Rubber Company sought the use of Standard’s butyl rubber patents, Standard brushed the request off by demanding prohibitive royalties. A letter written on Jan. 10, 1940 to Goodrich by Frank Howard, vice president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, states “quite frankly, it was our intention that the license would not be a suitable one under which to operate if the licensee expected to go beyond producing a relatively high-cost specialty product.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>E. Discouraging Plant Expansion</em>. During the past two years of government war preparation the monopolies sought to avoid expansion of productive facilities and the erection of new plants. Only when the government agreed to pay for new plants did the corporations finally agree to expansion.</p>
<p>A principal method for discouraging expansion has been the circulation of false reports that existing facilities and stock-piles of materials are large enough to meet any contemplated needs.</p>
<p>The present acute shortage of aluminum resulted from the deliberate efforts of ALCOA. For two years prior to American entry into the war ALCOA repeatedly assured the government that no new plants were needed. The Office of Production Management accepted these assurances and passed them on to the public:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“For months the Defense Advisory Commission and the OPM had said that talk about a shortage in aluminum was misleading and that it was unpatriotic to talk about the possibility of such a shortage ... The OPM had apparently completely relied on ALCOA as a source of information as to the availability of aluminum and had discouraged anyone else from going into the business of producing aluminum. ALCOA had long followed a policy of maintaining high prices and building new capacity only when certain that it could sell at its fixed prices all that would be produced.” (<strong>Truman Committee Report</strong>, June 1941.)</p>
<p class="fst">When ALCOA did finally permit the erection of new plants – at government expense – it received the lion’s share of the contracts. These new plants will not reach full production until 1943 or thereafter, and will still fail to produce sufficient aluminum for the country’s civilian and military needs. This is a calculated scarcity, enabling ALCOA to maintain its monopoly prices and conform to its cartel obligations.</p>
<p>The catastrophic rubber shortage is also due in great measure to discouragement of synthetic rubber plant expansion by the Rockefeller-du Pout-Mellon interests controlling the synthetic rubber processes. A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Jesse Jones, head of the RFC and the government’s Defense Plants Corporation, was informed of an impending rubber shortage and was urged to facilitate expansion of synthetic rubber production. Acting undoubtedly at the instigation of Standard and the other monopolies, Jones took the position that sufficient crude rubber stocks were available, even if all imports were cut off, to meet the country’s needs for more than a year of war. A year later, Jones finally agreed to start an “experimental” program for producing 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber. When Singapore was about to fall, Jones informed the Truman Committee that he was making plans for the production of 400,000 tons of synthetic rubber – in 1944. He also told the Truman Committee that “the president had concurred in this (previous) course.”</p>
<p>Likewise to prevent expansion Standard Oil falsely denied that its butyl rubber process, which it had made available to IG Farben, was the best and cheapest synthetic rubber available. It turned aside government investigators with the excuse that butyl rubber was “still in the experimental stage,” and anyway was “too costly.” Jesse Jones testified before the Truman Committee that “Standard had not encouraged any of us in the belief that butyl rubber was a success.” In 1939, an official of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair tried to get “first hand information on the compounding” of butyl, but was prevented, a letter sent by a Standard employe to the corporation officials boasted:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“You will recall,” says the letter in part, “that <em>I took up this question with you before his arrival. As agreed upon</em> I took Mr. Werkethin [the Navy official] over to see the K plant when it appeared that <em>I could not very well steer his interest away from the process</em>. However, I am quite certain that <em>he left with no picture of the operation</em> ...” (Our emphasis.)</p>
<p class="fst">Four months after Pearl Harbor, and after Standard had already agreed, because of a government suit, to release its butyl patents, Parish and Howard, heads of Standard Oil of New Jersey, still sought to mislead the government as to the true value of butyl rubber. They argued that it was still in the “experimental” stage, even though the committee had before it Standard’s own documentary evidence to show that butyl is superior in many respects to natural rubber. The Standard officials also claimed that butyl was “too costly” to produce, although documents taken from Standard’s files showed that it cost only 6.6 cents a pound as compared to the 21 cents a pound being charged by the British and Dutch interests for crude rubber.</p>
<p>In addition to curtailing production, the German capitalists exacted other payments which their American partners were willing to meet.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>A. Giving the Nazis Industrial Processes</em>. The first important price was granting the Nazi interests the patents on exclusive and invaluable industrial processes.</p>
<p>To IG Farben, Standard Oil gave the secret of butyl rubber manufacture, its superior acetylene process and its method for producing high-octane aviation and synthetic gasoline. For the gasoline processes, the Nazis have special reason to be grateful. They have kept the Luftwaffe in the air for two and a half years and enabled Hitler to keep his gigantic motorized army in motion.</p>
<p>The tungsten carbide formula perfected by General Electric has helped German industry to speed up certain tooling and metal cutting processes by as much as five hundred per cent.</p>
<p class="fst"><em>B. Direct Material Aid</em>. The American monopolies supplied German industry with the necessary capital for expansion. American capital investment in Germany was $5,000,000,000 in 1933. By 1939, it had increased another $3,000,000,000.</p>
<p>Among the leading American corporations owning or holding large interests in German corporations are Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Anaconda Copper, General Electric, International Telephone and Telegraph, US Rubber, International Business Machines, International Harvester, E.I. duPont de Nemours.</p>
<p>Standard Oil designed and directly supervised the construction of Germany’s synthetic gasoline and high-octane aviation gas plants.</p>
<p>When Nazi and Italian fascist airlines, prior to American entry in the war, could not secure fuel in South America, Standard’s Brazilian subsidiary supplied the necessary petrol, in defiance of objections from the American State Department. The Standard officials claimed they had contracts which, as a matter of “business honor,” they had to fulfill. A.A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State testified on April 3 that: “Their (Standard officials) position was they would keep the contract they had already made, irrespective of the interests of the United States.” On the same day, William La Varre, chief of the American republics office of the Department of Commerce, denied that any contracts existed, calling the claim a “subterfuge.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>C. Military Information</em>. Information of military value relating American and British production was regularly provided to the Nazis.</p>
<p>Through supplying Krupp with a complete list of the sources and amounts of royalties paid by its tungsten carbide licensees, General Electric’s Carboloy Company kept the Nazis informed on the number and location of plants producing tungsten carbide and the exact quantities of this vital war metal being produced in this country.</p>
<p>DuPont “gave a German company access to military information through Remington Arms royalty payments (on all tetracene produced in America) to the German company.” (AP dispatch, April 17)</p>
<p>Under the agreement between ALCOA and IG Farben, the Nazis were able to learn through royalty payments what companies in America were producing or using magnesium and how much.</p>
<p>After the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain, Standard Oil made an agreement with the British oil interests, pooling patents for the important hydrogenation and polymerization processes in the production of synthetic gasoline. In order to get this agreement, Standard had executed a fake dissolution of its arrangement with IG Farben. But as late as March 18,1940, as documents from Standard’s files revealed, Standard was secretly passing on to IG Farben all the confidential data and technical information it was securing from the British and other American oil firms in the Anglo-American pool.</p>
<p>Most of the information about how American corporations gave military information to the Nazis is buried in the Department of Justice files. It is too explosive to make public. But here are two examples, which the New York newspaper <strong>PM</strong> unearthed:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In one American company Arnold’s investigators have found a patent license for making steam turbine engines, used by the Navy, with an agreement by the American company to furnish the German licensor with ‘duplicates of all correspondence with the United States Navy as well as drawings worked out by the former.’</p>
<p class="quote">“In another case, the German trust was permitted to veto the appointment of the man in charge of military production for the American company.” (<strong>PM</strong>, April 5.)</p>
<p class="fst"><em>D. Withholding Military Information from US</em>. An important form of indirect aid has been given the Nazis by the refusal of American corporations to give information of military value to the American government. Not a single great American corporation has willingly released its patents for war production.</p>
<p>Standard Oil and ALCOA, months after Pearl Harbor, forced the government to initiate anti-trust suits to secure release of the butyl rubber and magnesium patents. General Electric has been able to secure an indefinite postponement of a threatened government prosecution aimed at releasing its tungsten carbide patents.</p>
<p>Even where the patents have finally been released, as in the Standard and ALCOA cases, the companies have been able to retain the vital “know-how,” the developed industrial techniques. Without this “know-how” which the companies have refused to release, the patents are of little value, since most of them are purposely incomplete and obscure.</p>
<p>American companies “failed” to give the government information about the patents they gave the German interests, or to keep the government informed of patents secured from Germany.</p>
<p>The following letter, sent by Standard Oil’s Howard to his superior Parish, demonstrates the reluctance of the monopolies to cooperate with the government when this is against their cartel interests. In part, the letter states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Any program by which the Army Air Corps can obtain their objective of a one or two year start over the rest of the world In this vital matter [high grade aviation gasoline] <em>bristles with difficulties and sacrifices from, our standpoint</em> ...</p>
<p class="quote">“To meet the very proper desires of the air corps as expressed to us, we shall have to <em>violate our agreements and perhaps forfeit the confidence of our associates, both American and foreign</em> ...” (Our emphasis.)</p>
<p class="fst">That letter was written in 1935. To date, Standard has not forfeited the confidence of its principal foreign associate – IG Farben.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Impotence of the Government</h4>
<p class="fst">The findings of the Department of Justice and of two Senate investigating committees have disclosed the above outlined consequences of the American-Nazi cartel agreements.</p>
<p>Yet the government has proved impotent to cancel these agreements or force Standard Oil, ALCOA, du Pont, General Electric and the other monopolies to discontinue honoring the terms of these agreements.</p>
<p>For more than a year the facts about the American-Nazi patent-pools were in the files of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, but the government was reluctant to make them public through anti-trust prosecutions.</p>
<p>Only after the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and three months after Pearl Harbor, did the Department of Justice initiate suits against Standard Oil, ALCOA, General Electric, du Pont, and a few other monopolies to secure release of the American-Nazi patents.</p>
<p>But these suits collapsed under the pressure of the corporations. Standard Oil threatened to stall the suit through years of lengthy litigation. To save face, the government was compelled to give Standard a so-called consent decree on Standard’s own terms. Standard agreed not to contest the case and to pay total fines of $50,000, if the government agreed to drop all charges. Standard further agreed to formally release its butyl rubber patents, with the understanding that the government was to have no power of supervision over the company’s future cartel agreements or its laboratories. The government in return obtained only the privilege of investing its funds in butyl rubber plants to be controlled by Standard. Other companies can use Standard’s patents provided they agree to pay a “reasonable royalty” on all production after the war. Standard is permitted, however, to charge its butyl rubber licensees royalties during the war for providing them with the “know-how,” the technical explanation which is needed to give the purposely obscure patents any value.</p>
<p>The only other case which has thus far come to trial is that of ALCOA. This case also was settled by a consent decree, which Thurman Arnold admitted was “even worse” than Standard’s.</p>
<p>Before the pending government suits against General Electric, du Pont and the other monopolies could come to trial, the Roosevelt administration took steps to halt further prosecutions “for the duration.” On March 20, Attorney General Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Knox and Assistant Attorney General Arnold sent a joint letter to Roosevelt, informing him that “some of the pending court investigations, suits and prosecutions under the Anti-Trust statutes by the Department of Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war materials ... In those cases we believe that continuing such prosecutions will be contrary to the national interest and security.” Roosevelt pointedly made this letter and his reply public on March 28, the day after Arnold exposed the facts about the Standard-IG Farben conspiracy to the Truman Committee. Roosevelt’s reply said, “I approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me ...”</p>
<p>The subsequent developments in the government’s projected suit against General Electric’s Carboloy, Inc., illustrate how this policy is now being carried out.</p>
<p>This suit was originally scheduled to begin last October. It was postponed to February 1942, again postponed to March, then postponed again to April. In the third week of April, Federal Judge Philip Forman of Trenton, N.J., was about to open the trial, when he received a telegram from Undersecretary of War Patterson and Under-Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The telegram asked Judge Forman to postpone the case once more, because “we desire time to study the question of whether trial at this time of US vs. General Electric Co. and others would interfere with war production.” Judge Forman agreed, indefinitely postponing the case.</p>
<p>Whether it will finally go to trial is up to the War and Navy Departments, which have an “inter-departmental” agreement with the Attorney General permitting them to halt any antitrust prosecution which they deem an “interference with war production,” unless the President orders such prosecution on the direct appeal of the Attorney General.</p>
<p>To cap this process, Attorney General Biddle on May 27 urged prompt passage of legislation exempting concerns from prosecution under the anti-trust laws when they are complying with specific requests from the War Production Board in furtherance of the war effort.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Already,” said the Associated Press, “business men are receiving formal assurance that they will not be prosecuted for anti-trust violations directly ordered as part of the war drive. The Attorney General issues certificates under a plan worked out by President Roosevelt.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is nothing less than unconditional surrender to the monopolies.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why the Government Will Not Act</h4>
<p class="fst">To interfere in any effective fashion with the monopolies’ cartel arrangements, with their control of patents and production, would mean to squeeze the very heart of monopoly capitalism. This government, whose sole function is to safeguard the interests of the capitalist class, cannot and will not take measures which would inevitably tend to undermine private property “rights” in the means of production.</p>
<p>In war-time particularly, the government is often constrained to establish certain rules and regulations which, if carried out, may step on the toes of this or that group of capitalists. This is done in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.</p>
<p>But, as the present situation reveals, this government will not curb the cartel system and its practices because this means to impose on the basic interests of all the monopolies. Since the cartel agreements, even those with the Nazi capitalists, are an inevitable and necessary part of the capitalist process in its present stage – monopoly – the government cannot and will not prevent them, just as it will not attack the monopoly system.</p>
<p>The government dares not even seriously expose the cartel practices. For this might serve to discredit the capitalist ruling class in the eyes of the masses. The government seeks to preserve the prestige of the monopolists for that prestige is essential to their continued domination of the economic and political life of the nation.</p>
<p>If the capitalist government cannot resolve this contradiction, still less can the assorted liberals, reformist labor leaders and the Stalinists, who are anxious above all else to maintain “national unity” with the owning class.</p>
<p>The liberal, trade union and Social-Democratic papers have been wailing woefully at the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. The “solutions” they offer are beneath contempt.</p>
<p>A typical liberal newspaper, <strong>PM</strong>, which has published more on these conspiracies than any other daily, seriously called on the small stockholders of Standard Oil to take steps to oust the trust officials responsible for the agreements with IG Farben. The editors of <strong>PM</strong> must be aware of the absurdity of this proposal. The majority of small stockholders with a few shares of common stock, have no more say about the operations of a giant corporation than any ordinary depositor has in the operations of a bank. They cannot hope to carry through a long, costly legal fight against the tremendous wealth of the leading corporation share-holders.</p>
<p>The trade union leaders and Social-Democrats would “solve” the problem by appealing to the administration to give the labor leaders a few more government posts. Naturally, they do not question the “right” of the private owners to control industry, nor do they dare to challenge the monopolies’ domination of the government and its war production and procurement agencies.</p>
<p>As for the Stalinist leaders, their press has systematically suppressed the facts about the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. From March through May, during the height of the exposures, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> and <strong>Sunday Worker</strong> carried exactly five tiny items, in obscure positions, on the conspiracies. This policy was “explained” in an editorial in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, April 24, assuring its readers that the “large American corporations and their leading personnel” are patriotic, and that they are “part of the camp of national unity.” The same editorial attacks those publications which are exposing the monopolies as “naive ‘trustbusters’” whose attitude “can be dangerous” and who are imitating the “demagogy of Hitler.”</p>
<p>Neither the monopolies nor their cartel agreements can be eliminated within the framework of the capitalist system. They are bred by the system. They will disappear only with the end of that system. The first effective step to mobilize the workers for that purpose is the transition slogan of the Socialist Workers Party:</p>
<p>For the expropriation of the war industries and their operation under workers’ control!</p>
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Art Preis
America’s Sixty Families and the Nazis
The Role of the US-Nazi Cartel Agreements
(June 1942)
From Fourth International, Vol. 3 No. 6, June 1942, pp. 165–170.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Standard Oil officials “hampered the development of synthetic rubber in the United States and ... engaged in activities helpful to the Axis nations” through their cartel agreement with the Nazi IG Farbenindustrie, but they are, nevertheless, “personally patriotic men,” declared the Truman Senate Investigating Committee May 26 report.
Similarly, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold, condemning the Standard Oil-Nazi cartel, added that “these arrangements were not entered into with any desire to aid or assist Germany.”
Neither of these claims can be denied. The American monopolies are anxious, desperately so, to win the war. They are the real masters of this country; and they would never have entered this war had they not considered it essential to their interests.
At the same time, however, the system of monopoly capitalism compels the monopolies individually to engage in activities that interfere with the war objectives of American capitalism as a whole.
The consolidation of capital, which at an earlier stage of capitalism served to expand the means of production, now tends inexorably toward opposite ends. As a means of self-preservation, the monopolies must now drive in one general direction: Curtailment and limitation of production, in the international as well as domestic sphere.
The safeguarding and increasing of profits is the sole objective of the monopolies, of course. Monopoly profit-making requires: arbitrary limits to production, restricting the output of goods which might glut the market, the elimination of competition.
Capitalism, in its early progressive stage, created the modern national state within which the productive forces might develop unhampered by feudal restrictions. Today, however, national boundaries have become a noose strangling the productive forces. The capitalists are compelled to reach out beyond the national borders for new markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labor, and especially for new fields for the investment of their surplus capital. Hence the war.
But the law of monopoly rules even on the international plane. The individual monopolies of every country, while instigating wars to win more of the world’s markets and productive resources, at the same time seek to free themselves from competition and to restrict production through internation cartel agreements with the foreign monopolies which their class as a whole aims to subdue by force of arms.
There is not a single monopoly, in any capitalist country, which does not have international cartel agreements, and which is not attempting to continue these agreements despite the war.
Thurman Arnold reported on June 3 that the Department of Justice had “discovered last week” a list of 162 agreements between IG Farbenindustrie, the German chemical trust, and American corporations. In his March 26 report to the Truman Committee on the Standard Oil-Nazi patents-pool conspiracy, Arnold had to admit
“There is no essential difference between what Standard Oil has done in this case and what other companies did in restricting the production of magnesium, aluminum, tungsten carbide, drugs, dyestuffs and a variety of other critical materials vital for the war.”
The same is true of the British, German, Japanese and French monopolies.
An outstanding example is the world aluminum cartel, an agreement by the American, British, German, French and Swiss interests to parcel among themselves the world markets. They pooled their resources, bought up all surpluses and withheld them from the world market, drastically limited world production and fixed the world prices.
The chemical and dyestuffs cartel agreement between du Pont and IG Farben also included the British Imperial Chemical Industries, the Etablissements Kuhlmann of France, and the Mitsui interests of Japan.
Although Standard Oil and the other monopolies now claim that their agreements with the Nazis have been “suspended” for the “duration,” the evidence indicates that the agreements are being maintained, so far as possible, during the war.
The American monopolists are keeping a weather eye fixed on the post-war period. They expect and desire a postwar epoch retaining all the fundamental characteristics of the pre-war capitalist era. They have no perspective other than a return to “normal” capitalist relations, to a post-war world in which German capitalism will continue to rule in Germany, and with which they will have to continue their monopoly agreements, though they hope it will be a defeated Germany – a weaker partner in the cartels.
Moreover, the American capitalists are not too sure about the outcome of the war. They are keeping the way open, in the event of a protracted stalemate or a failure to score a decisive victory, for resuming relations as equals with their German cartel partners.
As Thurman Arnold on June 3 was constrained to admit:
“There is another danger from the existence of these cartels which we have yet to face. It is a danger which will be felt in their influence over the peace that is to come. That danger arises from the fact that these cartels have not been terminated, they have only been suspended during the war. The small group of American business men who are parties to these International rings are not unpatriotic, but they still think of the war as a temporary recess from business-as-usual with a strong Germany. They expect to begin the game all over again after the war.”
So far as the monopoly rulers of America are concerned, even if Hitler must go, his masters, the German capitalists, must remain.
This perspective of the monopolies is shown by provisions they placed in the cartel agreements as soon as the war broke out in 1939. The American trusts hastened to implement and extend their cartel agreements with the Axis corporations.
The files of the Standard Oil Company have provided a typical example of such a “full marriage,” as Arnold called it, of the US-Nazi monopoly interests.
On October 12, 1939, the Standard official in charge of the negotiations with IG Farben wrote a letter stating:
“They [IG Farben] delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents, and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi arrangement for working together which would operate through the terms of the war, whether or not the US came in.” (Our emphasis.)
Another example is the cable which a Standard official sent on Sept. 11, 1939 from New York to the company’s agent in Japan. This cable states:
“Also, as we fear United States Government in near future may have grounds for action, unfavorable to American-Japanese trade, we consider timely for us to organize with Japanese partners whose influence would be valuable later towards re-establishment after Interruption in our trade.”
For Standard Oil, the war with the Axis is not an ideological battle to the death. It is merely an unfortunate but necessary “interruption in our trade.”
According to one confidential memorandum in its files, Standard had received an offer from IG Farben, after September 1939, to purchase Standard’s German subsidiary in order to “safeguard Standard Oil of New Jersey’s interest for the duration” – i.e., to prevent its seizure as enemy property. Very likely Standard accepted the offer, since it has attempted to do as much for IG’s interests in American firms.
Likewise the General Electric agreement with Krupp, the German steel and munitions trust, was extended after the start of the war. A special clause was inserted into the agreement fixing the formal date for its termination as 1950.
That cartel agreements were to be operative, as far as possible, during the war itself, is proved by the royalty provisions under which American corporations agreed to put aside a share of the profits from American war production to be paid their German cartel partners afterward.
An example of this practice was revealed at the Senate Patent Committee hearings. An official of Rohm and Haas, a du Pont subsidiary maintaining a monopoly on synthetic glass by cartel agreement with IG Farben, was forced to admit that his company had continued “after Pearl Harbor” to set aside royalties on US military orders for post-war payment to the German interests. These, he belatedly assured the committee – after the facts were out! – are now being held “with the hope and expectation that they will be seized by the Alien Property Custodian.”
How the Cartels Curtailed US Production
The American monopolies have used every conceivable device in carrying out their cartel agreements to restrict production.
A. Restricting the Number of Producers. The primary method is to exclude any independent companies from entering the field or to rigidly limit the number of producers and the quantities they may produce.
This was the device used by the Aluminum Company of America to restrict American production of the vital war metal, magnesium, to one-twentieth of German production. ALCOA’s agreement with IG Farben provided that only one American company, Dow Chemical, could produce magnesium and that it could sell the metal only to companies designated by ALCOA.
General Electric, which controlled the patents on tungsten carbide, the finest and cheapest metal alloy for the use of cutting tools, informed the German Krupp steel trust, at the time of the signing of its cartel agreement, that GE desired to limit American licensees “to a small number, preferably not more than two.” It was actually limited to just one, GE’s own subsidiary, Carboloy, Inc. GE’s agreement even gives Krupp the right to determine what companies GE may license.
Perhaps the most glaring example is tetracene, the best and most easily produced chemical agent for ammunition priming. The tetracene patents are jointly owned by Remington Arms, a du Pont subsidiary, and IG Farben. According to the agreement between the two, Remington could not license the United States and British governments to produce tetracene, nor could Remington or any of its private licensees produce tetracene to be used for war purposes by the American government or “in ammunition sold to the British government.”
B. Dismantling Plants. To curtail production American partners in the monopolies went to the extreme of dismantling costly plants.
Standard’s agreements with IG Farben covered acetylene and acetic acid, best and cheapest raw material base for rayons, plastics, paints, dyes and other important chemical products. Jasco, Inc., a holding company owned jointly by Standard and its Nazi cartel partner, had built an acetylene plant in Baton Rouge. At the behest of IG Farben, the plant had been closed down prior to the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain. Subsequently, Standard agreed to the complete demolition of the plant, through an agreement signed after the outbreak of war on Dec. 1, 1939. The Standard officials sought to cover up their tracks by pre-dating the agreement back to August 31, 1939, the day before war was declared.
In another instance, work on Standard’s government-financed Baton Rouge plant for the production of butadiene, basic element of synthetic butyl rubber, was impeded for several months. According to the testimony of W.S. Parish, president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, “in September 1941, the rubber corporation (division of the government Reconstruction Finance Corporation) instructed Standard to suspend all work on the government butadiene project for one year.” It was only after Pearl Harbor, Parish claims, that the government rescinded this order.
C. Limiting Production Through Price-Fixing. When independent companies seek licenses to produce commodities protected by American-Nazi patent agreements, they can secure such licenses only by agreeing to sell their products at the high price established by the monopolies.
Although it was manufacturing tungsten carbide at a cost of $6.50 a pound, General Electric, from 1928 until confronted with an anti-trust suit early this year, maintained a price as high at times as $453 a pound, and never lower than $200. According to the testimony before the Truman Committee of L. Gerald Firth, president of the Firth-Sterling Steel Company, a GE tungsten carbide licensee, “a large number of firms never used it because of the price.”
In accordance with its agreement with IG Farben, du Pont has fixed prices so high as to prevent any independent production of vital dyestuffs. Speaking of this conspiracy, Thurman Arnold stated that “it not only resulted in high prices to the American consumer, but has also restriced the full development of the chemical industry which is essential to our war effort.”
D. Prohibitive Royalties. Sometimes the monopoly simply refuses, on one pretext or another, to license any other manufacturer. More often, however, independent producers are discouraged by the exorbitant royalties demanded by the monopoly.
When Goodrich Rubber Company sought the use of Standard’s butyl rubber patents, Standard brushed the request off by demanding prohibitive royalties. A letter written on Jan. 10, 1940 to Goodrich by Frank Howard, vice president of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, states “quite frankly, it was our intention that the license would not be a suitable one under which to operate if the licensee expected to go beyond producing a relatively high-cost specialty product.”
E. Discouraging Plant Expansion. During the past two years of government war preparation the monopolies sought to avoid expansion of productive facilities and the erection of new plants. Only when the government agreed to pay for new plants did the corporations finally agree to expansion.
A principal method for discouraging expansion has been the circulation of false reports that existing facilities and stock-piles of materials are large enough to meet any contemplated needs.
The present acute shortage of aluminum resulted from the deliberate efforts of ALCOA. For two years prior to American entry into the war ALCOA repeatedly assured the government that no new plants were needed. The Office of Production Management accepted these assurances and passed them on to the public:
“For months the Defense Advisory Commission and the OPM had said that talk about a shortage in aluminum was misleading and that it was unpatriotic to talk about the possibility of such a shortage ... The OPM had apparently completely relied on ALCOA as a source of information as to the availability of aluminum and had discouraged anyone else from going into the business of producing aluminum. ALCOA had long followed a policy of maintaining high prices and building new capacity only when certain that it could sell at its fixed prices all that would be produced.” (Truman Committee Report, June 1941.)
When ALCOA did finally permit the erection of new plants – at government expense – it received the lion’s share of the contracts. These new plants will not reach full production until 1943 or thereafter, and will still fail to produce sufficient aluminum for the country’s civilian and military needs. This is a calculated scarcity, enabling ALCOA to maintain its monopoly prices and conform to its cartel obligations.
The catastrophic rubber shortage is also due in great measure to discouragement of synthetic rubber plant expansion by the Rockefeller-du Pout-Mellon interests controlling the synthetic rubber processes. A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Jesse Jones, head of the RFC and the government’s Defense Plants Corporation, was informed of an impending rubber shortage and was urged to facilitate expansion of synthetic rubber production. Acting undoubtedly at the instigation of Standard and the other monopolies, Jones took the position that sufficient crude rubber stocks were available, even if all imports were cut off, to meet the country’s needs for more than a year of war. A year later, Jones finally agreed to start an “experimental” program for producing 40,000 tons of synthetic rubber. When Singapore was about to fall, Jones informed the Truman Committee that he was making plans for the production of 400,000 tons of synthetic rubber – in 1944. He also told the Truman Committee that “the president had concurred in this (previous) course.”
Likewise to prevent expansion Standard Oil falsely denied that its butyl rubber process, which it had made available to IG Farben, was the best and cheapest synthetic rubber available. It turned aside government investigators with the excuse that butyl rubber was “still in the experimental stage,” and anyway was “too costly.” Jesse Jones testified before the Truman Committee that “Standard had not encouraged any of us in the belief that butyl rubber was a success.” In 1939, an official of the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair tried to get “first hand information on the compounding” of butyl, but was prevented, a letter sent by a Standard employe to the corporation officials boasted:
“You will recall,” says the letter in part, “that I took up this question with you before his arrival. As agreed upon I took Mr. Werkethin [the Navy official] over to see the K plant when it appeared that I could not very well steer his interest away from the process. However, I am quite certain that he left with no picture of the operation ...” (Our emphasis.)
Four months after Pearl Harbor, and after Standard had already agreed, because of a government suit, to release its butyl patents, Parish and Howard, heads of Standard Oil of New Jersey, still sought to mislead the government as to the true value of butyl rubber. They argued that it was still in the “experimental” stage, even though the committee had before it Standard’s own documentary evidence to show that butyl is superior in many respects to natural rubber. The Standard officials also claimed that butyl was “too costly” to produce, although documents taken from Standard’s files showed that it cost only 6.6 cents a pound as compared to the 21 cents a pound being charged by the British and Dutch interests for crude rubber.
In addition to curtailing production, the German capitalists exacted other payments which their American partners were willing to meet.
A. Giving the Nazis Industrial Processes. The first important price was granting the Nazi interests the patents on exclusive and invaluable industrial processes.
To IG Farben, Standard Oil gave the secret of butyl rubber manufacture, its superior acetylene process and its method for producing high-octane aviation and synthetic gasoline. For the gasoline processes, the Nazis have special reason to be grateful. They have kept the Luftwaffe in the air for two and a half years and enabled Hitler to keep his gigantic motorized army in motion.
The tungsten carbide formula perfected by General Electric has helped German industry to speed up certain tooling and metal cutting processes by as much as five hundred per cent.
B. Direct Material Aid. The American monopolies supplied German industry with the necessary capital for expansion. American capital investment in Germany was $5,000,000,000 in 1933. By 1939, it had increased another $3,000,000,000.
Among the leading American corporations owning or holding large interests in German corporations are Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford Motor Co., Anaconda Copper, General Electric, International Telephone and Telegraph, US Rubber, International Business Machines, International Harvester, E.I. duPont de Nemours.
Standard Oil designed and directly supervised the construction of Germany’s synthetic gasoline and high-octane aviation gas plants.
When Nazi and Italian fascist airlines, prior to American entry in the war, could not secure fuel in South America, Standard’s Brazilian subsidiary supplied the necessary petrol, in defiance of objections from the American State Department. The Standard officials claimed they had contracts which, as a matter of “business honor,” they had to fulfill. A.A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State testified on April 3 that: “Their (Standard officials) position was they would keep the contract they had already made, irrespective of the interests of the United States.” On the same day, William La Varre, chief of the American republics office of the Department of Commerce, denied that any contracts existed, calling the claim a “subterfuge.”
C. Military Information. Information of military value relating American and British production was regularly provided to the Nazis.
Through supplying Krupp with a complete list of the sources and amounts of royalties paid by its tungsten carbide licensees, General Electric’s Carboloy Company kept the Nazis informed on the number and location of plants producing tungsten carbide and the exact quantities of this vital war metal being produced in this country.
DuPont “gave a German company access to military information through Remington Arms royalty payments (on all tetracene produced in America) to the German company.” (AP dispatch, April 17)
Under the agreement between ALCOA and IG Farben, the Nazis were able to learn through royalty payments what companies in America were producing or using magnesium and how much.
After the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain, Standard Oil made an agreement with the British oil interests, pooling patents for the important hydrogenation and polymerization processes in the production of synthetic gasoline. In order to get this agreement, Standard had executed a fake dissolution of its arrangement with IG Farben. But as late as March 18,1940, as documents from Standard’s files revealed, Standard was secretly passing on to IG Farben all the confidential data and technical information it was securing from the British and other American oil firms in the Anglo-American pool.
Most of the information about how American corporations gave military information to the Nazis is buried in the Department of Justice files. It is too explosive to make public. But here are two examples, which the New York newspaper PM unearthed:
“In one American company Arnold’s investigators have found a patent license for making steam turbine engines, used by the Navy, with an agreement by the American company to furnish the German licensor with ‘duplicates of all correspondence with the United States Navy as well as drawings worked out by the former.’
“In another case, the German trust was permitted to veto the appointment of the man in charge of military production for the American company.” (PM, April 5.)
D. Withholding Military Information from US. An important form of indirect aid has been given the Nazis by the refusal of American corporations to give information of military value to the American government. Not a single great American corporation has willingly released its patents for war production.
Standard Oil and ALCOA, months after Pearl Harbor, forced the government to initiate anti-trust suits to secure release of the butyl rubber and magnesium patents. General Electric has been able to secure an indefinite postponement of a threatened government prosecution aimed at releasing its tungsten carbide patents.
Even where the patents have finally been released, as in the Standard and ALCOA cases, the companies have been able to retain the vital “know-how,” the developed industrial techniques. Without this “know-how” which the companies have refused to release, the patents are of little value, since most of them are purposely incomplete and obscure.
American companies “failed” to give the government information about the patents they gave the German interests, or to keep the government informed of patents secured from Germany.
The following letter, sent by Standard Oil’s Howard to his superior Parish, demonstrates the reluctance of the monopolies to cooperate with the government when this is against their cartel interests. In part, the letter states:
“Any program by which the Army Air Corps can obtain their objective of a one or two year start over the rest of the world In this vital matter [high grade aviation gasoline] bristles with difficulties and sacrifices from, our standpoint ...
“To meet the very proper desires of the air corps as expressed to us, we shall have to violate our agreements and perhaps forfeit the confidence of our associates, both American and foreign ...” (Our emphasis.)
That letter was written in 1935. To date, Standard has not forfeited the confidence of its principal foreign associate – IG Farben.
The Impotence of the Government
The findings of the Department of Justice and of two Senate investigating committees have disclosed the above outlined consequences of the American-Nazi cartel agreements.
Yet the government has proved impotent to cancel these agreements or force Standard Oil, ALCOA, du Pont, General Electric and the other monopolies to discontinue honoring the terms of these agreements.
For more than a year the facts about the American-Nazi patent-pools were in the files of the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, but the government was reluctant to make them public through anti-trust prosecutions.
Only after the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and three months after Pearl Harbor, did the Department of Justice initiate suits against Standard Oil, ALCOA, General Electric, du Pont, and a few other monopolies to secure release of the American-Nazi patents.
But these suits collapsed under the pressure of the corporations. Standard Oil threatened to stall the suit through years of lengthy litigation. To save face, the government was compelled to give Standard a so-called consent decree on Standard’s own terms. Standard agreed not to contest the case and to pay total fines of $50,000, if the government agreed to drop all charges. Standard further agreed to formally release its butyl rubber patents, with the understanding that the government was to have no power of supervision over the company’s future cartel agreements or its laboratories. The government in return obtained only the privilege of investing its funds in butyl rubber plants to be controlled by Standard. Other companies can use Standard’s patents provided they agree to pay a “reasonable royalty” on all production after the war. Standard is permitted, however, to charge its butyl rubber licensees royalties during the war for providing them with the “know-how,” the technical explanation which is needed to give the purposely obscure patents any value.
The only other case which has thus far come to trial is that of ALCOA. This case also was settled by a consent decree, which Thurman Arnold admitted was “even worse” than Standard’s.
Before the pending government suits against General Electric, du Pont and the other monopolies could come to trial, the Roosevelt administration took steps to halt further prosecutions “for the duration.” On March 20, Attorney General Biddle, Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Knox and Assistant Attorney General Arnold sent a joint letter to Roosevelt, informing him that “some of the pending court investigations, suits and prosecutions under the Anti-Trust statutes by the Department of Justice, if continued, will interfere with the production of war materials ... In those cases we believe that continuing such prosecutions will be contrary to the national interest and security.” Roosevelt pointedly made this letter and his reply public on March 28, the day after Arnold exposed the facts about the Standard-IG Farben conspiracy to the Truman Committee. Roosevelt’s reply said, “I approve the procedure outlined in your memorandum to me ...”
The subsequent developments in the government’s projected suit against General Electric’s Carboloy, Inc., illustrate how this policy is now being carried out.
This suit was originally scheduled to begin last October. It was postponed to February 1942, again postponed to March, then postponed again to April. In the third week of April, Federal Judge Philip Forman of Trenton, N.J., was about to open the trial, when he received a telegram from Undersecretary of War Patterson and Under-Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. The telegram asked Judge Forman to postpone the case once more, because “we desire time to study the question of whether trial at this time of US vs. General Electric Co. and others would interfere with war production.” Judge Forman agreed, indefinitely postponing the case.
Whether it will finally go to trial is up to the War and Navy Departments, which have an “inter-departmental” agreement with the Attorney General permitting them to halt any antitrust prosecution which they deem an “interference with war production,” unless the President orders such prosecution on the direct appeal of the Attorney General.
To cap this process, Attorney General Biddle on May 27 urged prompt passage of legislation exempting concerns from prosecution under the anti-trust laws when they are complying with specific requests from the War Production Board in furtherance of the war effort.
“Already,” said the Associated Press, “business men are receiving formal assurance that they will not be prosecuted for anti-trust violations directly ordered as part of the war drive. The Attorney General issues certificates under a plan worked out by President Roosevelt.”
This is nothing less than unconditional surrender to the monopolies.
Why the Government Will Not Act
To interfere in any effective fashion with the monopolies’ cartel arrangements, with their control of patents and production, would mean to squeeze the very heart of monopoly capitalism. This government, whose sole function is to safeguard the interests of the capitalist class, cannot and will not take measures which would inevitably tend to undermine private property “rights” in the means of production.
In war-time particularly, the government is often constrained to establish certain rules and regulations which, if carried out, may step on the toes of this or that group of capitalists. This is done in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.
But, as the present situation reveals, this government will not curb the cartel system and its practices because this means to impose on the basic interests of all the monopolies. Since the cartel agreements, even those with the Nazi capitalists, are an inevitable and necessary part of the capitalist process in its present stage – monopoly – the government cannot and will not prevent them, just as it will not attack the monopoly system.
The government dares not even seriously expose the cartel practices. For this might serve to discredit the capitalist ruling class in the eyes of the masses. The government seeks to preserve the prestige of the monopolists for that prestige is essential to their continued domination of the economic and political life of the nation.
If the capitalist government cannot resolve this contradiction, still less can the assorted liberals, reformist labor leaders and the Stalinists, who are anxious above all else to maintain “national unity” with the owning class.
The liberal, trade union and Social-Democratic papers have been wailing woefully at the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. The “solutions” they offer are beneath contempt.
A typical liberal newspaper, PM, which has published more on these conspiracies than any other daily, seriously called on the small stockholders of Standard Oil to take steps to oust the trust officials responsible for the agreements with IG Farben. The editors of PM must be aware of the absurdity of this proposal. The majority of small stockholders with a few shares of common stock, have no more say about the operations of a giant corporation than any ordinary depositor has in the operations of a bank. They cannot hope to carry through a long, costly legal fight against the tremendous wealth of the leading corporation share-holders.
The trade union leaders and Social-Democrats would “solve” the problem by appealing to the administration to give the labor leaders a few more government posts. Naturally, they do not question the “right” of the private owners to control industry, nor do they dare to challenge the monopolies’ domination of the government and its war production and procurement agencies.
As for the Stalinist leaders, their press has systematically suppressed the facts about the US-Nazi cartel conspiracies. From March through May, during the height of the exposures, the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker carried exactly five tiny items, in obscure positions, on the conspiracies. This policy was “explained” in an editorial in the Daily Worker, April 24, assuring its readers that the “large American corporations and their leading personnel” are patriotic, and that they are “part of the camp of national unity.” The same editorial attacks those publications which are exposing the monopolies as “naive ‘trustbusters’” whose attitude “can be dangerous” and who are imitating the “demagogy of Hitler.”
Neither the monopolies nor their cartel agreements can be eliminated within the framework of the capitalist system. They are bred by the system. They will disappear only with the end of that system. The first effective step to mobilize the workers for that purpose is the transition slogan of the Socialist Workers Party:
For the expropriation of the war industries and their operation under workers’ control!
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Roosevelt Puts on Pressure<br>
for Forced Labor Measures</h1>
<h3>(3 February 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_05" target="new">Vol. IX No. 5</a>, 3 February 1945, pp. 1 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Confronted by mounting labor opposition to his “National
Service” scheme for regimenting the workers and undermining the
unions, Roosevelt and his leading brass hats are pressing ever more
urgently for speedy enactment of the May-Bailey forced labor draft
bill, now before Congress. This bill contains features more harsh in
some instances than the original Nazi slave labor code on which the
Roosevelt plan is modeled and which inspired his cynical slogan,
“This is a war of free labor against slave labor.</p>
<p>The success of the administration’s conspiracy to enslave
American labor in the interests of the profiteering corporations
required the strategy of speed and surprise. Roosevelt’s plot,
therefore, was to shove through a forced labor bill before the labor
movement had time to mobilize its ranks for resistance and before his
sinister anti-labor intent could be fully exposed.</p>
<p>With this aim of speed in mind, Roosevelt timed his renewed forced
labor drive to go into high gear at the moment when popular fear of a
prolonged war slaughter was at its height, during the unexpected
military reverses on the Belgian front. Roosevelt unleashed a
fraudulent propaganda scare-campaign about munitions “shortages”
that was designed to play upon the fears of the masses for their
loved ones in the battle lines and break down their opposition to
labor regimentation.</p>
<p>However, despite the careful planning of the administration, its
forced labor blitz timetable has already been upset. It has run into
several unforeseen obstacles, causing delays which increasingly
imperil the administration’s original scheme.<br>
</p>
<h4>Anti-Labor Amendments</h4>
<p class="fst">One unanticipated snag has been created by the very eagerness of
reactionary Congressmen to respond in the same labor-hating spirit as
Roosevelt’s forced labor demand. In their desire to
“strengthen” the bill and eliminate any possibility of
loopholes, Roosevelt’s more unrestrained Congressional
colleagues, particularly from the Democratic South, are competing to
attach to the forced labor measure all sorts of cruder anti-labor
amendments. Their slobbering eagerness to embrace Roosevelt’s
plan and even “improve” it has not only delayed its
enactment but exposed the original bill for the viciously antilabor
measure that it is.</p>
<p>One amendment was designed to undermine union security by
abrogating closed shop union contracts for workers forced into jobs
in closed-shop plants. Another was intended to make all strikes
illegal. Differences arose among the Congressmen as to the most
effective means for enforcing the labor draft scheme. Some wanted
“work-or-fight” penalties. Some wanted to establish
“slacker work battalions” under Army rule. Others
preferred “civilian” penalties – $10,000 fines and
5 years imprisonment.</p>
<p>Fearful that all these amendments were stalling the bill and
exposing its real slave labor character, Roosevelt’s aides
rushed to Congress and insisted that it hold back all the trimmings
until the basic measure is passed. Under this pressure, the House
Military Affairs Committee eliminated the anti-strike, anti-closed
shop, “work-or-fight” and “slacker battalions”
amendments. The committeemen were aware that the bill as it stands,
which enables the administration to move workers in and out of jobs
at will under threat of huge fines and imprisonment, is sufficiently
broad and drastic to satisfy even the most hard-bitten,
fascist-minded employers.</p>
<p>The administration wants speed, in addition, because the change in
the military, picture, due especially to the Red Army offensive
toward Berlin, has reduced the popular fear of a prolonged war. Talk
of an immediate Allied offensive – with assurances that there
are now sufficient munitions for it – has reduced the effect of
the munitions “shortage” scare.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fake Shortage</h4>
<p class="fst">Most of all, the real facts about the “need” for
forced labor due to manpower shortages are coming to light. The Mead
Senate War Investigating Committee, for instance, has disclosed
“labor hoarding” and huge waste of manpower at the
Norfolk Naval Yard, where the officials had been clamoring for “4,000
more workers.”</p>
<p>The War Production Board report for December showed that despite
the holiday letdown substantial increases in all the major munitions
programs were registered. During the last half of 1944, the WPB
report admitted, “every one of the critical programs showed a
substantial gain” ranging from 20 to over 200 per cent.<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt’s Moves</h4>
<p class="fst">And then came the startling disclosure by John L. Lovett, Michigan
Manufacturers’ Association general manager, that in the
allegedly key “tight spot,” Detroit, the factories are in
position to handle 20 per cent more war contracts and that 50,000
experienced workers are right now forced to live off unemployment
compensation.</p>
<p>CIO United Automobile Workers President R.J. Thomas put his finger
on the biggest flaw in the claim of manpower “shortage.”
He last week challenged the government estimate of 700,000
unemployed, declaring there were no less than 5,000,000 workers
seeking jobs. “The bureau (Labor Statistics) must be thinking
of 700,000 white men,” Thomas declared. “My estimate
includes what they overlooked – the women and Negroes able and
wanting to work in war plants and other essential industries.”
But the House Military Affairs Committee struck out from the
May-Bailey bill a clause prohibiting discrimination against workers
for racial, religious or similar reasons.</p>
<p>Without even waiting for legislation, the administration has
already begun to initiate its forced labor scheme. Allentown, Pa.,
has been selected as the first test spot. There last week, under
orders of the War Manpower Commission, a group of brewery workers
were fired from their jobs and forced to take work in designated
plants at lower pay and longer hours.</p>
<p>If the administration succeeds in achieving its aims in this
instance, it plans to spread the same scheme everywhere. By hook or
by crook, Roosevelt intends to impose industrial regimentation upon
the American working class. This Nazi-like scheme can still be
smashed, however, if the entire labor movement goes into united
fighting action against it.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Roosevelt Puts on Pressure
for Forced Labor Measures
(3 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 5, 3 February 1945, pp. 1 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Confronted by mounting labor opposition to his “National
Service” scheme for regimenting the workers and undermining the
unions, Roosevelt and his leading brass hats are pressing ever more
urgently for speedy enactment of the May-Bailey forced labor draft
bill, now before Congress. This bill contains features more harsh in
some instances than the original Nazi slave labor code on which the
Roosevelt plan is modeled and which inspired his cynical slogan,
“This is a war of free labor against slave labor.
The success of the administration’s conspiracy to enslave
American labor in the interests of the profiteering corporations
required the strategy of speed and surprise. Roosevelt’s plot,
therefore, was to shove through a forced labor bill before the labor
movement had time to mobilize its ranks for resistance and before his
sinister anti-labor intent could be fully exposed.
With this aim of speed in mind, Roosevelt timed his renewed forced
labor drive to go into high gear at the moment when popular fear of a
prolonged war slaughter was at its height, during the unexpected
military reverses on the Belgian front. Roosevelt unleashed a
fraudulent propaganda scare-campaign about munitions “shortages”
that was designed to play upon the fears of the masses for their
loved ones in the battle lines and break down their opposition to
labor regimentation.
However, despite the careful planning of the administration, its
forced labor blitz timetable has already been upset. It has run into
several unforeseen obstacles, causing delays which increasingly
imperil the administration’s original scheme.
Anti-Labor Amendments
One unanticipated snag has been created by the very eagerness of
reactionary Congressmen to respond in the same labor-hating spirit as
Roosevelt’s forced labor demand. In their desire to
“strengthen” the bill and eliminate any possibility of
loopholes, Roosevelt’s more unrestrained Congressional
colleagues, particularly from the Democratic South, are competing to
attach to the forced labor measure all sorts of cruder anti-labor
amendments. Their slobbering eagerness to embrace Roosevelt’s
plan and even “improve” it has not only delayed its
enactment but exposed the original bill for the viciously antilabor
measure that it is.
One amendment was designed to undermine union security by
abrogating closed shop union contracts for workers forced into jobs
in closed-shop plants. Another was intended to make all strikes
illegal. Differences arose among the Congressmen as to the most
effective means for enforcing the labor draft scheme. Some wanted
“work-or-fight” penalties. Some wanted to establish
“slacker work battalions” under Army rule. Others
preferred “civilian” penalties – $10,000 fines and
5 years imprisonment.
Fearful that all these amendments were stalling the bill and
exposing its real slave labor character, Roosevelt’s aides
rushed to Congress and insisted that it hold back all the trimmings
until the basic measure is passed. Under this pressure, the House
Military Affairs Committee eliminated the anti-strike, anti-closed
shop, “work-or-fight” and “slacker battalions”
amendments. The committeemen were aware that the bill as it stands,
which enables the administration to move workers in and out of jobs
at will under threat of huge fines and imprisonment, is sufficiently
broad and drastic to satisfy even the most hard-bitten,
fascist-minded employers.
The administration wants speed, in addition, because the change in
the military, picture, due especially to the Red Army offensive
toward Berlin, has reduced the popular fear of a prolonged war. Talk
of an immediate Allied offensive – with assurances that there
are now sufficient munitions for it – has reduced the effect of
the munitions “shortage” scare.
Fake Shortage
Most of all, the real facts about the “need” for
forced labor due to manpower shortages are coming to light. The Mead
Senate War Investigating Committee, for instance, has disclosed
“labor hoarding” and huge waste of manpower at the
Norfolk Naval Yard, where the officials had been clamoring for “4,000
more workers.”
The War Production Board report for December showed that despite
the holiday letdown substantial increases in all the major munitions
programs were registered. During the last half of 1944, the WPB
report admitted, “every one of the critical programs showed a
substantial gain” ranging from 20 to over 200 per cent.
Roosevelt’s Moves
And then came the startling disclosure by John L. Lovett, Michigan
Manufacturers’ Association general manager, that in the
allegedly key “tight spot,” Detroit, the factories are in
position to handle 20 per cent more war contracts and that 50,000
experienced workers are right now forced to live off unemployment
compensation.
CIO United Automobile Workers President R.J. Thomas put his finger
on the biggest flaw in the claim of manpower “shortage.”
He last week challenged the government estimate of 700,000
unemployed, declaring there were no less than 5,000,000 workers
seeking jobs. “The bureau (Labor Statistics) must be thinking
of 700,000 white men,” Thomas declared. “My estimate
includes what they overlooked – the women and Negroes able and
wanting to work in war plants and other essential industries.”
But the House Military Affairs Committee struck out from the
May-Bailey bill a clause prohibiting discrimination against workers
for racial, religious or similar reasons.
Without even waiting for legislation, the administration has
already begun to initiate its forced labor scheme. Allentown, Pa.,
has been selected as the first test spot. There last week, under
orders of the War Manpower Commission, a group of brewery workers
were fired from their jobs and forced to take work in designated
plants at lower pay and longer hours.
If the administration succeeds in achieving its aims in this
instance, it plans to spread the same scheme everywhere. By hook or
by crook, Roosevelt intends to impose industrial regimentation upon
the American working class. This Nazi-like scheme can still be
smashed, however, if the entire labor movement goes into united
fighting action against it.
Top of page
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h4>World War II and the Monopolies</h4>
<h1>Big Business Grows Bigger</h1>
<h3>(20 July 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_29" target="new">Vol. X No. 29</a>, 20 July 1946, p. 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">World War II didn’t bring the promised “four freedoms.” It didn’t bring lasting peace, plenty and security. But it did make American Big Business bigger. It did increase the concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of the giant monopolies.</p>
<p>These monopolies – owning most of America’s industries, transport, raw materials, food processing and distribution, financial institutions – are controlled by a tiny oligarchy of America’s sixty richest families. They own most of this country. They rule it. And it is their armed forces and economic penetration which are reaching out to rule the whole world too.</p>
<p>How much of this country this ruling oligarchy owns and how much they have increased their ownership and control through World War II, is the subject of a recently-published report prepared for the Senate Small Business Committee by the Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), entitled <strong>Economic Concentration In World War II</strong>.</p>
<p>Packed into the 358 pages of this report are facts which confirm to the hilt the contentions <strong>of The Militant </strong>and the Socialist Workers Party that the war was inspired by and benefitted only Big Business.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Economic Royalists” Get Fatter</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt, at the start of his presidential career in 1933, promised to “drive the money-changers from the temple” and assailed the “economic royalists.” But, as the conclusive evidence of this Senate report shows, the “economic royalists” fattened during his peacetime regime and during his wartime rule grew to unprecedented wealth and power.</p>
<p>“The relative importance of big business particularly the giant corporations, increased sharply during the war, while the position of small business declined,” the report demonstrates.</p>
<p>In September 1939, start of World War II, the value of all usable production facilities in the United States was about 40 billion dollars.</p>
<p>BUT – just 250 of the largest corporations had 25.9 billion dollars of these capital assets – 65.7 per cent!</p>
<p>During the war, 26 billion dollars of production facilities were added – two-thirds from the pockets of the American people by way of the U.S. Treasury. Of these facilities, says the report, “about $20,000,000,000 of the $26,000,000,000 wartime plant is usable for the production of peacetime products either immediately or after only minor conversion.” Thus, there is today “a total of some 60 billion dollars of postwar usable facilities.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Who then controls this vast productive plant?” asks the report. “The answer to these questions may be obtained by examining the holdings of the Nation’s 250 largest manufacturing companies – 31 of which are controlled by five financial interests groups.</p>
<table cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" align="right">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<img src="bigger_files/bigger-1.jpg" alt="The Point of Free Enterprise" width="547" height="411">
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="quote">“If these 250 industrial giants finally acquire the 8.9 billion dollars of usable federally financed facilities on which they generally hold purchase options, their facility holdings will come to 38.5 billion dollars, 66.5 per cent of total usable facilities and almost as much as the entire 39.6 billion dollars held before the war by all of the more than 75,000 manufacturing corporations in existence.”</p>
<p class="fst">250 GIANT CORPORATIONS OWN ⅔ OF MANUFACTURING PRODUCTION FACILITIES IN AMERICA TODAY.</p>
<p>But that isn’t all. Just 31 of these corporations own a total of 18.2 billion dollars of facilities – 30 per cent of the nation’s productive plant and equipment. AND FIVE FINANCIAL GROUPS, “NAMELY, MORGAN-FIRST NATIONAL, MELLON, ROCKEFELLER, DU FONT, AND THE CLEVELAND GROUP,” OWN THESE 31 CORPORATIONS.</p>
<p>The direction in which Big Business has been heading – aided by two bonanza world wars – are shown by other illuminating figures.</p>
<p>Corporations with manufacturing assets of more than $50,000,000 each – “the giants of industry” as the report calls them – in 1934 controlled 37 per cent of all such assets in the country. By 1940, these “economic royalists” controlled 44 per cent. In 1942, blessed by war, these 205 corporations owned 49 per cent of all corporate manufacturing assets.</p>
<p>The bigger the corporations, the increasingly bigger proportion of all profits gravy they have been lapping up. The report states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The largest income recipients – those receiving $5,000,000 annual net income and over – have grown steadily in importance. For example, in 1918 they accounted for 34.2 per cent of the total net income received by all manufacturing corporations. During the depression the largest income recipients declined in importance. SINCE 1934, HOWEVER, THE LARGEST INCOME RECIPIENTS HAVE INCREASED THEIR POSITION, AND IN 1942, THE CORPORATIONS WITH $5,000,000 AND MORE ANNUAL NET INCOME ACCOUNTED FOR 50.7 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL.” (Our emphasis)<br>
</p>
<h4>Own 49 Per Cent of Assets</h4>
<p class="fst">By contrast, the small businessmen, those whom Roosevelt and Truman after him promised to save, are being forced more and more to the wall. “The smallest income recipients – those with annual net income of less than $250,000 – have shown a decrease in importance over the years. In 1918, this group received 23.4 per cent of the total net income of all manufacturers corporations. Their proportionate share had decreased to 19.1 per cent in 1929 ... and by 1942 their share had decreased to only 11.6 per cent.”</p>
<p>The only group which improved its relative position in the economy as a whole consisted of the largest firms, with 1,000 or more employes. In 1939, these firms employed 30 per cent of all wage earners. “By 1943, these figures had risen to 44 per cent.”</p>
<p>But those “few giants” employing 10,000 or more, “accounted for 13 per cent of total employment in 1939, and for fully 31 per cent of the total in 1944.”</p>
<p>Thus the war gave the big monopolies not only a greater share of the wealth and productive facilities – it gave them an immeasurably greater direct control over the lives of the working people.<br>
</p>
<h4>Deadly Blow at “Little Man”</h4>
<p class="fst">At the same time, the war struck a deadly blow at the little business men.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The record of the war years shows a constant increase in the importance of big business and a constant decline in that of the little concerns. This was due, in part, to the COMPLETE DISAPPEARANCE OF HALF A MILLION SMALL RETAIL, SERVICE, AND CONSTRUCTION FIRMS.” (Our emphasis)</p>
<p class="fst">The same tiny gang who owned most of America and ruled it in 1919 and 1939, own more of it today.</p>
<p>Only 10,000 persons (0.008 per cent of the population) owned one-fourth, and 75,000 (0.06 per cent of the population) owned one-half of all corporate stock in 1939i</p>
<p>The top one per cent of shareholders owned 60 per cent of the outstanding stock of the 200 largest non-financial corporations.</p>
<p>Just eight families and interlocked financial groups – including the Morgans, Mellons. Rockefellers, Du Ponts and Kuhn-Loeb – controlled outright 106 of the 250 largest corporations and two-thirds of their combined assets.</p>
<p>They are the ones who own most of America. The war was good to them.</p>
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Art Preis
World War II and the Monopolies
Big Business Grows Bigger
(20 July 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 29, 20 July 1946, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
World War II didn’t bring the promised “four freedoms.” It didn’t bring lasting peace, plenty and security. But it did make American Big Business bigger. It did increase the concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of the giant monopolies.
These monopolies – owning most of America’s industries, transport, raw materials, food processing and distribution, financial institutions – are controlled by a tiny oligarchy of America’s sixty richest families. They own most of this country. They rule it. And it is their armed forces and economic penetration which are reaching out to rule the whole world too.
How much of this country this ruling oligarchy owns and how much they have increased their ownership and control through World War II, is the subject of a recently-published report prepared for the Senate Small Business Committee by the Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), entitled Economic Concentration In World War II.
Packed into the 358 pages of this report are facts which confirm to the hilt the contentions of The Militant and the Socialist Workers Party that the war was inspired by and benefitted only Big Business.
“Economic Royalists” Get Fatter
Roosevelt, at the start of his presidential career in 1933, promised to “drive the money-changers from the temple” and assailed the “economic royalists.” But, as the conclusive evidence of this Senate report shows, the “economic royalists” fattened during his peacetime regime and during his wartime rule grew to unprecedented wealth and power.
“The relative importance of big business particularly the giant corporations, increased sharply during the war, while the position of small business declined,” the report demonstrates.
In September 1939, start of World War II, the value of all usable production facilities in the United States was about 40 billion dollars.
BUT – just 250 of the largest corporations had 25.9 billion dollars of these capital assets – 65.7 per cent!
During the war, 26 billion dollars of production facilities were added – two-thirds from the pockets of the American people by way of the U.S. Treasury. Of these facilities, says the report, “about $20,000,000,000 of the $26,000,000,000 wartime plant is usable for the production of peacetime products either immediately or after only minor conversion.” Thus, there is today “a total of some 60 billion dollars of postwar usable facilities.”
“Who then controls this vast productive plant?” asks the report. “The answer to these questions may be obtained by examining the holdings of the Nation’s 250 largest manufacturing companies – 31 of which are controlled by five financial interests groups.
“If these 250 industrial giants finally acquire the 8.9 billion dollars of usable federally financed facilities on which they generally hold purchase options, their facility holdings will come to 38.5 billion dollars, 66.5 per cent of total usable facilities and almost as much as the entire 39.6 billion dollars held before the war by all of the more than 75,000 manufacturing corporations in existence.”
250 GIANT CORPORATIONS OWN ⅔ OF MANUFACTURING PRODUCTION FACILITIES IN AMERICA TODAY.
But that isn’t all. Just 31 of these corporations own a total of 18.2 billion dollars of facilities – 30 per cent of the nation’s productive plant and equipment. AND FIVE FINANCIAL GROUPS, “NAMELY, MORGAN-FIRST NATIONAL, MELLON, ROCKEFELLER, DU FONT, AND THE CLEVELAND GROUP,” OWN THESE 31 CORPORATIONS.
The direction in which Big Business has been heading – aided by two bonanza world wars – are shown by other illuminating figures.
Corporations with manufacturing assets of more than $50,000,000 each – “the giants of industry” as the report calls them – in 1934 controlled 37 per cent of all such assets in the country. By 1940, these “economic royalists” controlled 44 per cent. In 1942, blessed by war, these 205 corporations owned 49 per cent of all corporate manufacturing assets.
The bigger the corporations, the increasingly bigger proportion of all profits gravy they have been lapping up. The report states:
“The largest income recipients – those receiving $5,000,000 annual net income and over – have grown steadily in importance. For example, in 1918 they accounted for 34.2 per cent of the total net income received by all manufacturing corporations. During the depression the largest income recipients declined in importance. SINCE 1934, HOWEVER, THE LARGEST INCOME RECIPIENTS HAVE INCREASED THEIR POSITION, AND IN 1942, THE CORPORATIONS WITH $5,000,000 AND MORE ANNUAL NET INCOME ACCOUNTED FOR 50.7 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL.” (Our emphasis)
Own 49 Per Cent of Assets
By contrast, the small businessmen, those whom Roosevelt and Truman after him promised to save, are being forced more and more to the wall. “The smallest income recipients – those with annual net income of less than $250,000 – have shown a decrease in importance over the years. In 1918, this group received 23.4 per cent of the total net income of all manufacturers corporations. Their proportionate share had decreased to 19.1 per cent in 1929 ... and by 1942 their share had decreased to only 11.6 per cent.”
The only group which improved its relative position in the economy as a whole consisted of the largest firms, with 1,000 or more employes. In 1939, these firms employed 30 per cent of all wage earners. “By 1943, these figures had risen to 44 per cent.”
But those “few giants” employing 10,000 or more, “accounted for 13 per cent of total employment in 1939, and for fully 31 per cent of the total in 1944.”
Thus the war gave the big monopolies not only a greater share of the wealth and productive facilities – it gave them an immeasurably greater direct control over the lives of the working people.
Deadly Blow at “Little Man”
At the same time, the war struck a deadly blow at the little business men.
“The record of the war years shows a constant increase in the importance of big business and a constant decline in that of the little concerns. This was due, in part, to the COMPLETE DISAPPEARANCE OF HALF A MILLION SMALL RETAIL, SERVICE, AND CONSTRUCTION FIRMS.” (Our emphasis)
The same tiny gang who owned most of America and ruled it in 1919 and 1939, own more of it today.
Only 10,000 persons (0.008 per cent of the population) owned one-fourth, and 75,000 (0.06 per cent of the population) owned one-half of all corporate stock in 1939i
The top one per cent of shareholders owned 60 per cent of the outstanding stock of the 200 largest non-financial corporations.
Just eight families and interlocked financial groups – including the Morgans, Mellons. Rockefellers, Du Ponts and Kuhn-Loeb – controlled outright 106 of the 250 largest corporations and two-thirds of their combined assets.
They are the ones who own most of America. The war was good to them.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Charter W.P.A. Workers: Major Task Before C.I.O.</h1>
<h4>Industry Pick-Up Does Not Relieve Unemployment;<br>
Labor Action Alone Will Open Factories</h4>
<h3>(December 1938)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_55" target="new">Vol. II No. 55</a>, 24 December 1938, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">The failure of the capitalist system to supply even the most elementary needs of the workers is no more glaringly illustrated than in the persistent phenomenon of mass unemployment in the richest country on earth.</p>
<p>It becomes increasingly clear, particularly in the mass production industries, that the organized labor movement and the employed workers in general, face in chronic mass unemployment the most devastating menace to their interests.</p>
<p>Despite all the tremendous gains of the past few years, particularly in the field of industrial unionism, constantly recurring economic declines heaping up new and more extensive strata of unemployed have cut wide swathes in the union ranks and hold the terror of insecurity over every employed worker. The knowledge that there are thousands of jobless men, desperate for any opportunity to earn a livelihood waiting just outside the plant gates, cannot help but breed an extreme caution in the average worker. It is a desire to hold on to his miserable portion without complaint rather than risk the loss of all in a fight for more decent wages and working conditions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Mass Unemployment Permanent</h4>
<p class="fst">In the past year and a half of Roosevelt depression, one decisive fact stands out – <em>mass unemployment is permanent</em>. If in the past nine years the workers have constantly renewed their hopes on the illusion that “bad times” were merely temporary and that “relief” was desirable merely as a “hand-out” to tide the jobless worker over until his next job, this illusion is fast disappearing. <em>Where formerly the WPA worker said, “When I get back into private industry ...” today, the workers in mass production industries are saying in increasing numbers, “When we get back on WPA.”</em> A pick-up in production no longer means a proportionate rise in employment. Rationalization of industry has proceeded at a pace sufficient in the past three years to permit a 25 to 35 percent expansion of production from the low norms of last March, <em>without any material increase in employment</em>. Those who worked two days a week work four now, and production is more than doubled. The totally unemployed must look to relief or government relief jobs as a permanent source of mere subsistence.<br>
</p>
<h4>Production Up – More WPA!</h4>
<p class="fst">A striking illustration of this fact was given several weeks ago, by the District WPA Director, William B. Schmuhl, in Toledo, Ohio, in a conference with the representatives of the C.I.O.-WPA Joint Action Committee. He stated that if production in Toledo industry were to rise to the peak of the 1937 boom, a minimum of 8,000 more WPA jobs would still be required now over the 7,000 actually provided previously during the production peak.</p>
<p>Included in the hundreds of thousands, rising production will fail to call back to private employment is a high percentage of young, militant union members, particularly in the C.I.O., who possess insufficient seniority. They had a taste of wages in unionized plants back in ’36 and ’37. They do not relish, as a permanent livelihood, WPA with its $10–$14 per week wages.</p>
<p>But despite the almost 100 percent political support given by organized labor in the past to the New Deal, that agency is proceeding with its now time-hallowed practice of withdrawing unemployed benefits, rather than expanding them and raising the standards.</p>
<p>Up to the present, the organized labor movement has failed to recognize the true character of present unemployment. The jobless worker who looked to his union for help, received little more than the encouragement of occasional resolutions and the sporadic aid of hastily formed, and most often, poorly informed, grievance committees.</p>
<p>In addition, the C.I.O. in many instances, especially where the Stalinists had any foothold or influence, simply told its members to join the Workers Alliance. Sad to relate, this organization was not merely numerically weak, but was so interlinked with the New Deal politicians and so anxious to gain the favors of the WPA officials as a “respectable” organization, that it has long since degenerated into its own unique form of company-unionism. Throughout the entire period of the Roosevelt depression, it spent its time fawning before the government officials. Its leaders, like David Lasser and Herbert Benjamin, cooled their heels in the anterooms of the WPA headquarters in Washington, the legislators offices, or the back-gates of the White House, rushing eagerly into print to expand each perfunctory official hand-shake or smile into another major victory for the unemployed. Such concessions are cheap, and the politicians bestowed them lavishly.</p>
<p>The specter of 10 to 14 millions of permanently disemployed hangs over organized labor. Hundreds of thousands of union men are jobless. The trade union leaders cannot and dare not permit these workers to continue either disorganized or divorced from the organized employed worker. Such a policy means only a gigantic breeding ground for the doctrines of the Father Coughlins, the Gerald K. Smiths, and all their fascist ilk, who spread the gospel that the unions only want the money of the workers, that the unions by their “excessive demands” are creating unemployment, etc.</p>
<p>The only answer organized labor can give to such demagogy, is a national program of organization of the unemployed and WPA workers.</p>
<p>More is needed than wordy resolutions or the intercessions of individual labor leaders. Just as the auto workers themselves, in open battle with the industrialists, won concessions, so the WPA workers and jobless are themselves the key to the solution of their problems.</p>
<p>The pressure from the ranks of the WPA workers in particular have forced the C.I.O. in cities like Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit to set up unions for the WPA workers. In this, they have begun to follow the spendid example of the Minneapolis Central Labor Union and the General Drivers Union which has followed this practice for four years and won outstanding benefits for the jobless of their community.</p>
<p>This move, still in its beginnings, is being bitterly fought by the reactionary elements within the labor movement, particularly the Stalinists, who fear the growth of fighting organizations directed against the New Deal politicians and the government which they so ardently woo.</p>
<p><em>Such elements must and will be brushed aside. The important thing right now is a nation-wide demand by every honest, militant unionist: “Charter the WPA workers!” and “Build the WPA Industrial Unions!”</em></p>
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Art Preis
Charter W.P.A. Workers: Major Task Before C.I.O.
Industry Pick-Up Does Not Relieve Unemployment;
Labor Action Alone Will Open Factories
(December 1938)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 55, 24 December 1938, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The failure of the capitalist system to supply even the most elementary needs of the workers is no more glaringly illustrated than in the persistent phenomenon of mass unemployment in the richest country on earth.
It becomes increasingly clear, particularly in the mass production industries, that the organized labor movement and the employed workers in general, face in chronic mass unemployment the most devastating menace to their interests.
Despite all the tremendous gains of the past few years, particularly in the field of industrial unionism, constantly recurring economic declines heaping up new and more extensive strata of unemployed have cut wide swathes in the union ranks and hold the terror of insecurity over every employed worker. The knowledge that there are thousands of jobless men, desperate for any opportunity to earn a livelihood waiting just outside the plant gates, cannot help but breed an extreme caution in the average worker. It is a desire to hold on to his miserable portion without complaint rather than risk the loss of all in a fight for more decent wages and working conditions.
Mass Unemployment Permanent
In the past year and a half of Roosevelt depression, one decisive fact stands out – mass unemployment is permanent. If in the past nine years the workers have constantly renewed their hopes on the illusion that “bad times” were merely temporary and that “relief” was desirable merely as a “hand-out” to tide the jobless worker over until his next job, this illusion is fast disappearing. Where formerly the WPA worker said, “When I get back into private industry ...” today, the workers in mass production industries are saying in increasing numbers, “When we get back on WPA.” A pick-up in production no longer means a proportionate rise in employment. Rationalization of industry has proceeded at a pace sufficient in the past three years to permit a 25 to 35 percent expansion of production from the low norms of last March, without any material increase in employment. Those who worked two days a week work four now, and production is more than doubled. The totally unemployed must look to relief or government relief jobs as a permanent source of mere subsistence.
Production Up – More WPA!
A striking illustration of this fact was given several weeks ago, by the District WPA Director, William B. Schmuhl, in Toledo, Ohio, in a conference with the representatives of the C.I.O.-WPA Joint Action Committee. He stated that if production in Toledo industry were to rise to the peak of the 1937 boom, a minimum of 8,000 more WPA jobs would still be required now over the 7,000 actually provided previously during the production peak.
Included in the hundreds of thousands, rising production will fail to call back to private employment is a high percentage of young, militant union members, particularly in the C.I.O., who possess insufficient seniority. They had a taste of wages in unionized plants back in ’36 and ’37. They do not relish, as a permanent livelihood, WPA with its $10–$14 per week wages.
But despite the almost 100 percent political support given by organized labor in the past to the New Deal, that agency is proceeding with its now time-hallowed practice of withdrawing unemployed benefits, rather than expanding them and raising the standards.
Up to the present, the organized labor movement has failed to recognize the true character of present unemployment. The jobless worker who looked to his union for help, received little more than the encouragement of occasional resolutions and the sporadic aid of hastily formed, and most often, poorly informed, grievance committees.
In addition, the C.I.O. in many instances, especially where the Stalinists had any foothold or influence, simply told its members to join the Workers Alliance. Sad to relate, this organization was not merely numerically weak, but was so interlinked with the New Deal politicians and so anxious to gain the favors of the WPA officials as a “respectable” organization, that it has long since degenerated into its own unique form of company-unionism. Throughout the entire period of the Roosevelt depression, it spent its time fawning before the government officials. Its leaders, like David Lasser and Herbert Benjamin, cooled their heels in the anterooms of the WPA headquarters in Washington, the legislators offices, or the back-gates of the White House, rushing eagerly into print to expand each perfunctory official hand-shake or smile into another major victory for the unemployed. Such concessions are cheap, and the politicians bestowed them lavishly.
The specter of 10 to 14 millions of permanently disemployed hangs over organized labor. Hundreds of thousands of union men are jobless. The trade union leaders cannot and dare not permit these workers to continue either disorganized or divorced from the organized employed worker. Such a policy means only a gigantic breeding ground for the doctrines of the Father Coughlins, the Gerald K. Smiths, and all their fascist ilk, who spread the gospel that the unions only want the money of the workers, that the unions by their “excessive demands” are creating unemployment, etc.
The only answer organized labor can give to such demagogy, is a national program of organization of the unemployed and WPA workers.
More is needed than wordy resolutions or the intercessions of individual labor leaders. Just as the auto workers themselves, in open battle with the industrialists, won concessions, so the WPA workers and jobless are themselves the key to the solution of their problems.
The pressure from the ranks of the WPA workers in particular have forced the C.I.O. in cities like Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit to set up unions for the WPA workers. In this, they have begun to follow the spendid example of the Minneapolis Central Labor Union and the General Drivers Union which has followed this practice for four years and won outstanding benefits for the jobless of their community.
This move, still in its beginnings, is being bitterly fought by the reactionary elements within the labor movement, particularly the Stalinists, who fear the growth of fighting organizations directed against the New Deal politicians and the government which they so ardently woo.
Such elements must and will be brushed aside. The important thing right now is a nation-wide demand by every honest, militant unionist: “Charter the WPA workers!” and “Build the WPA Industrial Unions!”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Inside Story of Toledo Strike</h1>
<h4>Told by a Leading Participant in the Battle with General Motors</h4>
<h3>(May/June 1935)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_23" target="new">Vol. I No. 23</a>, 25 May 1935, p. 2, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_24" target="new">Vol. I No. 24</a>, 1 June 1935, p. 2 & <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_07" target="new">Vol. I No. 25</a>, 8 June 1935, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<h4><a href="inside1.htm">Part 1</a><br>
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<a href="../06/inside2.htm">Part 2</a><br>
<br>
<a href="../06/inside3.htm">Part 3</a></h4>
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Art Preis
Inside Story of Toledo Strike
Told by a Leading Participant in the Battle with General Motors
(May/June 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 23, 25 May 1935, p. 2, Vol. I No. 24, 1 June 1935, p. 2 & Vol. I No. 25, 8 June 1935, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h4>Trade Union Notes</h4>
<h1>Textile Wage Case Conspiracy</h1>
<h3>(3 February 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_05" target="new">Vol. IX No. 5</a>, 3 February 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Some workers undoubtedly still have the illusion that the Roosevelt administration attempts to exercise “impartiality” in arriving at wage decisions. But the reality is the exact opposite. The rigmarole of War Labor Board hearings and other government arbitration procedures is designed to conceal behind-the-scenes conniving between the administration and the big employers.</p>
<p>The actual mechanics of one such conspiracy have been partially disclosed by recent developments in the textile wage case, including Director of Economic Stabilization Vinson’s intervention in this and other pending cases. This intervention came in the form of his letter to the WLB “requesting” that agency to grant no wage increases of any nature without prior approval of the Office of Price Administration.</p>
<p><em>By his action, Vinson succeeded in blocking a final decision of the WLB after it had indicated its intentions of lifting slightly the “sub-standard” wages of the terribly exploited textile workers. Further, he established an entirely new basis for “settling” wage disputes. Not the “merits of the case” are the criteria, but whether wage increases, however paltry, “affect costs and prices” – as the profiteering corporations always insist they do.</em></p>
<p>Moreover, final authority in wage disputes is no longer to reside in the official arbitration agency, the WLB, but in the “price control” agencies, where the unions do not even have formal representation. Thus, the administration has contrived a neat device for nullifying wage increases even in those few instances where the WLB, in order to preserve its prestige as an “impartial” agency, is compelled to grant “fringe” raises.</p>
<p>Apart from the obvious general fact that Roosevelt’s underlings and appointees, including Vinson, merely implement the administration’s wage and labor policies, in this particular case there is concrete evidence that Vinson acted in accordance with White House directions. Moreover, as we shall show, Vinson had a secret “understanding” with the leading textile manufacturers.</p>
<p>The first public knowledge of the general contents of Vinson’s letter to WLB chairman Davis came in a CIO statement of protest issued in Washington on January 12. This statement also contained a copy of a letter sent by Roosevelt to CIO President Murray. Roosevelt’s letter – into which the CIO leaders attempted at first to read a message of “hope” – clearly indicates that the inspiration for Vinson’s action came straight from the White House.</p>
<p><em>In his letter discussing the administration’s broad wage policy, Roosevelt emphasized just one point – the effect of any wage increases upon prices. “Naturally, any proposals for a change in our present policy must be considered in relation to their probable effect upon the price structure and upon our general anti-inflation program. The board (WLB), therefore, will submit its report to Judge Vinson whom I then expect to advise me in light of the board’s findings, as well as all other relevant information. As to objectives, we are in perfect agreement. We must not permit the price level to rise.”</em></p>
<p>It may be noted with reference to the last sentence that the compelling reason advanced by the unions to demand wage increases has been precisely that prices have already risen – at least 45 per cent since January 1941.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">It can now be proved, further more, that Vinson acted not only with Roosevelt’s approval but also upon secret agreement with the textile bosses. That is why Vinson’s letter to the WLB was timed to halt release of the WLB decision in the textile wage case.</p>
<p>The irrefutable evidence of this administration-employers conspiracy to defraud the textile workers is contained in a document made public on January 23 by Emil Rieve, President of the CIO Textile Workers Union.</p>
<p>This revealing document is signed by William P. Jacobs, Executive Director of the Print Cloth Group of Cotton Manufacturers, Clinton, S.C. It is dated January 12, 1945. It is fittingly titled, <em>Another Progress Report</em>.</p>
<p><em>The document begins:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“After spending another week in Washington, I give you another confidential report on price ceilings and wages. On this trip, I conferred with Judge Vinson, having previously conferred with Justice Byrnes. He arranged the conference with Judge Vinson for us.”</em></p>
<p class="fst"><em>What a spirit of cordiality and cooperation!</em></p>
<p>The report goes on to confide: “On wages the judge seemed better informed and more interested but still non-committal.” “Better informed and more interested” here means sympathetic to the sweat-shop operators’ view; “non-committal” means cautiously refraining from any <em>open</em> commitments.</p>
<p>Then comes the real pay-off.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This matter is now in his (Vinson’s) hands, and from the pressure that we know has now reached him it is possible that FOR POLITICAL REASONS he may be forced to indefinitely hold the matter, or he may recommend a basis somewhat lower than the WLB would authorize. From conferences which I held I know that Justice Byrnes, Senators George, Maybank, Russell and Governor Gardner, and perhaps others have insisted that he do nothing which will wipe out the traditional North-South differential.”</p>
<p class="fst">To what “political reasons” does this Southern sweatshop representative refer? Obviously the need of the Roosevelt regime to preserve its political ties with the powerful Southern Democratic Bourbons. The whole deal was engineered through Roosevelt’s right-hand man, Byrnes, the so-called “Assistant President.”</p>
<p>The report then observes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The interview (With Vinson) was satisfactory and resulted in a hopeful conclusion, again indicating the effect of pressure FROM HIGHER UP and perhaps from the letters which you have written to members of Congress. I RAN INTO THAT AT MANY POINTS.”</p>
<p class="fst">Such understanding and co-operation from the “higher ups” and legislators! Indeed, the textile manufacturers had every reason to anticipate a “hopeful conclusion.” And they were not disappointed.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">It need merely be added that WLB chairman Davis is now engaged in a bit of shadow-boxing with Vinson. Naturally, to prop up the WLB’s tottering authority, Davis is compelled to disclaim responsibility for the administration’s connivery. He is “disputing” in a polite way with Vinson’s “interpretation” – although conceding Vinson’s authority to enforce his “interpretation.”</p>
<p>However, Davis and Vinson have cooperated to keep their skulduggery hidden from the workers. The United Press reported on January 24 that the text of Vinson’s letter <em>“was made available despite efforts of both WLB Chairman William H. Davis and Mr. Vinson to prevent it from being made public.”</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
Textile Wage Case Conspiracy
(3 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 5, 3 February 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Some workers undoubtedly still have the illusion that the Roosevelt administration attempts to exercise “impartiality” in arriving at wage decisions. But the reality is the exact opposite. The rigmarole of War Labor Board hearings and other government arbitration procedures is designed to conceal behind-the-scenes conniving between the administration and the big employers.
The actual mechanics of one such conspiracy have been partially disclosed by recent developments in the textile wage case, including Director of Economic Stabilization Vinson’s intervention in this and other pending cases. This intervention came in the form of his letter to the WLB “requesting” that agency to grant no wage increases of any nature without prior approval of the Office of Price Administration.
By his action, Vinson succeeded in blocking a final decision of the WLB after it had indicated its intentions of lifting slightly the “sub-standard” wages of the terribly exploited textile workers. Further, he established an entirely new basis for “settling” wage disputes. Not the “merits of the case” are the criteria, but whether wage increases, however paltry, “affect costs and prices” – as the profiteering corporations always insist they do.
Moreover, final authority in wage disputes is no longer to reside in the official arbitration agency, the WLB, but in the “price control” agencies, where the unions do not even have formal representation. Thus, the administration has contrived a neat device for nullifying wage increases even in those few instances where the WLB, in order to preserve its prestige as an “impartial” agency, is compelled to grant “fringe” raises.
Apart from the obvious general fact that Roosevelt’s underlings and appointees, including Vinson, merely implement the administration’s wage and labor policies, in this particular case there is concrete evidence that Vinson acted in accordance with White House directions. Moreover, as we shall show, Vinson had a secret “understanding” with the leading textile manufacturers.
The first public knowledge of the general contents of Vinson’s letter to WLB chairman Davis came in a CIO statement of protest issued in Washington on January 12. This statement also contained a copy of a letter sent by Roosevelt to CIO President Murray. Roosevelt’s letter – into which the CIO leaders attempted at first to read a message of “hope” – clearly indicates that the inspiration for Vinson’s action came straight from the White House.
In his letter discussing the administration’s broad wage policy, Roosevelt emphasized just one point – the effect of any wage increases upon prices. “Naturally, any proposals for a change in our present policy must be considered in relation to their probable effect upon the price structure and upon our general anti-inflation program. The board (WLB), therefore, will submit its report to Judge Vinson whom I then expect to advise me in light of the board’s findings, as well as all other relevant information. As to objectives, we are in perfect agreement. We must not permit the price level to rise.”
It may be noted with reference to the last sentence that the compelling reason advanced by the unions to demand wage increases has been precisely that prices have already risen – at least 45 per cent since January 1941.
* * *
It can now be proved, further more, that Vinson acted not only with Roosevelt’s approval but also upon secret agreement with the textile bosses. That is why Vinson’s letter to the WLB was timed to halt release of the WLB decision in the textile wage case.
The irrefutable evidence of this administration-employers conspiracy to defraud the textile workers is contained in a document made public on January 23 by Emil Rieve, President of the CIO Textile Workers Union.
This revealing document is signed by William P. Jacobs, Executive Director of the Print Cloth Group of Cotton Manufacturers, Clinton, S.C. It is dated January 12, 1945. It is fittingly titled, Another Progress Report.
The document begins:
“After spending another week in Washington, I give you another confidential report on price ceilings and wages. On this trip, I conferred with Judge Vinson, having previously conferred with Justice Byrnes. He arranged the conference with Judge Vinson for us.”
What a spirit of cordiality and cooperation!
The report goes on to confide: “On wages the judge seemed better informed and more interested but still non-committal.” “Better informed and more interested” here means sympathetic to the sweat-shop operators’ view; “non-committal” means cautiously refraining from any open commitments.
Then comes the real pay-off.
“This matter is now in his (Vinson’s) hands, and from the pressure that we know has now reached him it is possible that FOR POLITICAL REASONS he may be forced to indefinitely hold the matter, or he may recommend a basis somewhat lower than the WLB would authorize. From conferences which I held I know that Justice Byrnes, Senators George, Maybank, Russell and Governor Gardner, and perhaps others have insisted that he do nothing which will wipe out the traditional North-South differential.”
To what “political reasons” does this Southern sweatshop representative refer? Obviously the need of the Roosevelt regime to preserve its political ties with the powerful Southern Democratic Bourbons. The whole deal was engineered through Roosevelt’s right-hand man, Byrnes, the so-called “Assistant President.”
The report then observes:
“The interview (With Vinson) was satisfactory and resulted in a hopeful conclusion, again indicating the effect of pressure FROM HIGHER UP and perhaps from the letters which you have written to members of Congress. I RAN INTO THAT AT MANY POINTS.”
Such understanding and co-operation from the “higher ups” and legislators! Indeed, the textile manufacturers had every reason to anticipate a “hopeful conclusion.” And they were not disappointed.
* * *
It need merely be added that WLB chairman Davis is now engaged in a bit of shadow-boxing with Vinson. Naturally, to prop up the WLB’s tottering authority, Davis is compelled to disclaim responsibility for the administration’s connivery. He is “disputing” in a polite way with Vinson’s “interpretation” – although conceding Vinson’s authority to enforce his “interpretation.”
However, Davis and Vinson have cooperated to keep their skulduggery hidden from the workers. The United Press reported on January 24 that the text of Vinson’s letter “was made available despite efforts of both WLB Chairman William H. Davis and Mr. Vinson to prevent it from being made public.”
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h4>Trade Union Notes</h4>
<h1>Stalinist Finks in the Ward Strikes</h1>
<h3>(6 January 1945))</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_01" target="new">Vol. IX No. 1</a>, 6 January 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">During the past three weeks through their press and union stooges, the Stalinists have been conducting their most virulent strikebreaking campaign to date. These rats have been busily trailing their slime across the magnificent strike struggle of the Montgomery Ward workers which has won staunch support in the ranks of the labor movement.</p>
<p>One of the most shameful acts of treachery perpetrated by the Stalinists was the stab in the back dealt the Detroit Ward Workers by the Stalinist officials of Local 65, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employes in New York. They belong to the very same international union which has been directing the strikes in Detroit, Kansas City and Chicago.</p>
<p><em>The Stalinist stooges in this local, headed by Local 65 President Arthur Osman, issued a public denunciation of the Ward strikes. In their statement opposing the struggle of the Ward workers for a union contract and increases beyond their 39 cents an hour wages, these finks slanderously linked the Ward workers with the “treasonous activities” of Sewell L. Avery, the open-shop plutocrat who for four years has been successfully defying scores of WLB and other government agencies’ orders.</em></p>
<p>These deliberate strikebreaking moves of the Stalinist stooges have of course been applauded by the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>. But these finks have become so brazen that they even boast of the praise of the bosses for their activities. In the December 24 issue of the Local 65 paper, <strong>New Voices</strong>, right next to a double-banner, double- cross headline attacking the Ward strikers, was “proudly” displayed a letter declaring “we are in complete accord with the views set forth by Mr. Osman” against the Ward workers. This statement was signed by Sidney B. Felsenfeld, Executive Secretary of the Shoe Wholesalers Employers’ Association!</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">While the Stalinists have joined with the open-shoppers against the Ward workers, almost every other section of the labor movement, including the bulk of the URWDSE-CIO members throughout the country, are giving tacit or open support to the strike. The infamous conduct of the Stalinists has aroused so much indignation that over 30 leading locals of the URWDSE-CIO have issued public statements condemning their strikebreaking in the Ward situation.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Anger against the Stalinists has been simmering ever since the Chicago Ward strike last May when Harry Bridges, head of the CIO Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, ordered the members of his organization in the company’s St. Paul branch to handle “hot goods” from the struck Chicago mail-order headquarters. At the start of the Ward strike in Detroit Bridges’ attorney, Douglas Hall, appeared before WLB hearings in Washington to boast that “there is no strike at St. Paul” despite Avery’s “non-compliance with every directive of the Board,” including directives affecting the St. Paul members of the ILWU.</em></p>
<p>While Bridges and his henchmen were pursuing their servile policies of surrender to the open-shoppers, the Roosevelt administration was prodded by the militancy of the Detroit Ward strike into issuing another WLB “last warning” compliance order to Avery. This order also included Ward’s St. Paul establishment along with those in several other cities.</p>
<p>Thereupon the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> had the gall to bray in a headline on Dec. 16: “Bridges Wins Order on Ward Without Strike.” To be sure, Bridges didn’t call any strike; he did his damndest to break the strike that was going on in Detroit. But that didn’t prevent him and his pack of Stalinized scabs from trying to steal a little credit for themselves by cashing in on the very Detroit strike he assailed.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The officers of Local 327, URWDSE, have filed formal charges against Harry Bridges’ ILWU lieutenants accusing them of direct collusion with the Ward management in an attempt to sabotage an impending strike at the Baltimore Ward plant. These charges were filed with the national CIO last week. In a letter to Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey, Maurice J. Niestadt, assistant business manager of Local 327, urged the CIO to take action against the strikebreaking Stalinist union officials.</p>
<p>Niestadt declared that on December 20 a committee of workers from Ward’s retail store in Baltimore solicited the aid of Local 327 in a strike planned for December 22. This committee also asked assistance in securing the backing of other CIO unions in the area.</p>
<p>The strike had to be postponed a day because of bad weather. On the originally scheduled day, an ILWU international representative, Jas. More, “with management assistance made a personal survey throughout the entire plant questioning the workers on their attitude toward a strike.” Also, that same day, the company sent an individual letter to each employee with intimidating propaganda against the projected strike.</p>
<p><em>“This act of collusion on the part of the ILWU and management completely destroyed the morale and terrorized the people in the retail store where our people had been working,” Niestadt stated. He also declared that the action of the ILWU officials who were carrying out Bridges’ strikebreaking policy, constituted interference with the internal affairs of another CIO union.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">A final note. Last week Washington correspondents, including members of the CIO American Newspaper Guild which backed the Ward strike, interviewed a committee of Stalinists and their front men from the Stalinist-dominated, Wayne County (Detroit) CIO Council. This committee had hot-footed to Washington to beg the government to halt the strike.</p>
<p>The committee boasted of “emphasizing” unyielding devotion to the no-strike pledge. “Do you regard the Ward strike as a breach of that pledge?” a reporter asked. W.G. Grant, Ford UAW Local 600 president, replied, “Yes.”</p>
<p><em>“Did you notice,” a reporter shot back, “that the WLB made an exception when it did not order the Ward strikers back to work?” Grant was taken aback. “Are you sure?” Several reporters, who had covered the WLB hearings, replied, “Absolutely.” Grant could only answer feebly, “I think I’d check to make doubly sure.”</em></p>
<p>As the reporters were clearly intimating, the Stalinists display a new low in finkery when they attack a strike WHICH NOT EVEN THE CORPORATION-DOMINATED WLB DARED TO CONDEMN OPENLY!</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
Stalinist Finks in the Ward Strikes
(6 January 1945))
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 1, 6 January 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
During the past three weeks through their press and union stooges, the Stalinists have been conducting their most virulent strikebreaking campaign to date. These rats have been busily trailing their slime across the magnificent strike struggle of the Montgomery Ward workers which has won staunch support in the ranks of the labor movement.
One of the most shameful acts of treachery perpetrated by the Stalinists was the stab in the back dealt the Detroit Ward Workers by the Stalinist officials of Local 65, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employes in New York. They belong to the very same international union which has been directing the strikes in Detroit, Kansas City and Chicago.
The Stalinist stooges in this local, headed by Local 65 President Arthur Osman, issued a public denunciation of the Ward strikes. In their statement opposing the struggle of the Ward workers for a union contract and increases beyond their 39 cents an hour wages, these finks slanderously linked the Ward workers with the “treasonous activities” of Sewell L. Avery, the open-shop plutocrat who for four years has been successfully defying scores of WLB and other government agencies’ orders.
These deliberate strikebreaking moves of the Stalinist stooges have of course been applauded by the Daily Worker. But these finks have become so brazen that they even boast of the praise of the bosses for their activities. In the December 24 issue of the Local 65 paper, New Voices, right next to a double-banner, double- cross headline attacking the Ward strikers, was “proudly” displayed a letter declaring “we are in complete accord with the views set forth by Mr. Osman” against the Ward workers. This statement was signed by Sidney B. Felsenfeld, Executive Secretary of the Shoe Wholesalers Employers’ Association!
* * *
While the Stalinists have joined with the open-shoppers against the Ward workers, almost every other section of the labor movement, including the bulk of the URWDSE-CIO members throughout the country, are giving tacit or open support to the strike. The infamous conduct of the Stalinists has aroused so much indignation that over 30 leading locals of the URWDSE-CIO have issued public statements condemning their strikebreaking in the Ward situation.
* * *
Anger against the Stalinists has been simmering ever since the Chicago Ward strike last May when Harry Bridges, head of the CIO Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, ordered the members of his organization in the company’s St. Paul branch to handle “hot goods” from the struck Chicago mail-order headquarters. At the start of the Ward strike in Detroit Bridges’ attorney, Douglas Hall, appeared before WLB hearings in Washington to boast that “there is no strike at St. Paul” despite Avery’s “non-compliance with every directive of the Board,” including directives affecting the St. Paul members of the ILWU.
While Bridges and his henchmen were pursuing their servile policies of surrender to the open-shoppers, the Roosevelt administration was prodded by the militancy of the Detroit Ward strike into issuing another WLB “last warning” compliance order to Avery. This order also included Ward’s St. Paul establishment along with those in several other cities.
Thereupon the Daily Worker had the gall to bray in a headline on Dec. 16: “Bridges Wins Order on Ward Without Strike.” To be sure, Bridges didn’t call any strike; he did his damndest to break the strike that was going on in Detroit. But that didn’t prevent him and his pack of Stalinized scabs from trying to steal a little credit for themselves by cashing in on the very Detroit strike he assailed.
* * *
The officers of Local 327, URWDSE, have filed formal charges against Harry Bridges’ ILWU lieutenants accusing them of direct collusion with the Ward management in an attempt to sabotage an impending strike at the Baltimore Ward plant. These charges were filed with the national CIO last week. In a letter to Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey, Maurice J. Niestadt, assistant business manager of Local 327, urged the CIO to take action against the strikebreaking Stalinist union officials.
Niestadt declared that on December 20 a committee of workers from Ward’s retail store in Baltimore solicited the aid of Local 327 in a strike planned for December 22. This committee also asked assistance in securing the backing of other CIO unions in the area.
The strike had to be postponed a day because of bad weather. On the originally scheduled day, an ILWU international representative, Jas. More, “with management assistance made a personal survey throughout the entire plant questioning the workers on their attitude toward a strike.” Also, that same day, the company sent an individual letter to each employee with intimidating propaganda against the projected strike.
“This act of collusion on the part of the ILWU and management completely destroyed the morale and terrorized the people in the retail store where our people had been working,” Niestadt stated. He also declared that the action of the ILWU officials who were carrying out Bridges’ strikebreaking policy, constituted interference with the internal affairs of another CIO union.
* * *
A final note. Last week Washington correspondents, including members of the CIO American Newspaper Guild which backed the Ward strike, interviewed a committee of Stalinists and their front men from the Stalinist-dominated, Wayne County (Detroit) CIO Council. This committee had hot-footed to Washington to beg the government to halt the strike.
The committee boasted of “emphasizing” unyielding devotion to the no-strike pledge. “Do you regard the Ward strike as a breach of that pledge?” a reporter asked. W.G. Grant, Ford UAW Local 600 president, replied, “Yes.”
“Did you notice,” a reporter shot back, “that the WLB made an exception when it did not order the Ward strikers back to work?” Grant was taken aback. “Are you sure?” Several reporters, who had covered the WLB hearings, replied, “Absolutely.” Grant could only answer feebly, “I think I’d check to make doubly sure.”
As the reporters were clearly intimating, the Stalinists display a new low in finkery when they attack a strike WHICH NOT EVEN THE CORPORATION-DOMINATED WLB DARED TO CONDEMN OPENLY!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Yipsels Unite with Spartacus at Toledo Meet</h1>
<h3>(14 December 1935)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_50" target="new">Vol. 1 No. 50</a>, 14 December 1935, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst"><strong>TOLEDO, Ohio</strong> – The youth section of the local Stalinists succeeded in capturing themselves and several Y.W.C.A. secretaries at the Toledo Youth Congress held at the Central Labor Union Hall, Saturday afternoon, November 30. Going one better on the Elders of the Church (Stalinist), who held the fort at the recent American League Against War and Fascism conference, the fledgelings succeeded in preventing entirely any discussion on the war and sanctions question, which had been introduced into the conference by a joint resolution against support of imperialist governments and their sanctions submitted by the Young Peoples Socialist League and Spartacus Youth League.</p>
<p>Highly advertised and ballyhooed, the conference began on the evening of November 29, with a meeting at the Civic Auditorium featuring a symposium of representatives of the Republican, Democratic, Socialist and Communist Parties on <em>What Our Party Offers American Youth</em>. For over three hours, the 300 of the faithful who lost themselves in the echoing vastness of the huge auditorium were, drenched by the greatest outpouring of reactionary balderdash ever spewed over a helpless audience, – saved only by the forthright utterances of Ben Fisher, national secretary of the Yipsels, who openly denounced the chauvinist policies of the Stalinists and attacked the support of sanctions and one’s own imperialist government in a war crisis.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Minimum Is Zero</h4>
<p class="fst">William Weinstone, who represented the Stalinists in the Symposium, completely skirted the entire war question, ducked the direct challenge of Fisher on the C.P. position on sanctions, and confined the greater portion of his remarks to sugary sentimental plea for organic unity between the Socialists and Stalinists. Waldo McNutt, Chairman of the American Youth Congress, one of the two main speakers on the program, distinguished himself in his remarks by declaring the purpose of the Congress to be “the uniting of the youth on a minimum program on which everyone could agree.” Everyone agreed on the minimum program offered – the minimum being nothing at all.</p>
<p>The wind-up speaker, and chief attraction of the evening, however, was Reverend Theodore Adams, pastor of the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church. The Reverend put on a regular revival and offered as the solution of the problems of American youth the slogan “Come to Jesus!” (<em>sic!</em>), and punctuated his pious exhortations with an attack on the Soviet Union, linking the workers’ fatherland with Nazi Germany! Reverend Adams is the respectable front the Stalinists in control of the Congress are using to appeal to the church groups. The actual conference, attended by 40 delegates, a majority of Y.C.L. and New America members in a bloc, lasted about 4 hours on Saturday afternoon. One hour of this time was spent in again listening to Mr. McNutt say nothing in the polished platform manner of a washing-machine salesman who just slays the Y.W.C.A. secretaries. Then the conference was divided into “commissions,” directed in reports on youth and “unemployment, industry, education, war and fascism. This was intended to prevent any full and open discussion before the entire congress on resolutions introduced by the Yipsels and S.Y.L.</p>
<p>However, a majority report in favor of the joint anti-sanctions resolution was reported by the commission on war and fascism, of which Sam Pollock was elected chairman. When the report was read to the congress, Lottie Gordon, Y.C.L. representative and wife of the district C.P. organizer, took the floor and charged the contents of the report to be out of order. After an hour’s fight on the floor, in which the Y.C.L. members by parliamentary conniving, succeeded in preventing any discussion on the actual contents of the resolution, it was tabled. During the course of the debate, however, it was revealed that the leaders of the A.Y.C., those staunch defenders of democratic rights, were opposed to “any controversial subject being discussed, since such subjects are against the program of the congress which is limited only to those questions on which all are in agreement.” (<em>sic!</em>)</p>
<p>The one significant phase of the entire affair was the genuine and principled united front affected between the Young Socialists and Young Fourth Internationalists on the basis of a fundamental agreement on the war question.</p>
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Art Preis
Yipsels Unite with Spartacus at Toledo Meet
(14 December 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. 1 No. 50, 14 December 1935, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
TOLEDO, Ohio – The youth section of the local Stalinists succeeded in capturing themselves and several Y.W.C.A. secretaries at the Toledo Youth Congress held at the Central Labor Union Hall, Saturday afternoon, November 30. Going one better on the Elders of the Church (Stalinist), who held the fort at the recent American League Against War and Fascism conference, the fledgelings succeeded in preventing entirely any discussion on the war and sanctions question, which had been introduced into the conference by a joint resolution against support of imperialist governments and their sanctions submitted by the Young Peoples Socialist League and Spartacus Youth League.
Highly advertised and ballyhooed, the conference began on the evening of November 29, with a meeting at the Civic Auditorium featuring a symposium of representatives of the Republican, Democratic, Socialist and Communist Parties on What Our Party Offers American Youth. For over three hours, the 300 of the faithful who lost themselves in the echoing vastness of the huge auditorium were, drenched by the greatest outpouring of reactionary balderdash ever spewed over a helpless audience, – saved only by the forthright utterances of Ben Fisher, national secretary of the Yipsels, who openly denounced the chauvinist policies of the Stalinists and attacked the support of sanctions and one’s own imperialist government in a war crisis.
The Minimum Is Zero
William Weinstone, who represented the Stalinists in the Symposium, completely skirted the entire war question, ducked the direct challenge of Fisher on the C.P. position on sanctions, and confined the greater portion of his remarks to sugary sentimental plea for organic unity between the Socialists and Stalinists. Waldo McNutt, Chairman of the American Youth Congress, one of the two main speakers on the program, distinguished himself in his remarks by declaring the purpose of the Congress to be “the uniting of the youth on a minimum program on which everyone could agree.” Everyone agreed on the minimum program offered – the minimum being nothing at all.
The wind-up speaker, and chief attraction of the evening, however, was Reverend Theodore Adams, pastor of the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church. The Reverend put on a regular revival and offered as the solution of the problems of American youth the slogan “Come to Jesus!” (sic!), and punctuated his pious exhortations with an attack on the Soviet Union, linking the workers’ fatherland with Nazi Germany! Reverend Adams is the respectable front the Stalinists in control of the Congress are using to appeal to the church groups. The actual conference, attended by 40 delegates, a majority of Y.C.L. and New America members in a bloc, lasted about 4 hours on Saturday afternoon. One hour of this time was spent in again listening to Mr. McNutt say nothing in the polished platform manner of a washing-machine salesman who just slays the Y.W.C.A. secretaries. Then the conference was divided into “commissions,” directed in reports on youth and “unemployment, industry, education, war and fascism. This was intended to prevent any full and open discussion before the entire congress on resolutions introduced by the Yipsels and S.Y.L.
However, a majority report in favor of the joint anti-sanctions resolution was reported by the commission on war and fascism, of which Sam Pollock was elected chairman. When the report was read to the congress, Lottie Gordon, Y.C.L. representative and wife of the district C.P. organizer, took the floor and charged the contents of the report to be out of order. After an hour’s fight on the floor, in which the Y.C.L. members by parliamentary conniving, succeeded in preventing any discussion on the actual contents of the resolution, it was tabled. During the course of the debate, however, it was revealed that the leaders of the A.Y.C., those staunch defenders of democratic rights, were opposed to “any controversial subject being discussed, since such subjects are against the program of the congress which is limited only to those questions on which all are in agreement.” (sic!)
The one significant phase of the entire affair was the genuine and principled united front affected between the Young Socialists and Young Fourth Internationalists on the basis of a fundamental agreement on the war question.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Coal Miner Railroaded to Jail<br>
Under Smith-Connally Slave Law</h1>
<h4>William Patterson Is the First Militant Unionist<br>
Victimized by Anti-Labor Act</h4>
<h3>(4 June 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_23" target="new">Vol. IX No. 23</a>, 9 June 1945, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>PITTSBURGH, Pa., June 4 – William Patterson, 40-year old union coal digger from tiny company-owned Daisytown, 50 miles south of here, is the first American worker to be imprisoned under the infamous Smith-Connally anti-strike law.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Last Saturday this loyal union man, who has spent the past 17 years toiling down in the dark and deadly dangers of Vesta No. 4, the world’s largest soft coal mine owned by Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., was thrust into the county prison at Uniontown, Pa.</strong></p>
<p><em>Snatched without warning from his wife and two children, he has been condemned to six months behind bars.</em></p>
<p><em>Thus Bill Patterson, a mine committeeman whom his fellow workers yesterday at Richeyville described as a “fighting fool for the men,” has become the first victim of the most vicious federal anti-labor law of modern times.</em></p>
<p><em>Today, he is an outstanding symbol of American capitalist class “justice.” The American ruling class and its government have selected him to serve as an “example” and “warning” to all American labor.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The Truth Revealed</h4>
<p class="fst">The truth about William Patterson’s case has been buried in slanderous misrepresentations. Yesterday I visited Richeyville, near Patterson’s home, where Vesta No. 4 is located. I had the privilege of attending a meeting of his local union, Local 2399, United Mine Workers of America.</p>
<p>From the lips of the officers and members of his union, who are behind him to a man, I have secured the first authentic account of this unprecedented and historic case.</p>
<p>Seated around a table on the platform of the Richeyville recreation hall where the local meets, Steve Panak, Local 2399 president, John G. Harris, vice-president, John Peters, secretary-treasurer, and a score of other officers and members indignantly related the facts behind this frame-up.</p>
<p>They described step by step how the government, aided by the courts, which in this area are controlled by the billion-dollar steel trust and the powerful mine operators, deliberately set out to “get” Patterson and make an “example” of him.<br>
</p>
<h4>Took the Rap</h4>
<p class="fst">Over and over again, they emphasized: “He took the rap for us.” They made it clear that Bill Patterson could have been any one of a half million miners who today might be standing in his shoes – or will be tomorrow, if the employing class and government get away with this first imprisonment under the anti-strike law.</p>
<p>The fact that Patterson was sentenced to six months, instead of five years as the law permits, is due solely to the “cautious” approach of the government in this first test case. A “light” sentence – throwing a worker into jail unjustly for six months and depriving his family of his support – they figured would not be apt to arouse “too much” protest.</p>
<p>Patterson was quickly railroaded to prison last week on the technical charge of violating his probation, after the original conviction and suspended sentence imposed on him and 26 other union miners of this area in the August 1942 trial for alleged violation of the Smith-Connally Act. They had participated in the general mine strike of that summer which was used as the pretext for pushing through the anti-strike law. On the advice of their legal counsel, they had been persuaded not to contest the charge. The government secured a conviction and, above all, a precedent.</p>
<p>Then the government and steel and mine bosses lay in wait for their first victim. They found him in William Patterson, who had continued to act as an elected mine committeeman and to defend the interests of his brother unionists despite the suspended sentence hanging over his head.<br>
</p>
<h4>Mine Walkout</h4>
<p class="fst">Last February 12 and 13 there was a walkout at Vesta No. 4. I have the direct testimony of scores of union men that Patterson had no direct or personal responsibility for the strike. I was informed that on last Saturday over 600 of Patterson’s fellow workers had signed a petition stating they were prepared to swear and testify that Patterson could in no way have been responsible for the February walkout.</p>
<p>Subsequently, however, the District 5 UMW officials, for reasons of their own about which the local rank and file are very angry, informed Patterson that he had been suspended from his mine committee post. Local 2399 refused to accept Patterson’s resignation under pressure and the subsequent suspension. They felt so keenly about the injustice of this act against Patterson that on May 14 they went on strike for seven days in protest.</p>
<p>But this was the pretext the government had been seeking. The workers yesterday informed me that FBI agents had been in the area since the walkout in April in the fight for the new soft coal contract. Members of Local 2399 were questioned and asked to give “evidence” against Patterson. His probation officer, George O’Brien, had even approached some of the other workers who had been convicted in August 1943 and tried to pressure them into “talking” against Patterson. All the evidence points to a deliberate plot to “get” Patterson.<br>
</p>
<h4>Patterson Arrested</h4>
<p class="fst">Without any prior warning, on May 21, a federal marshal walked into Bill Patterson’s home in Daisytown, a few miles from Richeyville, and arrested him on the charge of Probation Officer O’Brien that he had “violated” his probation because of the February and May strikes. The only “crime” he committed was simply not to be a rat and a scab when the rest of the men walked out. He was whisked away to the Alleghany County Jail here in Pittsburgh and held under a $2,000 bond.</p>
<p>For three days, his union brothers worked desperately to raise bond to release him. Those who owned little homes were ready and willing to put them up as bond. But the court refused to accept property mortgaged or owned jointly in the name of husband and wife. Every bonding company they approached turned them down. Finally, from one source and another they scraped together the – for them – enormous sum of $1,000 cash, which the judge accepted as temporary bond.</p>
<p>On Friday, June 1, Patterson was brought for hearing before Federal Judge F.P. Schoonmaker here. From all first-hand accounts of the proceedings that I gathered from the workers who had gone to the hearing as witnesses on Patterson’s behalf – although they were never permitted to testify – it was a judicial farce. As one worker put it, “That judge had his mind all made up in advance. Bill never had a chance.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“No Bearing”</h4>
<p class="fst">There were 24 union men who gave up a day’s pay and travelled at their own expenses to Pittsburgh in an effort to bring the truth into the federal court. They were forced to sit in angry silence while the judge, prosecuting attorney and probation officer went through the legal hairsplitting necessary to rush Patterson off to jail “strictly according to the law.”</p>
<p>The probation officer claimed that the mere fact that Patterson had acted as mine committeeman while he was on proba</p>
<p>tion was “evidence” that he had “violated” his probation. Whether or not Patterson had any direct responsibility for the strikes, the judge ruled, had “no bearing” on the case. The fact that he had not scabbed, that he had stayed away from work, meant he was “guilty.” Of course, the judge stuck to the technicality that this was a case of probation “violation,” in order to avoid a hearing on the real issue – the original frame- up under the unconstitutional Smith-Connally anti-labor law.</p>
<p>When Premo Columbus, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Patterson’s defense counsel, pleaded with the judge to permit the testimony of the 24 witnesses on Patterson’s behalf, the judge just brushed the plea aside.</p>
<p>Patterson sought to defend himself and showed that it was impossible, even if he had been willing to do so, to go to work during a mine shutdown. One local union officer explained that:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... he told how he couldn’t go to work, even if he wanted to. There was no coal-loader, no motorman, no brakemen, no shot-fer, no cutter.</p>
<p class="quote">“But the way they put it in court, even if the men went on strike, Bill had to work or go to jail. They said he had to be a scab. He was in a hell of a spot. They had him coming and going. He couldn’t stay out when there was a strike or he would be sent to the jug. But he couldn’t work even if he wanted to, so they knew they had him.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Denied Cigarettes</h4>
<p class="fst">As one final dirty piece of reprisal, the men told me, they wouldn’t even let his fellow workers slip him some cigarettes before they rushed him off to jail after the judge finally ended the farce and ordered his probation revoked. He was shipped almost immediately to the Uniontown prison, some 65 miles south of here, where he will serve his sentence.</p>
<p>The union local and Patterson’s union brothers are doing all in their power to aid him and his family, his wife Ruby, a 15-year old son and a 20-year old daughter. Yesterday the local meeting decided unanimously to continue the fight for Bill Patterson’s release and voted a special assessment to provide his family with the full amount each month he would have earned on the job, so his dependents will not want.</p>
<p>But the obligation to defend Bill Patterson and to see to it that there are no more victims of the Smith-Connally slave-labor bill must not rest alone on the shoulders of the fine, loyal members of Local 2399. Patterson is “taking the rap” for every militant union man in this country.</p>
<p>From all the facts I have gathered on the scene here, I do not hesitate to state that this case stinks to high heaven from start to finish. Far more than local forces have conspired in Patterson’s persecution and imprisonment. It represents a conspiracy on the part of the most powerful federal agencies backed by the greatest anti-labor corporations in the land.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Must Protest</h4>
<p class="fst">Only a storm of united labor protest will tear the veil from this rotten conspiracy and open the prison doors for Bill Patterson. Every labor organization in the country should adopt resolutions of protest to the federal government and send their immediate expressions of support to Local 2399, United Mine Workers, at Richeyville, Pa.</p>
<p>Elementary labor solidarity for a victimized union man demands such action. But even more, the elementary defense of the entire labor movement requires it. For if one militant miner can be persecuted and imprisoned under the vile anti-strike law without thunderous protest from all labor – what worker, what loyal union man fighting for labor’s rights, can say today that he won’t be next?</p>
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Art Preis
Coal Miner Railroaded to Jail
Under Smith-Connally Slave Law
William Patterson Is the First Militant Unionist
Victimized by Anti-Labor Act
(4 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 23, 9 June 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
PITTSBURGH, Pa., June 4 – William Patterson, 40-year old union coal digger from tiny company-owned Daisytown, 50 miles south of here, is the first American worker to be imprisoned under the infamous Smith-Connally anti-strike law.
Last Saturday this loyal union man, who has spent the past 17 years toiling down in the dark and deadly dangers of Vesta No. 4, the world’s largest soft coal mine owned by Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., was thrust into the county prison at Uniontown, Pa.
Snatched without warning from his wife and two children, he has been condemned to six months behind bars.
Thus Bill Patterson, a mine committeeman whom his fellow workers yesterday at Richeyville described as a “fighting fool for the men,” has become the first victim of the most vicious federal anti-labor law of modern times.
Today, he is an outstanding symbol of American capitalist class “justice.” The American ruling class and its government have selected him to serve as an “example” and “warning” to all American labor.
The Truth Revealed
The truth about William Patterson’s case has been buried in slanderous misrepresentations. Yesterday I visited Richeyville, near Patterson’s home, where Vesta No. 4 is located. I had the privilege of attending a meeting of his local union, Local 2399, United Mine Workers of America.
From the lips of the officers and members of his union, who are behind him to a man, I have secured the first authentic account of this unprecedented and historic case.
Seated around a table on the platform of the Richeyville recreation hall where the local meets, Steve Panak, Local 2399 president, John G. Harris, vice-president, John Peters, secretary-treasurer, and a score of other officers and members indignantly related the facts behind this frame-up.
They described step by step how the government, aided by the courts, which in this area are controlled by the billion-dollar steel trust and the powerful mine operators, deliberately set out to “get” Patterson and make an “example” of him.
Took the Rap
Over and over again, they emphasized: “He took the rap for us.” They made it clear that Bill Patterson could have been any one of a half million miners who today might be standing in his shoes – or will be tomorrow, if the employing class and government get away with this first imprisonment under the anti-strike law.
The fact that Patterson was sentenced to six months, instead of five years as the law permits, is due solely to the “cautious” approach of the government in this first test case. A “light” sentence – throwing a worker into jail unjustly for six months and depriving his family of his support – they figured would not be apt to arouse “too much” protest.
Patterson was quickly railroaded to prison last week on the technical charge of violating his probation, after the original conviction and suspended sentence imposed on him and 26 other union miners of this area in the August 1942 trial for alleged violation of the Smith-Connally Act. They had participated in the general mine strike of that summer which was used as the pretext for pushing through the anti-strike law. On the advice of their legal counsel, they had been persuaded not to contest the charge. The government secured a conviction and, above all, a precedent.
Then the government and steel and mine bosses lay in wait for their first victim. They found him in William Patterson, who had continued to act as an elected mine committeeman and to defend the interests of his brother unionists despite the suspended sentence hanging over his head.
Mine Walkout
Last February 12 and 13 there was a walkout at Vesta No. 4. I have the direct testimony of scores of union men that Patterson had no direct or personal responsibility for the strike. I was informed that on last Saturday over 600 of Patterson’s fellow workers had signed a petition stating they were prepared to swear and testify that Patterson could in no way have been responsible for the February walkout.
Subsequently, however, the District 5 UMW officials, for reasons of their own about which the local rank and file are very angry, informed Patterson that he had been suspended from his mine committee post. Local 2399 refused to accept Patterson’s resignation under pressure and the subsequent suspension. They felt so keenly about the injustice of this act against Patterson that on May 14 they went on strike for seven days in protest.
But this was the pretext the government had been seeking. The workers yesterday informed me that FBI agents had been in the area since the walkout in April in the fight for the new soft coal contract. Members of Local 2399 were questioned and asked to give “evidence” against Patterson. His probation officer, George O’Brien, had even approached some of the other workers who had been convicted in August 1943 and tried to pressure them into “talking” against Patterson. All the evidence points to a deliberate plot to “get” Patterson.
Patterson Arrested
Without any prior warning, on May 21, a federal marshal walked into Bill Patterson’s home in Daisytown, a few miles from Richeyville, and arrested him on the charge of Probation Officer O’Brien that he had “violated” his probation because of the February and May strikes. The only “crime” he committed was simply not to be a rat and a scab when the rest of the men walked out. He was whisked away to the Alleghany County Jail here in Pittsburgh and held under a $2,000 bond.
For three days, his union brothers worked desperately to raise bond to release him. Those who owned little homes were ready and willing to put them up as bond. But the court refused to accept property mortgaged or owned jointly in the name of husband and wife. Every bonding company they approached turned them down. Finally, from one source and another they scraped together the – for them – enormous sum of $1,000 cash, which the judge accepted as temporary bond.
On Friday, June 1, Patterson was brought for hearing before Federal Judge F.P. Schoonmaker here. From all first-hand accounts of the proceedings that I gathered from the workers who had gone to the hearing as witnesses on Patterson’s behalf – although they were never permitted to testify – it was a judicial farce. As one worker put it, “That judge had his mind all made up in advance. Bill never had a chance.”
“No Bearing”
There were 24 union men who gave up a day’s pay and travelled at their own expenses to Pittsburgh in an effort to bring the truth into the federal court. They were forced to sit in angry silence while the judge, prosecuting attorney and probation officer went through the legal hairsplitting necessary to rush Patterson off to jail “strictly according to the law.”
The probation officer claimed that the mere fact that Patterson had acted as mine committeeman while he was on proba
tion was “evidence” that he had “violated” his probation. Whether or not Patterson had any direct responsibility for the strikes, the judge ruled, had “no bearing” on the case. The fact that he had not scabbed, that he had stayed away from work, meant he was “guilty.” Of course, the judge stuck to the technicality that this was a case of probation “violation,” in order to avoid a hearing on the real issue – the original frame- up under the unconstitutional Smith-Connally anti-labor law.
When Premo Columbus, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Patterson’s defense counsel, pleaded with the judge to permit the testimony of the 24 witnesses on Patterson’s behalf, the judge just brushed the plea aside.
Patterson sought to defend himself and showed that it was impossible, even if he had been willing to do so, to go to work during a mine shutdown. One local union officer explained that:
“... he told how he couldn’t go to work, even if he wanted to. There was no coal-loader, no motorman, no brakemen, no shot-fer, no cutter.
“But the way they put it in court, even if the men went on strike, Bill had to work or go to jail. They said he had to be a scab. He was in a hell of a spot. They had him coming and going. He couldn’t stay out when there was a strike or he would be sent to the jug. But he couldn’t work even if he wanted to, so they knew they had him.”
Denied Cigarettes
As one final dirty piece of reprisal, the men told me, they wouldn’t even let his fellow workers slip him some cigarettes before they rushed him off to jail after the judge finally ended the farce and ordered his probation revoked. He was shipped almost immediately to the Uniontown prison, some 65 miles south of here, where he will serve his sentence.
The union local and Patterson’s union brothers are doing all in their power to aid him and his family, his wife Ruby, a 15-year old son and a 20-year old daughter. Yesterday the local meeting decided unanimously to continue the fight for Bill Patterson’s release and voted a special assessment to provide his family with the full amount each month he would have earned on the job, so his dependents will not want.
But the obligation to defend Bill Patterson and to see to it that there are no more victims of the Smith-Connally slave-labor bill must not rest alone on the shoulders of the fine, loyal members of Local 2399. Patterson is “taking the rap” for every militant union man in this country.
From all the facts I have gathered on the scene here, I do not hesitate to state that this case stinks to high heaven from start to finish. Far more than local forces have conspired in Patterson’s persecution and imprisonment. It represents a conspiracy on the part of the most powerful federal agencies backed by the greatest anti-labor corporations in the land.
Labor Must Protest
Only a storm of united labor protest will tear the veil from this rotten conspiracy and open the prison doors for Bill Patterson. Every labor organization in the country should adopt resolutions of protest to the federal government and send their immediate expressions of support to Local 2399, United Mine Workers, at Richeyville, Pa.
Elementary labor solidarity for a victimized union man demands such action. But even more, the elementary defense of the entire labor movement requires it. For if one militant miner can be persecuted and imprisoned under the vile anti-strike law without thunderous protest from all labor – what worker, what loyal union man fighting for labor’s rights, can say today that he won’t be next?
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Hillman Plays Judas in Arms Contract Fight</h1>
<h3>(26 October 1940)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_43" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 43</a>, 26 October 1940, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst">On September 6, a formal statement of the National Defense Advisory Commission was issued declaring, “All work carried on as part of the defense program <em>should</em> comply with Federal statutory provisions affecting labor wherever such provisions are applicable. This applies to the Walsh-Healy Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, etc. ...”</p>
<p>The Commission’s statement was seconded on September 9, by a formal endorsement from President Roosevelt.</p>
<p>On September 11, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, most notorious open-shop corporation in the country and branded as a violator of the labor laws by the NLRB, was granted the largest single war order yet released, for $625,000,000.</p>
<p>Phillip Murray, head of the CIO Steel workers Organizing Committee, expressed “utter astonishment” at this award to Bethlehem Steel just five days after the Defense Commission had presumably called on all war contractors to obey the labor laws.</p>
<p>The workers in Bethlehem Steel were puzzled by this contradiction between implied policy and applied fact.</p>
<p>Whereupon Sidney Hillman, as head of the Labor Division of the Defense Commission, sought to reassure the workers by a press statement on September 13, proudly quoting the Commission’s original statement and adding, “You will further observe that, in this statement of conditions underlying the awarding of contracts, <em>the Commission has not limited itself</em> merely to the requirements that contractors observe <em>existing laws. It has gone substantially beyond that</em>.”</p>
<p>But war contracts continued to go to Bethlehem Steel – to the sum of over $1,000,000,000. The Bethlehem workers became uneasy, and the CIO – organized Sparrows Point shipyard of Bethlehem Steel went out on strike. The CIO wrote Hillman for a little further clarification.</p>
<p>On October 3, Hillman hastened to send a letter citing an “informal” opinion of Attorney General Jackson to a gathering in Pittsburg of several hundred SWOC representatives who were considering the crisis in Bethlehem. This opinion declared; “<em>It seems too clear to admit of controversy</em> ... that the findings of the National Labor Relations Board that an employer is in violation of the National Labor Relations Act are <em>binding and conclusive</em> upon the other agencies in the executive branch of the government unless and until these findings are reversed by a court of competent jurisdiction”.</p>
<p>This obviously means, and was so interpreted by every capitalist newspaper, that no government agency may ignore a ruling of the NLRB and award contracts to outlawed corporations. Among several score corporations publicly listed as hit by this ruling were Standard Oil, the duPonts, General Motors, Ford Motor and Bethlehem Steel.</p>
<p>The Bethlehem conference of the SWOC looked on the Hillman assurance and the Jackson ruling as good coin. No action was taken to spread the Sparrows Point strike. Instead, they hastened to discourage direct action. The Sparrows Point shipyard stride was called off on the urging of Philip Van Gelder, national secretary of the CIO Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, who declared that <em>Jackson’s opinion “could be used as a weapon for enforcing collective bargaining in the Sparrows Point and other Bethlehem plants without the necessity of strike action.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>And After Stifling the Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">The capitalist press showed no gratitude to Hillman for spiking the Bethlehem strike. It did not like the method he employed, and demanded an unambiguous rejection of the principle implied in the Jackson ruling. The <strong>New York Times</strong> cynically likened a violation of the National Labor Relations Act to the violation of a municipal ordinance forbidding smoking in the subway. What! Hold up “national defense” for such trivialities?</p>
<p>The pay-off came – the day of the return to work of the Sparrows Point strikers on Oct. 8.</p>
<p>That afternoon a procession filed before the Smith Committee, the Congressional body “investigating” the NLRB. First came Under-secretary of War, Patterson. Said he, “It is not my understanding that a labor dispute is any bar to a contract. It is merely one thing to be considered.” Next, Secretary of the Navy Knox declared, “His (Patterson’s) words accurately reflect the navy’s attitude.” Hillman sat quietly listening to Knox and Patterson brazenly repudiate their own previous statements in letters to him.</p>
<p>Jackson then testified. There had been “a great storm of misunderstanding” about his previous opinion. “The effect,” said he, “was not intended to direct or imply that the Defense Commission should withhold contracts from persons or corporations declared by the NLRB to be in violation of the Wagner Act.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Judas-Hillman Apes His Masters</h4>
<p class="fst">Finally, Hillman was called to the stand. He cold-blood[ed]ly put the period to the end of Jackson’s sentence. As the <strong>New York Post</strong> described it:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Of all the apparent back-tracking, Hillman’s was the most startling, causing gasps among the committee members and spectators.”</p>
<p class="quote">“I’ve got to agree” with the gentlemen who had preceded him on the stand, said Hillman. “The army and navy have the power (to determine the conditions for the letting of contracts). <em>In every case the first consideration is whether it will help or harm national defense.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">After the hearing, Hillman further clarified his stand.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If the cause of national defense is to be served it is entirely obvious that there may be times when a person should not insist upon the final technical letter of the law.”</p>
<p class="fst">The next day the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an NLRB ruling against an appeal of the Bethlehem Steel corporation. The court declared Bethlehem Steel was guilty of “a plain violation” of the National Labor Relations Act.</p>
<p>Two days later, Bethlehem Steel was awarded another fat war contract, for $54,000,000. This was an example of Hillman’s non-insistence upon the “final technical letter of the law.”</p>
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Art Preis
Hillman Plays Judas in Arms Contract Fight
(26 October 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 43, 26 October 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
On September 6, a formal statement of the National Defense Advisory Commission was issued declaring, “All work carried on as part of the defense program should comply with Federal statutory provisions affecting labor wherever such provisions are applicable. This applies to the Walsh-Healy Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, etc. ...”
The Commission’s statement was seconded on September 9, by a formal endorsement from President Roosevelt.
On September 11, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, most notorious open-shop corporation in the country and branded as a violator of the labor laws by the NLRB, was granted the largest single war order yet released, for $625,000,000.
Phillip Murray, head of the CIO Steel workers Organizing Committee, expressed “utter astonishment” at this award to Bethlehem Steel just five days after the Defense Commission had presumably called on all war contractors to obey the labor laws.
The workers in Bethlehem Steel were puzzled by this contradiction between implied policy and applied fact.
Whereupon Sidney Hillman, as head of the Labor Division of the Defense Commission, sought to reassure the workers by a press statement on September 13, proudly quoting the Commission’s original statement and adding, “You will further observe that, in this statement of conditions underlying the awarding of contracts, the Commission has not limited itself merely to the requirements that contractors observe existing laws. It has gone substantially beyond that.”
But war contracts continued to go to Bethlehem Steel – to the sum of over $1,000,000,000. The Bethlehem workers became uneasy, and the CIO – organized Sparrows Point shipyard of Bethlehem Steel went out on strike. The CIO wrote Hillman for a little further clarification.
On October 3, Hillman hastened to send a letter citing an “informal” opinion of Attorney General Jackson to a gathering in Pittsburg of several hundred SWOC representatives who were considering the crisis in Bethlehem. This opinion declared; “It seems too clear to admit of controversy ... that the findings of the National Labor Relations Board that an employer is in violation of the National Labor Relations Act are binding and conclusive upon the other agencies in the executive branch of the government unless and until these findings are reversed by a court of competent jurisdiction”.
This obviously means, and was so interpreted by every capitalist newspaper, that no government agency may ignore a ruling of the NLRB and award contracts to outlawed corporations. Among several score corporations publicly listed as hit by this ruling were Standard Oil, the duPonts, General Motors, Ford Motor and Bethlehem Steel.
The Bethlehem conference of the SWOC looked on the Hillman assurance and the Jackson ruling as good coin. No action was taken to spread the Sparrows Point strike. Instead, they hastened to discourage direct action. The Sparrows Point shipyard stride was called off on the urging of Philip Van Gelder, national secretary of the CIO Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, who declared that Jackson’s opinion “could be used as a weapon for enforcing collective bargaining in the Sparrows Point and other Bethlehem plants without the necessity of strike action.”
And After Stifling the Strike
The capitalist press showed no gratitude to Hillman for spiking the Bethlehem strike. It did not like the method he employed, and demanded an unambiguous rejection of the principle implied in the Jackson ruling. The New York Times cynically likened a violation of the National Labor Relations Act to the violation of a municipal ordinance forbidding smoking in the subway. What! Hold up “national defense” for such trivialities?
The pay-off came – the day of the return to work of the Sparrows Point strikers on Oct. 8.
That afternoon a procession filed before the Smith Committee, the Congressional body “investigating” the NLRB. First came Under-secretary of War, Patterson. Said he, “It is not my understanding that a labor dispute is any bar to a contract. It is merely one thing to be considered.” Next, Secretary of the Navy Knox declared, “His (Patterson’s) words accurately reflect the navy’s attitude.” Hillman sat quietly listening to Knox and Patterson brazenly repudiate their own previous statements in letters to him.
Jackson then testified. There had been “a great storm of misunderstanding” about his previous opinion. “The effect,” said he, “was not intended to direct or imply that the Defense Commission should withhold contracts from persons or corporations declared by the NLRB to be in violation of the Wagner Act.”
Judas-Hillman Apes His Masters
Finally, Hillman was called to the stand. He cold-blood[ed]ly put the period to the end of Jackson’s sentence. As the New York Post described it:
“Of all the apparent back-tracking, Hillman’s was the most startling, causing gasps among the committee members and spectators.”
“I’ve got to agree” with the gentlemen who had preceded him on the stand, said Hillman. “The army and navy have the power (to determine the conditions for the letting of contracts). In every case the first consideration is whether it will help or harm national defense.”
After the hearing, Hillman further clarified his stand.
“If the cause of national defense is to be served it is entirely obvious that there may be times when a person should not insist upon the final technical letter of the law.”
The next day the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an NLRB ruling against an appeal of the Bethlehem Steel corporation. The court declared Bethlehem Steel was guilty of “a plain violation” of the National Labor Relations Act.
Two days later, Bethlehem Steel was awarded another fat war contract, for $54,000,000. This was an example of Hillman’s non-insistence upon the “final technical letter of the law.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Union Leaders Continue Stall on Wage Fight</h1>
<h3>(31 August 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_35" target="new">Vol. X No. 35</a>, 31 August 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Despite their protests against the Price Decontrol Board’s rulings, the union leaders are apparently determined to continue their policy of stalling or openly opposing any fight on the wage front.</p>
<p>The reaction of the AFL top leaders to the Decontrol Board’s rulings was stated by Robert J. Watt, AFL member on the Wage Stabilization Board, in an AFL radio program on August 24. He complained that “the price squeeze is aggravated by the government’s rigid freeze of wages” and that “the AFL has become completely disillusioned with bureaucratic control of prices and wages.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Tighten Belts”</h4>
<p class="fst">He said: “We look forward anxiously to the day when such controls can be wiped out entirely.” Until then, however, the AFL leaders advise the workers only to work harder until “supply meets demand.” In a previous broadcast, Watt had told the workers to “tighten their belts,” and he had echoed the standard propaganda of the employers that a fight for higher wages “would only delay production further and at the same time accelerate inflation.”</p>
<p>The CIO leaders, on the other hand, have vigorously condemned the view that the only way the workers can protect their standard of living is by working harder and turning out “more production” – and profits – for the corporations. They correctly charge that the employers have raised the hypocritical cry for “more production” to conceal the responsibility of the profiteers for the rising prices and to sweat even greater profits out of the workers through speed-up and longer hours.</p>
<p>The CIO leaders apparently look with more favor on demands for higher wages than the AFL leaders. The CIO tops have been under greater pressure from the ranks. Leading CIO unions, like the United Packinghouse Workers and United Automobile Workers, have raised new wage demands or are reopening wage contracts.</p>
<p>But the CIO leaders are putting forward no real program of union action on the wage front. They merely use the threat of new wage demands to put pressure on the government to “roll back” prices. The futility of this policy is once again demonstrated by the results it has attained in the CIO campaign to get the Price Decontrol Board to act in the interests of the workers and low-income consumers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Another Plea</h4>
<p class="fst">The immediate reaction of the CIO leaders to the Decontrol Board’s decisions was not to launch a campaign for wage increases – the only way the workers can protect their living standards. The August 21 statement of the CIO Cost-of-Living Committee indicated that the CIO leaders intend to direct another appeal to the Big Business-dominated Price Decontrol Board to “revise” its decisions of last week. At the same time, they are going to put even more emphasis on the ill-advised and misnamed “buyers’ strikes.”</p>
<p>These “buyers’ strikes” – consumer boycotts – have petered out. Workers have barely enough income to get elementary necessities, food, clothing and shelter. They are buying less and less – not because they are on “strike” – but because they haven’t the money. And as prices soar higher, they will “strike” even more – that is go without more necessities.<br>
</p>
<h4>Correct Course</h4>
<p class="fst">The duty of the trade unions is to fight to win more and more for the workers. The correct course is already being pointed out by the packinghouse workers, the Akron rubber workers, the auto workers. They are demanding a new type of wage agreement that will directly and immediately protect them against steadily mounting prices.</p>
<p>They are demanding various forms of the sliding scale of wages, automatically adjusted upward with every rise in the cost of living. The packinghouse workers, the Ford and Chrysler workers, are advancing the demand for an adjustable cost-of-living bonus on top of their regular wage rates. The Akron rubber workers, with the Goodrich Local taking the lead, are demanding the inclusion in all contracts of a rising-scale-of-wages escalator clause.</p>
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Art Preis
Union Leaders Continue Stall on Wage Fight
(31 August 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 35, 31 August 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Despite their protests against the Price Decontrol Board’s rulings, the union leaders are apparently determined to continue their policy of stalling or openly opposing any fight on the wage front.
The reaction of the AFL top leaders to the Decontrol Board’s rulings was stated by Robert J. Watt, AFL member on the Wage Stabilization Board, in an AFL radio program on August 24. He complained that “the price squeeze is aggravated by the government’s rigid freeze of wages” and that “the AFL has become completely disillusioned with bureaucratic control of prices and wages.”
“Tighten Belts”
He said: “We look forward anxiously to the day when such controls can be wiped out entirely.” Until then, however, the AFL leaders advise the workers only to work harder until “supply meets demand.” In a previous broadcast, Watt had told the workers to “tighten their belts,” and he had echoed the standard propaganda of the employers that a fight for higher wages “would only delay production further and at the same time accelerate inflation.”
The CIO leaders, on the other hand, have vigorously condemned the view that the only way the workers can protect their standard of living is by working harder and turning out “more production” – and profits – for the corporations. They correctly charge that the employers have raised the hypocritical cry for “more production” to conceal the responsibility of the profiteers for the rising prices and to sweat even greater profits out of the workers through speed-up and longer hours.
The CIO leaders apparently look with more favor on demands for higher wages than the AFL leaders. The CIO tops have been under greater pressure from the ranks. Leading CIO unions, like the United Packinghouse Workers and United Automobile Workers, have raised new wage demands or are reopening wage contracts.
But the CIO leaders are putting forward no real program of union action on the wage front. They merely use the threat of new wage demands to put pressure on the government to “roll back” prices. The futility of this policy is once again demonstrated by the results it has attained in the CIO campaign to get the Price Decontrol Board to act in the interests of the workers and low-income consumers.
Another Plea
The immediate reaction of the CIO leaders to the Decontrol Board’s decisions was not to launch a campaign for wage increases – the only way the workers can protect their living standards. The August 21 statement of the CIO Cost-of-Living Committee indicated that the CIO leaders intend to direct another appeal to the Big Business-dominated Price Decontrol Board to “revise” its decisions of last week. At the same time, they are going to put even more emphasis on the ill-advised and misnamed “buyers’ strikes.”
These “buyers’ strikes” – consumer boycotts – have petered out. Workers have barely enough income to get elementary necessities, food, clothing and shelter. They are buying less and less – not because they are on “strike” – but because they haven’t the money. And as prices soar higher, they will “strike” even more – that is go without more necessities.
Correct Course
The duty of the trade unions is to fight to win more and more for the workers. The correct course is already being pointed out by the packinghouse workers, the Akron rubber workers, the auto workers. They are demanding a new type of wage agreement that will directly and immediately protect them against steadily mounting prices.
They are demanding various forms of the sliding scale of wages, automatically adjusted upward with every rise in the cost of living. The packinghouse workers, the Ford and Chrysler workers, are advancing the demand for an adjustable cost-of-living bonus on top of their regular wage rates. The Akron rubber workers, with the Goodrich Local taking the lead, are demanding the inclusion in all contracts of a rising-scale-of-wages escalator clause.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Bosses Push Open-Shop Drive<br>
Despite CIO-AFL ‘Peace Pact’</h1>
<h3>(21 April 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_16" target="new">Vol. IX No. 16</a>, 21 April 1945, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">“It’s Industrial Peace for the Postwar Period!’’ shrieked the front-page headline of the April 2 <strong>CIO News</strong> to the startled ranks of the CIO. Thus did Philip Murray jubilantly proclaim the fact that he and AFL head William Green had signed a “peace charter” with Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.</p>
<p>The surprised membership of the CIO and AFL learned that their top leaders, after months of secret meetings with Johnston and without any prior consultation of the union rank and file, had agreed to call off all struggle against the profiteering, labor-hating bosses.</p>
<p><em>Even more startling to the ranks were the conditions of this “truce.” Labor is pledged to recognize the “sacred right” of the handful of ruling capitalists to control American economy and resources forever and to exploit the workers for profit under the system of monopoly capitalist “free enterprise.”</em></p>
<p>The employers generously agree – in words – to recognize the right of collective bargaining – a right they are already supposed to respect by law.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Real Situation</h4>
<p class="fst">Up and down the labor movement, and in their official press, Murray, Green and their lieutenants have announced that labor must surrender permanently its traditional methods of militant struggle. It must clasp the hand of fellowship now supposedly thrust forth by the corporations.</p>
<p>The workers have looked around to see some practical evidences of this miraculous transformation of the bosses into apostles of “good will” toward labor. In auto, steel, rubber and every other major industry, all they can see are the blows of the corporations falling on their heads faster than ever in a rampaging offensive of aggression and provocation against the unions.</p>
<p>A “peace pact” with labor? The National Association of Manufacturers, representing the most powerful corporations in the country, has bluntly announced that as far as it is concerned it doesn’t know anything about a “truce” with labor. The leaders of the Automotive Council for War Production – speaking for he largest industry in the country – flatly state that the only “truce” they want is one based on the open shop and the abolition of the National Labor Relations Act.</p>
<p>In fact, announced B.E. Hutchison, Chrysler corporation vice-president and a director of the NAM, the NAM is working together with the C. of C. in pushing a 5-point legislative program which would outlaw strikes, guarantee government protection to scabs and strikebreakers and illegalize the closed shop. And, he asked, what was Eric Johnston doing signing a “peace pact” with Murray and Green?</p>
<p>These facts cannot be ignored even by some of the blind union officials. As they spout from the right side of their mouths about the new era of “industrial harmony,” out of the left side they are forced to wail about the embarrassing lack of “good will” being displayed by the employers. Thus, Richard Frankensteen, vice- president of the CIO United Automobile Workers, charged on April 11 that “certain” employers “have started an all-out drive to attempt to destroy or greatly impair the usefulness of organized labor.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Industrial Harmony”</h4>
<p class="fst">The “certain” employers to whom he referred happen to be every single corporation in the automotive, aircraft and farm equipment industries – that is, the employers of about a fifth of the CIO membership.</p>
<p><em>It seems that so far all the “good will” is inside the heads of Murray and Green and any deceived workers who may be soft-headed enough to lower their dukes while the bosses are swinging hay-makers at their chins.</em></p>
<p>The open proclamation of the leading corporations that they are wheeling up their heaviest artillery for a further grand offensive against labor is not helping the Murray-Green sales campaign. It’s pretty tough trying to sell the workers a bill of goods about a “peace pact” when the workers are so busy trying to dodge the blows of the open shoppers.</p>
<p>So the labor leaders are shifting into a faster line of sales talk. It seems, according to them, there are two kinds of employers – “progressive and die-hards.” The workers must line up with the “progressive” bosses, represented by Eric Johnston of the C. of C, against the “diehards” like the NAM, the auto, steel, rubber barons, etc.</p>
<p>And that’s really something fishy! As a labor commentator for the <strong>New York Post</strong> – which hailed the “peace charter” – observed:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Somebody is pulling a squeeze play on the nation’s usually shrewd leaders ... Everybody believes that at least one section of American industry has reformed and created itself in the image of the pleasant and progressive Johnston. Hardly. For Mr. Johnston’s C. of C. is tied closely to the NAM.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“One part of the day Johnstom’s men are pounding Green and Murray on the back with a hail-fellow-labor’s-swell benevolence. And later in the afternoon they are NAM leaders campaigning for the outlawing of strikes and what sounds mightily like a ban on closed shops.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Who are these C. of C. leaders who are supposed to be so chummy with labor? “Some of the C. of C. key committees are headed by labor’s most bitter enemies – men who are working closely with the NAM to which they also belong.”</p>
<p>One of these is James Rand, of Remington-Rand, author of the notorious strikebreaking “Mohawk Valley Formula.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Another is the head of a huge publishing firm which has not knowingly hired Jews or union people; or one who has fought big AFL unions for years; another whose firm was cited for its employment discrimination policies and antilabor attitudes ... and one has defied a federal collective bargaining ruling since 1943.”</p>
<p class="fst">In short – the real leaders of the C. of C. are also among the leaders of the NAM who are avowed open shoppers and openly intent on smashing the unions.</p>
<p>“Who’s being kidded here?” asks the <strong>Post</strong> commentator.</p>
<p><em>Not Murray and Green, as he would have us believe. They know what they’re doing. They’re playing a conscious and deliberate role. They’re essential and willing part of the mechanism of this capitalist “squeeze play.”</em></p>
<p>It’s the old game of disarming labor to make it easier for the bosses to slug the workers. “You hold him – while I sock him!”</p>
<p>Certain spokesmen for the employers, with the connivance of the labor leaders, aim to tie labor’s hands with a phony “peace charter,” while the employing class as a whole winds up for a knockout against organized labor.</p>
<p><em>And just as Murray and Green have put over such treacherous policies as the no-strike pledge behind the backs of the union members and without their voice or consent, so now they are hastening to shove the “peace charter” – the charter of unconditional surrender – down the throats of the unwilling workers.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Bosses Push Open-Shop Drive
Despite CIO-AFL ‘Peace Pact’
(21 April 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 16, 21 April 1945, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
“It’s Industrial Peace for the Postwar Period!’’ shrieked the front-page headline of the April 2 CIO News to the startled ranks of the CIO. Thus did Philip Murray jubilantly proclaim the fact that he and AFL head William Green had signed a “peace charter” with Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The surprised membership of the CIO and AFL learned that their top leaders, after months of secret meetings with Johnston and without any prior consultation of the union rank and file, had agreed to call off all struggle against the profiteering, labor-hating bosses.
Even more startling to the ranks were the conditions of this “truce.” Labor is pledged to recognize the “sacred right” of the handful of ruling capitalists to control American economy and resources forever and to exploit the workers for profit under the system of monopoly capitalist “free enterprise.”
The employers generously agree – in words – to recognize the right of collective bargaining – a right they are already supposed to respect by law.
The Real Situation
Up and down the labor movement, and in their official press, Murray, Green and their lieutenants have announced that labor must surrender permanently its traditional methods of militant struggle. It must clasp the hand of fellowship now supposedly thrust forth by the corporations.
The workers have looked around to see some practical evidences of this miraculous transformation of the bosses into apostles of “good will” toward labor. In auto, steel, rubber and every other major industry, all they can see are the blows of the corporations falling on their heads faster than ever in a rampaging offensive of aggression and provocation against the unions.
A “peace pact” with labor? The National Association of Manufacturers, representing the most powerful corporations in the country, has bluntly announced that as far as it is concerned it doesn’t know anything about a “truce” with labor. The leaders of the Automotive Council for War Production – speaking for he largest industry in the country – flatly state that the only “truce” they want is one based on the open shop and the abolition of the National Labor Relations Act.
In fact, announced B.E. Hutchison, Chrysler corporation vice-president and a director of the NAM, the NAM is working together with the C. of C. in pushing a 5-point legislative program which would outlaw strikes, guarantee government protection to scabs and strikebreakers and illegalize the closed shop. And, he asked, what was Eric Johnston doing signing a “peace pact” with Murray and Green?
These facts cannot be ignored even by some of the blind union officials. As they spout from the right side of their mouths about the new era of “industrial harmony,” out of the left side they are forced to wail about the embarrassing lack of “good will” being displayed by the employers. Thus, Richard Frankensteen, vice- president of the CIO United Automobile Workers, charged on April 11 that “certain” employers “have started an all-out drive to attempt to destroy or greatly impair the usefulness of organized labor.”
“Industrial Harmony”
The “certain” employers to whom he referred happen to be every single corporation in the automotive, aircraft and farm equipment industries – that is, the employers of about a fifth of the CIO membership.
It seems that so far all the “good will” is inside the heads of Murray and Green and any deceived workers who may be soft-headed enough to lower their dukes while the bosses are swinging hay-makers at their chins.
The open proclamation of the leading corporations that they are wheeling up their heaviest artillery for a further grand offensive against labor is not helping the Murray-Green sales campaign. It’s pretty tough trying to sell the workers a bill of goods about a “peace pact” when the workers are so busy trying to dodge the blows of the open shoppers.
So the labor leaders are shifting into a faster line of sales talk. It seems, according to them, there are two kinds of employers – “progressive and die-hards.” The workers must line up with the “progressive” bosses, represented by Eric Johnston of the C. of C, against the “diehards” like the NAM, the auto, steel, rubber barons, etc.
And that’s really something fishy! As a labor commentator for the New York Post – which hailed the “peace charter” – observed:
“Somebody is pulling a squeeze play on the nation’s usually shrewd leaders ... Everybody believes that at least one section of American industry has reformed and created itself in the image of the pleasant and progressive Johnston. Hardly. For Mr. Johnston’s C. of C. is tied closely to the NAM.
“One part of the day Johnstom’s men are pounding Green and Murray on the back with a hail-fellow-labor’s-swell benevolence. And later in the afternoon they are NAM leaders campaigning for the outlawing of strikes and what sounds mightily like a ban on closed shops.”
Who are these C. of C. leaders who are supposed to be so chummy with labor? “Some of the C. of C. key committees are headed by labor’s most bitter enemies – men who are working closely with the NAM to which they also belong.”
One of these is James Rand, of Remington-Rand, author of the notorious strikebreaking “Mohawk Valley Formula.”
“Another is the head of a huge publishing firm which has not knowingly hired Jews or union people; or one who has fought big AFL unions for years; another whose firm was cited for its employment discrimination policies and antilabor attitudes ... and one has defied a federal collective bargaining ruling since 1943.”
In short – the real leaders of the C. of C. are also among the leaders of the NAM who are avowed open shoppers and openly intent on smashing the unions.
“Who’s being kidded here?” asks the Post commentator.
Not Murray and Green, as he would have us believe. They know what they’re doing. They’re playing a conscious and deliberate role. They’re essential and willing part of the mechanism of this capitalist “squeeze play.”
It’s the old game of disarming labor to make it easier for the bosses to slug the workers. “You hold him – while I sock him!”
Certain spokesmen for the employers, with the connivance of the labor leaders, aim to tie labor’s hands with a phony “peace charter,” while the employing class as a whole winds up for a knockout against organized labor.
And just as Murray and Green have put over such treacherous policies as the no-strike pledge behind the backs of the union members and without their voice or consent, so now they are hastening to shove the “peace charter” – the charter of unconditional surrender – down the throats of the unwilling workers.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Why the Draftee Army Lacks Morale</h1>
<h4>Soldiers Have No Faith in Cause for Which<br>
Ruling Class Wants Them to Fight</h4>
<h3>(August 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_35" target="new">Vol. V No. 35</a>, 30 August 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="quotec">“Morale is to materiel as three is to one.”</p>
<p class="fst">This famous observation of Napoleon was recalled last week by the United States Chief of Staff, General Marshall, in commenting on the low morale in the new draftee army.</p>
<p>Disciplinary examples, threats, appeals to patriotism or army tradition have not sufficed to stem the tide of draftee discontent. The flood of protests against the army term extension from the draftees, swelled by the clamor from the folks back home, has compelled Roosevelt and the War Department to modify their plans. Last week the administration had to promise the soldiers concessions, the release of 200,000 men from army service by Christmas, and the right of the draftees to apply for release after 14 to 18 months service, instead of the 30 months set by Congress. In addition, General Hershey, director of Selective Service, has directed local draft boards to assist draftees at the end of their service to get back their old jobs, as promised.</p>
<p>The army stuffed-shirts have come reluctantly to admit that army morale is “not what it should be.”</p>
<p>Lieutenant General Ben Lear, of “Yoo Hoo!” fame, voiced the typical officer caste point of view last week, when he said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If morale is not high, it is no fault of ours. We have done everything within reason to promote the welfare and comfort of the trainees. If the morale is poor, it is only because the morale of the people is poor.”</p>
<p class="fst">There is truth in this statement, in so far as it deals with the effect of popular moods on the army. The morale and attitude of a conscript army parallels that of the civilians.</p>
<p>By and large, the attitude of the draftees is one that has been expressed repeatedly by the people in polls, letters to Congressmen, and the other limited means of expression permitted them. The American people – three-fourths of them at least – are opposed to entering the war.</p>
<p>This sentiment of the people is not an alien force operating upon the morale of the troops, as the officer corps pretends. These are the feelings that the men bring with them into the army.</p>
<p>The officer staff wants the “ideal” soldier, i.e., one who is cut off from all civilian life, and who asks no questions provided he gets his three “squares” a day and a comfortable bunk at night.</p>
<p>The draftees resist. They have – or believe they have – the right to say something about how the army is run. They do not enter the army for a career. And they will fight willingly only for a cause in which they believe so deeply that they will not hesitate to sacrifice their personal welfare and lives to achieve it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Real Reasons for Low Morale</h4>
<p class="fst">Prom several authoritative sources we have been able recently to get an indication of the real factors underlying the poor morale of the army.</p>
<p>Pearson and Allen, in their syndicated <em>Merry-Go-Round</em> column, wrote on August 8:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“And to date, judging by our poll of selectees, plus the War Department’s own frank fears, the American Army lacks morale ...</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“... the War Department has given the boys no conception of what is happening in the world, has made no attempt to show them why they are called upon to serve. It has fallen down on the one big weapon which makes a modern army fight.”</em></p>
<p class="fst"><strong>Life</strong> magazine, August 18, 1941, reported the things that the soldiers themselves, in one of the large and typical training camps, gave as their reasons for wanting to get out of the army.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Not more than 5% of the men in this division believe that the emergency is as serious as President Roosevelt insists. <em>They do not want to fight because they do not see any reason for fighting.</em> Accordingly they see little point in their being in Army camps at all. There is very strong anti-Roosevelt feeling.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“A second reason for trouble is that the men have no faith in the officers who are commanding them ... The men complain about junior and senior officers indiscriminately. They say most of them do not know their jobs. The officers argue with the noncoms on tactical points and are frequently out-argued, losing the respect of the men.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The draftees see that they are commanded by incompetent officers, who look down on them and won’t hesitate to sacrifice the lives of the privates.</p>
<p>As <strong>Life</strong> indicates, the men are coming to realize that this is not their army; that it is the army of class rule. If officers are incompetent, if the general staff is ignorant, the soldiers must nevertheless submit. There is no way to replace the present officer caste with competent, responsible men from the ranks.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The men complain that there is no way to get ahead in the army. They say that very few draftees are given a chance to take officers’ training courses. They say that initiative on the the part of the privates is discouraged.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The War Department and the army staff cannot do those things which would eliminate the basic reasons for the low morale.</p>
<p>They cannot, first of all, provide the soldiers with a cause worth dying for. The draftees sense that they are not being called upon to fight for real democracy or for the “defense” of the nation. They see the preparations being made to send them to Europe or Asia to fight for colonies and markets. They observe the war profiteers growing fatter at their expense; They take account of Roosevelt’s broken promises, the trend toward repression of civil rights, the secret diplomacy and arbitrary acts of the administration driving toward war, the threat of post-war chaos.</p>
<p>Nor can the War Department change the class character of the army rule, for that rule is simply an extension of the rule of the bosses. The first criterion for an officer in this army is loyalty to the ruling class.</p>
<p>That is why the government makes no effort to assist men from the ranks – workers, trade unionists – to rise to positions of leadership in the army. The government seeks, above all, to preserve the army as an instrument of the ruling minority.</p>
<p>Thus, the method whereby the War Department and the officer caste seek to “build” morale is savage discipline and punishments. A striking instance of this is the court-martial sentence passed last week against Private John Habinyak, who was sentenced to ten years and nine months of hard labor, on five counts of “insubordination”: spitting on the floor; refusing to clean up the spit; refusing to clean his mess kit; refusing to sweep the floor; disobeying an order to pick up some broken concrete. (As we go to press, we learn that Habinyak’s original sentence has been reduced to three years and six months as a result of popular pressure.)</p>
<p>Major S. Murrell, judge advocate of the army post where Habinyak was convicted, on August 22 amplified the reasons for the savage sentence. He admitted that the five offenses cited were considered minor. But, he added, Habinyak was sentenced, in reality, for his “attitude.”</p>
<p>The officer staff knows that Habinyak’s “attitude” is similar to that of 95 per cent of all the draftees. And that “attitude” is the essence of their morale.</p>
<p>Morale is not, as the bourgeois officer caste thinks, simply a question of Prussian discipline, good food, fine equipment and training, or recreational facilities.</p>
<p>Pearson and Allen, in the article previously quoted, draw this comparison between the French and the Soviet Russian armies:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In France, battalions, companies, entire regiments, surrendered <em>en masse</em>. The world was astounded. The French Army had been heralded as the best in the world. Its officers had been trained for years. Its equipment, while not as good as the Nazis’, was the next best in Europe.</p>
<p class="quote">“Yet the French Army collapsed in 11 short days.</p>
<p class="quote">“... One year later an entirely different story comes from Russia.</p>
<p class="quote">“There, a huge, unwieldy, green army facing the pick of Hitler’s mechanized veterans, has retreated, but not surrendered. At times isolated and hopelessly cut off, Russian troops have continued fighting – fighting so desperately that he Germans have complained that they did not obey the rules of war.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“OBVIOUSLY RUSSIAN TROOPS HAVE BEEN DEFENDING SOMETHING WHICH THEY CHERISHED. THEY HAVE HAD WHAT THE FRENCH LACKED – MORALE.”</em></p>
<p class="fst"><em>The Soviet soldiers are indeed “defending something which they cherished” – i.e., their nationalized property, their freedom from capitalist exploitation, their free socialist future, which, in spite of the Stalin bureaucracy, still remains a living reality for them.</em></p>
<p><em>The French soldiers were defending the COMITÉ DES FORGES (the French Steel Trust) and the 200 Ruling Families of France.</em></p>
<p>The American officer staff professes to “marvel” at the morale of the Red Army. It cannot hope to achieve a similar morale in its own armies. American working-class youth cannot be made eager to die for America’s Sixty Families.</p>
<p>The draftees may be whipped together into some semblance of a disciplined fighting force by intimidation and terrorism. But that is not the type of army which will stand up under intensive fire and against imposing odds.<br>
</p>
<h4>Only a Workers’ Army Will Have Morale</h4>
<p class="fst">An army directed and ruled by the capitalists and their officer caste can never be trusted to fight fascism, whether of the domestic or foreign variety. But the workers of this country must be prepared to repel fascism by the only effective means.</p>
<p>Those means are military. They are blind men or knaves who counsel the workers to pacifism. Those who speak against the workers obtaining military training and learning the techniques of modern warfare would have the workers stand meek and defenseless against the onrushing worldwide capitalist reaction and fascism.</p>
<p>The only kind of army that can defeat fascism is an army which the ruling capitalist class cannot achieve, an army with morale. Morale can exist only in an army which fights for a cause in which it believes.</p>
<p>The American workers and farmers must have such an army. Their very lives and liberties depend on it. It must be an army responsive to the will of the masses, fighting in their interests, controlled and directed by the masses.</p>
<p>Such an army is possible only under a workers’ and farmers’ government. But even before this government is instituted, the’ workers can take effective measures to safeguard their vital interests in the military field. That is the purpose of our military program, which advocates:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Military training of workers financed by the government, but under the control of the trade unions.</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Special officers’ training camps, financed by the government, but controlled by the trade unions, to train workers to become officers.</em></li>
</ol>
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Art Preis
Why the Draftee Army Lacks Morale
Soldiers Have No Faith in Cause for Which
Ruling Class Wants Them to Fight
(August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 35, 30 August 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
“Morale is to materiel as three is to one.”
This famous observation of Napoleon was recalled last week by the United States Chief of Staff, General Marshall, in commenting on the low morale in the new draftee army.
Disciplinary examples, threats, appeals to patriotism or army tradition have not sufficed to stem the tide of draftee discontent. The flood of protests against the army term extension from the draftees, swelled by the clamor from the folks back home, has compelled Roosevelt and the War Department to modify their plans. Last week the administration had to promise the soldiers concessions, the release of 200,000 men from army service by Christmas, and the right of the draftees to apply for release after 14 to 18 months service, instead of the 30 months set by Congress. In addition, General Hershey, director of Selective Service, has directed local draft boards to assist draftees at the end of their service to get back their old jobs, as promised.
The army stuffed-shirts have come reluctantly to admit that army morale is “not what it should be.”
Lieutenant General Ben Lear, of “Yoo Hoo!” fame, voiced the typical officer caste point of view last week, when he said:
“If morale is not high, it is no fault of ours. We have done everything within reason to promote the welfare and comfort of the trainees. If the morale is poor, it is only because the morale of the people is poor.”
There is truth in this statement, in so far as it deals with the effect of popular moods on the army. The morale and attitude of a conscript army parallels that of the civilians.
By and large, the attitude of the draftees is one that has been expressed repeatedly by the people in polls, letters to Congressmen, and the other limited means of expression permitted them. The American people – three-fourths of them at least – are opposed to entering the war.
This sentiment of the people is not an alien force operating upon the morale of the troops, as the officer corps pretends. These are the feelings that the men bring with them into the army.
The officer staff wants the “ideal” soldier, i.e., one who is cut off from all civilian life, and who asks no questions provided he gets his three “squares” a day and a comfortable bunk at night.
The draftees resist. They have – or believe they have – the right to say something about how the army is run. They do not enter the army for a career. And they will fight willingly only for a cause in which they believe so deeply that they will not hesitate to sacrifice their personal welfare and lives to achieve it.
Real Reasons for Low Morale
Prom several authoritative sources we have been able recently to get an indication of the real factors underlying the poor morale of the army.
Pearson and Allen, in their syndicated Merry-Go-Round column, wrote on August 8:
“And to date, judging by our poll of selectees, plus the War Department’s own frank fears, the American Army lacks morale ...
“... the War Department has given the boys no conception of what is happening in the world, has made no attempt to show them why they are called upon to serve. It has fallen down on the one big weapon which makes a modern army fight.”
Life magazine, August 18, 1941, reported the things that the soldiers themselves, in one of the large and typical training camps, gave as their reasons for wanting to get out of the army.
“Not more than 5% of the men in this division believe that the emergency is as serious as President Roosevelt insists. They do not want to fight because they do not see any reason for fighting. Accordingly they see little point in their being in Army camps at all. There is very strong anti-Roosevelt feeling.
“A second reason for trouble is that the men have no faith in the officers who are commanding them ... The men complain about junior and senior officers indiscriminately. They say most of them do not know their jobs. The officers argue with the noncoms on tactical points and are frequently out-argued, losing the respect of the men.”
The draftees see that they are commanded by incompetent officers, who look down on them and won’t hesitate to sacrifice the lives of the privates.
As Life indicates, the men are coming to realize that this is not their army; that it is the army of class rule. If officers are incompetent, if the general staff is ignorant, the soldiers must nevertheless submit. There is no way to replace the present officer caste with competent, responsible men from the ranks.
“The men complain that there is no way to get ahead in the army. They say that very few draftees are given a chance to take officers’ training courses. They say that initiative on the the part of the privates is discouraged.”
The War Department and the army staff cannot do those things which would eliminate the basic reasons for the low morale.
They cannot, first of all, provide the soldiers with a cause worth dying for. The draftees sense that they are not being called upon to fight for real democracy or for the “defense” of the nation. They see the preparations being made to send them to Europe or Asia to fight for colonies and markets. They observe the war profiteers growing fatter at their expense; They take account of Roosevelt’s broken promises, the trend toward repression of civil rights, the secret diplomacy and arbitrary acts of the administration driving toward war, the threat of post-war chaos.
Nor can the War Department change the class character of the army rule, for that rule is simply an extension of the rule of the bosses. The first criterion for an officer in this army is loyalty to the ruling class.
That is why the government makes no effort to assist men from the ranks – workers, trade unionists – to rise to positions of leadership in the army. The government seeks, above all, to preserve the army as an instrument of the ruling minority.
Thus, the method whereby the War Department and the officer caste seek to “build” morale is savage discipline and punishments. A striking instance of this is the court-martial sentence passed last week against Private John Habinyak, who was sentenced to ten years and nine months of hard labor, on five counts of “insubordination”: spitting on the floor; refusing to clean up the spit; refusing to clean his mess kit; refusing to sweep the floor; disobeying an order to pick up some broken concrete. (As we go to press, we learn that Habinyak’s original sentence has been reduced to three years and six months as a result of popular pressure.)
Major S. Murrell, judge advocate of the army post where Habinyak was convicted, on August 22 amplified the reasons for the savage sentence. He admitted that the five offenses cited were considered minor. But, he added, Habinyak was sentenced, in reality, for his “attitude.”
The officer staff knows that Habinyak’s “attitude” is similar to that of 95 per cent of all the draftees. And that “attitude” is the essence of their morale.
Morale is not, as the bourgeois officer caste thinks, simply a question of Prussian discipline, good food, fine equipment and training, or recreational facilities.
Pearson and Allen, in the article previously quoted, draw this comparison between the French and the Soviet Russian armies:
“In France, battalions, companies, entire regiments, surrendered en masse. The world was astounded. The French Army had been heralded as the best in the world. Its officers had been trained for years. Its equipment, while not as good as the Nazis’, was the next best in Europe.
“Yet the French Army collapsed in 11 short days.
“... One year later an entirely different story comes from Russia.
“There, a huge, unwieldy, green army facing the pick of Hitler’s mechanized veterans, has retreated, but not surrendered. At times isolated and hopelessly cut off, Russian troops have continued fighting – fighting so desperately that he Germans have complained that they did not obey the rules of war.
“OBVIOUSLY RUSSIAN TROOPS HAVE BEEN DEFENDING SOMETHING WHICH THEY CHERISHED. THEY HAVE HAD WHAT THE FRENCH LACKED – MORALE.”
The Soviet soldiers are indeed “defending something which they cherished” – i.e., their nationalized property, their freedom from capitalist exploitation, their free socialist future, which, in spite of the Stalin bureaucracy, still remains a living reality for them.
The French soldiers were defending the COMITÉ DES FORGES (the French Steel Trust) and the 200 Ruling Families of France.
The American officer staff professes to “marvel” at the morale of the Red Army. It cannot hope to achieve a similar morale in its own armies. American working-class youth cannot be made eager to die for America’s Sixty Families.
The draftees may be whipped together into some semblance of a disciplined fighting force by intimidation and terrorism. But that is not the type of army which will stand up under intensive fire and against imposing odds.
Only a Workers’ Army Will Have Morale
An army directed and ruled by the capitalists and their officer caste can never be trusted to fight fascism, whether of the domestic or foreign variety. But the workers of this country must be prepared to repel fascism by the only effective means.
Those means are military. They are blind men or knaves who counsel the workers to pacifism. Those who speak against the workers obtaining military training and learning the techniques of modern warfare would have the workers stand meek and defenseless against the onrushing worldwide capitalist reaction and fascism.
The only kind of army that can defeat fascism is an army which the ruling capitalist class cannot achieve, an army with morale. Morale can exist only in an army which fights for a cause in which it believes.
The American workers and farmers must have such an army. Their very lives and liberties depend on it. It must be an army responsive to the will of the masses, fighting in their interests, controlled and directed by the masses.
Such an army is possible only under a workers’ and farmers’ government. But even before this government is instituted, the’ workers can take effective measures to safeguard their vital interests in the military field. That is the purpose of our military program, which advocates:
Military training of workers financed by the government, but under the control of the trade unions.
Special officers’ training camps, financed by the government, but controlled by the trade unions, to train workers to become officers.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(6 July 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_27" target="new">Vol. X No. 27<(a>, 6 July 1947, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by </a><a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="pt1"></a>
<h4>Boilermakers Local for Joint Labor Conference</h4>
<p class="fst">The CIO United Auto Workers proposal for a national united labor conference of all unions to combat government anti-labor policies continues to win adherents. In Seattle, Wash., the powerful AFL Boilermakers Local 104, with a large shipyard membership, passed a resolution at its general meeting on June 15 using such united action</p>
<p>“All sections of organized labor are menaced by an all-out union busting offensive conducted by Big Business, President Truman and his administration, and the Congress of the United States,” the resolution states.</p>
<p>Local 104 therefore went on record “supporting the idea of a National United Conference of Labor and calls on President William Green (AFL) to arrange with the heads of the CIO and the Railroad Brotherhoods for the convocation of such a conference at the earliest possible date.”</p>
<p>It also calls on the Washington State AFL and the Seattle Central Labor Council to organize state and local conferences to conduct “mass united protest action” against government strikebreaking and union busting.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="pt2"></a>
<h4>Stalinist Explanation on Plant Seizures</h4>
<p class="fst">During the war, when the Kremlin and Wall Street imperialism were putting on the brotherly love act, the American Communist (Stalinist) Party hailed Roosevelt’s strike-breaking seizures of the railroads, coal mines, Montgomery Ward’s, etc.</p>
<p>Soviet-U.S. relations have soured since. Now the CP has been ordered to take swipes at Truman and talk “militant.” Among other things, the Stalinist leaders condemn Truman’s strikebreaking plant seizures.</p>
<p>But the Stalinist leaders are being embarrassed by the pointed question: How come it’s wrong for Truman to break strikes by plant seizures, but it wasn’t for Roosevelt?</p>
<p>An answer has been dished up in the June 18 <strong>New Masses</strong>, Stalinist weekly. An article, <em>What Is Truman’s Game?</em> by Virginia Gardner, explains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is rarely pointed out that the administration (Truman) has foisted a completely new concept of seizure on the public, compared to that in use during the war. Then it was used as an aid to workers who had rendered themselves defenseless by forfeiting their strike weapon for the duration. It was used to compel employers to comply with WLB directives. Now it is used to impose unfair settlements, as was done in the rail case ...”</p>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists can’t admit that their shift in attitude regarding government strikebreaking followed the Kremlin’s shift in foreign policy. So they brazenly lie that Roosevelt’s seizures, which they supported, were “good” seizures.</p>
<p>Roosevelt seized the railroads in December 1943 to impose the rail operators’ and government’s terms on the railroad workers. Earlier he had seized the coal mines in an attempt to drive the miners back to work and enforce the wage freeze. Although Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward and George P. McNear of the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad long defied WLB rulings, Roosevelt did nothing. He invoked seizure only after strikes began and in order to break them. Avery and McNear never accepted the decisions. Their properties were finally handed back, after the government helped to weaken the unions.</p>
<p>The Stalinists don’t dare tell the truth about Roosevelt’s strikebreaking. That would damn them as well.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="pt3"></a>
<h4>More Unions Declare ‘Build a Labor Party’</h4>
<p class="fst">Sentiment for the formation, of an independent labor party is growing ever more rapidly. This is reflected in local union papers.</p>
<p>Among union publications which in recent weeks have advocated the building of a labor party are <strong>The Midwest Labor World</strong>, organ of the St. Louis Joint Council of the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees, and <strong>The Cable</strong>, published by the National Association of Telephone Equipment Workers, independent.</p>
<p><strong>The Cable</strong>, after summarizing Truman’s anti-labor role, concludes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In order to secure justice for 53,000,000 American workers and their 70,000,000 dependents, about 85 per cent of the U.S. population; and in order to peacefully wrest the control of the greatest nation in the world away from a greedy and selfish minority, American Labor Unions must unite to form a true Labor Party, capable of electing Congressmen and Presidents sworn to serve America best by truly representing the great majority of the American public – <strong>The American Worker</strong>. The two-party system has proved not only to be obsolete but also untrustworthy. Labor must place its own candidates in a political field.”</p>
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Art Preis
Trade Union Notes
(6 July 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 27<(a>, 6 July 1947, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Boilermakers Local for Joint Labor Conference
The CIO United Auto Workers proposal for a national united labor conference of all unions to combat government anti-labor policies continues to win adherents. In Seattle, Wash., the powerful AFL Boilermakers Local 104, with a large shipyard membership, passed a resolution at its general meeting on June 15 using such united action
“All sections of organized labor are menaced by an all-out union busting offensive conducted by Big Business, President Truman and his administration, and the Congress of the United States,” the resolution states.
Local 104 therefore went on record “supporting the idea of a National United Conference of Labor and calls on President William Green (AFL) to arrange with the heads of the CIO and the Railroad Brotherhoods for the convocation of such a conference at the earliest possible date.”
It also calls on the Washington State AFL and the Seattle Central Labor Council to organize state and local conferences to conduct “mass united protest action” against government strikebreaking and union busting.
* * *
Stalinist Explanation on Plant Seizures
During the war, when the Kremlin and Wall Street imperialism were putting on the brotherly love act, the American Communist (Stalinist) Party hailed Roosevelt’s strike-breaking seizures of the railroads, coal mines, Montgomery Ward’s, etc.
Soviet-U.S. relations have soured since. Now the CP has been ordered to take swipes at Truman and talk “militant.” Among other things, the Stalinist leaders condemn Truman’s strikebreaking plant seizures.
But the Stalinist leaders are being embarrassed by the pointed question: How come it’s wrong for Truman to break strikes by plant seizures, but it wasn’t for Roosevelt?
An answer has been dished up in the June 18 New Masses, Stalinist weekly. An article, What Is Truman’s Game? by Virginia Gardner, explains:
“It is rarely pointed out that the administration (Truman) has foisted a completely new concept of seizure on the public, compared to that in use during the war. Then it was used as an aid to workers who had rendered themselves defenseless by forfeiting their strike weapon for the duration. It was used to compel employers to comply with WLB directives. Now it is used to impose unfair settlements, as was done in the rail case ...”
The Stalinists can’t admit that their shift in attitude regarding government strikebreaking followed the Kremlin’s shift in foreign policy. So they brazenly lie that Roosevelt’s seizures, which they supported, were “good” seizures.
Roosevelt seized the railroads in December 1943 to impose the rail operators’ and government’s terms on the railroad workers. Earlier he had seized the coal mines in an attempt to drive the miners back to work and enforce the wage freeze. Although Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward and George P. McNear of the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad long defied WLB rulings, Roosevelt did nothing. He invoked seizure only after strikes began and in order to break them. Avery and McNear never accepted the decisions. Their properties were finally handed back, after the government helped to weaken the unions.
The Stalinists don’t dare tell the truth about Roosevelt’s strikebreaking. That would damn them as well.
* * *
More Unions Declare ‘Build a Labor Party’
Sentiment for the formation, of an independent labor party is growing ever more rapidly. This is reflected in local union papers.
Among union publications which in recent weeks have advocated the building of a labor party are The Midwest Labor World, organ of the St. Louis Joint Council of the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees, and The Cable, published by the National Association of Telephone Equipment Workers, independent.
The Cable, after summarizing Truman’s anti-labor role, concludes:
“In order to secure justice for 53,000,000 American workers and their 70,000,000 dependents, about 85 per cent of the U.S. population; and in order to peacefully wrest the control of the greatest nation in the world away from a greedy and selfish minority, American Labor Unions must unite to form a true Labor Party, capable of electing Congressmen and Presidents sworn to serve America best by truly representing the great majority of the American public – The American Worker. The two-party system has proved not only to be obsolete but also untrustworthy. Labor must place its own candidates in a political field.”
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<h2>Sam Pollock & Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“What If a Foreign Army Invaded Our Country?”<br>
Stalinist Jingoes Ask</h1>
<h3>(16 November 1935)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_47" target="new">Vol. 1 No. 47</a>, 16 November 1935, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst"><strong>TOLEDO, O, Nov. 4.</strong> – <em>“We can’t be against government sanctions. What would we do if an invading army attacked our homes?” This was not the statement of the Liberty League, nor an appeal by “Stinker” Hearst against the Red and Yellow perils, nor even a quotation from the constitution of the National Civic Federation. It was the full-blown wisdom donated to the Northwest District Conference of the American League Against War and Fascism, November 2–3, by a leading Detroit member of the Communist Party.</em></p>
<p>Fearful lest his party comrades might not make the position of the C.P. on imperialist sanctions sufficiently clear, Francis Murphy, local secretary and organizer of the American League, stated, “The American League is not concerned, with League of Nations sanctions. The U.S. is not a member of the League. Therefore, we are not concerned about the actions of the League of Nations.” Reinforcements were brought from the rear to support Murphy, when Sam Sponseller, New America organizer, emphatically stated, “The American League is against all wars.”</p>
<p>These were the arguments used to “prove” that a resolution against imperialist sanctions, submitted by Sam Pollock, a W.P. member who represented the Lucas County Unemployed League, was “pacifist.” The resolution, which was undoubtedly the most important submitted and the only one even discussed or disputed, was permitted only six minutes of debate (two speakers from each side, limited to three minutes apiece) by the mechanical control of the C.P. and its stooges. The resolution, which exposed the entire jingoistic Stalinist structure of the American League, is here quoted in its entirety:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“1. Resolved: That this conference goes on record against any war engaged in by American imperialism; and be it further</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“2. Resolved: That this conference does not recognize any idea that justifies support of one’s imperialist country during war, because that country {has an allegedly democratic form of government, against ft country in which fascism or reaction are in power. Any such war would still be an imperialistic war, a war of despoliation and conquest and would not be and could not be in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the peoples; and be it further</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“3. Resolved: That this conference is against extending any support to any sanctions that the U. S. government may apply to Italy in the present controversy; such sanctions being only a prelude to a new imperialist war and a world-wide slaughter of the masses of the world; and be it further</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“4. Resolved: That this conference support only working-class sanctions against Italy, in the form of strikes, refusal to handle Italian goods, etc., etc.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"> <em>Lucas County Unemployed League.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The conference had its auspicious start Saturday, Nov. 2, at a luncheon meeting ($1.00 per plate) at ritzy, Jim-Crow <em>Commodore Perry Hotel</em>, held in honor of Dr. Harry F. Ward, titular national head of the American League. This was followed in the evening by a “monster,” “gigantic” “People’s” rally against war at the huge Civic Auditorium (seating capacity 5,600). After titanic preparations, 300 of the masses were lured into the echoing desolation of the auditorium to hear Dr. Ward and such other fighters against war and fascism as Charles Hoover, vice-mayor of Toledo and an official of the Auto-Lite Co.</p>
<p>Resolutions were finally submitted to the evening session, which started late and from which a great share of the delegates were absent. Prior to the report of the resolutions committee, the C.P. majority bloc took the precautions to limit the debate to two delegates for either side of an issue with three minutes apiece. In its report, the resolutions committee “overlooked” the Unemployed League resolution against sanctions. When attention was called to this omission, the chairman hastily reported non-concurrence by the committee, but refused to give the reason for this position.<br>
</p>
<h4>Trade Unionists Balk</h4>
<p class="fst">When the recorded vote on the resolution was taken, of the 36 delegates present, 26 delegates, all of Stalinist or New America connections, voted as a bloc against it. Three delegates, including 2 <em>bona-fide</em> representatives of large trade union groups, endorsed the resolution. The remainder of the delegates, representing unions and other genuine mass groups, abstained from voting. Several of the abstainers later stated to Sam Pollock, “What was the use of voting? he meeting was stacked.”</p>
<p>Besides Sam Pollock, a militant trade unionist, representing a local of over 1,500 members, took the floor in support of the resolution, emphasizing in brief and straightforward terms, “Here the government is preparing 24 hours a day for a new war, with most of the money coming from relief funds in one form or another. This is the government which clubs us and jails us, and do you want us workers to support the sanctions of such a government?”</p>
<p>The only resolutions passed on the question of war were on a boycott of Italy and Germany and a protest to Japan. The whole question of sanctions was deliberately avoided.</p>
<p>While this farcical “conference” was dragging out its fruitless end, another meeting was being held a short distance away at the Toledo Workers School Hall, the regular Open Forum of the local W.P. Comrade Burke Cochran gave a splendid and eagerly attended talk on the 55th Convention of the A.F. of L. before a full audience of workers, the largest share of whom were active trade union progressives. There was no gag-rule at this meeting, for the floor was given over to an hour and a half of free and open discussion, with members of the auto union and other A.F. of L. groups and the M.E.S.A. participating.</p>
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Sam Pollock & Art Preis
“What If a Foreign Army Invaded Our Country?”
Stalinist Jingoes Ask
(16 November 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. 1 No. 47, 16 November 1935, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
TOLEDO, O, Nov. 4. – “We can’t be against government sanctions. What would we do if an invading army attacked our homes?” This was not the statement of the Liberty League, nor an appeal by “Stinker” Hearst against the Red and Yellow perils, nor even a quotation from the constitution of the National Civic Federation. It was the full-blown wisdom donated to the Northwest District Conference of the American League Against War and Fascism, November 2–3, by a leading Detroit member of the Communist Party.
Fearful lest his party comrades might not make the position of the C.P. on imperialist sanctions sufficiently clear, Francis Murphy, local secretary and organizer of the American League, stated, “The American League is not concerned, with League of Nations sanctions. The U.S. is not a member of the League. Therefore, we are not concerned about the actions of the League of Nations.” Reinforcements were brought from the rear to support Murphy, when Sam Sponseller, New America organizer, emphatically stated, “The American League is against all wars.”
These were the arguments used to “prove” that a resolution against imperialist sanctions, submitted by Sam Pollock, a W.P. member who represented the Lucas County Unemployed League, was “pacifist.” The resolution, which was undoubtedly the most important submitted and the only one even discussed or disputed, was permitted only six minutes of debate (two speakers from each side, limited to three minutes apiece) by the mechanical control of the C.P. and its stooges. The resolution, which exposed the entire jingoistic Stalinist structure of the American League, is here quoted in its entirety:
“1. Resolved: That this conference goes on record against any war engaged in by American imperialism; and be it further
“2. Resolved: That this conference does not recognize any idea that justifies support of one’s imperialist country during war, because that country {has an allegedly democratic form of government, against ft country in which fascism or reaction are in power. Any such war would still be an imperialistic war, a war of despoliation and conquest and would not be and could not be in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the peoples; and be it further
“3. Resolved: That this conference is against extending any support to any sanctions that the U. S. government may apply to Italy in the present controversy; such sanctions being only a prelude to a new imperialist war and a world-wide slaughter of the masses of the world; and be it further
“4. Resolved: That this conference support only working-class sanctions against Italy, in the form of strikes, refusal to handle Italian goods, etc., etc.
Lucas County Unemployed League.”
The conference had its auspicious start Saturday, Nov. 2, at a luncheon meeting ($1.00 per plate) at ritzy, Jim-Crow Commodore Perry Hotel, held in honor of Dr. Harry F. Ward, titular national head of the American League. This was followed in the evening by a “monster,” “gigantic” “People’s” rally against war at the huge Civic Auditorium (seating capacity 5,600). After titanic preparations, 300 of the masses were lured into the echoing desolation of the auditorium to hear Dr. Ward and such other fighters against war and fascism as Charles Hoover, vice-mayor of Toledo and an official of the Auto-Lite Co.
Resolutions were finally submitted to the evening session, which started late and from which a great share of the delegates were absent. Prior to the report of the resolutions committee, the C.P. majority bloc took the precautions to limit the debate to two delegates for either side of an issue with three minutes apiece. In its report, the resolutions committee “overlooked” the Unemployed League resolution against sanctions. When attention was called to this omission, the chairman hastily reported non-concurrence by the committee, but refused to give the reason for this position.
Trade Unionists Balk
When the recorded vote on the resolution was taken, of the 36 delegates present, 26 delegates, all of Stalinist or New America connections, voted as a bloc against it. Three delegates, including 2 bona-fide representatives of large trade union groups, endorsed the resolution. The remainder of the delegates, representing unions and other genuine mass groups, abstained from voting. Several of the abstainers later stated to Sam Pollock, “What was the use of voting? he meeting was stacked.”
Besides Sam Pollock, a militant trade unionist, representing a local of over 1,500 members, took the floor in support of the resolution, emphasizing in brief and straightforward terms, “Here the government is preparing 24 hours a day for a new war, with most of the money coming from relief funds in one form or another. This is the government which clubs us and jails us, and do you want us workers to support the sanctions of such a government?”
The only resolutions passed on the question of war were on a boycott of Italy and Germany and a protest to Japan. The whole question of sanctions was deliberately avoided.
While this farcical “conference” was dragging out its fruitless end, another meeting was being held a short distance away at the Toledo Workers School Hall, the regular Open Forum of the local W.P. Comrade Burke Cochran gave a splendid and eagerly attended talk on the 55th Convention of the A.F. of L. before a full audience of workers, the largest share of whom were active trade union progressives. There was no gag-rule at this meeting, for the floor was given over to an hour and a half of free and open discussion, with members of the auto union and other A.F. of L. groups and the M.E.S.A. participating.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(10 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_10" target="new">Vol. IX No. 10</a>, 10 March 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>Murray “Fights” Back</h4>
<p class="fst">CIO President Philip “Bleeding Heart” Murray greeted
the WLB’s approval of the Little Steel Formula with his typical
blustering display of verbal indignation.</p>
<p>Murray, who has been beating his gums for a couple of years about
the “inequity of the Little Steel Formula” While doing
all in his power to curb any independent action of the CIO workers to
smash the formula, declaimed that “the situation in which labor
now finds itself is simply intolerable.”</p>
<p>In his very next sentence, however he proposes to continue the
very union policy that has brought labor to this “intolerable
situation.” He declares: “Now, more than ever, it is of
the utmost importance to our war effort that there be maintained
uninterrupted production. The CIO and its members are fully conscious
of this need and therefore shall observe their no-strike pledge.”</p>
<p><em>Murray believes in the policy of “turning the other
cheek” – only it’s the workers who always get
slapped. But not forever and not for long. The CIO members are
becoming “fully conscious” of the need, not to “observe
the no-strike pledge,” but to scrap it. That’s the
significance of the Textile Union’s revocation of the no-strike
pledge for 100,000 cotton-rayon workers and the growing strike wave
in Detroit.</em></p>
<p>Incidentally, it is appropriate to recall how Murray helped disarm
the workers about the WLB and its position on the Little Steel
Formula. In his appeal for continuation of the no-strike pledge
before the rebellious delegates at the CIO. United Automobile Workers
convention last September, Murray asserted “I am just as sure
as I am living that the Little Steel Formula is going to be revised.
I don’t think I would be far from correct.”</p>
<p>At that time Murray demanded support for the no-strike policy
because he claimed the Little Steel Formula was sure to be revised.
Now he insists on the same policy because the formula hasn’t
been revised. The one thing Murray is sure of is that no matter how
the workers are kicked around, they must not fight back with their
most effective weapon, the strike.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>Telephone Pay</h4>
<p class="fst">Reversing the recommendation of a $5 a week increase made by its
own special panel, the WLB in Washington last week granted increases
of only $3 to the local and long distance telephone operators in New
York City who overwhelmingly voted to strike in January but postponed
a final strike vote under the Smith-Connally act pending a ruling of
the national WLB. Washington, D.C. operators who participated in the
Thanksgiving week strike along with Ohio and Michigan workers were
awarded a $4 increase. Louisville and Memphis operators were granted
$3.</p>
<p><em>The New York operators were induced to call off their strike in
January, when the American Telephone and Telegraph and New York
Telephone companies hastily made an offer to pay $4 a week more. This
was $1 less than the Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers and
the Traffic Employees Association (local operators) were demanding.
The unions continued to press for their original demands before the
WLB.</em></p>
<p>Union representatives have declared they are going to petition the
WLB for a reconsideration of the case in an effort to secure the $4
raise the companies agreed to pay. If the petition is rejected
another strike vote will very likely be taken. The telephone workers
are particularly indignant because the WLB made its decision without
giving the unions a public hearing.</p>
<p>WLB Vice-Chairman Taylor conceded that a “mistake may have
been made” by the failure to hold such a hearing. However, it
is always the corporations and never the workers who benefit by such
“mistakes.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Unionism Grows</h4>
<p class="fst">During the past year, according to the annual National Labor
Relations Board report, 1,072,694 unorganized workers voted in NLRB
elections for union collective bargaining representation. This brings
the nine year total to 5,220,983.</p>
<p>The number voting last year was the greatest in the NLRB’s
history, and the number of elections held registered “an
increase of 3,000 per cent over the number received in the first year
of the board’s operations.”</p>
<p><em>Despite all the anti-labor propaganda, the workers in the past
year voted union in greater numbers than ever before.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>55-Cent Minimum IF —</h4>
<p class="fst">After issuing its decision “recommending” a 55-cent an
hour minimum wage in the textile case, the War Labor Board last week
granted its regional agencies authority to approve a minimum wage up
to 55 cents for all “substandard” wage earners,
admittedly numbering over 4,000,000.</p>
<p><em>However, WLB Chairman Davis hastened to assure a press
Conference that “this action by the board does not mean,
unfortunately, that 4,000,000 workers are going to get a 55-cent wage
tomorrow.” All it does is merely “open the way for the
workers to get that amount.” In short, they’ll get it if
they raise enough hell!</em></p>
<p>The ruling has the usual loopholes enabling the administration to
deny in practice what it grants in principle. The workers can secure
a 55-cent minimum IF —</p>
<ol>
<li>the employers agree to it and request it;</li>
<li>no price increase is involved;</li>
<li>an increase to the new minimum does not conflict with the
“appropriate prevailing rates” in given areas and
communities.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The administration’s intent in making this new ruling is far
from benevolent. Its purpose is to take the curse off the WLB’s
prior “recommendation” upholding continuation of the
wage-freezing Little Steel Formula. In addition, the administration
is seeking to head off growing union pressure for passage of the
Pepper resolution which would fix the minimum hourly wage at 65
cents. The labor members of the WLB had proposed a 72-cent minimum,
basing their demand upon the government’s own figures for a
minimum health and decency income required by the average worker’s
family.</p>
<p><em>Even when the pro-corporation WLB does make a seeming
concession to the workers, it is so full of “if, ands, and
buts” that the workers can generally expect to get “nothin’
for nothin’ and damn little of that.”</em></p>
<p class="link"> <br>
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</body> |
Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(10 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 10, 10 March 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Murray “Fights” Back
CIO President Philip “Bleeding Heart” Murray greeted
the WLB’s approval of the Little Steel Formula with his typical
blustering display of verbal indignation.
Murray, who has been beating his gums for a couple of years about
the “inequity of the Little Steel Formula” While doing
all in his power to curb any independent action of the CIO workers to
smash the formula, declaimed that “the situation in which labor
now finds itself is simply intolerable.”
In his very next sentence, however he proposes to continue the
very union policy that has brought labor to this “intolerable
situation.” He declares: “Now, more than ever, it is of
the utmost importance to our war effort that there be maintained
uninterrupted production. The CIO and its members are fully conscious
of this need and therefore shall observe their no-strike pledge.”
Murray believes in the policy of “turning the other
cheek” – only it’s the workers who always get
slapped. But not forever and not for long. The CIO members are
becoming “fully conscious” of the need, not to “observe
the no-strike pledge,” but to scrap it. That’s the
significance of the Textile Union’s revocation of the no-strike
pledge for 100,000 cotton-rayon workers and the growing strike wave
in Detroit.
Incidentally, it is appropriate to recall how Murray helped disarm
the workers about the WLB and its position on the Little Steel
Formula. In his appeal for continuation of the no-strike pledge
before the rebellious delegates at the CIO. United Automobile Workers
convention last September, Murray asserted “I am just as sure
as I am living that the Little Steel Formula is going to be revised.
I don’t think I would be far from correct.”
At that time Murray demanded support for the no-strike policy
because he claimed the Little Steel Formula was sure to be revised.
Now he insists on the same policy because the formula hasn’t
been revised. The one thing Murray is sure of is that no matter how
the workers are kicked around, they must not fight back with their
most effective weapon, the strike.
* * *
Telephone Pay
Reversing the recommendation of a $5 a week increase made by its
own special panel, the WLB in Washington last week granted increases
of only $3 to the local and long distance telephone operators in New
York City who overwhelmingly voted to strike in January but postponed
a final strike vote under the Smith-Connally act pending a ruling of
the national WLB. Washington, D.C. operators who participated in the
Thanksgiving week strike along with Ohio and Michigan workers were
awarded a $4 increase. Louisville and Memphis operators were granted
$3.
The New York operators were induced to call off their strike in
January, when the American Telephone and Telegraph and New York
Telephone companies hastily made an offer to pay $4 a week more. This
was $1 less than the Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers and
the Traffic Employees Association (local operators) were demanding.
The unions continued to press for their original demands before the
WLB.
Union representatives have declared they are going to petition the
WLB for a reconsideration of the case in an effort to secure the $4
raise the companies agreed to pay. If the petition is rejected
another strike vote will very likely be taken. The telephone workers
are particularly indignant because the WLB made its decision without
giving the unions a public hearing.
WLB Vice-Chairman Taylor conceded that a “mistake may have
been made” by the failure to hold such a hearing. However, it
is always the corporations and never the workers who benefit by such
“mistakes.”
* * *
Unionism Grows
During the past year, according to the annual National Labor
Relations Board report, 1,072,694 unorganized workers voted in NLRB
elections for union collective bargaining representation. This brings
the nine year total to 5,220,983.
The number voting last year was the greatest in the NLRB’s
history, and the number of elections held registered “an
increase of 3,000 per cent over the number received in the first year
of the board’s operations.”
Despite all the anti-labor propaganda, the workers in the past
year voted union in greater numbers than ever before.
* * *
55-Cent Minimum IF —
After issuing its decision “recommending” a 55-cent an
hour minimum wage in the textile case, the War Labor Board last week
granted its regional agencies authority to approve a minimum wage up
to 55 cents for all “substandard” wage earners,
admittedly numbering over 4,000,000.
However, WLB Chairman Davis hastened to assure a press
Conference that “this action by the board does not mean,
unfortunately, that 4,000,000 workers are going to get a 55-cent wage
tomorrow.” All it does is merely “open the way for the
workers to get that amount.” In short, they’ll get it if
they raise enough hell!
The ruling has the usual loopholes enabling the administration to
deny in practice what it grants in principle. The workers can secure
a 55-cent minimum IF —
the employers agree to it and request it;
no price increase is involved;
an increase to the new minimum does not conflict with the
“appropriate prevailing rates” in given areas and
communities.
The administration’s intent in making this new ruling is far
from benevolent. Its purpose is to take the curse off the WLB’s
prior “recommendation” upholding continuation of the
wage-freezing Little Steel Formula. In addition, the administration
is seeking to head off growing union pressure for passage of the
Pepper resolution which would fix the minimum hourly wage at 65
cents. The labor members of the WLB had proposed a 72-cent minimum,
basing their demand upon the government’s own figures for a
minimum health and decency income required by the average worker’s
family.
Even when the pro-corporation WLB does make a seeming
concession to the workers, it is so full of “if, ands, and
buts” that the workers can generally expect to get “nothin’
for nothin’ and damn little of that.”
Top of page
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(3 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_09" target="new">Vol. IX No. 9</a>, 3 March 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>U.S. Steel Contract</h4>
<p class="fst">A “model” agreement containing no major improvements
over previous contracts, and, of course, none of the basic wage
demands of the steelworkers, was finally signed last week between the
CIO Steelworkers Union and the United States Steel Corporation,
leading steel trust. Five U.S. Steel subsidiaries signed the contract
which is expected to be the pattern for the rest of the industry.</p>
<p>The contract includes the so-called “fringe” demands
granted by the WLB at the time it turned down all the major demands
of the union after stalling the steel wage case for over a year. This
includes a four to six cents an hour premium for the two night
shifts, one week’s vacation with pay for service up to 5 years,
and some dismissal or severance pay. None of these concessions,
however, are up to the Standards customarily maintained in the best
organized industries.</p>
<p>The big “selling” point of the contract for the union
leaders is a clause providing for a permanent three-man arbitration
board with power to make binding decisions in disputes arising over
application of the contract. This board, the usual “impartial”
body selected by agreement of company and union officials, is hailed
by the union officials as “a momentous advance in management-
union relations.” It is actually nothing more than an
additional means for stalling the workers’ demands and keeping
them from taking independent action to enforce the contract. The
previous contract provided for such a board only on a temporary basis
from case to case.</p>
<p>CIO Steelworkers President Philip Murray crowed about a “great
victory” when the WLB turned down the union’s basic
demands. The tightening of compulsory arbitration is now hailed as a
“great advance.” A few more such “great victories”
and “great advances” and the steel workers will find
themselves completely at the mercy of the corporations and back to
their previous low level of living conditions.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>Army and Ward ‘Seizure’</h4>
<p class="fst">Army officials in charge of operating units of Montgomery Ward
“seized” by the government to halt strikes provoked by
WLB delay in enforcing its orders against the company, last week
relinquished control over the two main units, the warehouse and
mail-order house in Chicago. These are the central purchasing and
distributing agencies for Ward’s 650 outlets, including the 13
now under Army control.</p>
<p>By a fancy method of bookkeeping, the government was debited with
purchases of merchandise to stock the “seized” retail
outlets while all sales receipts were turned over to the company.
This meant that the government was constantly going “into the
red” – everything going out, nothing coming in.</p>
<p>Naturally, the government, which is loathe to infringe upon
“private property rights,” has found it almost impossible
to operate the tiny segment of Ward’s under its control while
the vast structure of the company remains in the control of Sewell
Avery.</p>
<p>The recent federal district court decision declaring the “seizure”
illegal gave the Army officials sufficient pretext for gradually
withdrawing from their uncomfortable position of having to enforce
WLB orders against an open-shop employer whose antilabor views
generally coincide with their own. Thus, Sewell Avery is still
successfully refusing to obey the WLB rulings after years of
defiance.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Auto Barons Assail UAW</h4>
<p class="fst">Charges of deliberate company provocations leading to numerous
strikes in the auto industry made by CIO United Automobile Workers
Secretary-Treasurer George Addes in a statement before the Senate War
Investigating Committee have brought a counter-attack from the
automotive barons.</p>
<p>Trying to cover up for the companies which have been emboldened to
ever greater anti-union acts by the continuance of the no-strike
policy, George Romney, managing .director of the Automotive Council
for War Production, last week howled that the strikes are part of a
scheme to “usurp management’s functions and
responsibilities.”</p>
<p>“While Mr. Addes and other leaders feign a pious public
attitude and pretend they do not want to control production, their
union representatives in the plants are trying to muscle in on
management for the greater aggrandizement of labor monopoly,”
proclaimed Mr. Romney.</p>
<p>This is not a new argument. The auto corporations fought unionism
in the industry from its earliest beginning by claiming that the
unions intend to infringe on their “god-given”
prerogatives to control production and boot the workers around any
way they see fit. So far as the bosses are concerned, any attempt of
the workers to have something to say about their conditions of work
is “usurpation” of the “rights of management.”</p>
<p>Besides, what’s wrong with the idea of the organized workers
assuming the whole function of capitalist management? The capitalists
are only profiteering parasites and a brake upon production’.
Guaranteed job security and uninterrupted production will be achieved
only when the automotive and other basic industries are taken over by
the government and operated under workers’ control.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>CIO Newspaper Guild and Bridges</h4>
<p class="fst">When Milton Murray, President of the CIO Newspaper Guild and
reporter for the New York daily <strong>PM</strong>, exposed the Stalinist “traitors’
lobby” in, the CIO which secretly approached Congressmen urging
them to vote for the May-Bailey slave labor bill, he did a service to
the labor movement.</p>
<p>But he makes a mistake when he. permits his justified and
understandable contempt for the Stalinist traitors to influence his
position on the question of the government’s attempt to deport
Harry Bridges, Stalinist leader of the CIO Longshoremen’s
Union. Last week Murray and the Guild executive board turned down a
resolution of protest against the Bridges deportation proceedings on
the grounds that Bridges is a “misleader of labor” and a
“quisling in our ranks.”</p>
<p>Everything the Newspaper Guild says about Bridges as a treacherous
union leader is true. But neither the government nor the employers
are attacking him for that reason. In fact, they praise his pi»sent
policies. They instituted proceedings against Bridges because he is a
union leader who is a non-citizen and once held radical views. His
deportation could then be used as a precedent to harass and victimize
other militant union leaders.</p>
<p>The job of eliminating elements like Bridges from the labor
movement cannot be handed over to the capitalist government, whose
motives are entirely anti-labor. That job belongs solely to the
organized workers themselves, who need to rid the unions of the
Stalinist blight in order to strengthen and protect their
organizations against such employer and government attacks.</p>
<p class="link"> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of page</a></p>
<hr size="1" noshade="noshade" width="100%">
<p class="linkback"><a href="../../index.htm">Preis Archive</a> | <a href="../../../index.htm">Trotskyist Writers Index</a> | <a href="../../../../index.htm">ETOL Main Page</a></p>
<p class="updat">Last updated: 22 June 2018</p>
</body> |
Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(3 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 9, 3 March 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
U.S. Steel Contract
A “model” agreement containing no major improvements
over previous contracts, and, of course, none of the basic wage
demands of the steelworkers, was finally signed last week between the
CIO Steelworkers Union and the United States Steel Corporation,
leading steel trust. Five U.S. Steel subsidiaries signed the contract
which is expected to be the pattern for the rest of the industry.
The contract includes the so-called “fringe” demands
granted by the WLB at the time it turned down all the major demands
of the union after stalling the steel wage case for over a year. This
includes a four to six cents an hour premium for the two night
shifts, one week’s vacation with pay for service up to 5 years,
and some dismissal or severance pay. None of these concessions,
however, are up to the Standards customarily maintained in the best
organized industries.
The big “selling” point of the contract for the union
leaders is a clause providing for a permanent three-man arbitration
board with power to make binding decisions in disputes arising over
application of the contract. This board, the usual “impartial”
body selected by agreement of company and union officials, is hailed
by the union officials as “a momentous advance in management-
union relations.” It is actually nothing more than an
additional means for stalling the workers’ demands and keeping
them from taking independent action to enforce the contract. The
previous contract provided for such a board only on a temporary basis
from case to case.
CIO Steelworkers President Philip Murray crowed about a “great
victory” when the WLB turned down the union’s basic
demands. The tightening of compulsory arbitration is now hailed as a
“great advance.” A few more such “great victories”
and “great advances” and the steel workers will find
themselves completely at the mercy of the corporations and back to
their previous low level of living conditions.
* * *
Army and Ward ‘Seizure’
Army officials in charge of operating units of Montgomery Ward
“seized” by the government to halt strikes provoked by
WLB delay in enforcing its orders against the company, last week
relinquished control over the two main units, the warehouse and
mail-order house in Chicago. These are the central purchasing and
distributing agencies for Ward’s 650 outlets, including the 13
now under Army control.
By a fancy method of bookkeeping, the government was debited with
purchases of merchandise to stock the “seized” retail
outlets while all sales receipts were turned over to the company.
This meant that the government was constantly going “into the
red” – everything going out, nothing coming in.
Naturally, the government, which is loathe to infringe upon
“private property rights,” has found it almost impossible
to operate the tiny segment of Ward’s under its control while
the vast structure of the company remains in the control of Sewell
Avery.
The recent federal district court decision declaring the “seizure”
illegal gave the Army officials sufficient pretext for gradually
withdrawing from their uncomfortable position of having to enforce
WLB orders against an open-shop employer whose antilabor views
generally coincide with their own. Thus, Sewell Avery is still
successfully refusing to obey the WLB rulings after years of
defiance.
* * *
Auto Barons Assail UAW
Charges of deliberate company provocations leading to numerous
strikes in the auto industry made by CIO United Automobile Workers
Secretary-Treasurer George Addes in a statement before the Senate War
Investigating Committee have brought a counter-attack from the
automotive barons.
Trying to cover up for the companies which have been emboldened to
ever greater anti-union acts by the continuance of the no-strike
policy, George Romney, managing .director of the Automotive Council
for War Production, last week howled that the strikes are part of a
scheme to “usurp management’s functions and
responsibilities.”
“While Mr. Addes and other leaders feign a pious public
attitude and pretend they do not want to control production, their
union representatives in the plants are trying to muscle in on
management for the greater aggrandizement of labor monopoly,”
proclaimed Mr. Romney.
This is not a new argument. The auto corporations fought unionism
in the industry from its earliest beginning by claiming that the
unions intend to infringe on their “god-given”
prerogatives to control production and boot the workers around any
way they see fit. So far as the bosses are concerned, any attempt of
the workers to have something to say about their conditions of work
is “usurpation” of the “rights of management.”
Besides, what’s wrong with the idea of the organized workers
assuming the whole function of capitalist management? The capitalists
are only profiteering parasites and a brake upon production’.
Guaranteed job security and uninterrupted production will be achieved
only when the automotive and other basic industries are taken over by
the government and operated under workers’ control.
* * *
CIO Newspaper Guild and Bridges
When Milton Murray, President of the CIO Newspaper Guild and
reporter for the New York daily PM, exposed the Stalinist “traitors’
lobby” in, the CIO which secretly approached Congressmen urging
them to vote for the May-Bailey slave labor bill, he did a service to
the labor movement.
But he makes a mistake when he. permits his justified and
understandable contempt for the Stalinist traitors to influence his
position on the question of the government’s attempt to deport
Harry Bridges, Stalinist leader of the CIO Longshoremen’s
Union. Last week Murray and the Guild executive board turned down a
resolution of protest against the Bridges deportation proceedings on
the grounds that Bridges is a “misleader of labor” and a
“quisling in our ranks.”
Everything the Newspaper Guild says about Bridges as a treacherous
union leader is true. But neither the government nor the employers
are attacking him for that reason. In fact, they praise his pi»sent
policies. They instituted proceedings against Bridges because he is a
union leader who is a non-citizen and once held radical views. His
deportation could then be used as a precedent to harass and victimize
other militant union leaders.
The job of eliminating elements like Bridges from the labor
movement cannot be handed over to the capitalist government, whose
motives are entirely anti-labor. That job belongs solely to the
organized workers themselves, who need to rid the unions of the
Stalinist blight in order to strengthen and protect their
organizations against such employer and government attacks.
Top of page
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(9 June 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_23" target="new">Vol. IX No. 23</a>, 9 June 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Real Score on Stalinists</h3>
<p class="fst">Appraising the significance of the ‘left’ shift in policy which the Stalinists appear to be preparing, the June 2 issue of <strong>Business Week</strong>, a leading big business weekly, admits the anti-labor role of the Stalinists and their union stooges during the war. <strong>Business Week</strong> has the function of telling the real score to the employers.</p>
<p><em>A Stalinist change of line from open support of American capitalism to more “militant” phrase-mongering “won’t come any too soon to protect the position” of the Stalinists in the unions, says <strong>Business Week</strong>. The Stalinists “have outdone all other factions in American labor in making patriotic appeals for more production, labor-management cooperation, ignoring of grievances, and observation of the no-strike pledge.” As long as the workers were passive, or greatly influenced by war propaganda, “this line paid good dividends.”</em></p>
<p>Now, however, “the temper of organized labor is changing.” For example, <strong>Business Week</strong> points out, “local elections held in C.I.O.’s United Auto Workers have shown Communist (Stalinist)-backed slates losing heavily. These losses are ascribed to the Communist-sponsored candidates’ continued adherence to their platform of employer cooperation end retention of the no-strike pledge.” Throughout the labor movement the same thing is occurring widely, and Communist influence is threatened.”</p>
<p>A “left” shift, says <strong>Business Week</strong>, “would be a direct result of Russia’s changing relations with the U.S.” and not any new concern for the working class. But the Stalinists in the unions are becoming so despised and discredited that they would “profit by being bidden to give leadership to, instead of frustrating, the new militance of American workers.”</p>
<p><em>Whatever shift the Stalinists make, however, we can be sure they will function not as genuine revolutionists, but as foreign agents of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Any “militancy” they may assume will be for the purpose of snatching the leadership of the workers’ struggles precisely in order to frustrate and behead them.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Just a “Mistake”!</h3>
<p class="fst">By a 5–4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on May 29 once more demonstrated the kind of “justice” the capitalist courts reserve for the workers.</p>
<p>That august body upheld a previous U.S. Circuit Court ruling which denied that the NLRB could rectify a “mistake” in computing an award of back pay to 209 lead and zinc miners of the Eagle-Picher Mining & Smelting Co. and the Eagle-Picher Lead Co.</p>
<p>The NLRB, by using a wrong formula, chiseled these miners out of over three-quarters of a million dollars in back pay to which they were entitled. A dissenting minority of the Supreme Court admitted that these workers should not be made to suffer because of a “mistake” of a government agency. “Approximately $800,000 is due these 209 employees instead of $5,400,” admitted dissenting Justice Murphy.</p>
<p><em>But the court majority used expert legal hair-splitting to rule that an NLRB decision is “final.” Of course, this court of corporation lawyers wasn’t thinking of saving the dough of the companies involved. – Oh no, they were just doing their duty in upholding the law – capitalist law!</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>“Muzzle Not the Ox ...”</h3>
<p class="fst">“Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn” is a Biblical injunction close to the hearts of the well-heeled craft union moguls dominating the AFL Executive Council. It’s a rare top AFL official whose salary and expense accounts don’t run into five figures annually.</p>
<p>So it’s understandable how they would react to the piteous plea of the Congressmen to get their annual $10,000 salaries raised by a tax-exempt “expense account” of $2,500. Just before adjourning their recent Spring session, reports the <strong>AFL Weekly News Service</strong>, May 15, the AFL council “went on record unanimously in favor of increased compensation for members of Congress.”</p>
<p>“The council, which previously had urged Congress to approve legislation increasing the basic pay of classified government employees, felt that Congressmen also deserve relief from increased living costs,” says the <strong>Weekly News Service</strong>.</p>
<p><em>The Congressmen, of course, didn’t need this support. They would have voted themselves a 25% increase in “take home” pay anyway. But it must have made them feel good to know that the “labor statesmen” who find it such tough going even though they are in the upper brackets, can appreciate the plight of those forced to exist on “only” $10,000 a year.</em></p>
<p>This just goes to show how far the AFL bureaucrats are removed from the conditions of life of the workers, and how close they are in sympathies and outlook to the agents and beneficiaries of the capitalist class.</p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(9 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 23, 9 June 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Real Score on Stalinists
Appraising the significance of the ‘left’ shift in policy which the Stalinists appear to be preparing, the June 2 issue of Business Week, a leading big business weekly, admits the anti-labor role of the Stalinists and their union stooges during the war. Business Week has the function of telling the real score to the employers.
A Stalinist change of line from open support of American capitalism to more “militant” phrase-mongering “won’t come any too soon to protect the position” of the Stalinists in the unions, says Business Week. The Stalinists “have outdone all other factions in American labor in making patriotic appeals for more production, labor-management cooperation, ignoring of grievances, and observation of the no-strike pledge.” As long as the workers were passive, or greatly influenced by war propaganda, “this line paid good dividends.”
Now, however, “the temper of organized labor is changing.” For example, Business Week points out, “local elections held in C.I.O.’s United Auto Workers have shown Communist (Stalinist)-backed slates losing heavily. These losses are ascribed to the Communist-sponsored candidates’ continued adherence to their platform of employer cooperation end retention of the no-strike pledge.” Throughout the labor movement the same thing is occurring widely, and Communist influence is threatened.”
A “left” shift, says Business Week, “would be a direct result of Russia’s changing relations with the U.S.” and not any new concern for the working class. But the Stalinists in the unions are becoming so despised and discredited that they would “profit by being bidden to give leadership to, instead of frustrating, the new militance of American workers.”
Whatever shift the Stalinists make, however, we can be sure they will function not as genuine revolutionists, but as foreign agents of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Any “militancy” they may assume will be for the purpose of snatching the leadership of the workers’ struggles precisely in order to frustrate and behead them.
* * *
Just a “Mistake”!
By a 5–4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on May 29 once more demonstrated the kind of “justice” the capitalist courts reserve for the workers.
That august body upheld a previous U.S. Circuit Court ruling which denied that the NLRB could rectify a “mistake” in computing an award of back pay to 209 lead and zinc miners of the Eagle-Picher Mining & Smelting Co. and the Eagle-Picher Lead Co.
The NLRB, by using a wrong formula, chiseled these miners out of over three-quarters of a million dollars in back pay to which they were entitled. A dissenting minority of the Supreme Court admitted that these workers should not be made to suffer because of a “mistake” of a government agency. “Approximately $800,000 is due these 209 employees instead of $5,400,” admitted dissenting Justice Murphy.
But the court majority used expert legal hair-splitting to rule that an NLRB decision is “final.” Of course, this court of corporation lawyers wasn’t thinking of saving the dough of the companies involved. – Oh no, they were just doing their duty in upholding the law – capitalist law!
* * *
“Muzzle Not the Ox ...”
“Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn” is a Biblical injunction close to the hearts of the well-heeled craft union moguls dominating the AFL Executive Council. It’s a rare top AFL official whose salary and expense accounts don’t run into five figures annually.
So it’s understandable how they would react to the piteous plea of the Congressmen to get their annual $10,000 salaries raised by a tax-exempt “expense account” of $2,500. Just before adjourning their recent Spring session, reports the AFL Weekly News Service, May 15, the AFL council “went on record unanimously in favor of increased compensation for members of Congress.”
“The council, which previously had urged Congress to approve legislation increasing the basic pay of classified government employees, felt that Congressmen also deserve relief from increased living costs,” says the Weekly News Service.
The Congressmen, of course, didn’t need this support. They would have voted themselves a 25% increase in “take home” pay anyway. But it must have made them feel good to know that the “labor statesmen” who find it such tough going even though they are in the upper brackets, can appreciate the plight of those forced to exist on “only” $10,000 a year.
This just goes to show how far the AFL bureaucrats are removed from the conditions of life of the workers, and how close they are in sympathies and outlook to the agents and beneficiaries of the capitalist class.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>At the Auto Convention</h1>
<h4>Militant Note Struck at the Very Outset</h4>
<h3>(August 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_32" target="new">Vol. V No. 32</a>, 9 August 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">BUFFALO, August, 4 – A muffled roll of drums sounded from, behind the closed doors at the rear of the mammoth auditorium.</p>
<p>Everyone of the thousand auto worker delegates seated at the dozen rows of tables, stretching hundreds of feet along the length of the auditorium, turned his head away from the speakers platform.</p>
<p>The formal opening this morning of the Sixth Annual Convention of the United Automobile Workers Union (CIO) had already taken place. But for the workers from all the automobile and aircraft centers of the country the real opening of the convention was just about to start.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Here comes the Ford Local 600 band!”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The thousand delegates stood on the tables and chairs, roared, stamped and cheered a titanic welcome to the Ford union local.</p>
<p>It was the tribute of fighting union men and women to the living symbol of their mighty victories of the past year, the victories which have smashed through the greatest bulwarks of the open-shop and industrial oppression and have made the UAW-CIO the most dynamic union in the American labor movement today.</p>
<p>These are no hand-picked delegates, no belarded business agents of the reactionary AFL craft-union vintage. These are the men and women from the ranks, the leaders of the picket lines, the shop stewards, the workers on the job who have won the greatest confidence and respect of their fellow members. There is an electric atmosphere of vitality, of confidence, of boldness, emanating from the assembled delegates.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Union’s Defense Guards</h4>
<p class="fst">Symbolic of the character of this union, as reflected in this convention, are the hundreds of delegates wearing their brightly colored service caps – the caps of the flying squadrons, the UAW local union defense guards.</p>
<p>One white and purple silk banner is lettered in gold: “Local 581, Flint, Mich., Fisher No. 1, The Flying Wedge.” Another, lettered gold on a green background, says: “The Flying Squadron, Chrysler Local 7, Detroit.” On numerous service caps and on the uniform shirts of delegates is proclaimed their function: “The Flying Squadron.”</p>
<p>The accomplishments of these Flying Squadrons and their union brothers are recorded in the reports of R.J. Thomas, UAW present, and George Addes, secretary-treasurer.<br>
</p>
<h4>Union’s Great Gains</h4>
<p class="fst">The paid-up membership of the UAW-CIO is today 526,413, an increase of 93 per cent over the membership reported at the last convention. This makes the UAW the third largest international union in the country.</p>
<p>The union has contracts covering 982 plants, protecting a total of 703,760 workers. At the previous convention last year in St. Louis the union had 494 contracts covering 398,000 workers.</p>
<p>During the past year, through the strike struggles in Ford, General Motors, Allis-Chalmers and scores of lesser plants and corporations, the UAW has secured a general average 10 cents an hour wage increase in the automobile industry.<br>
</p>
<h4>Aircraft Is Next</h4>
<p class="fst">The militant strike struggles at Vultee and North American Aviation have opened the way for an organizational drive in the mushrooming aircraft industry which has already added 50,000 members to the ranks of the UAW. It is clear from the vigorous response of the delegates to every mention of the aircraft organization drive, that one of the key ambitions of the UAW members is to carry through a drive on the scale of the Ford campaign to bring the 500,000 aircraft workers into the UAW in the next year, and thus realize the slogan of this convention – to make the UAW-CIO the largest and most powerful International union in America.</p>
<p>The initial proceedings of the convention today clearly revealed the moods and feelings of the auto workers.</p>
<p><em>The kind of language they respond to is fighting language. Every note of militancy struck by any speaker was the occasion for loud applause and cheers.</em></p>
<p>Those speakers who sensed this, and responded in the fashion which the delegates demanded, were greeted with the loudest applause.<br>
</p>
<h4>Thomas Taunts Warmongers</h4>
<p class="fst">The desire of the delegates for militant expression affected the talks of the various union officers who spoke. It forced R.J. Thomas, when he gave his opening address this afternoon, to strike a much stronger note than was expected of him.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most significant response to any portion of Thomas’s speech was when he dealt with the war question.</p>
<p>After declaring that he was for material aid to Great Britain – a statement which received scarcely any response – Thomas stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I was called a war-monger by certain people (the Stalinists) a few months ago when I advocated material aid to Britain.</p>
<p class="quote">“Today we can hear these same people wanting to go much further than I want to go today. I predict that these same people will be advocating we go to war.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“I still say we should keep ourselves on record as against any foreign adventure.”</em></p>
<p class="fst"><em>This last remark brought forth an instantaneous and tremendous volume of applause, and indicated that there is potentially no more powerful an anti-war force in this country today than the auto workers.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Union Democracy Jealously Guarded</h4>
<p class="fst">The delegates are quick to resent and loudly oppose anything that. smacks of high-handed or arbitrary decisions from the chair, and jealously guard every democratic right.</p>
<p>The minority of the Credentials Committee reported that an attempt was being made to refuse seating to the large delegation from the militant Allis-Chalmers local, whose 8,000 members recently won a bitter 79 day strike. The report charged that the seating of these delegates was being held up on the technicality that the local, in violation of a clause in the constitution, had nominated and elected delegates at the same meeting. The minority of the committee put in a motion to seat the Allis-Chalmers delegation immediately.</p>
<p><em>The minority motion was greeted with a tremendous volume of applause and stamping of feet. When Ed Hall, a former board member, took the floor and condemned any attempt to deprive the Allis-Chalmers workers of representation, and charged that this would be an act greeted most warmly by the open-shoppers throughout the country, he nearly brought the house down.</em></p>
<p>The storm was quieted finally by the explanation that the committee majority had not acted against seating the Allis-Chalmers delegation – although it had been the decision of a caucus of the right-wing to attempt this – and by a motion instructing the Credentials Committee to bring in its recommendation on the disputed delegates as the first business tomorrow morning, so as to prevent any stalling of the seating of the Allis-Chalmers representatives.<br>
</p>
<h4>Frankensteen Booed</h4>
<p class="fst">The maker of the motion to refer the decision to the next morning was Richard Frankensteen, the international board member who supported the use of troops against the North American Aviation workers.</p>
<p>No sooner had he approached the microphone to speak than he was met by a chorus of boos from all sections of the hail. Thomas in his published report had denied that Frankensteen had condoned the use of troops, but this has not convinced a large section of the delegates. And many of those who do accept the explanation on this point are still bitter about Frankensteen’s arbitrary action in suspending the officers of the North American local. The lesson of Homer Martin’s union-disrupting tactics has sunk deep.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negro Delegates Active</h4>
<p class="fst">Once more, at this convention, is shown the freedom from racial prejudice that has marked the policies of the UAW and the CIO. Almost every large delegation at the convention includes Negro delegates, who participate fully and freely in all the convention activities.</p>
<p>It was especially gratifying to see the many Negro workers in the Ford delegation and in the Ford Local 600 band. One of the most vicious features of Ford’s anti-labor policies was his attempt to split the workers by playing Negro and white workers against each other.<br>
</p>
<h4>Many Women Present</h4>
<p class="fst">Women workers are playing an important role in this convention, reflecting the vital part they are playing in the whole organizational life and struggles of the auto workers.</p>
<p>One of the brightest spots in the convention thus far was the parade of the Women’s Auxiliaries in the convention hall this morning. As they marched down the aisle, all the delegates rose and cheered them and then broke into the stirring tune of <em>Solidarity Forever</em>. The banner which headed the parade proudly announced that the membership of the UAW Women’s Auxiliary has increased 345 per cent in the past year. No other union has been able to draw the wives and mothers of the workers into the union struggles so well as the UAW. The militancy of the women on the UAW picket lines is traditional. Whatever decisions are made – and some of them may be poor and misguided – one thing is certain: The whole character, tradition and composition of the UAW-CIO will not tolerate for long policies which will lead to the destruction of union democracy and militancy. Time and again efforts have been made to enforce such policies on the auto union – Francis Dillon and Homer Martin tried it – but these attempts have failed. Each time the auto workers have spewed forth these poisonous reactionary elements. And each time the UAW has made new giant strides forward.</p>
<p>One has only to sit for a brief time among these delegates to observe their seriousness, their stern sense of responsibility, their boundless militancy and confidence, their innate love of freedom of expression, their hatred of bureaucracy to be convinced that here is a union capable of confronting all the hosts of reaction and ending the struggle victoriously.</p>
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Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Art Preis
At the Auto Convention
Militant Note Struck at the Very Outset
(August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 32, 9 August 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
BUFFALO, August, 4 – A muffled roll of drums sounded from, behind the closed doors at the rear of the mammoth auditorium.
Everyone of the thousand auto worker delegates seated at the dozen rows of tables, stretching hundreds of feet along the length of the auditorium, turned his head away from the speakers platform.
The formal opening this morning of the Sixth Annual Convention of the United Automobile Workers Union (CIO) had already taken place. But for the workers from all the automobile and aircraft centers of the country the real opening of the convention was just about to start.
“Here comes the Ford Local 600 band!”
The thousand delegates stood on the tables and chairs, roared, stamped and cheered a titanic welcome to the Ford union local.
It was the tribute of fighting union men and women to the living symbol of their mighty victories of the past year, the victories which have smashed through the greatest bulwarks of the open-shop and industrial oppression and have made the UAW-CIO the most dynamic union in the American labor movement today.
These are no hand-picked delegates, no belarded business agents of the reactionary AFL craft-union vintage. These are the men and women from the ranks, the leaders of the picket lines, the shop stewards, the workers on the job who have won the greatest confidence and respect of their fellow members. There is an electric atmosphere of vitality, of confidence, of boldness, emanating from the assembled delegates.
The Union’s Defense Guards
Symbolic of the character of this union, as reflected in this convention, are the hundreds of delegates wearing their brightly colored service caps – the caps of the flying squadrons, the UAW local union defense guards.
One white and purple silk banner is lettered in gold: “Local 581, Flint, Mich., Fisher No. 1, The Flying Wedge.” Another, lettered gold on a green background, says: “The Flying Squadron, Chrysler Local 7, Detroit.” On numerous service caps and on the uniform shirts of delegates is proclaimed their function: “The Flying Squadron.”
The accomplishments of these Flying Squadrons and their union brothers are recorded in the reports of R.J. Thomas, UAW present, and George Addes, secretary-treasurer.
Union’s Great Gains
The paid-up membership of the UAW-CIO is today 526,413, an increase of 93 per cent over the membership reported at the last convention. This makes the UAW the third largest international union in the country.
The union has contracts covering 982 plants, protecting a total of 703,760 workers. At the previous convention last year in St. Louis the union had 494 contracts covering 398,000 workers.
During the past year, through the strike struggles in Ford, General Motors, Allis-Chalmers and scores of lesser plants and corporations, the UAW has secured a general average 10 cents an hour wage increase in the automobile industry.
Aircraft Is Next
The militant strike struggles at Vultee and North American Aviation have opened the way for an organizational drive in the mushrooming aircraft industry which has already added 50,000 members to the ranks of the UAW. It is clear from the vigorous response of the delegates to every mention of the aircraft organization drive, that one of the key ambitions of the UAW members is to carry through a drive on the scale of the Ford campaign to bring the 500,000 aircraft workers into the UAW in the next year, and thus realize the slogan of this convention – to make the UAW-CIO the largest and most powerful International union in America.
The initial proceedings of the convention today clearly revealed the moods and feelings of the auto workers.
The kind of language they respond to is fighting language. Every note of militancy struck by any speaker was the occasion for loud applause and cheers.
Those speakers who sensed this, and responded in the fashion which the delegates demanded, were greeted with the loudest applause.
Thomas Taunts Warmongers
The desire of the delegates for militant expression affected the talks of the various union officers who spoke. It forced R.J. Thomas, when he gave his opening address this afternoon, to strike a much stronger note than was expected of him.
Perhaps the most significant response to any portion of Thomas’s speech was when he dealt with the war question.
After declaring that he was for material aid to Great Britain – a statement which received scarcely any response – Thomas stated:
“I was called a war-monger by certain people (the Stalinists) a few months ago when I advocated material aid to Britain.
“Today we can hear these same people wanting to go much further than I want to go today. I predict that these same people will be advocating we go to war.
“I still say we should keep ourselves on record as against any foreign adventure.”
This last remark brought forth an instantaneous and tremendous volume of applause, and indicated that there is potentially no more powerful an anti-war force in this country today than the auto workers.
Union Democracy Jealously Guarded
The delegates are quick to resent and loudly oppose anything that. smacks of high-handed or arbitrary decisions from the chair, and jealously guard every democratic right.
The minority of the Credentials Committee reported that an attempt was being made to refuse seating to the large delegation from the militant Allis-Chalmers local, whose 8,000 members recently won a bitter 79 day strike. The report charged that the seating of these delegates was being held up on the technicality that the local, in violation of a clause in the constitution, had nominated and elected delegates at the same meeting. The minority of the committee put in a motion to seat the Allis-Chalmers delegation immediately.
The minority motion was greeted with a tremendous volume of applause and stamping of feet. When Ed Hall, a former board member, took the floor and condemned any attempt to deprive the Allis-Chalmers workers of representation, and charged that this would be an act greeted most warmly by the open-shoppers throughout the country, he nearly brought the house down.
The storm was quieted finally by the explanation that the committee majority had not acted against seating the Allis-Chalmers delegation – although it had been the decision of a caucus of the right-wing to attempt this – and by a motion instructing the Credentials Committee to bring in its recommendation on the disputed delegates as the first business tomorrow morning, so as to prevent any stalling of the seating of the Allis-Chalmers representatives.
Frankensteen Booed
The maker of the motion to refer the decision to the next morning was Richard Frankensteen, the international board member who supported the use of troops against the North American Aviation workers.
No sooner had he approached the microphone to speak than he was met by a chorus of boos from all sections of the hail. Thomas in his published report had denied that Frankensteen had condoned the use of troops, but this has not convinced a large section of the delegates. And many of those who do accept the explanation on this point are still bitter about Frankensteen’s arbitrary action in suspending the officers of the North American local. The lesson of Homer Martin’s union-disrupting tactics has sunk deep.
Negro Delegates Active
Once more, at this convention, is shown the freedom from racial prejudice that has marked the policies of the UAW and the CIO. Almost every large delegation at the convention includes Negro delegates, who participate fully and freely in all the convention activities.
It was especially gratifying to see the many Negro workers in the Ford delegation and in the Ford Local 600 band. One of the most vicious features of Ford’s anti-labor policies was his attempt to split the workers by playing Negro and white workers against each other.
Many Women Present
Women workers are playing an important role in this convention, reflecting the vital part they are playing in the whole organizational life and struggles of the auto workers.
One of the brightest spots in the convention thus far was the parade of the Women’s Auxiliaries in the convention hall this morning. As they marched down the aisle, all the delegates rose and cheered them and then broke into the stirring tune of Solidarity Forever. The banner which headed the parade proudly announced that the membership of the UAW Women’s Auxiliary has increased 345 per cent in the past year. No other union has been able to draw the wives and mothers of the workers into the union struggles so well as the UAW. The militancy of the women on the UAW picket lines is traditional. Whatever decisions are made – and some of them may be poor and misguided – one thing is certain: The whole character, tradition and composition of the UAW-CIO will not tolerate for long policies which will lead to the destruction of union democracy and militancy. Time and again efforts have been made to enforce such policies on the auto union – Francis Dillon and Homer Martin tried it – but these attempts have failed. Each time the auto workers have spewed forth these poisonous reactionary elements. And each time the UAW has made new giant strides forward.
One has only to sit for a brief time among these delegates to observe their seriousness, their stern sense of responsibility, their boundless militancy and confidence, their innate love of freedom of expression, their hatred of bureaucracy to be convinced that here is a union capable of confronting all the hosts of reaction and ending the struggle victoriously.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>American Labor – Fact and Fiction</h1>
<h3>(November 1962)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr63win" target="new">Vol.24 No.1</a>, Winter 1963, pp.13-18.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="c"><strong>A mass of evidence contradicts the steady rumors of the current decline of the American labor movement. The future, in fact, promises a different prospect</strong></p>
<p class="fst">NATIONAL trade union organization has existed continuously in the United States since the founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. But only within the past twenty-five years has the organized labor movement assumed truly massive proportions. Organization of the industrial workers – most strategically placed and decisive sector of American labor – was not even successfully begun until the 1935-1941 period. Not until the spring of 1941, little more than two decades ago, did the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) win its conclusive victories in the automobile and steel industries with the first successful strikes and union contracts in Ford Motor Co. and Bethlehem Steel Corp.</p>
<p>The swift rise and gigantic growth of American organized labor within the historically brief span of a quarter of a century has induced a condition in the American capitalist class akin to what psychiatrists term a traumatic shock. The owning and employing class is like a person who never has been seriously ill and is felled suddenly by a dangerous ailment. Thereafter, he notes every twinge and palpitation, every rise or fall in his temperature, however slight.</p>
<p>Just within the past twenty-five years, vast staffs of labor experts, economists and statisticians, both governmental and private, have been mobilized to study and plot the growth or decline, the shifts in composition, the tendencies and trends of the American working class, its organized sector in particular.</p>
<p>Now, every day, week and month, new reports on the condition of American labor and its organization pour forth to enlighten us on the slightest change within the wage-earning class and the labor movement. The ruling class and its agencies, particularly the government, track the course of American labor with the absorption and concern of the US Weather Bureau and Coast Guard in charting the path, speed, intensity, area and possible shifts in direction of a hurricane sweeping north out of the Caribbean.</p>
<p>Despite the data being collected on labor and the constant refinement of methods used to obtain this data, it is astounding how much inaccurate and downright false information is being circulated both outside and within the labor movement. For, along with the increasing statistical study and analysis has come a sharpening of the fine art of manipulating and misinterpreting the accumulated data. We have to be ever more on the alert against false, one-sided or misleading conclusions drawn from apparently solid, factual evidence.</p>
<p>Two startling examples of such manipulation and misinterpretation have come to hand recently. Both have to do with the question of the division of the national income, which is at the very heart of the struggle between capital and labor.</p>
<p>In the first example, Herman P. Miller, a special assistant in the demographic section of the Bureau of the Census, exposes the “myth ... created in the United States that incomes are becoming more evenly distributed,” a “view held by prominent economists of both major political parties” and “also shared by the editors of the influential mass media.” Miller’s expose appears in <strong>The New York Times Magazine</strong>, November 11, 1962. In his article, entitled <em>Is the Income Gap Closed? ‘No!’</em>, Miller names top economic advisers of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, in addition to <strong>Fortune</strong> magazine and <strong>The New York Times</strong> itself as propagators of the myth of the more equal distribution of income.</p>
<p>In giving his “No!” answer to the question, “Has there been any narrowing of the gap between rich and poor?” Miller cites “data in US Government publications available to us all.” If we stick to these figures, he points out, “the answers are clear, unambiguous, and contrary to widely held beliefs. The statistics show no appreciable change in income shares for nearly twenty years.” The share of the national income going to the lower three-fifths of America’s families has not increased in almost two decades; the share retained by the top fifth, who get forty-five per cent of the nation’s income, has not decreased. The lowest twenty per cent of the family groups continues to get but five per cent of the national income, the same as in the past twenty years.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">NO SOONER is one myth destroyed, however, than another is created. A week after Miller’s article appeared, the November 18 <strong>New York Times</strong> published a news story from Washington, headlined: “<em>Gain in Living Standards Found to Top Price Rises</em>”.</p>
<p>According to this dispatch, a seven-city survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows “that purchasing power has gone up by 20 to 40 per cent in the last 10 to 12 years.” A cross-section of families, including exactly 212 families in New York City, was questioned and it was determined that their spending has increased 39 per cent while the consumer price index has risen only 15 per cent since 1950. The survey did not go back before 1950. If it had, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz might not have cited it. For the findings might have been considerably different. The Bureau of Labor Statistics consumers’ price index, which has risen 15 per cent since 1950, recorded a rise in the previous decade of 72 per cent. If purchasing power has actually gone up “by 20 to 40 per cent” since 1950 it means only that the workers have been catching up a bit with the World War II and post-war inflation.</p>
<p>The distortion and misinterpretation of data on such vital matters as the division of the national income and the trend of consumer purchasing power are paralleled in the study and analysis of the American labor movement and such closely related matters as the class structure of US society and the composition and weight of the wage-earning sector of the population.</p>
<p>Ever since the AFL and CIO merged in December 1955 to form the largest independent labor organization in world history there has been a growing campaign to convey the impression that the labor movement is in rapid decline and that, at any rate, organized labor has reached its natural limits because the so-called “blue-collar” workers, traditionally the main base of the trade unions, are declining in relation to the total labor force and even in absolute numbers.</p>
<p>Within recent months a slew of magazine and newspaper articles, some employing impressive statistical data, have been discussing and analyzing the “decline” of organized labor. Prominent labor leaders themselves have been uttering dire forebodings based on shifts in the per capita intake. Leading liberal publications, generally regarded as having a sympathetic attitude toward organized labor, have been participating in the discussion and expressing apprehensions of their own.</p>
<p>In my article, <a href="../../1961/05/myth.htm" target="new"><em>The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”</em></a>, published in the Winter 1962 issue of the <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, I examined the claim made in an editorial in <strong>The New York Times</strong>, February 7, 1960, that the numerical strength of organized labor in the United States had “sharply declined” in the 1956-1958 period, thus “reversing a trend of some twenty-five years.” Citing the actual statistical data, I showed that the “sharp decline” amounted only to 1.7%.</p>
<p>On February 21, 1961, at a meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council at Miami Beach, Fla., organizing director John Livingston reported with great alarm that all organized workers in the country represented 38% of the organizable workers compared to 40% five years before. He said this could spell union labor’s “obituary.” Seven months before, on June 3, 1960, Jacob S. Potofsky, President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, declared that organized labor faced the “grave danger” of a fast-shrinking membership. Previously, on November 9, 1959, Walter P. Reuther, United Automobile Workers President and an AFL-CIO Vice President, told a convention of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department which he heads that “We are going backward” and that the labor movement was “flabby.” His reference to flabbiness came just two days after the termination of the greatest single industrial strike in US history, the grueling 116-day national steel strike. In the same speech, Reuther proclaimed,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The merger we put together in 1955 never got off the ground ... We have been pushed around and put through the meat grinder. If we sulk in our tents we’ll be pushed back and back ... We have to stand up.”</p>
<p class="fst">The current crop of articles and statements follows much the same pattern as these earlier plaints of leading union officials. One of these articles, however, has aroused particular attention and interest. It is <em>Labor’s Ebbing Strength</em>, by George Kirstein, publisher of <strong>The Nation</strong>, the venerable liberal weekly. The article was published in the magazine’s September 1 issue. Kirstein came to national prominence during World War II when he served for a period as Executive Secretary of the National War Labor Board.</p>
<p>It is not my purpose to discuss the article as a whole and its important conclusions, which are analyzed at some length by Milton Alvin in this issue of the <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>.</p>
<p>I wish to direct attention to the two opening paragraphs of Kirstein’s article in which he states the basic premises on which the entire article rests. He writes that “labor’s power and prestige have sunk in 1962 to a depth unequaled since World War II” and this is demonstrated first of all by the fact that union membership, “continuing its descending curve, has shrunk to new lows for the last twenty-five years ...”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">BEFORE we look at Kirstein’s less measurable point about labor’s “power and prestige,” let us examine the more tangible matter of the “new lows for the last twenty-five years” allegedly reached by union membership today. Maybe, Kirstein put down a vague impression derived from such sources as the previously quoted <strong>New York Times</strong> editorial comment about union membership “reversing a trend of some twenty-five years.” Or maybe his entire editorial staff was out having a beer and he asked the office boy, “Do you think organized labor is as strong now as it was back in the good old New Deal days?” and the kid replied, “I wasn’t even born then but I hear tell that the CIO was sure hoppin’ back then and even Roosevelt was scared of John L. Lewis.” So Kirstein figured it was safe to say union membership is at its lowest point in a quarter of a century.</p>
<p>It just so happens that nothing could be farther from the truth. Total union membership, despite extensive unemployment, particularly in the steel and coal industries, remains not much below the 1956 peak of 18,400,000 – a number based, incidentally, on inflated figures issued by the union leaders at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, as I shall presently show.</p>
<p>The Department of Labor on last October 8 issued a report on its latest and most accurate survey of trade union membership. Total union membership in the United States is 17,546,000. This must be regarded as a reasonably hard figure because the data was obtained under the stringent regulations of the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act which exacts severe penalties for inaccurate statements by union officials under the Act’s compulsory reporting provisions.</p>
<p>What was the union membership twenty-five years ago in the heroic days of the rise of the CIO which Kirstein recalls in such a glowing light. Let me quote from my article, <em>The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”</em>. A little more than a year ago, I wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But before anyone hangs a wreath on the American labor movement ... let us review certain basic facts. Twenty-eight years ago – in 1933 – there were only 2,782,296 union members, or 7.8% of the organizable workers, after 47 years of AFL activity. In 1935, the year the CIO was formed, organized workers numbered 3,616,847, or 10.6% of potential unionists. By 1937, after the CIO went into action, union membership more than doubled, numbering 7,687,087, or 21.9% of organizable workers.”</p>
<p class="fst">These figures are from the appendix of Edward Levinson’s classic history of the early CIO, <strong>Labor on the March</strong>. Contrary to Kirstein’s idealized picture of the American labor movement twenty-five years ago as compared to today, the unions today have two and a third times the number of members and almost double the proportion of organizable workers.</p>
<p>Well, maybe Kirstein slipped up on his dates. Maybe he was really thinking about ten or twelve years ago, not twenty-five. All right. Let’s see how today’s nearly 17.5 million union members compare with the number in 1950 and 1953.</p>
<p>The <strong>World Almanac</strong>, which annually collates all the data on union memberships from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and from direct questionnaires to the unions, lists in its 1952 edition the “approximate” total of labor union members on June 30, 1950, as “14,000,000 to 16,800,000.”</p>
<p>One reason for the wide spread in the approximation is the fact that the CIO leaders – it was before the Landrum-Griffin Act – had reported grossly exaggerated membership and the fact was well known. The <strong>World Almanac</strong> listed AFL membership in 1950 at 8,000,000 and the CIO’s at “5,000,000 to 6,000,000.” In 1949, the CIO had reached the climax of a four-year internal “cold war” between pro-State Department and pro-Stalinist cliques. It ended with the expulsion of eleven affiliated unions. At the November 1950 CIO convention, it was revealed that the actual CIO membership at the time of the 1949 split convention had been 3,700,000, not “5,000,000 to 6,000,000.”</p>
<p>In the spring of 1953, according to the 1954 edition of the <strong>World-Almanac</strong>, the “approximate total” of labor union membership was “16,500,000 to 17,000,000.” This included 8,000,000 in the AFL, 5,000,000 in the CIO and 2,500,000 in independent unions. According to my arithmetic, the three breakdown figures add up to only 15,500,000, not “16,500,000 to 17,000,000.”</p>
<p>We do know that two years later, at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, the CIO membership was considerably less than the 6,000,000 claimed. J.B.S. Hardman, for many years editor of <strong>Advance</strong>, official publication of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, one of the major CIO affiliates, revealed in the January 4, 1958 issue of <strong>The Nation</strong> that at the time of the AFL-CIO merger the CIO “entered as pretty much of a junior partner, its stationary 4,000,000 members unimpressive against the AFL’s affiliation of 10,000,000 and advancing.”</p>
<p>Hardman confirmed what most of us surmised at the time of the merger that the CIO membership was closer to 4,000,000 than to the claimed 6,000,000. If this is true – and it is – then the hard figure of 17,456,000 labor union members today remains impressive compared not merely to 1937 but to 1955.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">WHAT is true about the decline in labor union membership is that a few key unions – notably in steel, automobile, coal and railroads – have had a fall in membership of one degree or another in the past decade. The decline has been most steep in coal mining and railroading. Here it is sufficient to note that even before the great depression of the Thirties, during the “Golden Twenties,” coal was known as a “sick industry” and the current sharp fall in the United Mine Workers membership – some two-thirds in ten years – is the continuation of a trend, based on technological development, which began more than forty years ago and was halted temporarily only during the exceptional periods of World War II and the Korean War. The railroad unions have gone through a similar technologically based four-decade decline.</p>
<p>We come now to the hard kernel of fact in the talk about the “rapid decline” in union membership. What really is at the heart of this question is the drop in the membership of the United Automobile Workers and United Steelworkers, whose organization in the 1935-1941 period is correctly regarded as the CIO’s two greatest achievements.</p>
<p>Both these unions are considerably reduced in membership from their peaks at the end of the Korean War a decade ago. But they are not down to mere skeletons or shadows by any means. Not only are they still completely entrenched in the basic auto and steel industries but they are giants both in membership and material resources compared to any time before World War II and rank among the five largest unions. Here are comparative membership figures from 1941:</p>
<table cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">Automobile Workers</p>
</th>
<th>
<p class="smc">Steelworkers</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>November 1941</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 400,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 500,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>June 30, 1950</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 947,598</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 960,738</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>April 1953</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,350,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,100,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>June 1956</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,353,993</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,032,346</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>June 30, 1961</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 995,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 796,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">At the end of 1961, the net assets of the American unions totaled more than $1.5 billion, aside from huge welfare and pension funds. While the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers do not approach the net assets of the United Mine Workers with its $105,355,886, the UAW isn’t doing too badly for a union that owned nothing but debts at the time of its historic General Motors sit-down strike in the winter of 1936-37 which established the UAW for the first time in the biggest corporation of the auto “Big Three.”</p>
<p>The UAW, as of December 31, 1961, had net assets of $57,284,000; the Steelworkers, $22,010,035. This compares with the $25,445,296 of the million-member International Association of Machinists; the $18,430,523 of the 771,000 member International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; the $22,249,785 of David Dubinsky’s 446,000-member International Ladies Garment Workers Union; or the $36,760,351 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with its 1,661,983 members. Of course, there are several dozen capitalist corporations with individual assets larger than those of all labor unions combined. But the unions of today command material resources – cash, investments, real estate – beyond anything even dreamed of in the Forties let alone the depression Thirties. In its first two years, 1935-37, the CIO was largely financed by about a million dollars in grants and loans from John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the original organization of the CIO Steelworkers, did not even charge dues during its first great organizing drive in 1937.</p>
<p>This is a good point to discuss – and eliminate – one of the major factors most frequently cited as a reason for the membership declines in such unions as the UAW and Steelworkers. That is unemployment due to what has been termed automation – the employment of electronic and other forms of automatic controls in production to reduce the use of labor power to the starting and stopping of the power flow and the maintenance and repair of machinery and equipment. President John F. Kennedy, in his message to Congress last January, termed automation the big economic challenge of this decade.</p>
<p>True enough, unemployment has been a very decisive factor in preventing any over-all growth of organized labor in the past five years, except in the case of such unions as the International Association of Machinists and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, both AFL-CIO, and the independent International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But contrary to what the Kennedy administration, many economists and quite a few labor leaders contend, automation is not the critical element yet in unemployment.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">REPORTING a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the November 5 <strong>Wall Street Journal</strong> noted that in a comparison of the years 1959 and 1953, periods of relatively high industrial activity, more than half the decline in jobs in those industries which had falling employment were due to decrease in total output not increased technological efficiency. The <strong>Journal</strong> wrote that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... job declines totaling 745,000 were associated with increases in efficiency, while declines totaling the somewhat larger number of 795,000 were associated merely with decreases in production by the industries concerned.”</p>
<p class="fst">Increases in “efficiency,” however, do not mean improved machinery or automation. A survey in the November <strong>Factory</strong>, McGraw-Hill trade publication, reveals that the major cause of “job displacement” in factories employing 1,000 or more workers is “improvement in business methods” and general “efficiency” rather than “modern machinery,” which runs a poor second to the “real villain” in wiping out jobs. Thus, in the basic metalworking industry during the first half of 1962, improved “work methods” – that includes good old-fashioned speed-up – were responsible for the loss of 54% of white-collar jobs and 30% of blue-collar jobs. Only 5% of the while-collar and 16% of the blue-collar jobs were eliminated by new machinery. Improved “work methods” were held responsible for 34% of the white-collar and 49% of the blue-collar job cuts in the chemical industry; slashes due to new equipment were only 19% and 13% respectively.</p>
<p>But “decreases in production,” as indicated in the previously cited November 5 <strong>Wall Street Journal</strong>, has been the arch villain in the unemployment situation. Take the automobile industry, which has been issuing such glowing reports of 1962 last quarter production. Ward’s automotive report on November 12 said that the automobile industry is anticipating a total car output for the entire year of 6,846,000. This is more than a million below the peak annual production of 7,942,000 in 1955, seven years ago. It is little higher than the 6,665,628 cars produced in 1950, twelve years ago.</p>
<p>The picture of steel production is even more revealing. During the second and third quarters of this year, the steel industry operated at between 45% and 55% of the 1961 rated capacity. In this month of November, even with the stimulus of the Cuban war crisis, the steel industry has been operating at about 61% of capacity. Based on the tonnage production index of 100 for the 1957-59 period, the index for the four weeks ending November 10 was 95.1. <strong>Iron Age</strong>, steel industry trade magazine, explained on November 14 that the $1.4 billion capital expenditures expected next year are intended to cut costs and increase efficiency, not to expand production. The steel industry’s present “break-even” point – the point where it begins to make profit – is 42% of capacity.</p>
<p>In spite of the factor of unemployment, the major causes of which are “efficiency” and lowered total output, the union movement of today not only remains gigantic in human and financial resources compared to twenty-five years and even ten years ago but it has more contracts and better contractual terms than in all American labor history. More than 100,000 collective bargaining agreements are negotiated each year and it is extremely rare for such agreements not to contain some gain for the workers, although for some key unions, like the Auto Workers, Steelworkers and Ladies Garment Workers, the recent gains have been minimal and not commensurate with the real size and resources of these unions and the capacity of their members for struggle.</p>
<p>This year, the Kennedy administration sought to impose a ceiling on wage increases in union contracts. The President indicated a limit of 2.5% to 3% based on the estimated annual average increase in hourly output per worker in industry. On November 10, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first nine months of 1962 major collective bargaining settlements covering 3,100,000 workers had been negotiated. The median increase for all the workers covered by these contracts was 3.2% of straight time hourly earnings. (Median is the point where half got more and half got less.) But for those who received raises the median increase was 3.4%.</p>
<p>The significant fact is that the majority of workers securing increases got gains of well over 3%. This was particularly true of construction workers, transportation and other non-factory workers. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area construction workers, after a strike of 200,000, won wage increases of from 7% to 8.4%. Airline pilots won 8%, although the Eastern Airlines strike is still not settled at this writing. West Coast dock workers netted 6.2%; textile mill workers from 3.25% in the North to 5% for some mills in the South; non-operating railroad workers, 4.1%; copper miners, 3.8%; telephone workers, 3.5%.</p>
<p>The aluminum, glass and oil workers were restricted to a bare 3% while the steelworkers, under the direct pressure of the Kennedy administration, settled for 2.5%, all in fringe benefits. This latter settlement, involving a half-million workers, seriously dragged down the total average gains.</p>
<p>The fact is that the workers won what the union leaders were willing to let them fight for. Thus, the Teamsters Union, headed by James R. Hoffa, in late September and early October, through a brief strike of several IBT locals won New Jersey-New York area contracts providing a 37-cent an hour wage increase for 57,000 truck drivers.</p>
<p>One fact cited as evidence of the “rapid decline” of the American labor movement is the smaller number of strikes, strikers and man-days lost due to strikes. In his August 13 broadcast and televised speech on the nation’s economy, President Kennedy boasted of his “extraordinary record of labor peace in the last eighteen months.” The press prominently reported the fact that in July 1962 man-hours lost in strikes reached the lowest point for any month since World War II.</p>
<p>Of course, the month in question also saw the greatest number of wage earners enjoying union-won paid vacations of any month in US history. Aside from that, as A.H. Raskin noted in an article in the November 11 <strong>New York Times</strong>, “The strike front just won’t stay zippered up.” In fact, an examination of the over-all strike statistics for the first half of 1962 shows a total of 9,800,000 man-days lost in strikes – a 62% rise over the first half of 1961. During the first quarter of this year, the number of workers on strike rose 38% over the corresponding quarter of 1961.</p>
<p>There are other factors to take into account in analyzing the over-all decline in strikes since 1953 – not just in the “last eighteen months.”</p>
<p>A study of the annual strike statistics since 1920 reveals that the eight-year period, 1946 through 1953, coinciding except for 1953 with the last Democratic administration, was the greatest strike period in US history. The years 1950 through 1953, during the Korean war, saw the largest number of strikes for any four-year period, climaxed by the all-time annual record of 5,117 strikes in 1952.</p>
<p>The reason for this great upsurge in strikes ranging over an eight-year period has already been indicated in the early part of this article. A rampant inflation, boosting the consumers’ price index 72%, occurred during World War II and the post-war period. In addition, direct federal, state and local taxes levied in the same period took an estimated one-third of the average wage-earner’s income. After a brief pause in the inflation during the Truman recession of 1949-50, the rise was resumed during the Korean war, when more than one-half of the 15% rise in the price index during the decade of the Fifties was recorded.</p>
<p>The decline in strikes over the past decade can be attributed neither to Kennedy’s policies since he took office in January 1960 nor to any shift in the programs and attitudes of the top union leaders. The latter were just as permeated with the philosophy of class collaboration, just as opposed to militancy, just as subservient to the capitalist government in the 1946-53 period as they have been since and are today. The difference was the greater inflationary pressure on the workers which forced them to strike and forced the union bureaucrats to go along, even though reluctantly.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THERE is another very important element in the decline in strikes over the recent years. That is the long-term contract with built-in automatic annual wage increases. The trend toward long-term contracts, now averaging between two and three years in duration, began with the signing of the notorious five-year General Motors contract in 1950 by UAW President Walter Reuther. It was hoped that such a contract would preserve “labor peace” for a long time in the auto industry and dampen the tradition of militancy among the auto workers. The Korean War was begun about a month after the GM contract went into effect. The renewed inflationary trend brought such rank-and-file condemnation of the five-year “handcuffs” contract that Reuther was forced in 1953 to demand a wage re-opener in spite of the contract. In fear of a strike, GM yielded.</p>
<p>It is well to keep in mind, however, that in the glorious days of twenty-five years ago for which <strong>Nation</strong> publisher Kirstein sighs, it took a major General Motors strike, including the historic “sit-down” occupation of the company’s main plants in Flint, Mich., to win a six-month contract, after CIO President John L. Lewis indignantly rejected President Roosevelt’s offer to propose a one-month contract to settle the strike and get the workers off GM’s property.</p>
<p>A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that union contracts are increasingly of longer duration. In 1956, about 15% of the contracts covering 1,000 or more workers were for three years, in contrast to the traditional one- and two-year contracts of the previous twenty years. By 1961, the proportion of three-year contracts had risen to more than 30%.</p>
<p>In order to get the workers to accept long-term contracts, the employers must agree to automatic annual wage concessions. In a sense, these are deferred wage increases because it is possible that the workers might insist on larger initial increases if the yearly wage raise were not built into the contract. Nevertheless, such automatic increases averaged 8 cents an hour so far this year and 8.2 cents in 1961 compared to average negotiated increases of 7.5 cents and 7.8 cents respectively, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a Washington research organization in the labor market field.</p>
<p>But even with the diminution of the inflationary pressure and the increase of long-term contracts providing automatic annual wage raises, the current period is by no means the low-point of strikes during the past twenty-five years. The impression that organized labor moved steadily onward and upward following the 1937 upsurge of the CIO is wrong. In the matter of strikes, the three-year period following the smashing of the Little Steel strike in the summer of 1937 and the period of US participation in World War II from December 8, 1941 to August 14, 1945 were far more repressed years for labor than the latest period. Here is the comparative statistical chart:</p>
<table cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<th colspan="4">
<p class="c">Strikes in the United States</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1"><em>Year</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"><em>Number Stoppages</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"><em>Workers Involved</em></p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"><em>Man Days Idle</em></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1937</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">4,740</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,861,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">28,425,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1938</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,772</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 688,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9,148,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1939</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,613</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,171,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17,812,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1940</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,508</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 577,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 6,701,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1941</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">4,288</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,363,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">23,048,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1942</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,968</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 840,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 4,183,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1943</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">3,752</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,981,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">13,501,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1944</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">4,956</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,116,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 8,721,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1945</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">4,750</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">3,470,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">38,000,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1958</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">3,694</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">2,060,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">23,900,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1959</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">3,708</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,880,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">69,000,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">1960</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">3,333</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">1,320,000</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">19,100,000</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<p class="sm1">1961 (Jan.-July)</p>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<p class="smc">2,010<br>
(est.)</p>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<p class="smc"> 704,000<br>
(est.)</p>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<p class="smc"> 7,410,000<br>
(est.)</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">Even a cursory study of these figures is revealing. In both 1958 and 1959, regarded as “quiet” years on the labor front, the number of strikers was greater than in 1937, the record year for the two decades, 1920-1940. The figures for 1960, low point of the decade, were still far larger in every strike category than in 1938, 1939, 1940 and 1942. Even for the seven-month period in 1961 for which I have available statistics at this writing, there were more strikers than in the entire years of 1939 and 1940 and more man-days lost due to strikes than in all of either 1940 or 1942. And as I showed earlier in this article, the first half of this year far surpassed the comparable period of 1961 both in the number of strikers and the man-days lost.</p>
<p>This does not tell the whole story. The strikes of the recent “quiet” years with few exceptions brought material gains in wages, benefits and improved working conditions. Most of the strikes in the 1937-1941 period were fought for simple union recognition – to compel an employer to agree to meet with a union committee and negotiate. The Little Steel strike of 1937 – the largest steel walkout since the smashed 1919 Great Steel Strike – was wiped out in blood. The low figures for man-days lost during the World War II years represent wholesale breaking of strikes by the quick action of the government and the cooperation of the union leaders during a period of fast-rising prices while wages were officially frozen.</p>
<p>The facts I have just cited also throw light on the low state of “labor’s power and prestige” which so concerns Kirstein. I do not know if labor’s “power and prestige” today are any lower than during the Little Steel strike of 1937, when the police of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” colleague, Mayor Kelly of Chicago, murdered ten workers in the Memorial Day Massacre at the Republic steel plant and Roosevelt answered John L. Lewis’ plea for help with the cynical reply, “A plague on both your houses.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">CERTAINLY, labor’s “power and prestige” are no lower than during World War II when wages were frozen while prices soared and every strike was smashed except the four national strikes of the coal miners in 1943, when John L. Lewis stood up to the lynch cries of the national press and the tirades of Roosevelt and Congress and the miners won their greatest victory.</p>
<p>It is not quite clear from Kirstein’s article just how he measures labor’s “power and prestige.” But to my way of thinking, labor’s “power and prestige” can’t sink much lower than it was during the 1947-1952 period of the Truman administration – the same Truman who woke up on the morning after Election Day, 1948, to find out he’d been unexpectedly re-elected to the Presidency and exclaimed, “Labor did it!”</p>
<p>It was in June 1947 that Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, condemned by every sector of organized labor as a “slave labor law.” The most significant political fact about the passage of this Act was that the overwhelming majority of both capitalist parties – Democratic as well as Republican – in both the House and Senate voted for this bill.</p>
<p>What is most significant of all is that President Truman invoked the injunctive powers of the Act against actual or threatened strikes seven times in 1948 and three times more before the end of his term in January 1953. This did not include his strikebreaking seizures of railroads, coal mines and steel plants.</p>
<p>There was not a single union man in Congress to speak or vote against the Taft-Hartley bill. There was no mass action of any kind initiated or led by either the CIO or AFL national leaders in opposition to passage of the T-H Act. All but a handful of labor leaders, notably John L. Lewis, Charles P. Howard of the International Typographical Union and Matthew Smith of the Mechanics Educational Society, took the degrading Taft-Hartley “non-Communist” oath.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1948, the top union leaders, particularly of the CIO, were hurling invectives against Truman and had initiated a “Draft Eisenhower” campaign. On April 4, 1948, the <strong>Detroit Free Press</strong> carried an interview with Walter Reuther, head of the CIO’s largest affiliate, who complained that “Truman is hopelessly inadequate” and hoped that “some competent man like Eisenhower will be nominated by the Democrats.” Surely, when Reuther and the rest of the labor leaders shortly fell into line behind Truman, campaigned furiously for him and hailed his election as a “great labor victory,” that was a pretty low point in labor’s “power and prestige.”</p>
<p>There is one other measurable factor most frequently cited as the conclusive argument against any further possibility of growth of the US labor unions and, indeed, as certain evidence that the unions must inevitably decline. Kirstein raises the argument as his concluding point when he refers to “the white-collar worker, who is now surpassing the blue-collar worker in numbers” and who, “one thing is certain,” will “not join the production worker’s union.”</p>
<p>It is not my purpose to take up the arguable point of whether white-collar workers will or will not join a blue-collar workers’ union. I wish to concentrate on the fiction, accepted as unquestionable fact by even well-informed and good-intentioned people like Kirstein, that the blue-collar workers are in decline and that the white-collar workers are inheriting the American earth.</p>
<p>In my previously cited article, <a href="../../1961/05/myth.htm" target="new"><em>The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”</em></a>, I reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for July 10-16, 1960, on the occupational division of the gainfully employed in this country. As of that date, I wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Two-thirds of all the gainfully employed are males – 90% of them white. An outright majority – 58.4% – of all employed males are in the manual, service and farm laborer classifications ... Factory operatives and kindred workers form the largest single group of male employees, 19.2%. Then come craftsmen, 18.7%; non-agricultural laborers, 9%; service workers (a wide category including domestic servants, repairmen, laundry workers, elevator operators, janitors, clothes pressers, garbage collectors, barbers, hotel, restaurant and bar workers, police and firemen, etc.) 6.5%; and hired farm laborers, 4.9%.</p>
<p class="quote">“All income earners of both sexes totaled 68,689,000 in the above-cited BLS report. Of these, 37,449,000 – or a 54% majority – are in physical labor categories, including operatives, craftsmen, laborers, service workers and hired farm hands. Clerical workers number 9,907,000 and sales workers, 4,405,000. The latter two ‘white collar’ groups total 14,312,000. They formed 20.8% of the employed working force in July 1960. Even if we add to them a mixed category listed as ‘professional, technical and kindred workers,’ numbering 7,042,000, or 10.3% of the total, we cannot stretch the ‘white collar’ workers to more than 31.1% of the gainfully employed.”</p>
<p class="fst">I pointed out, however, that in arriving at the conclusion that white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar workers, the classification of the service workers, who until 1960 were classified with the manual labor group, was transferred to the “white-collar” category and the remaining classifications of “managers, officials and proprietors” and “farm owners and farm managers,” together representing 14.4% of the total, are lumped in with the white-collar wage-earners.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">TO THIS statistical data, I am now able to add information based on an actual census presented in the October 1962 <strong>Scientific American</strong>, unquestionably the finest and most authoritative general science periodical published in this country. It is contained in the article, <em>More from the Census of 1960</em>, by Philip H. Hauser, chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee for the census of 1960 and head of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>Prof. Hauser has broken the census figures down into two general categories, “Providers of Services” and “Producers of Goods.”</p>
<p>Before we examine these figures, it should be noted that all managers and proprietors are listed as “producers of services” and all farmers, who are owners of their means of production and very frequently employers, are listed as “producers of goods.”</p>
<p>Hauser’s article contains a chart showing the continuous ratio of the various sectors of the labor force from 1900 to 1960. This chart reveals that aside from the farmers, who are in the main petty capitalists, the chief classifications of the “producers of physical goods” – the so-called blue-collar workers or operatives (factory workers mainly) and craftsmen (construction trades, etc.) – have increased in absolute numbers every year since 1900 and, every year right through to 1960, have represented a larger proportion of the total labor force. That is, the main base of the labor unions is not narrowing; it is widening.</p>
<p>In his two main categories, Hauser lists 54.4% in “producers of services,” including “42.2 per cent in white collar occupations and 12 per cent in household service and other service occupations.” Remember, “service occupations” include the $40-a-week Puerto Rican and Negro hospital workers in New York City who this year engaged in such a militant strike. He adds that “only 46 per cent were engaged in work directly contributing to the production of physical goods.”</p>
<p>He immediately adds, however, that “the decline in production workers is entirely attributable to the reduction in the number of farmers, farm laborers and nonfarm laborers. Since 1900 agricultural employment has fallen from 37.5 per cent to only 6.3 per cent of the labor force ...” He further adds that “men are still engaged primarily in the production of goods (three-fifths of the male work force in 1960, compared with four-fifths in 1900), the white-collar and service functions that have come to the fore have been taken over to a large extent by women ...” On the average, women workers earn only two-thirds the average wages of male workers.</p>
<p>Here is the break-down for the various classifications of “producers of goods” in 1900 and 1960 as a percentage of the total labor force:</p>
<table cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<th>
<p class="smc">Occupation</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="6">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">1900</p>
</th>
<td rowspan="6">
<p class="smc"> </p>
</td>
<th>
<p class="smc">1960</p>
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Craftsmen</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">10.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">14.1%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Operatives</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">20.1%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Laborers (non-farm)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">12.5%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 5.5%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Farm Laborers</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">17.5%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 2.3%</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p class="sm1">Service (incl. Domestic)</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc"> 9.0%</p>
</td>
<td>
<p class="smc">19.0%</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<p class="fst">If the unions were to stick to only the above categories of manual workers, although such white-collar and professional workers as the New York City school teachers and newspaper reporters went on strike this year, they could double the present labor union membership, from 17.5 million to 35 million. As a matter of fact, the AFL-CIO announced on November 14 a plan for an organizing campaign in the Los Angeles area, where there are about 5,000 unorganized firms with 750,000 potentially organizable workers.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">IF ORGANIZED labor faces a critical period ahead – and it does, it won’t be because the union membership is in “rapid decline” or because the blue-collar workers are disappearing. It will be due to the policies and program of the union leadership.</p>
<p>For one thing, the unions will have to develop a political action program and organization that will be completely independent of the old capitalist two-party set-up. The labor experts of the capitalist class don’t low-grade labor’s potential power and prestige in the political as well as economic arena. Thus, John D. Pomfret, labor reporter, wrote before this year’s elections in the October 24 <strong>New York Times</strong> about “labor’s principal political asset – sheer mass. The nation’s 17,500,000 union members and their families are an enormous political force.”</p>
<p>You bet. If they had their own party, they could turn the Democratic and Republican parties almost overnight into minor parties. They could be the government.</p>
<p class="date"><em>November 27, 1962</em></p>
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Art Preis
American Labor – Fact and Fiction
(November 1962)
From International Socialist Review, Vol.24 No.1, Winter 1963, pp.13-18.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A mass of evidence contradicts the steady rumors of the current decline of the American labor movement. The future, in fact, promises a different prospect
NATIONAL trade union organization has existed continuously in the United States since the founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. But only within the past twenty-five years has the organized labor movement assumed truly massive proportions. Organization of the industrial workers – most strategically placed and decisive sector of American labor – was not even successfully begun until the 1935-1941 period. Not until the spring of 1941, little more than two decades ago, did the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) win its conclusive victories in the automobile and steel industries with the first successful strikes and union contracts in Ford Motor Co. and Bethlehem Steel Corp.
The swift rise and gigantic growth of American organized labor within the historically brief span of a quarter of a century has induced a condition in the American capitalist class akin to what psychiatrists term a traumatic shock. The owning and employing class is like a person who never has been seriously ill and is felled suddenly by a dangerous ailment. Thereafter, he notes every twinge and palpitation, every rise or fall in his temperature, however slight.
Just within the past twenty-five years, vast staffs of labor experts, economists and statisticians, both governmental and private, have been mobilized to study and plot the growth or decline, the shifts in composition, the tendencies and trends of the American working class, its organized sector in particular.
Now, every day, week and month, new reports on the condition of American labor and its organization pour forth to enlighten us on the slightest change within the wage-earning class and the labor movement. The ruling class and its agencies, particularly the government, track the course of American labor with the absorption and concern of the US Weather Bureau and Coast Guard in charting the path, speed, intensity, area and possible shifts in direction of a hurricane sweeping north out of the Caribbean.
Despite the data being collected on labor and the constant refinement of methods used to obtain this data, it is astounding how much inaccurate and downright false information is being circulated both outside and within the labor movement. For, along with the increasing statistical study and analysis has come a sharpening of the fine art of manipulating and misinterpreting the accumulated data. We have to be ever more on the alert against false, one-sided or misleading conclusions drawn from apparently solid, factual evidence.
Two startling examples of such manipulation and misinterpretation have come to hand recently. Both have to do with the question of the division of the national income, which is at the very heart of the struggle between capital and labor.
In the first example, Herman P. Miller, a special assistant in the demographic section of the Bureau of the Census, exposes the “myth ... created in the United States that incomes are becoming more evenly distributed,” a “view held by prominent economists of both major political parties” and “also shared by the editors of the influential mass media.” Miller’s expose appears in The New York Times Magazine, November 11, 1962. In his article, entitled Is the Income Gap Closed? ‘No!’, Miller names top economic advisers of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, in addition to Fortune magazine and The New York Times itself as propagators of the myth of the more equal distribution of income.
In giving his “No!” answer to the question, “Has there been any narrowing of the gap between rich and poor?” Miller cites “data in US Government publications available to us all.” If we stick to these figures, he points out, “the answers are clear, unambiguous, and contrary to widely held beliefs. The statistics show no appreciable change in income shares for nearly twenty years.” The share of the national income going to the lower three-fifths of America’s families has not increased in almost two decades; the share retained by the top fifth, who get forty-five per cent of the nation’s income, has not decreased. The lowest twenty per cent of the family groups continues to get but five per cent of the national income, the same as in the past twenty years.
NO SOONER is one myth destroyed, however, than another is created. A week after Miller’s article appeared, the November 18 New York Times published a news story from Washington, headlined: “Gain in Living Standards Found to Top Price Rises”.
According to this dispatch, a seven-city survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows “that purchasing power has gone up by 20 to 40 per cent in the last 10 to 12 years.” A cross-section of families, including exactly 212 families in New York City, was questioned and it was determined that their spending has increased 39 per cent while the consumer price index has risen only 15 per cent since 1950. The survey did not go back before 1950. If it had, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz might not have cited it. For the findings might have been considerably different. The Bureau of Labor Statistics consumers’ price index, which has risen 15 per cent since 1950, recorded a rise in the previous decade of 72 per cent. If purchasing power has actually gone up “by 20 to 40 per cent” since 1950 it means only that the workers have been catching up a bit with the World War II and post-war inflation.
The distortion and misinterpretation of data on such vital matters as the division of the national income and the trend of consumer purchasing power are paralleled in the study and analysis of the American labor movement and such closely related matters as the class structure of US society and the composition and weight of the wage-earning sector of the population.
Ever since the AFL and CIO merged in December 1955 to form the largest independent labor organization in world history there has been a growing campaign to convey the impression that the labor movement is in rapid decline and that, at any rate, organized labor has reached its natural limits because the so-called “blue-collar” workers, traditionally the main base of the trade unions, are declining in relation to the total labor force and even in absolute numbers.
Within recent months a slew of magazine and newspaper articles, some employing impressive statistical data, have been discussing and analyzing the “decline” of organized labor. Prominent labor leaders themselves have been uttering dire forebodings based on shifts in the per capita intake. Leading liberal publications, generally regarded as having a sympathetic attitude toward organized labor, have been participating in the discussion and expressing apprehensions of their own.
In my article, The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”, published in the Winter 1962 issue of the International Socialist Review, I examined the claim made in an editorial in The New York Times, February 7, 1960, that the numerical strength of organized labor in the United States had “sharply declined” in the 1956-1958 period, thus “reversing a trend of some twenty-five years.” Citing the actual statistical data, I showed that the “sharp decline” amounted only to 1.7%.
On February 21, 1961, at a meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council at Miami Beach, Fla., organizing director John Livingston reported with great alarm that all organized workers in the country represented 38% of the organizable workers compared to 40% five years before. He said this could spell union labor’s “obituary.” Seven months before, on June 3, 1960, Jacob S. Potofsky, President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, declared that organized labor faced the “grave danger” of a fast-shrinking membership. Previously, on November 9, 1959, Walter P. Reuther, United Automobile Workers President and an AFL-CIO Vice President, told a convention of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department which he heads that “We are going backward” and that the labor movement was “flabby.” His reference to flabbiness came just two days after the termination of the greatest single industrial strike in US history, the grueling 116-day national steel strike. In the same speech, Reuther proclaimed,
“The merger we put together in 1955 never got off the ground ... We have been pushed around and put through the meat grinder. If we sulk in our tents we’ll be pushed back and back ... We have to stand up.”
The current crop of articles and statements follows much the same pattern as these earlier plaints of leading union officials. One of these articles, however, has aroused particular attention and interest. It is Labor’s Ebbing Strength, by George Kirstein, publisher of The Nation, the venerable liberal weekly. The article was published in the magazine’s September 1 issue. Kirstein came to national prominence during World War II when he served for a period as Executive Secretary of the National War Labor Board.
It is not my purpose to discuss the article as a whole and its important conclusions, which are analyzed at some length by Milton Alvin in this issue of the International Socialist Review.
I wish to direct attention to the two opening paragraphs of Kirstein’s article in which he states the basic premises on which the entire article rests. He writes that “labor’s power and prestige have sunk in 1962 to a depth unequaled since World War II” and this is demonstrated first of all by the fact that union membership, “continuing its descending curve, has shrunk to new lows for the last twenty-five years ...”
BEFORE we look at Kirstein’s less measurable point about labor’s “power and prestige,” let us examine the more tangible matter of the “new lows for the last twenty-five years” allegedly reached by union membership today. Maybe, Kirstein put down a vague impression derived from such sources as the previously quoted New York Times editorial comment about union membership “reversing a trend of some twenty-five years.” Or maybe his entire editorial staff was out having a beer and he asked the office boy, “Do you think organized labor is as strong now as it was back in the good old New Deal days?” and the kid replied, “I wasn’t even born then but I hear tell that the CIO was sure hoppin’ back then and even Roosevelt was scared of John L. Lewis.” So Kirstein figured it was safe to say union membership is at its lowest point in a quarter of a century.
It just so happens that nothing could be farther from the truth. Total union membership, despite extensive unemployment, particularly in the steel and coal industries, remains not much below the 1956 peak of 18,400,000 – a number based, incidentally, on inflated figures issued by the union leaders at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, as I shall presently show.
The Department of Labor on last October 8 issued a report on its latest and most accurate survey of trade union membership. Total union membership in the United States is 17,546,000. This must be regarded as a reasonably hard figure because the data was obtained under the stringent regulations of the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act which exacts severe penalties for inaccurate statements by union officials under the Act’s compulsory reporting provisions.
What was the union membership twenty-five years ago in the heroic days of the rise of the CIO which Kirstein recalls in such a glowing light. Let me quote from my article, The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”. A little more than a year ago, I wrote:
“But before anyone hangs a wreath on the American labor movement ... let us review certain basic facts. Twenty-eight years ago – in 1933 – there were only 2,782,296 union members, or 7.8% of the organizable workers, after 47 years of AFL activity. In 1935, the year the CIO was formed, organized workers numbered 3,616,847, or 10.6% of potential unionists. By 1937, after the CIO went into action, union membership more than doubled, numbering 7,687,087, or 21.9% of organizable workers.”
These figures are from the appendix of Edward Levinson’s classic history of the early CIO, Labor on the March. Contrary to Kirstein’s idealized picture of the American labor movement twenty-five years ago as compared to today, the unions today have two and a third times the number of members and almost double the proportion of organizable workers.
Well, maybe Kirstein slipped up on his dates. Maybe he was really thinking about ten or twelve years ago, not twenty-five. All right. Let’s see how today’s nearly 17.5 million union members compare with the number in 1950 and 1953.
The World Almanac, which annually collates all the data on union memberships from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and from direct questionnaires to the unions, lists in its 1952 edition the “approximate” total of labor union members on June 30, 1950, as “14,000,000 to 16,800,000.”
One reason for the wide spread in the approximation is the fact that the CIO leaders – it was before the Landrum-Griffin Act – had reported grossly exaggerated membership and the fact was well known. The World Almanac listed AFL membership in 1950 at 8,000,000 and the CIO’s at “5,000,000 to 6,000,000.” In 1949, the CIO had reached the climax of a four-year internal “cold war” between pro-State Department and pro-Stalinist cliques. It ended with the expulsion of eleven affiliated unions. At the November 1950 CIO convention, it was revealed that the actual CIO membership at the time of the 1949 split convention had been 3,700,000, not “5,000,000 to 6,000,000.”
In the spring of 1953, according to the 1954 edition of the World-Almanac, the “approximate total” of labor union membership was “16,500,000 to 17,000,000.” This included 8,000,000 in the AFL, 5,000,000 in the CIO and 2,500,000 in independent unions. According to my arithmetic, the three breakdown figures add up to only 15,500,000, not “16,500,000 to 17,000,000.”
We do know that two years later, at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, the CIO membership was considerably less than the 6,000,000 claimed. J.B.S. Hardman, for many years editor of Advance, official publication of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, one of the major CIO affiliates, revealed in the January 4, 1958 issue of The Nation that at the time of the AFL-CIO merger the CIO “entered as pretty much of a junior partner, its stationary 4,000,000 members unimpressive against the AFL’s affiliation of 10,000,000 and advancing.”
Hardman confirmed what most of us surmised at the time of the merger that the CIO membership was closer to 4,000,000 than to the claimed 6,000,000. If this is true – and it is – then the hard figure of 17,456,000 labor union members today remains impressive compared not merely to 1937 but to 1955.
WHAT is true about the decline in labor union membership is that a few key unions – notably in steel, automobile, coal and railroads – have had a fall in membership of one degree or another in the past decade. The decline has been most steep in coal mining and railroading. Here it is sufficient to note that even before the great depression of the Thirties, during the “Golden Twenties,” coal was known as a “sick industry” and the current sharp fall in the United Mine Workers membership – some two-thirds in ten years – is the continuation of a trend, based on technological development, which began more than forty years ago and was halted temporarily only during the exceptional periods of World War II and the Korean War. The railroad unions have gone through a similar technologically based four-decade decline.
We come now to the hard kernel of fact in the talk about the “rapid decline” in union membership. What really is at the heart of this question is the drop in the membership of the United Automobile Workers and United Steelworkers, whose organization in the 1935-1941 period is correctly regarded as the CIO’s two greatest achievements.
Both these unions are considerably reduced in membership from their peaks at the end of the Korean War a decade ago. But they are not down to mere skeletons or shadows by any means. Not only are they still completely entrenched in the basic auto and steel industries but they are giants both in membership and material resources compared to any time before World War II and rank among the five largest unions. Here are comparative membership figures from 1941:
Automobile Workers
Steelworkers
November 1941
400,000
500,000
June 30, 1950
947,598
960,738
April 1953
1,350,000
1,100,000
June 1956
1,353,993
1,032,346
June 30, 1961
995,000
796,000
At the end of 1961, the net assets of the American unions totaled more than $1.5 billion, aside from huge welfare and pension funds. While the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers do not approach the net assets of the United Mine Workers with its $105,355,886, the UAW isn’t doing too badly for a union that owned nothing but debts at the time of its historic General Motors sit-down strike in the winter of 1936-37 which established the UAW for the first time in the biggest corporation of the auto “Big Three.”
The UAW, as of December 31, 1961, had net assets of $57,284,000; the Steelworkers, $22,010,035. This compares with the $25,445,296 of the million-member International Association of Machinists; the $18,430,523 of the 771,000 member International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; the $22,249,785 of David Dubinsky’s 446,000-member International Ladies Garment Workers Union; or the $36,760,351 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with its 1,661,983 members. Of course, there are several dozen capitalist corporations with individual assets larger than those of all labor unions combined. But the unions of today command material resources – cash, investments, real estate – beyond anything even dreamed of in the Forties let alone the depression Thirties. In its first two years, 1935-37, the CIO was largely financed by about a million dollars in grants and loans from John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the original organization of the CIO Steelworkers, did not even charge dues during its first great organizing drive in 1937.
This is a good point to discuss – and eliminate – one of the major factors most frequently cited as a reason for the membership declines in such unions as the UAW and Steelworkers. That is unemployment due to what has been termed automation – the employment of electronic and other forms of automatic controls in production to reduce the use of labor power to the starting and stopping of the power flow and the maintenance and repair of machinery and equipment. President John F. Kennedy, in his message to Congress last January, termed automation the big economic challenge of this decade.
True enough, unemployment has been a very decisive factor in preventing any over-all growth of organized labor in the past five years, except in the case of such unions as the International Association of Machinists and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, both AFL-CIO, and the independent International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But contrary to what the Kennedy administration, many economists and quite a few labor leaders contend, automation is not the critical element yet in unemployment.
REPORTING a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the November 5 Wall Street Journal noted that in a comparison of the years 1959 and 1953, periods of relatively high industrial activity, more than half the decline in jobs in those industries which had falling employment were due to decrease in total output not increased technological efficiency. The Journal wrote that
“... job declines totaling 745,000 were associated with increases in efficiency, while declines totaling the somewhat larger number of 795,000 were associated merely with decreases in production by the industries concerned.”
Increases in “efficiency,” however, do not mean improved machinery or automation. A survey in the November Factory, McGraw-Hill trade publication, reveals that the major cause of “job displacement” in factories employing 1,000 or more workers is “improvement in business methods” and general “efficiency” rather than “modern machinery,” which runs a poor second to the “real villain” in wiping out jobs. Thus, in the basic metalworking industry during the first half of 1962, improved “work methods” – that includes good old-fashioned speed-up – were responsible for the loss of 54% of white-collar jobs and 30% of blue-collar jobs. Only 5% of the while-collar and 16% of the blue-collar jobs were eliminated by new machinery. Improved “work methods” were held responsible for 34% of the white-collar and 49% of the blue-collar job cuts in the chemical industry; slashes due to new equipment were only 19% and 13% respectively.
But “decreases in production,” as indicated in the previously cited November 5 Wall Street Journal, has been the arch villain in the unemployment situation. Take the automobile industry, which has been issuing such glowing reports of 1962 last quarter production. Ward’s automotive report on November 12 said that the automobile industry is anticipating a total car output for the entire year of 6,846,000. This is more than a million below the peak annual production of 7,942,000 in 1955, seven years ago. It is little higher than the 6,665,628 cars produced in 1950, twelve years ago.
The picture of steel production is even more revealing. During the second and third quarters of this year, the steel industry operated at between 45% and 55% of the 1961 rated capacity. In this month of November, even with the stimulus of the Cuban war crisis, the steel industry has been operating at about 61% of capacity. Based on the tonnage production index of 100 for the 1957-59 period, the index for the four weeks ending November 10 was 95.1. Iron Age, steel industry trade magazine, explained on November 14 that the $1.4 billion capital expenditures expected next year are intended to cut costs and increase efficiency, not to expand production. The steel industry’s present “break-even” point – the point where it begins to make profit – is 42% of capacity.
In spite of the factor of unemployment, the major causes of which are “efficiency” and lowered total output, the union movement of today not only remains gigantic in human and financial resources compared to twenty-five years and even ten years ago but it has more contracts and better contractual terms than in all American labor history. More than 100,000 collective bargaining agreements are negotiated each year and it is extremely rare for such agreements not to contain some gain for the workers, although for some key unions, like the Auto Workers, Steelworkers and Ladies Garment Workers, the recent gains have been minimal and not commensurate with the real size and resources of these unions and the capacity of their members for struggle.
This year, the Kennedy administration sought to impose a ceiling on wage increases in union contracts. The President indicated a limit of 2.5% to 3% based on the estimated annual average increase in hourly output per worker in industry. On November 10, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first nine months of 1962 major collective bargaining settlements covering 3,100,000 workers had been negotiated. The median increase for all the workers covered by these contracts was 3.2% of straight time hourly earnings. (Median is the point where half got more and half got less.) But for those who received raises the median increase was 3.4%.
The significant fact is that the majority of workers securing increases got gains of well over 3%. This was particularly true of construction workers, transportation and other non-factory workers. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area construction workers, after a strike of 200,000, won wage increases of from 7% to 8.4%. Airline pilots won 8%, although the Eastern Airlines strike is still not settled at this writing. West Coast dock workers netted 6.2%; textile mill workers from 3.25% in the North to 5% for some mills in the South; non-operating railroad workers, 4.1%; copper miners, 3.8%; telephone workers, 3.5%.
The aluminum, glass and oil workers were restricted to a bare 3% while the steelworkers, under the direct pressure of the Kennedy administration, settled for 2.5%, all in fringe benefits. This latter settlement, involving a half-million workers, seriously dragged down the total average gains.
The fact is that the workers won what the union leaders were willing to let them fight for. Thus, the Teamsters Union, headed by James R. Hoffa, in late September and early October, through a brief strike of several IBT locals won New Jersey-New York area contracts providing a 37-cent an hour wage increase for 57,000 truck drivers.
One fact cited as evidence of the “rapid decline” of the American labor movement is the smaller number of strikes, strikers and man-days lost due to strikes. In his August 13 broadcast and televised speech on the nation’s economy, President Kennedy boasted of his “extraordinary record of labor peace in the last eighteen months.” The press prominently reported the fact that in July 1962 man-hours lost in strikes reached the lowest point for any month since World War II.
Of course, the month in question also saw the greatest number of wage earners enjoying union-won paid vacations of any month in US history. Aside from that, as A.H. Raskin noted in an article in the November 11 New York Times, “The strike front just won’t stay zippered up.” In fact, an examination of the over-all strike statistics for the first half of 1962 shows a total of 9,800,000 man-days lost in strikes – a 62% rise over the first half of 1961. During the first quarter of this year, the number of workers on strike rose 38% over the corresponding quarter of 1961.
There are other factors to take into account in analyzing the over-all decline in strikes since 1953 – not just in the “last eighteen months.”
A study of the annual strike statistics since 1920 reveals that the eight-year period, 1946 through 1953, coinciding except for 1953 with the last Democratic administration, was the greatest strike period in US history. The years 1950 through 1953, during the Korean war, saw the largest number of strikes for any four-year period, climaxed by the all-time annual record of 5,117 strikes in 1952.
The reason for this great upsurge in strikes ranging over an eight-year period has already been indicated in the early part of this article. A rampant inflation, boosting the consumers’ price index 72%, occurred during World War II and the post-war period. In addition, direct federal, state and local taxes levied in the same period took an estimated one-third of the average wage-earner’s income. After a brief pause in the inflation during the Truman recession of 1949-50, the rise was resumed during the Korean war, when more than one-half of the 15% rise in the price index during the decade of the Fifties was recorded.
The decline in strikes over the past decade can be attributed neither to Kennedy’s policies since he took office in January 1960 nor to any shift in the programs and attitudes of the top union leaders. The latter were just as permeated with the philosophy of class collaboration, just as opposed to militancy, just as subservient to the capitalist government in the 1946-53 period as they have been since and are today. The difference was the greater inflationary pressure on the workers which forced them to strike and forced the union bureaucrats to go along, even though reluctantly.
THERE is another very important element in the decline in strikes over the recent years. That is the long-term contract with built-in automatic annual wage increases. The trend toward long-term contracts, now averaging between two and three years in duration, began with the signing of the notorious five-year General Motors contract in 1950 by UAW President Walter Reuther. It was hoped that such a contract would preserve “labor peace” for a long time in the auto industry and dampen the tradition of militancy among the auto workers. The Korean War was begun about a month after the GM contract went into effect. The renewed inflationary trend brought such rank-and-file condemnation of the five-year “handcuffs” contract that Reuther was forced in 1953 to demand a wage re-opener in spite of the contract. In fear of a strike, GM yielded.
It is well to keep in mind, however, that in the glorious days of twenty-five years ago for which Nation publisher Kirstein sighs, it took a major General Motors strike, including the historic “sit-down” occupation of the company’s main plants in Flint, Mich., to win a six-month contract, after CIO President John L. Lewis indignantly rejected President Roosevelt’s offer to propose a one-month contract to settle the strike and get the workers off GM’s property.
A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that union contracts are increasingly of longer duration. In 1956, about 15% of the contracts covering 1,000 or more workers were for three years, in contrast to the traditional one- and two-year contracts of the previous twenty years. By 1961, the proportion of three-year contracts had risen to more than 30%.
In order to get the workers to accept long-term contracts, the employers must agree to automatic annual wage concessions. In a sense, these are deferred wage increases because it is possible that the workers might insist on larger initial increases if the yearly wage raise were not built into the contract. Nevertheless, such automatic increases averaged 8 cents an hour so far this year and 8.2 cents in 1961 compared to average negotiated increases of 7.5 cents and 7.8 cents respectively, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a Washington research organization in the labor market field.
But even with the diminution of the inflationary pressure and the increase of long-term contracts providing automatic annual wage raises, the current period is by no means the low-point of strikes during the past twenty-five years. The impression that organized labor moved steadily onward and upward following the 1937 upsurge of the CIO is wrong. In the matter of strikes, the three-year period following the smashing of the Little Steel strike in the summer of 1937 and the period of US participation in World War II from December 8, 1941 to August 14, 1945 were far more repressed years for labor than the latest period. Here is the comparative statistical chart:
Strikes in the United States
Year
Number Stoppages
Workers Involved
Man Days Idle
1937
4,740
1,861,000
28,425,000
1938
2,772
688,000
9,148,000
1939
2,613
1,171,000
17,812,000
1940
2,508
577,000
6,701,000
1941
4,288
2,363,000
23,048,000
1942
2,968
840,000
4,183,000
1943
3,752
1,981,000
13,501,000
1944
4,956
2,116,000
8,721,000
1945
4,750
3,470,000
38,000,000
1958
3,694
2,060,000
23,900,000
1959
3,708
1,880,000
69,000,000
1960
3,333
1,320,000
19,100,000
1961 (Jan.-July)
2,010
(est.)
704,000
(est.)
7,410,000
(est.)
Even a cursory study of these figures is revealing. In both 1958 and 1959, regarded as “quiet” years on the labor front, the number of strikers was greater than in 1937, the record year for the two decades, 1920-1940. The figures for 1960, low point of the decade, were still far larger in every strike category than in 1938, 1939, 1940 and 1942. Even for the seven-month period in 1961 for which I have available statistics at this writing, there were more strikers than in the entire years of 1939 and 1940 and more man-days lost due to strikes than in all of either 1940 or 1942. And as I showed earlier in this article, the first half of this year far surpassed the comparable period of 1961 both in the number of strikers and the man-days lost.
This does not tell the whole story. The strikes of the recent “quiet” years with few exceptions brought material gains in wages, benefits and improved working conditions. Most of the strikes in the 1937-1941 period were fought for simple union recognition – to compel an employer to agree to meet with a union committee and negotiate. The Little Steel strike of 1937 – the largest steel walkout since the smashed 1919 Great Steel Strike – was wiped out in blood. The low figures for man-days lost during the World War II years represent wholesale breaking of strikes by the quick action of the government and the cooperation of the union leaders during a period of fast-rising prices while wages were officially frozen.
The facts I have just cited also throw light on the low state of “labor’s power and prestige” which so concerns Kirstein. I do not know if labor’s “power and prestige” today are any lower than during the Little Steel strike of 1937, when the police of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” colleague, Mayor Kelly of Chicago, murdered ten workers in the Memorial Day Massacre at the Republic steel plant and Roosevelt answered John L. Lewis’ plea for help with the cynical reply, “A plague on both your houses.”
CERTAINLY, labor’s “power and prestige” are no lower than during World War II when wages were frozen while prices soared and every strike was smashed except the four national strikes of the coal miners in 1943, when John L. Lewis stood up to the lynch cries of the national press and the tirades of Roosevelt and Congress and the miners won their greatest victory.
It is not quite clear from Kirstein’s article just how he measures labor’s “power and prestige.” But to my way of thinking, labor’s “power and prestige” can’t sink much lower than it was during the 1947-1952 period of the Truman administration – the same Truman who woke up on the morning after Election Day, 1948, to find out he’d been unexpectedly re-elected to the Presidency and exclaimed, “Labor did it!”
It was in June 1947 that Congress enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, condemned by every sector of organized labor as a “slave labor law.” The most significant political fact about the passage of this Act was that the overwhelming majority of both capitalist parties – Democratic as well as Republican – in both the House and Senate voted for this bill.
What is most significant of all is that President Truman invoked the injunctive powers of the Act against actual or threatened strikes seven times in 1948 and three times more before the end of his term in January 1953. This did not include his strikebreaking seizures of railroads, coal mines and steel plants.
There was not a single union man in Congress to speak or vote against the Taft-Hartley bill. There was no mass action of any kind initiated or led by either the CIO or AFL national leaders in opposition to passage of the T-H Act. All but a handful of labor leaders, notably John L. Lewis, Charles P. Howard of the International Typographical Union and Matthew Smith of the Mechanics Educational Society, took the degrading Taft-Hartley “non-Communist” oath.
In the spring of 1948, the top union leaders, particularly of the CIO, were hurling invectives against Truman and had initiated a “Draft Eisenhower” campaign. On April 4, 1948, the Detroit Free Press carried an interview with Walter Reuther, head of the CIO’s largest affiliate, who complained that “Truman is hopelessly inadequate” and hoped that “some competent man like Eisenhower will be nominated by the Democrats.” Surely, when Reuther and the rest of the labor leaders shortly fell into line behind Truman, campaigned furiously for him and hailed his election as a “great labor victory,” that was a pretty low point in labor’s “power and prestige.”
There is one other measurable factor most frequently cited as the conclusive argument against any further possibility of growth of the US labor unions and, indeed, as certain evidence that the unions must inevitably decline. Kirstein raises the argument as his concluding point when he refers to “the white-collar worker, who is now surpassing the blue-collar worker in numbers” and who, “one thing is certain,” will “not join the production worker’s union.”
It is not my purpose to take up the arguable point of whether white-collar workers will or will not join a blue-collar workers’ union. I wish to concentrate on the fiction, accepted as unquestionable fact by even well-informed and good-intentioned people like Kirstein, that the blue-collar workers are in decline and that the white-collar workers are inheriting the American earth.
In my previously cited article, The Myth of “People’s Capitalism”, I reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for July 10-16, 1960, on the occupational division of the gainfully employed in this country. As of that date, I wrote:
“Two-thirds of all the gainfully employed are males – 90% of them white. An outright majority – 58.4% – of all employed males are in the manual, service and farm laborer classifications ... Factory operatives and kindred workers form the largest single group of male employees, 19.2%. Then come craftsmen, 18.7%; non-agricultural laborers, 9%; service workers (a wide category including domestic servants, repairmen, laundry workers, elevator operators, janitors, clothes pressers, garbage collectors, barbers, hotel, restaurant and bar workers, police and firemen, etc.) 6.5%; and hired farm laborers, 4.9%.
“All income earners of both sexes totaled 68,689,000 in the above-cited BLS report. Of these, 37,449,000 – or a 54% majority – are in physical labor categories, including operatives, craftsmen, laborers, service workers and hired farm hands. Clerical workers number 9,907,000 and sales workers, 4,405,000. The latter two ‘white collar’ groups total 14,312,000. They formed 20.8% of the employed working force in July 1960. Even if we add to them a mixed category listed as ‘professional, technical and kindred workers,’ numbering 7,042,000, or 10.3% of the total, we cannot stretch the ‘white collar’ workers to more than 31.1% of the gainfully employed.”
I pointed out, however, that in arriving at the conclusion that white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar workers, the classification of the service workers, who until 1960 were classified with the manual labor group, was transferred to the “white-collar” category and the remaining classifications of “managers, officials and proprietors” and “farm owners and farm managers,” together representing 14.4% of the total, are lumped in with the white-collar wage-earners.
TO THIS statistical data, I am now able to add information based on an actual census presented in the October 1962 Scientific American, unquestionably the finest and most authoritative general science periodical published in this country. It is contained in the article, More from the Census of 1960, by Philip H. Hauser, chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee for the census of 1960 and head of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago.
Prof. Hauser has broken the census figures down into two general categories, “Providers of Services” and “Producers of Goods.”
Before we examine these figures, it should be noted that all managers and proprietors are listed as “producers of services” and all farmers, who are owners of their means of production and very frequently employers, are listed as “producers of goods.”
Hauser’s article contains a chart showing the continuous ratio of the various sectors of the labor force from 1900 to 1960. This chart reveals that aside from the farmers, who are in the main petty capitalists, the chief classifications of the “producers of physical goods” – the so-called blue-collar workers or operatives (factory workers mainly) and craftsmen (construction trades, etc.) – have increased in absolute numbers every year since 1900 and, every year right through to 1960, have represented a larger proportion of the total labor force. That is, the main base of the labor unions is not narrowing; it is widening.
In his two main categories, Hauser lists 54.4% in “producers of services,” including “42.2 per cent in white collar occupations and 12 per cent in household service and other service occupations.” Remember, “service occupations” include the $40-a-week Puerto Rican and Negro hospital workers in New York City who this year engaged in such a militant strike. He adds that “only 46 per cent were engaged in work directly contributing to the production of physical goods.”
He immediately adds, however, that “the decline in production workers is entirely attributable to the reduction in the number of farmers, farm laborers and nonfarm laborers. Since 1900 agricultural employment has fallen from 37.5 per cent to only 6.3 per cent of the labor force ...” He further adds that “men are still engaged primarily in the production of goods (three-fifths of the male work force in 1960, compared with four-fifths in 1900), the white-collar and service functions that have come to the fore have been taken over to a large extent by women ...” On the average, women workers earn only two-thirds the average wages of male workers.
Here is the break-down for the various classifications of “producers of goods” in 1900 and 1960 as a percentage of the total labor force:
Occupation
1900
1960
Craftsmen
10.0%
14.1%
Operatives
12.0%
20.1%
Laborers (non-farm)
12.5%
5.5%
Farm Laborers
17.5%
2.3%
Service (incl. Domestic)
9.0%
19.0%
If the unions were to stick to only the above categories of manual workers, although such white-collar and professional workers as the New York City school teachers and newspaper reporters went on strike this year, they could double the present labor union membership, from 17.5 million to 35 million. As a matter of fact, the AFL-CIO announced on November 14 a plan for an organizing campaign in the Los Angeles area, where there are about 5,000 unorganized firms with 750,000 potentially organizable workers.
IF ORGANIZED labor faces a critical period ahead – and it does, it won’t be because the union membership is in “rapid decline” or because the blue-collar workers are disappearing. It will be due to the policies and program of the union leadership.
For one thing, the unions will have to develop a political action program and organization that will be completely independent of the old capitalist two-party set-up. The labor experts of the capitalist class don’t low-grade labor’s potential power and prestige in the political as well as economic arena. Thus, John D. Pomfret, labor reporter, wrote before this year’s elections in the October 24 New York Times about “labor’s principal political asset – sheer mass. The nation’s 17,500,000 union members and their families are an enormous political force.”
You bet. If they had their own party, they could turn the Democratic and Republican parties almost overnight into minor parties. They could be the government.
November 27, 1962
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(30 June 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_26" target="new">Vol. IX No. 26</a>, 30 June 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Annual Wage – How?</h3>
<p class="fst">When the union leaders, both AFL and CIO, raised the demand for a guaranteed annual wage, it was generally assumed they were seeking federal legislation requiring the employers to pay minimum security wages based on continuous employment. The demand was placed directly before the late President Roosevelt, who shunted it into the hands of a committee for “study.” This “study” has yet to begin.</p>
<p>But the CIO and AFL leaders have already beat a retreat. William Green says he wants the employers to agree to this demand “on a voluntary, not compulsory basis.” Philip Murray, who raised the biggest hue, and holler on this issue, now states, that “all the union (CIO Steelworkers) is asking with its request for an annual guarantee is that the steel corporations, which have their guarantee (of continued big profits), make a firm commitment to their employees.”</p>
<p>In effect, this means that the projected crusade for the annual wage will boil down to numerous disconnected skirmishes with individual employers, most of whom, we can be sure, will merely scoff at the idea. All it would mean would be a host of new cases to be buried among all the others by the War Labor Board, or some other government agency.</p>
<p><em>How does Murray propose to get any big corporation to “voluntarily” make a “firm commitment” on this or any other demand? The corporations have laughed in the face of the unions during the war on even the smallest demand and are mobilizing for an all-out assault on labor in the coming period. But Murray pursues the policy of “peace” and insists on the continuation of the no-strike policy.</em></p>
<p>There is only one way to win the guaranteed annual security wage. That is by a united, militant fight of all labor for a compulsory annual wage system. And if the profiteering employers – who continually demand government compulsion against the workers – can’t ensure steady work and wages, then let the government take over their plants and operate them under workers’ control.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Tobin’s Latest Outburst</h3>
<p class="fst">AFL Teamsters President Daniel Tobin is the first and only prominent union leader, to our knowledge, who has come out in favor of Wall Street’s plan to Prussianize the country through peacetime military conscription. All the major labor organizations have gone on record in opposition.</p>
<p>Tobin’s personal organ, <strong>The International Teamster</strong>, in the June issue contains a featured leading editorial entitled <em>Keep Military Conscription!</em> This comes out at a time when armed troops are being used in an attempt to smash the Chicago truck drivers strike, involving among others thousands of members of Tobin’s own union – a grim forecast of what the employing class hopes to do, in part, with the peacetime conscripts.</p>
<p><em>Tobin’s “future war prevention” arguments have the familiar ring of the Wall Street propagandists of permanent militarism. He adds his own fantastic note about “a highly financed campaign against future preparedness,” “smarter people than the pacifists ... supplying the money,” etc. But it’s no secret who supplies the money for the peacetime militarism campaign – the wealthiest and most powerful anti-labor interests in the country. And it’s no secret, either, on</em>
<em>whose side Tobin is lined up!</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>“Go On Back Home!’</h3>
<p class="fst">Millions of workers were lured by employer propaganda and the need for jobs to leave their home towns and go into the war industry centers. In many instances they had to live in shack towns; they were robbed right and left for the necessities of life; their wages were frozen and they were frozen to the jobs.</p>
<p>Now that the bosses want to toss them on the unemployed scrapheap, they are being told to “go back home where you belong.” If they have any savings, they are being pressured to use their last cent to return to their pre-war towns, broke and without any prospects for jobs.</p>
<p>We expect that from the employers. But now we have the example of a professed union leader, Frank X. Martel, president of the Detroit and Wayne County Federation of Labor, handing out this vicious line in a front page editorial of <strong>Detroit Labor News</strong>, June 9.</p>
<p>His advice to hundreds of thousands of CIO auto workers (he thinks in this fashion he may make it easier to maintain jobs for AFL members who pay their dues) is “for them to leave now, before their savings are used up.” He tells them “there never was before, and there is no hope now, of providing employment for all the people who have been brought to this community” – so pack up and scram! That’s how one so-called labor leader proposes to “solve” the growing unemployment problem.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(30 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 26, 30 June 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Annual Wage – How?
When the union leaders, both AFL and CIO, raised the demand for a guaranteed annual wage, it was generally assumed they were seeking federal legislation requiring the employers to pay minimum security wages based on continuous employment. The demand was placed directly before the late President Roosevelt, who shunted it into the hands of a committee for “study.” This “study” has yet to begin.
But the CIO and AFL leaders have already beat a retreat. William Green says he wants the employers to agree to this demand “on a voluntary, not compulsory basis.” Philip Murray, who raised the biggest hue, and holler on this issue, now states, that “all the union (CIO Steelworkers) is asking with its request for an annual guarantee is that the steel corporations, which have their guarantee (of continued big profits), make a firm commitment to their employees.”
In effect, this means that the projected crusade for the annual wage will boil down to numerous disconnected skirmishes with individual employers, most of whom, we can be sure, will merely scoff at the idea. All it would mean would be a host of new cases to be buried among all the others by the War Labor Board, or some other government agency.
How does Murray propose to get any big corporation to “voluntarily” make a “firm commitment” on this or any other demand? The corporations have laughed in the face of the unions during the war on even the smallest demand and are mobilizing for an all-out assault on labor in the coming period. But Murray pursues the policy of “peace” and insists on the continuation of the no-strike policy.
There is only one way to win the guaranteed annual security wage. That is by a united, militant fight of all labor for a compulsory annual wage system. And if the profiteering employers – who continually demand government compulsion against the workers – can’t ensure steady work and wages, then let the government take over their plants and operate them under workers’ control.
* * *
Tobin’s Latest Outburst
AFL Teamsters President Daniel Tobin is the first and only prominent union leader, to our knowledge, who has come out in favor of Wall Street’s plan to Prussianize the country through peacetime military conscription. All the major labor organizations have gone on record in opposition.
Tobin’s personal organ, The International Teamster, in the June issue contains a featured leading editorial entitled Keep Military Conscription! This comes out at a time when armed troops are being used in an attempt to smash the Chicago truck drivers strike, involving among others thousands of members of Tobin’s own union – a grim forecast of what the employing class hopes to do, in part, with the peacetime conscripts.
Tobin’s “future war prevention” arguments have the familiar ring of the Wall Street propagandists of permanent militarism. He adds his own fantastic note about “a highly financed campaign against future preparedness,” “smarter people than the pacifists ... supplying the money,” etc. But it’s no secret who supplies the money for the peacetime militarism campaign – the wealthiest and most powerful anti-labor interests in the country. And it’s no secret, either, on
whose side Tobin is lined up!
* * *
“Go On Back Home!’
Millions of workers were lured by employer propaganda and the need for jobs to leave their home towns and go into the war industry centers. In many instances they had to live in shack towns; they were robbed right and left for the necessities of life; their wages were frozen and they were frozen to the jobs.
Now that the bosses want to toss them on the unemployed scrapheap, they are being told to “go back home where you belong.” If they have any savings, they are being pressured to use their last cent to return to their pre-war towns, broke and without any prospects for jobs.
We expect that from the employers. But now we have the example of a professed union leader, Frank X. Martel, president of the Detroit and Wayne County Federation of Labor, handing out this vicious line in a front page editorial of Detroit Labor News, June 9.
His advice to hundreds of thousands of CIO auto workers (he thinks in this fashion he may make it easier to maintain jobs for AFL members who pay their dues) is “for them to leave now, before their savings are used up.” He tells them “there never was before, and there is no hope now, of providing employment for all the people who have been brought to this community” – so pack up and scram! That’s how one so-called labor leader proposes to “solve” the growing unemployment problem.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Textile Union Ends No-Strike Pledge</h1>
<h3>TWU-CIO Leader Resigns From Membership on WLB</h3>
<h4>Textile Workers’ Actions Strike Heavy Blow<br>
at Prestige of Roosevelt’s Anti-Labor Board</h4>
<h3>(3 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_09" target="new">Vol. IX No. 9</a>, 3 March 1945, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The CIO Textile Workers Union of America, representing over
500,000 members in the country’s lowest-wage industry, on
February 20 withdrew the no-strike pledge for some 100,000
cotton-rayon workers. This is the first formal revocation of the
no-strike policy by any CIO international union since Pearl Harbor.
The action was taken by the TWU Executive Council at a meeting in New
York City just prior to release of the War Labor Board’s
long-delayed decision in the textile wage case.</strong></p>
<p><em>At the same time, the union’s President, Emil Rieve,
resigned from the WLB “in protest against the usurpation of its
functions and the plain fact that the Board has now been reduced to
little more than a rubber stamp.” This is especially
significant because Rieve was one of the union leaders who originally
committed organised labor to the no-strike policy and helped
establish the compulsory arbitration WLB.</em></p>
<p>These simultaneous actions are the most serious blows struck at
the union-shackling no-strike policy and Roosevelt’s tottering
WLB since the coal strikes two years ago. They are a big advance over
the action of the CtO United Automobile Workers’ executive
board, which several weeks ago called on the CIO to withdraw its
members from the WLB, but did not recall its own members and
continues to uphold the no-strike surrender policy.</p>
<p>In response to the TWU action, the WLB hastily announced its
decision in the textile wage case. This was a rejection of the 10
cents an hour general wage increase demanded by the union. The board
also halved the union’s demand for a boost from 50 cents to a
60 cents an hour wage minimum, conceding only a 55 cents wage floor
for an industry which the board itself admitted “pays the
lowest wages of any basic manufacturing industry in America.”</p>
<p><em>However, this concession, plus some meager “fringe”
awards, are not going into immediate effect. The board simply
referred them as “recommendations” to Economic
Stabilization Director Vinson. He must first determine whether such
increases will mean price increases – the administration’s
most recent pretext for stalling wage awards and upholding the
wage-freeze. ”</em></p>
<p>This belated WLB statement has not altered the TWU actions.
Following the WLB announcement, Rieve issued a press statement
declaring that the union’s decision “still stands.”
He scored the WLB ruling as “meaningless” and stated it
would “not raise the wages of a single cotton- rayon textile
worker.” The case, he charged, “is still where it was two
months ago – in Vinson’s vest pocket.” He frankly
predicted that withdrawal of the no-strike pledge for a large section
of the industry would lead to strikes.</p>
<p>That the TWU top officials were influenced in making their
decision primarily by the terrific pressure of the union’s
ranks was clearly indicated by Rieve. He admitted that the union’s
officers had been “deluged by request for walk-outs in
telegrams by the bushel.”</p>
<p>The textile union’s action is all the more significant
because it is part of important developments reflecting general rank
and file pressure throughout industry for scrapping the no-strike
pledge and scuttling the pro-corporation WLB.</p>
<p>Just prior to the TWU decision, a national gathering of CIO
Packinghouse Workers representatives meeting in Chicago threatened to
revoke the no-strike pledge if the WLB did not immediately release
its decision in the PWU wage case which had been stalled for 19
months. This brought a speedy response with the issuance of a WLB
order denying a general wage increase but recommending “fringe”
grants. These however must still await approval by Vinson.</p>
<p><em>The CIO United Automobile Workers, largest and most dynamic
union in the country, has urged the withdrawal of labor
representatives from the WLB. This union has just concluded a
national referendum on the no-strike pledge. While the results have
not yet been published, it is conceded that hundreds of thousands of
militant auto and aircraft workers, if not a majority of the union,
have voted to rescind the no-strike policy. A new wave of strikes has
broken out in Detroit, key war industry center, with the
Chrysler-Dodge workers now taking the lead.</em></p>
<p>Moreover, within a few weeks the over 600,000 members of the
powerful United Mine Workers may be enforcing their traditional “no
contract, no work” policy. The UMW policy committee on February
26 at its opening session to prepare demands for forthcoming contract
negotiations indicated the possibilities of another general mine
strike by sending formal notice to Secretary of Labor Perkins, the
NLRB and WLB that a dispute exists in the industry – the 30-day
notification of strike intent required under the Smith-Connally
Anti-Strike Law.</p>
<p>Important as all these developments are, they do not yet
constitute a genuine, definitive break with the union leadership’s
basic policy of reliance on government agencies and compulsory
arbitration to win the workers’ just demands. Even Rieve, who
has taken the boldest stand to date of all the CIO leaders, still
holds out the hope of advancing labor’s interests by
collaboration with the employers and their government through a
differently constituted board.<br>
</p>
<h4>Time for Action</h4>
<p class="fst">Thus, the TWU’s executive board did not attack the WLB for
what it is – a government agency deliberately constructed by
Roosevelt, with the aid of the union officials, to curb the unions
and enforce the wage-freeze. The TWU resolution urges CIO withdrawal
from the WLB “unless the WLB’s original function as a
decision-making body, acting in the interest of equal justice, is
re-established.” Of course, the WLB never had and was not
intended to have such a function. That was merely a fiction used to
gain the worker’s support for the, board and their surrender of
the strike weapon.</p>
<p><em>Nevertheless, the TWU decisions are further confirmation, of
the correctness of the policies consistently advocated by the
Socialist Workers Party and <strong>The Militant</strong>. From the very first,
the Trotskyists have warned of the disastrous consequences for labor
in the no-strike policy and support of the WLB. Today workers
everywhere are learning the truth of the Trotskyist contentions
through their own bitter experiences. They must now demand that the
lessons of these experiences be translated into decisive action. The
union leaders must be compelled to resign immediately from the
anti-labor WLB. The no-strike policy must be scrapped. A united
militant union offensive must be launched to smash the wage-freezing
Little Steel Formula.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Textile Union Ends No-Strike Pledge
TWU-CIO Leader Resigns From Membership on WLB
Textile Workers’ Actions Strike Heavy Blow
at Prestige of Roosevelt’s Anti-Labor Board
(3 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 9, 3 March 1945, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The CIO Textile Workers Union of America, representing over
500,000 members in the country’s lowest-wage industry, on
February 20 withdrew the no-strike pledge for some 100,000
cotton-rayon workers. This is the first formal revocation of the
no-strike policy by any CIO international union since Pearl Harbor.
The action was taken by the TWU Executive Council at a meeting in New
York City just prior to release of the War Labor Board’s
long-delayed decision in the textile wage case.
At the same time, the union’s President, Emil Rieve,
resigned from the WLB “in protest against the usurpation of its
functions and the plain fact that the Board has now been reduced to
little more than a rubber stamp.” This is especially
significant because Rieve was one of the union leaders who originally
committed organised labor to the no-strike policy and helped
establish the compulsory arbitration WLB.
These simultaneous actions are the most serious blows struck at
the union-shackling no-strike policy and Roosevelt’s tottering
WLB since the coal strikes two years ago. They are a big advance over
the action of the CtO United Automobile Workers’ executive
board, which several weeks ago called on the CIO to withdraw its
members from the WLB, but did not recall its own members and
continues to uphold the no-strike surrender policy.
In response to the TWU action, the WLB hastily announced its
decision in the textile wage case. This was a rejection of the 10
cents an hour general wage increase demanded by the union. The board
also halved the union’s demand for a boost from 50 cents to a
60 cents an hour wage minimum, conceding only a 55 cents wage floor
for an industry which the board itself admitted “pays the
lowest wages of any basic manufacturing industry in America.”
However, this concession, plus some meager “fringe”
awards, are not going into immediate effect. The board simply
referred them as “recommendations” to Economic
Stabilization Director Vinson. He must first determine whether such
increases will mean price increases – the administration’s
most recent pretext for stalling wage awards and upholding the
wage-freeze. ”
This belated WLB statement has not altered the TWU actions.
Following the WLB announcement, Rieve issued a press statement
declaring that the union’s decision “still stands.”
He scored the WLB ruling as “meaningless” and stated it
would “not raise the wages of a single cotton- rayon textile
worker.” The case, he charged, “is still where it was two
months ago – in Vinson’s vest pocket.” He frankly
predicted that withdrawal of the no-strike pledge for a large section
of the industry would lead to strikes.
That the TWU top officials were influenced in making their
decision primarily by the terrific pressure of the union’s
ranks was clearly indicated by Rieve. He admitted that the union’s
officers had been “deluged by request for walk-outs in
telegrams by the bushel.”
The textile union’s action is all the more significant
because it is part of important developments reflecting general rank
and file pressure throughout industry for scrapping the no-strike
pledge and scuttling the pro-corporation WLB.
Just prior to the TWU decision, a national gathering of CIO
Packinghouse Workers representatives meeting in Chicago threatened to
revoke the no-strike pledge if the WLB did not immediately release
its decision in the PWU wage case which had been stalled for 19
months. This brought a speedy response with the issuance of a WLB
order denying a general wage increase but recommending “fringe”
grants. These however must still await approval by Vinson.
The CIO United Automobile Workers, largest and most dynamic
union in the country, has urged the withdrawal of labor
representatives from the WLB. This union has just concluded a
national referendum on the no-strike pledge. While the results have
not yet been published, it is conceded that hundreds of thousands of
militant auto and aircraft workers, if not a majority of the union,
have voted to rescind the no-strike policy. A new wave of strikes has
broken out in Detroit, key war industry center, with the
Chrysler-Dodge workers now taking the lead.
Moreover, within a few weeks the over 600,000 members of the
powerful United Mine Workers may be enforcing their traditional “no
contract, no work” policy. The UMW policy committee on February
26 at its opening session to prepare demands for forthcoming contract
negotiations indicated the possibilities of another general mine
strike by sending formal notice to Secretary of Labor Perkins, the
NLRB and WLB that a dispute exists in the industry – the 30-day
notification of strike intent required under the Smith-Connally
Anti-Strike Law.
Important as all these developments are, they do not yet
constitute a genuine, definitive break with the union leadership’s
basic policy of reliance on government agencies and compulsory
arbitration to win the workers’ just demands. Even Rieve, who
has taken the boldest stand to date of all the CIO leaders, still
holds out the hope of advancing labor’s interests by
collaboration with the employers and their government through a
differently constituted board.
Time for Action
Thus, the TWU’s executive board did not attack the WLB for
what it is – a government agency deliberately constructed by
Roosevelt, with the aid of the union officials, to curb the unions
and enforce the wage-freeze. The TWU resolution urges CIO withdrawal
from the WLB “unless the WLB’s original function as a
decision-making body, acting in the interest of equal justice, is
re-established.” Of course, the WLB never had and was not
intended to have such a function. That was merely a fiction used to
gain the worker’s support for the, board and their surrender of
the strike weapon.
Nevertheless, the TWU decisions are further confirmation, of
the correctness of the policies consistently advocated by the
Socialist Workers Party and The Militant. From the very first,
the Trotskyists have warned of the disastrous consequences for labor
in the no-strike policy and support of the WLB. Today workers
everywhere are learning the truth of the Trotskyist contentions
through their own bitter experiences. They must now demand that the
lessons of these experiences be translated into decisive action. The
union leaders must be compelled to resign immediately from the
anti-labor WLB. The no-strike policy must be scrapped. A united
militant union offensive must be launched to smash the wage-freezing
Little Steel Formula.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(16 June 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_24" target="new">Vol. IX No. 24</a>, 16 June 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Now They’re ‘Slackers’</h3>
<p class="fst">Even the most benevolent of capitalists pay off with a lay-off. That’s what half the 8,600 employees of Jack and Heintz Company, Cleveland, found out last week. Some 4,300 of them were “requested” to “resign” because of war contract terminations.</p>
<p>It was quite, a shock to the workers, called “associates,” to find out how quickly the bosses would make them “disassociates” when they were no longer needed to make profits. Jack and Heintz were highly publicized as the “ideal” employers. By working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the “associates” pulled down relatively high “take home” pay. The plant was run like “one big happy family,” – call the boss by his first name, music while you work.</p>
<p>On May 29, President William S. Jack broadcast over the plant loudspeakers asking women and professional workers particularly to “come to their foremen and say ‘Here is my resignation’.” He added: “You have done well by your country in its greatest trial and we appreciate it. The time has come for us to help your return to your families and professions.” <em>When only 20 “associates” accepted this “help” to return to their families – jobless; Jack and Heintz “benevolence” evaporated. On May 31, the company announced that there were a bunch of “slackers” and “discord seekers” in the plant who were to be purged.</em></p>
<p>Although the AFL Machinists have a contract in the plant, the union is almost completely “housebroken.” The “purge” will be conducted through the union grievance committee, a company official stated. The union stewards, he said, have an “eye” on the “disrupters.” They don’t seem to have an eye on the contract, however, because the layoffs are being conducted in ruthless violation of seniority provisions.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>No Union Conventions</h3>
<p class="fst">The Office of Defense Transportation recently announced that for the next 12 to 15 months the government would hot permit conventions of more than 50 people. This decision was turned primarily at the unions, several of which were preparing to hold their annual conventions this summer and fall.</p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of civilians use the railroads and buses daily, with most business men and their families still managing to take their vacations and trips. It would seem that a few union conventions, numbering usually from a couple of hundred to one or two with as many as 2,000 delegates, would not interfere appreciably with the transportation problem.</p>
<p>But the government doesn’t think union conventions are “essential.” Millions of workers are facing layoffs. “Take home” pay is being drastically slashed through reduced hours and loss of overtime, while prices and shortages mount. Meanwhile, the administration has put new rivets in the wage freeze.</p>
<p><em>The rank and file of the unions are beginning to put up a fight. All over the country they are starting to scrap the no-strike pledge in action. The workers ere demanding a real program against unemployment and wage cuts. And that’s the real reason Why the administration doesn’t want any conventions – especially big rank and file union conventions.</em></p>
<p>And its a mighty fine decision from the standpoint of the top union leaders. They’re having a hard time holding the ranks “in line.” They’re not anxious to hold conventions where “anything” might happen.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Avery Rides Again</h3>
<p class="fst">Although the WLB rulings in the Montgomery Ward case go back several years, and several of the company’s 800 stores and warehouses were “seized” by the Army a year ago, the mills of the capitalist courts finally ground out a decision upholding the “seizure” only last week, on June 8.</p>
<p>In a two-to-one decision, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous ruling of a Federal District Court and declared the “seizure” constitutional. The Army officers in charge then announced that they would finally put into effect the WLB orders which the company so far has defied successfully. This includes payment of $1,342,000 in retroactive pay to the Ward workers, members of the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees.</p>
<p>S.L. Avery, Ward’s board chairman and No. 1 Open-Shopper promptly announced the company would fight the latest court ruling to the Supreme Court. Company lawyers sought a stay of execution until the Supreme Court could act. Another long legal stall might mean the complete destruction of the union, which has already taken a terrific pounding. The plea of the company is that payment of the back pay due the workers would mean “irreparable injury” to it.</p>
<p><em>But only a few days before, Montgomery Ward reported that for the first quarter of 1945, it had upped its net profits, after all taxes and costs, 44 per cent over the same quarter in 1944 – $4,767,955 as compared with $3,439,324. That’s just for three months. And yet it claims it will he “ruined” by paying $1,342,000 in back wages stolen from the workers.</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(16 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 24, 16 June 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Now They’re ‘Slackers’
Even the most benevolent of capitalists pay off with a lay-off. That’s what half the 8,600 employees of Jack and Heintz Company, Cleveland, found out last week. Some 4,300 of them were “requested” to “resign” because of war contract terminations.
It was quite, a shock to the workers, called “associates,” to find out how quickly the bosses would make them “disassociates” when they were no longer needed to make profits. Jack and Heintz were highly publicized as the “ideal” employers. By working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the “associates” pulled down relatively high “take home” pay. The plant was run like “one big happy family,” – call the boss by his first name, music while you work.
On May 29, President William S. Jack broadcast over the plant loudspeakers asking women and professional workers particularly to “come to their foremen and say ‘Here is my resignation’.” He added: “You have done well by your country in its greatest trial and we appreciate it. The time has come for us to help your return to your families and professions.” When only 20 “associates” accepted this “help” to return to their families – jobless; Jack and Heintz “benevolence” evaporated. On May 31, the company announced that there were a bunch of “slackers” and “discord seekers” in the plant who were to be purged.
Although the AFL Machinists have a contract in the plant, the union is almost completely “housebroken.” The “purge” will be conducted through the union grievance committee, a company official stated. The union stewards, he said, have an “eye” on the “disrupters.” They don’t seem to have an eye on the contract, however, because the layoffs are being conducted in ruthless violation of seniority provisions.
* * *
No Union Conventions
The Office of Defense Transportation recently announced that for the next 12 to 15 months the government would hot permit conventions of more than 50 people. This decision was turned primarily at the unions, several of which were preparing to hold their annual conventions this summer and fall.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians use the railroads and buses daily, with most business men and their families still managing to take their vacations and trips. It would seem that a few union conventions, numbering usually from a couple of hundred to one or two with as many as 2,000 delegates, would not interfere appreciably with the transportation problem.
But the government doesn’t think union conventions are “essential.” Millions of workers are facing layoffs. “Take home” pay is being drastically slashed through reduced hours and loss of overtime, while prices and shortages mount. Meanwhile, the administration has put new rivets in the wage freeze.
The rank and file of the unions are beginning to put up a fight. All over the country they are starting to scrap the no-strike pledge in action. The workers ere demanding a real program against unemployment and wage cuts. And that’s the real reason Why the administration doesn’t want any conventions – especially big rank and file union conventions.
And its a mighty fine decision from the standpoint of the top union leaders. They’re having a hard time holding the ranks “in line.” They’re not anxious to hold conventions where “anything” might happen.
* * *
Avery Rides Again
Although the WLB rulings in the Montgomery Ward case go back several years, and several of the company’s 800 stores and warehouses were “seized” by the Army a year ago, the mills of the capitalist courts finally ground out a decision upholding the “seizure” only last week, on June 8.
In a two-to-one decision, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous ruling of a Federal District Court and declared the “seizure” constitutional. The Army officers in charge then announced that they would finally put into effect the WLB orders which the company so far has defied successfully. This includes payment of $1,342,000 in retroactive pay to the Ward workers, members of the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees.
S.L. Avery, Ward’s board chairman and No. 1 Open-Shopper promptly announced the company would fight the latest court ruling to the Supreme Court. Company lawyers sought a stay of execution until the Supreme Court could act. Another long legal stall might mean the complete destruction of the union, which has already taken a terrific pounding. The plea of the company is that payment of the back pay due the workers would mean “irreparable injury” to it.
But only a few days before, Montgomery Ward reported that for the first quarter of 1945, it had upped its net profits, after all taxes and costs, 44 per cent over the same quarter in 1944 – $4,767,955 as compared with $3,439,324. That’s just for three months. And yet it claims it will he “ruined” by paying $1,342,000 in back wages stolen from the workers.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>What Can Labor Expect of Truman?</h1>
<h3>(21 April 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_16" target="new">Vol. IX No. 16</a>, 21 April 1945, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt has suddenly lifted into the office of the presidency of the United States a man who is little known to the majority of the American people. This comparatively obscure figure, Harry S. Truman, now stands at the head of the greatest military, industrial and financial power in the world. As the chief executive officer of the ruling capitalist class in the United States, his words and deeds will directly affect the lives of all American workers and the future welfare of the hungry, tortured, war-weary masses throughout the world.</p>
<p>Universal interest is now focused upon this political personage. Every thinking worker wants to know who Truman really is. What are his connections and background? Who are his advisers? What interests will he serve ? What policies will he pursue? American labor needs a clear and truthful answer to these questions as a guiding line for the period ahead of economic convulsions and world-wide social crisis.</p>
<p><em>One thing is certain at first glance. Truman commands the confidence of every sector of the capitalist class today. The entire capitalist press – from the extreme right wing to the so-called “liberal” – have hailed the new President. Their expressions of confidence and pledges of support are no mere products of sentiment and good-will. They are based upon a precise and well-founded appraisal of the policies they expect him to follow.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Wall Street’s Verdict</h4>
<p class="fst">The <strong>New York Times</strong>, mouthpiece of the Morgan financial interests, on April 14 frankly headlined, “Turn To Right Seen.” It characterizes Truman as “imbued with basic conservatism,” “one whose philosophy is far more ‘a little right of center’ than the ‘little left of center’ of recent days.”</p>
<p>On this same theme, the <strong>New York Post</strong>, which professes liberalism, on April 17 indicated that the character of Truman’s advisers, who are expected to play a decisive role jn shaping his policies, “might be accurately described as ‘a little right of center’.” In more concrete terms, Ralph Hendershot, financial editor of the reactionary Republican <strong>New York World-Telegram</strong>, wrote on April 14: “The stock market yesterday gave President Truman a splendid vote of confidence ... businessmen have confidence in him.”</p>
<p>This confidence of Big Business is based on its conviction that Truman will effectively advance its program and protect its interests. This is amply demonstrated by a review of his background and political record.</p>
<p>More will be written about Truman’s boyhood on his father’s 600-acre Missouri farm and his activities as an artillery officer in the last war than about his political rise through the notorious Pendergast machine in Kansas City and his record as a loyal machine man in the Democratic Party councils of the big city bosses and Southern poll-tax politicians. The latter affiliations provide the real clue to his political role.</p>
<p>After the last war, Truman got his political start with the Pendergast gang – a number of whom, including the big boss himself, were sent to prison in 1937 for vote-fraud, graft and corruption. He was introduced to Tom Pendergast, the big boss of Kansas City politics, by Pendergast’s nephew who had served under Truman in the army.<br>
</p>
<h4>Pendergast Protégé</h4>
<p class="fst">Through Pendergast’s support Truman was elected as county judge, a post he occupied as a faithful henchman of Pendergast until 1934. In that year he was hand-picked by boss Pendergast for election to the U.S. Senate from Missouri.</p>
<p>To this day, as the <strong>New York Times</strong> points out: “Trained in the Tom Pendergast school of politics, President Truman is a party man, with small regard for dreamers in government who have no definite political affiliations.” Marshall Field’s professional liberal daily, <strong>PM</strong>, while trying to squeeze Truman into a “liberal” mold, confesses with misgiving that he is “fiercely loyal to old political associates... does not break old political school ties easily.” This was written apropos of his present connections with James Pendergast and reports of his intention to draw into influential posts a number of those machine politicians who helped boost Truman to the top.</p>
<p>In short, as one commentator expressed it with evident satisfaction, Truman will bring to his appointments the traits of a “good, shrewd horsetrader’’ – that is, of a practitioner of the political spoils system.</p>
<p>The liberal press and the union leaders are trying hard to represent Truman as a “practical liberal” on the scant record of his activities in the Senate from 1934 until his elevation to the vice-presidency after he got the backing of the late President Roosevelt, the big city bosses and the Southern poll-tax politicians at the 1944 Democratic convention.<br>
</p>
<h4>Congressional Record</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>His record of routine support for “New Deal” measures does not weigh in the scale with his vote on two decisive measures. He voted originally for the Smith-Connally anti-strike law. He supported the last tax bill which Rooseyelt himself was compelled to characterize as “relief for the greedy.” He headed the Senate war investigation committee – which skimmed the surface of some of the more glaring scandals, but did little to halt the more than fifty-billions in graft that Comptroller General Lindsay Warren admitted has been made in this war beyond “reasonable profits.”</em></p>
<p>The real tip-off on Truman’s future policies lies in his associates and advisers and in his relations with Congress. The present Congress, in the opinion of almost every liberal and labor commentator, rates as one of the most reactionary in American history. Truman’s accession to the presidency, according to conservative commentator Arthur Krock, means “that Congressional influence will once again loom large in the American government, and the voice of the Senate will sway Executive decisions.” That is to say, Truman will act in harmony with the reactionary character of Congress.</p>
<p>This is more than borne out by the men associated with Truman and those he is expected to draw into his intimate administrative circle in the future.<br>
</p>
<h4>Truman’s Close Advisers</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>First and foremost will be James F. Byrnes, former War Mobilization Director. He was the first man called back to Washington to advise Truman. A hardened Southern “white supremacy” reactionary, a target before his resignation of the most bitter attacks from all sections of the labor movement, Byrnes looms as Truman’s closest and most influential adviser, who is said to be slated for the key post of Secretary of State.</em></p>
<p>Others in the retinue of Truman’s advisers and possible new cabinet members include John Snyder, Hugh Fulton, Robert Hannegan. Snyder is a St. Louis banker, described by one of his friends as “holding about the same views as Emil Schram,” president of the New York Stock Exchange. Fulton was formerly associated with Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood, a wealthy New York corporation law firm associated with some of America’s most powerful corporations and cartel interests, including U.S. Steel and the House of Morgan. Hannegan is chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee, spokesman for the big city bosses.</p>
<p>These few facts cited here give a warning to labor of what it can expect of Truman.</p>
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Joseph Keller
What Can Labor Expect of Truman?
(21 April 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 16, 21 April 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt has suddenly lifted into the office of the presidency of the United States a man who is little known to the majority of the American people. This comparatively obscure figure, Harry S. Truman, now stands at the head of the greatest military, industrial and financial power in the world. As the chief executive officer of the ruling capitalist class in the United States, his words and deeds will directly affect the lives of all American workers and the future welfare of the hungry, tortured, war-weary masses throughout the world.
Universal interest is now focused upon this political personage. Every thinking worker wants to know who Truman really is. What are his connections and background? Who are his advisers? What interests will he serve ? What policies will he pursue? American labor needs a clear and truthful answer to these questions as a guiding line for the period ahead of economic convulsions and world-wide social crisis.
One thing is certain at first glance. Truman commands the confidence of every sector of the capitalist class today. The entire capitalist press – from the extreme right wing to the so-called “liberal” – have hailed the new President. Their expressions of confidence and pledges of support are no mere products of sentiment and good-will. They are based upon a precise and well-founded appraisal of the policies they expect him to follow.
Wall Street’s Verdict
The New York Times, mouthpiece of the Morgan financial interests, on April 14 frankly headlined, “Turn To Right Seen.” It characterizes Truman as “imbued with basic conservatism,” “one whose philosophy is far more ‘a little right of center’ than the ‘little left of center’ of recent days.”
On this same theme, the New York Post, which professes liberalism, on April 17 indicated that the character of Truman’s advisers, who are expected to play a decisive role jn shaping his policies, “might be accurately described as ‘a little right of center’.” In more concrete terms, Ralph Hendershot, financial editor of the reactionary Republican New York World-Telegram, wrote on April 14: “The stock market yesterday gave President Truman a splendid vote of confidence ... businessmen have confidence in him.”
This confidence of Big Business is based on its conviction that Truman will effectively advance its program and protect its interests. This is amply demonstrated by a review of his background and political record.
More will be written about Truman’s boyhood on his father’s 600-acre Missouri farm and his activities as an artillery officer in the last war than about his political rise through the notorious Pendergast machine in Kansas City and his record as a loyal machine man in the Democratic Party councils of the big city bosses and Southern poll-tax politicians. The latter affiliations provide the real clue to his political role.
After the last war, Truman got his political start with the Pendergast gang – a number of whom, including the big boss himself, were sent to prison in 1937 for vote-fraud, graft and corruption. He was introduced to Tom Pendergast, the big boss of Kansas City politics, by Pendergast’s nephew who had served under Truman in the army.
Pendergast Protégé
Through Pendergast’s support Truman was elected as county judge, a post he occupied as a faithful henchman of Pendergast until 1934. In that year he was hand-picked by boss Pendergast for election to the U.S. Senate from Missouri.
To this day, as the New York Times points out: “Trained in the Tom Pendergast school of politics, President Truman is a party man, with small regard for dreamers in government who have no definite political affiliations.” Marshall Field’s professional liberal daily, PM, while trying to squeeze Truman into a “liberal” mold, confesses with misgiving that he is “fiercely loyal to old political associates... does not break old political school ties easily.” This was written apropos of his present connections with James Pendergast and reports of his intention to draw into influential posts a number of those machine politicians who helped boost Truman to the top.
In short, as one commentator expressed it with evident satisfaction, Truman will bring to his appointments the traits of a “good, shrewd horsetrader’’ – that is, of a practitioner of the political spoils system.
The liberal press and the union leaders are trying hard to represent Truman as a “practical liberal” on the scant record of his activities in the Senate from 1934 until his elevation to the vice-presidency after he got the backing of the late President Roosevelt, the big city bosses and the Southern poll-tax politicians at the 1944 Democratic convention.
Congressional Record
His record of routine support for “New Deal” measures does not weigh in the scale with his vote on two decisive measures. He voted originally for the Smith-Connally anti-strike law. He supported the last tax bill which Rooseyelt himself was compelled to characterize as “relief for the greedy.” He headed the Senate war investigation committee – which skimmed the surface of some of the more glaring scandals, but did little to halt the more than fifty-billions in graft that Comptroller General Lindsay Warren admitted has been made in this war beyond “reasonable profits.”
The real tip-off on Truman’s future policies lies in his associates and advisers and in his relations with Congress. The present Congress, in the opinion of almost every liberal and labor commentator, rates as one of the most reactionary in American history. Truman’s accession to the presidency, according to conservative commentator Arthur Krock, means “that Congressional influence will once again loom large in the American government, and the voice of the Senate will sway Executive decisions.” That is to say, Truman will act in harmony with the reactionary character of Congress.
This is more than borne out by the men associated with Truman and those he is expected to draw into his intimate administrative circle in the future.
Truman’s Close Advisers
First and foremost will be James F. Byrnes, former War Mobilization Director. He was the first man called back to Washington to advise Truman. A hardened Southern “white supremacy” reactionary, a target before his resignation of the most bitter attacks from all sections of the labor movement, Byrnes looms as Truman’s closest and most influential adviser, who is said to be slated for the key post of Secretary of State.
Others in the retinue of Truman’s advisers and possible new cabinet members include John Snyder, Hugh Fulton, Robert Hannegan. Snyder is a St. Louis banker, described by one of his friends as “holding about the same views as Emil Schram,” president of the New York Stock Exchange. Fulton was formerly associated with Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood, a wealthy New York corporation law firm associated with some of America’s most powerful corporations and cartel interests, including U.S. Steel and the House of Morgan. Hannegan is chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee, spokesman for the big city bosses.
These few facts cited here give a warning to labor of what it can expect of Truman.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>GM, UAW Agree on Sliding Scale;<br>
Meat Union Forced to End Strike</h1>
<h4>General Motors Forestalls Walkout with 11-Cent Raise</h4>
<h3>(31 May 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_22" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 22</a>, 31 May 1948, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><b>Seventy-two hours before the strike deadline set by the CIO United Auto Workers for 225,000 members in 90 GM plants, the General Motors Corporation broke the Big Business front of opposition to any pay increases and agreed to a general wage raise of 11 cents an hour, effective May 28.</b></p>
<p>For the first time in any major union agreement, the proposed new GM contract incorporates the principle of the sliding scale of wages. This will provide automatic wage increases proportional to rising living costs, adjusted every three months on the basis of the cost-of-living figures of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.</p>
<p>UAW leaders hail the sliding scale cost-of-living contract, which must go to the GM workers for final ratification, as a “far-reaching victory” for the UAW’s one million members and “for all American workers.”</p>
<p><em>This present attitude of the UAW leaders is surprising in view of the bitter opposition of UAW President Walter Reuther to the sliding scale, principle. At the delegates conference last February and subsequently, Reuther attacked the sliding scale program advanced by five GM local union presidents in Flint. The sliding scale program has long been advocated by <b>The Militant</b> and demanded by UAW progressives, BUT WITH DEFINITE SAFEGUARDS THAT THE GM CONTRACT DOES NOT INCLUDE.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>GM Feared Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">The action of General Motors was undoubtedly based primarily ch the threat of a strike which, coming simultaneously with the two-week-old walkout of 75,000 Chrysler workers, could easily have developed into a general auto industry strike at the time of the highest profits in its history.</p>
<p>The actual immediate wage increase, however, is only about a third of the original demand of the UAW. This called for a total of 30 cents an hour more. The UAW International Executive Board, had adopted a program calling for a flat 25-cent increase in basic pay, plus five cents in fringe demands. Reuther was instrumental in reducing the basic pay demand on GM to 15 cents, offering to settle for this smaller sum if the company granted an “acceptable” pension plan.</p>
<p>However, the contract includes none of the vital welfare demands. Nor does it contain any of the essential improvements in grievance procedure and working conditions long sought by GM workers. The contract still contains all the onerous “penalty” clauses and other discriminatory features that have always made the GM contract the most unsatisfactory in the industry. <em>Thus, the UAW leaders have accepted the sliding scale program not as a fortification of, but as a substitute for the needed increase in real basic wages, welfare benefits and grievance improvements.</em></p>
<p>The immediate effect of the GM agreement is to crack the solid front of the big corporations, including U.S. Steel, General Electric, Westinghouse, Ford and Chrysler, against any wage increases. It«, is expected that it will lead to a speedy settlement of the Chrysler strike and possibly the Ford wage negotiations. Chrysler had withdrawn even a miserable 6-cent offer, and Ford had insultingly “offered” a wage cut.</p>
<p>The capitalist press has greeted the GM settlement with great misgivings.. Prices have been rising steadily since the commodity market break last February. The ERP and the expanding military budget are expected to give a new impulsion to the inflation. The GM workers are bound to benefit by automatic wage increases during the next two years, the term of the new contract.</p>
<p><em>Here is how the new sliding scale contract will work:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>The immediate 11-cent increase includes three cents this year for “living-improvement” and eight cents for a cost-of-living adjustment. Another three cents will be added for “living improvement” next year.<br>
</li>
<li>The eight-cent cost-of-living adjustment can go up or. down according to the movement of living costs. For each two-thirds of a per cent rise in the consumers prices index of the Bureau of Labor Statistics there will be an equivalent rise in the wage rate. That is, if the index rises 1.14 points above the April figure of 169.3, then the auto workers automatically get a one cent pay boost. THERE IS NO CEILING ON UPWARD WAGE ADJUSTMENTS.<br>
</li>
<li><em>If prices decline, then there will be an equivalent percentage decline ip the wage scale, BUT NOT MORE THAN A MAXIMUM TOTAL OF FIVE CENTS Thus, even if there should be an unlikely big drop in prices, the GM workers are assured not less than a six cent increase this year, plus three cents more next year.</em><br>
<p></p>
</li></ul>
<h4>Two “Gimmicks”</h4>
<p class="fst">There are two real “gimmicks” in the contract, however. First, it establishes as the “norm” for real wages (the actual buying power of money wages) the ratio of living costs to money wages in the depressed year of 1940. Secondly, changes in living costs, for the purposes of the sliding wage scale, are based on the unreliable and doctored consumers prices index of the capitalist government.</p>
<p><em>The original UAW demands had called for a 25-cent increase in basic wages to bring the real wages up to the level of real wages at the end of the war. By arbitrarily going back eight years to August 1940, GM and the UAW negotiators established as a “norm” a figure for real wages which is only eight cents above the existing real wage. But GM hourly wages, before the present increase, were actually 20 to 25 cents below the real wages two years ago.</em></p>
<p>The three cents “improvement” boost was thrown in to cover up the fact that the “cost-of-living” increase of eight cents does not nearly compensate for the actual rise in the cost of living since the end of the war. The extra three cents does not begin to bring the real wages of the GM workers up to the highest previous peak and is only a slight “improvement” over the real wages of nearly a decade ago.<br>
</p>
<h4>Easy to Cheat</h4>
<p class="fst">The consumers prices index of the government, as the union leaders themselves have repeatedly pointed out, is heavily weighted to minimize the real rise in living costs. It will be easy to cheat the GM workers of increases to which they are entitled if the sliding wage scale is based upon a falsified index. The only reliable cost-of-living index would be one maintained by economists and statisticians of the unions themselves.</p>
<p>In the wage program of the UAW progressives, the demands were for a 25-cent raise in basic wages to bring real wages up to the highest previous level and for a sliding wage scale to protect these real wages from future price rises. The UAW leaders adopted the first demand and threw out the second. Reuther falsely claimed that the sliding Wage scale did not permit improvements in real wages. Now the UAW negotiators throw out the progressives’ first demand Slid settle for the second, which they had previously rejected.</p>
<p><em>Naturally, in negotiating a sliding scale contract, the workers must be wary of such “gimmicks” as have been incorporated into the GM contract. In taking over the wage program of the UAW progressives, the Reutherites have distorted it and left out the safeguards which the progressives have always included in their sliding scale program.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Forward Step</h4>
<p class="fst">However, the principle of the sliding scale of wages represents a great forward step in this period of inflation. It is the indispensable and only immediately effective program to safeguard real wages against constantly mounting prices.</p>
<p>This sliding scale program, with all the necessary safeguards included, must become a great unifying and rallying slogan of the union struggle in the coming period of mounting inflation brought on by the new war preparations.</p>
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Art Preis
GM, UAW Agree on Sliding Scale;
Meat Union Forced to End Strike
General Motors Forestalls Walkout with 11-Cent Raise
(31 May 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 22, 31 May 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Seventy-two hours before the strike deadline set by the CIO United Auto Workers for 225,000 members in 90 GM plants, the General Motors Corporation broke the Big Business front of opposition to any pay increases and agreed to a general wage raise of 11 cents an hour, effective May 28.
For the first time in any major union agreement, the proposed new GM contract incorporates the principle of the sliding scale of wages. This will provide automatic wage increases proportional to rising living costs, adjusted every three months on the basis of the cost-of-living figures of the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
UAW leaders hail the sliding scale cost-of-living contract, which must go to the GM workers for final ratification, as a “far-reaching victory” for the UAW’s one million members and “for all American workers.”
This present attitude of the UAW leaders is surprising in view of the bitter opposition of UAW President Walter Reuther to the sliding scale, principle. At the delegates conference last February and subsequently, Reuther attacked the sliding scale program advanced by five GM local union presidents in Flint. The sliding scale program has long been advocated by The Militant and demanded by UAW progressives, BUT WITH DEFINITE SAFEGUARDS THAT THE GM CONTRACT DOES NOT INCLUDE.
GM Feared Strike
The action of General Motors was undoubtedly based primarily ch the threat of a strike which, coming simultaneously with the two-week-old walkout of 75,000 Chrysler workers, could easily have developed into a general auto industry strike at the time of the highest profits in its history.
The actual immediate wage increase, however, is only about a third of the original demand of the UAW. This called for a total of 30 cents an hour more. The UAW International Executive Board, had adopted a program calling for a flat 25-cent increase in basic pay, plus five cents in fringe demands. Reuther was instrumental in reducing the basic pay demand on GM to 15 cents, offering to settle for this smaller sum if the company granted an “acceptable” pension plan.
However, the contract includes none of the vital welfare demands. Nor does it contain any of the essential improvements in grievance procedure and working conditions long sought by GM workers. The contract still contains all the onerous “penalty” clauses and other discriminatory features that have always made the GM contract the most unsatisfactory in the industry. Thus, the UAW leaders have accepted the sliding scale program not as a fortification of, but as a substitute for the needed increase in real basic wages, welfare benefits and grievance improvements.
The immediate effect of the GM agreement is to crack the solid front of the big corporations, including U.S. Steel, General Electric, Westinghouse, Ford and Chrysler, against any wage increases. It«, is expected that it will lead to a speedy settlement of the Chrysler strike and possibly the Ford wage negotiations. Chrysler had withdrawn even a miserable 6-cent offer, and Ford had insultingly “offered” a wage cut.
The capitalist press has greeted the GM settlement with great misgivings.. Prices have been rising steadily since the commodity market break last February. The ERP and the expanding military budget are expected to give a new impulsion to the inflation. The GM workers are bound to benefit by automatic wage increases during the next two years, the term of the new contract.
Here is how the new sliding scale contract will work:
The immediate 11-cent increase includes three cents this year for “living-improvement” and eight cents for a cost-of-living adjustment. Another three cents will be added for “living improvement” next year.
The eight-cent cost-of-living adjustment can go up or. down according to the movement of living costs. For each two-thirds of a per cent rise in the consumers prices index of the Bureau of Labor Statistics there will be an equivalent rise in the wage rate. That is, if the index rises 1.14 points above the April figure of 169.3, then the auto workers automatically get a one cent pay boost. THERE IS NO CEILING ON UPWARD WAGE ADJUSTMENTS.
If prices decline, then there will be an equivalent percentage decline ip the wage scale, BUT NOT MORE THAN A MAXIMUM TOTAL OF FIVE CENTS Thus, even if there should be an unlikely big drop in prices, the GM workers are assured not less than a six cent increase this year, plus three cents more next year.
Two “Gimmicks”
There are two real “gimmicks” in the contract, however. First, it establishes as the “norm” for real wages (the actual buying power of money wages) the ratio of living costs to money wages in the depressed year of 1940. Secondly, changes in living costs, for the purposes of the sliding wage scale, are based on the unreliable and doctored consumers prices index of the capitalist government.
The original UAW demands had called for a 25-cent increase in basic wages to bring the real wages up to the level of real wages at the end of the war. By arbitrarily going back eight years to August 1940, GM and the UAW negotiators established as a “norm” a figure for real wages which is only eight cents above the existing real wage. But GM hourly wages, before the present increase, were actually 20 to 25 cents below the real wages two years ago.
The three cents “improvement” boost was thrown in to cover up the fact that the “cost-of-living” increase of eight cents does not nearly compensate for the actual rise in the cost of living since the end of the war. The extra three cents does not begin to bring the real wages of the GM workers up to the highest previous peak and is only a slight “improvement” over the real wages of nearly a decade ago.
Easy to Cheat
The consumers prices index of the government, as the union leaders themselves have repeatedly pointed out, is heavily weighted to minimize the real rise in living costs. It will be easy to cheat the GM workers of increases to which they are entitled if the sliding wage scale is based upon a falsified index. The only reliable cost-of-living index would be one maintained by economists and statisticians of the unions themselves.
In the wage program of the UAW progressives, the demands were for a 25-cent raise in basic wages to bring real wages up to the highest previous level and for a sliding wage scale to protect these real wages from future price rises. The UAW leaders adopted the first demand and threw out the second. Reuther falsely claimed that the sliding Wage scale did not permit improvements in real wages. Now the UAW negotiators throw out the progressives’ first demand Slid settle for the second, which they had previously rejected.
Naturally, in negotiating a sliding scale contract, the workers must be wary of such “gimmicks” as have been incorporated into the GM contract. In taking over the wage program of the UAW progressives, the Reutherites have distorted it and left out the safeguards which the progressives have always included in their sliding scale program.
Forward Step
However, the principle of the sliding scale of wages represents a great forward step in this period of inflation. It is the indispensable and only immediately effective program to safeguard real wages against constantly mounting prices.
This sliding scale program, with all the necessary safeguards included, must become a great unifying and rallying slogan of the union struggle in the coming period of mounting inflation brought on by the new war preparations.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Search for a White House Tenant</h1>
<h3>(8 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_10" target="new">Vol. XII No. 10</a>, 8 March 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Housing shortage got you down? A couple of real estate brokers named Philip Murray and William Green are seeking a new tenant for one of the choicest residences in Washington, D.C. It’s in an exclusive neighborhood, but close to the shopping district. It’s equipped with a new $15,000 balcony for sun-bathing. And it’s rent free – with a $75,000 a year honorarium. Just to help you keep up this elegant joint.</p>
<p>But before you start writing any letters like “Dear Sirs: I’m a veteran with a wife and two kids living in a one-room cold-water flat,” you should know there are a few strings attached to the deal. The lease contains a list of restrictive covenants a yard long – and the usual one barring occupancy by “non-Caucasians” is just a starter.</p>
<p>Labor leaders, non-believers in capitalist “free enterprise,” working-class radicals of any stripe are strictly <i>verboten</i>. The new tenant must be some solid citizen, with respect for property, law and order and the established two-party system. He must have some good Wall Street references, comport himself in a decorous and conservative fashion, but at the same time be able, when the occasion requires, to talk a polite brand of “liberalism.”</p>
<p>Murray & Green, Inc., would prefer, if possible, a tenant of long-standing devotion to the Democratic Party. But a Republican might prove acceptable if he can meet all the other qualifications.</p>
<p>There’s one other very important restriction. Opponents of the Truman Doctrine are barred from the start. Anyone who doesn’t stand four-square for American imperialism, support of anti-labor regimes in Europe and preparations for World War III against the Soviet Union had better not send in an application for White House tenancy to Murray & Green, Inc.</p>
<p>But, you will probably ask, why arc these real estate brokers – -whose sideline, incidentally, is holding union offices – looking for a new tenant? Don’t they have a desirable tenant in the White House now? Well, yes – and no.</p>
<p>If it were altogether up to Murray and Green, they’d renew Harry S. Truman’s lease in a minute, But there’s one further little hitch.</p>
<p>The lease to the White House has to be renewed every four years and signed by a majority vote of the American electorate – meaning principally the workers. And Truman, it looks like now, is suffering from an aggravated case of political halitosis. Even his best friends arc beginning to tell him so.</p>
<p>So, Murray & Green, Inc., have to scram around at this late date to line up a possible new tenant, acceptable to the landlord, Wall Street, and yet who can turn on the “liberal” charm like a neon sign and attract the labor vote. That kind of tenant is scarce as hen’s teeth today.</p>
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Art Preis
Search for a White House Tenant
(8 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 10, 8 March 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Housing shortage got you down? A couple of real estate brokers named Philip Murray and William Green are seeking a new tenant for one of the choicest residences in Washington, D.C. It’s in an exclusive neighborhood, but close to the shopping district. It’s equipped with a new $15,000 balcony for sun-bathing. And it’s rent free – with a $75,000 a year honorarium. Just to help you keep up this elegant joint.
But before you start writing any letters like “Dear Sirs: I’m a veteran with a wife and two kids living in a one-room cold-water flat,” you should know there are a few strings attached to the deal. The lease contains a list of restrictive covenants a yard long – and the usual one barring occupancy by “non-Caucasians” is just a starter.
Labor leaders, non-believers in capitalist “free enterprise,” working-class radicals of any stripe are strictly verboten. The new tenant must be some solid citizen, with respect for property, law and order and the established two-party system. He must have some good Wall Street references, comport himself in a decorous and conservative fashion, but at the same time be able, when the occasion requires, to talk a polite brand of “liberalism.”
Murray & Green, Inc., would prefer, if possible, a tenant of long-standing devotion to the Democratic Party. But a Republican might prove acceptable if he can meet all the other qualifications.
There’s one other very important restriction. Opponents of the Truman Doctrine are barred from the start. Anyone who doesn’t stand four-square for American imperialism, support of anti-labor regimes in Europe and preparations for World War III against the Soviet Union had better not send in an application for White House tenancy to Murray & Green, Inc.
But, you will probably ask, why arc these real estate brokers – -whose sideline, incidentally, is holding union offices – looking for a new tenant? Don’t they have a desirable tenant in the White House now? Well, yes – and no.
If it were altogether up to Murray and Green, they’d renew Harry S. Truman’s lease in a minute, But there’s one further little hitch.
The lease to the White House has to be renewed every four years and signed by a majority vote of the American electorate – meaning principally the workers. And Truman, it looks like now, is suffering from an aggravated case of political halitosis. Even his best friends arc beginning to tell him so.
So, Murray & Green, Inc., have to scram around at this late date to line up a possible new tenant, acceptable to the landlord, Wall Street, and yet who can turn on the “liberal” charm like a neon sign and attract the labor vote. That kind of tenant is scarce as hen’s teeth today.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Meaning of Justice Douglas’s Speech to the CIO</h1>
<h3>(13 December 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_50" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 50</a>, 13 December 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Justice William O. Douglas’s speech to the recent CIO convention was far more than the hypocritical tributes and trite generalities usually bestowed by capitalist politicians on labor audiences. It was a serious attempt by a capable leader of American bourgeois liberalism to provide a rounded and reasoned thesis for the American union leaders. This thesis formulated and justified in theoretical terms their fundamental social philosophy and perspective. That is why CIO President Philip Murray hailed Douglas’s words in such extravagant terms and why the CIO leaders plan to publish the speech and circulate it widely.<br>
</p>
<h4>National Figures</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The official union leaders in America today rest on the potentially most powerful organised force in the world, the 15 million-member trade union movement. They are conscious of themselves as national figures, wielding immense influence. They have been pushed by social developments and social forces into the sphere of ‘‘labor statesmanship,” in which they arc called upon to present solutions to the basic economic, social and political questions of this country and the World.</em></p>
<p>The need of the union bureaucracy to formulate a fundamental perspective, to justify and defend it, is made especially imperative by the direction in which the ranks of the unions have been traveling with ever more persistence. That is toward a break with capitalist politics. Although they had resisted and obstructed this movement, with all their means, some of the union bureaucrats themselves were forced before the elections to concede the need for a “new party,” even a "labor party.”<br>
</p>
<h4>A Defense</h4>
<p class="fst">The unexpected outcome of the elections – unexpected particularly to the union leaders – has momentarily relieved them of the pressure for a new and fundamental turn in their political policies. But it has not altered the deep underlying forces that produced this pressure. It will be felt with redoubled strength on the morrow. The union bureaucrats, capitalist-minded beneficiaries of the capitalist system, are mindful that now, more than ever before, they must defend their policies before the workers. Douglas’s speech is, in a large sense, that defense.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Today labor stands astride a world fraught with fear,” said Douglas. “It occupies a strategic position in the affairs of nations. By reason of its new strength, it is wooed as it has never been before.”</p>
<p class="fst">And by virtue of this new strategic position and strength, Douglas concludes, American labor – and by that he means the leaders – “can no longer take refuge in the slogans of bygone days. It cannot indulge the luxury of complete preoccupation with traditional trade-union activities.”</p>
<p><em>No, it is the duty of America to show “how a human welfare state creates health ... show Europe that it need not be the victim of the concept of a class society ... show how a human welfare state has, managed to distribute in an increasingly equitable manner the dividends of modern technology ...” In short, American labor must be “a missionary of the American way of life” to the whole world.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>“Human Welfare”</h4>
<p class="fst">What is this “human welfare state”? It is already here, according to Douglas, in the United States of America in 1948. It is nothing less than the “classless” state achieved when the “tide of liberalism” from Bryan to Roosevelt finally succeeded in sweeping away “the remaining threats of an industrial serfdom” and “human rights – not property rights alone – became standards of industrial justice.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, stated Douglas, the European workers don’t seem to understand the virtues of this “human welfare state” which Washington seeks to export through the Marshall Plan. They are downright suspicious and even hostile to it. And therefore it becomes necessary for American labor “to bridge the gap that has been growing between the United States and Europe.” If American imperialism cannot speak in its own name, “American labor carries good credentials to western Europe. Doors tightly closed to all others may open at its knock.”</p>
<p><em>The reason for this sad state of affairs in Europe, says Douglas, is that “history has woven the European fabric with a strange twist that has been omitted from our own.” Its development from feudal times “has been based on the concept of ‘class society.’ ... This was the historical condition which Marx – and those socialist writers and thinkers who both preceded and followed him – observed. This then formed the base for their economic thought.”</em></p>
<p>But “the idea of class is foreign to us in this country. We are unable to function on a class basis for the simple reason that it is no part of our tradition ... Man is born here not to class, but to opportunity.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Douglas Thesis</h4>
<p class="fst">In short, what Douglas presents us with is the thesis that American capitalism has solved the problems of human welfare, that it has resolved the class struggle which has torn all other capitalist countries, that it has hit upon a “democratic middle course” – capitalist to be sure – which if spread by American diplomacy, dollars and arms will initiate the “human welfare state” over the entire globe.</p>
<p>Let us look more closely at our model “human welfare state” here at home where we have no class struggle and where everything is distributed in an equitable manner. If there is no class struggle, what have beer these truly titanic strike struggles that have swept this country since the end of the war? Why have even the traditionally most conservative workers – railroadmen, printers, AFL longshoremen – been involved in bitter conflicts with the employers and the government? What is this “human welfare state” that still has a Taft-Hartley Law on the books; that permits the lynching of Negroes, that can’t find adequate housing for tens of millions, that swings ominously between inflation and depression that conducts Hitler-like “loyalty” purges and witchhunts against political dissenters?</p>
<p>This is a country where, in fact, the division between rich and poor has reached extremes never before known – a tiny and ever-narrowing class of multi-millionaires and billionaires on top and a vast mass of wage earners, proletarians – the propertyless – on the bottom. Every day sees a greater and greater concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of an owning few, who control the basic industries, banks, railrdads, utilities, oil and mineral resources, etc.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Depression</h4>
<p class="fst">Even Douglas admits that before the war “the effects of the depression in the 30’s was so severe that the real earnings at that time dropped practically to the level of forty years earlier. One-fifth of our national labor force was idle. The dent in our national income was so great that it completely wiped out the gain in wage rates that had been painfully obtained since the early 1890’s.”</p>
<p>Douglas does not say what has happened since the end of the war, but Murray – who is so eager to spread Douglas’s thesis – stated it in cold figures in his official report to the CIO convention. You will find it on page 5 of his printed <strong>Report to the CIO</strong> under the heading: <em>Percentage Distribution of Our National Income – 1945–1948</em>.</p>
<p><em>The share of all employees in the national income fell from 67.6% in 1915 to 61.2% in 1948 – and this in spite of the greatest strike struggles in American labor history. Imagine how low it would have fallen had this class struggle never taken place! Corporate profits, however, rose in the same four years from 4.8% to 9.1% of the national income. Non-incorporated business profits rose from 9.2% to 11.5%. Farm-owning incomes rose from 6.8% to 8.5%.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>War Budgets</h4>
<p class="fst">But the depression, relieved only by the forced march of war economy, was a hurdle which Douglas could not evade. He leaped, but stumbled flat on his face. “Violent swings in the business cycle” under capitalism, he maintained, “are not as certain as death or taxes.” And he added, “It is indeed ironical and shocking to conclude that it is only through war that we can get maximum production and full employment.”</p>
<p>But that is precisely the case. The “human welfare state” has thus far escaped a terrible postwar depression solely on the basis of swollen government expenditures for armaments. Without the tens of billions being spent annually for both American militarism and “aid” to military dictatorships abroad, American capitalism would right now be in the throes of severe economic convulsions.</p>
<p><em>What in reality is the “human welfare state” we are actually bringing to Europe. Paul Hoffman, Marshall Plan administrator, told the NAM convention last week that the average per capita income in 1947 in Europe “was only $347,” but “if after four years the European average can be raised to $500, that will be the kind of recovery we are thinking about.” The “human welfare state” – maybe in four years – on an average income of less than $10 a week!</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The Mirror</h4>
<p class="fst">And Europe is the mirror of America’s future. In it we can see the whole lifespan of the capitalist system, which was born and flourished there. There too, bourgeois liberals like Douglas once abounded and spread the thesis of the “classless human welfare state” that would arise on the foundations of the profit system. There too, the reformist labor leaders and the Social-Democrats envisaged the amelioration of the class struggle, its modification and disappearance as capitalism provided an ever-growing abundance for all, But they proved wrong. And American capitalism will follow the European road, if the system is permitted to survive.</p>
<p>No, the Murrays and Reuthers will never sell Wall Street’s “human welfare state” to the European workers. And they will not convince the American workers either that we are already enjoying the blessings of such a state here under the domination of monopoly capitalism.</p>
<p>Rather, the division between wealth and poverty will grow here. The Truman Administration and bi-partisan Congress will heap new burdens on the masses through an unbridled program of militarism and war preparations. “Classless” America will experience new and greater class struggles between the workers and the capitalists over the distribution of the national income. And there Will be a vast extension of this class struggle into the political arena. In this sense above all we will embrace the “traditions” of Europe – the traditions of Marx and Marxian socialism – of class parties.<br>
</p>
<h4>Social Forces</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Against the great stream of social forces unleashed by the contradictions and crisis of American capitalism, the thesis of Douglas and the union leaders who seek to float themselves upon it will be swept under. The “human welfare state” will be – can be no other – than a Workers State under the genuinely classless system of socialism.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Meaning of Justice Douglas’s Speech to the CIO
(13 December 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 50, 13 December 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Justice William O. Douglas’s speech to the recent CIO convention was far more than the hypocritical tributes and trite generalities usually bestowed by capitalist politicians on labor audiences. It was a serious attempt by a capable leader of American bourgeois liberalism to provide a rounded and reasoned thesis for the American union leaders. This thesis formulated and justified in theoretical terms their fundamental social philosophy and perspective. That is why CIO President Philip Murray hailed Douglas’s words in such extravagant terms and why the CIO leaders plan to publish the speech and circulate it widely.
National Figures
The official union leaders in America today rest on the potentially most powerful organised force in the world, the 15 million-member trade union movement. They are conscious of themselves as national figures, wielding immense influence. They have been pushed by social developments and social forces into the sphere of ‘‘labor statesmanship,” in which they arc called upon to present solutions to the basic economic, social and political questions of this country and the World.
The need of the union bureaucracy to formulate a fundamental perspective, to justify and defend it, is made especially imperative by the direction in which the ranks of the unions have been traveling with ever more persistence. That is toward a break with capitalist politics. Although they had resisted and obstructed this movement, with all their means, some of the union bureaucrats themselves were forced before the elections to concede the need for a “new party,” even a "labor party.”
A Defense
The unexpected outcome of the elections – unexpected particularly to the union leaders – has momentarily relieved them of the pressure for a new and fundamental turn in their political policies. But it has not altered the deep underlying forces that produced this pressure. It will be felt with redoubled strength on the morrow. The union bureaucrats, capitalist-minded beneficiaries of the capitalist system, are mindful that now, more than ever before, they must defend their policies before the workers. Douglas’s speech is, in a large sense, that defense.
“Today labor stands astride a world fraught with fear,” said Douglas. “It occupies a strategic position in the affairs of nations. By reason of its new strength, it is wooed as it has never been before.”
And by virtue of this new strategic position and strength, Douglas concludes, American labor – and by that he means the leaders – “can no longer take refuge in the slogans of bygone days. It cannot indulge the luxury of complete preoccupation with traditional trade-union activities.”
No, it is the duty of America to show “how a human welfare state creates health ... show Europe that it need not be the victim of the concept of a class society ... show how a human welfare state has, managed to distribute in an increasingly equitable manner the dividends of modern technology ...” In short, American labor must be “a missionary of the American way of life” to the whole world.
“Human Welfare”
What is this “human welfare state”? It is already here, according to Douglas, in the United States of America in 1948. It is nothing less than the “classless” state achieved when the “tide of liberalism” from Bryan to Roosevelt finally succeeded in sweeping away “the remaining threats of an industrial serfdom” and “human rights – not property rights alone – became standards of industrial justice.”
Unfortunately, stated Douglas, the European workers don’t seem to understand the virtues of this “human welfare state” which Washington seeks to export through the Marshall Plan. They are downright suspicious and even hostile to it. And therefore it becomes necessary for American labor “to bridge the gap that has been growing between the United States and Europe.” If American imperialism cannot speak in its own name, “American labor carries good credentials to western Europe. Doors tightly closed to all others may open at its knock.”
The reason for this sad state of affairs in Europe, says Douglas, is that “history has woven the European fabric with a strange twist that has been omitted from our own.” Its development from feudal times “has been based on the concept of ‘class society.’ ... This was the historical condition which Marx – and those socialist writers and thinkers who both preceded and followed him – observed. This then formed the base for their economic thought.”
But “the idea of class is foreign to us in this country. We are unable to function on a class basis for the simple reason that it is no part of our tradition ... Man is born here not to class, but to opportunity.”
Douglas Thesis
In short, what Douglas presents us with is the thesis that American capitalism has solved the problems of human welfare, that it has resolved the class struggle which has torn all other capitalist countries, that it has hit upon a “democratic middle course” – capitalist to be sure – which if spread by American diplomacy, dollars and arms will initiate the “human welfare state” over the entire globe.
Let us look more closely at our model “human welfare state” here at home where we have no class struggle and where everything is distributed in an equitable manner. If there is no class struggle, what have beer these truly titanic strike struggles that have swept this country since the end of the war? Why have even the traditionally most conservative workers – railroadmen, printers, AFL longshoremen – been involved in bitter conflicts with the employers and the government? What is this “human welfare state” that still has a Taft-Hartley Law on the books; that permits the lynching of Negroes, that can’t find adequate housing for tens of millions, that swings ominously between inflation and depression that conducts Hitler-like “loyalty” purges and witchhunts against political dissenters?
This is a country where, in fact, the division between rich and poor has reached extremes never before known – a tiny and ever-narrowing class of multi-millionaires and billionaires on top and a vast mass of wage earners, proletarians – the propertyless – on the bottom. Every day sees a greater and greater concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of an owning few, who control the basic industries, banks, railrdads, utilities, oil and mineral resources, etc.
The Depression
Even Douglas admits that before the war “the effects of the depression in the 30’s was so severe that the real earnings at that time dropped practically to the level of forty years earlier. One-fifth of our national labor force was idle. The dent in our national income was so great that it completely wiped out the gain in wage rates that had been painfully obtained since the early 1890’s.”
Douglas does not say what has happened since the end of the war, but Murray – who is so eager to spread Douglas’s thesis – stated it in cold figures in his official report to the CIO convention. You will find it on page 5 of his printed Report to the CIO under the heading: Percentage Distribution of Our National Income – 1945–1948.
The share of all employees in the national income fell from 67.6% in 1915 to 61.2% in 1948 – and this in spite of the greatest strike struggles in American labor history. Imagine how low it would have fallen had this class struggle never taken place! Corporate profits, however, rose in the same four years from 4.8% to 9.1% of the national income. Non-incorporated business profits rose from 9.2% to 11.5%. Farm-owning incomes rose from 6.8% to 8.5%.
War Budgets
But the depression, relieved only by the forced march of war economy, was a hurdle which Douglas could not evade. He leaped, but stumbled flat on his face. “Violent swings in the business cycle” under capitalism, he maintained, “are not as certain as death or taxes.” And he added, “It is indeed ironical and shocking to conclude that it is only through war that we can get maximum production and full employment.”
But that is precisely the case. The “human welfare state” has thus far escaped a terrible postwar depression solely on the basis of swollen government expenditures for armaments. Without the tens of billions being spent annually for both American militarism and “aid” to military dictatorships abroad, American capitalism would right now be in the throes of severe economic convulsions.
What in reality is the “human welfare state” we are actually bringing to Europe. Paul Hoffman, Marshall Plan administrator, told the NAM convention last week that the average per capita income in 1947 in Europe “was only $347,” but “if after four years the European average can be raised to $500, that will be the kind of recovery we are thinking about.” The “human welfare state” – maybe in four years – on an average income of less than $10 a week!
The Mirror
And Europe is the mirror of America’s future. In it we can see the whole lifespan of the capitalist system, which was born and flourished there. There too, bourgeois liberals like Douglas once abounded and spread the thesis of the “classless human welfare state” that would arise on the foundations of the profit system. There too, the reformist labor leaders and the Social-Democrats envisaged the amelioration of the class struggle, its modification and disappearance as capitalism provided an ever-growing abundance for all, But they proved wrong. And American capitalism will follow the European road, if the system is permitted to survive.
No, the Murrays and Reuthers will never sell Wall Street’s “human welfare state” to the European workers. And they will not convince the American workers either that we are already enjoying the blessings of such a state here under the domination of monopoly capitalism.
Rather, the division between wealth and poverty will grow here. The Truman Administration and bi-partisan Congress will heap new burdens on the masses through an unbridled program of militarism and war preparations. “Classless” America will experience new and greater class struggles between the workers and the capitalists over the distribution of the national income. And there Will be a vast extension of this class struggle into the political arena. In this sense above all we will embrace the “traditions” of Europe – the traditions of Marx and Marxian socialism – of class parties.
Social Forces
Against the great stream of social forces unleashed by the contradictions and crisis of American capitalism, the thesis of Douglas and the union leaders who seek to float themselves upon it will be swept under. The “human welfare state” will be – can be no other – than a Workers State under the genuinely classless system of socialism.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>What Colonial People Think<br> About the War</h1>
<h4>British Get Little Aid Now from Their Own Subjects</h4>
<h3>(14 February 1942)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1942/index.htm#m42_07" target="new">Vol. VI No. 7</a>, 14 February 1942, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">Some of the capitalist press accounts of the Malaya fighting stoop to the absurd in an effort to “explain”, the Japanese military successes. One of the correspondents, for instance, even has it that the Japanese soldiers have the advantage of being “natural” jungle fighters, although most of them have never seen a jungle, being largely farm boys, factory workers, office clerks, etc., of the sort that make up the armies of the western powers.</p>
<p>More plausible accounts reiterate the plaint about Japanese “hordes” and “overwhelming superiority of numbers” and “tremendous concentrations” of mechanical equipment.</p>
<p>A <strong>New York Times</strong> story, Jan. 31, reports the extent of these “hordes”. “A British military commentator in London estimated that the Japanese had six full divisions of 100,000 men in Malaya.”</p>
<p>But how does it happen that 100,000 men have made such rapid advances against the British who rule over 400,000,000 people in India, Burma and the Malay States?<br> </p>
<h4>Britain and China</h4>
<p class="fst">As for aircraft, tanks and guns, the British forces in Malaya are far better off in this respect than the Chinese army.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Yet here are the Chinese, who have nothing,” observes the columnist Samuel Grafton in the <strong>New York Post</strong>, Jan. 15, “killing hell out of the Japanese at Changsha, and filtering toward Canton, while the Malayans, plus Indians, plus Australians, plus British, are backing down the Malay Peninsula toward Singapore. How is it that Chinese ‘natives’ alone” he asks, “are doing better than Malayan natives plus English?”</p>
<p class="fst">Here is a question which probes deeply into the reasons for, the British defeats. What about the Malayan natives? What role are they playing? Haven’t they heard the message of the “four freedoms?”</p>
<p>The dispatches from the Far East don’t say much about the native peoples. But they do contain somé significant hints on the status of affairs.<br> </p>
<h4>Reports on the Natives</h4>
<p class="fst">Interspersed in the reports from Malay and Burma one reads repeatedly:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“British troops most of the time have had to fight blind ... while the Japanese have had aerial observation constantly and the great added advantage of land reconnaissance by their own men slipping through the lines disguised as Malayans or by hirelings among the natives.” (Singapore dispatch, <strong>New York Times</strong>, Jan. 15)</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Japanese continue to fight largely in plain clothes ... Japanese troops dressed like Malays and riding in small groups on bicycles, as if going to market, have attempted to filter through the British lines.” (Northern Johore dispatch, <strong>New York Times</strong>, Jan. 21)</p>
<p class="fst">And from the Maulmein Front, Burma, comes the story:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Fifth columnists aided them (the Japanese), to some extent, in creating general civilian disorganization ... The Japanese dress in the uniforms of prisoners and advance shouting in Burmese, Indian and English. They force natives to shoulder guns and march along with them to give the impression of numerical superiority.”</p>
<p class="fst">It sounds strange indeed, that the British who have ruled Malaya for a hundred years are so easily fooled by Japanese “disguised as natives”; that the Malayan and Burmese natives don’t tip the British off about these cunning tricks; that ordinary Japanese soldiers tun around “shouting” in three foreign tongues, no less.</p>
<p>One is forced to conclude, at any rate, that the native peoples aren’t giving much aid to the British because they are more or less indifferent about the British fight for the “four freedoms?’ Here, then, is a clue to the British difficulties.<br> </p>
<h4>Afraid to Arm the Native People</h4>
<p class="fst">Moreover, the British show no eagerness to organize and arm the natives in defense of their own land.</p>
<p>The London <strong>Daily Express</strong>, Jan. 15, lamented that:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... here is the great tragedy of Malaya. We could have had a native defense in Malaya ... But a pack of whiskey-swilling planters and military birds of passage have forgotten this side of the Malayan population.”</p>
<p class="fst">No, they haven’t “forgotten” it. They deliberately obstruct it. An Associated Press dispatch from Singapore on Feb. 6 tells that the Singapore radio has broadcast an appeal “for all able-bodied European civilians” to join the Singapore defense forces, explaining that “the use of only Europeans for this service likely would prevent the Japanese from trying to land disguised as natives.”</p>
<p>Surely, one must ask, wouldn’t the advantages of a greatly augmented armed force offset the possibility of a few Japanese infiltrating “disguised as natives”, and wouldn’t aimed Malayans be the best, preventive of such a possibility? Clearly, this is a pretty thin excuse to cover the fact that the British fear aimed natives as much as they do the Japanese.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Because the British authorities feel that the native people hate them no less than they fear the threat of the new Japanese masters.</p>
<p>We have a good example on a small scale of what has bred that hatred in the following, reported in an Associated Press dispatch from Singapore, <strong>New York Times</strong>, Feb. 6:</p>
<p>The ranking air raid warden in Singapore is quoted as saying:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It’s no use telling the people that Malta has had a thousand raids and they have stuck it, or that Chungking has had worse than we’ve had. Those places have ideal shelters and we have nothing except drains and trenches.”</p>
<p class="fst">The report comments:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Before the war came to Malaya, authorities here shelved a proposal for deep shelters holding that the terrain was unsuitable and the cost prohibitive.”</p>
<p class="fst">Naturally, the native people, who are being bombed mercilessly by the Japanese, resent the fact that the British could spend $400,000,000 for a now useless naval base and find the “cost prohibitive” for air raid shelters.</p>
<p>And behind this British indifference to the natives’ welfare is what the CBS correspondent Cecil Brown described in the Jan. 12 issue of <strong>Life</strong> magazine:</p>
<h4>“Singapore Mentality”</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“The atrophying malady of dying-without-death best known as the ‘Singapore mentality’, largely helped to bring the Japanese more than 125 miles inside Malaya (early in Jan.). For civilians (British) this walking death is characterized by an apathy to all affairs except making tin and rubber, money, having stengahs (whiskey and soda) between 5 and 8 p.m., keeping fit, being known as ‘a good chap’, and getting thoroughly ‘plawstered’ on Saturday night.”</p>
<p class="fst">The Singapore authorities reacted to this disclosure by barring Brown’s broadcasts, over the Singapore radio because they were “damaging to the British cause and inimical to the local morale.” Local morale, it seems, is affected by accurate reporting, but not by the lack of air raid shelters or the activities of the British ruling class exclusively devoted to “making tin and rubber, money, having stengahs.”</p>
<p>At least one capitalist press commentator, however, has dared to put his finger on the real reason for the British defeats. Samuel Grafton, in the <strong>New York Post</strong>, Feb. 5, frankly states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The natives of Malaya did not care whether the British Won or the Japanese won, and refused stoutly to give their all for what the London press calls the ‘whiskey-swilling planters’ ... Singapore needed a layer of freedom around it a couple of hundred miles wide: this is the only kind of Maginot line which works ...</p>
<p class="quote">“India’s millions, like the Chinese, could pour across that border (Burma) or over the Bay of Bengal, and rip the heart out of the invaders, save the Burma Road, save China, save India, and save freedom, if only they had a portion of freedom to save.</p>
<p class="quote">“It is not that the Indians are indifferent to the war, or ‘prefer the Japanese’; it is that the spirit of man or dog dies under sufficient cuffing and one gets sick of hearing about how we are going to free countries we don’t have, and won’t free countries we do have.”</p>
<p class="fst">Yes, it’s hard for the peoples of India, Burma and Malay to get panic-struck at the idea of suffering a new Japanese master, when three centuries of British “civilization” has brought them little more than a 90 per cent illiteracy, a ragged cotton gown or loin-cloth, and an average life expectancy of 21 years.</p>
<p>Somehow the message of the <i>Atlantic Charter</i> has failed to reach the lands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. And if it has, the natives of India, Burma, Malay and the Dutch East Indies are still so largely illiterate that they cannot read it.</p>
<p>Some apologists for western imperialism shake their heads at the “stupidity” of the subject peoples in the Far East Who aren’t willing to fight for the “difference” between their present lot and what they will have to suffer under the Japanese imperialists. They cannot understand that the natives’ minds are too occupied with the whip actually slicing across their backs to worry much about a Japanese whip which has not yet struck.</p>
<p>The only message that will arouse these subject peoples is the message of independence from all oppressors. Under the banner of national liberation of all the colonial peonies, they would fight and die gladly against the Japanese invaders.</p>
<p>But apparently the British government prefers to risk defeat at the hands of the Japanese rather than give up a single one of its colonies to the people who live in them.</p>
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Art Preis
What Colonial People Think About the War
British Get Little Aid Now from Their Own Subjects
(14 February 1942)
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 7, 14 February 1942, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Some of the capitalist press accounts of the Malaya fighting stoop to the absurd in an effort to “explain”, the Japanese military successes. One of the correspondents, for instance, even has it that the Japanese soldiers have the advantage of being “natural” jungle fighters, although most of them have never seen a jungle, being largely farm boys, factory workers, office clerks, etc., of the sort that make up the armies of the western powers.
More plausible accounts reiterate the plaint about Japanese “hordes” and “overwhelming superiority of numbers” and “tremendous concentrations” of mechanical equipment.
A New York Times story, Jan. 31, reports the extent of these “hordes”. “A British military commentator in London estimated that the Japanese had six full divisions of 100,000 men in Malaya.”
But how does it happen that 100,000 men have made such rapid advances against the British who rule over 400,000,000 people in India, Burma and the Malay States?
Britain and China
As for aircraft, tanks and guns, the British forces in Malaya are far better off in this respect than the Chinese army.
“Yet here are the Chinese, who have nothing,” observes the columnist Samuel Grafton in the New York Post, Jan. 15, “killing hell out of the Japanese at Changsha, and filtering toward Canton, while the Malayans, plus Indians, plus Australians, plus British, are backing down the Malay Peninsula toward Singapore. How is it that Chinese ‘natives’ alone” he asks, “are doing better than Malayan natives plus English?”
Here is a question which probes deeply into the reasons for, the British defeats. What about the Malayan natives? What role are they playing? Haven’t they heard the message of the “four freedoms?”
The dispatches from the Far East don’t say much about the native peoples. But they do contain somé significant hints on the status of affairs.
Reports on the Natives
Interspersed in the reports from Malay and Burma one reads repeatedly:
“British troops most of the time have had to fight blind ... while the Japanese have had aerial observation constantly and the great added advantage of land reconnaissance by their own men slipping through the lines disguised as Malayans or by hirelings among the natives.” (Singapore dispatch, New York Times, Jan. 15)
“The Japanese continue to fight largely in plain clothes ... Japanese troops dressed like Malays and riding in small groups on bicycles, as if going to market, have attempted to filter through the British lines.” (Northern Johore dispatch, New York Times, Jan. 21)
And from the Maulmein Front, Burma, comes the story:
“Fifth columnists aided them (the Japanese), to some extent, in creating general civilian disorganization ... The Japanese dress in the uniforms of prisoners and advance shouting in Burmese, Indian and English. They force natives to shoulder guns and march along with them to give the impression of numerical superiority.”
It sounds strange indeed, that the British who have ruled Malaya for a hundred years are so easily fooled by Japanese “disguised as natives”; that the Malayan and Burmese natives don’t tip the British off about these cunning tricks; that ordinary Japanese soldiers tun around “shouting” in three foreign tongues, no less.
One is forced to conclude, at any rate, that the native peoples aren’t giving much aid to the British because they are more or less indifferent about the British fight for the “four freedoms?’ Here, then, is a clue to the British difficulties.
Afraid to Arm the Native People
Moreover, the British show no eagerness to organize and arm the natives in defense of their own land.
The London Daily Express, Jan. 15, lamented that:
“... here is the great tragedy of Malaya. We could have had a native defense in Malaya ... But a pack of whiskey-swilling planters and military birds of passage have forgotten this side of the Malayan population.”
No, they haven’t “forgotten” it. They deliberately obstruct it. An Associated Press dispatch from Singapore on Feb. 6 tells that the Singapore radio has broadcast an appeal “for all able-bodied European civilians” to join the Singapore defense forces, explaining that “the use of only Europeans for this service likely would prevent the Japanese from trying to land disguised as natives.”
Surely, one must ask, wouldn’t the advantages of a greatly augmented armed force offset the possibility of a few Japanese infiltrating “disguised as natives”, and wouldn’t aimed Malayans be the best, preventive of such a possibility? Clearly, this is a pretty thin excuse to cover the fact that the British fear aimed natives as much as they do the Japanese.
Why?
Because the British authorities feel that the native people hate them no less than they fear the threat of the new Japanese masters.
We have a good example on a small scale of what has bred that hatred in the following, reported in an Associated Press dispatch from Singapore, New York Times, Feb. 6:
The ranking air raid warden in Singapore is quoted as saying:
“It’s no use telling the people that Malta has had a thousand raids and they have stuck it, or that Chungking has had worse than we’ve had. Those places have ideal shelters and we have nothing except drains and trenches.”
The report comments:
“Before the war came to Malaya, authorities here shelved a proposal for deep shelters holding that the terrain was unsuitable and the cost prohibitive.”
Naturally, the native people, who are being bombed mercilessly by the Japanese, resent the fact that the British could spend $400,000,000 for a now useless naval base and find the “cost prohibitive” for air raid shelters.
And behind this British indifference to the natives’ welfare is what the CBS correspondent Cecil Brown described in the Jan. 12 issue of Life magazine:
“Singapore Mentality”
“The atrophying malady of dying-without-death best known as the ‘Singapore mentality’, largely helped to bring the Japanese more than 125 miles inside Malaya (early in Jan.). For civilians (British) this walking death is characterized by an apathy to all affairs except making tin and rubber, money, having stengahs (whiskey and soda) between 5 and 8 p.m., keeping fit, being known as ‘a good chap’, and getting thoroughly ‘plawstered’ on Saturday night.”
The Singapore authorities reacted to this disclosure by barring Brown’s broadcasts, over the Singapore radio because they were “damaging to the British cause and inimical to the local morale.” Local morale, it seems, is affected by accurate reporting, but not by the lack of air raid shelters or the activities of the British ruling class exclusively devoted to “making tin and rubber, money, having stengahs.”
At least one capitalist press commentator, however, has dared to put his finger on the real reason for the British defeats. Samuel Grafton, in the New York Post, Feb. 5, frankly states:
“The natives of Malaya did not care whether the British Won or the Japanese won, and refused stoutly to give their all for what the London press calls the ‘whiskey-swilling planters’ ... Singapore needed a layer of freedom around it a couple of hundred miles wide: this is the only kind of Maginot line which works ...
“India’s millions, like the Chinese, could pour across that border (Burma) or over the Bay of Bengal, and rip the heart out of the invaders, save the Burma Road, save China, save India, and save freedom, if only they had a portion of freedom to save.
“It is not that the Indians are indifferent to the war, or ‘prefer the Japanese’; it is that the spirit of man or dog dies under sufficient cuffing and one gets sick of hearing about how we are going to free countries we don’t have, and won’t free countries we do have.”
Yes, it’s hard for the peoples of India, Burma and Malay to get panic-struck at the idea of suffering a new Japanese master, when three centuries of British “civilization” has brought them little more than a 90 per cent illiteracy, a ragged cotton gown or loin-cloth, and an average life expectancy of 21 years.
Somehow the message of the Atlantic Charter has failed to reach the lands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. And if it has, the natives of India, Burma, Malay and the Dutch East Indies are still so largely illiterate that they cannot read it.
Some apologists for western imperialism shake their heads at the “stupidity” of the subject peoples in the Far East Who aren’t willing to fight for the “difference” between their present lot and what they will have to suffer under the Japanese imperialists. They cannot understand that the natives’ minds are too occupied with the whip actually slicing across their backs to worry much about a Japanese whip which has not yet struck.
The only message that will arouse these subject peoples is the message of independence from all oppressors. Under the banner of national liberation of all the colonial peonies, they would fight and die gladly against the Japanese invaders.
But apparently the British government prefers to risk defeat at the hands of the Japanese rather than give up a single one of its colonies to the people who live in them.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Urges War-Time Air Force</h1>
<h4>Wants to Add Billions of Dollars<br>
to Present Huge Military Budget</h4>
<h3>(26 January 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_04" target="new">Vol. XII No. 4</a>, 26 January 1948, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>American capitalism is gearing its economy and military machine for another world war. That is the clear meaning of the report issued on Jan. 13 by Truman’s Air Policy Commission.</strong></p>
<p>This report, released with Truman’s letter of commendation, projects a vast increase in U.S. military air strength. It sets Jan. 1, 1953 as “A-Day” – the dates when American imperialism must be in position to fight an all-out atomic world war.</p>
<p>The Air Policy Commission proposes for this purpose that expenditures for the air forces, totaling four billion dollars in 1948, be increased starting this year until they reach an annual total of 11 billion dollars in 1952.</p>
<p>Truman – in his 40 billion dollar budget message – asked for more than 11 billion dollars for the military establishment, 28% of the total budget. But his Air Policy Commission the very next day called for an additional sum for military aircraft if more than 1½ billion dollars annually for the next two years. This would bring the direct military budget total in 1949 to 13.2 billion dollars to be increased progressively to 18 billions by 1952.<br>
</p>
<h4>Only the Beginning</h4>
<p class="fst">This is only the beginning, however, as Hanson W. Baldwin, military expert of the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, points out in his Jan. 15 article, <em>Huge Arms Costs Loom</em>. Direct military costs between 1948 and 1952 will range from 15 billions to 25 billions annually – and not the 11 billions Truman told the public in his budget report.</p>
<p>Universal compulsory military training as proposed by Truman and the Big Brass will cost two billions a year (400 million dollars in 1949 just “in anticipation,” Truman’s budget message says.) The National Guard is to be brought to a peak strength of 723,000 with a yearly federal expenditure of 700 million dollars. The Army’s Organized Reserve Corps will get 400 million dollars as against 60 million now.</p>
<p><em>No estimates have been made by the Navy of what it is going to demand to bring its forces up to full wartime peak. The Atomic Energy Commission, now operating on a budget of 600 millions, is asking for another 2 billion dollars for production expansion in the next “four or five years.” A five-year program of “strategic stockpiling” of war materials has already been approved by Congress – cost 2.1 billions.</em></p>
<p>Billions more are being asked for various forms of military construction – new National Guard armories (600 million) new transonic and supersonic wind tunnels (500 millions); new laboratories, testing centers and proving grounds for guided missiles and new weapons (500 millions); modernized merchant marine adaptable to war purposes (600 millions).</p>
<p><em>“These lists are by no means complete,” says Hanson Baldwin.</em></p>
<p>What it all adds up to is this: American imperialism is deliberately and systematically preparing for war. The swollen war budget, growing more gigantic each year, prevents any possibility of halting or controlling the price inflation that is tearing down the living standards of the American people.<br>
</p>
<h4>Will Increase</h4>
<p class="fst">Tm Truman’s Air Policy Commission doesn’t only propose to expand the war establishment now but expresses belief that if conditions do change “substantially for the better” by 1950. “the 1950 review will increase the size of the establishment rather than decrease it.” In other words, the present proposals just a beginning!</p>
<p>But suppose conditions do change “substantially for the better?” According to the Air Policy Commission (and that’s Truman and the Big Brass speaking), that will make no difference!</p>
<p><em>Because “our will to carry the financial burden, which will increase from year to year for several years, may weaken, especially if we should have a period of depression combined with calculated changes for the better in the public attitude of a possible enemy. That is our gravest danger.”</em></p>
<p>As I.F. Stone commented in the Jan 15 <strong>P.M.</strong>, “Heads or tails, higher appropriations win.”</p>
<p>Quick support for the major proposals of the Air Policy Commission is anticipated in Congress from Republicans and Democrats alike. Senator Edwin C. Johnston, Colorado Democrat who has frequently lined up with Taft and the Republicans, has introduced a bill to increase air force appropriations by 4 billions in the next two years. His bill contains no profit-limitations clause. “I just overlooked it,” he breezily told reporters.<br>
</p>
<h4>Quick Support</h4>
<p class="fst">The Republicans, who talk “economy,” are likewise expected to back the demanded gigantic expenditures. In a recent speech in providence, R.I., Senator Taft demonstratively called for an expanded air force.</p>
<p><em>Truman’s war budget, his Air Policy Commission’s report, plus the tremendous increases in military expenditures envisaged in his universal training’ program, reveal the ominous trend. It is the trend to higher and higher prices, to a war-bolstered economy, to scarcity and want, to militarist regimentation, to atomic annihilation.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Truman Urges War-Time Air Force
Wants to Add Billions of Dollars
to Present Huge Military Budget
(26 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 4, 26 January 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
American capitalism is gearing its economy and military machine for another world war. That is the clear meaning of the report issued on Jan. 13 by Truman’s Air Policy Commission.
This report, released with Truman’s letter of commendation, projects a vast increase in U.S. military air strength. It sets Jan. 1, 1953 as “A-Day” – the dates when American imperialism must be in position to fight an all-out atomic world war.
The Air Policy Commission proposes for this purpose that expenditures for the air forces, totaling four billion dollars in 1948, be increased starting this year until they reach an annual total of 11 billion dollars in 1952.
Truman – in his 40 billion dollar budget message – asked for more than 11 billion dollars for the military establishment, 28% of the total budget. But his Air Policy Commission the very next day called for an additional sum for military aircraft if more than 1½ billion dollars annually for the next two years. This would bring the direct military budget total in 1949 to 13.2 billion dollars to be increased progressively to 18 billions by 1952.
Only the Beginning
This is only the beginning, however, as Hanson W. Baldwin, military expert of the N.Y. Times, points out in his Jan. 15 article, Huge Arms Costs Loom. Direct military costs between 1948 and 1952 will range from 15 billions to 25 billions annually – and not the 11 billions Truman told the public in his budget report.
Universal compulsory military training as proposed by Truman and the Big Brass will cost two billions a year (400 million dollars in 1949 just “in anticipation,” Truman’s budget message says.) The National Guard is to be brought to a peak strength of 723,000 with a yearly federal expenditure of 700 million dollars. The Army’s Organized Reserve Corps will get 400 million dollars as against 60 million now.
No estimates have been made by the Navy of what it is going to demand to bring its forces up to full wartime peak. The Atomic Energy Commission, now operating on a budget of 600 millions, is asking for another 2 billion dollars for production expansion in the next “four or five years.” A five-year program of “strategic stockpiling” of war materials has already been approved by Congress – cost 2.1 billions.
Billions more are being asked for various forms of military construction – new National Guard armories (600 million) new transonic and supersonic wind tunnels (500 millions); new laboratories, testing centers and proving grounds for guided missiles and new weapons (500 millions); modernized merchant marine adaptable to war purposes (600 millions).
“These lists are by no means complete,” says Hanson Baldwin.
What it all adds up to is this: American imperialism is deliberately and systematically preparing for war. The swollen war budget, growing more gigantic each year, prevents any possibility of halting or controlling the price inflation that is tearing down the living standards of the American people.
Will Increase
Tm Truman’s Air Policy Commission doesn’t only propose to expand the war establishment now but expresses belief that if conditions do change “substantially for the better” by 1950. “the 1950 review will increase the size of the establishment rather than decrease it.” In other words, the present proposals just a beginning!
But suppose conditions do change “substantially for the better?” According to the Air Policy Commission (and that’s Truman and the Big Brass speaking), that will make no difference!
Because “our will to carry the financial burden, which will increase from year to year for several years, may weaken, especially if we should have a period of depression combined with calculated changes for the better in the public attitude of a possible enemy. That is our gravest danger.”
As I.F. Stone commented in the Jan 15 P.M., “Heads or tails, higher appropriations win.”
Quick support for the major proposals of the Air Policy Commission is anticipated in Congress from Republicans and Democrats alike. Senator Edwin C. Johnston, Colorado Democrat who has frequently lined up with Taft and the Republicans, has introduced a bill to increase air force appropriations by 4 billions in the next two years. His bill contains no profit-limitations clause. “I just overlooked it,” he breezily told reporters.
Quick Support
The Republicans, who talk “economy,” are likewise expected to back the demanded gigantic expenditures. In a recent speech in providence, R.I., Senator Taft demonstratively called for an expanded air force.
Truman’s war budget, his Air Policy Commission’s report, plus the tremendous increases in military expenditures envisaged in his universal training’ program, reveal the ominous trend. It is the trend to higher and higher prices, to a war-bolstered economy, to scarcity and want, to militarist regimentation, to atomic annihilation.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Labor Faces Deadly Peril<br>
of Goverment by Injunction</h1>
<h4>CIO and AFL Heads Follow Do-Nothing Policy in Crisis</h4>
<h3>(5 April 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_14" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 14</a>, 5 April 1948, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><b>Government by Taft-Hartley injunction threatens the American labor movement with the greatest menace in decades – although the CIO and AFL leaders are lost in a fog of indifference, disunity and inaction.</b></p>
<p>The ugly face of the Slave Labor Law has been revealed in the sweeping strikebreaking injunction issued by a federal court on March 27 against the AFL international Typographical Union and its officers.</p>
<p>Machinery for invoking similar injunctions against the striking soft coal miners and CIO meat packing workers has been set in motion by Truman.</p>
<p>Far-reaching precedents that can and will be used against the entire union movement have been established in the ITU case.<br>
</p>
<h4>Drastic Rulings</h4>
<p class="fst">In language that covered every conceivable action of the ITU by deed or word, Federal Judge Luther M. Swygert ruled in effect that:</p>
<ol>
<li>ITU and its local unions cannot strike or take any other form of action to enforce demands which might be in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act, even though these are the subject of an unresolved dispute before the National Labor Relations Board.<br>
</li>
<li>The ITU and its officers may give no aid or encouragement in any form to local unions on strike for demands that might be prohibited by the Taft-Hartley Act.<br>
</li>
<li>The court, in a further unprecedented move, arrogated to itself the authority of deciding what can and what cannot go into the union contract.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">Under peril of imprisonment and ruinous fines, the ITU officials, headed by Woodruff Randolph, are in effect, ordered to negotiate contracts that will eliminate the traditional closed shop.</p>
<p>Now, the United Mine Workers’ representatives, whose union has already felt the weight of one federal injunction and a $710,000 fine for “contempt,” have been ordered by a federal judge to appear at hearings of Truman’s hand-picked, pro-employer “fact-finding” committee.</p>
<p>At the hearing, Lewis insisted that he had not ordered a strike, that the men had walked out spontaneously under the “able and willing” clause of the contract which the mine operators have “dishonored.” The miners, he said, are angry because they have been “goldbricked” by the operators in the matter of the union’s health and welfare fund, from which they have not drawn a penny.</p>
<p><em>While another Truman “fact-finding” committee is clearing the legal path for an injunction against the CIO Packinghouse Workers, local judges are mass-producing anti-picketing restraining orders at the behest of the “Big Four” meat packers. Such injunctions have already been issued in Omaha; St. Paul; Fargo, N.D.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Tifton, Ga.; and Mason City, Iowa.</em></p>
<p>In this hour of deadly peril for labor, the leaders of the CIO and AFL are displaying a criminally sluggish attitude. Not only as between the CIO and AFL, but within these two major organizations there is a total lack of unity of purpose and action.</p>
<p>The AFL top hierarchy has hardly lifted a finger in the ITU case. The CIO chieftains are permitting the packinghouse union to stand isolated. Neither group has so much as said a word against the government’s intervention in the miners’ strike.<br>
</p>
<h4>Two Years Ago</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Only two years ago, organized labor was aggressively on the march, battling on a hundred picket lines. Today, the government is contemptuously clubbing the unions around while the union leaders sit passive and paralyzed, watching labor’s most cherished rights being trampled upon. They are too busy carrying out State Department chores to bother about mobilizing the workers to defend the very life of their unions.</em></p>
<p>These leaders thought they could “come to terms” with the Taft-Hartley Act. They thought by capitulating to the Taft-Hartley “yellow dog” oaths and playing deaf and dumb maybe the unions could ignore the Taft-Hartley Law. But it isn’t ignoring them.<br>
</p>
<h4>Great Danger</h4>
<p class="fst">Unless the whole labor movement joins forces in action around a unified program of struggle, the unions are in great danger. The injunction against the ITU, the government’s moves against the miners and packinghouse workers, are a LATE warning. There is no time to lose.</p>
<p>A Congress of Labor, with full rank and file representation of the CIO, AFL, Railroad Brotherhoods and independents, must be summoned as speedily as possible. A unified program and strategy of action to fight the Taft-Hartley Law, to halt government by injunction for a unified wage fight must be mapped out. The union ranks must demand that their leaders stop peddling the Marshall Plan patent medicine and get on the job of leading labor’s fight for existence.</p>
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Art Preis
Labor Faces Deadly Peril
of Goverment by Injunction
CIO and AFL Heads Follow Do-Nothing Policy in Crisis
(5 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 14, 5 April 1948, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Government by Taft-Hartley injunction threatens the American labor movement with the greatest menace in decades – although the CIO and AFL leaders are lost in a fog of indifference, disunity and inaction.
The ugly face of the Slave Labor Law has been revealed in the sweeping strikebreaking injunction issued by a federal court on March 27 against the AFL international Typographical Union and its officers.
Machinery for invoking similar injunctions against the striking soft coal miners and CIO meat packing workers has been set in motion by Truman.
Far-reaching precedents that can and will be used against the entire union movement have been established in the ITU case.
Drastic Rulings
In language that covered every conceivable action of the ITU by deed or word, Federal Judge Luther M. Swygert ruled in effect that:
ITU and its local unions cannot strike or take any other form of action to enforce demands which might be in violation of the Taft-Hartley Act, even though these are the subject of an unresolved dispute before the National Labor Relations Board.
The ITU and its officers may give no aid or encouragement in any form to local unions on strike for demands that might be prohibited by the Taft-Hartley Act.
The court, in a further unprecedented move, arrogated to itself the authority of deciding what can and what cannot go into the union contract.
Under peril of imprisonment and ruinous fines, the ITU officials, headed by Woodruff Randolph, are in effect, ordered to negotiate contracts that will eliminate the traditional closed shop.
Now, the United Mine Workers’ representatives, whose union has already felt the weight of one federal injunction and a $710,000 fine for “contempt,” have been ordered by a federal judge to appear at hearings of Truman’s hand-picked, pro-employer “fact-finding” committee.
At the hearing, Lewis insisted that he had not ordered a strike, that the men had walked out spontaneously under the “able and willing” clause of the contract which the mine operators have “dishonored.” The miners, he said, are angry because they have been “goldbricked” by the operators in the matter of the union’s health and welfare fund, from which they have not drawn a penny.
While another Truman “fact-finding” committee is clearing the legal path for an injunction against the CIO Packinghouse Workers, local judges are mass-producing anti-picketing restraining orders at the behest of the “Big Four” meat packers. Such injunctions have already been issued in Omaha; St. Paul; Fargo, N.D.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Tifton, Ga.; and Mason City, Iowa.
In this hour of deadly peril for labor, the leaders of the CIO and AFL are displaying a criminally sluggish attitude. Not only as between the CIO and AFL, but within these two major organizations there is a total lack of unity of purpose and action.
The AFL top hierarchy has hardly lifted a finger in the ITU case. The CIO chieftains are permitting the packinghouse union to stand isolated. Neither group has so much as said a word against the government’s intervention in the miners’ strike.
Two Years Ago
Only two years ago, organized labor was aggressively on the march, battling on a hundred picket lines. Today, the government is contemptuously clubbing the unions around while the union leaders sit passive and paralyzed, watching labor’s most cherished rights being trampled upon. They are too busy carrying out State Department chores to bother about mobilizing the workers to defend the very life of their unions.
These leaders thought they could “come to terms” with the Taft-Hartley Act. They thought by capitulating to the Taft-Hartley “yellow dog” oaths and playing deaf and dumb maybe the unions could ignore the Taft-Hartley Law. But it isn’t ignoring them.
Great Danger
Unless the whole labor movement joins forces in action around a unified program of struggle, the unions are in great danger. The injunction against the ITU, the government’s moves against the miners and packinghouse workers, are a LATE warning. There is no time to lose.
A Congress of Labor, with full rank and file representation of the CIO, AFL, Railroad Brotherhoods and independents, must be summoned as speedily as possible. A unified program and strategy of action to fight the Taft-Hartley Law, to halt government by injunction for a unified wage fight must be mapped out. The union ranks must demand that their leaders stop peddling the Marshall Plan patent medicine and get on the job of leading labor’s fight for existence.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>First Anti-Strike Law Victim<br>
Appeals to Labor from Prison</h1>
<h3>(8 June 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_24" target="new">Vol. IX No. 24</a>, 16 June 1945, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>UNIONTOWN, Pa., June 8 – I am writing this in white-hot anger. Just a half hour ago I talked with a courageous, loyal and sincere union man, William Patterson, coal miner from Daisytown. He was locked behind the grey walls and thick black iron bars of the Fayette County prison here. He is American labor’s first imprisoned victim of the vicious Smith-Connally anti-strike act.</strong></p>
<p><em>I hope I can transmit my feeling of protest and outrage to every worker in this country. Because after talking to him this morning inside his grim prison, I am more convinced than ever that not Bill Patterson but those who framed him up and conspired against him are the ones who should be behind bars.</em></p>
<p>“This is not a case just of personal persecution,” was the first thing he said to me in his quiet, firm voice with a trace of southern accent.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“This case involves all labor. It affects every laboring man who ever comes under the conditions of the Smith-Connally act. It would take his civil rights away, his freedom of speech and make him an industrial slave.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Threat to Others</h4>
<p class="fst">His very next thoughts were not about himself, but the 29 other union miners who have had a suspended sentence hanging over their heads since the 1943 national mine strikes when 30 miners from this area were tried under the federal anti-strike law. They were persuaded to plead no contest of the charges and convicted under the most vicious anti-labor law of modern times.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The labor movement should contest the constitutionality of this bill. What I’m afraid of is the threat against the others who were involved in the 1943 trial. They treated me pretty salty when they said I violated my probation when my local went on strike last February and May. But what I’m worried about is the other poor devils. My case sets a precedent which may leave them in a hell of a shape.”</p>
<p class="fst">He then told me a few facts about his case.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There were 27 of us called before a judge on August 27, 1943. There were 30 supposed to come up, but three had been hurt in the mine, and were not tried until later. We never did have any jury trial. We had been indicted by a grand jury that we never even saw. All the testimony came from other people. But we were advised by our lawyers to plead <em>nolo contendere</em> – no contest – and threw ourselves on the mercy of the court.”</p>
<p class="fst">He continued with the circumstances of his imprisonment after a hearing on June 1 for alleged violation of his probation.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“They had 11 strikes chalked up against me when I appeared at the hearing. There were a bunch of men from the mine (Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp’s Vesta No. 4, Richeyville, Pa.) to testify that I wasn’t responsible for the strikes, but the judge wouldn’t let them testify. I told the judge that every man was essential to the other in the mine, and I couldn’t work when a strike was on, even if I wanted to. But I guess they wanted a test case and I was a victim of circumstances, so I’m it.”</p>
<p class="fst">I knew every word he spoke was the truth. I had confirmed it in advance from the officers of UMW Local 2399 at Richeyville where I had attended the union meeting on June 3, the day after Bill was sent to prison. He had been snatched without warning from his wife and two children and shot off to jail after a speedy hearing on June 1.</p>
<p>As he spoke, I peered closely through the heavy steel screen and poor light at the man I had come hundreds of miles to interview so that he might have the chance for the first time to tell in his own words the story that the big-business press and anti-labor government officials have tried to misrepresent and bury.</p>
<p>He stood within a foot or so of me, with just the screen separating our faces, close so that we could see and hear each other. Against the dim background of the four-story barn-like prison interior, with its lines of cells in tiers along the sides, I saw a tall, slim, dark-haired man dressed in a green jacket and tan work trousers. His features were handsome even strong, and he looked much younger than his 39 years. His face revealed intelligence and firm character and his flashing black eyes looked straight into mine as he spoke quietly, but with deep conviction and feeling.<br>
</p>
<h4>Rapid Interview</h4>
<p class="fst">We had to talk fast, because the prison regulations permitted him only 15 minutes with a visitor, although the local prison officials stretched it. a bit to permit me to finish the interview. I shot a list of prepared questions at him. He answered every question without hesitation</p>
<p>During the entire interview there was not a trace of self- pity in anything he said. He was clearly a fighter and a man who understands that he went to prison for a principle in the cause of labor.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I don’t regret a thing I did for the union,” he stated firmly. “I’m a victim of persecution, but I’d conduct the same fight all over again. And when I get out, I’m going to keep up the fight.”</p>
<p class="fst">At this point, his voice bad the only slight tremor in it during the entire conversation. He was obviously swept with deep emotion when he said: “I was always honest and sincere about everything I did for the union. And I’m going to continue to be so.”</p>
<p>From what his union brothers had told me about him, the respect they held for him, I knew he meant it from the bottom of his heart.<br>
</p>
<h4>Patterson’s Life</h4>
<p class="fst">Then he told me a few facts about his life.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I’ve worked 22 years in the mines, since I was 17 years old. I’ve worked 17 years in that one mine at Richeyville. When I first started in the mines, back in 1923, I joined the union, and I’ve stuck with the union ever since.”</p>
<p class="fst">With justifiable pride in his fighting union record, he said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I’ve been in every strike in the mines since 1923. The longest I was ever out was in 1940 – six weeks. I’ve been through some pretty tough times and had plenty of close shaves in the mines, but I was lucky to get off with only slight injuries.”</p>
<p class="fst">He spoke about his wife, Ruby, who comes from a West Virginia miner’s family.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I was never put out on the roadside myself, but my wife’s family was put out of their house in the 1922 strike and they lived in a tent on the mountain-side for seven months.”</p>
<p class="fst">His father was in the mines before him, Bill explained. He was born in Virginia, of old American stock.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“My ancestors came to this country long before the American Revolution. Why, they fought in the American Revolution. And no one can ever accuse me of any un-American activities.”</p>
<p class="fst">For all his courageous attitude, I could see that being in a prison was a terrible ordeal for him, a humiliating experience for a man of his self-respect, who had worked hard all his life.<br>
</p>
<h4>Never Arrested</h4>
<p class="fst">I started to ask, “Have you ever before been – “ He broke in, his lips smiling. “I know what you want to ask, have I ever been in jail before? No – never! I’ve never been arrested.” I could feel his deep hurt at the unjust blot which the enemies of labor have tried to put on his record.</p>
<p>Some people might say, well it’s only for six months. But that’s six months stolen from a man’s life, a man who values freedom and has fought for it all his life. I was in that prison only half an hour, and I confess I couldn’t wait to get out. I promised not to ask any questions. about the conditions there. But I could see it was no better nor worse than most county prisons. The prison attendant informed me that the Fayette County institution is over 50 years old. Outside, it is built like an imitation Gothic church. Inside, it is dim, bare, cold – a forbidding place of grey stone and iron. It’s a place where you do “hard time.”</p>
<p>But there was no complaint from Bill. The only time a note of bitterness entered his voice was when he spoke of the UMW district officials, who let him “take the rap” and have been maintaining a “hand’s off” policy. “It seems that the UMW officials are afraid to stick their necks out. The district officials (Dist. 5, UMW) have made damn fools out of themselves and possibly a martyr out of me.” He spoke not out of concern for himself, but out of pride for the union which he felt the top officials were hurting by their attitude in his case, which grew out of an anti-labor law that was directed in the first instance against the UMW itself.</p>
<p>Just before the time was up, he asked me to give a message to his union brothers of Local 2399 who have voted to back him 100 per cent and have established a fund to keep his family as long as he is in prison with the same amount of money they would have received if he had been working.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Tell all the men to keep up the good fight. And tell them how much I appreciate their support and the help they are giving my family, who are being made to suffer for something they had no part in. Let the boys keep on pitching, and I will sure as hell run a few bases when I serve this time.”</p>
<p class="fst">That’s the spirit that has built the American labor movement, so a working man can lift up his head. That’s the spirit that the Smith-Connally law was intended to crush. For as Bill Patterson emphasized, it’s not just a “personal case.”</p>
<p>There will be many more Bill Pattersons, if the whole labor movement is not aroused to protest, if it fails to fight to free the honest union man, Bill Patterson, and to deal with the real criminals the profiteering crooks, labor exploiters and their political henchmen who conspired to make him an “example” and threw him behind prison bars.</p>
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Art Preis
First Anti-Strike Law Victim
Appeals to Labor from Prison
(8 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 24, 16 June 1945, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
UNIONTOWN, Pa., June 8 – I am writing this in white-hot anger. Just a half hour ago I talked with a courageous, loyal and sincere union man, William Patterson, coal miner from Daisytown. He was locked behind the grey walls and thick black iron bars of the Fayette County prison here. He is American labor’s first imprisoned victim of the vicious Smith-Connally anti-strike act.
I hope I can transmit my feeling of protest and outrage to every worker in this country. Because after talking to him this morning inside his grim prison, I am more convinced than ever that not Bill Patterson but those who framed him up and conspired against him are the ones who should be behind bars.
“This is not a case just of personal persecution,” was the first thing he said to me in his quiet, firm voice with a trace of southern accent.
“This case involves all labor. It affects every laboring man who ever comes under the conditions of the Smith-Connally act. It would take his civil rights away, his freedom of speech and make him an industrial slave.”
Threat to Others
His very next thoughts were not about himself, but the 29 other union miners who have had a suspended sentence hanging over their heads since the 1943 national mine strikes when 30 miners from this area were tried under the federal anti-strike law. They were persuaded to plead no contest of the charges and convicted under the most vicious anti-labor law of modern times.
“The labor movement should contest the constitutionality of this bill. What I’m afraid of is the threat against the others who were involved in the 1943 trial. They treated me pretty salty when they said I violated my probation when my local went on strike last February and May. But what I’m worried about is the other poor devils. My case sets a precedent which may leave them in a hell of a shape.”
He then told me a few facts about his case.
“There were 27 of us called before a judge on August 27, 1943. There were 30 supposed to come up, but three had been hurt in the mine, and were not tried until later. We never did have any jury trial. We had been indicted by a grand jury that we never even saw. All the testimony came from other people. But we were advised by our lawyers to plead nolo contendere – no contest – and threw ourselves on the mercy of the court.”
He continued with the circumstances of his imprisonment after a hearing on June 1 for alleged violation of his probation.
“They had 11 strikes chalked up against me when I appeared at the hearing. There were a bunch of men from the mine (Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp’s Vesta No. 4, Richeyville, Pa.) to testify that I wasn’t responsible for the strikes, but the judge wouldn’t let them testify. I told the judge that every man was essential to the other in the mine, and I couldn’t work when a strike was on, even if I wanted to. But I guess they wanted a test case and I was a victim of circumstances, so I’m it.”
I knew every word he spoke was the truth. I had confirmed it in advance from the officers of UMW Local 2399 at Richeyville where I had attended the union meeting on June 3, the day after Bill was sent to prison. He had been snatched without warning from his wife and two children and shot off to jail after a speedy hearing on June 1.
As he spoke, I peered closely through the heavy steel screen and poor light at the man I had come hundreds of miles to interview so that he might have the chance for the first time to tell in his own words the story that the big-business press and anti-labor government officials have tried to misrepresent and bury.
He stood within a foot or so of me, with just the screen separating our faces, close so that we could see and hear each other. Against the dim background of the four-story barn-like prison interior, with its lines of cells in tiers along the sides, I saw a tall, slim, dark-haired man dressed in a green jacket and tan work trousers. His features were handsome even strong, and he looked much younger than his 39 years. His face revealed intelligence and firm character and his flashing black eyes looked straight into mine as he spoke quietly, but with deep conviction and feeling.
Rapid Interview
We had to talk fast, because the prison regulations permitted him only 15 minutes with a visitor, although the local prison officials stretched it. a bit to permit me to finish the interview. I shot a list of prepared questions at him. He answered every question without hesitation
During the entire interview there was not a trace of self- pity in anything he said. He was clearly a fighter and a man who understands that he went to prison for a principle in the cause of labor.
“I don’t regret a thing I did for the union,” he stated firmly. “I’m a victim of persecution, but I’d conduct the same fight all over again. And when I get out, I’m going to keep up the fight.”
At this point, his voice bad the only slight tremor in it during the entire conversation. He was obviously swept with deep emotion when he said: “I was always honest and sincere about everything I did for the union. And I’m going to continue to be so.”
From what his union brothers had told me about him, the respect they held for him, I knew he meant it from the bottom of his heart.
Patterson’s Life
Then he told me a few facts about his life.
“I’ve worked 22 years in the mines, since I was 17 years old. I’ve worked 17 years in that one mine at Richeyville. When I first started in the mines, back in 1923, I joined the union, and I’ve stuck with the union ever since.”
With justifiable pride in his fighting union record, he said:
“I’ve been in every strike in the mines since 1923. The longest I was ever out was in 1940 – six weeks. I’ve been through some pretty tough times and had plenty of close shaves in the mines, but I was lucky to get off with only slight injuries.”
He spoke about his wife, Ruby, who comes from a West Virginia miner’s family.
“I was never put out on the roadside myself, but my wife’s family was put out of their house in the 1922 strike and they lived in a tent on the mountain-side for seven months.”
His father was in the mines before him, Bill explained. He was born in Virginia, of old American stock.
“My ancestors came to this country long before the American Revolution. Why, they fought in the American Revolution. And no one can ever accuse me of any un-American activities.”
For all his courageous attitude, I could see that being in a prison was a terrible ordeal for him, a humiliating experience for a man of his self-respect, who had worked hard all his life.
Never Arrested
I started to ask, “Have you ever before been – “ He broke in, his lips smiling. “I know what you want to ask, have I ever been in jail before? No – never! I’ve never been arrested.” I could feel his deep hurt at the unjust blot which the enemies of labor have tried to put on his record.
Some people might say, well it’s only for six months. But that’s six months stolen from a man’s life, a man who values freedom and has fought for it all his life. I was in that prison only half an hour, and I confess I couldn’t wait to get out. I promised not to ask any questions. about the conditions there. But I could see it was no better nor worse than most county prisons. The prison attendant informed me that the Fayette County institution is over 50 years old. Outside, it is built like an imitation Gothic church. Inside, it is dim, bare, cold – a forbidding place of grey stone and iron. It’s a place where you do “hard time.”
But there was no complaint from Bill. The only time a note of bitterness entered his voice was when he spoke of the UMW district officials, who let him “take the rap” and have been maintaining a “hand’s off” policy. “It seems that the UMW officials are afraid to stick their necks out. The district officials (Dist. 5, UMW) have made damn fools out of themselves and possibly a martyr out of me.” He spoke not out of concern for himself, but out of pride for the union which he felt the top officials were hurting by their attitude in his case, which grew out of an anti-labor law that was directed in the first instance against the UMW itself.
Just before the time was up, he asked me to give a message to his union brothers of Local 2399 who have voted to back him 100 per cent and have established a fund to keep his family as long as he is in prison with the same amount of money they would have received if he had been working.
“Tell all the men to keep up the good fight. And tell them how much I appreciate their support and the help they are giving my family, who are being made to suffer for something they had no part in. Let the boys keep on pitching, and I will sure as hell run a few bases when I serve this time.”
That’s the spirit that has built the American labor movement, so a working man can lift up his head. That’s the spirit that the Smith-Connally law was intended to crush. For as Bill Patterson emphasized, it’s not just a “personal case.”
There will be many more Bill Pattersons, if the whole labor movement is not aroused to protest, if it fails to fight to free the honest union man, Bill Patterson, and to deal with the real criminals the profiteering crooks, labor exploiters and their political henchmen who conspired to make him an “example” and threw him behind prison bars.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Striking Miners Stand Firm<br>
for Social Demands</h1>
<h3>(20 April 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_16" target="new">Vol. X No. 16</a>, 20 April 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">APRIL 13 – The 400,000 soft coal miners on strike since April 1 mean business about securing their precedent-making social demands before they will even consider the question of wages. This was brought home sharply to the stunned mine operators when AFL United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and the UMW negotiating committee dramatically broke off negotiations on April 10 and stalked out of the conference room.</p>
<p>“We trust that time, as it shrinks your purse, may modify your niggardly and anti-social propensities,” declared Lewis at the conclusion of a scathing statement he read to the operators just preceding his walkout.</p>
<p>From the very start of the mine union negotiations, the UMW representatives have insisted on the consideration of a series of life-and-death social demands going far beyond the wage question.<br>
</p>
<h4>What Demands Mean</h4>
<p class="fst">These are directed at eliminating the terrible toll of accidents in American mines; providing adequate health, medical and sanitation facilities in the filthy, decrepit company towns; ensuring the welfare of miners’ widows and orphans; compensating the injured and their families; restricting the price-gouging in the monopoly company stores and rent-gouging on company-owned dwellings.</p>
<p>To all these vital demands of the miners the smug, grasping operators replied that the mine union committee was merely bringing up “time-killing trivia with the obvious intent of stalling negotiations and creating a national crisis.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Terrible Toll</h4>
<p class="fst">These “trivia,” as Lewis demonstrated at the very opening of negotiations, include the slaughter of 28,000 miners and injury of more than a million in the past 14 years. This casualty list comes from the refusal of the operators to provide proper safety equipment, their resistance to mine inspection and safety laws, their control of state inspection boards.</p>
<p>These “trivia” include scores of thousands of widows and orphans left to starve because the operators have blocked compensation laws. They include disease-ridden, insanitary communities and “homes” because many operators will not use their huge profits to provide even a semblance of modern sanitation and health facilities for their company towns.</p>
<p>The miners are determined to secure decent conditions first of all through a welfare fund, provided from the, operators’ profits, which the union itself will control. They are demanding safety equipment at operators’ expense. They insist that the operators provide them such “trivia” as running water, bath facilities, garbage collection and sewage disposal.<br>
</p>
<h4>Company Stores</h4>
<p class="fst">They are seeking an end to the extortionate prices of the company stores through a 10 per cent discount on all purchases at present price levels and 20 per cent on mine clothes and equipment. As Lewis charged, the 3,600 mining company owned stores “were inferior in service and in goods because competition is eliminated and thus prices are high.”</p>
<p>Lewis minced no words in characterising the smug attitude of the wealthy operators towards these “trivia.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When we sought surcease from blood-letting you professed indifference. When we cried aloud for the safety of our members you answer ‘Be content – ’twas always thus’ ... When we emphasized the importance of life you pleaded the priority of profits; when we spoke of little children in unkempt surroundings you said, ‘Look to the State.’”<br>
</p>
<h4>Bread and Roses</h4>
<p class="fst">Now the operators are complaining that they are willing to give the miners the highest pattern of wage increases but have been “refused with abuse.” The miners answer, in the words of the old labor song, “We want bread, but we want roses too.” If they win their social demands, they will set an example for the rest of American labor that may have far-reaching progressive consequences.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Striking Miners Stand Firm
for Social Demands
(20 April 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 16, 20 April 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
APRIL 13 – The 400,000 soft coal miners on strike since April 1 mean business about securing their precedent-making social demands before they will even consider the question of wages. This was brought home sharply to the stunned mine operators when AFL United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and the UMW negotiating committee dramatically broke off negotiations on April 10 and stalked out of the conference room.
“We trust that time, as it shrinks your purse, may modify your niggardly and anti-social propensities,” declared Lewis at the conclusion of a scathing statement he read to the operators just preceding his walkout.
From the very start of the mine union negotiations, the UMW representatives have insisted on the consideration of a series of life-and-death social demands going far beyond the wage question.
What Demands Mean
These are directed at eliminating the terrible toll of accidents in American mines; providing adequate health, medical and sanitation facilities in the filthy, decrepit company towns; ensuring the welfare of miners’ widows and orphans; compensating the injured and their families; restricting the price-gouging in the monopoly company stores and rent-gouging on company-owned dwellings.
To all these vital demands of the miners the smug, grasping operators replied that the mine union committee was merely bringing up “time-killing trivia with the obvious intent of stalling negotiations and creating a national crisis.”
Terrible Toll
These “trivia,” as Lewis demonstrated at the very opening of negotiations, include the slaughter of 28,000 miners and injury of more than a million in the past 14 years. This casualty list comes from the refusal of the operators to provide proper safety equipment, their resistance to mine inspection and safety laws, their control of state inspection boards.
These “trivia” include scores of thousands of widows and orphans left to starve because the operators have blocked compensation laws. They include disease-ridden, insanitary communities and “homes” because many operators will not use their huge profits to provide even a semblance of modern sanitation and health facilities for their company towns.
The miners are determined to secure decent conditions first of all through a welfare fund, provided from the, operators’ profits, which the union itself will control. They are demanding safety equipment at operators’ expense. They insist that the operators provide them such “trivia” as running water, bath facilities, garbage collection and sewage disposal.
Company Stores
They are seeking an end to the extortionate prices of the company stores through a 10 per cent discount on all purchases at present price levels and 20 per cent on mine clothes and equipment. As Lewis charged, the 3,600 mining company owned stores “were inferior in service and in goods because competition is eliminated and thus prices are high.”
Lewis minced no words in characterising the smug attitude of the wealthy operators towards these “trivia.”
“When we sought surcease from blood-letting you professed indifference. When we cried aloud for the safety of our members you answer ‘Be content – ’twas always thus’ ... When we emphasized the importance of life you pleaded the priority of profits; when we spoke of little children in unkempt surroundings you said, ‘Look to the State.’”
Bread and Roses
Now the operators are complaining that they are willing to give the miners the highest pattern of wage increases but have been “refused with abuse.” The miners answer, in the words of the old labor song, “We want bread, but we want roses too.” If they win their social demands, they will set an example for the rest of American labor that may have far-reaching progressive consequences.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Henry Wallace – His Record<br>
as Capitalist Politician</h1>
<h3>(8 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_10" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 10</a>, 8 March 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Henry, Agard Wallace is a middle-class, capitalist politician who feeds on liberal-sounding words. These he chews over like a cow does its cud. He never tires of the flavor of such phrases as the “Common Man,” the “General Welfare” and “Progressivism.” And who dares oppose these?</p>
<p>Liberal phonies always use such glittering generalities. Only Wallace repeats them more often, more vaguely and more shamelessly. This windy demagogy is the foundation of his reputation as a “Champion of the People.”</p>
<p>Fortunately, we are not forced to judge him by words alone. Wallace has had ample opportunity to demonstrate in deeds his self-proclaimed love for the “common man.” He was a top figure in the government for 13½ years and once bore the proud title of Roosevelt’s “Crown Prince.”</p>
<p>In all those years he did not do a single thing of benefit for the “common man” – not for the workers, the Negro people, the poor farmers and sharecroppers or the small business man.</p>
<p>His deeds in office were an <i>unbroken chain of reaction</i>. That is a matter, of public record, if not of public knowledge. Most of the facts have now been conveniently compiled in a book, <b>Henry Wallace – The Man and the Myth</b> by Dwight Macdonald. (Vanguard Press, Inc., New York City).</p>
<p>Wallace was the Roosevelt administration’s loudest warmonger, jingo and apologist for U.S. imperialist participation in World War II.</p>
<p><i>He was a member of Roosevelt’s secret policy group that initiated the development of the atomic bomb. He hailed this most fiendish instrument of war as a major triumph of Roosevelt and the “New Deal.”</i></p>
<p>He upheld Roosevelt’s wartime demand for Saudi Arabian oil, boasting this “was not ruthless imperialism but good old-fashioned American imperialism” and “the United States: is proud of it.”</p>
<p>He defends to this day the dismemberment of Germany, starvation rations for the German people and continued ruthless military occupation of the conquered countries.<br>
</p>
<h4>“World Peace” Formula</h4>
<p class="fst">His “anti-imperialist” program, stated most fully and crudely in his Madison Square Garden speech in September 1946 calls for an agreement between Washington and the Kremlin to divide the world between them. That is his formula for “world peace.”</p>
<p>Here are some highlights of his record on the “common man” at home:</p>
<p>He put through, as Secretary of Agriculture, a program of “planned scarcity,” whereby the big landowners were paid to destroy crops and livestock to boost prices in a world of unemployment and hunger.</p>
<p><i>He fired his own “New Deal” colleagues out of the Department of Agriculture at the behest of cotton speculators, textile interests and the reactionary Farm Bureau of big landowners.</i></p>
<p>He falsely interpreted a clause in the Agricultural Adjustment Act. to permit wealthy landowners to reduce acreage by evicting thousands of tenant-farmers and sharecroppers.</p>
<p>He repudiated, at the climax of the 1946 General Motors strike, a confidential report of Commerce Department economist’s which he himself had released before the strike and which showed that the auto corporations could raise wages 10% without raising prices.</p>
<p><i>He demanded, just after the 1946 coal strike, that the government take over strike-threatened industries and that the workers, “like other federal employeee, give up the right to ... strike.”</i></p>
<p>He rudely refused to see a Negro delegation and sneaked out on them when they came to appeal for aid in saving the life of the Virginia sharecropper Odell Waller, who was later executed for his self-defense slaying of a white man.</p>
<p>He surrounded himself, as Secretary of Commerce, with a retinue of conservative big businessmen and proclaimed himself “the representative of business in government.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Defends Profit System</h4>
<p class="fst">He has championed consistently but one program, “the preservation of our democratic free enterprise system” – that is, the capitalist exploitation of labor for private profit.</p>
<p>These fully documented damning facts go unchallenged and unmentioned in an attempted reply to Macdonald’s book in a review by Russell Lord in the March 1 <b>New Republic</b>, Wallace’s mouthpiece.</p>
<p>Lord treats us to the worshipful disciple’s fanciful portrait of Wallace, “profoundly simple, profoundly practical ... it is certain he will keep growing.” Lord concerns himself chiefly with heated denials of the least important aspects of Macdonald’s book, his psychological and moral appraisals of Wallace.</p>
<p>The record cited by Macdonald shows that Wallace is a “trimmer, hedger and chronic reneger” who “lacks the guts to stand up under pressure.” But Macdonald overemphasizes personal quirks and traits and leaves out the key to a real understanding of Wallace.</p>
<p><i>That key is the class character of Wallace, his politics and his movement. In every major test of his career Wallace has proved himself a loyal defender of capitalism and American imperialism.</i></p>
<p>From 1933 to 1940, when Wallace headed the Department of Agriculture, he faithfully served the rich landowners against the poor farmers, tenant-farmers, sharecroppers and low-wage consumers. He worked most closely with the Farm Bureau Federation, the lobby of the “400-acre farmers.” The Farm Bureau’s 1,800 county agents became the local agents of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).</p>
<p>The AAA paid landowning farmers to withdraw a portion of their land from cultivation in order to reduce crops and raise prices. But the majority of farmers are tenants and sharecroppers and only <i>landowners</i> received benefits. The landowners. first withdrew from production land occupied by tenants and share-croppers. These not only were deprived of a livelihood, but were kicked out of their homes.<br>
</p>
<h4>Wallace’s Sell-Out</h4>
<p class="fst">A clause in the AAA contract said that the landlord “shall permit all tenants to continue in occupancy of their houses on this farm, rent free, for the years 1934 and 1935.” The Southern Tenant Farmers Union protested there were hundreds of evictions in spite of this clause. Wallace fired several of his aides who supported the tenants. He said the clause did not mean the same tenants must remain, <i>only the same number of tenants</i>. The Arkansas courts promptly accepted his interpretation and upheld hundreds of evictions.</p>
<p><i>Ten years later, when he was Secretary of Commence, Wallace followed similar policies. He appointed as his undersecretary Alfred Schinder, a conservative big businessman who had previously served under banker Jesse Jones. Another ton job went to Albert J. Browning, who called for incentive wages. Wallace brushed aside the small business interests who sought his aid against the monopolies. The May 20, 1945 <b>N.Y. Times</b> published a special article describing the surprise and pleasure of Big Business at Wallace’s policies.</i></p>
<p>While Vice President, from 1940 to 1944, Wallace destroyed any claim he might have to being “anti-war” and “anti-imperialist.” He served the special role of whitewashing the imperialist character of the war and dressing up its sordid aims. In his highly-publicized address on the “People’s Century,” he lied about the war as a “people’s war,” even a “people’s revolution,” whose aim was to bring a quart of milk a day to every child in the world.</p>
<p>Today, as we all know, not the least result of the war has been to bring starvation and death to millions of children in Europe and Asia.<br>
</p>
<h4>Deal with Stalin</h4>
<p class="fst">Wallace’s campaign for a deal with Russia and his expulsion from the Truman, administration over this issue has led to the charge that he is “pro-Russian” and a “Communist fellow-traveller.” Macdonald’s crude Stalinophobia and lack of a class approach to politics leads him to make similar charges.</p>
<p>Wallace is just as much an American imperialist today as he was during the war. He is no more “pro-Russian” than were the capitalist politicians – from the White House down – who whitewashed the crimes of Stalin during wartime, just as the Stalinists whitewashed Wall Street and its chief political agent, Roosevelt.</p>
<p><i>Wallace, today asks no more than Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to, in essence, at Teheran and Yalta, and Truman underwrote , at Potsdam. He wants to give American capitalism a breathing spell through another deal with Stalin to divide the world into “spheres of influence.” Wallace’s differences with Truman are tactical, not fundamental.</i></p>
<p>What Wallace wants he stated in his Madison Square Garden speech, on Sept. 12, 1946. He declared that “by mutual agreement, this competition should be put on a friendly basis” and mutual fears should be “allayed by practical regional political reservations.” These “regional reservations”, he stated, would include the one-third of the world which “Russian ideas ... are going to govern” and “much of the rest” of the world where “American Ideals” will rule,</p>
<p>This is dirty horse-trading disguised as a “peace” program. It is Wallace’s chief plank today – the most he has to offer the “Common Man.”</p>
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Art Preis
Henry Wallace – His Record
as Capitalist Politician
(8 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 10, 8 March 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Henry, Agard Wallace is a middle-class, capitalist politician who feeds on liberal-sounding words. These he chews over like a cow does its cud. He never tires of the flavor of such phrases as the “Common Man,” the “General Welfare” and “Progressivism.” And who dares oppose these?
Liberal phonies always use such glittering generalities. Only Wallace repeats them more often, more vaguely and more shamelessly. This windy demagogy is the foundation of his reputation as a “Champion of the People.”
Fortunately, we are not forced to judge him by words alone. Wallace has had ample opportunity to demonstrate in deeds his self-proclaimed love for the “common man.” He was a top figure in the government for 13½ years and once bore the proud title of Roosevelt’s “Crown Prince.”
In all those years he did not do a single thing of benefit for the “common man” – not for the workers, the Negro people, the poor farmers and sharecroppers or the small business man.
His deeds in office were an unbroken chain of reaction. That is a matter, of public record, if not of public knowledge. Most of the facts have now been conveniently compiled in a book, Henry Wallace – The Man and the Myth by Dwight Macdonald. (Vanguard Press, Inc., New York City).
Wallace was the Roosevelt administration’s loudest warmonger, jingo and apologist for U.S. imperialist participation in World War II.
He was a member of Roosevelt’s secret policy group that initiated the development of the atomic bomb. He hailed this most fiendish instrument of war as a major triumph of Roosevelt and the “New Deal.”
He upheld Roosevelt’s wartime demand for Saudi Arabian oil, boasting this “was not ruthless imperialism but good old-fashioned American imperialism” and “the United States: is proud of it.”
He defends to this day the dismemberment of Germany, starvation rations for the German people and continued ruthless military occupation of the conquered countries.
“World Peace” Formula
His “anti-imperialist” program, stated most fully and crudely in his Madison Square Garden speech in September 1946 calls for an agreement between Washington and the Kremlin to divide the world between them. That is his formula for “world peace.”
Here are some highlights of his record on the “common man” at home:
He put through, as Secretary of Agriculture, a program of “planned scarcity,” whereby the big landowners were paid to destroy crops and livestock to boost prices in a world of unemployment and hunger.
He fired his own “New Deal” colleagues out of the Department of Agriculture at the behest of cotton speculators, textile interests and the reactionary Farm Bureau of big landowners.
He falsely interpreted a clause in the Agricultural Adjustment Act. to permit wealthy landowners to reduce acreage by evicting thousands of tenant-farmers and sharecroppers.
He repudiated, at the climax of the 1946 General Motors strike, a confidential report of Commerce Department economist’s which he himself had released before the strike and which showed that the auto corporations could raise wages 10% without raising prices.
He demanded, just after the 1946 coal strike, that the government take over strike-threatened industries and that the workers, “like other federal employeee, give up the right to ... strike.”
He rudely refused to see a Negro delegation and sneaked out on them when they came to appeal for aid in saving the life of the Virginia sharecropper Odell Waller, who was later executed for his self-defense slaying of a white man.
He surrounded himself, as Secretary of Commerce, with a retinue of conservative big businessmen and proclaimed himself “the representative of business in government.”
Defends Profit System
He has championed consistently but one program, “the preservation of our democratic free enterprise system” – that is, the capitalist exploitation of labor for private profit.
These fully documented damning facts go unchallenged and unmentioned in an attempted reply to Macdonald’s book in a review by Russell Lord in the March 1 New Republic, Wallace’s mouthpiece.
Lord treats us to the worshipful disciple’s fanciful portrait of Wallace, “profoundly simple, profoundly practical ... it is certain he will keep growing.” Lord concerns himself chiefly with heated denials of the least important aspects of Macdonald’s book, his psychological and moral appraisals of Wallace.
The record cited by Macdonald shows that Wallace is a “trimmer, hedger and chronic reneger” who “lacks the guts to stand up under pressure.” But Macdonald overemphasizes personal quirks and traits and leaves out the key to a real understanding of Wallace.
That key is the class character of Wallace, his politics and his movement. In every major test of his career Wallace has proved himself a loyal defender of capitalism and American imperialism.
From 1933 to 1940, when Wallace headed the Department of Agriculture, he faithfully served the rich landowners against the poor farmers, tenant-farmers, sharecroppers and low-wage consumers. He worked most closely with the Farm Bureau Federation, the lobby of the “400-acre farmers.” The Farm Bureau’s 1,800 county agents became the local agents of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).
The AAA paid landowning farmers to withdraw a portion of their land from cultivation in order to reduce crops and raise prices. But the majority of farmers are tenants and sharecroppers and only landowners received benefits. The landowners. first withdrew from production land occupied by tenants and share-croppers. These not only were deprived of a livelihood, but were kicked out of their homes.
Wallace’s Sell-Out
A clause in the AAA contract said that the landlord “shall permit all tenants to continue in occupancy of their houses on this farm, rent free, for the years 1934 and 1935.” The Southern Tenant Farmers Union protested there were hundreds of evictions in spite of this clause. Wallace fired several of his aides who supported the tenants. He said the clause did not mean the same tenants must remain, only the same number of tenants. The Arkansas courts promptly accepted his interpretation and upheld hundreds of evictions.
Ten years later, when he was Secretary of Commence, Wallace followed similar policies. He appointed as his undersecretary Alfred Schinder, a conservative big businessman who had previously served under banker Jesse Jones. Another ton job went to Albert J. Browning, who called for incentive wages. Wallace brushed aside the small business interests who sought his aid against the monopolies. The May 20, 1945 N.Y. Times published a special article describing the surprise and pleasure of Big Business at Wallace’s policies.
While Vice President, from 1940 to 1944, Wallace destroyed any claim he might have to being “anti-war” and “anti-imperialist.” He served the special role of whitewashing the imperialist character of the war and dressing up its sordid aims. In his highly-publicized address on the “People’s Century,” he lied about the war as a “people’s war,” even a “people’s revolution,” whose aim was to bring a quart of milk a day to every child in the world.
Today, as we all know, not the least result of the war has been to bring starvation and death to millions of children in Europe and Asia.
Deal with Stalin
Wallace’s campaign for a deal with Russia and his expulsion from the Truman, administration over this issue has led to the charge that he is “pro-Russian” and a “Communist fellow-traveller.” Macdonald’s crude Stalinophobia and lack of a class approach to politics leads him to make similar charges.
Wallace is just as much an American imperialist today as he was during the war. He is no more “pro-Russian” than were the capitalist politicians – from the White House down – who whitewashed the crimes of Stalin during wartime, just as the Stalinists whitewashed Wall Street and its chief political agent, Roosevelt.
Wallace, today asks no more than Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to, in essence, at Teheran and Yalta, and Truman underwrote , at Potsdam. He wants to give American capitalism a breathing spell through another deal with Stalin to divide the world into “spheres of influence.” Wallace’s differences with Truman are tactical, not fundamental.
What Wallace wants he stated in his Madison Square Garden speech, on Sept. 12, 1946. He declared that “by mutual agreement, this competition should be put on a friendly basis” and mutual fears should be “allayed by practical regional political reservations.” These “regional reservations”, he stated, would include the one-third of the world which “Russian ideas ... are going to govern” and “much of the rest” of the world where “American Ideals” will rule,
This is dirty horse-trading disguised as a “peace” program. It is Wallace’s chief plank today – the most he has to offer the “Common Man.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Miners Defy Federal<br>
Strikebreaking</h1>
<h4>Ignore Injunction Order; Lewis Threatened<br>
with Citation for “Contempt”</h4>
<h3>(6 April 1924)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_15" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 15</a>, 12 April 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><b>APRIL 6 – True to their fighting traditions, the country’s 400,000 soft coal miners have defied the government’s Taft-Hartley injunction commanding them to “cease” their pension strike and “immediately” return to work, Instead, thousands of hard coal miners have also walked out in support of their fellow members.</b></p>
<p>A compliant federal judge, Justice Matthew F. McGuire of the United States District Court in Washington, issued the strikebreaking order on April 3, within a few hours after Truman directed Attorney General Clark to seek and anti-strike restraining order under the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law.</p>
<p>The order not only bans the strike until April 13, when hearings on a permanent injunction will be completed, but demands that Lewis “instruct forthwith” the miners to go back to the pits.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stands Firm</h4>
<p class="fst">To date, Lewis has not complied. He has consistently maintained that he did not call the strike. He repeated this in a letter to the mine locals on the day the injunction was issued, stating further that “any action or decision which you may now care to take continues to be entirely of your own determination.”</p>
<p><em>Even the Taft-Hartley Act specifically says that “nothing in this act shall be construed to require an individual employee to render labor or service without his consent ... nor shall any court issue any process to compel performance by an individual employee of such labor or service without his consent.”</em></p>
<p>The government, however, has another ace – the same one it pulled from its sleeve in the 1946 injunction case – “contempt of court” action. In that former case, it was claimed that a union must obey a federal court injunction – even an illegal one – or be subject to “contempt” charges. The judge who issues the injunction, acting as his own prosecutor and jury, can rule the union and its officers in “contempt” and throw the book at them.</p>
<p>Attorney General Clark has already initiated “contempt” proceedings against the union and Lewis. The miners and their officers face the threat of harsh penalties, such as the $3,500,000 fine ordered by Federal Judge Goldsborough in 1946, later reduced to $710,000.</p>
<p>There is not a shred of evidence that Lewis or the union have violated even the existing Slave Law or the contract in any meaning within the law. The sole <em>contention</em> of Truman’s “fact-finding’’ committee, which “found” against the miners, is that Lewis “induced’’ the miners to strike by the fact of writing them a letter which stated that the operators had “dishonored” the contract by sabotaging the use of the welfare fund.</p>
<p>It is, of course, true that the miners have a binding tradition, “No contract, no work.” For them a dishonored contract is no contract at all.</p>
<p>What infuriates the employers and their government stooges is the iron-clad solidarity of the miners, their unshakable discipline in action – a magnificent example for the whole labor movement. The government is bringing all its power to bear on tile miners to destroy that solidarity.</p>
<p>Once again, and in the clearest fashion, the government has revealed its capitalist class nature. The courts are shown once more to be mere tools of the employing class. The entire course of the government and its agencies has been crudely biased in favor of the operators, at whose nod the federal strikebreaking machinery was set in motion.</p>
<p><em>But the miners’ struggle now far transcends the immediate issues involved. They are spearheading the fight of the whole labor movement against the deadly menace of the Taft-Hartley Law and government by injunction. They are battling for the most precious right of labor – the right to strike.</em></p>
<p>Everyone – that is, everyone but the narrow-minded top leaders of the CIO and AFL – understands that the miners are engaged in a struggle whose outcome will have far-reaching implications for every union and every worker.</p>
<p>Yet, because of their organizational conflicts with Lewis, the CIO and AFL leaders haven’t said one word against this infamous government strikebreaking. They have not uttered one protest while the government sharpens the Taft-Hartley knife on the miners to make it keener for the throat of the whole labor movement.</p>
<p>It was shameful that the CIO and AFL leadership offered nothing more than token protests when the AFL International Typographical Union was clubbed by the Taft-Hartley Law and. a federal injunction. In the face of the further and even more venomous attack on the miners, their silence and inaction is downright criminal.</p>
<p><em>Every local union should immediately adopt resolutions of support for the miners. The union ranks everywhere should vigorously demand that their national leaders call an immediate conference of the CIO, AFL and mine unions to map out a joint program of action to stop government by injunction and smash the Slave Labor Law.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Miners Defy Federal
Strikebreaking
Ignore Injunction Order; Lewis Threatened
with Citation for “Contempt”
(6 April 1924)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 15, 12 April 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
APRIL 6 – True to their fighting traditions, the country’s 400,000 soft coal miners have defied the government’s Taft-Hartley injunction commanding them to “cease” their pension strike and “immediately” return to work, Instead, thousands of hard coal miners have also walked out in support of their fellow members.
A compliant federal judge, Justice Matthew F. McGuire of the United States District Court in Washington, issued the strikebreaking order on April 3, within a few hours after Truman directed Attorney General Clark to seek and anti-strike restraining order under the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law.
The order not only bans the strike until April 13, when hearings on a permanent injunction will be completed, but demands that Lewis “instruct forthwith” the miners to go back to the pits.
Stands Firm
To date, Lewis has not complied. He has consistently maintained that he did not call the strike. He repeated this in a letter to the mine locals on the day the injunction was issued, stating further that “any action or decision which you may now care to take continues to be entirely of your own determination.”
Even the Taft-Hartley Act specifically says that “nothing in this act shall be construed to require an individual employee to render labor or service without his consent ... nor shall any court issue any process to compel performance by an individual employee of such labor or service without his consent.”
The government, however, has another ace – the same one it pulled from its sleeve in the 1946 injunction case – “contempt of court” action. In that former case, it was claimed that a union must obey a federal court injunction – even an illegal one – or be subject to “contempt” charges. The judge who issues the injunction, acting as his own prosecutor and jury, can rule the union and its officers in “contempt” and throw the book at them.
Attorney General Clark has already initiated “contempt” proceedings against the union and Lewis. The miners and their officers face the threat of harsh penalties, such as the $3,500,000 fine ordered by Federal Judge Goldsborough in 1946, later reduced to $710,000.
There is not a shred of evidence that Lewis or the union have violated even the existing Slave Law or the contract in any meaning within the law. The sole contention of Truman’s “fact-finding’’ committee, which “found” against the miners, is that Lewis “induced’’ the miners to strike by the fact of writing them a letter which stated that the operators had “dishonored” the contract by sabotaging the use of the welfare fund.
It is, of course, true that the miners have a binding tradition, “No contract, no work.” For them a dishonored contract is no contract at all.
What infuriates the employers and their government stooges is the iron-clad solidarity of the miners, their unshakable discipline in action – a magnificent example for the whole labor movement. The government is bringing all its power to bear on tile miners to destroy that solidarity.
Once again, and in the clearest fashion, the government has revealed its capitalist class nature. The courts are shown once more to be mere tools of the employing class. The entire course of the government and its agencies has been crudely biased in favor of the operators, at whose nod the federal strikebreaking machinery was set in motion.
But the miners’ struggle now far transcends the immediate issues involved. They are spearheading the fight of the whole labor movement against the deadly menace of the Taft-Hartley Law and government by injunction. They are battling for the most precious right of labor – the right to strike.
Everyone – that is, everyone but the narrow-minded top leaders of the CIO and AFL – understands that the miners are engaged in a struggle whose outcome will have far-reaching implications for every union and every worker.
Yet, because of their organizational conflicts with Lewis, the CIO and AFL leaders haven’t said one word against this infamous government strikebreaking. They have not uttered one protest while the government sharpens the Taft-Hartley knife on the miners to make it keener for the throat of the whole labor movement.
It was shameful that the CIO and AFL leadership offered nothing more than token protests when the AFL International Typographical Union was clubbed by the Taft-Hartley Law and. a federal injunction. In the face of the further and even more venomous attack on the miners, their silence and inaction is downright criminal.
Every local union should immediately adopt resolutions of support for the miners. The union ranks everywhere should vigorously demand that their national leaders call an immediate conference of the CIO, AFL and mine unions to map out a joint program of action to stop government by injunction and smash the Slave Labor Law.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>United Labor Conference<br>
Urged by UAW Officers</h1>
<h4>Seek Joint Action Program to Fight Anti-Union Drive</h4>
<h3>(8 June 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_23" target="new">Vol. X No. 23</a>, 8 June 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><b>A proposal for a national united labor conference of all unions, AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods, to initiate joint action against enactment of anti-labor legislation by Congress and President Truman, was announced on May 27 in Detroit by CIO United Automobile Workers President Walter P. Reuther. This proposal, Reuther stated, is backed by the top officers of the UAW-CIO.</b></p>
<p>This is the most positive answer that has yet come from any American union leaders in response to the urgent demand from labor’s ranks for effective united action to beat back the increasingly violent anti-labor offensive of Big Business and its government. This offensive has been climaxed by Truman’s call for a draft-strikers law and Congressional passage of the infamous Case Union-Busting Bill.</p>
<p>Foreseeing the tremendous struggle impending at the very start of the Big Business-government drive against labor after V-J Day, <b>The Militant</b> last September 15, 1945, first urged:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Right now one of the most reactionary Congresses in American history is debating problems affecting the destinies of scores of millions. These millions have no genuine voice in the legislative halls and no means of bringing direct immediate and concentrated pressure to bear. The obvious and crying need is for the mobilization of organized labor’s power in Washington through a National Labor Congress representing every union local and labor body in the United States.”</p>
<p class="fst">On September 15, 1945, the UAW General Motors delegates conference in Detroit adopted a resolution urging the International Union to initiate a Congress of Labor. This proposal was not seriously pressed at the time. Events of the past few weeks in connection with the breaking of the railroad strike and action on the Truman and Case bills have brought the question forward with greater force than ever.</p>
<p>In his statement last week, Reuther said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The top officers of the UAW-CIO today decided to ask President Philip Murray of the CIO to take immediate steps to bring about joint action by all organized labor to prevent passage in the Senate of restrictive labor legislation proposed Saturday to Congress by President Harry S. Truman.</p>
<p class="quote">“Vice President Richard T. Leonard and R.J. Thomas agreed with me to ask President Murray to confer immediately with officers of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods to plan the calling at the earliest possible date of a national united labor conference for the specific purpose of combating President Truman’s proposals and all other restrictive legislation aimed at labor now pending in the Congress.”</p>
<p class="fst">Prior to Reuther’s announcement, a resolution had been adopted on May 23 by Detroit Briggs Local 212, which embodied proposals made by Emil Mazey, former Local 212 president and newly-elected member of the UAW International Executive Board. Mazey, a leading UAW militant who spoke against the no-strike pledge and for a labor party at the 1943 UAW convention, was attending his first general membership meeting since his return from Army duty in the Philippines and Okinawa.</p>
<p><b>The Militant</b> hails the UAW’s proposal for united labor action and urges all unionists to call upon their leaders to take immediate steps for the convening of a National United Conference of Labor. United labor action is the most imperative need today in the face of the concerted attacks of Big Business and its government upon the fundamental rights of the working people.</p>
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Joseph Keller
United Labor Conference
Urged by UAW Officers
Seek Joint Action Program to Fight Anti-Union Drive
(8 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 23, 8 June 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A proposal for a national united labor conference of all unions, AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods, to initiate joint action against enactment of anti-labor legislation by Congress and President Truman, was announced on May 27 in Detroit by CIO United Automobile Workers President Walter P. Reuther. This proposal, Reuther stated, is backed by the top officers of the UAW-CIO.
This is the most positive answer that has yet come from any American union leaders in response to the urgent demand from labor’s ranks for effective united action to beat back the increasingly violent anti-labor offensive of Big Business and its government. This offensive has been climaxed by Truman’s call for a draft-strikers law and Congressional passage of the infamous Case Union-Busting Bill.
Foreseeing the tremendous struggle impending at the very start of the Big Business-government drive against labor after V-J Day, The Militant last September 15, 1945, first urged:
“Right now one of the most reactionary Congresses in American history is debating problems affecting the destinies of scores of millions. These millions have no genuine voice in the legislative halls and no means of bringing direct immediate and concentrated pressure to bear. The obvious and crying need is for the mobilization of organized labor’s power in Washington through a National Labor Congress representing every union local and labor body in the United States.”
On September 15, 1945, the UAW General Motors delegates conference in Detroit adopted a resolution urging the International Union to initiate a Congress of Labor. This proposal was not seriously pressed at the time. Events of the past few weeks in connection with the breaking of the railroad strike and action on the Truman and Case bills have brought the question forward with greater force than ever.
In his statement last week, Reuther said:
“The top officers of the UAW-CIO today decided to ask President Philip Murray of the CIO to take immediate steps to bring about joint action by all organized labor to prevent passage in the Senate of restrictive labor legislation proposed Saturday to Congress by President Harry S. Truman.
“Vice President Richard T. Leonard and R.J. Thomas agreed with me to ask President Murray to confer immediately with officers of the American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods to plan the calling at the earliest possible date of a national united labor conference for the specific purpose of combating President Truman’s proposals and all other restrictive legislation aimed at labor now pending in the Congress.”
Prior to Reuther’s announcement, a resolution had been adopted on May 23 by Detroit Briggs Local 212, which embodied proposals made by Emil Mazey, former Local 212 president and newly-elected member of the UAW International Executive Board. Mazey, a leading UAW militant who spoke against the no-strike pledge and for a labor party at the 1943 UAW convention, was attending his first general membership meeting since his return from Army duty in the Philippines and Okinawa.
The Militant hails the UAW’s proposal for united labor action and urges all unionists to call upon their leaders to take immediate steps for the convening of a National United Conference of Labor. United labor action is the most imperative need today in the face of the concerted attacks of Big Business and its government upon the fundamental rights of the working people.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Why the Prosecution?</h1>
<h3>To Aid Tobin, Attack War Opposition,<br>
Set Anti-Labor Precedent</h3>
<h4>Government Masks These Real Reasons<br>
Behind ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ Charge</h4>
<h3>(1 November 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_44" target="new">Vol. V No. 44</a>, 1 November 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst">According to the official federal indictment and recent statements by the prosecution, the Roosevelt administration is trying to convict and imprison the 28 defendants in the Minneapolis ‘sedition’ trial because they “did feloniously conspire ... to destroy by force the Government of the United States of America ...”</p>
<p>But all the evidence of the public record and the circumstances and statements leading up to the opening of the trial indicate that this was not the reason for this indictment being handed down at this time.</p>
<p>Rather, the evidence shows that the government was trying to achieve three ends by the indictment and the prosecution:</p>
<ol>
<li>To aid Daniel J. Tobin, AFL teamster chief, in his fight to prevent the members of Local 544 from exercising their democratic right to belong to the union of their own choice, and to strike a blow at the leaders of this union who were noted for their opposition to all moves to stifle the militancy of the labor movement in the name of “national defense”;<br>
</li>
<li>To terrorize, isolate and, if possible, suppress the party which proclaimed its irreconcilable opposition to the war and the warmongers;<br>
</li>
<li>And to establish a precedent which will be used against all working class opponents of the war in the future.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">The government comes into this trial “with unclean hands” because in its haste to achieve these ends, and especially the first, its true intentions were made manifest by the statements issued by the prosecution and Tobin, statements which are a matter of public record.<br>
</p>
<h4>Background of Trial</h4>
<p class="fst">The immediate circumstance which inspired the administration to undertake this prosecution when it did was the conflict between the Minneapolis truck drivers union, Local 544, and Tobin, climaxed on June 9 when over 4,000 Local 544 members voted to disaffiliate from the AFL and join the CIO.</p>
<p>Tobin, a staunch supporter of the Roosevelt administration, had declared himself unconditionally pledged to the war aims and policies of the government. Furthermore, he had publicly declared that adherence to his pro-war policies were a condition for continued membership in the AFL Teamsters, and that the members of the union must be prepared to make “sacrifices” in the interests of the war program.</p>
<p>The leaders of Local 544, several of whom had been known for years to Tobin and the labor movement at large as members of the Socialist Workers Party or sympathetic to its ideas, had condemned the war as a war for bosses’ profits and had advocated that the unions maintain a militant policy in defense of the workers interests despite war.</p>
<p>When these leaders refused to abide by Tobin’s ultimatum that they renounce their anti-war convictions, and his further edict that they agree to the establishment of a Tobin receivership over their local, Tobin sought to dust them. This move was frustrated when the local’s members voted to join the CIO.<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt Intervenes</h4>
<p class="fst">Four days later, Tobin addressed a direct telegraphic appeal to Roosevelt, urgently requesting his aid against the dissident local. He declared in part:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The withdrawal from the International Union by the truckdrivers union, Local 544 and one other small union in Minneapolis, and their affiliation with the CIO is indeed a regrettable and dangerous condition. The officers of this local union ... were requested to disassociate themselves from the radical Trotsky organization ... we feel that while our country is in a dangerous position, those disturbers who believe in the policies of foreign, radical governments must be in some way prevented from pursuing this dangerous course ...” (<strong>New York Times</strong>, June 14, 1941)</p>
<p class="fst">On the very same day that he received Tobin’s appeal, Roosevelt acted. Through his secretary, Stephen Early, Roosevelt issued a statement to the White House press conference, which acknowledged Tobin’s telegram and recognized Tobin’s claim that the Teamsters’ international leadership was being fought “by all subversive organizations and all enemies of the government, including Bundists, Trotskyists and Stalinists” because Tobin and his colleagues <em>“have been and will continue to stand squarely behind the government</em>.”</p>
<p>Early then added:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When I advised the President of Tobin’s representations this morning, <em>he asked me to immediately have the Government departments and agencies interested in this matter notified</em>, and to point out that this is no time, in his opinion, for labor unions, local and national, to begin raiding one another for the purpose of getting memberships or for similar reason.” (<strong>New York Times</strong>, June 14).</p>
<p class="fst">Three things are established by these statements:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Tobin appealed to Roosevelt for aid on the basis that this was a “political favor” owed him for his support of the administration and its war program.</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Roosevelt acted promptly on behalf of Tobin at Tobin’s direct request.</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>Roosevelt’s immediate specific actions were to condemn the CIO for “raiding”, without any further inquiry into the situation, and to instruct the “Government departments and agencies interested in this matter” to assist Tobin.</em><br>
</li>
</ol>
<h4>The FBI Acts</h4>
<p class="fst">Within a few days these “departments and agencies” did act. On June 27, FBI agents raided the headquarters of the SWP in Minneapolis and St. Paul, seizing copies of works by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and various publications of the party, all of which are on public sale everywhere.</p>
<p>Announcement was then made that these publicly available books and publications would be used as “evidence” in a federal prosecution against members of the Socialist Workers Party.</p>
<p>Attorney General Biddle, who was subsequently to brazenly deny that the prosecution had any connection with the fight between Tobin and Local 544, declared on the day of the FBI raids that “the principal Socialist Workers Party leaders against whom prosecution is being brought, are also leaders of Local 544-CIO in Minneapolis ... and have gained control of a legitimate labor union to use it for illegitimate purposes.” (<strong>Minneapolis Star-Journal</strong>, June 28)</p>
<p>The <strong>St. Paul Dispatch</strong>, a representative organ of the conservative business interests in the Twin Cities, announced that an indictment was being prepared against the Socialist Workers Party, with the revealing headline: <em>“U.S. TO PROSECUTE 544.”</em></p>
<p>But Biddle hastened to lie: “The prosecution is not in any sense an attack on organized labor, nor is it an effort to interfere in a dispute between labor organizations.”</p>
<p>However, in reporting this very statement of Biddle’s, the <strong>Minneapolis Star-Journal</strong>, June 28, added that the federal officials themselves had admitted that “the criminal proceedings were stimulated by the bolt of former leaders of General Drivers’ Union 544 from AFL to CIO.”<br>
</p>
<h4>First Main Reason for the Prosecution</h4>
<p class="fst">The facts are iron-clad. The initial purpose of the prosecution was to aid in the crushing of an influential and powerful sector of the trade union movement because of its opposition to the Tobin dictatorship on the question of labor’s policies in the war.</p>
<p>There was, it is then apparent, no question of “seditious conspiracy” involved in the events leading up to the opening of the prosecution by the Roosevelt administration. That came later when the prosecution saw that it would have to cover up its real motives.<br>
</p>
<h4>Second Main Reason</h4>
<p class="fst">The second reason for the prosecution was purely political and stemmed from the administration’s decision to use this case for an attack on the Socialist Workers Party because of its outspoken opposition to the imperialist war.</p>
<p>This was explicitly admitted by Biddle who stated: “The principal basis for the prosecution is found in the <em>Declaration of Principles</em> adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in January 1938.” (<strong>Minneapolis Tribune</strong>, June 28)</p>
<p>Biddle then made specific reference to those sections of the <em>Declaration</em> which read:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If, in spite of the efforts of the revolutionists and the militant workers, the U.S. government enters a new war, the SWP will not, under any circumstances, support that war but will, on the contrary, fight against it.”</p>
<p class="fst">There was nothing secret or “conspiratorial” about this <em>Declaration</em>. It was made public three and a half years before the indictment was drawn. It is the expression of political opinions and, as such, the SWP and the defendants had, and have, the constitutional right to express them.</p>
<p>But the indictment itself, handed down two weeks later, had nothing whatever to say about “the principal basis for the prosecution.” As a matter of fact it does not even contain the word war.</p>
<p>The prosecution acted hastily in its eagerness to help Tobin before it was too late to help him effectively, and it blurted out some truths. Afterwards, they realized that it would not be very easy under the circumstances to get convictions on the basis of the defendants’ anti-war policies, for millions of others share their opposition to the war and would rally to their defense on this basis.</p>
<p><em>Unable to tell the truth about why he was prosecuting the Socialist Workers Party and trying to divert attention away from the obvious fact that the fight between Tobin and 544 had been the initial impulse for the action by the FBI and the Department of Justice, Biddle had to cook up the “seditious conspiracy” charge.</em></p>
<p>To find a legal basis for such a charge, the Department of Justice had to disinter two federal statutes which had never previously been used and which are in clear violation of the guarantees of free speech and free press contained in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.</p>
<p>One of these statutes is the Smith Act of 1940, which makes the mere expression of revolutionary ideas a felony; and the other is a similar statute enacted in 1861 for use against the Southern Confederacy during an actual armed rebellion.</p>
<p>The American Civil Liberties Union, which is actively supporting the defendants in this ease, addressed a letter on August 20 to Biddle, which said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In our judgment both these statutes violate the First Amendment. of the Constitution; and even if upheld could not be applied to this set of facts under the ‘clear and present’ danger rule.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Third Reason for the Prosecutions</h4>
<p class="fst">But the government wants to get a conviction precisely on the basis of these unconstitutional statutes, because it wants a legal precedent for the future prosecution of any individuals or groups whose opinions the administration deems hostile to its war program.</p>
<p>That this was one of the major reasons for the prosecution was indicated by Biddle himself, who was quoted in the <strong>St. Paul Pioneer Press</strong>. June 28, as stating that this prosecution was to be the first step in a nationwide drive against “dangerous radicals.” “It is a fair inference,” said Department of Justice officials, according to the <strong>Pioneer Press</strong>, “that the St. Paul prosecutions may be followed by others in other parts of the country.”</p>
<p>And Assistant Attorney General Schweinhaut, one of the government prosecutors who signed the indictment, said: “We cracked down here <em>first</em>. Mr. Biddle has said this is only a <em>start</em>. So you can expect other actions to follow shortly.” (<strong>St. Paul Dispatch</strong>, June 28)</p>
<p>There are those in “liberal” circles who say that the Minneapolis case is not important, that the government is not “serious” in its prosecution, that little or nothing will come of it.</p>
<p>But they are refuting the facts leading up to the indictment, by the desperate lengths to which Biddle and the prosecution have gone in attempting to hide their real reactionary motives, by the obvious contradictions in the statements explaining the reasons for the trial, by the glaring inconsistencies between these statements and the indictment.</p>
<p><em>No administration would go to such lengths or place itself in such a compromising position unless it was in deadly seriousness. determined to go through with the case and secure convictions, if only to take the curse off what it has already done and “justify” its course up to now.</em></p>
<p>Most decisive of all is the fact that the Roosevelt administration is serious about the war, and it is serious, therefore, about getting a conviction in this case as an important part of its war preparations.</p>
<p>Let there be no mistake about it. The government is in deadly earnest about railroading the 28 defendants to prison. Progressive workers must mobilize all their forces to help the fight against a conviction in this case, a conviction which will jeopardize their rights and liberties in the war days ahead.</p>
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Art Preis
Why the Prosecution?
To Aid Tobin, Attack War Opposition,
Set Anti-Labor Precedent
Government Masks These Real Reasons
Behind ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ Charge
(1 November 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 44, 1 November 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
According to the official federal indictment and recent statements by the prosecution, the Roosevelt administration is trying to convict and imprison the 28 defendants in the Minneapolis ‘sedition’ trial because they “did feloniously conspire ... to destroy by force the Government of the United States of America ...”
But all the evidence of the public record and the circumstances and statements leading up to the opening of the trial indicate that this was not the reason for this indictment being handed down at this time.
Rather, the evidence shows that the government was trying to achieve three ends by the indictment and the prosecution:
To aid Daniel J. Tobin, AFL teamster chief, in his fight to prevent the members of Local 544 from exercising their democratic right to belong to the union of their own choice, and to strike a blow at the leaders of this union who were noted for their opposition to all moves to stifle the militancy of the labor movement in the name of “national defense”;
To terrorize, isolate and, if possible, suppress the party which proclaimed its irreconcilable opposition to the war and the warmongers;
And to establish a precedent which will be used against all working class opponents of the war in the future.
The government comes into this trial “with unclean hands” because in its haste to achieve these ends, and especially the first, its true intentions were made manifest by the statements issued by the prosecution and Tobin, statements which are a matter of public record.
Background of Trial
The immediate circumstance which inspired the administration to undertake this prosecution when it did was the conflict between the Minneapolis truck drivers union, Local 544, and Tobin, climaxed on June 9 when over 4,000 Local 544 members voted to disaffiliate from the AFL and join the CIO.
Tobin, a staunch supporter of the Roosevelt administration, had declared himself unconditionally pledged to the war aims and policies of the government. Furthermore, he had publicly declared that adherence to his pro-war policies were a condition for continued membership in the AFL Teamsters, and that the members of the union must be prepared to make “sacrifices” in the interests of the war program.
The leaders of Local 544, several of whom had been known for years to Tobin and the labor movement at large as members of the Socialist Workers Party or sympathetic to its ideas, had condemned the war as a war for bosses’ profits and had advocated that the unions maintain a militant policy in defense of the workers interests despite war.
When these leaders refused to abide by Tobin’s ultimatum that they renounce their anti-war convictions, and his further edict that they agree to the establishment of a Tobin receivership over their local, Tobin sought to dust them. This move was frustrated when the local’s members voted to join the CIO.
Roosevelt Intervenes
Four days later, Tobin addressed a direct telegraphic appeal to Roosevelt, urgently requesting his aid against the dissident local. He declared in part:
“The withdrawal from the International Union by the truckdrivers union, Local 544 and one other small union in Minneapolis, and their affiliation with the CIO is indeed a regrettable and dangerous condition. The officers of this local union ... were requested to disassociate themselves from the radical Trotsky organization ... we feel that while our country is in a dangerous position, those disturbers who believe in the policies of foreign, radical governments must be in some way prevented from pursuing this dangerous course ...” (New York Times, June 14, 1941)
On the very same day that he received Tobin’s appeal, Roosevelt acted. Through his secretary, Stephen Early, Roosevelt issued a statement to the White House press conference, which acknowledged Tobin’s telegram and recognized Tobin’s claim that the Teamsters’ international leadership was being fought “by all subversive organizations and all enemies of the government, including Bundists, Trotskyists and Stalinists” because Tobin and his colleagues “have been and will continue to stand squarely behind the government.”
Early then added:
“When I advised the President of Tobin’s representations this morning, he asked me to immediately have the Government departments and agencies interested in this matter notified, and to point out that this is no time, in his opinion, for labor unions, local and national, to begin raiding one another for the purpose of getting memberships or for similar reason.” (New York Times, June 14).
Three things are established by these statements:
Tobin appealed to Roosevelt for aid on the basis that this was a “political favor” owed him for his support of the administration and its war program.
Roosevelt acted promptly on behalf of Tobin at Tobin’s direct request.
Roosevelt’s immediate specific actions were to condemn the CIO for “raiding”, without any further inquiry into the situation, and to instruct the “Government departments and agencies interested in this matter” to assist Tobin.
The FBI Acts
Within a few days these “departments and agencies” did act. On June 27, FBI agents raided the headquarters of the SWP in Minneapolis and St. Paul, seizing copies of works by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and various publications of the party, all of which are on public sale everywhere.
Announcement was then made that these publicly available books and publications would be used as “evidence” in a federal prosecution against members of the Socialist Workers Party.
Attorney General Biddle, who was subsequently to brazenly deny that the prosecution had any connection with the fight between Tobin and Local 544, declared on the day of the FBI raids that “the principal Socialist Workers Party leaders against whom prosecution is being brought, are also leaders of Local 544-CIO in Minneapolis ... and have gained control of a legitimate labor union to use it for illegitimate purposes.” (Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 28)
The St. Paul Dispatch, a representative organ of the conservative business interests in the Twin Cities, announced that an indictment was being prepared against the Socialist Workers Party, with the revealing headline: “U.S. TO PROSECUTE 544.”
But Biddle hastened to lie: “The prosecution is not in any sense an attack on organized labor, nor is it an effort to interfere in a dispute between labor organizations.”
However, in reporting this very statement of Biddle’s, the Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 28, added that the federal officials themselves had admitted that “the criminal proceedings were stimulated by the bolt of former leaders of General Drivers’ Union 544 from AFL to CIO.”
First Main Reason for the Prosecution
The facts are iron-clad. The initial purpose of the prosecution was to aid in the crushing of an influential and powerful sector of the trade union movement because of its opposition to the Tobin dictatorship on the question of labor’s policies in the war.
There was, it is then apparent, no question of “seditious conspiracy” involved in the events leading up to the opening of the prosecution by the Roosevelt administration. That came later when the prosecution saw that it would have to cover up its real motives.
Second Main Reason
The second reason for the prosecution was purely political and stemmed from the administration’s decision to use this case for an attack on the Socialist Workers Party because of its outspoken opposition to the imperialist war.
This was explicitly admitted by Biddle who stated: “The principal basis for the prosecution is found in the Declaration of Principles adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in January 1938.” (Minneapolis Tribune, June 28)
Biddle then made specific reference to those sections of the Declaration which read:
“If, in spite of the efforts of the revolutionists and the militant workers, the U.S. government enters a new war, the SWP will not, under any circumstances, support that war but will, on the contrary, fight against it.”
There was nothing secret or “conspiratorial” about this Declaration. It was made public three and a half years before the indictment was drawn. It is the expression of political opinions and, as such, the SWP and the defendants had, and have, the constitutional right to express them.
But the indictment itself, handed down two weeks later, had nothing whatever to say about “the principal basis for the prosecution.” As a matter of fact it does not even contain the word war.
The prosecution acted hastily in its eagerness to help Tobin before it was too late to help him effectively, and it blurted out some truths. Afterwards, they realized that it would not be very easy under the circumstances to get convictions on the basis of the defendants’ anti-war policies, for millions of others share their opposition to the war and would rally to their defense on this basis.
Unable to tell the truth about why he was prosecuting the Socialist Workers Party and trying to divert attention away from the obvious fact that the fight between Tobin and 544 had been the initial impulse for the action by the FBI and the Department of Justice, Biddle had to cook up the “seditious conspiracy” charge.
To find a legal basis for such a charge, the Department of Justice had to disinter two federal statutes which had never previously been used and which are in clear violation of the guarantees of free speech and free press contained in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.
One of these statutes is the Smith Act of 1940, which makes the mere expression of revolutionary ideas a felony; and the other is a similar statute enacted in 1861 for use against the Southern Confederacy during an actual armed rebellion.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is actively supporting the defendants in this ease, addressed a letter on August 20 to Biddle, which said:
“In our judgment both these statutes violate the First Amendment. of the Constitution; and even if upheld could not be applied to this set of facts under the ‘clear and present’ danger rule.”
Third Reason for the Prosecutions
But the government wants to get a conviction precisely on the basis of these unconstitutional statutes, because it wants a legal precedent for the future prosecution of any individuals or groups whose opinions the administration deems hostile to its war program.
That this was one of the major reasons for the prosecution was indicated by Biddle himself, who was quoted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. June 28, as stating that this prosecution was to be the first step in a nationwide drive against “dangerous radicals.” “It is a fair inference,” said Department of Justice officials, according to the Pioneer Press, “that the St. Paul prosecutions may be followed by others in other parts of the country.”
And Assistant Attorney General Schweinhaut, one of the government prosecutors who signed the indictment, said: “We cracked down here first. Mr. Biddle has said this is only a start. So you can expect other actions to follow shortly.” (St. Paul Dispatch, June 28)
There are those in “liberal” circles who say that the Minneapolis case is not important, that the government is not “serious” in its prosecution, that little or nothing will come of it.
But they are refuting the facts leading up to the indictment, by the desperate lengths to which Biddle and the prosecution have gone in attempting to hide their real reactionary motives, by the obvious contradictions in the statements explaining the reasons for the trial, by the glaring inconsistencies between these statements and the indictment.
No administration would go to such lengths or place itself in such a compromising position unless it was in deadly seriousness. determined to go through with the case and secure convictions, if only to take the curse off what it has already done and “justify” its course up to now.
Most decisive of all is the fact that the Roosevelt administration is serious about the war, and it is serious, therefore, about getting a conviction in this case as an important part of its war preparations.
Let there be no mistake about it. The government is in deadly earnest about railroading the 28 defendants to prison. Progressive workers must mobilize all their forces to help the fight against a conviction in this case, a conviction which will jeopardize their rights and liberties in the war days ahead.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Stalin’s Frame-up Purges Whitewashed</h1>
<h4>Liberals Aid Stalin’s Imperialist Allies<br>
Spread GPU Lies About the Moscow Trials</h4>
<h3>(22 November 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_47" target="new">Vol. V No. 47</a>, 22 November 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">Among the obligations undertaken by the bourgeois democrats in line with the diplomatic needs of their new-found friendship with Stalin, is a “re-evaluation” of the frameup Moscow Trials. Belated “justifications” are being advanced for the monstrous purges, which up to now, no one but GPU hirelings, professional apologies for Stalinism, and the official Stalinist press dared appraise as anything but the frameups they were.</p>
<p>Far from serving their purpose of discrediting the Trotskyists, the trials boomeranged on Stalin. During the period of the Stalin- Hitler pact, the Stalinist press maintained strict silence about the trials, and the Trotskyists, charged in the trials with being agents of Hitler and the Mikado, were transformed overnight by the Stalinist press into agents of Anglo-French imperialism.</p>
<p>Now, such representatives of the American bourgeoisie as Harry Hopkins and former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies, are assisting the GPU in its task of whitewashing the Kremlin. Leading publications, such as <strong>Time</strong> and <strong>Life</strong> magazines, and the New York newspaper <strong>PM</strong>, through articles by its editor, Ralph Ingersoll, also have given support recently to the GPU versions of the trials.<br>
</p>
<h4>Davies and the Trials</h4>
<p class="fst">The crudest expression of this campaign so far is contained in an article by Davies in the November issue of <strong>American</strong> magazine. Davies, after admitting that he had attended some of the sessions of the Moscow trials and had considered them “fantastic” at the time, now claims to have gained “new light” on them. Just what “new” evidence he has uncovered he does not state. He merely gives full credence to the trials and the “confessions,” seeking to implicate Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers as agents of German and Japanese imperialism.</p>
<p>Davies indicates the purposes of his article in his conclusion, stating: “There are no saboteurs, secret agents or Fifth Columnists to co-operate with the invaders, because the Russians were sufficiently far-sighted to eliminate them before it was too late. That is a fact which other liberty-loving nations might well ponder.”</p>
<p>Unquestionably this bourgeois support is extremely welcome to Stalin. The sustained defeats and losses of the Red Army have raised new doubts about the Kremlin’s policies among the Soviet masses and the workers everywhere. It has become increasingly difficult for Stalin to conceal the direct connection between the present catastrophic Soviet defeats and the 1937–38 purge of the Red Army command, in which no less than 40,000 officers and technicians were executed or imprisoned.</p>
<p>The American imperialists are serving their own ends by aiding Stalin in his criminal task of discrediting and destroying the proletarian revolutionary opposition to his betrayal of the international class struggle and his support of the “democratic” imperialists in the war.</p>
<p>Davies is pointing to Stalin’s Moscow Trial frameup method, “which other liberty-loving nations might ponder,” as a pattern to be followed against the working class opponents of the war in this country.<br>
</p>
<h4>Findings of the Dewey Commission</h4>
<p class="fst">The conclusive and irrefutable evidence uncovered and made public by the Commission headed by Prof. John Dewey, which exhaustively investigated the Moscow frameups, has exposed the complete falsity of the “confessions” in the Moscow trials. The Dewey Commission produced documentary evidence which proved the falsity of <em>every alleged material fact</em> permitted to slip into the “confessions.” <em>Since the publication of the Commission’s findings in 1938, literally no individual or group has dared to offer a specific refutation of them.</em></p>
<p>So unanswerable are these findings that the <strong>American</strong> magazine, after printing Davies’ article, refuses to permit mention of them in its columns. <strong>The Nation</strong>, Nov. 15, reports:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The <strong>American</strong> magazine has rejected an article by John Dewey answering one by Joseph E. Davies in which the former Ambassador said that the Soviet Union’s resistance to Hitler was made possible by the purging of pro-Nazis in the Moscow trials.”</p>
<p class="fst">A despicable role in this attempt to justify the Moscow trials frameups is being played by the liberals. Echoing the direct spokesmen of the imperialists, the liberal exponents of the “war for democracy” are likewise beginning to “revise” their estimates of the trials and purges.</p>
<p>The most recent examples of this are contained in the <strong>New Republic</strong>, November 17, in a lengthy compendium of articles on <em>Russia Today</em>.<br>
</p>
<h4>Some “Liberals” Help Out</h4>
<p class="fst">Some of the writers, wary of stepping on slippery ground, manage to discuss the most fundamental aspects of Soviet military and industrial policies without even mentioning the purges. Max Werner, in <strong>Prospects for the Red Army</strong>, and A. Jugow, in the <strong>Results of the Five Year Plans</strong>, write as though the trials and purges had never been.</p>
<p>Others offer various “explanations” designed to provide belated hindsight justification for the Moscow trial frameups.</p>
<p>Vera Micheles Dean, in discussing the <em>Kremlin’s Foreign Policy</em>, states: “It would seem more accurate to say that, the spectacular Moscow trials reflected a widespread outburst of xenophobia – mistrust of all foreigners.” According to this view, Stalin was only yielding to the “xenophobia” of the Soviet masses in the purges which wiped out the old Bolshevik party, decimated the trained leadership of the Soviet army, government and industry and wound up with – a pact with Hitler.</p>
<p>John Scott, who shortly before the Soviet-Nazi war began was ordered expelled from the Soviet Union for articles he wrote in the <strong>London News-Chronicle</strong>, gives as one reason for the purges:</p>
<p class="quoteb">”I am convinced that many of those high, top-flight functionaries who disappeared between 1936 and 1938 got into trouble originally because of their failure to agree with Stalin’s far reaching and ruthless plans for industrialization.”</p>
<p class="fst">Scott then goes on to imply that tens of thousands of leading officials, technicians, army commanders, etc., had entered into the services of the German and Japanese fascists.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“One of the most important accomplishments of the Soviet administrative system has been the elimination of enemy fifth columnists ... In Russia we have seen no evidence of the existence of any effective Nazi organizations or agents. These were eliminated by the systematic vigilance on the part of the Soviet people, the Communist Party and the NKVD (GPU). From 1936 to 1938 thousands of individuals who were accused of hostility to the Soviet Union were purged. Many innocent men and women suffered unjustly, but the Quislings and Antonescus were liquidated.”<br>
</p>
<h4>What the “Liberals” Are Really Helping</h4>
<p class="fst">John N. Hazard (<strong>The Legal Framework</strong>) brazenly states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">”... There was no path open for society except self-protection. This approach was extensively adopted for the political offender, whether the sincere dissenter or the paid agents of outside forces. The fifth column was exterminated before it could form.”</p>
<p class="fst">If Stalin exterminated a “fifth column” before it could form,” that means it never existed.</p>
<p>No, these trials were not directed against “paid agents of outside forces.” By giving credence to this GPU argument, Scott, Hazard and the others who repeat this lie are supporting the very essence of the frameups, the deliberate Stalinist amalgam between the hundreds of thousands of pro-Soviet elements who were executed or imprisoned and spies, provocateurs, and wreckers.</p>
<p>The disorganization in Soviet military and industrial life that accompanied the purges was as harmful to the defense of the Soviet Union as any conceivable acts of actual imperialist spies and saboteurs. The debacle which today confronts the Soviet Union is in large part a result of Stalin’s ruthless destruction of the competent military and industrial leadership.</p>
<p>In order to uphold Stalin as a defender of “democracy,” the liberal apologists for Allied imperialism must become apologists also for the abominations of Stalinism, not the least of which were the Moscow trials frameups and the bloody purges. At the same time, these liberals aid Stalin’s attempts to discredit the Trotskyist revolutionary opposition to his ruinous policies.</p>
<p>These “defenders” of democracy are playing the game of the most reactionary American imperialists who are willing to learn from the methods of Stalinism how better to persecute and frameup the Trotskyists and other labor militants in this country.</p>
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Art Preis
Stalin’s Frame-up Purges Whitewashed
Liberals Aid Stalin’s Imperialist Allies
Spread GPU Lies About the Moscow Trials
(22 November 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 47, 22 November 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Among the obligations undertaken by the bourgeois democrats in line with the diplomatic needs of their new-found friendship with Stalin, is a “re-evaluation” of the frameup Moscow Trials. Belated “justifications” are being advanced for the monstrous purges, which up to now, no one but GPU hirelings, professional apologies for Stalinism, and the official Stalinist press dared appraise as anything but the frameups they were.
Far from serving their purpose of discrediting the Trotskyists, the trials boomeranged on Stalin. During the period of the Stalin- Hitler pact, the Stalinist press maintained strict silence about the trials, and the Trotskyists, charged in the trials with being agents of Hitler and the Mikado, were transformed overnight by the Stalinist press into agents of Anglo-French imperialism.
Now, such representatives of the American bourgeoisie as Harry Hopkins and former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies, are assisting the GPU in its task of whitewashing the Kremlin. Leading publications, such as Time and Life magazines, and the New York newspaper PM, through articles by its editor, Ralph Ingersoll, also have given support recently to the GPU versions of the trials.
Davies and the Trials
The crudest expression of this campaign so far is contained in an article by Davies in the November issue of American magazine. Davies, after admitting that he had attended some of the sessions of the Moscow trials and had considered them “fantastic” at the time, now claims to have gained “new light” on them. Just what “new” evidence he has uncovered he does not state. He merely gives full credence to the trials and the “confessions,” seeking to implicate Leon Trotsky and his co-thinkers as agents of German and Japanese imperialism.
Davies indicates the purposes of his article in his conclusion, stating: “There are no saboteurs, secret agents or Fifth Columnists to co-operate with the invaders, because the Russians were sufficiently far-sighted to eliminate them before it was too late. That is a fact which other liberty-loving nations might well ponder.”
Unquestionably this bourgeois support is extremely welcome to Stalin. The sustained defeats and losses of the Red Army have raised new doubts about the Kremlin’s policies among the Soviet masses and the workers everywhere. It has become increasingly difficult for Stalin to conceal the direct connection between the present catastrophic Soviet defeats and the 1937–38 purge of the Red Army command, in which no less than 40,000 officers and technicians were executed or imprisoned.
The American imperialists are serving their own ends by aiding Stalin in his criminal task of discrediting and destroying the proletarian revolutionary opposition to his betrayal of the international class struggle and his support of the “democratic” imperialists in the war.
Davies is pointing to Stalin’s Moscow Trial frameup method, “which other liberty-loving nations might ponder,” as a pattern to be followed against the working class opponents of the war in this country.
Findings of the Dewey Commission
The conclusive and irrefutable evidence uncovered and made public by the Commission headed by Prof. John Dewey, which exhaustively investigated the Moscow frameups, has exposed the complete falsity of the “confessions” in the Moscow trials. The Dewey Commission produced documentary evidence which proved the falsity of every alleged material fact permitted to slip into the “confessions.” Since the publication of the Commission’s findings in 1938, literally no individual or group has dared to offer a specific refutation of them.
So unanswerable are these findings that the American magazine, after printing Davies’ article, refuses to permit mention of them in its columns. The Nation, Nov. 15, reports:
“The American magazine has rejected an article by John Dewey answering one by Joseph E. Davies in which the former Ambassador said that the Soviet Union’s resistance to Hitler was made possible by the purging of pro-Nazis in the Moscow trials.”
A despicable role in this attempt to justify the Moscow trials frameups is being played by the liberals. Echoing the direct spokesmen of the imperialists, the liberal exponents of the “war for democracy” are likewise beginning to “revise” their estimates of the trials and purges.
The most recent examples of this are contained in the New Republic, November 17, in a lengthy compendium of articles on Russia Today.
Some “Liberals” Help Out
Some of the writers, wary of stepping on slippery ground, manage to discuss the most fundamental aspects of Soviet military and industrial policies without even mentioning the purges. Max Werner, in Prospects for the Red Army, and A. Jugow, in the Results of the Five Year Plans, write as though the trials and purges had never been.
Others offer various “explanations” designed to provide belated hindsight justification for the Moscow trial frameups.
Vera Micheles Dean, in discussing the Kremlin’s Foreign Policy, states: “It would seem more accurate to say that, the spectacular Moscow trials reflected a widespread outburst of xenophobia – mistrust of all foreigners.” According to this view, Stalin was only yielding to the “xenophobia” of the Soviet masses in the purges which wiped out the old Bolshevik party, decimated the trained leadership of the Soviet army, government and industry and wound up with – a pact with Hitler.
John Scott, who shortly before the Soviet-Nazi war began was ordered expelled from the Soviet Union for articles he wrote in the London News-Chronicle, gives as one reason for the purges:
”I am convinced that many of those high, top-flight functionaries who disappeared between 1936 and 1938 got into trouble originally because of their failure to agree with Stalin’s far reaching and ruthless plans for industrialization.”
Scott then goes on to imply that tens of thousands of leading officials, technicians, army commanders, etc., had entered into the services of the German and Japanese fascists.
“One of the most important accomplishments of the Soviet administrative system has been the elimination of enemy fifth columnists ... In Russia we have seen no evidence of the existence of any effective Nazi organizations or agents. These were eliminated by the systematic vigilance on the part of the Soviet people, the Communist Party and the NKVD (GPU). From 1936 to 1938 thousands of individuals who were accused of hostility to the Soviet Union were purged. Many innocent men and women suffered unjustly, but the Quislings and Antonescus were liquidated.”
What the “Liberals” Are Really Helping
John N. Hazard (The Legal Framework) brazenly states:
”... There was no path open for society except self-protection. This approach was extensively adopted for the political offender, whether the sincere dissenter or the paid agents of outside forces. The fifth column was exterminated before it could form.”
If Stalin exterminated a “fifth column” before it could form,” that means it never existed.
No, these trials were not directed against “paid agents of outside forces.” By giving credence to this GPU argument, Scott, Hazard and the others who repeat this lie are supporting the very essence of the frameups, the deliberate Stalinist amalgam between the hundreds of thousands of pro-Soviet elements who were executed or imprisoned and spies, provocateurs, and wreckers.
The disorganization in Soviet military and industrial life that accompanied the purges was as harmful to the defense of the Soviet Union as any conceivable acts of actual imperialist spies and saboteurs. The debacle which today confronts the Soviet Union is in large part a result of Stalin’s ruthless destruction of the competent military and industrial leadership.
In order to uphold Stalin as a defender of “democracy,” the liberal apologists for Allied imperialism must become apologists also for the abominations of Stalinism, not the least of which were the Moscow trials frameups and the bloody purges. At the same time, these liberals aid Stalin’s attempts to discredit the Trotskyist revolutionary opposition to his ruinous policies.
These “defenders” of democracy are playing the game of the most reactionary American imperialists who are willing to learn from the methods of Stalinism how better to persecute and frameup the Trotskyists and other labor militants in this country.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“Educating” Japan’s Crown Prince</h1>
<h3>(7 September 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_36" target="new">Vol. X No. 36</a>, 7 September 1946, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Suppose a foreign army does rule Japan? Suppose MacArthur did issue an edict last week forbidding Japanese workers to strike. Suppose U.S. occupation forces do keep Emperor Hirohito – a newly-renovated Emperor, of course – on his throne? That still doesn’t mean the Japanese people are to be deprived of the “blessings of democracy.”</p>
<p>U.S. imperialism naturally doesn’t want to feed “too much democracy” to the Japanese people all at once. They’re not used to such a rich diet, you see. So Wall Street’s State Department has found a way to nurture Japan with a bit of “democratic” broth without taxing the people’s digestive systems.<br>
</p>
<h4>How It’s Done</h4>
<p class="fst">It will all be done through that ideally “democratic” institution, the monarchy. First, the 12-year-old Crown Prince of Japan, Akihito, is to learn all about “American democracy” from an American tutor, hand-picked by the U.S. Department of State.</p>
<p>Then the gracious Son of the Son of the Sun will one day. as Emperor, spread the “democratic” sunshine over the miserable, hungry, exploited people of Japan.</p>
<p>Did any conquered people ever took forward to such delightful perspectives – “American democracy” dispensed by a “democratic” Emperor benevolently aided by American bayonets?</p>
<p>The honor of inculcating “democratic ideals” into the young Crown Prince has been bestowed by Washington on Mrs. Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Philadelphia writer of children’s books. She is reported “filled with zeal” for her assignment. She says she is going to teach Akihito all about “Washington and Jefferson and Longfellow” – all about “American thoughts and ideals.”</p>
<p>She didn’t say anything about republicanism – after all, scarcely a suitable subject for one who is being groomed for Emperor, even a “democratic” one.<br>
</p>
<h4>Not Included</h4>
<p class="fst">There are some phases of American “democracy” which we presume will not be covered in the future Emperor’s studies: Subjugation of racial minorities, like the Jim-Crowing and lynching of Negroes; government strikebreaking and anti-labor laws; discriminatory tax laws favoring the rich; etc. But, then, the Crown Prince represents the Japanese ruling class and he undoubtedly wil secure sufficient schooling in this type of “democratic” practice from traditional Japanese sources.</p>
<p>Educating the young Crown Prince in American “democratic ideals” has certain advantages not precisely related to democracy. These will be most greatly appreciated should the Japanese masses “abuse” democracy to the point of trying to kick out the present discredited Emperor. In that event, the U.S. State Department will have a nice new Emperor all ready for them – a Crown Prince just chock-full of American “democratic ideals.”</p>
<p>It goes without saying that he will also be a puppet of U.S. imperialism who will do its bidding in urging submission on the Japanese people. At any rate, he’ll do it “democratically.”</p>
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“Educating” Japan’s Crown Prince
(7 September 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 36, 7 September 1946, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Suppose a foreign army does rule Japan? Suppose MacArthur did issue an edict last week forbidding Japanese workers to strike. Suppose U.S. occupation forces do keep Emperor Hirohito – a newly-renovated Emperor, of course – on his throne? That still doesn’t mean the Japanese people are to be deprived of the “blessings of democracy.”
U.S. imperialism naturally doesn’t want to feed “too much democracy” to the Japanese people all at once. They’re not used to such a rich diet, you see. So Wall Street’s State Department has found a way to nurture Japan with a bit of “democratic” broth without taxing the people’s digestive systems.
How It’s Done
It will all be done through that ideally “democratic” institution, the monarchy. First, the 12-year-old Crown Prince of Japan, Akihito, is to learn all about “American democracy” from an American tutor, hand-picked by the U.S. Department of State.
Then the gracious Son of the Son of the Sun will one day. as Emperor, spread the “democratic” sunshine over the miserable, hungry, exploited people of Japan.
Did any conquered people ever took forward to such delightful perspectives – “American democracy” dispensed by a “democratic” Emperor benevolently aided by American bayonets?
The honor of inculcating “democratic ideals” into the young Crown Prince has been bestowed by Washington on Mrs. Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Philadelphia writer of children’s books. She is reported “filled with zeal” for her assignment. She says she is going to teach Akihito all about “Washington and Jefferson and Longfellow” – all about “American thoughts and ideals.”
She didn’t say anything about republicanism – after all, scarcely a suitable subject for one who is being groomed for Emperor, even a “democratic” one.
Not Included
There are some phases of American “democracy” which we presume will not be covered in the future Emperor’s studies: Subjugation of racial minorities, like the Jim-Crowing and lynching of Negroes; government strikebreaking and anti-labor laws; discriminatory tax laws favoring the rich; etc. But, then, the Crown Prince represents the Japanese ruling class and he undoubtedly wil secure sufficient schooling in this type of “democratic” practice from traditional Japanese sources.
Educating the young Crown Prince in American “democratic ideals” has certain advantages not precisely related to democracy. These will be most greatly appreciated should the Japanese masses “abuse” democracy to the point of trying to kick out the present discredited Emperor. In that event, the U.S. State Department will have a nice new Emperor all ready for them – a Crown Prince just chock-full of American “democratic ideals.”
It goes without saying that he will also be a puppet of U.S. imperialism who will do its bidding in urging submission on the Japanese people. At any rate, he’ll do it “democratically.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Wailing Liberals</h1>
<h3>(July 1942)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index.htm#fi42_06" target="new">Vol.3 No.7</a>, July 1942, pp.201-203.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">America’s liberals are beginning to beat their breasts
in lamentation. “Democratic” imperialism is repaying their faithful
services with a weighty boot on their tender backsides. Liberals and
sub-rosa and one-time Stalinists are being hounded out of government
jobs by the hundreds. A government witch-hunt is in progress against
liberals in the shipyards, radio communications and other maritime
services by orders of Secretary of the Navy Knox. The liberal literary
lights, who have sought to shine in the government propaganda agencies,
are being snuffed out.</p>
<p>These personal indignities are but half the burden of the liberals’
laments. The other half is that, no matter how loudly the liberals
shout, “This is really and truly a war for democracy,” the deeds of the
bourgeois rulers cry out even more loudly, “This is an imperialist war.”</p>
<p>In the heat of the “war for democracy,” the New Deal is melting
away. Its much-vaunted social reforms, the CCC, NYA, WPA, etc., its
social and labor legislation are being liquidated. The government war
agencies have been tucked away in the pockets of Big Business.
Reactionaries of the vilest stripe are being coddled by the
administration, not only at home but internationally. The State
Department is maintaining toward Petain, Franco and Mannerheim an
attitude singularly fraternal for a government that is urging the
masses to fight and die “against fascism.”</p>
<p>The liberals are embarrassed. Like the dreamer who sees himself
exposed in some public place minus his pants and is incapable of
running to cover, the liberals are suffering from involuntary indecent
exposure. Only they aren’t dreaming.<br>
</p>
<h4>“How Can Such Things Be?”</h4>
<p class="fst">The first personal blows came when ex-Stalinoid Malcolm
Cowley, an editor of the liberal weekly, <strong>New Republic</strong>,
and the writer C. Hartley Grattan were unceremoniously booted out of
the Office of Facts and Information. This first sprinkling has since
turned into a flood, with hundreds of other liberals swept out of
government jobs.</p>
<p>The Stalino-liberal newspaper <strong>PM</strong> has been wailing
at length about this government witch-hunt. The June 10 <strong>PM</strong>
reports:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Employees of the Government of the United States in
this year of 1942, a New Deal Government headed by FDR, have lost their
right of free speech and free thought.</p>
<p class="quote">“This is the direct and most important result of a
current ‘Red’ witch-hunt – the color is Dies-tinted – that has already
cost several hundred persons their jobs, finds at least a thousand more
on the grid, and ultimately threatens thousands more whose only crimp
is that they are liberals and have fought for years in the forefront of
New Deal reform at home and anti-Fascism abroad.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>PM</strong> cannot reconcile this witch-hunt
with its picture of Rooseveltian liberalism:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the midst of this extraordinary phenomenon, the
Vice President of this country, with the approval of the President,
wrote and delivered a ringing speech which identifies our war as the
climax of 150 years of revolution – revolution for the people, by the
people and for a quart of milk a day for the people’s children ...</p>
<p class="quote">“In the midst of this phenomenon, a liberal Attorney
General of the country spoke at a dinner of New Deal leaders and put
heart in them by saying that it was vital to the success of our war
effort that they press on with their good works. That this same
Attorney General, some weeks later, made a legalistic mistake and a
political blunder (deportation order against Harry Bridges) has nothing
to do with the fact that he was chosen by the President because of his
record for liberalism.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>PM</strong> simply can’t explain the
contradiction it sees:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the face of all these things, how can this witch
hunt be explained? ... How can this be? How can men be persecuted for
anti-Fascist ideas in a war against Fascism? We do not know the precise
answer to this paradox.”</p>
<p class="fst"><strong>PM</strong> finally attempts an answer. It is
really the insidious work of the enemies of the New Deal and Roosevelt
“who have yet to make up their minds who is more important to their
purpose to destroy: Adolf Hitler or Franklin D. Roosevelt.”</p>
<p><strong>PM</strong> is not alone in its lament. <strong>The Nation</strong>,
traditional oracle of American liberalism, also complains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The persistent red-baiting patterns of the
investigations and the consistency with which only liberals are fired
give strong color to the suspicion that officials high up in both
agencies [FBI and Civil Service] are neither ignorant nor naive. It is
time we discovered who is responsible for the idiotic and dangerous
procedure by which men and women appointed to government jobs because
they are known anti-fascists are forthwith dismissed – for the same
reason.” (<strong>The Nation</strong>, June 20, 1942.)</p>
<p class="fst">Likewise the Social-Democratic <strong>New Leader</strong>
puts on a scowl and even dares to shake a disapproving forefinger under
the nose of the Commander-in-Chief himself:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“With the Department of Justice working overtime
(ousting liberals), there are weighty scores against the Roosevelt
administration. The White House has done little to force the removal of
the isolationist Senator Reynolds from the chairmanship of the Senate
Military Affairs Committee, and even less to remove Senator Walsh as
head of the Naval Affairs Committee.</p>
<p class="quote">“The President has permitted Father Coughlin to go
free. This was done on the basis of some agreement that the radio
priest would keep silent and that clerical fascism would be halted in
the United States. Roosevelt has kept his part of the bargain – the
other side has not.” (<strong>New Leader</strong>, June 27.)</p>
<p class="fst">The <strong>New Leader</strong> apparently wants
Roosevelt to strike bargains only with fascists who will live up to
their part of the deal.</p>
<p>And the Stalinists join the wailing, to report that:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... the one man in Congress who cast his vote for
democracy on Jan. 6, 1939 in opposing the infamous embargo against
Loyalist Spain is being blacklisted today by government agencies.</p>
<p class="quote">“John T. Bernard (ex-Representative from Minnesota)
has been refused his right toiparticipate in this world war against
fascism – because he is one of the nation’s most stalwart foes of
fascism. It doesn’t make sense but it is true.” (Adam Lapin, in the <strong>Daily
Worker</strong>, June 18.)<br>
</p>
<h4>The Bridges “Mystery”</h4>
<p class="fst">The dilemma of the liberals is most clearly exemplified
in the case of Harry Bridges, CIO Longshoremen’s president, who is a
model of Stalinist servility to the administration, acting as a
“fingerman” for the employers and FBI against labor militants. When
Attorney General Biddle, “chosen by the President because of his record
of liberalism,” ordered the deportation of Bridges, the liberals found
themselves in quite a stew.</p>
<p><strong>PM</strong>’s editor Ralph Ingersoll struck on the matchless
explanation that Biddle ordered Bridges’ deportation because Biddle is
a Biddle.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our Attorney General is an honest, intelligent,
educated, highly principled and liberal Biddle – then is it fair to ask
what <em>is</em> a Biddle? Regretfully, we leave the answer to wiser
heads than ours.” (<strong>PM</strong>, May 29.)</p>
<p class="fst">We search for an answer among “wiser heads” in the
columns of <strong>The Nation</strong>. There I.F. Stone, writing on <em>Biddle
and the Facts</em> in the June 20 issue, sadly reports that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... the whole case suggests absolutism in decay,
rather than democracy in action: the long persecution of a workers’
leader, the use of secret police for political purposes, the
mobilization of witnesses from the dregs of society, the readiness of
an upper-class liberal to serve as the tool of these forces.”</p>
<p class="fst">Is there a distinction between “upper class” and “lower
class” liberals ? And isn’t Biddle as much the “tool” of Roosevelt, who
named him to office, as of “absolutism in decay”? But naturally such
questions are not answered by the wailing <strong>Nation</strong>
editors.</p>
<p><strong>Common Sense</strong>, the liberal monthly, decides in its
July issue that Biddle is really but a seeker for knowledge:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“How could Mr. Biddle, probably the most liberal
member of FDR’s cabinet, be accused of deliberately giving comfort to
the enemy at home and abroad? Probably the answer is that Mr. Biddle
wanted a test case before the Supreme Court on the question of whether
Communists aim to overthrow the government by force.”</p>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists solve the Bridges deportation mystery in
their usual neat fashion – there’s Munichmen “appeaser” work afoot:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Instead of prosecuting and jailing the Fifth Column
Coughlinites, Nazi agents and Ku Kluxers, Biddle is trying to deport an
outstanding anti-fascist labor leader whose work is a pillar of
strength to the war effort ... Biddle’s ‘force and violence’
defamations against the Communist Party are a notorious tactic of
Hitler and Goebbels to divide and conquer.” (<strong>Daily Worker</strong>,
May 31.)</p>
<p class="fst">But since Biddle is also Roosevelt’s flunkey, is
Roosevelt also a Munichman? The mystery deepens and Adam Lapin,
Washington correspondent, can only shake his head in the June 25 <strong>Daily
Worker</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There sure are some queer goings on in the
Department of Justice under the Biddle regime.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Terrible Doings in Washington</h4>
<p class="fst">Pointing to the blows being struck at the social
agencies of the New Deal – the CCC, NYA, WPA, etcetera – <strong>PM</strong>,
on June 15, complains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There seems to be a very real danger that the New
Deal is losing the domestic front while its attention is absorbed with
the job of licking the Fascist foe without. Bit by bit the reactionary
clique in Congress is nibbling away the New Deal bases that gave the
common man a real stake in democracy and saved him from succumbing to
Fascist demagogues. It makes one angry to see good New Dealers in
Congress on the defensive, uttering apologies, for things that ought to
make our Nation proud.”</p>
<p class="fst">Then there is the sad case of the Roosevelt-majority
Supreme Court. Of one of its recent reactionary decisions, Samuel
Grafton, the liberal columnist, says complainingly:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I hope everyone has noticed the remarkable
similarity between our ancient poll taxes and the recent Supreme Court
ruling that it is all right for a municipality to charge a book peddler
$10, or more, or less, for a license to sell books.</p>
<p class="quote">“Under the poll tax, as it exists in eight states, one
must pay from $1 to umpty-ump dollars to exercise the right to vote.
Under the new Supreme Court decision one must pay $10, in Fort Smith,
Arkansas, to exercise the right of free press.</p>
<p class="quote">“If anything were needed to show that the Supreme
Court decision, a bare 5-to-4, <em>put over by the perfectly shocking
acquiescence of Mr. Justice Frankfurter</em>, was a retrograde
decision, that by it the Court speeded backward into a dark tunnel like
a man with his foot caught in a roller-coaster, it is this comparison
... Are we going to let local government get up a kind of juridical
Sears, Roebuck catalogue with prices on the various items in the Bill
of Rights?”</p>
<p class="fst">By Gad, it’s enough to make one want to get up from
one’s easy chair and do something about it, if only Grafton would tell
us how to upset a Supreme Court decision short of revolution, and how
to make a typical liberal, Felix Frankfurter, not act like a typical
liberal in a capitalist government post. The June 27 <strong>Nation</strong>
can only shake its head mournfully at the speedy demise of Roosevelt’s
“liberal majority” on the Supreme Court:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is sad to see Stone, Frankfurter and Jackson
taken in by the sweet company-union overtones of Byrnes in the
wage-hour case.”</p>
<p class="fst">The liberal complaints pile up, against every cabinet
officer, every government department, and the government war production
agencies. The latter especially, dominated by the corporation
dollar-a-year men, come in for some loud wails.</p>
<p><strong>The Nation</strong> catalogues the “business-as-usual”
set-up of the
War Production Board and ends with the pitiable plaint:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... Something is still ‘seriously wrong’ ... and it
will not be corrected until Nelson, who is as fainthearted as the
President about firing people, gets out the ax and keeps the promise he
made when he became head of the WPB. When, Mr. Nelson, will the heads
roll?” (<strong>The Nation</strong>, April 11.)</p>
<p class="fst">Yes, when? Evidently, Mr. Nelson was too busy that week
to read the <strong>Nation</strong>. At any rate, the streets of
Washington have been singularly free of rolling heads except those of
liberals. I.F. Stone sadly concludes in <strong>The Nation</strong> of
June 27:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Carefully read and considered, the Truman report on
the Guthrie case is the key to the continued setbacks suffered by
ourselves and our allies. The arsenal of democracy, as the Guthrie case
and the reactions to the report show, is still being operated with one
eye on the war and the other on the convenience of big business ...</p>
<p class="quote">“The Guthrie report shows that, months after Pearl
Harbor ... the big-business crowd is as powerfully entrenched under
Nelson as it was under Knudsen.”</p>
<p class="fst">Stone ends with the happy suggestion that: “The solution
of our problems lies in a more democratic direction of our industrial
effort,” although he confesses dolefully, “the trend is the other way.”</p>
<p>And even Dorothy Thompson, who can say “war for democracy” in every
language including the Sanskrit, complains that the government is
giving $600,000,000 worth of new plants for synthetic rubber production
to “finance enormously rich corporations to manufacture a product for
which the people themselves are a certain market ... Why didn’t they
put up their own money?” Why indeed? She finishes off with the profound
suggestion:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If we are going to survive this epoch we have got to
do imaginative thinking. And stop letting people whose brains have
grown dull on monopoly do it for us.”</p>
<p class="fst">The problem that is beginning to trouble the liberals
more than anything else is the strange international company the
“democratic” rulers are keeping these days.</p>
<p>Freda Kirchwey, editor of <strong>The Nation</strong>, had some
strong words to say on this subject on January 3, after the State
Department had “advised” the Free French to withdraw from St. Pierre
and Miquelon islands in favor of Petain. “<em>Mr. Hull Should Resign</em>”
was the title of her indignation piece:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“If the State Department, without consultation with
the President or the Cabinet, has plunged the nation into its present
humiliating position, its officials should be called into account as
promptly as were the military leaders at Pearl Harbor. Without the
least delay, the President should demand the resignation of the
officials who on their own say-so betrayed the cause to which this
country has been pledged not only by the terms of the Atlantic Charter
but in many pronouncements by the President ... Why should men who have
demonstrated their failure with such undeviating success be permitted
to direct the policy of a great power committed to a life-and-death
struggle?”<br>
</p>
<h4>Hull’s Bedfellows Embarrass the Liberals</h4>
<p class="fst">Why, indeed ? Miss Kirchwey can’t answer her own riddles
but, evidently, President Roosevelt knows why, because Miss Kirchwey
was compelled to report six months later in the June 20 <strong>Nation</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“But it must be admitted the future is still obscure.
. . . The agreements made in Washington and London (with the Kremlin)
are only a blue-print
... on the very day when the new coalition was proclaimed, Secretary
Hull announced the resumption of shipments of food and other supplies
from America to the Vichy government in North Africa.</p>
<p class="quote">“No promises, no pacts, no fine speeches by Welles or
even (!) Wallace or Winant, can wipe out the demoralizing effect of the
old diplomacy pursuing its old discredited maneuvers while the struggle
against fascism reaches a climax of danger and effort.”</p>
<p class="fst">Samuel Grafton, who poses many questions well and knows
none of the answers, stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The best I can make of our current policy is that we
insist the French people shall rise in revolution, but not against
their government ... Hitler thinks the French resolution is more
important than the French fleet, for he has kept his hands off the
latter to avoid the former. We have reached the remarkable situation in
which Hitler lets the French fleet alone, to sustain Vichy’s prestige,
and we sustain Vichy’s prestige in order to save the fleet.</p>
<p class="quote">“One of us must be taking a hell of an ideological
beating. Who are the French people to revolt against? Hitler doesn’t
want them to know, either.” (<strong>New York Post</strong>, June 16.)</p>
<p class="fst"> And
echo calls in the Stalinist press:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“How long is Marshal Petain going to be allowed to
make a sucker out of the United States?” (<strong>Daily Worker</strong>,
June 13.)</p>
<p class="fst">The liberals are also taking “a hell of an ideological
beating” about Finland as well. Here the Stalinist press gives the lead
that the liberals follow. Adam Lapin goes in for some illuminating
society reporting in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, June 9:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Mannerheim’s envoy to Washington, Hjalmar Procope,
spent his Sunday evening chatting and dining with high administration
officials and with leading
United States Senators ... As plans for a new Finnish-Nazi drive
against the Soviet Union, personally mapped by Hitler, were under way,
some of the officials who dined with Finnish Minister Procope included:</p>
<p class="quote">“Milo Perkins, Director of the War Economic Board;
Paul V. McNutt, Chairman of the National Manpower Commission; Assistant
Attorney General Thurman Arnold; Associate Justice Stanley Reed of the
Supreme Court; Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Senator Joseph
B. Guffey of Pennsylvania.</p>
<p class="quote">“... it seems about time they realized that Finland is
Hitler’s ally, and that attending social evenings with Procope can
hardly he construed as a friendly gesture toward the Soviet Union ...”</p>
<p class="fst">The concern of the liberals about the particular
attitudes of the “democratic” rulers toward Vichy and Finland has begun
to broaden out into a more generalized worry about where this whole
“struggle against fascism” is heading. This is best expressed by J.
Alvarez Del Vayo, Foreign Minister in the Spanish Loyalist Government,
in one of a series of articles on <em>World War III?</em> in the June
20 <strong>Nation</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Petains and Francos were not merely tolerated.
They were, and they yet are, considered by the ruling diplomacy a
useful element of counterpoise in a Europe which tomorrow might swing
too far to the left. That is why the diplomacy which today still
directs foreign policy on the side of the Allies, when it has a choice,
prefers an Otto of Hapsburg to an Austrian Socialist, an Eckhardt to a
Hungarian democrat ... One cannot but maintain a certain reserve when
considering the question what kind of peace would emerge if the present
governments of the United Nations could vote secretly on the
transcendental question of the organization of the world of tomorrow.”</p>
<p class="fst">How long? How is it possible? How can this be? How can
we convince the masses that this is a “war for democracy against
fascism” when liberals and anti-fascists are persecuted, when
reactionaries and pro-fascists are handled with kid gloves, when Big
Business is in the saddle and the old ruling diplomacy rides higher
than ever? The liberals chant their woes and drench the wailing wall
with their tears. But they have no answers and would not like the
correct answers.<br>
</p>
<h4>They Don’t Want to Tell the Truth</h4>
<p class="fst">If it occurs to them that Mr. Hull does not resign
because Roosevelt approves his policies, or that the monopolies are
running this war because it is a capitalist war, or that high
administration officials maintain a certain fraternal attitude toward
Petain, Franco and Mannerheim because this is not and never was an
ideological war between democracy and fascism, they do not voice their
suspicions. God forbid! They don’t want to tell the truth about this
war. They just want to save their own tender hides in the mounting
reaction and continue with a straight face to be able to tell the
masses that this is “our” war.</p>
<p>But it is becoming more difficult for the liberals to be convincing.
As the intellectual spokesmen for the petty-bourgeoisie who are being
crushed by the war-expedited monopoly control, the liberals are feeling
the weight of reaction on their own backs. They look to the past with
misgivings and to the future with rising fear. They keep shouting
hoop-la for the “war against fascism” but they can scarcely conceal the
feeling that somehow this “war for democracy” is writing the epitaph
for bourgeois democracy in general and for its liberal exponents in
particular.</p>
<p>Fortunately for the masses of the world, their fate does not depend
on these hired mourners at the death-bed of bourgeois democracy. While
the liberals wring their hands hopelessly at the spectacle of the death
agony of capitalism, the revolutionary proletarian forces are building
their cadres and mobilizing their strength throughout the world.</p>
<p>The oppressed of the earth will silence the whines of the liberals
along with burying the rotting corpse of capitalism. For the masses,
unlike the liberals, are seeking an answer to the question of their
destiny, an answer that will sweep the globe – the socialist revolution.</p>
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Art Preis
The Wailing Liberals
(July 1942)
From Fourth International, Vol.3 No.7, July 1942, pp.201-203.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
America’s liberals are beginning to beat their breasts
in lamentation. “Democratic” imperialism is repaying their faithful
services with a weighty boot on their tender backsides. Liberals and
sub-rosa and one-time Stalinists are being hounded out of government
jobs by the hundreds. A government witch-hunt is in progress against
liberals in the shipyards, radio communications and other maritime
services by orders of Secretary of the Navy Knox. The liberal literary
lights, who have sought to shine in the government propaganda agencies,
are being snuffed out.
These personal indignities are but half the burden of the liberals’
laments. The other half is that, no matter how loudly the liberals
shout, “This is really and truly a war for democracy,” the deeds of the
bourgeois rulers cry out even more loudly, “This is an imperialist war.”
In the heat of the “war for democracy,” the New Deal is melting
away. Its much-vaunted social reforms, the CCC, NYA, WPA, etc., its
social and labor legislation are being liquidated. The government war
agencies have been tucked away in the pockets of Big Business.
Reactionaries of the vilest stripe are being coddled by the
administration, not only at home but internationally. The State
Department is maintaining toward Petain, Franco and Mannerheim an
attitude singularly fraternal for a government that is urging the
masses to fight and die “against fascism.”
The liberals are embarrassed. Like the dreamer who sees himself
exposed in some public place minus his pants and is incapable of
running to cover, the liberals are suffering from involuntary indecent
exposure. Only they aren’t dreaming.
“How Can Such Things Be?”
The first personal blows came when ex-Stalinoid Malcolm
Cowley, an editor of the liberal weekly, New Republic,
and the writer C. Hartley Grattan were unceremoniously booted out of
the Office of Facts and Information. This first sprinkling has since
turned into a flood, with hundreds of other liberals swept out of
government jobs.
The Stalino-liberal newspaper PM has been wailing
at length about this government witch-hunt. The June 10 PM
reports:
“Employees of the Government of the United States in
this year of 1942, a New Deal Government headed by FDR, have lost their
right of free speech and free thought.
“This is the direct and most important result of a
current ‘Red’ witch-hunt – the color is Dies-tinted – that has already
cost several hundred persons their jobs, finds at least a thousand more
on the grid, and ultimately threatens thousands more whose only crimp
is that they are liberals and have fought for years in the forefront of
New Deal reform at home and anti-Fascism abroad.”
PM cannot reconcile this witch-hunt
with its picture of Rooseveltian liberalism:
“In the midst of this extraordinary phenomenon, the
Vice President of this country, with the approval of the President,
wrote and delivered a ringing speech which identifies our war as the
climax of 150 years of revolution – revolution for the people, by the
people and for a quart of milk a day for the people’s children ...
“In the midst of this phenomenon, a liberal Attorney
General of the country spoke at a dinner of New Deal leaders and put
heart in them by saying that it was vital to the success of our war
effort that they press on with their good works. That this same
Attorney General, some weeks later, made a legalistic mistake and a
political blunder (deportation order against Harry Bridges) has nothing
to do with the fact that he was chosen by the President because of his
record for liberalism.”
PM simply can’t explain the
contradiction it sees:
“In the face of all these things, how can this witch
hunt be explained? ... How can this be? How can men be persecuted for
anti-Fascist ideas in a war against Fascism? We do not know the precise
answer to this paradox.”
PM finally attempts an answer. It is
really the insidious work of the enemies of the New Deal and Roosevelt
“who have yet to make up their minds who is more important to their
purpose to destroy: Adolf Hitler or Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
PM is not alone in its lament. The Nation,
traditional oracle of American liberalism, also complains:
“The persistent red-baiting patterns of the
investigations and the consistency with which only liberals are fired
give strong color to the suspicion that officials high up in both
agencies [FBI and Civil Service] are neither ignorant nor naive. It is
time we discovered who is responsible for the idiotic and dangerous
procedure by which men and women appointed to government jobs because
they are known anti-fascists are forthwith dismissed – for the same
reason.” (The Nation, June 20, 1942.)
Likewise the Social-Democratic New Leader
puts on a scowl and even dares to shake a disapproving forefinger under
the nose of the Commander-in-Chief himself:
“With the Department of Justice working overtime
(ousting liberals), there are weighty scores against the Roosevelt
administration. The White House has done little to force the removal of
the isolationist Senator Reynolds from the chairmanship of the Senate
Military Affairs Committee, and even less to remove Senator Walsh as
head of the Naval Affairs Committee.
“The President has permitted Father Coughlin to go
free. This was done on the basis of some agreement that the radio
priest would keep silent and that clerical fascism would be halted in
the United States. Roosevelt has kept his part of the bargain – the
other side has not.” (New Leader, June 27.)
The New Leader apparently wants
Roosevelt to strike bargains only with fascists who will live up to
their part of the deal.
And the Stalinists join the wailing, to report that:
“... the one man in Congress who cast his vote for
democracy on Jan. 6, 1939 in opposing the infamous embargo against
Loyalist Spain is being blacklisted today by government agencies.
“John T. Bernard (ex-Representative from Minnesota)
has been refused his right toiparticipate in this world war against
fascism – because he is one of the nation’s most stalwart foes of
fascism. It doesn’t make sense but it is true.” (Adam Lapin, in the Daily
Worker, June 18.)
The Bridges “Mystery”
The dilemma of the liberals is most clearly exemplified
in the case of Harry Bridges, CIO Longshoremen’s president, who is a
model of Stalinist servility to the administration, acting as a
“fingerman” for the employers and FBI against labor militants. When
Attorney General Biddle, “chosen by the President because of his record
of liberalism,” ordered the deportation of Bridges, the liberals found
themselves in quite a stew.
PM’s editor Ralph Ingersoll struck on the matchless
explanation that Biddle ordered Bridges’ deportation because Biddle is
a Biddle.
“Our Attorney General is an honest, intelligent,
educated, highly principled and liberal Biddle – then is it fair to ask
what is a Biddle? Regretfully, we leave the answer to wiser
heads than ours.” (PM, May 29.)
We search for an answer among “wiser heads” in the
columns of The Nation. There I.F. Stone, writing on Biddle
and the Facts in the June 20 issue, sadly reports that
“... the whole case suggests absolutism in decay,
rather than democracy in action: the long persecution of a workers’
leader, the use of secret police for political purposes, the
mobilization of witnesses from the dregs of society, the readiness of
an upper-class liberal to serve as the tool of these forces.”
Is there a distinction between “upper class” and “lower
class” liberals ? And isn’t Biddle as much the “tool” of Roosevelt, who
named him to office, as of “absolutism in decay”? But naturally such
questions are not answered by the wailing Nation
editors.
Common Sense, the liberal monthly, decides in its
July issue that Biddle is really but a seeker for knowledge:
“How could Mr. Biddle, probably the most liberal
member of FDR’s cabinet, be accused of deliberately giving comfort to
the enemy at home and abroad? Probably the answer is that Mr. Biddle
wanted a test case before the Supreme Court on the question of whether
Communists aim to overthrow the government by force.”
The Stalinists solve the Bridges deportation mystery in
their usual neat fashion – there’s Munichmen “appeaser” work afoot:
“Instead of prosecuting and jailing the Fifth Column
Coughlinites, Nazi agents and Ku Kluxers, Biddle is trying to deport an
outstanding anti-fascist labor leader whose work is a pillar of
strength to the war effort ... Biddle’s ‘force and violence’
defamations against the Communist Party are a notorious tactic of
Hitler and Goebbels to divide and conquer.” (Daily Worker,
May 31.)
But since Biddle is also Roosevelt’s flunkey, is
Roosevelt also a Munichman? The mystery deepens and Adam Lapin,
Washington correspondent, can only shake his head in the June 25 Daily
Worker:
“There sure are some queer goings on in the
Department of Justice under the Biddle regime.”
Terrible Doings in Washington
Pointing to the blows being struck at the social
agencies of the New Deal – the CCC, NYA, WPA, etcetera – PM,
on June 15, complains:
“There seems to be a very real danger that the New
Deal is losing the domestic front while its attention is absorbed with
the job of licking the Fascist foe without. Bit by bit the reactionary
clique in Congress is nibbling away the New Deal bases that gave the
common man a real stake in democracy and saved him from succumbing to
Fascist demagogues. It makes one angry to see good New Dealers in
Congress on the defensive, uttering apologies, for things that ought to
make our Nation proud.”
Then there is the sad case of the Roosevelt-majority
Supreme Court. Of one of its recent reactionary decisions, Samuel
Grafton, the liberal columnist, says complainingly:
“I hope everyone has noticed the remarkable
similarity between our ancient poll taxes and the recent Supreme Court
ruling that it is all right for a municipality to charge a book peddler
$10, or more, or less, for a license to sell books.
“Under the poll tax, as it exists in eight states, one
must pay from $1 to umpty-ump dollars to exercise the right to vote.
Under the new Supreme Court decision one must pay $10, in Fort Smith,
Arkansas, to exercise the right of free press.
“If anything were needed to show that the Supreme
Court decision, a bare 5-to-4, put over by the perfectly shocking
acquiescence of Mr. Justice Frankfurter, was a retrograde
decision, that by it the Court speeded backward into a dark tunnel like
a man with his foot caught in a roller-coaster, it is this comparison
... Are we going to let local government get up a kind of juridical
Sears, Roebuck catalogue with prices on the various items in the Bill
of Rights?”
By Gad, it’s enough to make one want to get up from
one’s easy chair and do something about it, if only Grafton would tell
us how to upset a Supreme Court decision short of revolution, and how
to make a typical liberal, Felix Frankfurter, not act like a typical
liberal in a capitalist government post. The June 27 Nation
can only shake its head mournfully at the speedy demise of Roosevelt’s
“liberal majority” on the Supreme Court:
“It is sad to see Stone, Frankfurter and Jackson
taken in by the sweet company-union overtones of Byrnes in the
wage-hour case.”
The liberal complaints pile up, against every cabinet
officer, every government department, and the government war production
agencies. The latter especially, dominated by the corporation
dollar-a-year men, come in for some loud wails.
The Nation catalogues the “business-as-usual”
set-up of the
War Production Board and ends with the pitiable plaint:
“... Something is still ‘seriously wrong’ ... and it
will not be corrected until Nelson, who is as fainthearted as the
President about firing people, gets out the ax and keeps the promise he
made when he became head of the WPB. When, Mr. Nelson, will the heads
roll?” (The Nation, April 11.)
Yes, when? Evidently, Mr. Nelson was too busy that week
to read the Nation. At any rate, the streets of
Washington have been singularly free of rolling heads except those of
liberals. I.F. Stone sadly concludes in The Nation of
June 27:
“Carefully read and considered, the Truman report on
the Guthrie case is the key to the continued setbacks suffered by
ourselves and our allies. The arsenal of democracy, as the Guthrie case
and the reactions to the report show, is still being operated with one
eye on the war and the other on the convenience of big business ...
“The Guthrie report shows that, months after Pearl
Harbor ... the big-business crowd is as powerfully entrenched under
Nelson as it was under Knudsen.”
Stone ends with the happy suggestion that: “The solution
of our problems lies in a more democratic direction of our industrial
effort,” although he confesses dolefully, “the trend is the other way.”
And even Dorothy Thompson, who can say “war for democracy” in every
language including the Sanskrit, complains that the government is
giving $600,000,000 worth of new plants for synthetic rubber production
to “finance enormously rich corporations to manufacture a product for
which the people themselves are a certain market ... Why didn’t they
put up their own money?” Why indeed? She finishes off with the profound
suggestion:
“If we are going to survive this epoch we have got to
do imaginative thinking. And stop letting people whose brains have
grown dull on monopoly do it for us.”
The problem that is beginning to trouble the liberals
more than anything else is the strange international company the
“democratic” rulers are keeping these days.
Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, had some
strong words to say on this subject on January 3, after the State
Department had “advised” the Free French to withdraw from St. Pierre
and Miquelon islands in favor of Petain. “Mr. Hull Should Resign”
was the title of her indignation piece:
“If the State Department, without consultation with
the President or the Cabinet, has plunged the nation into its present
humiliating position, its officials should be called into account as
promptly as were the military leaders at Pearl Harbor. Without the
least delay, the President should demand the resignation of the
officials who on their own say-so betrayed the cause to which this
country has been pledged not only by the terms of the Atlantic Charter
but in many pronouncements by the President ... Why should men who have
demonstrated their failure with such undeviating success be permitted
to direct the policy of a great power committed to a life-and-death
struggle?”
Hull’s Bedfellows Embarrass the Liberals
Why, indeed ? Miss Kirchwey can’t answer her own riddles
but, evidently, President Roosevelt knows why, because Miss Kirchwey
was compelled to report six months later in the June 20 Nation:
“But it must be admitted the future is still obscure.
. . . The agreements made in Washington and London (with the Kremlin)
are only a blue-print
... on the very day when the new coalition was proclaimed, Secretary
Hull announced the resumption of shipments of food and other supplies
from America to the Vichy government in North Africa.
“No promises, no pacts, no fine speeches by Welles or
even (!) Wallace or Winant, can wipe out the demoralizing effect of the
old diplomacy pursuing its old discredited maneuvers while the struggle
against fascism reaches a climax of danger and effort.”
Samuel Grafton, who poses many questions well and knows
none of the answers, stated:
“The best I can make of our current policy is that we
insist the French people shall rise in revolution, but not against
their government ... Hitler thinks the French resolution is more
important than the French fleet, for he has kept his hands off the
latter to avoid the former. We have reached the remarkable situation in
which Hitler lets the French fleet alone, to sustain Vichy’s prestige,
and we sustain Vichy’s prestige in order to save the fleet.
“One of us must be taking a hell of an ideological
beating. Who are the French people to revolt against? Hitler doesn’t
want them to know, either.” (New York Post, June 16.)
And
echo calls in the Stalinist press:
“How long is Marshal Petain going to be allowed to
make a sucker out of the United States?” (Daily Worker,
June 13.)
The liberals are also taking “a hell of an ideological
beating” about Finland as well. Here the Stalinist press gives the lead
that the liberals follow. Adam Lapin goes in for some illuminating
society reporting in the Daily Worker, June 9:
“Mannerheim’s envoy to Washington, Hjalmar Procope,
spent his Sunday evening chatting and dining with high administration
officials and with leading
United States Senators ... As plans for a new Finnish-Nazi drive
against the Soviet Union, personally mapped by Hitler, were under way,
some of the officials who dined with Finnish Minister Procope included:
“Milo Perkins, Director of the War Economic Board;
Paul V. McNutt, Chairman of the National Manpower Commission; Assistant
Attorney General Thurman Arnold; Associate Justice Stanley Reed of the
Supreme Court; Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Senator Joseph
B. Guffey of Pennsylvania.
“... it seems about time they realized that Finland is
Hitler’s ally, and that attending social evenings with Procope can
hardly he construed as a friendly gesture toward the Soviet Union ...”
The concern of the liberals about the particular
attitudes of the “democratic” rulers toward Vichy and Finland has begun
to broaden out into a more generalized worry about where this whole
“struggle against fascism” is heading. This is best expressed by J.
Alvarez Del Vayo, Foreign Minister in the Spanish Loyalist Government,
in one of a series of articles on World War III? in the June
20 Nation:
“The Petains and Francos were not merely tolerated.
They were, and they yet are, considered by the ruling diplomacy a
useful element of counterpoise in a Europe which tomorrow might swing
too far to the left. That is why the diplomacy which today still
directs foreign policy on the side of the Allies, when it has a choice,
prefers an Otto of Hapsburg to an Austrian Socialist, an Eckhardt to a
Hungarian democrat ... One cannot but maintain a certain reserve when
considering the question what kind of peace would emerge if the present
governments of the United Nations could vote secretly on the
transcendental question of the organization of the world of tomorrow.”
How long? How is it possible? How can this be? How can
we convince the masses that this is a “war for democracy against
fascism” when liberals and anti-fascists are persecuted, when
reactionaries and pro-fascists are handled with kid gloves, when Big
Business is in the saddle and the old ruling diplomacy rides higher
than ever? The liberals chant their woes and drench the wailing wall
with their tears. But they have no answers and would not like the
correct answers.
They Don’t Want to Tell the Truth
If it occurs to them that Mr. Hull does not resign
because Roosevelt approves his policies, or that the monopolies are
running this war because it is a capitalist war, or that high
administration officials maintain a certain fraternal attitude toward
Petain, Franco and Mannerheim because this is not and never was an
ideological war between democracy and fascism, they do not voice their
suspicions. God forbid! They don’t want to tell the truth about this
war. They just want to save their own tender hides in the mounting
reaction and continue with a straight face to be able to tell the
masses that this is “our” war.
But it is becoming more difficult for the liberals to be convincing.
As the intellectual spokesmen for the petty-bourgeoisie who are being
crushed by the war-expedited monopoly control, the liberals are feeling
the weight of reaction on their own backs. They look to the past with
misgivings and to the future with rising fear. They keep shouting
hoop-la for the “war against fascism” but they can scarcely conceal the
feeling that somehow this “war for democracy” is writing the epitaph
for bourgeois democracy in general and for its liberal exponents in
particular.
Fortunately for the masses of the world, their fate does not depend
on these hired mourners at the death-bed of bourgeois democracy. While
the liberals wring their hands hopelessly at the spectacle of the death
agony of capitalism, the revolutionary proletarian forces are building
their cadres and mobilizing their strength throughout the world.
The oppressed of the earth will silence the whines of the liberals
along with burying the rotting corpse of capitalism. For the masses,
unlike the liberals, are seeking an answer to the question of their
destiny, an answer that will sweep the globe – the socialist revolution.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>If War Comes</h1>
<h3>(8 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_45" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 45</a>, 8 November 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">World War III, even on the scale of the last War, will cost the American people half a trillion dollars. They will suffer not less than 9 to 10 million casualties. All freedoms will be cancelled, strikes outlawed, work-or-fight laws imposed. Civilian goods production will be halted. The national debt will rise to $500 billion. The dollar won’t be worth 10 cents.</p>
<p>That is the conservative prediction of <em>The Costs of Another War</em>, a condensation of an article from <strong>U.S. News World Report</strong> published in the October <strong>Reader’s Digest</strong>. Ironically, the article is featured in the <em>Understatement of the Month</em> section.</p>
<p>In the last war, by 1944, the U.S. was spending $90 billion a year. On the same basis, the next war “would cost $143,000,000,000 a year at present prices.” A war of the same length as the last would cost “$540,000,000,000 <em>without allowing for new inflation</em>.” (Original emphasis.)</p>
<p>All war supplies will cost “at least 50% more for any new war that may come.”</p>
<p>While the cost in lives is “unpredictable,” the scale of casualties is “suggested by German experience.” The Russian war cost Germany 5 million killed and missing, 4 million wounded. U.S. losses in the last war were 294,000 killed, 670,000 wounded. The losses in the next – not allowing for atomic weapons – will be 10 times as great.</p>
<p>In last war, U.S. used 5 billion tons of its “best minerals”; about 8 billion barrels of oil. Plans now being prepared assume a far bigger use of materials in World War III. “By war’s end, the United States would be a ‘have not’ nation.” Impoverishment of resources would reduce U.S. economy to European levels.</p>
<p>“Practically everything” will be rationed; autos and trucks “confiscated.” The price situation is already “dynamite” with the military now taking 10% of total production; in war, the military will take “at least 60%.” Competition for what’s left “would set off explosive inflation.”</p>
<p>There will probably be a work-or-fight law “applying to adults up to 65.” Strikes will be “outlawed,” job-switching “seldom permitted,” production for civilian consumption “would be stopped,” military needs “would get priority everywhere.”</p>
<p>World War II has already left the U.S. with a debt of $250 billion dollars. By the end of World War III, it would increase by another $500 billion and interest charges alone “would be staggering.” The government would face the decision “on whether to repudiate debt as Russia did.”</p>
<p>As an alternative to debt repudiation – that is, a declaration of bankruptcy – the government would inflate prices, issue huge amounts of cheapened currency. The present U.S. dollar, now worth less than 60 cents in pre-war buying power, “could become a ten-cent dollar after World War III.”</p>
<p>The sober conclusion of this <em>Understatement of the Month</em> is: “War, in other words, would not be a simple solution of U.S.-Russian difficulties.”</p>
<p>In spite of this capitalist realization of the cost of another war, as expressed by <strong>U.S. News</strong>, the U.S. capitalists are preparing to resort to war as the only “solution” to the impending crisis of the decayed profit system.</p>
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Joseph Keller
If War Comes
(8 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 45, 8 November 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
World War III, even on the scale of the last War, will cost the American people half a trillion dollars. They will suffer not less than 9 to 10 million casualties. All freedoms will be cancelled, strikes outlawed, work-or-fight laws imposed. Civilian goods production will be halted. The national debt will rise to $500 billion. The dollar won’t be worth 10 cents.
That is the conservative prediction of The Costs of Another War, a condensation of an article from U.S. News World Report published in the October Reader’s Digest. Ironically, the article is featured in the Understatement of the Month section.
In the last war, by 1944, the U.S. was spending $90 billion a year. On the same basis, the next war “would cost $143,000,000,000 a year at present prices.” A war of the same length as the last would cost “$540,000,000,000 without allowing for new inflation.” (Original emphasis.)
All war supplies will cost “at least 50% more for any new war that may come.”
While the cost in lives is “unpredictable,” the scale of casualties is “suggested by German experience.” The Russian war cost Germany 5 million killed and missing, 4 million wounded. U.S. losses in the last war were 294,000 killed, 670,000 wounded. The losses in the next – not allowing for atomic weapons – will be 10 times as great.
In last war, U.S. used 5 billion tons of its “best minerals”; about 8 billion barrels of oil. Plans now being prepared assume a far bigger use of materials in World War III. “By war’s end, the United States would be a ‘have not’ nation.” Impoverishment of resources would reduce U.S. economy to European levels.
“Practically everything” will be rationed; autos and trucks “confiscated.” The price situation is already “dynamite” with the military now taking 10% of total production; in war, the military will take “at least 60%.” Competition for what’s left “would set off explosive inflation.”
There will probably be a work-or-fight law “applying to adults up to 65.” Strikes will be “outlawed,” job-switching “seldom permitted,” production for civilian consumption “would be stopped,” military needs “would get priority everywhere.”
World War II has already left the U.S. with a debt of $250 billion dollars. By the end of World War III, it would increase by another $500 billion and interest charges alone “would be staggering.” The government would face the decision “on whether to repudiate debt as Russia did.”
As an alternative to debt repudiation – that is, a declaration of bankruptcy – the government would inflate prices, issue huge amounts of cheapened currency. The present U.S. dollar, now worth less than 60 cents in pre-war buying power, “could become a ten-cent dollar after World War III.”
The sober conclusion of this Understatement of the Month is: “War, in other words, would not be a simple solution of U.S.-Russian difficulties.”
In spite of this capitalist realization of the cost of another war, as expressed by U.S. News, the U.S. capitalists are preparing to resort to war as the only “solution” to the impending crisis of the decayed profit system.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Highest Paid Labor Leader</h1>
<h3>(1 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_44" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 44</a>, 1 November 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">One of the evils within the old AFL that helped precipitate the revolt of the CIO was the big salaries and expense accounts of the AFL bureaucrats, When the CIO was formed, the ranks insisted that their officers be paid wages comparable to what a skilled worker getting the union scale might receive.</p>
<p>It was not because the CIO workers begrudged their leaders the extra money. But bitter experience had taught them that union officials who are too far removed from the workers in their living standards lose touch with the realities of the workers’ lives, become soft and corrupt.</p>
<p>The old-line AFL moguls – the Greens, Tobins, Wolls, Hutchinsons and Freys – not only lived like well-heeled business executives, but thought and acted like them.</p>
<p>One feature of the recent mine workers convention that the capitalist press gave much publicity was the raising of John L. Lewis’ salary from $25,000 a year, plus a $10,000 annual bonus, to $50,000 – making him the highest paid union official in the world. John Owens, Secretary-Treasurer, got a boost from $18,000 to $40,000, and International Executive Board members were raised from $500 to $1,000 per month.</p>
<p>Lewis and the officials of the UMW are in the top national income brackets. Their scale of living places them closer to the more successful capitalist executives than to the mine workers. This is the outward sign of the fundamental weakness of the Lewis leadership.</p>
<p>Like the Greens, Murrays and Tobins, the UMW leaders live in a world apart from the workers. They are accustomed to material security and luxury. They regard their jobs as a source of emoluments and wealth. They thrive under capitalism, live like capitalists and are capitalist-minded.</p>
<p>That is why Lewis – personally so aggressive in economic struggles – is an unregenerate reactionary in politics. He clings to the system that nourishes him. He is a Republican in his pocketbook and in his heart.</p>
<p>Lewis may fight the capitalist government on this or that issue, and sometimes he may win a point, but in the end, and on the basic issues, he must submit. His great talents, his inspiring combativeness founder on the rocks of his backward social and political philosophy.</p>
<p>Lewis’ militancy differs in an important respect from that of the early CIO. That latter militancy was linked with the rights of the members and was the democratic expression of their will. It could not be turned on or off at the whim of a leader.</p>
<p>But the UMW is internally throttled. Lewis runs it with a well-paid machine based on personal loyalty to himself. He appoints two-thirds of the district presidents. He is a bureaucrat – albeit a far more capable one than most – lacking in faith in the powers and intelligence of the workers. Which means he is blind to the real source of his own powers. And in this too he reflects the psychology of the capitalist class system – ruler and ruled – which he upholds.</p>
<p>That is why the labor movement, if it is to go forward, cannot depend on even so talented a man as Lewis. For the job of fundamental social reorganization that labor is destined to undertake, new and superior leaders are demanded, leaders linked integrally with the way of life of the working-class, leaders with real social vision and understanding of the class forces that move society.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Highest Paid Labor Leader
(1 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 44, 1 November 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
One of the evils within the old AFL that helped precipitate the revolt of the CIO was the big salaries and expense accounts of the AFL bureaucrats, When the CIO was formed, the ranks insisted that their officers be paid wages comparable to what a skilled worker getting the union scale might receive.
It was not because the CIO workers begrudged their leaders the extra money. But bitter experience had taught them that union officials who are too far removed from the workers in their living standards lose touch with the realities of the workers’ lives, become soft and corrupt.
The old-line AFL moguls – the Greens, Tobins, Wolls, Hutchinsons and Freys – not only lived like well-heeled business executives, but thought and acted like them.
One feature of the recent mine workers convention that the capitalist press gave much publicity was the raising of John L. Lewis’ salary from $25,000 a year, plus a $10,000 annual bonus, to $50,000 – making him the highest paid union official in the world. John Owens, Secretary-Treasurer, got a boost from $18,000 to $40,000, and International Executive Board members were raised from $500 to $1,000 per month.
Lewis and the officials of the UMW are in the top national income brackets. Their scale of living places them closer to the more successful capitalist executives than to the mine workers. This is the outward sign of the fundamental weakness of the Lewis leadership.
Like the Greens, Murrays and Tobins, the UMW leaders live in a world apart from the workers. They are accustomed to material security and luxury. They regard their jobs as a source of emoluments and wealth. They thrive under capitalism, live like capitalists and are capitalist-minded.
That is why Lewis – personally so aggressive in economic struggles – is an unregenerate reactionary in politics. He clings to the system that nourishes him. He is a Republican in his pocketbook and in his heart.
Lewis may fight the capitalist government on this or that issue, and sometimes he may win a point, but in the end, and on the basic issues, he must submit. His great talents, his inspiring combativeness founder on the rocks of his backward social and political philosophy.
Lewis’ militancy differs in an important respect from that of the early CIO. That latter militancy was linked with the rights of the members and was the democratic expression of their will. It could not be turned on or off at the whim of a leader.
But the UMW is internally throttled. Lewis runs it with a well-paid machine based on personal loyalty to himself. He appoints two-thirds of the district presidents. He is a bureaucrat – albeit a far more capable one than most – lacking in faith in the powers and intelligence of the workers. Which means he is blind to the real source of his own powers. And in this too he reflects the psychology of the capitalist class system – ruler and ruled – which he upholds.
That is why the labor movement, if it is to go forward, cannot depend on even so talented a man as Lewis. For the job of fundamental social reorganization that labor is destined to undertake, new and superior leaders are demanded, leaders linked integrally with the way of life of the working-class, leaders with real social vision and understanding of the class forces that move society.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Green, Reuther Hand Out Same Political Bunkum</h1>
<h4>Offer No Positive Labor Program in Speeches at Convention of Truman Doctrine Liberals</h4>
<h3>(1 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_09" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 9</a>, 1 March 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">AFL President William Green and CIO United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther were the chief union spokesmen at the Americans for Democratic Action convention on Feb. 22 in Philadelphia. The ADA is the organization of Truman Doctrine liberals.</p>
<p>Green, an ancient mossback, represents the horse-and-buggy era of craft unionism. Reuther is a star graduate of the newer school of streamlined labor bureaucrats who pose as up-to-date and “progressive” in their thinking.</p>
<p>But they spoke the same language before the ADA convention. They expressed identical views on political action and the Marshall Plan – and all their views were reactionary.<br>
</p>
<h4>Ignored Labor’s Problems</h4>
<p class="fst">The problems of American labor before advancing Big Business reaction found place in their speeches only in a few brief complaints. They had another program to peddle – the Truman Doctrine, currently disguised as the European Recovery Program.</p>
<p><i>When it came to a political program for labor and progressives in 1948 they came forth with a hollow negative – “Get Henry Wallace!”</i></p>
<p>Green ranted about Wallace’s third-party venture as “ill-conceived and ill-timed”, not to speak of “red-starred.” Reuther proclaimed, “We’ve got the job of taking on Wallace and his Joe Stalin associates.”</p>
<p>From their concentration on Wallace, you’d think that all evils stemmed from him rather than the Democratic and Republican freebooters who have mutually held a political monopoly for eight decades.</p>
<p>But you will search in vain in their speeches for any direct intimation of who these big “labor statesmen” are for. And that’s what shows them to be such sad bankrupts. They’ve literally nothing to offer.<br>
</p>
<h4>Blind Alley</h4>
<p class="fst">Wallace is a phony who doesn’t represent labor. Good. Taft is the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law. Nuff said. Truman? Well, he’s the author of the Truman Doctrine and they’re all for that. But still they didn’t dare let his name pass their lips. Not yet anyway.</p>
<p>That is the blind alley that the whole past policy of the top trade union leaders has led to. At this late hour and at this critical stage in American and world developments. the Greens and the Reuthers have no political answer for the American workers.</p>
<p><i>Shall they continue to play the politics of the “lesser evil” and go down to defeat with strikebreaker Truman or some, other Democratic stumblebum? Shall they stall around until after the Democratic and Republican conventions in the hopes that from one or the other they’ll get a name to which they can attach a “liberal” label? Or shall they just forget all about national politics in this year of decision and put the stress on “local politics,” as some are counselling?</i></p>
<p>This Gordian knot of political ineptness and indecision can be cut through at one stroke. Let the 15 million organized American workers. through their elected representatives, hold a national united labor conference, form their own Labor Party and run their own presidential and local candidates in November.</p>
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Art Preis
Green, Reuther Hand Out Same Political Bunkum
Offer No Positive Labor Program in Speeches at Convention of Truman Doctrine Liberals
(1 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 9, 1 March 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
AFL President William Green and CIO United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther were the chief union spokesmen at the Americans for Democratic Action convention on Feb. 22 in Philadelphia. The ADA is the organization of Truman Doctrine liberals.
Green, an ancient mossback, represents the horse-and-buggy era of craft unionism. Reuther is a star graduate of the newer school of streamlined labor bureaucrats who pose as up-to-date and “progressive” in their thinking.
But they spoke the same language before the ADA convention. They expressed identical views on political action and the Marshall Plan – and all their views were reactionary.
Ignored Labor’s Problems
The problems of American labor before advancing Big Business reaction found place in their speeches only in a few brief complaints. They had another program to peddle – the Truman Doctrine, currently disguised as the European Recovery Program.
When it came to a political program for labor and progressives in 1948 they came forth with a hollow negative – “Get Henry Wallace!”
Green ranted about Wallace’s third-party venture as “ill-conceived and ill-timed”, not to speak of “red-starred.” Reuther proclaimed, “We’ve got the job of taking on Wallace and his Joe Stalin associates.”
From their concentration on Wallace, you’d think that all evils stemmed from him rather than the Democratic and Republican freebooters who have mutually held a political monopoly for eight decades.
But you will search in vain in their speeches for any direct intimation of who these big “labor statesmen” are for. And that’s what shows them to be such sad bankrupts. They’ve literally nothing to offer.
Blind Alley
Wallace is a phony who doesn’t represent labor. Good. Taft is the co-author of the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law. Nuff said. Truman? Well, he’s the author of the Truman Doctrine and they’re all for that. But still they didn’t dare let his name pass their lips. Not yet anyway.
That is the blind alley that the whole past policy of the top trade union leaders has led to. At this late hour and at this critical stage in American and world developments. the Greens and the Reuthers have no political answer for the American workers.
Shall they continue to play the politics of the “lesser evil” and go down to defeat with strikebreaker Truman or some, other Democratic stumblebum? Shall they stall around until after the Democratic and Republican conventions in the hopes that from one or the other they’ll get a name to which they can attach a “liberal” label? Or shall they just forget all about national politics in this year of decision and put the stress on “local politics,” as some are counselling?
This Gordian knot of political ineptness and indecision can be cut through at one stroke. Let the 15 million organized American workers. through their elected representatives, hold a national united labor conference, form their own Labor Party and run their own presidential and local candidates in November.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(19 May 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_20" target="new">Vol. IX No. 20</a>, 19 May 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Mine Union Affiliation</h3>
<p class="fst">The labor reporter for the <strong>New York Post,</strong> Victor Riesel, states from San Francisco in his May 9 column that “John L. Lewis will take his 600,000 followers back into the AFL within a few weeks.” The <strong>Post</strong> reporter was told this by AFL President Green, “who is here today to consult with U.S. delegates to the World Security Conference.”</p>
<p>Riesel quotes Green as stating: “The United Mine Workers will be a part of the AFL before long. This is my personal opinion based on the facts and occurrences of the past weeks.”</p>
<p><em>This is the first definite statement of this nature from any high AFL official. It would indicate that the AFL intends to admit the UMW once the hard coal strike is over.</em></p>
<p>The reaffiliation of the UMW would boost the AFL’s membership to over 8,500,000. Such a move is likely to presage an intensification of the conflict between the AFL and CIO, with the hand of the craft union chiefs strengthened against industrial union organization, Riesel contends.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>How Not to Win</h3>
<p class="fst">The workers at Macy’s Department Store in New York City, the largest department store in the world, have initiated a campaign for wage increases and against wage cuts. Department store employees are among the lowest paid workers in America, while department store profits have soared more than a 1000 per cent since 1939. However, their union, Local 1-s, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees, is dominated by Stalinists, whose idea of putting up a fight is a leaflet distributed to customers after closing time asking the customers to write letters to the management. The most prominent feature of the leaflet is the heading, <em>We Will Not Strike! That’s Why We’re Asking You To Help Us!</em></p>
<p><em>The only people inspired by such a headline are the employers.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Rieve Retreats</h3>
<p class="fst">President Emil Rieve of the CIO Textile Workers has used the authority granted him by the union’s National Executive Council to re-impose the no-strike policy on the 100,000 cotton-rayon workers freed by the Council from the no-strike pledge last Feb. 20. This step backward was taken on April 10 in a letter to the local unions involved and the WLB, reports the May 1 <strong>Textile Labor</strong>.</p>
<p>The previous rescinding of the no-strike pledge together with Rieve’s resignation from the WLB got more real action out of the WLB and the administration in one day than months of prolonged hearings and pleadings. The WLB hastened to announce a 55 cent wage minimum and various other concessions previously withheld from the textile workers.</p>
<p><em>These concessions were at best pretty small and far less than the union had demanded. Certainly they were no warrant for once more putting the no-strike noose around the neck of the textile workers and bolstering the wage-freezing WLB.</em></p>
<p>This retreat is still less justified in the face of the general anti-labor offensive of the corporations today, which <strong>Textile Labor</strong> describes in the very same issue.</p>
<p>Moreover, Rieve’s action throws light on the whole bureaucratic manner in which the no-strike policy has been foisted on the workers. Rieve and the top union officials put over the no-strike pledge. Then they withdrew it. Then they arbitrarily re-imposed it. But what did the workers have to say in all this? Nothing. They were never consulted about the no-strike policy to begin with.</p>
<p>But if Rieve can withdraw the pledge when he sees fit, why can’t the workers? Especially since it was his pledge and not theirs.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Auto Firms Fire Vets</h3>
<p class="fst">Ford, Chrysler and General Motors have started a campaign of firing returned veterans under the pretext that they are compelled to do so by the seniority terms of the CIO United Automobile Workers contracts.</p>
<p>The May 15 <strong>United Auto Worker</strong>, Service men’s edition, exposes this attempt to incite the returned soldiers against the workers and the unions.</p>
<p>At Chrysler Dodge in Chicago, for instance, 50 veterans were fired with the blame being thrown on the union. At Ford Lincoln in Detroit three were discharged with the same propaganda. The union paper reveals that both these companies, as well as General Motors, have for eight months refused to sign a Model Contract clause to protect veterans who have not previously worked in these companies and give them seniority for their time in service. Some 40 other companies have already accepted it.</p>
<p>In the cases cited at Ford and Chrysler Dodge, the paper reports that: “Neither Chrysler nor Ford had to lay off those veterans EVEN UNDER EXISTING CONTRACT PROVISIONS!” The contract provides that those not employed less than six months are probationary and have no seniority. The companies deliberately selected veterans for dismissal when they were free to lay off other non-veterans. This was done to initiate an attack on the unions and create anti-union sentiment among returned soldiers.</p>
<p>“As soon as the union exposed these facts, the veterans were offered reinstatement,” says the UAW paper. But not before the daily press made a lot of anti-labor capital out of the incidents.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(19 May 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 20, 19 May 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Mine Union Affiliation
The labor reporter for the New York Post, Victor Riesel, states from San Francisco in his May 9 column that “John L. Lewis will take his 600,000 followers back into the AFL within a few weeks.” The Post reporter was told this by AFL President Green, “who is here today to consult with U.S. delegates to the World Security Conference.”
Riesel quotes Green as stating: “The United Mine Workers will be a part of the AFL before long. This is my personal opinion based on the facts and occurrences of the past weeks.”
This is the first definite statement of this nature from any high AFL official. It would indicate that the AFL intends to admit the UMW once the hard coal strike is over.
The reaffiliation of the UMW would boost the AFL’s membership to over 8,500,000. Such a move is likely to presage an intensification of the conflict between the AFL and CIO, with the hand of the craft union chiefs strengthened against industrial union organization, Riesel contends.
* * *
How Not to Win
The workers at Macy’s Department Store in New York City, the largest department store in the world, have initiated a campaign for wage increases and against wage cuts. Department store employees are among the lowest paid workers in America, while department store profits have soared more than a 1000 per cent since 1939. However, their union, Local 1-s, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees, is dominated by Stalinists, whose idea of putting up a fight is a leaflet distributed to customers after closing time asking the customers to write letters to the management. The most prominent feature of the leaflet is the heading, We Will Not Strike! That’s Why We’re Asking You To Help Us!
The only people inspired by such a headline are the employers.
* * *
Rieve Retreats
President Emil Rieve of the CIO Textile Workers has used the authority granted him by the union’s National Executive Council to re-impose the no-strike policy on the 100,000 cotton-rayon workers freed by the Council from the no-strike pledge last Feb. 20. This step backward was taken on April 10 in a letter to the local unions involved and the WLB, reports the May 1 Textile Labor.
The previous rescinding of the no-strike pledge together with Rieve’s resignation from the WLB got more real action out of the WLB and the administration in one day than months of prolonged hearings and pleadings. The WLB hastened to announce a 55 cent wage minimum and various other concessions previously withheld from the textile workers.
These concessions were at best pretty small and far less than the union had demanded. Certainly they were no warrant for once more putting the no-strike noose around the neck of the textile workers and bolstering the wage-freezing WLB.
This retreat is still less justified in the face of the general anti-labor offensive of the corporations today, which Textile Labor describes in the very same issue.
Moreover, Rieve’s action throws light on the whole bureaucratic manner in which the no-strike policy has been foisted on the workers. Rieve and the top union officials put over the no-strike pledge. Then they withdrew it. Then they arbitrarily re-imposed it. But what did the workers have to say in all this? Nothing. They were never consulted about the no-strike policy to begin with.
But if Rieve can withdraw the pledge when he sees fit, why can’t the workers? Especially since it was his pledge and not theirs.
* * *
Auto Firms Fire Vets
Ford, Chrysler and General Motors have started a campaign of firing returned veterans under the pretext that they are compelled to do so by the seniority terms of the CIO United Automobile Workers contracts.
The May 15 United Auto Worker, Service men’s edition, exposes this attempt to incite the returned soldiers against the workers and the unions.
At Chrysler Dodge in Chicago, for instance, 50 veterans were fired with the blame being thrown on the union. At Ford Lincoln in Detroit three were discharged with the same propaganda. The union paper reveals that both these companies, as well as General Motors, have for eight months refused to sign a Model Contract clause to protect veterans who have not previously worked in these companies and give them seniority for their time in service. Some 40 other companies have already accepted it.
In the cases cited at Ford and Chrysler Dodge, the paper reports that: “Neither Chrysler nor Ford had to lay off those veterans EVEN UNDER EXISTING CONTRACT PROVISIONS!” The contract provides that those not employed less than six months are probationary and have no seniority. The companies deliberately selected veterans for dismissal when they were free to lay off other non-veterans. This was done to initiate an attack on the unions and create anti-union sentiment among returned soldiers.
“As soon as the union exposed these facts, the veterans were offered reinstatement,” says the UAW paper. But not before the daily press made a lot of anti-labor capital out of the incidents.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h3>Results of the First Year of Conscription</h3>
<h1>Adequate Direct Relief Is Immediate Necessity<br>
for Victims of Priorities</h1>
<h4>Unions Must Fight to Prevent Suffering of Workers Unemployed<br>
Because of Latest Results of Anarchy in Capitalist Production</h4>
<h3>(25 October 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_43" target="new">Vol. V No. 43</a>, 25 October 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">Priorities unemployment is the major immediate problem confronting workers in the automobile, radio and electrical appliance, textile and other leading industries.</p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of workers, who had been led to believe that the war boom would ensure them a measure of job security, are already walking the streets.</p>
<p>It is frankly admitted by government agencies that the dislocation of industry, because of material shortages and the resultant operations of the priorities rationing system, will shortly create a new army of no less than two or three millions of unemployed.</p>
<p>The industrialists and the government are doing little to relieve the situation. But the workers, who face the bleak prospect of repeating their experiences of the ten years of pre-war economic crisis, view the menace of priorities unemployment with growing concern.</p>
<p>A number of plans have been projected by union officials, both AFL and CIO, in an attempt to cope with this problem.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Union Plans</h4>
<p class="fst">The major emphasis of all these plans – elaborated in detail for the auto, steel, radio and electrical, textile and other specific industries – is placed upon the need for the reorganization of the industries in order to expand production or to replace production of consumer goods by an equivalent production of war goods.</p>
<p>All of these plans, however, immediately bump up against the solid wall of the monopoly control of the basic industries by the handful of capitalist owners. It is these owners who now have the exclusive power to operate industry, regulate production, determine what is to be produced, and when, how, where and why.</p>
<p>They exercise this monopoly of industrial control for one end: Profits.</p>
<p>The very existence of priorities unemployment is the direct consequence of this profit motivation. The shortages in aluminum, steel and other vital materials, which have led to the application of priorities, result primarily from the unwillingness of the big monopoly corporations to expand their own production facilities or permit the government to build other facilities.</p>
<p>Above all, the trusts are determined to maintain their monopolies, to regulate prices and output, and thereby maintain their volume of profit and prevent the possibilities of competition.</p>
<p>The most technically-sound plans for reorganizing industrial production to eliminate priorities unemployment – and there is no lack of such plans – fail to surmount the key obstacle: the control of industry by the monopoly owners.</p>
<p>While every union plan attempts in some measure to deal with the question of control, their proposals end by leaving the control of industry intact in the hands of the owners.</p>
<p>In each case the success of these plans depends on the good will of the bosses or on the illusion that the government is a “neutral” agency which places the interests of the nation as a whole above the interests of the ruling capitalist minority.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Question of Control</h4>
<p class="fst">The employing class, on the one hand, will fight to the death against sharing the control of industry with the workers. The monopolists ruthlessly brush aside the suggestion that the workers might have even an interest in the control and management of industry. That is a “right” which the owning class reserves exclusively for itself.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the government, which is the agency for administering the state power of the ruling class, pigeon-holes or sabotages all plans for the reorganization of industry which, involve infringement on the present monopoly of control and management by the private owners of industry.</p>
<p>Moreover, all the union plans are an attempt to solve the problem of the capitalist anarchy of production – which is just as much a fact in war-time as in peace-time – within the framework of the existing economic system.</p>
<p>For each capitalist, or group of capitalists, is in ruthless competition with other capitalists. The big industries are trying to drive the small industries to the wall. The manufacturers of one kind of metal compete with manufacturers of substitute metals. Far from being interested in planning and coordinating the production of each industry as a whole, the few big competing corporations within the industry try to wipe each other out and gain complete control.</p>
<p>There can be no question of the necessity for the reorganization of industry in order to provide jobs for the workers. But It is pursuing an illusion to believe that this can be satisfactorily accomplished without first divesting the monopoly owners of their control. For, even should the capitalists succeed temporarily in meeting the immediate crisis of priorities, new and worse crises are certain to follow.</p>
<p>For it is impossible, except on a most limited scale, to separate the problem of priorities unemployment from the general condition of the decline and decay of capitalism as a whole.</p>
<p>That is why any feasible and sound plan to combat priorities unemployment must first of all deal with the question: Who will control and manage industry?<br>
</p>
<h4>Who Shall Control Industry?</h4>
<p class="fst">It is clear that the owning class is incapable of planning and coordinating production in the interests of the masses of people. Their control has led to priorities unemployment as only the most recent addition to all the other monstrous evils of the existing social order.</p>
<p>Only the working class, upon whom all production and distribution depends in the first place, can possibly organize and manage industry in the interests of the people as a whole.</p>
<p>Today, the only realistic beginnings of a solution to the workers’ problems, of which priorities unemployment is the most immediate and pressing one, is contained in the slogan of the Socialist Workers Party:</p>
<p>Expropriate the war industries and operate them under the control and management of the workers!</p>
<p>But in the meantime, the workers must be provided for when they become unemployed. They cannot sit idle waiting for long-term solutions to their problems and their immediate suffering, as a consequence of joblessness, must be alleviated.<br>
</p>
<h4>An Immediate Demand</h4>
<p class="fst">Are the workers to suffer hunger and privation because of the mismanagement and greed of the ruling class?</p>
<p>Regardless of what the owning class and government do with respect to the management of industry, the workers must not starve or face the winter without decent homes, clothing, blankets, fuel.</p>
<p>If the government and the bosses cannot provide jobs for the workers, then they must nevertheless continue to provide the workers with the means of subsistence.</p>
<p>Every worker deprived of the right to work by priorities unemployment must receive from the government relief in the form of money equivalent to the wages he normally would receive in private industry, and no less than union wages.</p>
<p>This is the demand which the organized workers, all the trade unions, must raise and fight for. Regardless of what promises and plans the government puts forth for a future solution to the problem of priorities unemployment, the victims of such unemployment must be decently fed, clothed, and housed now.</p>
<p>To secure this demand, more will be required of the unions than a simple plea to the “humanitarian” instincts of the government officials.</p>
<p>Mass pressure and mass action of the workers alone will force the government to provide decent incomes for the millions of workers who will shortly be jobless.</p>
<p>This immediate program must be placed on the agenda of every union which is forced to deal with priorities unemployment.</p>
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Art Preis
Results of the First Year of Conscription
Adequate Direct Relief Is Immediate Necessity
for Victims of Priorities
Unions Must Fight to Prevent Suffering of Workers Unemployed
Because of Latest Results of Anarchy in Capitalist Production
(25 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 43, 25 October 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Priorities unemployment is the major immediate problem confronting workers in the automobile, radio and electrical appliance, textile and other leading industries.
Hundreds of thousands of workers, who had been led to believe that the war boom would ensure them a measure of job security, are already walking the streets.
It is frankly admitted by government agencies that the dislocation of industry, because of material shortages and the resultant operations of the priorities rationing system, will shortly create a new army of no less than two or three millions of unemployed.
The industrialists and the government are doing little to relieve the situation. But the workers, who face the bleak prospect of repeating their experiences of the ten years of pre-war economic crisis, view the menace of priorities unemployment with growing concern.
A number of plans have been projected by union officials, both AFL and CIO, in an attempt to cope with this problem.
The Union Plans
The major emphasis of all these plans – elaborated in detail for the auto, steel, radio and electrical, textile and other specific industries – is placed upon the need for the reorganization of the industries in order to expand production or to replace production of consumer goods by an equivalent production of war goods.
All of these plans, however, immediately bump up against the solid wall of the monopoly control of the basic industries by the handful of capitalist owners. It is these owners who now have the exclusive power to operate industry, regulate production, determine what is to be produced, and when, how, where and why.
They exercise this monopoly of industrial control for one end: Profits.
The very existence of priorities unemployment is the direct consequence of this profit motivation. The shortages in aluminum, steel and other vital materials, which have led to the application of priorities, result primarily from the unwillingness of the big monopoly corporations to expand their own production facilities or permit the government to build other facilities.
Above all, the trusts are determined to maintain their monopolies, to regulate prices and output, and thereby maintain their volume of profit and prevent the possibilities of competition.
The most technically-sound plans for reorganizing industrial production to eliminate priorities unemployment – and there is no lack of such plans – fail to surmount the key obstacle: the control of industry by the monopoly owners.
While every union plan attempts in some measure to deal with the question of control, their proposals end by leaving the control of industry intact in the hands of the owners.
In each case the success of these plans depends on the good will of the bosses or on the illusion that the government is a “neutral” agency which places the interests of the nation as a whole above the interests of the ruling capitalist minority.
The Question of Control
The employing class, on the one hand, will fight to the death against sharing the control of industry with the workers. The monopolists ruthlessly brush aside the suggestion that the workers might have even an interest in the control and management of industry. That is a “right” which the owning class reserves exclusively for itself.
On the other hand, the government, which is the agency for administering the state power of the ruling class, pigeon-holes or sabotages all plans for the reorganization of industry which, involve infringement on the present monopoly of control and management by the private owners of industry.
Moreover, all the union plans are an attempt to solve the problem of the capitalist anarchy of production – which is just as much a fact in war-time as in peace-time – within the framework of the existing economic system.
For each capitalist, or group of capitalists, is in ruthless competition with other capitalists. The big industries are trying to drive the small industries to the wall. The manufacturers of one kind of metal compete with manufacturers of substitute metals. Far from being interested in planning and coordinating the production of each industry as a whole, the few big competing corporations within the industry try to wipe each other out and gain complete control.
There can be no question of the necessity for the reorganization of industry in order to provide jobs for the workers. But It is pursuing an illusion to believe that this can be satisfactorily accomplished without first divesting the monopoly owners of their control. For, even should the capitalists succeed temporarily in meeting the immediate crisis of priorities, new and worse crises are certain to follow.
For it is impossible, except on a most limited scale, to separate the problem of priorities unemployment from the general condition of the decline and decay of capitalism as a whole.
That is why any feasible and sound plan to combat priorities unemployment must first of all deal with the question: Who will control and manage industry?
Who Shall Control Industry?
It is clear that the owning class is incapable of planning and coordinating production in the interests of the masses of people. Their control has led to priorities unemployment as only the most recent addition to all the other monstrous evils of the existing social order.
Only the working class, upon whom all production and distribution depends in the first place, can possibly organize and manage industry in the interests of the people as a whole.
Today, the only realistic beginnings of a solution to the workers’ problems, of which priorities unemployment is the most immediate and pressing one, is contained in the slogan of the Socialist Workers Party:
Expropriate the war industries and operate them under the control and management of the workers!
But in the meantime, the workers must be provided for when they become unemployed. They cannot sit idle waiting for long-term solutions to their problems and their immediate suffering, as a consequence of joblessness, must be alleviated.
An Immediate Demand
Are the workers to suffer hunger and privation because of the mismanagement and greed of the ruling class?
Regardless of what the owning class and government do with respect to the management of industry, the workers must not starve or face the winter without decent homes, clothing, blankets, fuel.
If the government and the bosses cannot provide jobs for the workers, then they must nevertheless continue to provide the workers with the means of subsistence.
Every worker deprived of the right to work by priorities unemployment must receive from the government relief in the form of money equivalent to the wages he normally would receive in private industry, and no less than union wages.
This is the demand which the organized workers, all the trade unions, must raise and fight for. Regardless of what promises and plans the government puts forth for a future solution to the problem of priorities unemployment, the victims of such unemployment must be decently fed, clothed, and housed now.
To secure this demand, more will be required of the unions than a simple plea to the “humanitarian” instincts of the government officials.
Mass pressure and mass action of the workers alone will force the government to provide decent incomes for the millions of workers who will shortly be jobless.
This immediate program must be placed on the agenda of every union which is forced to deal with priorities unemployment.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Union Brothers Solidly Behind Wm. Patterson</h1>
<h3>(3 June 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_23" target="new">Vol. IX No. 23</a>, 9 June 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">RICHEYVILLE, Pa., June 3 – Part of the frame-up against William Patterson, union miner from Daisytown and first imprisoned victim of the Smith-Connally anti-strike bill, was the story spread by the corporation-dominated daily press that his union wasn’t in back of him.</p>
<p>This afternoon I attended the meeting of United Mine Workers Local 2399 here in Richeyville’s recreation hall. That’s the local to which Bill Patterson belongs and which he has served loyally for many years.<br>
</p>
<h4>Members Outraged</h4>
<p class="fst">No one was more indignant and outraged by the press reports than Bill’s fellow union members. The 1,400 union men who worked along with him in the Vesta No. 4 mine are back of him solid – to a man. Their actions on his behalf at the union meeting were a conclusive and inspiring demonstration of union brotherhood and labor solidarity.</p>
<p>When I arrived at the hall, the meeting was already in session. I inquired for one of the officers from the sergeant at arms. To my great pleasure, several of the workers who came out to examine my credentials were men I had met during the July 1943 strike and whose activities I had then reported in <strong>The Militant</strong>. Among those who remembered me and the support <strong>The Militant</strong> gave them two years ago were Steve Panak, president; John Harris, vice-president; Emil Maslow and a number of others.</p>
<p>They welcomed me warmly and were particularly glad I had come to them to get the truth about the frame-up against Bill Patterson. They were so eager to tell the facts and so indignant that they all seemed to talk at once. I caught one sentence that told what they all felt. “Bill Patterson? Why that’s the dirtiest, rawest deal ever pulled – a goddam frame-up just to make him an example.”<br>
</p>
<h4><em>Militant</em> Welcomed</h4>
<p class="fst">As they invited me in to attend their meeting, a privilege not accorded to reporters of the capitalist press, they let me know that <strong>The Militant</strong> is its own best credential. One of the leading members stated with genuine enthusiasm as he greeted me, “Your paper’s all right. I read it right along. At first I thought you were just coming out strong for labor before the election. But now I see your paper comes out strong every week.”</p>
<p>There were a couple of hundred workers at the meeting. As I took my seat on a bench along the wall, I noticed a red and gold service flag hung behind the chairman. It recorded 469 members of Local 2399 in the armed forces. Noticing that I was observing the service flag, a worker next to me said: “That’s out of date. We now have 550 men in service. We’re down to 1,400 in the mine from 2,100.” This is one of the locals that the yellow press has been howling is “against the interests of the soldiers.”</p>
<p>The main business of the meeting was devoted to the William Patterson case. As soon as the meeting concluded its preliminary business, John Harris took the floor and gave a full report on the persecution of their union brother and the action so far taken by the union. This was the first chance the local had to meet since Patterson’s hurried trial and imprisonment just two days before.<br>
</p>
<h4>Miners Testified</h4>
<p class="fst">Every man sat still and tense in his seat as Harris told in simple words the background of the case and all the moves that were made to hound Bill Patterson to prison. The silence was so great you could almost reach out and touch it. You could read on the faces of every one present the deep feeling of anger and outrage they felt.</p>
<p>Harris told with special indignation how he and 23 others went to Pittsburgh to testify in the trial. He told how the judge refused to let them speak and how Patterson was “railroaded right through to prison.” He concluded with an appeal for every member to sign the petition on which over 600 names had been secured the day before.</p>
<p>“The way things are going on around here,” he warned, “we don’t know who’s going to be next!” The silence was suddenly broken by an explosive shout from a score of throats: “That’s right!”</p>
<p>One after another the workers took the floor and told their feelings about the case and what they knew of the deliberate efforts to frame Bill Patterson.<br>
</p>
<h4>Caught Either Way</h4>
<p class="fst">“We’ve got to do everything we can to get Bill out,” stated one member. “I was at that trial – and I’ve been at many a trial – but I never saw anybody rushed through like they did to Bill. They never even showed that he had violated his parole. If ever a man got a hooking, it was Bill.”</p>
<p>Another declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He was caught either way, if he went to work or if he didn’t go to work during the strikes. He was framed in advance no matter what he did. They just wanted one man to be the goat. Then if the rest don’t keep in line, they can go after them.”</p>
<p class="fst">But the Local 2399 members didn’t express their sentiments in mere words. Every man felt his responsibility to Bill Patterson’s family to continue the legal fight on his behalf. One worker declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He’s taken the rap for you and me. He was on the mine committee and he put up a fight for us. We got to raise one dollar apiece from every man in the local for a fund to take care of Bill’s family and to see that they get the same money coming in as if he were on the job.”</p>
<p class="fst">That motion was passed with a resounding, unanimous “Aye!” Another motion that was also enthusiastically endorsed was that “each and every pay day the officers of the local shall go up to the Uniontown jail and personally give Bill Patterson the money to send his wife.”</p>
<p>As the maker of the motion explained:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“He’s big enough to take the rap for us, and we have to be big enough to visit him personally every two weeks, and give him the money personally, and let him know that we’re behind him and going to do everything we can for him and his family.”</p>
<p class="fst">That’s the kind of union men Bill Patterson represents. That’s the kind of solid, loyal union he fought to build. It is for their sake, as well as his, that American labor must fight against the frame-up of Bill Patterson and the vicious law that threatens to put other good union men behind prison bars.</p>
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Art Preis
Union Brothers Solidly Behind Wm. Patterson
(3 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 23, 9 June 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
RICHEYVILLE, Pa., June 3 – Part of the frame-up against William Patterson, union miner from Daisytown and first imprisoned victim of the Smith-Connally anti-strike bill, was the story spread by the corporation-dominated daily press that his union wasn’t in back of him.
This afternoon I attended the meeting of United Mine Workers Local 2399 here in Richeyville’s recreation hall. That’s the local to which Bill Patterson belongs and which he has served loyally for many years.
Members Outraged
No one was more indignant and outraged by the press reports than Bill’s fellow union members. The 1,400 union men who worked along with him in the Vesta No. 4 mine are back of him solid – to a man. Their actions on his behalf at the union meeting were a conclusive and inspiring demonstration of union brotherhood and labor solidarity.
When I arrived at the hall, the meeting was already in session. I inquired for one of the officers from the sergeant at arms. To my great pleasure, several of the workers who came out to examine my credentials were men I had met during the July 1943 strike and whose activities I had then reported in The Militant. Among those who remembered me and the support The Militant gave them two years ago were Steve Panak, president; John Harris, vice-president; Emil Maslow and a number of others.
They welcomed me warmly and were particularly glad I had come to them to get the truth about the frame-up against Bill Patterson. They were so eager to tell the facts and so indignant that they all seemed to talk at once. I caught one sentence that told what they all felt. “Bill Patterson? Why that’s the dirtiest, rawest deal ever pulled – a goddam frame-up just to make him an example.”
Militant Welcomed
As they invited me in to attend their meeting, a privilege not accorded to reporters of the capitalist press, they let me know that The Militant is its own best credential. One of the leading members stated with genuine enthusiasm as he greeted me, “Your paper’s all right. I read it right along. At first I thought you were just coming out strong for labor before the election. But now I see your paper comes out strong every week.”
There were a couple of hundred workers at the meeting. As I took my seat on a bench along the wall, I noticed a red and gold service flag hung behind the chairman. It recorded 469 members of Local 2399 in the armed forces. Noticing that I was observing the service flag, a worker next to me said: “That’s out of date. We now have 550 men in service. We’re down to 1,400 in the mine from 2,100.” This is one of the locals that the yellow press has been howling is “against the interests of the soldiers.”
The main business of the meeting was devoted to the William Patterson case. As soon as the meeting concluded its preliminary business, John Harris took the floor and gave a full report on the persecution of their union brother and the action so far taken by the union. This was the first chance the local had to meet since Patterson’s hurried trial and imprisonment just two days before.
Miners Testified
Every man sat still and tense in his seat as Harris told in simple words the background of the case and all the moves that were made to hound Bill Patterson to prison. The silence was so great you could almost reach out and touch it. You could read on the faces of every one present the deep feeling of anger and outrage they felt.
Harris told with special indignation how he and 23 others went to Pittsburgh to testify in the trial. He told how the judge refused to let them speak and how Patterson was “railroaded right through to prison.” He concluded with an appeal for every member to sign the petition on which over 600 names had been secured the day before.
“The way things are going on around here,” he warned, “we don’t know who’s going to be next!” The silence was suddenly broken by an explosive shout from a score of throats: “That’s right!”
One after another the workers took the floor and told their feelings about the case and what they knew of the deliberate efforts to frame Bill Patterson.
Caught Either Way
“We’ve got to do everything we can to get Bill out,” stated one member. “I was at that trial – and I’ve been at many a trial – but I never saw anybody rushed through like they did to Bill. They never even showed that he had violated his parole. If ever a man got a hooking, it was Bill.”
Another declared:
“He was caught either way, if he went to work or if he didn’t go to work during the strikes. He was framed in advance no matter what he did. They just wanted one man to be the goat. Then if the rest don’t keep in line, they can go after them.”
But the Local 2399 members didn’t express their sentiments in mere words. Every man felt his responsibility to Bill Patterson’s family to continue the legal fight on his behalf. One worker declared:
“He’s taken the rap for you and me. He was on the mine committee and he put up a fight for us. We got to raise one dollar apiece from every man in the local for a fund to take care of Bill’s family and to see that they get the same money coming in as if he were on the job.”
That motion was passed with a resounding, unanimous “Aye!” Another motion that was also enthusiastically endorsed was that “each and every pay day the officers of the local shall go up to the Uniontown jail and personally give Bill Patterson the money to send his wife.”
As the maker of the motion explained:
“He’s big enough to take the rap for us, and we have to be big enough to visit him personally every two weeks, and give him the money personally, and let him know that we’re behind him and going to do everything we can for him and his family.”
That’s the kind of union men Bill Patterson represents. That’s the kind of solid, loyal union he fought to build. It is for their sake, as well as his, that American labor must fight against the frame-up of Bill Patterson and the vicious law that threatens to put other good union men behind prison bars.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Roosevelt Now Imitates<br>
Wilson’s ‘14 Points’</h1>
<h4>Fate of 1918 ‘War Aims’ Shows<br>
What Will Happen to FDR’s Eight Points</h4>
<h3>(August 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_34" target="new">Vol. V No. 34</a>, 23 August 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">The Roosevelt-Churchill eight-point statement of “war aims” invited immediate comparison with Woodrow Wilson’s <em>Fourteen Points</em>, enunciated before a joint Congressional session on January 8, 1918, in the fourth year of World War I. The comparison is apt – and devastating.</p>
<p>Wilson’s <em>Fourteen Points</em>, of which the Roosevelt-Churchill statement is a pale copy, has been proved the most fraudulent promise in all history.</p>
<p>The declaration of Wilson included several claims significantly omitted from the present eight-point statement. Roosevelt and Churchill cannot attempt to justify their war even to the extent that Wilson did.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Open Covenants Openly Arrived At”</h4>
<p class="fst">Wilson’s first “war aim” called for:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed frankly and in the public view.”</p>
<p class="fst">The “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” was the monstrous Treaty of Versailles, drawn up in secrecy by the representatives of the four largest Allied powers, Wilson, Clemenceau Lloyd George and Orlando. This treaty simply looted and dismembered the conquered nations for the aggrandizement of the victors. Not even the people of the victorious powers, let alone those of the defeated nations, participated in the establishment of this “peace.”<br>
</p>
<h4>An FDR-Churchill Omission</h4>
<p class="fst">After World War I, diplomacy did not proceed “frankly and in the public view.” On the contrary diplomacy became more secret and devious, on tbe part of the “democracies” as well as the totalitarian nations. The diplomatic dealings of the American and British governments have always been conducted behind closed doors. The very statement of “war aims” just announced followed discussions and decisions of which the American and British peoples had no advance knowledge and in which they did not participate.</p>
<p>The Roosevelt-Churchill statement cautiously excludes Wilson’s first point. A mere mention of open diplomacy would expose the shady character of the negotiations between the American and British “democratic” governments. It would embarrass future negotiations for an imperialist settlement.<br>
</p>
<h4>Freedom of the Seas</h4>
<p class="fst">Wilson’s second point, for “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,” is the model for the Similar statement in the new eight-point declaration. What was meant by “freedom of the seas” was demonstrated after the last war, when the Allies destroyed German sea power, seizing the German merchant marine as well as navy. American and British imperialism then established the policy of maintaining an absolute naval supremacy over the combined navies of all the other nations. “Freedom of the seas” meant freedom to rule the seas.<br>
</p>
<h4>No “Economic Barriers”</h4>
<p class="fst">The fourth “war aim” of Wilson was the removal – “so far as possible” – “of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace ...”</p>
<p>During the years following World War I, there was an unparalleled extension of “economic barriers” and a frenzied competition between all the imperialist nations for trade advantages and control of world markets. Every European country erected insurmontable tariff walls. For its part, the United States raised tariffs to a point which virtually excluded imported competitive products from this country.</p>
<p>Roosevelt and Churchill repeat this pious pledge of “trade equality,” with the qualifying phrase, “without disregarding their (American and British) present obligations.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Present Obligations” Excepted</h4>
<p class="fst">What are these “present obligations”? They are the real war aims of Roosevelt and Churchill, embodied, no doubt, in a secret agreement designating American and British “spheres of influence” with respect to world trade, colonies and markets, in the event of an Allied victory.</p>
<p>Wilson’s fifth point was another grim joke. This promised the establishment of “guarantees ... that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Disarmament Hoax</h4>
<p class="fst">This pledge was carried out with the disarming of – the Central powers. But the armaments race did not slacken. It grew more feverish and intense. Wilson’s “peace” – as every imperialist peace – served merely as the interlude for increased preparations for the next war, World War II.</p>
<p>Related to Wilson’s disarmament pledge was his proposal for a “general association of nations,” his fourteenth point. This was the genesis of the League of Nations, which, the United States scorned to join. The League was fashioned merely to further the hegemony of British and French imperialism on the European continent. It crumbled to dust with the impact of the violent resurgence of German imperialism.</p>
<p>The Roosevelt-Churchill “disarmament” proposal frankly states that their “future peace” is based on the disarmament of “nations which threaten, or may threaten aggression outside their frontiers” – that is, the imperialist competitors of Wall Street and the “City.” All else is reduced to the nebulous promise to “aid and encourage all practicable measures which will lighten ... the crushing burden of armaments.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Self-Determination in the Colonies</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Wilson’s fifth point has no parallel in the present, Allied statement. It deals with the disposition of the colonies. Wilson called for “a free, open-minded, absolutely impartial, adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”</p>
<p class="fst">This did not disavow the principle of colonial exploitation, but it did give some “recognition” to the rights of self-determination of the colonial peoples. After the last war, the victorious imperialist nations fought for colonial spoils like jackals over a piece of carrion. Germany was stripped of her colonies, which were parcelled out mainly to Britain, France and Belgium. The possessions of Turkey in Asia Minor were divided up between England and France. In all these transactions, “the interests of the populations concerned” not only did not have “equal weight,” they had no weight whatsoever! One imperialist marched in as the other marched out.</p>
<p>Nor did American imperialism pay more attention to the “interests of the populations concerned” in imposing its domination over colonial nations, in the period following World War I, American bullets sang the tune of Wall Street imperialism in Nicaragua, Haiti, Porto Rico, the Dominican Republics, the Philippines and in China.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Significant Silence</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt and Churchill dare not mention the colonial question in their “war aims.” That might raise the question of the “interests of the populations concerned” in the enslaved colonies of American and British imperialism, the questions of India, the West Indies, the Malay States, the African colonies.</p>
<p>Seven of the Wilsonian <em>Fourteen Point</em> dealt with specific questions of the restoration of nations and self-determination for nationalities conquered or ruled by the Central powers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Subject Nations</h4>
<p class="fst">After the war, each European nation found itself confronting some counter-claim. The need for alignments had induced the lead ing Allied imperialist powers to promise the same territories to different nations. The Versailles Treaty and the other “peace” treaties revamped but did not alter the system of subject, peoples, in Europe. The Austrian Empire oppressor of half a dozen subject peoples, was ruthlessly pared down to a weak dependency of 6,000,000 inhabitants from a country of 60,000,000. Czechoslovakia was established as an independent nation to play the role of pawn for French and British imperialism in Central Europe, and this new nation became in turn the oppressor of national minorities.</p>
<p>An independent Hungary was set up, which included subject Rumanians. Rumania was re-established, with rule over a largc group of subject Hungarians. Poland, which Wilson declared must be established as an independent state “which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations,” was given domination over 15,000,000 Ukrainians. “Poor little Serbia” became Yugo-Slavia, the persecutor of the Croatians. Wilson’s “self-determination” resolved itself into a post-war Europe that groaned with the new sufferings of oppressed nationalities.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the 8 Points Slur Over</h4>
<p class="fst">Wilson was more specific about the restoration of nations in Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill have already made too many conflicting commitments. They have undoubtedly, parcelled out Europe twice over in bribes to win over the small nations to the side of the imperialist democracies. And above all, there are the inevitable conflicting claims between the democratic imperialists and the Soviet Union, a, delicate point which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin now prefer to slur over.</p>
<p>The most fraudulent of the <em>Fourteen Points</em> was the sixth, dealing with the newly-founded Soviet Union. Wilson declared for:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>The “Sincere Welcome”</h4>
<p class="fst">The “fulfillment” of this promise was the imperialist armed intervention against the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1921. American troops, sent by Wilson without the consent of Congress, participated in this war. And the “sincere welcome” accorded the Soviet Union by the United States government was the refusal to recognize the Soviet government for 15 years.</p>
<p>The Roosevelt-Churchill statement fails to mention their new “ally,” the Soviet Union. They dare not place themselves on record, as Wilson did, for the “unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development” of the Soviet Union. Wilson risked that “concession” solely because he believed the Soviet Union of 1918 would not survive for a year.<br>
</p>
<h4>Imperialist “Peace”</h4>
<p class="fst">History has proved that. Wilson’s <em>Fourteen Points</em> were compounded of hypocrisy and fraud. They were the veneer covering the ruthless imperialist aims for which this nation was thrust into World War I.</p>
<p>That is the character of the present Roosevelt-Churchill eight-point statement of “war aims.” Like Wilson’s <em>Fourteen Points</em>, the Roosevelt-Churchill statement will be blown away by the harsh winds of any future imperialist “peace.”</p>
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Art Preis
Roosevelt Now Imitates
Wilson’s ‘14 Points’
Fate of 1918 ‘War Aims’ Shows
What Will Happen to FDR’s Eight Points
(August 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 34, 23 August 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Roosevelt-Churchill eight-point statement of “war aims” invited immediate comparison with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, enunciated before a joint Congressional session on January 8, 1918, in the fourth year of World War I. The comparison is apt – and devastating.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, of which the Roosevelt-Churchill statement is a pale copy, has been proved the most fraudulent promise in all history.
The declaration of Wilson included several claims significantly omitted from the present eight-point statement. Roosevelt and Churchill cannot attempt to justify their war even to the extent that Wilson did.
“Open Covenants Openly Arrived At”
Wilson’s first “war aim” called for:
“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed frankly and in the public view.”
The “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” was the monstrous Treaty of Versailles, drawn up in secrecy by the representatives of the four largest Allied powers, Wilson, Clemenceau Lloyd George and Orlando. This treaty simply looted and dismembered the conquered nations for the aggrandizement of the victors. Not even the people of the victorious powers, let alone those of the defeated nations, participated in the establishment of this “peace.”
An FDR-Churchill Omission
After World War I, diplomacy did not proceed “frankly and in the public view.” On the contrary diplomacy became more secret and devious, on tbe part of the “democracies” as well as the totalitarian nations. The diplomatic dealings of the American and British governments have always been conducted behind closed doors. The very statement of “war aims” just announced followed discussions and decisions of which the American and British peoples had no advance knowledge and in which they did not participate.
The Roosevelt-Churchill statement cautiously excludes Wilson’s first point. A mere mention of open diplomacy would expose the shady character of the negotiations between the American and British “democratic” governments. It would embarrass future negotiations for an imperialist settlement.
Freedom of the Seas
Wilson’s second point, for “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,” is the model for the Similar statement in the new eight-point declaration. What was meant by “freedom of the seas” was demonstrated after the last war, when the Allies destroyed German sea power, seizing the German merchant marine as well as navy. American and British imperialism then established the policy of maintaining an absolute naval supremacy over the combined navies of all the other nations. “Freedom of the seas” meant freedom to rule the seas.
No “Economic Barriers”
The fourth “war aim” of Wilson was the removal – “so far as possible” – “of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace ...”
During the years following World War I, there was an unparalleled extension of “economic barriers” and a frenzied competition between all the imperialist nations for trade advantages and control of world markets. Every European country erected insurmontable tariff walls. For its part, the United States raised tariffs to a point which virtually excluded imported competitive products from this country.
Roosevelt and Churchill repeat this pious pledge of “trade equality,” with the qualifying phrase, “without disregarding their (American and British) present obligations.”
“Present Obligations” Excepted
What are these “present obligations”? They are the real war aims of Roosevelt and Churchill, embodied, no doubt, in a secret agreement designating American and British “spheres of influence” with respect to world trade, colonies and markets, in the event of an Allied victory.
Wilson’s fifth point was another grim joke. This promised the establishment of “guarantees ... that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.”
Disarmament Hoax
This pledge was carried out with the disarming of – the Central powers. But the armaments race did not slacken. It grew more feverish and intense. Wilson’s “peace” – as every imperialist peace – served merely as the interlude for increased preparations for the next war, World War II.
Related to Wilson’s disarmament pledge was his proposal for a “general association of nations,” his fourteenth point. This was the genesis of the League of Nations, which, the United States scorned to join. The League was fashioned merely to further the hegemony of British and French imperialism on the European continent. It crumbled to dust with the impact of the violent resurgence of German imperialism.
The Roosevelt-Churchill “disarmament” proposal frankly states that their “future peace” is based on the disarmament of “nations which threaten, or may threaten aggression outside their frontiers” – that is, the imperialist competitors of Wall Street and the “City.” All else is reduced to the nebulous promise to “aid and encourage all practicable measures which will lighten ... the crushing burden of armaments.”
Self-Determination in the Colonies
“Wilson’s fifth point has no parallel in the present, Allied statement. It deals with the disposition of the colonies. Wilson called for “a free, open-minded, absolutely impartial, adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”
This did not disavow the principle of colonial exploitation, but it did give some “recognition” to the rights of self-determination of the colonial peoples. After the last war, the victorious imperialist nations fought for colonial spoils like jackals over a piece of carrion. Germany was stripped of her colonies, which were parcelled out mainly to Britain, France and Belgium. The possessions of Turkey in Asia Minor were divided up between England and France. In all these transactions, “the interests of the populations concerned” not only did not have “equal weight,” they had no weight whatsoever! One imperialist marched in as the other marched out.
Nor did American imperialism pay more attention to the “interests of the populations concerned” in imposing its domination over colonial nations, in the period following World War I, American bullets sang the tune of Wall Street imperialism in Nicaragua, Haiti, Porto Rico, the Dominican Republics, the Philippines and in China.
A Significant Silence
Roosevelt and Churchill dare not mention the colonial question in their “war aims.” That might raise the question of the “interests of the populations concerned” in the enslaved colonies of American and British imperialism, the questions of India, the West Indies, the Malay States, the African colonies.
Seven of the Wilsonian Fourteen Point dealt with specific questions of the restoration of nations and self-determination for nationalities conquered or ruled by the Central powers.
Subject Nations
After the war, each European nation found itself confronting some counter-claim. The need for alignments had induced the lead ing Allied imperialist powers to promise the same territories to different nations. The Versailles Treaty and the other “peace” treaties revamped but did not alter the system of subject, peoples, in Europe. The Austrian Empire oppressor of half a dozen subject peoples, was ruthlessly pared down to a weak dependency of 6,000,000 inhabitants from a country of 60,000,000. Czechoslovakia was established as an independent nation to play the role of pawn for French and British imperialism in Central Europe, and this new nation became in turn the oppressor of national minorities.
An independent Hungary was set up, which included subject Rumanians. Rumania was re-established, with rule over a largc group of subject Hungarians. Poland, which Wilson declared must be established as an independent state “which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations,” was given domination over 15,000,000 Ukrainians. “Poor little Serbia” became Yugo-Slavia, the persecutor of the Croatians. Wilson’s “self-determination” resolved itself into a post-war Europe that groaned with the new sufferings of oppressed nationalities.
What the 8 Points Slur Over
Wilson was more specific about the restoration of nations in Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill have already made too many conflicting commitments. They have undoubtedly, parcelled out Europe twice over in bribes to win over the small nations to the side of the imperialist democracies. And above all, there are the inevitable conflicting claims between the democratic imperialists and the Soviet Union, a, delicate point which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin now prefer to slur over.
The most fraudulent of the Fourteen Points was the sixth, dealing with the newly-founded Soviet Union. Wilson declared for:
“The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing ...”
The “Sincere Welcome”
The “fulfillment” of this promise was the imperialist armed intervention against the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1921. American troops, sent by Wilson without the consent of Congress, participated in this war. And the “sincere welcome” accorded the Soviet Union by the United States government was the refusal to recognize the Soviet government for 15 years.
The Roosevelt-Churchill statement fails to mention their new “ally,” the Soviet Union. They dare not place themselves on record, as Wilson did, for the “unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development” of the Soviet Union. Wilson risked that “concession” solely because he believed the Soviet Union of 1918 would not survive for a year.
Imperialist “Peace”
History has proved that. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were compounded of hypocrisy and fraud. They were the veneer covering the ruthless imperialist aims for which this nation was thrust into World War I.
That is the character of the present Roosevelt-Churchill eight-point statement of “war aims.” Like Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Roosevelt-Churchill statement will be blown away by the harsh winds of any future imperialist “peace.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>You Paid for It – U.S. Steel Gets It</h1>
<h3>(29 June 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_26" target="new">Vol. X No. 26</a>, 29 June 1946, p. 8.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">During the war, the U.S. government took $203,000,000 of the American people’s money and built a tremendous steel plant at Geneva, Utah. The operation of this plant was turned over to the U.S. Steel Corporation which made high guaranteed profits from government contracts.</p>
<p>Last week, Attorney General Tom C. Clark approved the War Assets Administration’s sale of this $203,000,000 government-built and owned plant to U.S. Steel for $47,500,000 – that is, a fourth of its cost.</p>
<p>Of course, there was “competitive” bidding. If any of our readers, or all of them together, had made a fair offer of $47,500,001, they could have been the proud owners of a brand-new super-de-luxe steel plant.</p>
<p>It might be argued that our readers and the rest of the workers did own this plant. Well, it’s true they paid for it – but they never owned it. The U.S. government owned it; and it’s a capitalist government.</p>
<p>Since this government is a great defender of “free enterprise,” and since U.S. Steel had $47,500,000 to pay for a $203,000,000 plant, Benjamin Fairless is now the president of a steel empire owning 32,7 per cent of national steel capacity, instead of 31.4 per cent as in 1945.</p>
<p>There is, of course, a trifling matter of anti-trust laws and further expansion of private monopoly. Even the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice had to concede that. The Anti-Trust Division advised Attorney General Clark against the gift to U.S. Steel.</p>
<p>Clark opined that “I do not view the sale, as such ... as a violation of the anti-trust laws.” He piously added that this did not constitute approval of “the conduct of practices of the U.S. Steel Corp, in its use of property.”</p>
<p>That doesn’t worry U.S. Steel. It has the plant. The modest cost – for U.S. Steel – can be defrayed through tax rebates and tax deductions. It can even afford to junk the plant entirely. After all, it just wanted to keep the plant from competitors.</p>
<p>The plant could have been operated by the government under workers’ control. “Free enterprise” has dictated, however, that U.S. Steel must increase its monopoly over national steel capacity by 1.3 per cent even if it means robbing the working people who paid for the plant.</p>
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Art Preis
You Paid for It – U.S. Steel Gets It
(29 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 26, 29 June 1946, p. 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
During the war, the U.S. government took $203,000,000 of the American people’s money and built a tremendous steel plant at Geneva, Utah. The operation of this plant was turned over to the U.S. Steel Corporation which made high guaranteed profits from government contracts.
Last week, Attorney General Tom C. Clark approved the War Assets Administration’s sale of this $203,000,000 government-built and owned plant to U.S. Steel for $47,500,000 – that is, a fourth of its cost.
Of course, there was “competitive” bidding. If any of our readers, or all of them together, had made a fair offer of $47,500,001, they could have been the proud owners of a brand-new super-de-luxe steel plant.
It might be argued that our readers and the rest of the workers did own this plant. Well, it’s true they paid for it – but they never owned it. The U.S. government owned it; and it’s a capitalist government.
Since this government is a great defender of “free enterprise,” and since U.S. Steel had $47,500,000 to pay for a $203,000,000 plant, Benjamin Fairless is now the president of a steel empire owning 32,7 per cent of national steel capacity, instead of 31.4 per cent as in 1945.
There is, of course, a trifling matter of anti-trust laws and further expansion of private monopoly. Even the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice had to concede that. The Anti-Trust Division advised Attorney General Clark against the gift to U.S. Steel.
Clark opined that “I do not view the sale, as such ... as a violation of the anti-trust laws.” He piously added that this did not constitute approval of “the conduct of practices of the U.S. Steel Corp, in its use of property.”
That doesn’t worry U.S. Steel. It has the plant. The modest cost – for U.S. Steel – can be defrayed through tax rebates and tax deductions. It can even afford to junk the plant entirely. After all, it just wanted to keep the plant from competitors.
The plant could have been operated by the government under workers’ control. “Free enterprise” has dictated, however, that U.S. Steel must increase its monopoly over national steel capacity by 1.3 per cent even if it means robbing the working people who paid for the plant.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>CIO Wage Campaign<br>
Faces Disaster</h1>
<h4>Union Heads Fail to Offer Program of<br>
Unified Action as Corporations Gang Up</h4>
<h3>(10 May 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_19" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 19</a>, 10 May 1948, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><b>The flabbiness of the CIO top leaders and their lack of a program of unified action is heading the CIO’s “third-round” wage drive toward disaster.</b></p>
<p><b>Big Business is already gloating over the anticipated loss in influence the CIO will suffer as a result of failure to win its demands for “substantial” wage increases.</b></p>
<p>The CIO leadership’s policy of depending on the corporations to “go soft” and toss the unions a few extra crumbs has paid off in exactly zero.</p>
<p><em>Leading corporations in steel, auto, electrical equipment, meat packing, maritime and other major industries have taken the offensive simultaneously against the CIO unions. In rapid-fire fashion, they have tossed the CIO’s wage demands back in the faces of CIO negotiators.</em></p>
<p>CIO President Philip Murray, also head of the CIO Steelworkers, who is supposed to be leading the wage fight, is giving an exhibition of bumbling, fumbling and downright cowardice that is rare even for the traditionally craven union bureaucrats.</p>
<p>Last year Murray slipped over a, two-year no-strike clause in the Steelworkers contract in return for meager wage increases. Apparently, he hoped to get similar concessions this year with the same appeasement policy.</p>
<p>Weeks ago, when he reopened wage negotiations with U.S. Steel, Murray assured the steel barons in advance that under no conditions would the union strike. At the same time, his office circulated rumors that a wage increase was “in the bag.”</p>
<p>This was reflected in the April 2 <b>Wage Earner</b>, Detroit publication of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, with which Murray is reputed to be closely connected. Its headline read: <em>STEEL LABOR TO LEAD ‘THIRD ROUND’</em>. The story, from Pittsburgh, said:</p>
<p>“Inside reports here this week said U.S. Steel has a wage increase offer for the CIO’s United Steelworkers of America. The company expects that its offer will prove to be the ‘third round’ pattern. There was no word as to how big the wage boost is, but guesses were ‘somewhere near 15 cents’.”</p>
<p><em>Whose guesses? Murray’s. Certainly not the steel companies? Benjamin Fairless, head of U.S. Steel, had publicly told a Senate committee back in March that his company was opposed to any wage boosts.</em></p>
<p>Murray strung along his membership. But Fairless wasn’t kidding. Two weeks ago U.S. Steel signalled an anti-union offensive all along the Big Business line. It rejected out-of-hand the CIO Steelworkers wage demands under the pretext of a trifling price cut that will not infringe on U.S. Steel’s monumental profits.<br>
</p>
<h4>Retreat and Surrender</h4>
<p class="fst">In the face of this Big Business offensive, Murray once again assured the steel companies that, the steelworkers union would not, strike. Murray was saying, in effect, that the CIO Steelworkers, the second largest union in the CIO, intends to leave the other CIO unions to fight it out alone. He was also saying, that he, as-the elected head of the CIO, was for a continued policy of retreat and surrender.</p>
<p><em>On the same day Murray made his latest no-strike pronouncement. General Electric and Westinghouse turned the cold shoulder to the CIO electrical workers.</em></p>
<p><em>General Motors disdained even to make a counter-offer to the CIO auto workers, while Chrysler withdrew its original six-cent offer. The East Coast and Gulf ship owners turned down the CIO National Maritime Union’s wage demands and called for the elimination of the union hiring hall.</em></p>
<p>The big meat packing companies, headed by Armour, have been emboldened to launch a violent strikebreaking attack against the seven-week walkout of the CIO packinghouse workers, the one major CIO union which is putting up a real fight for higher wages.</p>
<p>The policy of making each CIO union carry on its wage fight individually against the combined might of the corporations and government has already cost the CIO dearly.<br>
</p>
<h4>Serious Setbacks</h4>
<p class="fst">The American Communications Association suffered a complete defeat against the cable companies – the first serious defeat of any CIO union since the Little Steel strike of 1937. After an eight-month strike the CIO Textile Workers at Huntsville, Alabama, have been unable to gain renewal of a contract. And Murray’s own union sustained a serious blow when the Steelworkers local at the Nashville Corp., in Nashville, Tenn., ended a 26-week strike without gaining the union recognition it fought for.</p>
<p><em>The CIO wage campaign is in a completely chaotic condition. Every union is going its own sweet way, without even a hint of coordinated strategy and mutual aid in the face of the united offensive of the corporations.</em></p>
<p>The Stalinist leaders of UE, who oppose Murray politically but follow his wage policy, have answered the turn-down of General Electric and Westinghouse with mere bluster. They have asked the local unions to take action on a local scale.</p>
<p>The CIO United Auto Workers has scheduled a strike of 76,000 Chrysler workers to begin May 12. It appears that the UAW leadership is again committing the union to the inadequate “one-at-a-time" strategy which resulted in the long-drawn-out GM s trike two years ago.</p>
<p>The National Maritime Union is to hold a strike referendum of its membership during this month. Other CIO unions are expected to take similar votes.</p>
<p><em>But isolated, uncoordinated strikes in scattered industries or sections of industries are not enough. Against the unified front of the corporations, single strikes even of an entire national union often cannot prevail, or lead to minor gains after long and costly struggle.</em></p>
<p>It is clear that the CIO workers cannot depend on Murray and his lieutenants for real leadership. Just this past week he spoke on the steel situation over a national radio hook-up. With millions of CIO workers listening for some guidance, Murray offered only complaints about the actions of the steel companies.</p>
<p>At the start of the CIO wage drive, <b>The Militant</b> pointed the way to victory. We warned in the March 15 issue:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The half-hearted, spineless manner in which the CIO leader’s are proceeding in the wage drive inspires no confidence, whatsoever. If there is no drastic revision in the CIO leaders’ wage policies, the CIO workers are going to end up with mere crumbs and less than that.</p>
<p class="quote">“A successful wage drive depends on the CIO unions, being swiftly consolidated into a single, effective fighting front with a unified strategy.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>This program holds good today and can turn threatening disaster into victory. It is up to the union ranks to compel their leaders to cal! an emergency conference of all CIO unions to work out and put into practice a program of united militant action on the wage front.</em></p>
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Art Preis
CIO Wage Campaign
Faces Disaster
Union Heads Fail to Offer Program of
Unified Action as Corporations Gang Up
(10 May 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 19, 10 May 1948, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The flabbiness of the CIO top leaders and their lack of a program of unified action is heading the CIO’s “third-round” wage drive toward disaster.
Big Business is already gloating over the anticipated loss in influence the CIO will suffer as a result of failure to win its demands for “substantial” wage increases.
The CIO leadership’s policy of depending on the corporations to “go soft” and toss the unions a few extra crumbs has paid off in exactly zero.
Leading corporations in steel, auto, electrical equipment, meat packing, maritime and other major industries have taken the offensive simultaneously against the CIO unions. In rapid-fire fashion, they have tossed the CIO’s wage demands back in the faces of CIO negotiators.
CIO President Philip Murray, also head of the CIO Steelworkers, who is supposed to be leading the wage fight, is giving an exhibition of bumbling, fumbling and downright cowardice that is rare even for the traditionally craven union bureaucrats.
Last year Murray slipped over a, two-year no-strike clause in the Steelworkers contract in return for meager wage increases. Apparently, he hoped to get similar concessions this year with the same appeasement policy.
Weeks ago, when he reopened wage negotiations with U.S. Steel, Murray assured the steel barons in advance that under no conditions would the union strike. At the same time, his office circulated rumors that a wage increase was “in the bag.”
This was reflected in the April 2 Wage Earner, Detroit publication of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, with which Murray is reputed to be closely connected. Its headline read: STEEL LABOR TO LEAD ‘THIRD ROUND’. The story, from Pittsburgh, said:
“Inside reports here this week said U.S. Steel has a wage increase offer for the CIO’s United Steelworkers of America. The company expects that its offer will prove to be the ‘third round’ pattern. There was no word as to how big the wage boost is, but guesses were ‘somewhere near 15 cents’.”
Whose guesses? Murray’s. Certainly not the steel companies? Benjamin Fairless, head of U.S. Steel, had publicly told a Senate committee back in March that his company was opposed to any wage boosts.
Murray strung along his membership. But Fairless wasn’t kidding. Two weeks ago U.S. Steel signalled an anti-union offensive all along the Big Business line. It rejected out-of-hand the CIO Steelworkers wage demands under the pretext of a trifling price cut that will not infringe on U.S. Steel’s monumental profits.
Retreat and Surrender
In the face of this Big Business offensive, Murray once again assured the steel companies that, the steelworkers union would not, strike. Murray was saying, in effect, that the CIO Steelworkers, the second largest union in the CIO, intends to leave the other CIO unions to fight it out alone. He was also saying, that he, as-the elected head of the CIO, was for a continued policy of retreat and surrender.
On the same day Murray made his latest no-strike pronouncement. General Electric and Westinghouse turned the cold shoulder to the CIO electrical workers.
General Motors disdained even to make a counter-offer to the CIO auto workers, while Chrysler withdrew its original six-cent offer. The East Coast and Gulf ship owners turned down the CIO National Maritime Union’s wage demands and called for the elimination of the union hiring hall.
The big meat packing companies, headed by Armour, have been emboldened to launch a violent strikebreaking attack against the seven-week walkout of the CIO packinghouse workers, the one major CIO union which is putting up a real fight for higher wages.
The policy of making each CIO union carry on its wage fight individually against the combined might of the corporations and government has already cost the CIO dearly.
Serious Setbacks
The American Communications Association suffered a complete defeat against the cable companies – the first serious defeat of any CIO union since the Little Steel strike of 1937. After an eight-month strike the CIO Textile Workers at Huntsville, Alabama, have been unable to gain renewal of a contract. And Murray’s own union sustained a serious blow when the Steelworkers local at the Nashville Corp., in Nashville, Tenn., ended a 26-week strike without gaining the union recognition it fought for.
The CIO wage campaign is in a completely chaotic condition. Every union is going its own sweet way, without even a hint of coordinated strategy and mutual aid in the face of the united offensive of the corporations.
The Stalinist leaders of UE, who oppose Murray politically but follow his wage policy, have answered the turn-down of General Electric and Westinghouse with mere bluster. They have asked the local unions to take action on a local scale.
The CIO United Auto Workers has scheduled a strike of 76,000 Chrysler workers to begin May 12. It appears that the UAW leadership is again committing the union to the inadequate “one-at-a-time" strategy which resulted in the long-drawn-out GM s trike two years ago.
The National Maritime Union is to hold a strike referendum of its membership during this month. Other CIO unions are expected to take similar votes.
But isolated, uncoordinated strikes in scattered industries or sections of industries are not enough. Against the unified front of the corporations, single strikes even of an entire national union often cannot prevail, or lead to minor gains after long and costly struggle.
It is clear that the CIO workers cannot depend on Murray and his lieutenants for real leadership. Just this past week he spoke on the steel situation over a national radio hook-up. With millions of CIO workers listening for some guidance, Murray offered only complaints about the actions of the steel companies.
At the start of the CIO wage drive, The Militant pointed the way to victory. We warned in the March 15 issue:
“The half-hearted, spineless manner in which the CIO leader’s are proceeding in the wage drive inspires no confidence, whatsoever. If there is no drastic revision in the CIO leaders’ wage policies, the CIO workers are going to end up with mere crumbs and less than that.
“A successful wage drive depends on the CIO unions, being swiftly consolidated into a single, effective fighting front with a unified strategy.”
This program holds good today and can turn threatening disaster into victory. It is up to the union ranks to compel their leaders to cal! an emergency conference of all CIO unions to work out and put into practice a program of united militant action on the wage front.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>AFL Chiefs Uphold 2-Party Misrule</h1>
<h4>Council Stages Political Farce at Miami Parley</h4>
<h3>(9 February 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_06" target="new">Vol. XII No. 6</a>, 9 February 1948, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>FEB. 3 – While warming their senile hides and thin blood in Miami sunshine, the 15 “elder statesmen’’ of the AFL. Executive Council have been disporting themselves since Jan. 26 in a shameless political farce.</strong></p>
<p>They have decked themselves in the fetching costumes of “independent” politics. But their gestures and postures are those of solicitors for the two-parity dive of Big Business.</p>
<p>On Feb. 2, the entire AFL Council lined up in chorus formation for the first act of their burlesque. This was their unanimous rejection of Henry Wallace and any third-party candidacy for the U.S. Presidency. Their theme song was “Do Not Split the Liberal Vote.”</p>
<p>The next act played the following day, was performed largely in the vein of low slapstick comedy. Here the cast of characters was seen trying to contrive their own political program and set-up.<br>
</p>
<h4>Falling Apart</h4>
<p class="fst">They were seated around a machine called Labor’s League for Political Education, blue-printed at the San Francisco convention last October to be the AFL’s political conveyance.</p>
<p>Then, right on the stage, one of the biggest parts of the machine dropped off – the carpenters’ union led by William L. Hutcheson. Daniel Tobin’s teamsters’ union started coming loose. John L. Lewis had wrenched off – in technical parlance, “disaffiliated” – the miners’ union a number of weeks ago. But the denouement, came in the attempts of the Council members to get a “reputable” driver for the machine. For months they had been hunting high and low for some old-line capitalist politician in need of a $20,000 a year job, to take the steering wheel of LLPE.</p>
<p><em>They had reached a point of frustration and desperation when they were actually considering appointing one of their own number to keep the job from going begging. At the last moment, however, they dug up a likely candidate ex-Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and even announced his acceptance.</em></p>
<p>Then the farce got out of hand altogether. Wheeler advised them that he could only take the job on a “part-time” basis, if at all. Besides he could not accept without the understanding that he did not go along hook-line-and-sinker with the Marshall Plan and did not subscribe to the AFL’s position of opposition to all Congressional candidates who voted for the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Bill.</p>
<p>This led to a free-for-all among the Council members that did not appear to be in the original script of their show. A section of the Council, headed by David Dubinsky, “revolted.” They said they would not accept Wheeler.<br>
</p>
<h4>A Thin Disguise</h4>
<p class="fst">Seldom has the American labor movement been so disgraced as by the Miami spectacle put on by the AFL big-wigs. In the very breath that they opposed Wallace for his “false liberalism,” they revealed their own complete subservience to reaction. They complained that supporting Wallace “would play into the hands of Soviet Russia’s expansionist policy” – but that’s a thin disguise for their own slavish support of Wall Street’s imperialist program.</p>
<p>They also claimed a third party would “split the liberal vote.” We’ve heard that song before – at every election since 1932 and every time the workers demand their own political party. The last time we heard it was in 1946. The workers didn’t “split the liberal vote” and got the most reactionary Congress in decades anyway.</p>
<p><em>If the AFL leaders don’t go for Wallace’s third-party movement – and they are correct when they say it does not spring from the labor movement – how do they propose to free the American workers from subjection to the two old political machines of Wall Street?</em></p>
<p>It was on this issue particularly that the AFL leaders in Miami staged an exhibition that would be comic – if it were not so serious for the life of the American labor movement, and such an insult to the more than 7 million hard-working AFL members who pay the salaries of the “fat and stately asses” of the Executive Council.<br>
</p>
<h4>Nobody Is Fooled</h4>
<p class="fst">The game of the Council majority is to swing labor’s votes once more behind strikebreaker Truman and the Democratic Party. They haven’t dared to say this in so many words, but nobody is fooled by their pretenses of “non-partisanship.”</p>
<p>But some of these “labor statesmen” can’t agree on what capitalist party to sell out to in the 1948 elections. Hutcheson of the Carpenters has declined to go along with LLPE, because, as an old-time standby of the Republican National Committee he’s still playing for a deal with some “acceptable” Republican candidate. Tobin of the Teamsters has been gyrating around their political weather-vane – at the last sighting he was pointed toward Republican Governor Warren of California.</p>
<p><em>But in essence, they all represent the same kind of politics. They are company unionists in the political arena, opposed to all genuine independent political action by labor and supporting established political reaction through the two-party system.</em></p>
<p>How symbolic have been their frantic efforts to secure <em>anybody but a genuine labor leader</em> to head LLPE. They have been scouring the political swamps for months to drag up some Democratic politician who will graciously take $20,000 a year to cover up the word “Labor” in Labor’s League for Political Education.</p>
<p>They went after Robert LaFollette and Mathew Neely and James Mead and Maury Maverick. They were almost ready to settle for Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin, until he decided he would rather run again for Congress. Besides some of the Council members thought Biemiller was “too radical” because of his former New Deal sympathies!</p>
<p>Then they finally latched onto that old Democratic wheel-horse and pre-Pearl Harbor darling of the American Firsters and isolationist ultra-reactionaries – Senator Wheeler. Wheeler brought this whole farce to a head when he telephoned the AFL leaders that before he’d take the $20,000 a year for the use of his name they’d have to know “I just couldn’t abandon my law business” – aiding the railroad corporations.</p>
<p>At this writing the LLPE is still without a national figurehead.</p>
<p>What voice have the AFL members had in the life-and-death question of the political course they must travel? None whatsoever. The 15 bureaucrats luxuriating in Miami have never given a thought to consulting those who pay the dues and assessments.</p>
<p><em>It’s high lime for the AFL members to put a stop to the disgusting conduct of those who presume to speak in the name of seven million workers. The voice of the ranks must be heard. They must decide.</em></p>
<p>The demand must be raised in all the great bodies of organized labor for a National United Labor Conference, with rank and file representation from the AFL, CIO, Railroad Brotherhoods and independents, to map out a program of independent political action for the labor movement.</p>
<p>Such a conference could end the shoddy maneuvers and deals on the top with capitalist politicians. It could launch the mighty legions of labor as a truly independent force by organizing labor’s own party and running its own candidates next November.</p>
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Art Preis
AFL Chiefs Uphold 2-Party Misrule
Council Stages Political Farce at Miami Parley
(9 February 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 6, 9 February 1948, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
FEB. 3 – While warming their senile hides and thin blood in Miami sunshine, the 15 “elder statesmen’’ of the AFL. Executive Council have been disporting themselves since Jan. 26 in a shameless political farce.
They have decked themselves in the fetching costumes of “independent” politics. But their gestures and postures are those of solicitors for the two-parity dive of Big Business.
On Feb. 2, the entire AFL Council lined up in chorus formation for the first act of their burlesque. This was their unanimous rejection of Henry Wallace and any third-party candidacy for the U.S. Presidency. Their theme song was “Do Not Split the Liberal Vote.”
The next act played the following day, was performed largely in the vein of low slapstick comedy. Here the cast of characters was seen trying to contrive their own political program and set-up.
Falling Apart
They were seated around a machine called Labor’s League for Political Education, blue-printed at the San Francisco convention last October to be the AFL’s political conveyance.
Then, right on the stage, one of the biggest parts of the machine dropped off – the carpenters’ union led by William L. Hutcheson. Daniel Tobin’s teamsters’ union started coming loose. John L. Lewis had wrenched off – in technical parlance, “disaffiliated” – the miners’ union a number of weeks ago. But the denouement, came in the attempts of the Council members to get a “reputable” driver for the machine. For months they had been hunting high and low for some old-line capitalist politician in need of a $20,000 a year job, to take the steering wheel of LLPE.
They had reached a point of frustration and desperation when they were actually considering appointing one of their own number to keep the job from going begging. At the last moment, however, they dug up a likely candidate ex-Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and even announced his acceptance.
Then the farce got out of hand altogether. Wheeler advised them that he could only take the job on a “part-time” basis, if at all. Besides he could not accept without the understanding that he did not go along hook-line-and-sinker with the Marshall Plan and did not subscribe to the AFL’s position of opposition to all Congressional candidates who voted for the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Bill.
This led to a free-for-all among the Council members that did not appear to be in the original script of their show. A section of the Council, headed by David Dubinsky, “revolted.” They said they would not accept Wheeler.
A Thin Disguise
Seldom has the American labor movement been so disgraced as by the Miami spectacle put on by the AFL big-wigs. In the very breath that they opposed Wallace for his “false liberalism,” they revealed their own complete subservience to reaction. They complained that supporting Wallace “would play into the hands of Soviet Russia’s expansionist policy” – but that’s a thin disguise for their own slavish support of Wall Street’s imperialist program.
They also claimed a third party would “split the liberal vote.” We’ve heard that song before – at every election since 1932 and every time the workers demand their own political party. The last time we heard it was in 1946. The workers didn’t “split the liberal vote” and got the most reactionary Congress in decades anyway.
If the AFL leaders don’t go for Wallace’s third-party movement – and they are correct when they say it does not spring from the labor movement – how do they propose to free the American workers from subjection to the two old political machines of Wall Street?
It was on this issue particularly that the AFL leaders in Miami staged an exhibition that would be comic – if it were not so serious for the life of the American labor movement, and such an insult to the more than 7 million hard-working AFL members who pay the salaries of the “fat and stately asses” of the Executive Council.
Nobody Is Fooled
The game of the Council majority is to swing labor’s votes once more behind strikebreaker Truman and the Democratic Party. They haven’t dared to say this in so many words, but nobody is fooled by their pretenses of “non-partisanship.”
But some of these “labor statesmen” can’t agree on what capitalist party to sell out to in the 1948 elections. Hutcheson of the Carpenters has declined to go along with LLPE, because, as an old-time standby of the Republican National Committee he’s still playing for a deal with some “acceptable” Republican candidate. Tobin of the Teamsters has been gyrating around their political weather-vane – at the last sighting he was pointed toward Republican Governor Warren of California.
But in essence, they all represent the same kind of politics. They are company unionists in the political arena, opposed to all genuine independent political action by labor and supporting established political reaction through the two-party system.
How symbolic have been their frantic efforts to secure anybody but a genuine labor leader to head LLPE. They have been scouring the political swamps for months to drag up some Democratic politician who will graciously take $20,000 a year to cover up the word “Labor” in Labor’s League for Political Education.
They went after Robert LaFollette and Mathew Neely and James Mead and Maury Maverick. They were almost ready to settle for Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin, until he decided he would rather run again for Congress. Besides some of the Council members thought Biemiller was “too radical” because of his former New Deal sympathies!
Then they finally latched onto that old Democratic wheel-horse and pre-Pearl Harbor darling of the American Firsters and isolationist ultra-reactionaries – Senator Wheeler. Wheeler brought this whole farce to a head when he telephoned the AFL leaders that before he’d take the $20,000 a year for the use of his name they’d have to know “I just couldn’t abandon my law business” – aiding the railroad corporations.
At this writing the LLPE is still without a national figurehead.
What voice have the AFL members had in the life-and-death question of the political course they must travel? None whatsoever. The 15 bureaucrats luxuriating in Miami have never given a thought to consulting those who pay the dues and assessments.
It’s high lime for the AFL members to put a stop to the disgusting conduct of those who presume to speak in the name of seven million workers. The voice of the ranks must be heard. They must decide.
The demand must be raised in all the great bodies of organized labor for a National United Labor Conference, with rank and file representation from the AFL, CIO, Railroad Brotherhoods and independents, to map out a program of independent political action for the labor movement.
Such a conference could end the shoddy maneuvers and deals on the top with capitalist politicians. It could launch the mighty legions of labor as a truly independent force by organizing labor’s own party and running its own candidates next November.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>A Glimpse at U.S. Diplomats</h1>
<h4>Ambassador Dodd Painted a Devastating Portrait of These Parasites</h4>
<h3>(22 March 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_12" target="new">Vol. V No. 12</a>, 22 March 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">The diplomatic world that William E. Dodd entered he was appointed United States Ambassador to Germany in June 1933 is pictured in his daily personal journal, published recently by his son and daughter under the title <strong>Ambassador Dodd’s Diary 1933–1938</strong>.</p>
<p>Dodd’s description of a dinner at the French embassy in Berlin is a good introduction to that world:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There Was a great room for the accommodation of men’s and women’s wraps, with two servants, in livery, to receive them – expecting tips. Up the magnificent stairway there were pages dressed in the gay liveries of Louis XIV’s. time. At the entrance to the reception hall, there were two other servants to hand out cards indicating dinner companions. In the reception room there was a marvelous rug with a huge letter N in the middle to remind one, especially Germans, of the conquests of Napoleon, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and Count von Bassewitz were compelled to walk over or around the famous initial ...</p>
<p class="quote">“The walls were covered with beautiful Gobelin tapestries. The chairs were of Louis XIV style ... I noticed ... also portraits of French generals of the Louis XIV period ... and a lavish table with decorations in the best of form and taste. There were eight or ten servants, in liveries, as pages, all standing at attention. It surpassed the Belgian’s dining hall outfit.</p>
<p class="quote">“We ate for an hour. Nothing worth while was said ... After we were through, all marched correctly to the reception room where everyone stood gossiping in little groups until 11:45 when the musicians came to open a concert ... There was nothing else to do, so we went out as the great party moved into the music hall. <em>Such was the show of democratic France to autocratic Germany</em>.” (our emphasis)<br>
</p>
<h4>A Typical Example of Bourgeois Hypocrisy</h4>
<p class="fst">In one passage, Dodd sums up the hypocritical character of capitalist statesmen and diplomacy:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I went to the Catholic Cathedral near the old Kaiser’s palace to attend the service in honor of Pilsudski, who was being buried in Cracow, Poland, at the same time ... Hitler took the seat of honor on the right of the altar ...</p>
<p class="quote">“To me it was all half-absurd. I do not know much about Pilsudski, except that he was a dictator who put people to death when they opposed him. Why so much religious ceremony when no one could have imagined him to be a Christian? But there was probably not one follower of Jesus in the whole congregation. I wondered how German Lutherans and Catholics would honor Hitler, a professed Catholic, if he should die. He has murdered or caused to be murdered hundreds of innocent people. Yet all of us diplomats would be called into the churches to pay tribute to him as a Christian in case of his death.”</p>
<p class="fst">The American State Department took no second place in pretentious display. Its emissaries and officials were, and are, the spokesmen of huge wealth and private gain, ignorant, mercenary and ruling-class consciois to the core. Dodd so describes them:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... The further I go in my study of State Department policies, the more evidence there is that a clique of kinspeople connected with certain rich families are bent upon exploiting the Foreign Service for their set, many of them Harvard graduates who are not even well informed. Snobbery and personal gratification are the main objects with then.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Dodd’s Descriptions if American Diplomats</h4>
<p class="fst">Here are some individual portraits :</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The American Minister in Vienna, George Earle, called at 11 o’clock. He is one of the rich men appointed to foreign posts who know little history of their own or any other country ... He is intelligent, but he has a rich man’s estimate of social values. For instance, servants, valets, butlers were to him a mark of distinction. He thought it terrible that less than 300 families in Vienna have as many as three servants each ...”</p>
<p class="quote">“Earle thinks Dollfuss was right in his ruthless handling of the Socialist rebellion in Austria during the second half of February.”</p>
<p class="fst">Earle is now U.S. Minister to Bulgaria.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“When I accepted this post, I stipulated that there was to be no complaint if I lived within my official income ... However, I had not been in Berlin long before I received notice that the then Counselor, George Gordon, was to be recalled and J.C. White was to succeed him ... I did not realize the purpose of this appointment until some months later when I learned that White was one of the richest men in the service.</p>
<p class="quote">“At the same time, I learned that Orme Wilson was to come with the Whites, and he was reported also to be a very wealthy man. This was clearly to supplement my want of millions of dollars. Furthermore, I saw that Jay Pierrepont Moffat, brother-in-law of White and Phillips, uncle of Wilson, both in high position in the State Department, intended to have White and Wilson manage the Embassy.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Dodd’s Picture of the State Department</h4>
<p class="fst">In March 1934, Dodd returned for a visit to the United States. One journal entry during this period is particularly devastating in its depiction of the character of the State Department personnel.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the afternoon I attended a conference of personnel officers in the State Department: Moore, (now Counselor of the State Department) Carr, Sumner Welles (of doubtful Cuban fame), Hugh Wilson and others were present. I reported that American diplomacy had a new role to play. The Louis XIV and Victoria style and times had passed. The nations of the world were bankrupt, including our own. It was time to cease grand style performances. I described Belgian, Italian and French dinners of state in Berlin. There was some amusement.</p>
<p class="quote">“I then talked of American staff officials who shipped furniture enough for twenty-room houses with only two persons in the family! An assistant to me in Berlin had a chauffeur, a porter, a butler, a valet, two cooks and two maids. All for two persons! ... I urged that men should not be allowed to spend more than their salaries: $4,000 to $17,000 a year. Besides I urged the necessity of having ambassadors and assistants who knew the history and traditions of the countries to which they were sent, men who think of their own country’s interests, not so much about a different suit of clothes each day or sitting up at gay but silly dinners and shows very night ... Sumner Welles winced a little: the owner of a mansion in Washington which outshines the White House in some respects and is about as large.</p>
<p class="quote">“There was much talk and some embarrassment, but general agreement that the time had come for a new kind of service. <em>I was not fooled, however, after two hours of</em> <em>pretended agreement.”</em> (our emphasis)</p>
<p class="fst">On June 30, 1937, Dodd records:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I heard from a friend today distressing news about the new Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles. According to the story as I heard it, six Senators secured his appointment by threatening quietly to vote against Roosevelt’s Supreme Court reform if he did not name Welles to the post. He was Ambassador to Cuba early in the Roosevelt regime. His conduct here was most embarrassing, I have heard.</p>
<p class="quote">“He has one of the greatest houses in Washington, with fifteen servants, and another house for summer use in Maryland. He prides himself on spending twice as much as Secretary Hull and gives parties hardly matched by any of the Ambassadors in Washington. I was a little surprised to read a day or two ago in the press that Roosevelt had spent a Sunday with Welles at his Maryland mansion. Politics is a strange game, even with a real man like Roosevelt.”</p>
<p class="fst">Strange only to a petty-bourgeois history professor like Dodd whom chance placed as a useful tool in the hands of American imperialist diplomacy. As an honest and befuddled Jeffersonian democrat, Dodd gave a liberal front to the machinations of the State Department in Nazi Germany. And when he had played his part, he was summarily withdrawn by Roosevelt in December 1937. He died shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>But Welles, as Under-Secretary of State, now has the special task of convincing the semi-totalitarian and totalitarian governments of Latin America that their job is to defend “democracy” under the direction of American imperialism.</p>
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Art Preis
A Glimpse at U.S. Diplomats
Ambassador Dodd Painted a Devastating Portrait of These Parasites
(22 March 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 12, 22 March 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The diplomatic world that William E. Dodd entered he was appointed United States Ambassador to Germany in June 1933 is pictured in his daily personal journal, published recently by his son and daughter under the title Ambassador Dodd’s Diary 1933–1938.
Dodd’s description of a dinner at the French embassy in Berlin is a good introduction to that world:
“There Was a great room for the accommodation of men’s and women’s wraps, with two servants, in livery, to receive them – expecting tips. Up the magnificent stairway there were pages dressed in the gay liveries of Louis XIV’s. time. At the entrance to the reception hall, there were two other servants to hand out cards indicating dinner companions. In the reception room there was a marvelous rug with a huge letter N in the middle to remind one, especially Germans, of the conquests of Napoleon, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and Count von Bassewitz were compelled to walk over or around the famous initial ...
“The walls were covered with beautiful Gobelin tapestries. The chairs were of Louis XIV style ... I noticed ... also portraits of French generals of the Louis XIV period ... and a lavish table with decorations in the best of form and taste. There were eight or ten servants, in liveries, as pages, all standing at attention. It surpassed the Belgian’s dining hall outfit.
“We ate for an hour. Nothing worth while was said ... After we were through, all marched correctly to the reception room where everyone stood gossiping in little groups until 11:45 when the musicians came to open a concert ... There was nothing else to do, so we went out as the great party moved into the music hall. Such was the show of democratic France to autocratic Germany.” (our emphasis)
A Typical Example of Bourgeois Hypocrisy
In one passage, Dodd sums up the hypocritical character of capitalist statesmen and diplomacy:
“I went to the Catholic Cathedral near the old Kaiser’s palace to attend the service in honor of Pilsudski, who was being buried in Cracow, Poland, at the same time ... Hitler took the seat of honor on the right of the altar ...
“To me it was all half-absurd. I do not know much about Pilsudski, except that he was a dictator who put people to death when they opposed him. Why so much religious ceremony when no one could have imagined him to be a Christian? But there was probably not one follower of Jesus in the whole congregation. I wondered how German Lutherans and Catholics would honor Hitler, a professed Catholic, if he should die. He has murdered or caused to be murdered hundreds of innocent people. Yet all of us diplomats would be called into the churches to pay tribute to him as a Christian in case of his death.”
The American State Department took no second place in pretentious display. Its emissaries and officials were, and are, the spokesmen of huge wealth and private gain, ignorant, mercenary and ruling-class consciois to the core. Dodd so describes them:
“... The further I go in my study of State Department policies, the more evidence there is that a clique of kinspeople connected with certain rich families are bent upon exploiting the Foreign Service for their set, many of them Harvard graduates who are not even well informed. Snobbery and personal gratification are the main objects with then.”
Dodd’s Descriptions if American Diplomats
Here are some individual portraits :
“The American Minister in Vienna, George Earle, called at 11 o’clock. He is one of the rich men appointed to foreign posts who know little history of their own or any other country ... He is intelligent, but he has a rich man’s estimate of social values. For instance, servants, valets, butlers were to him a mark of distinction. He thought it terrible that less than 300 families in Vienna have as many as three servants each ...”
“Earle thinks Dollfuss was right in his ruthless handling of the Socialist rebellion in Austria during the second half of February.”
Earle is now U.S. Minister to Bulgaria.
“When I accepted this post, I stipulated that there was to be no complaint if I lived within my official income ... However, I had not been in Berlin long before I received notice that the then Counselor, George Gordon, was to be recalled and J.C. White was to succeed him ... I did not realize the purpose of this appointment until some months later when I learned that White was one of the richest men in the service.
“At the same time, I learned that Orme Wilson was to come with the Whites, and he was reported also to be a very wealthy man. This was clearly to supplement my want of millions of dollars. Furthermore, I saw that Jay Pierrepont Moffat, brother-in-law of White and Phillips, uncle of Wilson, both in high position in the State Department, intended to have White and Wilson manage the Embassy.”
Dodd’s Picture of the State Department
In March 1934, Dodd returned for a visit to the United States. One journal entry during this period is particularly devastating in its depiction of the character of the State Department personnel.
“In the afternoon I attended a conference of personnel officers in the State Department: Moore, (now Counselor of the State Department) Carr, Sumner Welles (of doubtful Cuban fame), Hugh Wilson and others were present. I reported that American diplomacy had a new role to play. The Louis XIV and Victoria style and times had passed. The nations of the world were bankrupt, including our own. It was time to cease grand style performances. I described Belgian, Italian and French dinners of state in Berlin. There was some amusement.
“I then talked of American staff officials who shipped furniture enough for twenty-room houses with only two persons in the family! An assistant to me in Berlin had a chauffeur, a porter, a butler, a valet, two cooks and two maids. All for two persons! ... I urged that men should not be allowed to spend more than their salaries: $4,000 to $17,000 a year. Besides I urged the necessity of having ambassadors and assistants who knew the history and traditions of the countries to which they were sent, men who think of their own country’s interests, not so much about a different suit of clothes each day or sitting up at gay but silly dinners and shows very night ... Sumner Welles winced a little: the owner of a mansion in Washington which outshines the White House in some respects and is about as large.
“There was much talk and some embarrassment, but general agreement that the time had come for a new kind of service. I was not fooled, however, after two hours of pretended agreement.” (our emphasis)
On June 30, 1937, Dodd records:
“I heard from a friend today distressing news about the new Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles. According to the story as I heard it, six Senators secured his appointment by threatening quietly to vote against Roosevelt’s Supreme Court reform if he did not name Welles to the post. He was Ambassador to Cuba early in the Roosevelt regime. His conduct here was most embarrassing, I have heard.
“He has one of the greatest houses in Washington, with fifteen servants, and another house for summer use in Maryland. He prides himself on spending twice as much as Secretary Hull and gives parties hardly matched by any of the Ambassadors in Washington. I was a little surprised to read a day or two ago in the press that Roosevelt had spent a Sunday with Welles at his Maryland mansion. Politics is a strange game, even with a real man like Roosevelt.”
Strange only to a petty-bourgeois history professor like Dodd whom chance placed as a useful tool in the hands of American imperialist diplomacy. As an honest and befuddled Jeffersonian democrat, Dodd gave a liberal front to the machinations of the State Department in Nazi Germany. And when he had played his part, he was summarily withdrawn by Roosevelt in December 1937. He died shortly thereafter.
But Welles, as Under-Secretary of State, now has the special task of convincing the semi-totalitarian and totalitarian governments of Latin America that their job is to defend “democracy” under the direction of American imperialism.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>12 Released Trotskyists<br>
Honored at Meeting</h1>
<h4>Fighters for Labor’s Rights Given Ovation at Mass Rally</h4>
<h3>(10 February 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_06" target="new">Vol. IX No. 6</a>, 10 February 1945, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 2</strong> – <em>Over 800 unionists and
other progressive fighters for civil liberties this evening jammed
the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat here to honor the 12
Minneapolis Labor Case defendants released last week after their 13
months behind Roosevelt’s prison bars.</em></p>
<p>Inspired by the imprisoned Trotskyist leaders’ courageous
stand for labor’s rights, this Welcome Home Mass Meeting,
sponsored by the Civil Rights Defense Committee, enthusiastically
pledged to continue the struggle for repeal of the infamous Smith
“Gag” Act under which the Socialist Workers Party leaders
were the first labor victim’s. The demand was issued for an
unconditional presidential pardon and restoration of their full
citizenship rights, now denied the defendants because of their
“felony” convictions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Prolonged Ovation</h4>
<p class="fst">A prolonged ovation was accorded to the three released prisoners
who addressed the meeting, Albert Goldman, Farrell Dobbs and Felix
Morrow, and to James P. Cannon, who was unable to attend because of
illness but sent a stirring statement to the gathering.</p>
<p>The released Socialist Workers Party and Minneapolis Truckdrivers
Local 544-00 leaders spoke with the fervor of the revolutionary
socialist convictions for which they were railroaded to prison and
which capitalist government persecution has only deepened. They
issued a militant call to all labor to unite in unceasing struggle
against capitalist reaction and in defense of the workers’
rights.</p>
<p>Outstanding labor and civil liberties leaders joined in greeting
the returned Trotskyist fighters. The welcoming speakers included
Osmund K. Fraenkel, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union;
James T. Farrell, noted novelist and Chairman of the Civil Rights
Defense Committee; Benjamin S. McLaurin, International Field
Organizer of the AFL Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and National
Secretary of the Negro March on Washington Movement; and B.A.
Gebiner, Assistant General Secretary of the Workmen’s Circle.
George Novack, CRDC National Secretary, was the chairman.</p>
<p>At this mass meeting, all the 18 Trotskyists originally
imprisoned, 6 of whom were released last October, demonstrated the
front of solidarity they have maintained throughout their trial and
imprisonment. Oscar Shoenfeld, Karl Kuehn and Al Russel, released
last October from Danbury, Conn., prison, sat on the platform with
their newly-released comrades from the Sandstone, Minn.,
penitentiary. A message of solidarity came from the other Minneapolis
prisoners, Grace Carlson, Jake Cooper, Oscar Coover, Harry DeBoer,
Vincent Dunne, Max Geldman, Clarence Hamel, Emil Hansen, Carlos
Hudson, Ed Palmquist and Carl Skoglund.<br>
</p>
<h4>Cannon’s Statement</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>In his statement read at the opening of the meeting, Comrade
Cannon, founder of the American Trotskyist movement and SWP National
Secretary, paid special tribute to Grace Carlson, sole woman among
the defendants, who was separated from the rest of her comrades all
alone at the women’s prison in Alderson, W.Va. She is
affectionately called “The Senator” since the time in
1940 when she ran on the Minnesota SWP ticket for the U.S. Senate.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our hearts ached for our Senator there all alone
with such a ‘hard way to go,’ as the convicts say. But
she stood up and played her part and set us an example. We, are proud
of our Senator. All the rest of us did the best we could and we hope
you approve of the way we conducted ourselves,” Cannon
declared.</p>
<p class="quote">“If I were to be present at the meeting, the thing
I would like to say would be how deeply, how profoundly, I thank you
for your solidarity, your kindness, your friendship.”</p>
<p class="fst">He also expressed his “heartfelt gratitude” to Roger
Baldwin, National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who
aided the CRDG’s defense campaign from the beginning of the
case in June 1941.<br>
</p>
<h4>Goldman’s Speech</h4>
<p class="fst">Comrade Goldman, who made labor defense history as defense counsel
in the Minneapolis trial where he was also a defendant spoke with his
usual militancy. “Far be it from us to lay the least claim to a
martyr’s crown. Imprisonment is a terrible thing under the best
conditions.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is not, however, because of our treatment in
prison that you and thousands of others have protested and are
protesting. It is because of the fact that we were imprisoned for
propagating ideas which we believe offer the only path to the
liberation of mankind. Very few of those who supported us agree with
our ideas, but they understand that to permit reactionary forces to
imprison people for preaching ideas that have as their aim the
achievement of true liberty and equality for all men is dangerous
indeed for everyone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.”</p>
<p class="fst">Calling for a continuation of the struggle against the Smith “Gag”
Act, Goldman stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Our agitation against it may not result in its
immediate repeal but it will undoubtedly save many a potential labor
victim. Let all agitation against the Smith law cease and prosecutors
all over the country will be encouraged to use it. Our agitation
against the Smith Act becomes part of pur struggle to preserve and
extend democratic rights for the people. For we live in a period when
those rights are constantly threatened.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>CRDC Role in Helping Prisoners</h4>
<p class="fst">Farrell Dobbs, who as a young coal yard driver helped to organize
and lead the great Minneapolis truckdrivers strikes in 1934 and rose
to the position of SWP National Labor Secretary and then Editor of
<strong>The Militant</strong>, told what it meant to the morale of the
prisoners to know that the CRDC and its supporters were taking care
of their dependent families.</p>
<p><em>He spoke with deep gratification of the “millions of
trade union fighters [who] rallied to the defense of the 18
throughout our entire case and particularly when we were in prison
and [who] rallied to the defense of Kelly Postal, Local 544-CIO
secretary-treasurer, who was railroaded to jail by Tobin in the
Minnesota courts. This defense movement has cut across political
lines and organizational boundaries. Virtually all of the
working-class parties have supported us – that is, all except
the Stalinist betrayers of the working class.</em> The oppressed Negro
people sprang to our defense. And all liberal groups with the courage
of their convictions lent us their support. Over 600 labor bodies
have given their aid in this fight. They are so numerous it is
impossible to name them all tonight and tell them how much we
appreciate their support.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Felix Morrow’s Speech</h4>
<p class="fst">Felix Morrow, Editor of <strong>Fourth International</strong> magazine and
one of the most notable revolutionary journalists, declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“We went to prison for – a party in which
we have supreme faith – a trade union which had every right to
exist – and a principle of workers’ liberties which every
militant worker could understand if only our voices could reach him.
And we reached millions of such workers. What is important is that
several millions of workers learned to understand the principles
involved in this case and learned what a threat to the labor movement
is contained in the Smith Act and similar legislation.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">For the labor movement really to fight firmly against reaction.
Comrade Morrow pointed out, “means for labor to stand up as a
class, a class which recognizes its irreconcilable hostility to the
capitalist class – on the economic front, on the political
front, on the civil liberties front.” He concluded:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are confident that as we march together in
battle after battle for labor’s rights, the very logic of those
battles will weld together the kind of labor movement we believe
necessary for ultimate victory.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Noted Novelist Greets the 12</h4>
<p class="fst">James T. Farrell greeted the return of the 12 in the name of the
Civil Rights Defense Committee. He pointed out that the Minneapolis
Labor case was not a mere “episode.” Describing the
illusions about the case held by many liberals, their belief, doomed
to disappointment, that the “liberal” Roosevelt or the
“democratic” Supreme Court would reverse the convictions,
Farrell warned: “On the basis of these facts, one needs to be
ready for the future, ready in case other cases arise.” The
defense of civil liberties, he said, “rests most strongly on
the labor movement.” <em>He called on the labor movement to
start work now “for broader defense work and broader struggle
ini the future.” Only a united front based on the labor
movement “can systematically carry on a struggle against the
Smith ‘Gag’ Act. Let us now say that we want no more
Minneapolis cases, and let us work to make this slogan a fact,”</em></p>
<p>Farrell also pointed out that the Trotskyists were prosecuted
because they “upheld Marxian views.” He showed how for
nearly a hundred years all the agents of capitalism have been
“refuting” Marxism. <em>But despite the fact that “Marxism
is one of the most refuted of all tendencies,” the ruling
classes can only answer Marxism with repression, prison, murder. “And
in this case, Marxism has been legally attacked in the United States.
The expression of Marxian opinion has been held sufficient to send
men to jail. I will not stress the irony of this situation.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Fraenkel Speaks for ACLU</h4>
<p class="fst">The counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Osmund K.
Fraenkel, who helped prepare the appeal for a hearing before the
Supreme Court, described the legal aspects of the Minneapolis case
and particularly the refusal of the Supreme Court on three occasions
even to hear the case, although the Smith “Gag” Act
directly violates the free speech amendment of the U.S. Constitution,
“I sincerely hope the organizations affiliated with this case
will succeed in wiping out the Smith Act,” Fraenkel said, for
it places anyone in jeopardy “for expression of opinions shared
by millions the world over and which may yet prove more correct than
the opinions of those who sent these people to prison.”</p>
<p>Speaking on behalf of the most oppressed section of the
population, the Negro people, Benjamin McLaurin brought greetings
from “the largest international union of Negro workers in the
world, the AFL Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and from the most
radical organization of the Negro people in America, the March On
Washington Movement.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Spokesmen Call for Support of CRDC</h4>
<p class="fst">He showed the parallel between the persecution and frameups
against the Negro people and the Minneapolis Labor Case.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“We realize what the Minneapolis case means,
perhaps more than any other group on the American scene. Let us give
support to the CRDC which has fought so heroically that the world
might know the truth in this case.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">B.A. Gebiner greeted the meeting and “all the defendants in
the case in the name of the Workmen’s Circle, the largest
Jewish labor fraternal order in the United States.” Despite
differences of political views, “these differences did not
preclude participation in the fight for the liberation of our
friends. A considerable number of our branches have given, and will
give, moral and financial support to this fight.” The defense
campaign for the 18, he said, has shown that “there are
progressive and liberal-minded people who do not merely give lip
service to civil liberties but are ready to fight for it.”</p>
<p><em>A high point of the meeting was the appeal made by George
Novack for financial aid to Kelly Postal. The CRDC National Secretary
described the ruthless persecution of the Local 544-CIO
secretary-treasurer by AFL Teamsters Czar Daniel Tobin, the Minnesota
government and the employers.</em></p>
<p>Kelly Postal, because of his militancy and devotion to union
democracy, was first placed on trial in the Minneapolis Labor Case,
but was one of 10 acquitted. Tobin’s agents cooked up charges
of “embezzlement” against him, because he had carried out
the mandate of the Local 544 members in transferring the local’s
funds from the AFL to the CIO affiliation. <em>One judge threw the
case out of court. A more pliable judge was secured. Kelly was tried
on a different but similar count based on identical “evidence,”
framed and sent to prison for up to 5 years.</em></p>
<p>After serving more than a year, he was paroled as a result of the
pressure brought to bear through the CRDC defense campaign. He was
paroled to Seattle, where his wife, Mae, had moved. She was suffering
from cancer. She had to return to Minneapolis for treatment, but the
parole officers refused to permit Kelly to go. Mae was compelled to
make the long, difficult journey back to Seattle to spend her last
few weeks with her husband. She died several weeks ago. Kelly has
been left a big burden of debt for his wife’s medical care,
travel and funeral.</p>
<p>With a genuine demonstration of solidarity and generosity for a
persecuted union brother, the mass meeting contributed $468 in the
collection to aid Kelly Postal meet the debts accumulated because he
was sent to prison for his loyalty to the labor movement.</p>
<p><em>Scores of telegrams and messages greeting the released
Trotskyists were sent to the meeting.</em> Among the Labor
organizations and leaders expressing their solidarity were Irving
Abramson, President of the New Jersey CIO; Thomas DeLorenzo,
President of Brewster Aeronautical Local 365, CIO autoworkers; Peter
Capitano, Representative of Local 160, AFL Ladies Garment Workers;
Aron S. Gilmartin, Chairman of the Workers Defense League. <em>From
every part of the country, the branches of the Socialist Workers
Party sent their pledges of solidarity.</em></p>
<p><em>Demonstrating the international solidarity of the working
class, leading organizations of Mexican workers hailed the release of
the American Trotskyist leaders.</em> These included the Mexican
section of the Fourth International; the Workers and Peasants
Confederation; Union of Construction Workers of the, Federal
District; Union of Tanning Industry Workers of the Federal District;
Union of Construction Industry Workers, CTM; Libertarian Federation
of Workers and Peasants; Union of Stage Employees (“Smima
Club.”)</p>
<p>The meeting concluded with the adoption of a resolution calling on
“the President of the United States to grant immediate and
unconditional pardon and restore their civil rights to the 18
Socialist Workers Party and CIO members who were singled out for
persecution and imprisonment under the Smith ‘Gag’ Act.”</p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Art Preis
12 Released Trotskyists
Honored at Meeting
Fighters for Labor’s Rights Given Ovation at Mass Rally
(10 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 6, 10 February 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 2 – Over 800 unionists and
other progressive fighters for civil liberties this evening jammed
the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat here to honor the 12
Minneapolis Labor Case defendants released last week after their 13
months behind Roosevelt’s prison bars.
Inspired by the imprisoned Trotskyist leaders’ courageous
stand for labor’s rights, this Welcome Home Mass Meeting,
sponsored by the Civil Rights Defense Committee, enthusiastically
pledged to continue the struggle for repeal of the infamous Smith
“Gag” Act under which the Socialist Workers Party leaders
were the first labor victim’s. The demand was issued for an
unconditional presidential pardon and restoration of their full
citizenship rights, now denied the defendants because of their
“felony” convictions.
Prolonged Ovation
A prolonged ovation was accorded to the three released prisoners
who addressed the meeting, Albert Goldman, Farrell Dobbs and Felix
Morrow, and to James P. Cannon, who was unable to attend because of
illness but sent a stirring statement to the gathering.
The released Socialist Workers Party and Minneapolis Truckdrivers
Local 544-00 leaders spoke with the fervor of the revolutionary
socialist convictions for which they were railroaded to prison and
which capitalist government persecution has only deepened. They
issued a militant call to all labor to unite in unceasing struggle
against capitalist reaction and in defense of the workers’
rights.
Outstanding labor and civil liberties leaders joined in greeting
the returned Trotskyist fighters. The welcoming speakers included
Osmund K. Fraenkel, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union;
James T. Farrell, noted novelist and Chairman of the Civil Rights
Defense Committee; Benjamin S. McLaurin, International Field
Organizer of the AFL Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and National
Secretary of the Negro March on Washington Movement; and B.A.
Gebiner, Assistant General Secretary of the Workmen’s Circle.
George Novack, CRDC National Secretary, was the chairman.
At this mass meeting, all the 18 Trotskyists originally
imprisoned, 6 of whom were released last October, demonstrated the
front of solidarity they have maintained throughout their trial and
imprisonment. Oscar Shoenfeld, Karl Kuehn and Al Russel, released
last October from Danbury, Conn., prison, sat on the platform with
their newly-released comrades from the Sandstone, Minn.,
penitentiary. A message of solidarity came from the other Minneapolis
prisoners, Grace Carlson, Jake Cooper, Oscar Coover, Harry DeBoer,
Vincent Dunne, Max Geldman, Clarence Hamel, Emil Hansen, Carlos
Hudson, Ed Palmquist and Carl Skoglund.
Cannon’s Statement
In his statement read at the opening of the meeting, Comrade
Cannon, founder of the American Trotskyist movement and SWP National
Secretary, paid special tribute to Grace Carlson, sole woman among
the defendants, who was separated from the rest of her comrades all
alone at the women’s prison in Alderson, W.Va. She is
affectionately called “The Senator” since the time in
1940 when she ran on the Minnesota SWP ticket for the U.S. Senate.
“Our hearts ached for our Senator there all alone
with such a ‘hard way to go,’ as the convicts say. But
she stood up and played her part and set us an example. We, are proud
of our Senator. All the rest of us did the best we could and we hope
you approve of the way we conducted ourselves,” Cannon
declared.
“If I were to be present at the meeting, the thing
I would like to say would be how deeply, how profoundly, I thank you
for your solidarity, your kindness, your friendship.”
He also expressed his “heartfelt gratitude” to Roger
Baldwin, National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who
aided the CRDG’s defense campaign from the beginning of the
case in June 1941.
Goldman’s Speech
Comrade Goldman, who made labor defense history as defense counsel
in the Minneapolis trial where he was also a defendant spoke with his
usual militancy. “Far be it from us to lay the least claim to a
martyr’s crown. Imprisonment is a terrible thing under the best
conditions.
“It is not, however, because of our treatment in
prison that you and thousands of others have protested and are
protesting. It is because of the fact that we were imprisoned for
propagating ideas which we believe offer the only path to the
liberation of mankind. Very few of those who supported us agree with
our ideas, but they understand that to permit reactionary forces to
imprison people for preaching ideas that have as their aim the
achievement of true liberty and equality for all men is dangerous
indeed for everyone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.”
Calling for a continuation of the struggle against the Smith “Gag”
Act, Goldman stated:
“Our agitation against it may not result in its
immediate repeal but it will undoubtedly save many a potential labor
victim. Let all agitation against the Smith law cease and prosecutors
all over the country will be encouraged to use it. Our agitation
against the Smith Act becomes part of pur struggle to preserve and
extend democratic rights for the people. For we live in a period when
those rights are constantly threatened.”
CRDC Role in Helping Prisoners
Farrell Dobbs, who as a young coal yard driver helped to organize
and lead the great Minneapolis truckdrivers strikes in 1934 and rose
to the position of SWP National Labor Secretary and then Editor of
The Militant, told what it meant to the morale of the
prisoners to know that the CRDC and its supporters were taking care
of their dependent families.
He spoke with deep gratification of the “millions of
trade union fighters [who] rallied to the defense of the 18
throughout our entire case and particularly when we were in prison
and [who] rallied to the defense of Kelly Postal, Local 544-CIO
secretary-treasurer, who was railroaded to jail by Tobin in the
Minnesota courts. This defense movement has cut across political
lines and organizational boundaries. Virtually all of the
working-class parties have supported us – that is, all except
the Stalinist betrayers of the working class. The oppressed Negro
people sprang to our defense. And all liberal groups with the courage
of their convictions lent us their support. Over 600 labor bodies
have given their aid in this fight. They are so numerous it is
impossible to name them all tonight and tell them how much we
appreciate their support.”
Felix Morrow’s Speech
Felix Morrow, Editor of Fourth International magazine and
one of the most notable revolutionary journalists, declared:
“We went to prison for – a party in which
we have supreme faith – a trade union which had every right to
exist – and a principle of workers’ liberties which every
militant worker could understand if only our voices could reach him.
And we reached millions of such workers. What is important is that
several millions of workers learned to understand the principles
involved in this case and learned what a threat to the labor movement
is contained in the Smith Act and similar legislation.”
For the labor movement really to fight firmly against reaction.
Comrade Morrow pointed out, “means for labor to stand up as a
class, a class which recognizes its irreconcilable hostility to the
capitalist class – on the economic front, on the political
front, on the civil liberties front.” He concluded:
“We are confident that as we march together in
battle after battle for labor’s rights, the very logic of those
battles will weld together the kind of labor movement we believe
necessary for ultimate victory.”
Noted Novelist Greets the 12
James T. Farrell greeted the return of the 12 in the name of the
Civil Rights Defense Committee. He pointed out that the Minneapolis
Labor case was not a mere “episode.” Describing the
illusions about the case held by many liberals, their belief, doomed
to disappointment, that the “liberal” Roosevelt or the
“democratic” Supreme Court would reverse the convictions,
Farrell warned: “On the basis of these facts, one needs to be
ready for the future, ready in case other cases arise.” The
defense of civil liberties, he said, “rests most strongly on
the labor movement.” He called on the labor movement to
start work now “for broader defense work and broader struggle
ini the future.” Only a united front based on the labor
movement “can systematically carry on a struggle against the
Smith ‘Gag’ Act. Let us now say that we want no more
Minneapolis cases, and let us work to make this slogan a fact,”
Farrell also pointed out that the Trotskyists were prosecuted
because they “upheld Marxian views.” He showed how for
nearly a hundred years all the agents of capitalism have been
“refuting” Marxism. But despite the fact that “Marxism
is one of the most refuted of all tendencies,” the ruling
classes can only answer Marxism with repression, prison, murder. “And
in this case, Marxism has been legally attacked in the United States.
The expression of Marxian opinion has been held sufficient to send
men to jail. I will not stress the irony of this situation.”
Fraenkel Speaks for ACLU
The counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, Osmund K.
Fraenkel, who helped prepare the appeal for a hearing before the
Supreme Court, described the legal aspects of the Minneapolis case
and particularly the refusal of the Supreme Court on three occasions
even to hear the case, although the Smith “Gag” Act
directly violates the free speech amendment of the U.S. Constitution,
“I sincerely hope the organizations affiliated with this case
will succeed in wiping out the Smith Act,” Fraenkel said, for
it places anyone in jeopardy “for expression of opinions shared
by millions the world over and which may yet prove more correct than
the opinions of those who sent these people to prison.”
Speaking on behalf of the most oppressed section of the
population, the Negro people, Benjamin McLaurin brought greetings
from “the largest international union of Negro workers in the
world, the AFL Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and from the most
radical organization of the Negro people in America, the March On
Washington Movement.”
Labor Spokesmen Call for Support of CRDC
He showed the parallel between the persecution and frameups
against the Negro people and the Minneapolis Labor Case.
“We realize what the Minneapolis case means,
perhaps more than any other group on the American scene. Let us give
support to the CRDC which has fought so heroically that the world
might know the truth in this case.”
B.A. Gebiner greeted the meeting and “all the defendants in
the case in the name of the Workmen’s Circle, the largest
Jewish labor fraternal order in the United States.” Despite
differences of political views, “these differences did not
preclude participation in the fight for the liberation of our
friends. A considerable number of our branches have given, and will
give, moral and financial support to this fight.” The defense
campaign for the 18, he said, has shown that “there are
progressive and liberal-minded people who do not merely give lip
service to civil liberties but are ready to fight for it.”
A high point of the meeting was the appeal made by George
Novack for financial aid to Kelly Postal. The CRDC National Secretary
described the ruthless persecution of the Local 544-CIO
secretary-treasurer by AFL Teamsters Czar Daniel Tobin, the Minnesota
government and the employers.
Kelly Postal, because of his militancy and devotion to union
democracy, was first placed on trial in the Minneapolis Labor Case,
but was one of 10 acquitted. Tobin’s agents cooked up charges
of “embezzlement” against him, because he had carried out
the mandate of the Local 544 members in transferring the local’s
funds from the AFL to the CIO affiliation. One judge threw the
case out of court. A more pliable judge was secured. Kelly was tried
on a different but similar count based on identical “evidence,”
framed and sent to prison for up to 5 years.
After serving more than a year, he was paroled as a result of the
pressure brought to bear through the CRDC defense campaign. He was
paroled to Seattle, where his wife, Mae, had moved. She was suffering
from cancer. She had to return to Minneapolis for treatment, but the
parole officers refused to permit Kelly to go. Mae was compelled to
make the long, difficult journey back to Seattle to spend her last
few weeks with her husband. She died several weeks ago. Kelly has
been left a big burden of debt for his wife’s medical care,
travel and funeral.
With a genuine demonstration of solidarity and generosity for a
persecuted union brother, the mass meeting contributed $468 in the
collection to aid Kelly Postal meet the debts accumulated because he
was sent to prison for his loyalty to the labor movement.
Scores of telegrams and messages greeting the released
Trotskyists were sent to the meeting. Among the Labor
organizations and leaders expressing their solidarity were Irving
Abramson, President of the New Jersey CIO; Thomas DeLorenzo,
President of Brewster Aeronautical Local 365, CIO autoworkers; Peter
Capitano, Representative of Local 160, AFL Ladies Garment Workers;
Aron S. Gilmartin, Chairman of the Workers Defense League. From
every part of the country, the branches of the Socialist Workers
Party sent their pledges of solidarity.
Demonstrating the international solidarity of the working
class, leading organizations of Mexican workers hailed the release of
the American Trotskyist leaders. These included the Mexican
section of the Fourth International; the Workers and Peasants
Confederation; Union of Construction Workers of the, Federal
District; Union of Tanning Industry Workers of the Federal District;
Union of Construction Industry Workers, CTM; Libertarian Federation
of Workers and Peasants; Union of Stage Employees (“Smima
Club.”)
The meeting concluded with the adoption of a resolution calling on
“the President of the United States to grant immediate and
unconditional pardon and restore their civil rights to the 18
Socialist Workers Party and CIO members who were singled out for
persecution and imprisonment under the Smith ‘Gag’ Act.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>New OPA Bill Will Not<br>
Halt Run-Away Prices</h1>
<h4>Truman-Sponsored Measure Designed to Fool Workers</h4>
<h3>(13 July 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_27" target="new">Vol. X No. 28</a>, 13 July 1946, pp. 1 & 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The new Truman-sponsored OPA bill being debated in Congress is a deception. It will not control prices any more than the previous measure, under which living costs soared during the war more than a hundred per cent.</strong></p>
<p><em>This measure, like its predecessor, is intended not to halt rising prices but to “regulate” inflation.</em> Unwilling to take responsibility for Congress’s openly inflationary bill which he vetoed, Truman is seeking to reestablish a fictitious price control in the disguise of a “good” OPA bill.</p>
<p>Although the Senate Banking Committee deleted some portions of the vetoed bill, the “compromise” measure it proposed last week is merely a patch-work of the former feeble “price control” act and the vetoed bill.</p>
<p>It fa clear that the administration would like to palm a measure like this off on the workers as “price control.” This would then be used as the pretext for demanding a wage freeze; – while prices continue upward as they did during the war.</p>
<p>The present bounding inflation is merely an intensification of the trend which developed throughout the imperialist war and has been accelerating steadily since V-J Day.</p>
<p>Prior to the expiration of the old OPA, the Truman administration had been whetting the profiteers’ appetites by sanctioning one price increase after another. The wage increases for which labor fought to compensate for previous big price increases were used by Truman as a pretext for granting huge profiteering price rises to virtually every industry. OPA completely “de-controlled” thousands of commodities.<br>
</p>
<h4>Profiteers Gouge</h4>
<p class="fst">While Truman and Congress are going through their fancy maneuvers and shadow-boxing, the food profiteers and rent hogs are digging their claws deeper and deeper into the workers’ pockets. At the same time, the capitalist press runs advertisements, editorials and angled news stories to give the false impression that the profiteers themselves are exercising “self-restraint” in their price demands.</p>
<p>According to the wholesale food prices index of Dun & Bradstreet, on July 2 prices of 31 basic commodities had risen to the highest peak since July 29, 1920 – high point of the post-World War I inflation. Tens of thousands are threatened with evictions as rents are being hiked almost everywhere.</p>
<p>Most of the union leaders, who want an excuse for holding back struggles for higher wages, are urging the workers to fight for a “good” OPA along the lines Truman is proposing.</p>
<p>They are spreading illusions about reliance on government “price control,” as they did during the war with their ill-fated campaigns for the “roll-back of prices” and “make OPA work.”</p>
<p>All the efforts of the workers should be directed instead toward independent mass struggle on an independent labor program of combatting the consequences of inflation.<br>
</p>
<h4>Real Battle</h4>
<p class="fst">The workers should be mobilized for a real battle for higher wages, and especially for a sliding scale of wages, automatically rising with every rise in living costs.</p>
<p>Workers, poor farmers and the lower middle class must be organized into their own mass consumers’ and tenants’ committees. They must directly resist exorbitant prices and rentals by mass pressure means.</p>
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Art Preis
New OPA Bill Will Not
Halt Run-Away Prices
Truman-Sponsored Measure Designed to Fool Workers
(13 July 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 28, 13 July 1946, pp. 1 & 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The new Truman-sponsored OPA bill being debated in Congress is a deception. It will not control prices any more than the previous measure, under which living costs soared during the war more than a hundred per cent.
This measure, like its predecessor, is intended not to halt rising prices but to “regulate” inflation. Unwilling to take responsibility for Congress’s openly inflationary bill which he vetoed, Truman is seeking to reestablish a fictitious price control in the disguise of a “good” OPA bill.
Although the Senate Banking Committee deleted some portions of the vetoed bill, the “compromise” measure it proposed last week is merely a patch-work of the former feeble “price control” act and the vetoed bill.
It fa clear that the administration would like to palm a measure like this off on the workers as “price control.” This would then be used as the pretext for demanding a wage freeze; – while prices continue upward as they did during the war.
The present bounding inflation is merely an intensification of the trend which developed throughout the imperialist war and has been accelerating steadily since V-J Day.
Prior to the expiration of the old OPA, the Truman administration had been whetting the profiteers’ appetites by sanctioning one price increase after another. The wage increases for which labor fought to compensate for previous big price increases were used by Truman as a pretext for granting huge profiteering price rises to virtually every industry. OPA completely “de-controlled” thousands of commodities.
Profiteers Gouge
While Truman and Congress are going through their fancy maneuvers and shadow-boxing, the food profiteers and rent hogs are digging their claws deeper and deeper into the workers’ pockets. At the same time, the capitalist press runs advertisements, editorials and angled news stories to give the false impression that the profiteers themselves are exercising “self-restraint” in their price demands.
According to the wholesale food prices index of Dun & Bradstreet, on July 2 prices of 31 basic commodities had risen to the highest peak since July 29, 1920 – high point of the post-World War I inflation. Tens of thousands are threatened with evictions as rents are being hiked almost everywhere.
Most of the union leaders, who want an excuse for holding back struggles for higher wages, are urging the workers to fight for a “good” OPA along the lines Truman is proposing.
They are spreading illusions about reliance on government “price control,” as they did during the war with their ill-fated campaigns for the “roll-back of prices” and “make OPA work.”
All the efforts of the workers should be directed instead toward independent mass struggle on an independent labor program of combatting the consequences of inflation.
Real Battle
The workers should be mobilized for a real battle for higher wages, and especially for a sliding scale of wages, automatically rising with every rise in living costs.
Workers, poor farmers and the lower middle class must be organized into their own mass consumers’ and tenants’ committees. They must directly resist exorbitant prices and rentals by mass pressure means.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(29 June 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_26" target="new">Vol. X No. 26</a>, 29 June 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Packinghouse Union Seeks New Wage Boost</h3>
<p class="fst">The most important action of the recent convention of the CIO United Packinghouse Workers of America, held in Montreal, Canada, was adoption of a report of the contract committee calling for a new “master agreement” with the Big Four meatpacking trust and the large independents.</p>
<p>Negotiations are to begin August 7, about six months after the UPWA won a 16-cent an hour increase by strike action. Truman tried to break the strike by plant seizures. The UPWA’s principal demands, as voted by the convention, will be for a 12-cent an hour increase, a $1 an hour minimum wage, a guaranteed annual wage and 30-hour week.</p>
<p>Another great labor struggle is shaping up as unions like the UPWA, which are being robbed of hard-won wage gains by price extortions, are renewing wage demands. If they want to put a real road-block in the path of the profiteering price-gougers, they should demand an escalator clause in the next contract providing a sliding scale of wages, under a fixed minimum, automatically rising in direct proportion to the rising cost of living.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>All Not Yet Quiet on the Strike Front</h3>
<p class="fst">In the 30 days following June 18, there are more than 700 strikes scheduled by smaller unions, according to Department of Labor records. These involve demands for wage increases and shorter hours.</p>
<p>Labor Department officials predict that there will be at least 150 strikes going on at any time during the rest of the year, with an average of 30,000 to 50,000 out at all times.</p>
<p>This appears to be a very small figure in terms of the peak of the strike wave last January, when 1,750,000 were out at one time. Actually, it represents a several times higher average of strikes and strikers than during the pre-war period.</p>
<p>What has the corporations and their political agents most worried is the real possibility of big industrial strikes by this fall and winter, as those who won wage gains last spring find them shrunk to zero by price inflation.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Guild President Lashes at Truman</h3>
<p class="fst">The 250 delegates to the CIO American Newspaper Guild convention in Scranton, Pa„ last week, heard Guild President Milton Murray keynote the deliberations with a scathing attack on Truman’s labor policy.</p>
<p>“We find the most unhappy picture of petty advisors who have constituted a new Missouri gang surrounding the President of the United States and counseling him to invoke a draft law against labor, to put bayonets at the backs of workers, if necessary, to break strikes ...” said Murray.</p>
<p>Murray’s answer to Truman’s assault on labor is “to see that decent, proper legislators attend the halls of Congress so that sane and sensible legislation can be adopted.”</p>
<p>First, it must be noted that Truman’s draft-strikers bill wasn’t just cooked up by a “new Missouri Gang.” It was originated by Truman’s predecessor, Roosevelt, in his Congressional message of June 1943. Truman’s strikebreaking plant seizures are an exact duplicate of Roosevelt’s, in the rail and coal industries specifically. As for using troops against American workers, memory recalls Roosevelt’s breaking of the North American Aviation strike in June 1941 – and he didn’t get the advice to do that from Missouri, either. Truman is following, whether expertly or not, Roosevelt’s labor policy in its fundamentals.</p>
<p>Secondly, labor has been voting for “decent, proper legislators” for lo! these many years. Unfortunately, these “decent, proper legislators,” as they were represented by the union leaders in past elections, were also representatives of capitalist parties.</p>
<p>The only “decent, proper legislators” for labor are genuine labor representatives, put in office by a labor party.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Sidney Hillman Looks Beyond the Case Veto</h3>
<p class="fst">As this column noted last week, various union leaders are trying to cuddle up to Truman once more, using his veto of the Case Union-Busting Bill as a pretext for dusting off his “friend of labor” label.</p>
<p>The June issue of <b>The Advance</b>, organ of Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, CIO, publishes a front-page editorial, <i>Beyond the Case Veto</i>. It starts off saying, “It is not the province of <b>The Advance</b> to speculate on the why or wherefore of the President’s veto of the reactionary Case Bill.”</p>
<p>Any such speculation, of course, would embarrass Hillman’s editors, since it would lead to the conclusion it wasn’t done from pure pro-labor motives, but simple political expediency. Besides, in the same breath as his veto, Truman called again for a draft-strikers law.</p>
<p>By some pretty tricky calculations, <b>The Advance</b> then tries to show that the voting on the Case Bill in Congress proves that the sole anti-labor forces that must be feared are the Republicans and “Democratic tories” from the South. It concludes that the “record of the two parties still points to the importance of the workers in this country not being cajoled into supporting the reactionary Republican party because of the reactionary minority in the Democratic party.”</p>
<p>There’s no gainsaying that the Republicans are reactionary. But what “minority” in the Democratic Party passed Truman’s “work-under-bayonets” bill in the House by a vote of 306 to 13?</p>
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Art Preis
Trade Union Notes
(29 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 26, 29 June 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Packinghouse Union Seeks New Wage Boost
The most important action of the recent convention of the CIO United Packinghouse Workers of America, held in Montreal, Canada, was adoption of a report of the contract committee calling for a new “master agreement” with the Big Four meatpacking trust and the large independents.
Negotiations are to begin August 7, about six months after the UPWA won a 16-cent an hour increase by strike action. Truman tried to break the strike by plant seizures. The UPWA’s principal demands, as voted by the convention, will be for a 12-cent an hour increase, a $1 an hour minimum wage, a guaranteed annual wage and 30-hour week.
Another great labor struggle is shaping up as unions like the UPWA, which are being robbed of hard-won wage gains by price extortions, are renewing wage demands. If they want to put a real road-block in the path of the profiteering price-gougers, they should demand an escalator clause in the next contract providing a sliding scale of wages, under a fixed minimum, automatically rising in direct proportion to the rising cost of living.
* * *
All Not Yet Quiet on the Strike Front
In the 30 days following June 18, there are more than 700 strikes scheduled by smaller unions, according to Department of Labor records. These involve demands for wage increases and shorter hours.
Labor Department officials predict that there will be at least 150 strikes going on at any time during the rest of the year, with an average of 30,000 to 50,000 out at all times.
This appears to be a very small figure in terms of the peak of the strike wave last January, when 1,750,000 were out at one time. Actually, it represents a several times higher average of strikes and strikers than during the pre-war period.
What has the corporations and their political agents most worried is the real possibility of big industrial strikes by this fall and winter, as those who won wage gains last spring find them shrunk to zero by price inflation.
* * *
Guild President Lashes at Truman
The 250 delegates to the CIO American Newspaper Guild convention in Scranton, Pa„ last week, heard Guild President Milton Murray keynote the deliberations with a scathing attack on Truman’s labor policy.
“We find the most unhappy picture of petty advisors who have constituted a new Missouri gang surrounding the President of the United States and counseling him to invoke a draft law against labor, to put bayonets at the backs of workers, if necessary, to break strikes ...” said Murray.
Murray’s answer to Truman’s assault on labor is “to see that decent, proper legislators attend the halls of Congress so that sane and sensible legislation can be adopted.”
First, it must be noted that Truman’s draft-strikers bill wasn’t just cooked up by a “new Missouri Gang.” It was originated by Truman’s predecessor, Roosevelt, in his Congressional message of June 1943. Truman’s strikebreaking plant seizures are an exact duplicate of Roosevelt’s, in the rail and coal industries specifically. As for using troops against American workers, memory recalls Roosevelt’s breaking of the North American Aviation strike in June 1941 – and he didn’t get the advice to do that from Missouri, either. Truman is following, whether expertly or not, Roosevelt’s labor policy in its fundamentals.
Secondly, labor has been voting for “decent, proper legislators” for lo! these many years. Unfortunately, these “decent, proper legislators,” as they were represented by the union leaders in past elections, were also representatives of capitalist parties.
The only “decent, proper legislators” for labor are genuine labor representatives, put in office by a labor party.
* * *
Sidney Hillman Looks Beyond the Case Veto
As this column noted last week, various union leaders are trying to cuddle up to Truman once more, using his veto of the Case Union-Busting Bill as a pretext for dusting off his “friend of labor” label.
The June issue of The Advance, organ of Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, CIO, publishes a front-page editorial, Beyond the Case Veto. It starts off saying, “It is not the province of The Advance to speculate on the why or wherefore of the President’s veto of the reactionary Case Bill.”
Any such speculation, of course, would embarrass Hillman’s editors, since it would lead to the conclusion it wasn’t done from pure pro-labor motives, but simple political expediency. Besides, in the same breath as his veto, Truman called again for a draft-strikers law.
By some pretty tricky calculations, The Advance then tries to show that the voting on the Case Bill in Congress proves that the sole anti-labor forces that must be feared are the Republicans and “Democratic tories” from the South. It concludes that the “record of the two parties still points to the importance of the workers in this country not being cajoled into supporting the reactionary Republican party because of the reactionary minority in the Democratic party.”
There’s no gainsaying that the Republicans are reactionary. But what “minority” in the Democratic Party passed Truman’s “work-under-bayonets” bill in the House by a vote of 306 to 13?
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Hedging on Outright<br>
Repeal of Slave Labor Law</h1>
<h4>Plans New “Substitute” Bill to Continue Union Restraints</h4>
<h3>(15 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_46" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 46</a>, 15 November 1948, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>On the morning after Election Day, Truman greeted the news of his victory with, “Labor did it!” Before another 24 hours went by, Truman and his advisers began to hedge on the key campaign promise to labor – the unqualified pledge to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.</strong></p>
<p>Now, we are informed by Administration-inspired preps reports, Truman intends to push for repeal of the Slave Labor Law – BUT. That big “but” is his plan to seek passage of a substitute anti-labor law which will contain some of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act itself.</p>
<p>If Truman is already trying to welch on his one unambiguous campaign promise, ‘we can well imagine the sad fate in store for his other promises: on civil rights, which his administration consistently violated; on inflation, which his arms budget will fuel still further; on housing, which has remained in acute crisis.</p>
<p>On Nov. 4, Truman’s Secretary of Labor Maurice J. Tobin revealed that the President is preparing a new labor law to offer at the same time that he calls on the 81st Congress to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. This substitute law, said Secretary Tobin, will be “fair, to both workers and management.” That’s what was said about the Taft-Hartley Act too.<br>
</p>
<h4>Pressuring Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">The Administration is already pressuring organized labor to “get together” with the employers, looking to an “agreement” on the provisions of a new law. The press – adapting its tactics to the new situation – is beginning to hammer away on the need for labor to make “concessions” to the employers.</p>
<p>Industry, reports labor correspondent Louis Stark in the Nov. 6 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, has reacted with “surprise” and “pleasure” at the opportunity Truman is now affording the employers to help write another “fair” law’ regulating the unions. If the Taft-Hartley Act is to go, they will not lack “substitutes.” Truman’s own proposals for union-curbing, legislation provide an ample supply.</p>
<p>Among his own formal proposals during the past two years have been a work-or-be-drafted law; “fact-finding” commissions and 60-day “cooling-off” periods before strikes, binding arbitration in all' labor, disputes involving interpretations of <sup>:</sup> contracts; outlawing of “jurisdictional” strikes and secondary boycotts; establishment of government labor boards to intervene in strikes; government seizure of plants and the use of injunctions against strikes affecting the “public welfare.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Net Effect</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The net effect of any or all of these restrictions would be to continue many of the basic principles of the Taft-Hartley Act.</em></p>
<p>Louis Stark, in the Nov. 7 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, reports that “those conversant with the views of influential union figures believe that they would be willing to give the nod to a law which would encompass” most or all of these principles. AFL President William Green four days after the elections approved the idea of Congress enacting new labor lows “fairly acceptable to all.” To show how ready he is for “concessions” to the employers, Green even called on the workers for “increased productivity” – more work – “and that will apply to bricklayers as well as coal miners.”</p>
<p>If union leaders like Green are ready to hand back to employers what the workers have just voted to take away, the Democratic politicians are even more; ready to “go easy” on the fulfillment of their campaign promises. Typical of the post-election attitude of even the most “liberal” Democrats is the statement of Chester Bowles, newly elected Governor of Connecticut.<br>
</p>
<h4>Tact and Compromise</h4>
<p class="fst">Bowles, whom even the Wallaceites supported, stated on Nov. 4 that his administration will reflect “a kind, of practical; liberalism” which “even conservatives” will respect as “a good, clean operation.” He would, avoid the mistake of the New Deal which, “was always whaling the hell out of conservatives so that they got frightened and failed to function ... There’s got to be tact and compromise.”</p>
<p>No more Truman-talk about “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries.” The new theme song of the Truman Democrats is “Tact and Compromise.”</p>
<p>A cunning campaign is under way to rob the workers of what they considered a victory against the Taft-Hartley Act. On the one hand, the press is continuously reminding labor that the majority in the 81st Congress, both Senate and House, is still composed of those who voted for the Taft-Hartley Act. On the other hand, Truman Administration spokesmen and certain union leaders are spreading the idea that if Congress is to be persuaded to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, it will be necessary for labor to agree to a “reasonable substitute.”</p>
<p>But a majority voted for outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act – with no “ifs, buts or maybes.” They didn’t vote for “substitutes,” They didn’t vote for “tact and compromise.” They expect Truman to live up to his pledge and on the opening day of Congress to demand immediate scrapping of the Slave Labor Law, without “bargaining” or equivocation. Smash the Taft-Hartley Act first – discuss anything else afterwards.<br>
</p>
<h4>Straws in Wind</h4>
<p class="fst">These straws in the wind should cure the labor ranks of any illusions that they can afford to sit back and wait for Truman and the Democrats to carry out their promises. Labor will win only what it fights for. Truman will carry out only those promises that he is pressured and forced into carrying out. That is why the fight to repeal the Slave Labor Law will have to be pressed harder than ever. And to the slogan “Smash the Taft-Hartley Act!,” must now be added, “Accept No Substitutes!”</p>
<p>Labor will have to be mobilized on a national scale and in battle array. The need of the hour remains – as it has since the beginning of the post-war anti-labor offensive – the conveying in Washington, D.C. of a National Emergency Congress of Labor, representing all the unions.</p>
<p>Such a Congress of Labor, as proposed by the AFL International Typographical Union and endorsed by the CIO National Maritime Union, must launch a united militant labor offensive as the only way to assure that Congress will repeal the Taft-Hartley Act in the shortest possible time – and with no “substitutes.” And that the other Truman promises will be carried out.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman Hedging on Outright
Repeal of Slave Labor Law
Plans New “Substitute” Bill to Continue Union Restraints
(15 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 46, 15 November 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
On the morning after Election Day, Truman greeted the news of his victory with, “Labor did it!” Before another 24 hours went by, Truman and his advisers began to hedge on the key campaign promise to labor – the unqualified pledge to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.
Now, we are informed by Administration-inspired preps reports, Truman intends to push for repeal of the Slave Labor Law – BUT. That big “but” is his plan to seek passage of a substitute anti-labor law which will contain some of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act itself.
If Truman is already trying to welch on his one unambiguous campaign promise, ‘we can well imagine the sad fate in store for his other promises: on civil rights, which his administration consistently violated; on inflation, which his arms budget will fuel still further; on housing, which has remained in acute crisis.
On Nov. 4, Truman’s Secretary of Labor Maurice J. Tobin revealed that the President is preparing a new labor law to offer at the same time that he calls on the 81st Congress to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. This substitute law, said Secretary Tobin, will be “fair, to both workers and management.” That’s what was said about the Taft-Hartley Act too.
Pressuring Labor
The Administration is already pressuring organized labor to “get together” with the employers, looking to an “agreement” on the provisions of a new law. The press – adapting its tactics to the new situation – is beginning to hammer away on the need for labor to make “concessions” to the employers.
Industry, reports labor correspondent Louis Stark in the Nov. 6 N.Y. Times, has reacted with “surprise” and “pleasure” at the opportunity Truman is now affording the employers to help write another “fair” law’ regulating the unions. If the Taft-Hartley Act is to go, they will not lack “substitutes.” Truman’s own proposals for union-curbing, legislation provide an ample supply.
Among his own formal proposals during the past two years have been a work-or-be-drafted law; “fact-finding” commissions and 60-day “cooling-off” periods before strikes, binding arbitration in all' labor, disputes involving interpretations of : contracts; outlawing of “jurisdictional” strikes and secondary boycotts; establishment of government labor boards to intervene in strikes; government seizure of plants and the use of injunctions against strikes affecting the “public welfare.”
Net Effect
The net effect of any or all of these restrictions would be to continue many of the basic principles of the Taft-Hartley Act.
Louis Stark, in the Nov. 7 N.Y. Times, reports that “those conversant with the views of influential union figures believe that they would be willing to give the nod to a law which would encompass” most or all of these principles. AFL President William Green four days after the elections approved the idea of Congress enacting new labor lows “fairly acceptable to all.” To show how ready he is for “concessions” to the employers, Green even called on the workers for “increased productivity” – more work – “and that will apply to bricklayers as well as coal miners.”
If union leaders like Green are ready to hand back to employers what the workers have just voted to take away, the Democratic politicians are even more; ready to “go easy” on the fulfillment of their campaign promises. Typical of the post-election attitude of even the most “liberal” Democrats is the statement of Chester Bowles, newly elected Governor of Connecticut.
Tact and Compromise
Bowles, whom even the Wallaceites supported, stated on Nov. 4 that his administration will reflect “a kind, of practical; liberalism” which “even conservatives” will respect as “a good, clean operation.” He would, avoid the mistake of the New Deal which, “was always whaling the hell out of conservatives so that they got frightened and failed to function ... There’s got to be tact and compromise.”
No more Truman-talk about “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries.” The new theme song of the Truman Democrats is “Tact and Compromise.”
A cunning campaign is under way to rob the workers of what they considered a victory against the Taft-Hartley Act. On the one hand, the press is continuously reminding labor that the majority in the 81st Congress, both Senate and House, is still composed of those who voted for the Taft-Hartley Act. On the other hand, Truman Administration spokesmen and certain union leaders are spreading the idea that if Congress is to be persuaded to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, it will be necessary for labor to agree to a “reasonable substitute.”
But a majority voted for outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act – with no “ifs, buts or maybes.” They didn’t vote for “substitutes,” They didn’t vote for “tact and compromise.” They expect Truman to live up to his pledge and on the opening day of Congress to demand immediate scrapping of the Slave Labor Law, without “bargaining” or equivocation. Smash the Taft-Hartley Act first – discuss anything else afterwards.
Straws in Wind
These straws in the wind should cure the labor ranks of any illusions that they can afford to sit back and wait for Truman and the Democrats to carry out their promises. Labor will win only what it fights for. Truman will carry out only those promises that he is pressured and forced into carrying out. That is why the fight to repeal the Slave Labor Law will have to be pressed harder than ever. And to the slogan “Smash the Taft-Hartley Act!,” must now be added, “Accept No Substitutes!”
Labor will have to be mobilized on a national scale and in battle array. The need of the hour remains – as it has since the beginning of the post-war anti-labor offensive – the conveying in Washington, D.C. of a National Emergency Congress of Labor, representing all the unions.
Such a Congress of Labor, as proposed by the AFL International Typographical Union and endorsed by the CIO National Maritime Union, must launch a united militant labor offensive as the only way to assure that Congress will repeal the Taft-Hartley Act in the shortest possible time – and with no “substitutes.” And that the other Truman promises will be carried out.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Appeases Capitalist Class</h1>
<h4>‘Nothing to Fear,’ He Tells Conclave of Manufacturers</h4>
<h3>(13 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_50" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 50</a>, 13 December 1948, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Truman took the occasion of the National Association of Manufacturers convention last week to assure Big Business that his blasts at “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries” before Nov. 2 were just election ballyhoo. As the spokesmen of the country’s powerful monopolies met in New York City, the President told his largest press conference since the elections that the corporations have “nothing to fear’’ from his program. He pointedly offered as evidence his past three and a half years in office when corporate profits broke all records, ini peace or war.</strong></p>
<p>The very next day Secretary of Commerce Sawyer made an extremely conciliatory and reassuring address to the NAM convention. Sawyer’s speech, it was emphasized, was approved in advance by Truman.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Nothing to Fear”</h4>
<p class="fst">Repeating that “business has nothing to fear” from Truman’s program, the Commerce Secretary lavishly praised “private enterprise” and the capitalists. “Firat of all,” he said, <em>“Government officials should remember that business men are working for profits. Profit is the main motivation of business; it is the ignition system of our economic engine. The importance of profit must be recognized and utilized.”</em></p>
<p>He whitewashed the scandalous profiteering by the major corporations, claiming they “have shown admirable restraint in raising prices and have reluctantly done so in the face of steadily mounting costs.” Emphasizing that “there is nothing sinful about profits,” he suggested that the corporation pirates merely “give careful and thoughtful consideration” to the inflationary effect of large profits and “unreasonably” high prices.</p>
<p>The Big Business press has expressed both surprise and pleasure – but more pleasure than surprise – at Truman’s demonstrative peace overtures to the economic royalists he so roundly denounced little more than a month ago. They are further reassured by the mounting evidence that Truman intends to hedge all along the line on his promises to labor. <em>He is now preparing, it is well known, a “substitute” law for the Taft-Hartley Act which will contain some of the worst features of the latter. His civil rights program is almost certain to be buried or compromised as a conciliatory gesture to the still-powerful Southern wing of the Democratic Party.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Same Cabinet</h4>
<p class="fst">On the same day as he reassured the NAM gang in New York, Truman punctured the fond hopes of the Trumanite liberals and labor leaders that he would rid his cabinet of the professional militarists and Wall Street bankers who are directing U.S. foreign policy. Marshall, former Army Chief of Staff, and Forrestal, former Dillon, Read investment bank official, have been asked to continue as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense respectively, Truman told reporters, and they “are willing” to do so.</p>
<p><em>Marshall and Forrestal are the chief symbols of the Wall Street-Big Brass domination of the Truman Administration’s policies. Their retention in the cabinet affirms the continued drive of Truman toward militarism and war.</em></p>
<p>This program rules out any substantial social improvements at home. Sawyer, in his speech to the NAM, admitted that the major drain on the economy and the biggest inflationary pressure is “the enlargement of our military program.” Further military expansion must “further intensify that pressure.”</p>
<p>Truman now talks about a $15 billion “limit” on direct military expenditures for 1949. What most people don’t realize is that this is nea/ly 40® more than the $11 billion he proposed in January 1948 and which the bi-partisan Congress boosted by $3 billion.<br>
</p>
<h4>Military Costs</h4>
<p class="fst">The Administration also plans vast new expenditures to arm the so-called “Western Union” countries and all the capitalist dictatorships being lined up for the contemplated war against the Soviet Union. “Foreign military aid may wreck Truman’s budget ... No one knows what it will cost. Estimates run from $2 billion to $5 billion a year,” writes the Scripps-Howard Washington staff on Dec. 4. A half billion has already been sunk in tiny Greece alone.</p>
<p><em>With these big increases for the military and “foreign aid” already scheduled, while Truman promises a “balanced budget,” how much will be allocated for social improvements? In his January 1948 budget, when he proposed far smaller sums for military purposes, the total of all new sums his budget allowed for education, health, housing, social security, etc., was only a half billion dollars.</em></p>
<p>Against a total of $42 billion or more that the government will spend this fiscal year, the whole cost of the social improvements Truman promised in his election campaign – health, education, housing, reclamation, higher social security payments, etc., adds up to $573 million.</p>
<p><em>Militarism and war preparations – these will have first call. Who will foot the bill? Not the monopolists, as Truman has plainly indicated by his latest appeasement gestures toward Big Business. As always, it will be the working people who will be forced to carry the load. The “new New Deal” will be a scrawny, short-lived infant indeed – if it isn’t dead before it’s born.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Truman Appeases Capitalist Class
‘Nothing to Fear,’ He Tells Conclave of Manufacturers
(13 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 50, 13 December 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Truman took the occasion of the National Association of Manufacturers convention last week to assure Big Business that his blasts at “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries” before Nov. 2 were just election ballyhoo. As the spokesmen of the country’s powerful monopolies met in New York City, the President told his largest press conference since the elections that the corporations have “nothing to fear’’ from his program. He pointedly offered as evidence his past three and a half years in office when corporate profits broke all records, ini peace or war.
The very next day Secretary of Commerce Sawyer made an extremely conciliatory and reassuring address to the NAM convention. Sawyer’s speech, it was emphasized, was approved in advance by Truman.
“Nothing to Fear”
Repeating that “business has nothing to fear” from Truman’s program, the Commerce Secretary lavishly praised “private enterprise” and the capitalists. “Firat of all,” he said, “Government officials should remember that business men are working for profits. Profit is the main motivation of business; it is the ignition system of our economic engine. The importance of profit must be recognized and utilized.”
He whitewashed the scandalous profiteering by the major corporations, claiming they “have shown admirable restraint in raising prices and have reluctantly done so in the face of steadily mounting costs.” Emphasizing that “there is nothing sinful about profits,” he suggested that the corporation pirates merely “give careful and thoughtful consideration” to the inflationary effect of large profits and “unreasonably” high prices.
The Big Business press has expressed both surprise and pleasure – but more pleasure than surprise – at Truman’s demonstrative peace overtures to the economic royalists he so roundly denounced little more than a month ago. They are further reassured by the mounting evidence that Truman intends to hedge all along the line on his promises to labor. He is now preparing, it is well known, a “substitute” law for the Taft-Hartley Act which will contain some of the worst features of the latter. His civil rights program is almost certain to be buried or compromised as a conciliatory gesture to the still-powerful Southern wing of the Democratic Party.
Same Cabinet
On the same day as he reassured the NAM gang in New York, Truman punctured the fond hopes of the Trumanite liberals and labor leaders that he would rid his cabinet of the professional militarists and Wall Street bankers who are directing U.S. foreign policy. Marshall, former Army Chief of Staff, and Forrestal, former Dillon, Read investment bank official, have been asked to continue as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense respectively, Truman told reporters, and they “are willing” to do so.
Marshall and Forrestal are the chief symbols of the Wall Street-Big Brass domination of the Truman Administration’s policies. Their retention in the cabinet affirms the continued drive of Truman toward militarism and war.
This program rules out any substantial social improvements at home. Sawyer, in his speech to the NAM, admitted that the major drain on the economy and the biggest inflationary pressure is “the enlargement of our military program.” Further military expansion must “further intensify that pressure.”
Truman now talks about a $15 billion “limit” on direct military expenditures for 1949. What most people don’t realize is that this is nea/ly 40® more than the $11 billion he proposed in January 1948 and which the bi-partisan Congress boosted by $3 billion.
Military Costs
The Administration also plans vast new expenditures to arm the so-called “Western Union” countries and all the capitalist dictatorships being lined up for the contemplated war against the Soviet Union. “Foreign military aid may wreck Truman’s budget ... No one knows what it will cost. Estimates run from $2 billion to $5 billion a year,” writes the Scripps-Howard Washington staff on Dec. 4. A half billion has already been sunk in tiny Greece alone.
With these big increases for the military and “foreign aid” already scheduled, while Truman promises a “balanced budget,” how much will be allocated for social improvements? In his January 1948 budget, when he proposed far smaller sums for military purposes, the total of all new sums his budget allowed for education, health, housing, social security, etc., was only a half billion dollars.
Against a total of $42 billion or more that the government will spend this fiscal year, the whole cost of the social improvements Truman promised in his election campaign – health, education, housing, reclamation, higher social security payments, etc., adds up to $573 million.
Militarism and war preparations – these will have first call. Who will foot the bill? Not the monopolists, as Truman has plainly indicated by his latest appeasement gestures toward Big Business. As always, it will be the working people who will be forced to carry the load. The “new New Deal” will be a scrawny, short-lived infant indeed – if it isn’t dead before it’s born.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Attack on Miners Hits All Labor</h1>
<h4>Union Calls Two-Week Truce in Strike<br>
After Owners Agree to Come to Terms</h4>
<h3>(18 May 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_20" target="new">Vol. X No. 20</a>, 18 May 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The most savage and concerted strikebreaking assault ever hurled by Big Business and its government against American workers reached its frenzied climax last Friday, May 10, the day the AFL United Mine Workers Union wrested an “agreement in principle” from the coal operators on its key health and safety demands and offered a two-week truce in the 40-day strike of 400,000 soft coal miners.</strong></p>
<p><strong>With a desperation born of fear before the demonstrated power and solidarity of the militant coal miners, the agencies of government, the big corporations, and every capitalist instrument of propaganda were mobilized for a ferocious attempt to intimidate the miners and frustrate their just demands. With the mine strike as a pretext, Congress renewed its drive for laws to shackle the unions and help beat labor’s standards down.</strong></p>
<p>The invective, slanders, lies and threats hurled at the miners increased in volume and unrestraint as it became clearer that the profiteering mine operators and the government were being forced to yield major concessions by the unshakable stand of the mine workers. From all reports, the union’s offer of truce, with retroactivity for all gains finally granted, came only after the operators had wilted and indicated their readiness to talk terms. The day after the truce, the UMW announced its further demands for wage increases totalling 27 cents an hour.<br>
</p>
<h4>Truman Gives Signal</h4>
<p class="fst">The signal for last week’s coordinated anti-labor offensive had been given by President Truman himself with his scare-head statement of the previous Friday that the mine strike confronted the country with an imminent “national disaster.”</p>
<p>He followed this up by calling “illegal” the miners’ chief demand for a “royalty” to provide a union health and welfare fund. Truman threatened “militant action” to break the strike which he said was “gradually” assuming the proportions of a “strike against the government.”</p>
<p>At its peak, the anti-labor offensive unleashed at Truman’s cue surpassed in ferocity even the strikebreaking drive of the late President Roosevelt against the wartime mine strikes of 1943. Last week’s assault renewed and extended the virulent labor-hating drive that followed V-J Day and reached its previous climax during the General Motors strike.<br>
</p>
<h4>Poisonous Barrage</h4>
<p class="fst">Advancing behind a poison-gas barrage from the boss press, Congress, spewing labor-hate and denunciations against the miners and their leaders, poured anti-union bills into the legislative hopper.</p>
<p>The Senate even shoved aside its consideration of Wall Street’s militarism program and voted 66 to 9 for immediate discussion of the notorious Case Labor Disputes Bill. This is designed virtually to destroy the right to strike and to disembowel the American union movement.</p>
<p>Both houses began consideration of hastily-drafted measures to make it “illegal” for the mine operators to grant a union health and welfare fund financed by “Royalties” based on production or for employers to grant similar demands to other unions.</p>
<p>The atmosphere for this Congressional labor-hating orgy was created by the Big Business press and radio which turned on a nationwide geyser intended to flood the country with panic and sweep the people into a veritable lynch spirit against the valiant miners.</p>
<p>Newspaper headlines screamed in “disaster” type – special huge ominous black type kept in reserve for announcement of overwhelming catastrophes, like declarations of war. A horrifying picture was painted of imminent famine, water supplies and utilities cut off, millions unemployed and the country lying in ruin.</p>
<p>These horror stories were bolstered by rapid-fire announcements of threatened plant shutdowns, railroad curtailments and “state of emergency” warnings fa big cities like New York and Chicago. To the actual reduction of coal stocks, the capitalist press added fantastic exaggerations.</p>
<p>One after another, big industrial corporations threatened huge lay-offs. General Motors, which only the week before had calmly reported that due to the GM strike it had accumulated coal reserves sufficient for a long period, suddenly discovered it would be down to its last lump in 10 days.</p>
<p>Shameful to relate, the miners also received some stabs-in-the- back from within the labor movement itself. At the very height of the anti-labor attacks on the mine strike, which were being focused especially on the person of UMW President John L. Lewis, CIO President Philip Murray speaking at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers convention on May 9 launched a blistering attack at Lewis, boasting that “no one in the CIO has turned against the Government.”</p>
<p>This attack on a strike leader who was then under fire from the most reactionary elements in the country could only give comfort to labor’s enemies. Moreover, it was unaccompanied by any statement of support for the miners’ strike or their demands.</p>
<p>From another quarter, the Communist (Stalinist) Party and its <strong>Daily Worker</strong> were conducting a continuous sniping attack on Lewis, stressing particularly his leadership of the wartime mine strikes which the Stalinist leaders had helped try to break. At the same time, like the capitalist press, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> called on the capitalist government “to act” in the mine strike – of course, “in the interests of the miners.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Operators to Blame</h4>
<p class="fst">Under a tremendous flood of scare-head propaganda, Big Business and its government sought to bury the plain and simple fact that the responsibility for the mine strike rested squarely on the rich operators who had arrogantly refused even to consider the elementary demands of the miners for adequate health and safety conditions.</p>
<p>The Truman administration could have forestalled what it called a “national disaster” by the simple device of forcing the operators to meet the miners’ just demands. But Truman did not say so much as a word on behalf of the miners – not even their demand that the new contract Include an agreement by the operators to carry out all safety regulations recommended by the U.S. Bureau of Mines!</p>
<p>What the capitalists and their agents like Truman yelled about was the union’s “illegal” demand for a 10-cent payment on every ton of coal mined to maintain an imperatively needed union health and welfare fund. Yet all the miners have asked for in essence is an increase in their meager share of the wealth their labor alone produces – an increase that will go into a union fund for their mutual welfare.</p>
<p>Truman doesn’t find anything “illegal” about the corporations collecting royalties on anything produced under monopoly patents. The government itself hands billions in “royalties” to the corporations in the form of tax rebates. It gives other billions from the public treasury in “royalties” – subsidies – to the meat and other trusts. Nor does Truman find anything “illegal” about the coal operators deducting tens of millions of dollars annually from miners’ pay checks for COMPANY-controlled “welfare” funds from which the miners never receive a penny.<br>
</p>
<h4>Brazen Tie-Up</h4>
<p class="fst">Never was it more clearly revealed than in last week’s savage attacks on the miners that American Big Business and the present government are inextricably tied together. All the politicians of the Wall Street- owned Democratic and Republican parties act as cogs in the political machines of big capital.</p>
<p>The fact that a tiny cut-throat gang of Big Business rulers can carry out with impunity such a brazen and unrestrained anti-labor attack as was witnessed last week is directly attributable to the political “company-unionism” of the American labor leaders.</p>
<p>So long as the union leaders in every national election urge the workers to cast their votes for this or that current “friend of labor” within the Big Business political machines, the workers will find themselves politically helpless before the offensive of capitalist reaction, which is spearheaded by the government itself.</p>
<p>The ferocity of the drive against the miners, revealing ever more openly the fusion of government and Big Business, is a further storm-signal to the American labor movement. Labor must have its own independent political weapon, a labor party committed to a real program of struggle against American Big Business, if it is to beat back the assaults of Wall Street and its government and wield real political power in the interests of the American people.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Attack on Miners Hits All Labor
Union Calls Two-Week Truce in Strike
After Owners Agree to Come to Terms
(18 May 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 20, 18 May 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The most savage and concerted strikebreaking assault ever hurled by Big Business and its government against American workers reached its frenzied climax last Friday, May 10, the day the AFL United Mine Workers Union wrested an “agreement in principle” from the coal operators on its key health and safety demands and offered a two-week truce in the 40-day strike of 400,000 soft coal miners.
With a desperation born of fear before the demonstrated power and solidarity of the militant coal miners, the agencies of government, the big corporations, and every capitalist instrument of propaganda were mobilized for a ferocious attempt to intimidate the miners and frustrate their just demands. With the mine strike as a pretext, Congress renewed its drive for laws to shackle the unions and help beat labor’s standards down.
The invective, slanders, lies and threats hurled at the miners increased in volume and unrestraint as it became clearer that the profiteering mine operators and the government were being forced to yield major concessions by the unshakable stand of the mine workers. From all reports, the union’s offer of truce, with retroactivity for all gains finally granted, came only after the operators had wilted and indicated their readiness to talk terms. The day after the truce, the UMW announced its further demands for wage increases totalling 27 cents an hour.
Truman Gives Signal
The signal for last week’s coordinated anti-labor offensive had been given by President Truman himself with his scare-head statement of the previous Friday that the mine strike confronted the country with an imminent “national disaster.”
He followed this up by calling “illegal” the miners’ chief demand for a “royalty” to provide a union health and welfare fund. Truman threatened “militant action” to break the strike which he said was “gradually” assuming the proportions of a “strike against the government.”
At its peak, the anti-labor offensive unleashed at Truman’s cue surpassed in ferocity even the strikebreaking drive of the late President Roosevelt against the wartime mine strikes of 1943. Last week’s assault renewed and extended the virulent labor-hating drive that followed V-J Day and reached its previous climax during the General Motors strike.
Poisonous Barrage
Advancing behind a poison-gas barrage from the boss press, Congress, spewing labor-hate and denunciations against the miners and their leaders, poured anti-union bills into the legislative hopper.
The Senate even shoved aside its consideration of Wall Street’s militarism program and voted 66 to 9 for immediate discussion of the notorious Case Labor Disputes Bill. This is designed virtually to destroy the right to strike and to disembowel the American union movement.
Both houses began consideration of hastily-drafted measures to make it “illegal” for the mine operators to grant a union health and welfare fund financed by “Royalties” based on production or for employers to grant similar demands to other unions.
The atmosphere for this Congressional labor-hating orgy was created by the Big Business press and radio which turned on a nationwide geyser intended to flood the country with panic and sweep the people into a veritable lynch spirit against the valiant miners.
Newspaper headlines screamed in “disaster” type – special huge ominous black type kept in reserve for announcement of overwhelming catastrophes, like declarations of war. A horrifying picture was painted of imminent famine, water supplies and utilities cut off, millions unemployed and the country lying in ruin.
These horror stories were bolstered by rapid-fire announcements of threatened plant shutdowns, railroad curtailments and “state of emergency” warnings fa big cities like New York and Chicago. To the actual reduction of coal stocks, the capitalist press added fantastic exaggerations.
One after another, big industrial corporations threatened huge lay-offs. General Motors, which only the week before had calmly reported that due to the GM strike it had accumulated coal reserves sufficient for a long period, suddenly discovered it would be down to its last lump in 10 days.
Shameful to relate, the miners also received some stabs-in-the- back from within the labor movement itself. At the very height of the anti-labor attacks on the mine strike, which were being focused especially on the person of UMW President John L. Lewis, CIO President Philip Murray speaking at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers convention on May 9 launched a blistering attack at Lewis, boasting that “no one in the CIO has turned against the Government.”
This attack on a strike leader who was then under fire from the most reactionary elements in the country could only give comfort to labor’s enemies. Moreover, it was unaccompanied by any statement of support for the miners’ strike or their demands.
From another quarter, the Communist (Stalinist) Party and its Daily Worker were conducting a continuous sniping attack on Lewis, stressing particularly his leadership of the wartime mine strikes which the Stalinist leaders had helped try to break. At the same time, like the capitalist press, the Daily Worker called on the capitalist government “to act” in the mine strike – of course, “in the interests of the miners.”
Operators to Blame
Under a tremendous flood of scare-head propaganda, Big Business and its government sought to bury the plain and simple fact that the responsibility for the mine strike rested squarely on the rich operators who had arrogantly refused even to consider the elementary demands of the miners for adequate health and safety conditions.
The Truman administration could have forestalled what it called a “national disaster” by the simple device of forcing the operators to meet the miners’ just demands. But Truman did not say so much as a word on behalf of the miners – not even their demand that the new contract Include an agreement by the operators to carry out all safety regulations recommended by the U.S. Bureau of Mines!
What the capitalists and their agents like Truman yelled about was the union’s “illegal” demand for a 10-cent payment on every ton of coal mined to maintain an imperatively needed union health and welfare fund. Yet all the miners have asked for in essence is an increase in their meager share of the wealth their labor alone produces – an increase that will go into a union fund for their mutual welfare.
Truman doesn’t find anything “illegal” about the corporations collecting royalties on anything produced under monopoly patents. The government itself hands billions in “royalties” to the corporations in the form of tax rebates. It gives other billions from the public treasury in “royalties” – subsidies – to the meat and other trusts. Nor does Truman find anything “illegal” about the coal operators deducting tens of millions of dollars annually from miners’ pay checks for COMPANY-controlled “welfare” funds from which the miners never receive a penny.
Brazen Tie-Up
Never was it more clearly revealed than in last week’s savage attacks on the miners that American Big Business and the present government are inextricably tied together. All the politicians of the Wall Street- owned Democratic and Republican parties act as cogs in the political machines of big capital.
The fact that a tiny cut-throat gang of Big Business rulers can carry out with impunity such a brazen and unrestrained anti-labor attack as was witnessed last week is directly attributable to the political “company-unionism” of the American labor leaders.
So long as the union leaders in every national election urge the workers to cast their votes for this or that current “friend of labor” within the Big Business political machines, the workers will find themselves politically helpless before the offensive of capitalist reaction, which is spearheaded by the government itself.
The ferocity of the drive against the miners, revealing ever more openly the fusion of government and Big Business, is a further storm-signal to the American labor movement. Labor must have its own independent political weapon, a labor party committed to a real program of struggle against American Big Business, if it is to beat back the assaults of Wall Street and its government and wield real political power in the interests of the American people.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Coal Miners Triumph<br>
After Defying ‘Seizure’</h1>
<h4>Win Big Gains as Truman Bows to Solid Strike</h4>
<h3>(8 June 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_23" target="new">Vol. X No. 23</a>, 8 June 1946, p. 1 & 8.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Unflinching in their defiance of the government’s all-Truman administration to terms and gained an historic out drive to break their strike, the 400,000 soft coal miners of the AFL United Mine Workers on May 29 forced the triumph.</p>
<p>The contract they wrested from the government, present controller of the mines, provides major concessions in line with the union’s key demands for an operator-financed health and welfare fund, improved safety regulations and the right to organize supervisory employees.</p>
<p>In addition, the miners won wage increases totalling $1.85 a day – the largest amount so far won by any union during the current strike wave.</p>
<p>Forced to concede the fact of a clear-cut victory by the miners, the Big Business press could only vent its rage by denunciation of the Truman administration for retreating before the miners after failing to crack their solid front through a terrifically savage strikebreaking campaign.</p>
<p>The bituminous miners struck on April 1, after the mine owners had arrogantly refused even to consider the mine workers’ main demands. These included an operator-financed, union-controlled health and welfare fund, contractual agreement to meet federal and state mine boards’ safety regulations and recommendations, and observance of the National Labor Relations Board decision recognizing the right of supervisory employees to collective bargaining through unions of their own choosing.</p>
<p>The agreement made by the government does not provide for the type of health and welfare fund the miners sought. But it is a far-reaching concession. Through a five-cent a ton levy on coal production, a health and welfare fund of between $25,000,000 and $30,000,000 annually is to be established for the miners. It will be administered jointly by the government and union.</p>
<p>In addition, the union is to get complete control over the millions of dollars which the companies have been deducting annually from miners’ pay for company-controlled “welfare” funds from which the miners received scarcely any benefits. These funds must now be turned over to the union for a genuine welfare fund.<br>
</p>
<h4>Safety Committees</h4>
<p class="fst">The federal safety code, which has been non-compulsory, is to be enforced, with periodic federal mine inspection and obligatory institution of all safety recommendations. Every mine union local is to have a mine safety committee with power to inspect at all times any operations and to pull out any workers immediately endangered by unsafe conditions.</p>
<p>The straight time wages are raised 18½ cents an hour. Since the miners will return from a 40-hour to a 35-hour week with two-hours-a-day guaranteed overtime at time-and-a-half rates, the total daily increase will amount to $1.85.</p>
<p>Truman seized the mines on May 22, after the UMW leaders had declared a two-week strike-truce on May 10. This truce followed the false declaration by Truman that the operators had “agreed in principle” to the union’s demands.</p>
<p>Large numbers of the miners refused to accept the truce. On May 25, when the truce ended, virtually all the mines were shut down despite Truman’s threats to use troops, which was actually begun in Kentucky. It was also after Truman had told the striking railroad workers he would not deal with a union on “strike against the government.”</p>
<p>But the miners could not be terrorized. Truman had to swallow his threats and come to terms.</p>
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Art Preis
Coal Miners Triumph
After Defying ‘Seizure’
Win Big Gains as Truman Bows to Solid Strike
(8 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 23, 8 June 1946, p. 1 & 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Unflinching in their defiance of the government’s all-Truman administration to terms and gained an historic out drive to break their strike, the 400,000 soft coal miners of the AFL United Mine Workers on May 29 forced the triumph.
The contract they wrested from the government, present controller of the mines, provides major concessions in line with the union’s key demands for an operator-financed health and welfare fund, improved safety regulations and the right to organize supervisory employees.
In addition, the miners won wage increases totalling $1.85 a day – the largest amount so far won by any union during the current strike wave.
Forced to concede the fact of a clear-cut victory by the miners, the Big Business press could only vent its rage by denunciation of the Truman administration for retreating before the miners after failing to crack their solid front through a terrifically savage strikebreaking campaign.
The bituminous miners struck on April 1, after the mine owners had arrogantly refused even to consider the mine workers’ main demands. These included an operator-financed, union-controlled health and welfare fund, contractual agreement to meet federal and state mine boards’ safety regulations and recommendations, and observance of the National Labor Relations Board decision recognizing the right of supervisory employees to collective bargaining through unions of their own choosing.
The agreement made by the government does not provide for the type of health and welfare fund the miners sought. But it is a far-reaching concession. Through a five-cent a ton levy on coal production, a health and welfare fund of between $25,000,000 and $30,000,000 annually is to be established for the miners. It will be administered jointly by the government and union.
In addition, the union is to get complete control over the millions of dollars which the companies have been deducting annually from miners’ pay for company-controlled “welfare” funds from which the miners received scarcely any benefits. These funds must now be turned over to the union for a genuine welfare fund.
Safety Committees
The federal safety code, which has been non-compulsory, is to be enforced, with periodic federal mine inspection and obligatory institution of all safety recommendations. Every mine union local is to have a mine safety committee with power to inspect at all times any operations and to pull out any workers immediately endangered by unsafe conditions.
The straight time wages are raised 18½ cents an hour. Since the miners will return from a 40-hour to a 35-hour week with two-hours-a-day guaranteed overtime at time-and-a-half rates, the total daily increase will amount to $1.85.
Truman seized the mines on May 22, after the UMW leaders had declared a two-week strike-truce on May 10. This truce followed the false declaration by Truman that the operators had “agreed in principle” to the union’s demands.
Large numbers of the miners refused to accept the truce. On May 25, when the truce ended, virtually all the mines were shut down despite Truman’s threats to use troops, which was actually begun in Kentucky. It was also after Truman had told the striking railroad workers he would not deal with a union on “strike against the government.”
But the miners could not be terrorized. Truman had to swallow his threats and come to terms.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Demands 40 Billions<br>
for Inflationary War Budget</h1>
<h4>A-Bomb Gets 17 Times as Much as Housing</h4>
<h3>(19 January 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_03" target="new">Vol. XII No. 3</a>, 19 January 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>Seventy-nine cents of every dollar the American people will shell out for Truman’s proposed 1949 budget of $39,669,000,000 (that’s billions) will go tor war – past, present and future. This does not include items, like the atom bomb development, which are hidden under special misleading headings.</strong></p>
<p>Six times more will be spent for war preparations than for human needs.</p>
<p>Direct military expenditures alone will cost $11,025,000,000 – 28% of the total – a $279,000,000 increase over the present budget. The Social Welfare, Health and Security program will take $2,028,000,000 – $68 million more than before, but one-third less than the $3,147,000,000 in 1940.</p>
<p>Almost 17 times as much will be spent for developing the atom bomb ($674,000,000 under the heading – Natural resources not primarily agriculture”) as for long-range public housing ($40 million).</p>
<p>Truman proposes a “first year” expenditure of $400,000,000 for “universal training” – that is, universal compulsory military training which “in full operation will cost about 2 billion dollars annually.”</p>
<p>At the same time, he allocates the magnificent sum of – $20 million – to extend unemployment compensation to millions of workers not now covered. He also asks for a new national health insurance fund of $150 million – to be paid for out of new payroll taxes – and to cost the government in 1949 just $15,000,000 for administration.</p>
<p>In addition to direct military outlays, Truman proposes to spend $7,009,000,000 to bolster capitalist dictatorships and military machines in Europe, Asia and Latin America – under the heading of “international affairs” and “foreign relief.’” This is nearly 1½ billion more than in the present 1948 budget.</p>
<p>Another major war cost will be payment of $5,250,000,000 of interest on public debt – mostly to bankers and corporations for war loans and on interest-bearing government bonds.</p>
<p>Another $5 billion – a claimed anticipated surplus of revenue over expenditures – will go to these same bankers and corporations to pay off a part of the $251 billion war debt.</p>
<p>Still another sum of nearly $2 billion is earmarked for payment to the capitalists. It is buried right at the bottom of the budget under “Refund of receipts.” This is $1,990,000,000 for war tax rebates mainly to corporations.</p>
<p>The budget proposes $300 million as grants to states for elementary and secondary schooling in the face of the near-collapse of the country’s public school systems. Less than half as much for our children’s education as for the atom bomb!<br>
</p>
<h4>Non-Military</h4>
<p class="fst">Only $1,157,000,000 of the budget is designated for general operations other than those concerned with the military. This is less than the 1948 budget total of $1,473,000,000. It gives an idea of what the federal government’s operations would cost minus the war machine. Even this item includes a hidden war cost – $85 million for cemeteries and return of war dead.</p>
<p><em>While interest payments, military preparations and other war costs are higher, there is one war cost that Truman proposes to reduce – expenditures for the victims of past wars, the veterans. Veteran services and benefits will be cut from $6,632,000,000 in 1948 to $6,102,000,000 in 1949.</em></p>
<p>Compared to his eventual $2 billion annual spending for compulsory military training, his $4,507,000,000 for “foreign aid” and his $1,250,000,000 for “occupation purposes” in 1949, Truman has asked for just $571,000,000 in new appropriations for his much-vaunted new social welfare program, which some of the press has dubbed his “New Deal.”<br>
</p>
<h4>More Inflation</h4>
<p class="fst">Included in this “New Deal” is $80,000,000 of additional expenses for a so-called “new anti-inflation program.” This useless expenditure just raises the cost of government – and the inflation.</p>
<p><em>The “economy-minded” Republicans who dominate Congress have quickly indicated that if there is going to be any cutting of Truman’s budget, it will come from the minor items related to human welfare. Thus, Republican Senator Styles Bridges found the military and foreign affairs items “realistic,” but thought the meager sums for social security, health, education, housing, etc., “beyond the means of the nation to meet this year.”</em></p>
<p>Truman’s expanding war budget is the greatest single item aggravating the inflation, although he says in his budget message that “we are all aware of the imperative necessity for preventing further inflation.” One of his major proposals on this score is:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I am not recommending at this time cost-of-living increases in pay for military and civilian government personnel, nor cost-of-living increases in benefits for our veterans, social insurance beneficiaries, retired Federal employees and other similar groups,” although “the rapid increase in living costs ... has placed a serious burden on these groups.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Surplus to Bankers</h4>
<p class="fst">Truman’s claimed anticipated surplus of $5 billion in 1949 is all going to pay the war debt to the bankers.</p>
<p><em>The budget figures give the lie direct to Truman’s “State of the Union” speech where he demagogically said he wants to cut income taxes $40 a year for every individual and put additional taxes on corporation profits.</em></p>
<p>His own estimate of direct taxes on individuals in 1949 totals $23,322,000,000, compared to $22,793,000,000 in 1948. Total direct taxes on corporations will be only $610,000,000 more in 1949 than 1948. But Truman doesn’t expect Congress to follow his tax proposals anyway.</p>
<p>The cold figures of Truman’s budget add up to – inflation, war, human agony.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman Demands 40 Billions
for Inflationary War Budget
A-Bomb Gets 17 Times as Much as Housing
(19 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 3, 19 January 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Seventy-nine cents of every dollar the American people will shell out for Truman’s proposed 1949 budget of $39,669,000,000 (that’s billions) will go tor war – past, present and future. This does not include items, like the atom bomb development, which are hidden under special misleading headings.
Six times more will be spent for war preparations than for human needs.
Direct military expenditures alone will cost $11,025,000,000 – 28% of the total – a $279,000,000 increase over the present budget. The Social Welfare, Health and Security program will take $2,028,000,000 – $68 million more than before, but one-third less than the $3,147,000,000 in 1940.
Almost 17 times as much will be spent for developing the atom bomb ($674,000,000 under the heading – Natural resources not primarily agriculture”) as for long-range public housing ($40 million).
Truman proposes a “first year” expenditure of $400,000,000 for “universal training” – that is, universal compulsory military training which “in full operation will cost about 2 billion dollars annually.”
At the same time, he allocates the magnificent sum of – $20 million – to extend unemployment compensation to millions of workers not now covered. He also asks for a new national health insurance fund of $150 million – to be paid for out of new payroll taxes – and to cost the government in 1949 just $15,000,000 for administration.
In addition to direct military outlays, Truman proposes to spend $7,009,000,000 to bolster capitalist dictatorships and military machines in Europe, Asia and Latin America – under the heading of “international affairs” and “foreign relief.’” This is nearly 1½ billion more than in the present 1948 budget.
Another major war cost will be payment of $5,250,000,000 of interest on public debt – mostly to bankers and corporations for war loans and on interest-bearing government bonds.
Another $5 billion – a claimed anticipated surplus of revenue over expenditures – will go to these same bankers and corporations to pay off a part of the $251 billion war debt.
Still another sum of nearly $2 billion is earmarked for payment to the capitalists. It is buried right at the bottom of the budget under “Refund of receipts.” This is $1,990,000,000 for war tax rebates mainly to corporations.
The budget proposes $300 million as grants to states for elementary and secondary schooling in the face of the near-collapse of the country’s public school systems. Less than half as much for our children’s education as for the atom bomb!
Non-Military
Only $1,157,000,000 of the budget is designated for general operations other than those concerned with the military. This is less than the 1948 budget total of $1,473,000,000. It gives an idea of what the federal government’s operations would cost minus the war machine. Even this item includes a hidden war cost – $85 million for cemeteries and return of war dead.
While interest payments, military preparations and other war costs are higher, there is one war cost that Truman proposes to reduce – expenditures for the victims of past wars, the veterans. Veteran services and benefits will be cut from $6,632,000,000 in 1948 to $6,102,000,000 in 1949.
Compared to his eventual $2 billion annual spending for compulsory military training, his $4,507,000,000 for “foreign aid” and his $1,250,000,000 for “occupation purposes” in 1949, Truman has asked for just $571,000,000 in new appropriations for his much-vaunted new social welfare program, which some of the press has dubbed his “New Deal.”
More Inflation
Included in this “New Deal” is $80,000,000 of additional expenses for a so-called “new anti-inflation program.” This useless expenditure just raises the cost of government – and the inflation.
The “economy-minded” Republicans who dominate Congress have quickly indicated that if there is going to be any cutting of Truman’s budget, it will come from the minor items related to human welfare. Thus, Republican Senator Styles Bridges found the military and foreign affairs items “realistic,” but thought the meager sums for social security, health, education, housing, etc., “beyond the means of the nation to meet this year.”
Truman’s expanding war budget is the greatest single item aggravating the inflation, although he says in his budget message that “we are all aware of the imperative necessity for preventing further inflation.” One of his major proposals on this score is:
“I am not recommending at this time cost-of-living increases in pay for military and civilian government personnel, nor cost-of-living increases in benefits for our veterans, social insurance beneficiaries, retired Federal employees and other similar groups,” although “the rapid increase in living costs ... has placed a serious burden on these groups.”
Surplus to Bankers
Truman’s claimed anticipated surplus of $5 billion in 1949 is all going to pay the war debt to the bankers.
The budget figures give the lie direct to Truman’s “State of the Union” speech where he demagogically said he wants to cut income taxes $40 a year for every individual and put additional taxes on corporation profits.
His own estimate of direct taxes on individuals in 1949 totals $23,322,000,000, compared to $22,793,000,000 in 1948. Total direct taxes on corporations will be only $610,000,000 more in 1949 than 1948. But Truman doesn’t expect Congress to follow his tax proposals anyway.
The cold figures of Truman’s budget add up to – inflation, war, human agony.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Those “Timid” Profiteers</h1>
<h3>(6 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_49" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 49</a>, 6 December 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">It’s surprising how shy and coy the big corporations are when it comes to discussing publicly their profits and how they are made. Get some Congressional hearing going to “investigate” the unions or to reduce corporation taxes, and the corporation spokesmen swarm about thick as flies around molasses and buzzing twice as loud. But get some Congress committee ask the corporations for a little first-hand information about their profits and prices, and they wing for open country like they were just an inch ahead of a spray of DDT.</p>
<p>Senator, Ralph E. Flanders, Vermont Republican, admitted last week that his Congressional sub-committee to investigate prices and profits is being strangely shunned by “some” corporations. No matter how politely and invitingly the committee’s invitations are worded,! these corporations are reluctant to appear and testify.</p>
<p>Of course the worthy Senator didn’t mean to imply that these corporations have anything to hide. The trouble he said is with the corporation lawyers. They suffer from “timidity.” Lawyers, he said, “are timid folk, the most rabbit-like of the human race.” And he might have added – which he didn’t – that it’s a strange coincidence that the higher-paid the lawyer and the bigger the corporation he represents and advises, the more “timid” he is.</p>
<p>Although Senator Flanders didn’t give the names or industries of any of these reluctant corporations, he cited the example of one that “is under, or facing, indictment under the antitrust laws, and their attorneys have assured them that they should not say a word, not even mutter to themselves in a closet.”</p>
<p>Some naive soul might well ask, “Why doesn’t the committee subpoena these corporations?” After all Congress committees haven’t hesitated to subpoena “reds” and labor leaders when they want to grill them and send them to jail for “contempt” should they refuse to answer questions.</p>
<p>But Senator Flanders said that the committee felt “in doubt” about its power to issue subpoenas to wealthy and powerful corporations. In any event, he added, the committee would not issue subpoenas “for we felt that we can get further, and get more information, without them.” He didn’t say how.</p>
<p>We are not surprised that the corporations are particularly tight-mouthed about answering questions about the sources and scope of their profits at this season. The third quarter returns have come in and the figures take a lot of explaining.</p>
<p>Aggregate profits for the three months ending September 30 were 39%. higher than in the same period a year ago, and this follows a rise of 24% for the first quarter and 28% for the second. And that’s during a period when wages went up hardly at all.</p>
<p>Bernard T. Frevert, of Standard & Poor’s Corp., business advisors, writes in the Nov. 27 <strong>N.Y. World-Telegram</strong> that “this excellent showing” is “largely the result of price advances” – that is, of milking the consumers. He predicts that when the full year’s profits reports are in they will show a profits increase over 1947 of “25% or more.”</p>
<p>We don’t think the workers should wait for “timid” lawyers to advise “timid” corporations to testify before timid Congressional committees. The unions should undertake their own investigating. They should demand to see the books and records of the corporations. We have no doubt that this kind of “peek at the books” will reveal good reasons why the corporations play shy violet on the matter of profits.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Those “Timid” Profiteers
(6 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 49, 6 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
It’s surprising how shy and coy the big corporations are when it comes to discussing publicly their profits and how they are made. Get some Congressional hearing going to “investigate” the unions or to reduce corporation taxes, and the corporation spokesmen swarm about thick as flies around molasses and buzzing twice as loud. But get some Congress committee ask the corporations for a little first-hand information about their profits and prices, and they wing for open country like they were just an inch ahead of a spray of DDT.
Senator, Ralph E. Flanders, Vermont Republican, admitted last week that his Congressional sub-committee to investigate prices and profits is being strangely shunned by “some” corporations. No matter how politely and invitingly the committee’s invitations are worded,! these corporations are reluctant to appear and testify.
Of course the worthy Senator didn’t mean to imply that these corporations have anything to hide. The trouble he said is with the corporation lawyers. They suffer from “timidity.” Lawyers, he said, “are timid folk, the most rabbit-like of the human race.” And he might have added – which he didn’t – that it’s a strange coincidence that the higher-paid the lawyer and the bigger the corporation he represents and advises, the more “timid” he is.
Although Senator Flanders didn’t give the names or industries of any of these reluctant corporations, he cited the example of one that “is under, or facing, indictment under the antitrust laws, and their attorneys have assured them that they should not say a word, not even mutter to themselves in a closet.”
Some naive soul might well ask, “Why doesn’t the committee subpoena these corporations?” After all Congress committees haven’t hesitated to subpoena “reds” and labor leaders when they want to grill them and send them to jail for “contempt” should they refuse to answer questions.
But Senator Flanders said that the committee felt “in doubt” about its power to issue subpoenas to wealthy and powerful corporations. In any event, he added, the committee would not issue subpoenas “for we felt that we can get further, and get more information, without them.” He didn’t say how.
We are not surprised that the corporations are particularly tight-mouthed about answering questions about the sources and scope of their profits at this season. The third quarter returns have come in and the figures take a lot of explaining.
Aggregate profits for the three months ending September 30 were 39%. higher than in the same period a year ago, and this follows a rise of 24% for the first quarter and 28% for the second. And that’s during a period when wages went up hardly at all.
Bernard T. Frevert, of Standard & Poor’s Corp., business advisors, writes in the Nov. 27 N.Y. World-Telegram that “this excellent showing” is “largely the result of price advances” – that is, of milking the consumers. He predicts that when the full year’s profits reports are in they will show a profits increase over 1947 of “25% or more.”
We don’t think the workers should wait for “timid” lawyers to advise “timid” corporations to testify before timid Congressional committees. The unions should undertake their own investigating. They should demand to see the books and records of the corporations. We have no doubt that this kind of “peek at the books” will reveal good reasons why the corporations play shy violet on the matter of profits.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h4>1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949</h4>
<h1>Two-Party Rule Received Shocks, But Union Leaders Rescued It</h1>
<h3>(27 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_52" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 52</a>, 27 December 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">American capitalism’s two-party system of political rule received serious shocks in the past year, but remains virtually intact thanks to the timely repair work of the old-line union leaders.</p>
<p>Prior to the national political conventions, the sentiment for a labor party was mounting. The Democratic Party was in disrepute and torn with internal dissension, while Truman had earned the contempt of millions of workers through his brutal strikebreaking. The Republican Party bore the stigma of avowed reaction.</p>
<p>Henry Wallace, the millionaire political adventurer, had split off a section of the Democratic leftwing over the question of how best to deal with Stalin in the interests of American imperialism. Aware of the widespread disgust with both major parties, Wallace, with the Stalinists as his chief supporters, set up a third party devoted to “progressive” capitalism and posing as the anti-war party.</p>
<p>At the Democratic convention, the ultra-reactionary “white supremacist” right-wing walked out and subsequently set up the so-called States Rights Party, with strong bases in several Southern states and an outright fascist program.<br>
</p>
<h4>Opportunity Lost</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The labor movement was confronted with a magnificent opportunity to set up a labor party and run its own candidates with every possibility of getting tremendous support in its very first campaign. But the capitalist-minded union leaders, CIO and AFL, brushed this opportunity aside.</em></p>
<p>At first they tried to get a new and less discredited candidate to offer the workers. They freely predicted Truman’s defeat if nominated. But when Truman won the nomination, most of the union leaders announced their support for the greatest presidential strikebreaker in American history.</p>
<p>Truman campaigned in the most demagogic fashion, promising repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, housing, civil rights, etc. The Wallaceites complained he was “stealing” their program, including Wallace’s single-plank foreign policy of “man-to-man" dealings with Stalin. The union leaders, primarily through CIO-PAC and the newly-formed AFL Labor’s Political Education League, spent millions in Truman’s behalf.<br>
</p>
<h4>SWP Campaign</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The most significant event of the election campaign, however, was the emergence of the American Trotskyists – the Socialist Workers Party – as a national political factor. After 20 years preparation, the SWP entered its first national election campaign, with Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates.</em></p>
<p>For the first time in nearly three decades, the authentic voice of international revolutionary socialism summoned the American workers in a presidential election campaign: Millions, who had never heard of the SWP, learned for the first time of the existence of a genuine Marxist party, opposed to the Kremlin-puppets of the Communist Party and the fake-socialist party of Norman Thomas.</p>
<p>Despite small forces and financial poverty, the SWP placed the Dobbs-Carlson ticket on the ballot in 11 states. By dint of much pressure, the SWP obtained six national broadcasts and a number of local broadcasts. The SWP candidates campaigned for the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government to end the threat of imperialist war and fascism and to build a socialist society. When the campaign ended, the SWP had won recognition as the genuine revolutionary socialist left of American politics.<br>
</p>
<h4>After Nov. 2</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>Truman won an unexpected victory by a plurality, although he failed to gain a popular majority of all votes cast. The support of the unions proved decisive.</em></p>
<p>The workers, deprived by the union leaders of the chance to vote for a party and candidates of their own, by and large voted for Truman as the “lesser evil” to Dewey, who openly endorsed the Taft-Hartley Act.</p>
<p>In this indirect and misguided fashion, the workers overwhelmingly demonstrated their opposition to reaction. The arrogant Republicans, who had misjudged the times, suffered a disastrous set-back that has inspired a crisis in their ranks.</p>
<p><em>The Wallace movement, tainted with Stalinism and lacking a real labor base, suffered a debacle. Many of its ex-Democratic elements are deserting it, leaving the Stalinists as the hardened core inside the Progressive Party.</em></p>
<p>Some union leaders like Walter Reuther had talked about a third party “after the elections.” They have ceased such talk now. The labor leaders have effected a Peoples Front-type coalition with, the Truman forces.</p>
<p>Like its Stalinist-inspired European prototypes, this coalition is highly unstable. Truman is already hedging on promises, appeasing Big Business and resuming full force his militarist Warmongering program. In the next period, Truman and his party will expose themselves completely. The workers will push forward toward class political action. Their pressure will split the new coalition and place on the order of the day the building of labor’s own class party.</p>
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Joseph Keller
1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949
Two-Party Rule Received Shocks, But Union Leaders Rescued It
(27 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
American capitalism’s two-party system of political rule received serious shocks in the past year, but remains virtually intact thanks to the timely repair work of the old-line union leaders.
Prior to the national political conventions, the sentiment for a labor party was mounting. The Democratic Party was in disrepute and torn with internal dissension, while Truman had earned the contempt of millions of workers through his brutal strikebreaking. The Republican Party bore the stigma of avowed reaction.
Henry Wallace, the millionaire political adventurer, had split off a section of the Democratic leftwing over the question of how best to deal with Stalin in the interests of American imperialism. Aware of the widespread disgust with both major parties, Wallace, with the Stalinists as his chief supporters, set up a third party devoted to “progressive” capitalism and posing as the anti-war party.
At the Democratic convention, the ultra-reactionary “white supremacist” right-wing walked out and subsequently set up the so-called States Rights Party, with strong bases in several Southern states and an outright fascist program.
Opportunity Lost
The labor movement was confronted with a magnificent opportunity to set up a labor party and run its own candidates with every possibility of getting tremendous support in its very first campaign. But the capitalist-minded union leaders, CIO and AFL, brushed this opportunity aside.
At first they tried to get a new and less discredited candidate to offer the workers. They freely predicted Truman’s defeat if nominated. But when Truman won the nomination, most of the union leaders announced their support for the greatest presidential strikebreaker in American history.
Truman campaigned in the most demagogic fashion, promising repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, housing, civil rights, etc. The Wallaceites complained he was “stealing” their program, including Wallace’s single-plank foreign policy of “man-to-man" dealings with Stalin. The union leaders, primarily through CIO-PAC and the newly-formed AFL Labor’s Political Education League, spent millions in Truman’s behalf.
SWP Campaign
The most significant event of the election campaign, however, was the emergence of the American Trotskyists – the Socialist Workers Party – as a national political factor. After 20 years preparation, the SWP entered its first national election campaign, with Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
For the first time in nearly three decades, the authentic voice of international revolutionary socialism summoned the American workers in a presidential election campaign: Millions, who had never heard of the SWP, learned for the first time of the existence of a genuine Marxist party, opposed to the Kremlin-puppets of the Communist Party and the fake-socialist party of Norman Thomas.
Despite small forces and financial poverty, the SWP placed the Dobbs-Carlson ticket on the ballot in 11 states. By dint of much pressure, the SWP obtained six national broadcasts and a number of local broadcasts. The SWP candidates campaigned for the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government to end the threat of imperialist war and fascism and to build a socialist society. When the campaign ended, the SWP had won recognition as the genuine revolutionary socialist left of American politics.
After Nov. 2
Truman won an unexpected victory by a plurality, although he failed to gain a popular majority of all votes cast. The support of the unions proved decisive.
The workers, deprived by the union leaders of the chance to vote for a party and candidates of their own, by and large voted for Truman as the “lesser evil” to Dewey, who openly endorsed the Taft-Hartley Act.
In this indirect and misguided fashion, the workers overwhelmingly demonstrated their opposition to reaction. The arrogant Republicans, who had misjudged the times, suffered a disastrous set-back that has inspired a crisis in their ranks.
The Wallace movement, tainted with Stalinism and lacking a real labor base, suffered a debacle. Many of its ex-Democratic elements are deserting it, leaving the Stalinists as the hardened core inside the Progressive Party.
Some union leaders like Walter Reuther had talked about a third party “after the elections.” They have ceased such talk now. The labor leaders have effected a Peoples Front-type coalition with, the Truman forces.
Like its Stalinist-inspired European prototypes, this coalition is highly unstable. Truman is already hedging on promises, appeasing Big Business and resuming full force his militarist Warmongering program. In the next period, Truman and his party will expose themselves completely. The workers will push forward toward class political action. Their pressure will split the new coalition and place on the order of the day the building of labor’s own class party.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Roosevelt and Wall St.</h1>
<h4>The Background and Future of a Third-Term President;<br>
Bosses Use F.D.R. to Lure Workers to War and Reaction</h4>
<h3>(9 November 1940)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_45" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 45</a>, 9 November 1940, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p class="fst">The pay-off on a tremendous historical shell-game is now due. On November 5, the American working masses were lined up behind two empty walnut shells, labelled “Roosevelt” and “Willkie.” They were wagering not merely their rights and security, but their very lives.</p>
<p>They were certain losers whatever their choice. For the only winner in the “old army game” is the manipulator. The manipulator of the 1940 Presidential election was Big Business. The little pea, that is, the welfare of the American masses, was hidden under neither shell. It was “palmed” in the dextrous hand of Wall Street.</p>
<p>Every racket employs a “come-on.” During the past eight years, the workers have been placing their bets on Roosevelt. They were permitted to “win” a few small bets, – just enough to give them confidence in the game. Again they have staked everything on Roosevelt, – maybe this time they will gain some real winnings! But, by a sleight of hand called “war,” Wall Street is ready now for a grand “kill.”</p>
<p>“America’s Sixty Families” are already counting the take. <b>The Magazine of Wall Street</b>, September 7, informed its silk-hat subscribers:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>“Tentative Washington guesses put it (immediate PEACETIME ‘national defense’ appropriations) at probably not less than $10 billion more for the Navy and $10 billion more for the Army – an aggregate ‘capital investment’ of some $35 billion.”</i></p>
<p class="fst">THIRTY-FIVE BILLION DOLLARS – just as a starter! For the “Defense of Democracy”? No! As a CAPITAL INVESTMENT!</p>
<p>But that’s just pin money to Wall Street. <b>Barron’s</b>, one of the Wall Street financial weeklies, August 26, declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>“However, by close examination of the testimony before Congressional committees and other expert opinion it becomes evident that the total sum involved takes oh staggering proportions. Certainly it is much greater” than tiny that has been publicised so far. The minimum is perhaps 50 BILLION DOLLARS and the maximum may be as much as 75 billion dollars ... These ’figures, large as they are, ARE BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE UNITED STATES WILL NOT ENTER THE PRESENT CONFLICT.</i> (Our emphasis)”</p>
<p class="fst">A FIFTY BILLION DOLLAR MINIMUM TAKE FOR WALL STREET – IF THE U.S. DOES NOT GO TO WAR! That’s what every worker voted for when he voted for Roosevelt. 50 billion dollars – that’s not hay! And it’s coming out of the flesh and bones of the American workers. That’s the Old Army Game of 1940!<br>
</p>
<h4>Wall Street’s Second Choice</h4>
<p class="fst">If Roosevelt is really the tool of Wall St., why did so many of the bankers and industrialists and the big business press endorse Willkie?</p>
<p>The answer to that question is, first, that they regarded Willkie as a more tractable tool, not a different but a better instrument for their designs than Roosevelt.</p>
<p>But even more impelling than this reason, is the completely unvarnished reactionary character of the ruling class. Through the just completed election campaign the ruling class has served final warning on the workers that it is through with the nonsense of “reformers.” Its program, henceforth, is merciless warfare on labor. In “attacking” Roosevelt, Wall Street did not attack him as its tool, but as the symbol of “liberalism” which he represents to so many misguided workers.</p>
<p>For, in luring an unwilling people into war, Roosevelt has proved supreme in the art of deception. His liberal camouflage often appeared so realistic that it frightened many capitalists. They have always opposed yielding to labor even “in principle.” They have always preferred to address labor in a more direct tongue, the conciliatory end of a black-jack.</p>
<p>Although led by Roosevelt to the “kill,” Wall Street regards him with distaste. In the past, Roosevelt cleverly held the financial pack in leash whenever its impatience threatened to frighten off the labor quarry. Wall Street is used to free-ranging, and dislikes even the mildest restraints. Although the leash is now off, Big Business dislikes even the fact that it still dangles from Roosevelt’s hand. If only the leash could be destroyed altogether!</p>
<p>That is why Wendell Willkie was Wall Street’s <i>first</i> choice for War President. Willkie is one of the pack itself, who has tugged hardest at the leash. He would have been certain, had he been elected, to have led the assault on labor with undisguised ferocity.</p>
<p>Yes, it is true that the majority of Wall Street magnates preferred Willkie. But they are not greatly concerned about the re-election of Roosevelt. They understand fully well that Roosevelt has no choice but to represent them. And, after all, the bankers and industrial bosses can’t feel too harshly toward Roosevelt when profits for the first quarter of 1940, prior to the “shoot-the-works” war spending, were already 67 percent higher than the same quarter of 1939: in fact, higher than in 1928, a peak prosperity year.<br>
</p>
<h4>“My Friends ....”</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt’s ability to make the masses <i>think</i> they are getting something has been his greatest contribution to the preservation of capitalism. For his primary objective ever since first taking office has been <i>to save the American capitalist system</i>. He attempted to do this by reconciling the workers to the interests of the bosses.</p>
<p>From the start, Roosevelt yielded to labor only “in principle,” not fact. His first act as President revealed this. He consolidated the leading finance capitalists through the bank moratorium, while wiping out most of the small independent banks and millions of small depositors. Next, through the National Industrial Recovery Act, he further entrenched industrial monopoly. Under this Act, the big industrialists exterminated a large section of competing small businesses by monopoly price-fixing and similar measures.</p>
<p>Finally, he attempted to stabilize the light, or consumers goods industries by “pump-priming.” Through farm loans, unemployed relief, etc., he tried to start the flow of profits once more. These funds were intended primarily as indirect hand-outs to the chain and department stores, and the textile, furniture, tobacco, chemical, radio, auto and other manufacturers. The meagre benefits from these measures gleaned by the workers were included in Administration costs under the headings. “Riot Insurance” and “Smart Politics.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor “Appeasement”</h4>
<p class="fst">While stabilizing capitalism, Roosevelt was compelled to “appease” labor. He affirmed <i>verbally</i> certain rights of labor, embodied in Section 7A of the NIRA and, later, in the Wagner Act. These measures merely endorsed an established right – so long as labor could enforce it by organized action – the right to collective bargaining by organizations of labor’s own choosing.</p>
<p>This grant in “principle” was gained <i>in fact</i> solely by labor itself. From 1933–1939 there were 17,862 strikes, involving 8,261,000 workers. (<b>Labor Information Bulletins</b>, U.S. Dept. of Labor) These strikes occurred in every single industry without exception, and were fought with a fury unequalled in American labor history.</p>
<p>The fury was required. During Roosevelt’s administration the National Guard, financed and equipped with federal funds and trained by Regular Army officers, has played its most active strikebreaking role. From 1933-35 alone, out of 42,737 National Guards who were called to active duty, <i>32,645 or</i> 77 <i>percent were used, to break strikes.</i> In the one year, 1935, the National Guard was employed in 73 strikes in 20 states, a majority of them under “New Deal” state administrations. During the National Textile Strike, Roosevelt himself threatened to send Regular Army troops against the Rhode Island strikers.</p>
<p>In 1934, Roosevelt already clearly demonstrated that his labor “platform” was jerry-built. He permitted General Hugh S. Johnson, then his NRA administrator, to publicly denounce the textile strikers and the San Francisco general strike. New Dealer Paul V. McNutt, as Governor of Indiana, terrorized the Terre Haute strikers for two months with martial law. Roosevelt later rewarded him with the post of Social Security Administrator. F.D.R.’s New Deal governor in Ohio, Martin L. Davey, smashed, the Little Steel strike in 1937 with armed troops. The New Deal Kelly-Nash machine in Chicago murdered ten unarmed workers in the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937.</p>
<p>These are but a few of the endless facts which give irrefutable proof that Roosevelt “gave” labor just what labor has been able to take – without any boss politician’s blessing!</p>
<p class="c"><a href="wallst2.htm"><i>(To Be Continued)</i></a></p>
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Art Preis
Roosevelt and Wall St.
The Background and Future of a Third-Term President;
Bosses Use F.D.R. to Lure Workers to War and Reaction
(9 November 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 45, 9 November 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
I.
The pay-off on a tremendous historical shell-game is now due. On November 5, the American working masses were lined up behind two empty walnut shells, labelled “Roosevelt” and “Willkie.” They were wagering not merely their rights and security, but their very lives.
They were certain losers whatever their choice. For the only winner in the “old army game” is the manipulator. The manipulator of the 1940 Presidential election was Big Business. The little pea, that is, the welfare of the American masses, was hidden under neither shell. It was “palmed” in the dextrous hand of Wall Street.
Every racket employs a “come-on.” During the past eight years, the workers have been placing their bets on Roosevelt. They were permitted to “win” a few small bets, – just enough to give them confidence in the game. Again they have staked everything on Roosevelt, – maybe this time they will gain some real winnings! But, by a sleight of hand called “war,” Wall Street is ready now for a grand “kill.”
“America’s Sixty Families” are already counting the take. The Magazine of Wall Street, September 7, informed its silk-hat subscribers:
“Tentative Washington guesses put it (immediate PEACETIME ‘national defense’ appropriations) at probably not less than $10 billion more for the Navy and $10 billion more for the Army – an aggregate ‘capital investment’ of some $35 billion.”
THIRTY-FIVE BILLION DOLLARS – just as a starter! For the “Defense of Democracy”? No! As a CAPITAL INVESTMENT!
But that’s just pin money to Wall Street. Barron’s, one of the Wall Street financial weeklies, August 26, declared:
“However, by close examination of the testimony before Congressional committees and other expert opinion it becomes evident that the total sum involved takes oh staggering proportions. Certainly it is much greater” than tiny that has been publicised so far. The minimum is perhaps 50 BILLION DOLLARS and the maximum may be as much as 75 billion dollars ... These ’figures, large as they are, ARE BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE UNITED STATES WILL NOT ENTER THE PRESENT CONFLICT. (Our emphasis)”
A FIFTY BILLION DOLLAR MINIMUM TAKE FOR WALL STREET – IF THE U.S. DOES NOT GO TO WAR! That’s what every worker voted for when he voted for Roosevelt. 50 billion dollars – that’s not hay! And it’s coming out of the flesh and bones of the American workers. That’s the Old Army Game of 1940!
Wall Street’s Second Choice
If Roosevelt is really the tool of Wall St., why did so many of the bankers and industrialists and the big business press endorse Willkie?
The answer to that question is, first, that they regarded Willkie as a more tractable tool, not a different but a better instrument for their designs than Roosevelt.
But even more impelling than this reason, is the completely unvarnished reactionary character of the ruling class. Through the just completed election campaign the ruling class has served final warning on the workers that it is through with the nonsense of “reformers.” Its program, henceforth, is merciless warfare on labor. In “attacking” Roosevelt, Wall Street did not attack him as its tool, but as the symbol of “liberalism” which he represents to so many misguided workers.
For, in luring an unwilling people into war, Roosevelt has proved supreme in the art of deception. His liberal camouflage often appeared so realistic that it frightened many capitalists. They have always opposed yielding to labor even “in principle.” They have always preferred to address labor in a more direct tongue, the conciliatory end of a black-jack.
Although led by Roosevelt to the “kill,” Wall Street regards him with distaste. In the past, Roosevelt cleverly held the financial pack in leash whenever its impatience threatened to frighten off the labor quarry. Wall Street is used to free-ranging, and dislikes even the mildest restraints. Although the leash is now off, Big Business dislikes even the fact that it still dangles from Roosevelt’s hand. If only the leash could be destroyed altogether!
That is why Wendell Willkie was Wall Street’s first choice for War President. Willkie is one of the pack itself, who has tugged hardest at the leash. He would have been certain, had he been elected, to have led the assault on labor with undisguised ferocity.
Yes, it is true that the majority of Wall Street magnates preferred Willkie. But they are not greatly concerned about the re-election of Roosevelt. They understand fully well that Roosevelt has no choice but to represent them. And, after all, the bankers and industrial bosses can’t feel too harshly toward Roosevelt when profits for the first quarter of 1940, prior to the “shoot-the-works” war spending, were already 67 percent higher than the same quarter of 1939: in fact, higher than in 1928, a peak prosperity year.
“My Friends ....”
Roosevelt’s ability to make the masses think they are getting something has been his greatest contribution to the preservation of capitalism. For his primary objective ever since first taking office has been to save the American capitalist system. He attempted to do this by reconciling the workers to the interests of the bosses.
From the start, Roosevelt yielded to labor only “in principle,” not fact. His first act as President revealed this. He consolidated the leading finance capitalists through the bank moratorium, while wiping out most of the small independent banks and millions of small depositors. Next, through the National Industrial Recovery Act, he further entrenched industrial monopoly. Under this Act, the big industrialists exterminated a large section of competing small businesses by monopoly price-fixing and similar measures.
Finally, he attempted to stabilize the light, or consumers goods industries by “pump-priming.” Through farm loans, unemployed relief, etc., he tried to start the flow of profits once more. These funds were intended primarily as indirect hand-outs to the chain and department stores, and the textile, furniture, tobacco, chemical, radio, auto and other manufacturers. The meagre benefits from these measures gleaned by the workers were included in Administration costs under the headings. “Riot Insurance” and “Smart Politics.”
Labor “Appeasement”
While stabilizing capitalism, Roosevelt was compelled to “appease” labor. He affirmed verbally certain rights of labor, embodied in Section 7A of the NIRA and, later, in the Wagner Act. These measures merely endorsed an established right – so long as labor could enforce it by organized action – the right to collective bargaining by organizations of labor’s own choosing.
This grant in “principle” was gained in fact solely by labor itself. From 1933–1939 there were 17,862 strikes, involving 8,261,000 workers. (Labor Information Bulletins, U.S. Dept. of Labor) These strikes occurred in every single industry without exception, and were fought with a fury unequalled in American labor history.
The fury was required. During Roosevelt’s administration the National Guard, financed and equipped with federal funds and trained by Regular Army officers, has played its most active strikebreaking role. From 1933-35 alone, out of 42,737 National Guards who were called to active duty, 32,645 or 77 percent were used, to break strikes. In the one year, 1935, the National Guard was employed in 73 strikes in 20 states, a majority of them under “New Deal” state administrations. During the National Textile Strike, Roosevelt himself threatened to send Regular Army troops against the Rhode Island strikers.
In 1934, Roosevelt already clearly demonstrated that his labor “platform” was jerry-built. He permitted General Hugh S. Johnson, then his NRA administrator, to publicly denounce the textile strikers and the San Francisco general strike. New Dealer Paul V. McNutt, as Governor of Indiana, terrorized the Terre Haute strikers for two months with martial law. Roosevelt later rewarded him with the post of Social Security Administrator. F.D.R.’s New Deal governor in Ohio, Martin L. Davey, smashed, the Little Steel strike in 1937 with armed troops. The New Deal Kelly-Nash machine in Chicago murdered ten unarmed workers in the Memorial Day Massacre in 1937.
These are but a few of the endless facts which give irrefutable proof that Roosevelt “gave” labor just what labor has been able to take – without any boss politician’s blessing!
(To Be Continued)
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Battle of the Demagogues</h1>
<h3>(19 January 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_03" target="new">Vol. XII No. 3</a>, 19 January 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A hyena, a vulture and a jackal cornered a poor little pig. The hyena said, “Come home with me. I’ll put out some nice pineapple slices.” The vulture said, “Come home with me. I’ll open a tub of delicious sauerkraut.” The jackal said, “Come home with me. I’ll put a big red apple in your mouth.”</p>
<p>This is a fable.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The election fight this year will have its special name in history. It will be called the Battle of the Demagogues.</p>
<p>We are already being pounded from land, sea and air by all the capitalist candidates for President.</p>
<p>For the next ten months, we will be flattered and cajoled. Our passions and prejudices will be stimulated. We will be lured with glittering promises and persuaded with specious arguments. No lie or deception will be left unsaid that can possibly swing a vote.</p>
<p>This era and this year are especially favorable for demagogues. It is a time of vast social discontent. It is a time of unrest and seeking. The people are edger to listen, ripe for answers.</p>
<p>There is Truman, pride of the Pendergast machine, colleague of Rankin and Howard Smith. He’s anxious for votes and scared of Wallace. So he promises $40 a year more in every pocketbook and peace on earth. It sounds good – except he wants a $40 billion war budget and compulsory military training.</p>
<p>Taft is swinging at Truman in the name of “free enterprise” and against “regimentation,” “bureaucracy” and “totalitarianism.” Mouth-filling words – but not broad enough to cover up the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Act.</p>
<p>They are joined in the demagogue free-for-all by a past master, Wallace. He plays on the fear of war and hatred of imperialism. This wartime vice-president of American imperialism says he will lead us to the promised land of peace – via a few detours, such as continued occupation of Germany and Japan, the United Nations and “enlightened capitalism.”</p>
<p>Never say what you mean or mean what you say. That’s the slogan of the capitalist demagogues, and we are in for it. Start ducking. That pie in the sky is falling right on our heads. This is no fable.</p>
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Art Preis
Battle of the Demagogues
(19 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 3, 19 January 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A hyena, a vulture and a jackal cornered a poor little pig. The hyena said, “Come home with me. I’ll put out some nice pineapple slices.” The vulture said, “Come home with me. I’ll open a tub of delicious sauerkraut.” The jackal said, “Come home with me. I’ll put a big red apple in your mouth.”
This is a fable.
* * *
The election fight this year will have its special name in history. It will be called the Battle of the Demagogues.
We are already being pounded from land, sea and air by all the capitalist candidates for President.
For the next ten months, we will be flattered and cajoled. Our passions and prejudices will be stimulated. We will be lured with glittering promises and persuaded with specious arguments. No lie or deception will be left unsaid that can possibly swing a vote.
This era and this year are especially favorable for demagogues. It is a time of vast social discontent. It is a time of unrest and seeking. The people are edger to listen, ripe for answers.
There is Truman, pride of the Pendergast machine, colleague of Rankin and Howard Smith. He’s anxious for votes and scared of Wallace. So he promises $40 a year more in every pocketbook and peace on earth. It sounds good – except he wants a $40 billion war budget and compulsory military training.
Taft is swinging at Truman in the name of “free enterprise” and against “regimentation,” “bureaucracy” and “totalitarianism.” Mouth-filling words – but not broad enough to cover up the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Act.
They are joined in the demagogue free-for-all by a past master, Wallace. He plays on the fear of war and hatred of imperialism. This wartime vice-president of American imperialism says he will lead us to the promised land of peace – via a few detours, such as continued occupation of Germany and Japan, the United Nations and “enlightened capitalism.”
Never say what you mean or mean what you say. That’s the slogan of the capitalist demagogues, and we are in for it. Start ducking. That pie in the sky is falling right on our heads. This is no fable.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Minneapolis Case and<br>
the CP Indictments</h1>
<h3>(2 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_31" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 31</a>, 2 August 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><b>Truman’s Department of Justice will cite the Minneapolis Labor Case, in which 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) were railroaded to prison under the notorious Smith “Gag” Act, as the precedent for prosecution of 12 leaders of the Communist Party (Stalinist) under the same Act, it was revealed by the July 23 <i>N.Y. Times</i>.</b><br>
</p>
<h4>Trotskyists Jailed</h4>
<p class="fst">Among the Trotskyists imprisoned in 1944 for their socialist anti-war stand were Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson, now running as SWP candidates for President and Vice President, and Vincent R. Dunne, SWP candidate for Senator from Minnesota. Dobbs last week denounced the latest use of the Smith Act as “a monstrous blow against civil liberties, another step in the direction of establishing a police state and thought control in this country.”</p>
<p>Although the Stalinists were vociferous supporters of Wall Street’s war and. publicly hailed the persecution of the Trotskyists, the <b>N.Y. Times</b> discloses that one of the government’s chief legal weapons against the CP leaders, how slated as the second victims of the Smith Act, will be the conviction of the Trotskyists.</p>
<p>Frank H. Gordon, U.S. special assistant attorney general, and Irving Shypohl, chief assistant to U.S. Attorney John F.X. McGohey, who obtained the indictments against the CP leaders, “seemed certain yesterday that there was definite precedent for these true bills” against the CP defendants, reports the <b>Times</b>.</p>
<p>“It was understood, unofficially,” says the <b>Times</b>, “that they would probably cite one group conviction under the Smith Act that has stood up in the Supreme Court of the United States – the conviction of 18 members of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis, a Trotskyite unit, in 1941.” The SWP convictions are the only ones ever obtained under the Smith “Gag” Act of 1940.<br>
</p>
<h4>Issue Was Free Speech</h4>
<p class="fst">The <b>Times</b> further reports that “Mr. McGohey’s staff said yesterday that the convictions (of the Trotskyists) held up in the Circuit Court of Appeals in 1943 and that the Supreme Court of the United States has thrice denied motions for review.” The <b>Times</b> especially emphasizes that, according to members of McGohey’s staff, the “defense attorneys in the case of the Minneapolis Trotskyites argued in vain that their clients’ constitutional right to free speech had been abridged. This was overruled.”</p>
<p>The Democratic administration is again using the Smith Act charge of “advocacy of the overthrow of the government by force and violence” as the chief indictment. The Minneapolis Case defendants pointed out in their 1941 trial that this was the first federal law since repeal of the infamous Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 to make mere “advocacy” of anything a crime in the United States.</p>
<p>It was on these grounds that they appealed their cases three times to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an unprecedented ruling, the Court refused to review the case, although it clearly involved the constitutional question of free speech and free press.</p>
<p>The Minneapolis Labor Case became the “<i>cause celèbre</i>” of civil liberties during World War II. It was compared most frequently to the famous case of the great Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who was similarly railroaded to prison for his anti-war stand in World War I.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Supported Case</h4>
<p class="fst">Labor, Negro and civil rights organizations representing more than five million members protested the conviction of the Trotskyists and the subsequent cowardly and unheard-of refusal of the Supreme Court to take a position on this vital civil rights case.</p>
<p>Six months later, in May 1944, the Supreme Court decided to review the case of 24 officials of the German-American Bund, convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. This time – for avowed Nazis – the Court found their “rights of free speech” had been violated and all were freed.</p>
<p>During the four years when the Minneapolis Labor Case was the outstanding civil liberties issue in the country, the <b>Militant</b> and SWP warned that the Smith “Gag” Act was being sharpened on the Trotskyists in preparation for use against other working-class parties and finally the whole labor movement. The <b>Militant</b> of Feb. 26, 1944, repeated this warning in front page headlines when Stalinist Harry Bridges was cited under the Smith Act for deportation. Bridges at that time was giving wholehearted support to the government’s strikebreaking program and his case was finally quashed.</p>
<p>The revelation that the Minneapolis Case will be the legal basis for the CP prosecutions doubly emphasizes Farrell Dobbs’ statement last week: “Despite the hypocrisy, deceit and treachery of the Stalinist leaders, we have no intention of imitating their unprincipled abandonment of civil rights and outrageous treachery toward us during the war. We consider it our duty to fight, the present prosecution to the limit and to alert the entire labor movement to oppose it.”</p>
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Art Preis
Minneapolis Case and
the CP Indictments
(2 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 31, 2 August 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Truman’s Department of Justice will cite the Minneapolis Labor Case, in which 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) were railroaded to prison under the notorious Smith “Gag” Act, as the precedent for prosecution of 12 leaders of the Communist Party (Stalinist) under the same Act, it was revealed by the July 23 N.Y. Times.
Trotskyists Jailed
Among the Trotskyists imprisoned in 1944 for their socialist anti-war stand were Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson, now running as SWP candidates for President and Vice President, and Vincent R. Dunne, SWP candidate for Senator from Minnesota. Dobbs last week denounced the latest use of the Smith Act as “a monstrous blow against civil liberties, another step in the direction of establishing a police state and thought control in this country.”
Although the Stalinists were vociferous supporters of Wall Street’s war and. publicly hailed the persecution of the Trotskyists, the N.Y. Times discloses that one of the government’s chief legal weapons against the CP leaders, how slated as the second victims of the Smith Act, will be the conviction of the Trotskyists.
Frank H. Gordon, U.S. special assistant attorney general, and Irving Shypohl, chief assistant to U.S. Attorney John F.X. McGohey, who obtained the indictments against the CP leaders, “seemed certain yesterday that there was definite precedent for these true bills” against the CP defendants, reports the Times.
“It was understood, unofficially,” says the Times, “that they would probably cite one group conviction under the Smith Act that has stood up in the Supreme Court of the United States – the conviction of 18 members of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis, a Trotskyite unit, in 1941.” The SWP convictions are the only ones ever obtained under the Smith “Gag” Act of 1940.
Issue Was Free Speech
The Times further reports that “Mr. McGohey’s staff said yesterday that the convictions (of the Trotskyists) held up in the Circuit Court of Appeals in 1943 and that the Supreme Court of the United States has thrice denied motions for review.” The Times especially emphasizes that, according to members of McGohey’s staff, the “defense attorneys in the case of the Minneapolis Trotskyites argued in vain that their clients’ constitutional right to free speech had been abridged. This was overruled.”
The Democratic administration is again using the Smith Act charge of “advocacy of the overthrow of the government by force and violence” as the chief indictment. The Minneapolis Case defendants pointed out in their 1941 trial that this was the first federal law since repeal of the infamous Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 to make mere “advocacy” of anything a crime in the United States.
It was on these grounds that they appealed their cases three times to the U.S. Supreme Court. In an unprecedented ruling, the Court refused to review the case, although it clearly involved the constitutional question of free speech and free press.
The Minneapolis Labor Case became the “cause celèbre” of civil liberties during World War II. It was compared most frequently to the famous case of the great Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who was similarly railroaded to prison for his anti-war stand in World War I.
Labor Supported Case
Labor, Negro and civil rights organizations representing more than five million members protested the conviction of the Trotskyists and the subsequent cowardly and unheard-of refusal of the Supreme Court to take a position on this vital civil rights case.
Six months later, in May 1944, the Supreme Court decided to review the case of 24 officials of the German-American Bund, convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. This time – for avowed Nazis – the Court found their “rights of free speech” had been violated and all were freed.
During the four years when the Minneapolis Labor Case was the outstanding civil liberties issue in the country, the Militant and SWP warned that the Smith “Gag” Act was being sharpened on the Trotskyists in preparation for use against other working-class parties and finally the whole labor movement. The Militant of Feb. 26, 1944, repeated this warning in front page headlines when Stalinist Harry Bridges was cited under the Smith Act for deportation. Bridges at that time was giving wholehearted support to the government’s strikebreaking program and his case was finally quashed.
The revelation that the Minneapolis Case will be the legal basis for the CP prosecutions doubly emphasizes Farrell Dobbs’ statement last week: “Despite the hypocrisy, deceit and treachery of the Stalinist leaders, we have no intention of imitating their unprincipled abandonment of civil rights and outrageous treachery toward us during the war. We consider it our duty to fight, the present prosecution to the limit and to alert the entire labor movement to oppose it.”
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(9 March 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_10" target="new">Vol. X No. 10</a>, 9 March 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>New Big Strikes Loom</h3>
<p class="fst">Balloting in the strike poll of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, two key railway unions, was running 68 per cent in favor of strike, it was announced on March 1, with 90 per cent of the vote completed. The final total is expected to be announced by March 6.</p>
<p>Unlike other railway unions, the trainmen and locomotive engineers have correctly rejected arbitration of their basic wage demands for a 25 per cent increase and 45 improvements in the working rules. The 215,000 organised trainmen and 78,000 locomotive engineers could effectively tie up virtually the entire railway system.</p>
<p>In addition to the pending railway walkout, the country’s militant coal miners, whose bituminous contract expires April 1, may be putting their traditional “no contract, no work” policy into effect on that date unless the operators meet the new demands of the AFL United Mine Workers.</p>
<p>UMW President John L. Lewis on March 2 informed the soft coal operators of the union’s desire to reopen wage negotiations on March 12. He simultaneously filed, a 30-day strike notice with the NLRB.</p>
<p>It is reported that the miners will seek wage increases above the 16 to 18½-cent “pattern” fixed by the administration in the packinghouse and steel cases. The miners cracked the Little Steel formula during the war – but it was not split wide open because the other unions failed to follow the miners’ fighting example.</p>
<p>Perhaps the miners will crack the new “Big Steal” formula before it hardens into a real wage freeze.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<h3>Chrysler Contract</h3>
<a name="p2"></a>
<p class="fst">There has been a general hush-hush about the terms of the new Chrysler contract which the CIO United Auto Workers leaders concluded in January.</p>
<p>This contract was concluded in an utterly bureaucratic fashion over the heads of the Chrysler workers. The reason for this high handed conduct can be gleaned from two letters sent by UAW officials to the Chrysler Corporation on January 26. The letters reveal some of the impermissible concessions made to the corporation – concessions which the Chrysler workers would have rejected out-of-hand if there had been any prior full and free discussion of their real meaning.</p>
<p>in a letter to Robert W. Conder, director of labor relations for Chrysler Corporation, Norman Matthews, UAW-CIO National Chrysler Director, states that the International union disapproves of “violation and abuses by union representatives of the bargaining procedure” which were “due to lack of understanding and because of changing conditions during the war.” He states further that “a large percentage of time has been spent by Union representatives on matters other than provided for in the agreement” and that the UAW will “assign a full-time representative to see that this abuse of the bargaining procedure will discontinue.”</p>
<p>Thus, the resistance of local unions to the continued provocations and contract violations practiced by Chrysler during the war when the workers were shackled with the no-strike pledge is now slanderously labeled “abuses” by Matthews. He proposes to spend the union’s money for an International representative, not to safeguard the workers from contract violations by the company, but to PROTECT THE COMPANY from the “abuse of the bargaining procedure” when local unions and grievance men seek to end company provocations!</p>
<p>Another vicious feature of the Chrysler contract is revealed in a letter from the International union office to Conder. This states that “the union and the company disapprove and will discourage their members or representatives from using or issuing statements in their official papers, handbills, newspapers or other literature which are inconsistent with amicable industrial relations between the parties.”</p>
<p>This capitulation to the corporation’s demand that the union surrender its rights of free speech and press is a most sinister precedent for the whole labor movement. Even if the corporation abides by this agreement, which is very doubtful, it can continue its anti-union propaganda indirectly through a thousand channels. It has the daily press and radio, Big Business political spokesmen from the city halls all the way up to Congress, “front” groups like the NAM and Chamber of Commerce.</p>
<p>This restriction is really aimed exclusively at silencing local unions and militant workers when they seek to expose the corporation’s anti-union practices, provocations and contract violations. It would forbid them the right to publicize corporation profiteering, price hiking and political activities. Moreover, the whole lying inference of the “non-criticism” agreement is that the union in the past has been unjust and untruthful in its printed attacks on the corporation.</p>
<p>This concession to the corporation will be used by the company, in collaboration with the union officials, in attempts to suppress the voice of the workers when they seek to fight company abuses. It is a flagrant attack on freedom of speech and press which can only further encourage the invasion of the democratic rights of the unions.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(9 March 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 10, 9 March 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
New Big Strikes Loom
Balloting in the strike poll of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, two key railway unions, was running 68 per cent in favor of strike, it was announced on March 1, with 90 per cent of the vote completed. The final total is expected to be announced by March 6.
Unlike other railway unions, the trainmen and locomotive engineers have correctly rejected arbitration of their basic wage demands for a 25 per cent increase and 45 improvements in the working rules. The 215,000 organised trainmen and 78,000 locomotive engineers could effectively tie up virtually the entire railway system.
In addition to the pending railway walkout, the country’s militant coal miners, whose bituminous contract expires April 1, may be putting their traditional “no contract, no work” policy into effect on that date unless the operators meet the new demands of the AFL United Mine Workers.
UMW President John L. Lewis on March 2 informed the soft coal operators of the union’s desire to reopen wage negotiations on March 12. He simultaneously filed, a 30-day strike notice with the NLRB.
It is reported that the miners will seek wage increases above the 16 to 18½-cent “pattern” fixed by the administration in the packinghouse and steel cases. The miners cracked the Little Steel formula during the war – but it was not split wide open because the other unions failed to follow the miners’ fighting example.
Perhaps the miners will crack the new “Big Steal” formula before it hardens into a real wage freeze.
* * *
Chrysler Contract
There has been a general hush-hush about the terms of the new Chrysler contract which the CIO United Auto Workers leaders concluded in January.
This contract was concluded in an utterly bureaucratic fashion over the heads of the Chrysler workers. The reason for this high handed conduct can be gleaned from two letters sent by UAW officials to the Chrysler Corporation on January 26. The letters reveal some of the impermissible concessions made to the corporation – concessions which the Chrysler workers would have rejected out-of-hand if there had been any prior full and free discussion of their real meaning.
in a letter to Robert W. Conder, director of labor relations for Chrysler Corporation, Norman Matthews, UAW-CIO National Chrysler Director, states that the International union disapproves of “violation and abuses by union representatives of the bargaining procedure” which were “due to lack of understanding and because of changing conditions during the war.” He states further that “a large percentage of time has been spent by Union representatives on matters other than provided for in the agreement” and that the UAW will “assign a full-time representative to see that this abuse of the bargaining procedure will discontinue.”
Thus, the resistance of local unions to the continued provocations and contract violations practiced by Chrysler during the war when the workers were shackled with the no-strike pledge is now slanderously labeled “abuses” by Matthews. He proposes to spend the union’s money for an International representative, not to safeguard the workers from contract violations by the company, but to PROTECT THE COMPANY from the “abuse of the bargaining procedure” when local unions and grievance men seek to end company provocations!
Another vicious feature of the Chrysler contract is revealed in a letter from the International union office to Conder. This states that “the union and the company disapprove and will discourage their members or representatives from using or issuing statements in their official papers, handbills, newspapers or other literature which are inconsistent with amicable industrial relations between the parties.”
This capitulation to the corporation’s demand that the union surrender its rights of free speech and press is a most sinister precedent for the whole labor movement. Even if the corporation abides by this agreement, which is very doubtful, it can continue its anti-union propaganda indirectly through a thousand channels. It has the daily press and radio, Big Business political spokesmen from the city halls all the way up to Congress, “front” groups like the NAM and Chamber of Commerce.
This restriction is really aimed exclusively at silencing local unions and militant workers when they seek to expose the corporation’s anti-union practices, provocations and contract violations. It would forbid them the right to publicize corporation profiteering, price hiking and political activities. Moreover, the whole lying inference of the “non-criticism” agreement is that the union in the past has been unjust and untruthful in its printed attacks on the corporation.
This concession to the corporation will be used by the company, in collaboration with the union officials, in attempts to suppress the voice of the workers when they seek to fight company abuses. It is a flagrant attack on freedom of speech and press which can only further encourage the invasion of the democratic rights of the unions.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>After the Death of Leon Trotsky</h1>
<h3>(23 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_34" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 34</a>, 23 August 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Eight years ago on August 21, 1940, the greatest teacher and, leader of the international working class in our times, Leon Trotsky, died from a pick- axe driven into his brain by Stalin’s hired killer. The assassination of the co-organizer, with Lenin, of the Russian Revolution, builder of the Red Army and founder of the Fourth International, was a truly symbolic crime. Its very method – a blow at the brain. – befitted the intent of Cain-Stalin, as Trotsky had branded him, to wipe out in blood what the Kremlin despot feared most – Trotsky’s ideas.</p>
<p>Reaction through all ages has always used violence and murder in its vain effort to halt the march of ideas. When Socrates was handed the bowl of hemlock poison, when the Inquisition burned Bruno at the stake, when the slaveholders’ government hanged John Brown, these were desperate attempts to destroy ideas ... by physically destroying their creators and proponents. History records the ultimate futility of such attempts.</p>
<p>Great and correct ideas, derived from mankind’s needs and guiding its upward climb, have an immortal life of their own. Once born, they thrive and grow, acquire ever more power and vitality, sweep aside opposition and, in the end, conquer.<br>
</p>
<h4>After Eight Years</h4>
<p class="fst">Judged by the timetable of history, we can say that Trotsky’s ideas are steadily advancing. In eight brief years, those questions of theory and principle, which appeared so academic and abstract to most people when the exiled Trotsky died his martyr’s death in Mexico, have now become real and concrete for millions the world over.</p>
<p>We need but look at recent developments in Yugoslavia, at Tito’s break with Stalin and the issues involved, to realize the universality and import of the ideas for which Trotsky lived, fought and died. The problems confronting the Yugoslav workers and peasants are precisely those foreseen and analyzed by Trotsky and the movement he founded. Their solution has long since been illuminated in his brilliant writings.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, in 1928, there was published in this country the program of the Trotskyist opposition, under the title, <b>The Real Situation in Russia</b>. It contained the platform of the Russian Left Opposition, drafted in 1926, dealing exhaustively with the question of the method by which the small-proprietor class of Russian peasants could be transformed into a sector of a classless, socialized economy.</p>
<p>It pointed out that the solution of this problem – so crucial to the survival of the Soviet Union – could net be achieved by bureaucratic violence and force. That it was first of all necessary to make a distinction between the poor peasant and rich kulak, and then to demonstrate the superiority of collective farming and the advantages of a nationalized economy. To do this, it was essential to industrialize the country according to plan and to provide the equipment so indispensable for the superior collective method in agriculture.</p>
<p>Stalin and his gang of bureaucratic usurpers brutally expelled Trotsky and the Left Oppositionists from the Russian Communist Party in 1927. Then, in 1928, the unfolding economic crisis in Russia forced Stalin to adopt – in highly distorted form – Trotsky’s program for industrialization. Bureaucratic planning, devoid of mass initiative and participation,</p>
<p>could tide Soviet economy over, but could not free it from crisis. In 1931 and 1932 came the great revolt of the peasants, the forced collectivization; the death of millions by famine.</p>
<p>Today, the issue about which the Russian Left Opposition fought in 1926 arid 1927 in Russia, the issue of collectivization that seemed so remote and obscure to the outside world, is among the most urgent questions for the Yugoslav people, as for the peoples of all Eastern Europe. The struggle of Trotsky in Russia more than 29 years ago is provirig no abstraction, but. of burning timeliness to the Yugoslavs.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Key Question</h4>
<p class="fst">Let us take another example, the question of “socialism in one country,” that bedrock deviation of Stalinism from the principles of Marxism and Leninism. That was the key question around which Trotsky fought the Kremlin bureaucracy from 1924 to his death.</p>
<p>Even leading members of the Russian Bolshevik Party, coworkers with Lenin, failed to perceive the tremendous implications of the slight phrase, “socialism in one country,” that Stalin had first slipped obscurely into a pamphlet in 1924. As for the press and commentators of the bourgeois world, they could not begin to grasp the issue at stake when news of the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin began to leak out. They treated this historic struggle of ideas as a personal feud, a clash of personalities – although their sure class instincts impelled them to nod favorably in the direction of Stalin as against Trotsky.</p>
<p>When Trotsky pointed out that the theory of “socialism in one country” marked a turn toward</p>
<p>reactionary nationalism and abandonment of the international revolutionary socialist program, Stalin’s henchmen howled him down. Few could then see the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet Union; the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks; the tremendous expansion of the parasitic bureaucracy; the corruption and destruction of the international revolutionary party of Lenin; the counter-revolutionary betrayal by Stalin of the German, Spanish, Chinese, French and other revolutionary workers; the sellout of the world proletariat. Yet all these, as Trotsky predicted, were products of the false theory of “socialism in one country” – the theory that a single, backward country could achieve socialism by itself, in a world of hostile capitalism, without successful socialist revolutions in the more advanced capitalist countries.</p>
<p>Today the question of socialism in oiie country does not appear as a “sectarian quibble” to the Yugoslav peoples. It is an immediate life-and-death question for them. We read the declaration of Tito that he recognizes the limitations' of a small, backward peasant country, that he does not seek to achieve “socialism in one country” and appeals for economic and political cooperation of the other East-European countries, and above all, of the Soviet Union.<br>
</p>
<h4>No Aid from Stalin</h4>
<p class="fst">But the Soviet Union under Stalin – that prime example of “socialism in one country” – gives no aid. The Nationalistic Kremlin clique can only try to loot from the Yugoslav people the little they now have. Stalin – the author of the theory of “socialism in one country” – comes to the other peoples not as a socialist emancipator, but as a brigand trying to maintain his own “socialist” regime with the stolen goods of others.</p>
<p>We hear the cry from the cadres of the Stalinized Yugoslav Communist Party about the “degeneration of the Soviet Union.” What are they speaking of but the predictions of Trotsky in 1923 made real today?</p>
<p>For already in. 1923, Trotsky wrote his articles gathered together in the book, <b>The New Course</b>, in which he described the growing bureaucratism within the Soviet Union and the Russian Communist Party and warned of inevitable bureaucratic degeneration if the Soviet leaders did not return to the paths of party democracy.<br>
</p>
<h4>Trotsky’s Program</h4>
<p class="fst">As against reactionary nationalism, Trotsky represented revolutionary internationalism. As against bureaucratic repression, Trotsky stood for working-class democracy. As against political collaboration with the imperialists and Peoples Frontism, Trotsky called for international workers solidarity and unremitting class struggle against imperialism. As against Stalinism, in short, Trotsky upheld the program of Marxism-Leninism.</p>
<p>To destroy his implacable foe armed with, the power of a correct program, Stalin mobilized all the resources of a great state. He sought to expunge Trotsky’s name. from the Russian text books, to rewrite history. He unloosed a campaign of falsification, vilification and slander – not without encouragement and support from the camp of imperialism. – such as the world had never known. <i>He murdered Trotsky’s co-thinkers in Russia by the tens of thousands. He staged monstrous frame-up trials in which the leading Old Bolsheviks were represented as “agents of Hitler.” He hounded Trotsky from country to country and thought to settle the issue once and for all by driving a pick-axe into Trotsky’s brain.</i></p>
<p>But Stalin has again proved what history has long taught. You can murder men; you cannot murder ideas. The ideas of Trotsky are today an indestructible force in the world – an organized force. They live on, more dynamic, more powerful, more widespread by far than on the day he died. For Trotsky left the inheritance not only of his program, but of his organization, the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution.</p>
<p>Last April the Fourth International held its Second World Congress in France. Since Trotsky’s death and during the war, it had been forced to work without the living guidance of Trotsky’s genius. But armed with his program, it survived the cruelest blows ever dealt any revolutionary organization.</p>
<p>In some countries, whole sections of the Fourth International had been physically exterminated by war, disease and famine, by Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s GPU. But the Fourth International endured, revived and emerged from the war stronger than ever.</p>
<p>Its Second World Congress was attended by delegates of sections in 19 countries, from all continents. Adhering to the program of the Fourth International today are groups and organizations in 32 countries.</p>
<p>The Second World Congress, of the Fourth International cemented together more firmly,the vanguard of the world revolutionary socialist movement. It drew up a program of action, worldwide in scope and objective; to rally s arid mobilize humanity for the triumphant struggle for international socialism.</p>
<p>The building of his world party, the continuation: and development of his struggle through this party, is the greatest monument to Trotsky’s memory. He would have wanted no other.</p>
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Art Preis
After the Death of Leon Trotsky
(23 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 34, 23 August 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Eight years ago on August 21, 1940, the greatest teacher and, leader of the international working class in our times, Leon Trotsky, died from a pick- axe driven into his brain by Stalin’s hired killer. The assassination of the co-organizer, with Lenin, of the Russian Revolution, builder of the Red Army and founder of the Fourth International, was a truly symbolic crime. Its very method – a blow at the brain. – befitted the intent of Cain-Stalin, as Trotsky had branded him, to wipe out in blood what the Kremlin despot feared most – Trotsky’s ideas.
Reaction through all ages has always used violence and murder in its vain effort to halt the march of ideas. When Socrates was handed the bowl of hemlock poison, when the Inquisition burned Bruno at the stake, when the slaveholders’ government hanged John Brown, these were desperate attempts to destroy ideas ... by physically destroying their creators and proponents. History records the ultimate futility of such attempts.
Great and correct ideas, derived from mankind’s needs and guiding its upward climb, have an immortal life of their own. Once born, they thrive and grow, acquire ever more power and vitality, sweep aside opposition and, in the end, conquer.
After Eight Years
Judged by the timetable of history, we can say that Trotsky’s ideas are steadily advancing. In eight brief years, those questions of theory and principle, which appeared so academic and abstract to most people when the exiled Trotsky died his martyr’s death in Mexico, have now become real and concrete for millions the world over.
We need but look at recent developments in Yugoslavia, at Tito’s break with Stalin and the issues involved, to realize the universality and import of the ideas for which Trotsky lived, fought and died. The problems confronting the Yugoslav workers and peasants are precisely those foreseen and analyzed by Trotsky and the movement he founded. Their solution has long since been illuminated in his brilliant writings.
Twenty years ago, in 1928, there was published in this country the program of the Trotskyist opposition, under the title, The Real Situation in Russia. It contained the platform of the Russian Left Opposition, drafted in 1926, dealing exhaustively with the question of the method by which the small-proprietor class of Russian peasants could be transformed into a sector of a classless, socialized economy.
It pointed out that the solution of this problem – so crucial to the survival of the Soviet Union – could net be achieved by bureaucratic violence and force. That it was first of all necessary to make a distinction between the poor peasant and rich kulak, and then to demonstrate the superiority of collective farming and the advantages of a nationalized economy. To do this, it was essential to industrialize the country according to plan and to provide the equipment so indispensable for the superior collective method in agriculture.
Stalin and his gang of bureaucratic usurpers brutally expelled Trotsky and the Left Oppositionists from the Russian Communist Party in 1927. Then, in 1928, the unfolding economic crisis in Russia forced Stalin to adopt – in highly distorted form – Trotsky’s program for industrialization. Bureaucratic planning, devoid of mass initiative and participation,
could tide Soviet economy over, but could not free it from crisis. In 1931 and 1932 came the great revolt of the peasants, the forced collectivization; the death of millions by famine.
Today, the issue about which the Russian Left Opposition fought in 1926 arid 1927 in Russia, the issue of collectivization that seemed so remote and obscure to the outside world, is among the most urgent questions for the Yugoslav people, as for the peoples of all Eastern Europe. The struggle of Trotsky in Russia more than 29 years ago is provirig no abstraction, but. of burning timeliness to the Yugoslavs.
The Key Question
Let us take another example, the question of “socialism in one country,” that bedrock deviation of Stalinism from the principles of Marxism and Leninism. That was the key question around which Trotsky fought the Kremlin bureaucracy from 1924 to his death.
Even leading members of the Russian Bolshevik Party, coworkers with Lenin, failed to perceive the tremendous implications of the slight phrase, “socialism in one country,” that Stalin had first slipped obscurely into a pamphlet in 1924. As for the press and commentators of the bourgeois world, they could not begin to grasp the issue at stake when news of the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin began to leak out. They treated this historic struggle of ideas as a personal feud, a clash of personalities – although their sure class instincts impelled them to nod favorably in the direction of Stalin as against Trotsky.
When Trotsky pointed out that the theory of “socialism in one country” marked a turn toward
reactionary nationalism and abandonment of the international revolutionary socialist program, Stalin’s henchmen howled him down. Few could then see the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet Union; the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks; the tremendous expansion of the parasitic bureaucracy; the corruption and destruction of the international revolutionary party of Lenin; the counter-revolutionary betrayal by Stalin of the German, Spanish, Chinese, French and other revolutionary workers; the sellout of the world proletariat. Yet all these, as Trotsky predicted, were products of the false theory of “socialism in one country” – the theory that a single, backward country could achieve socialism by itself, in a world of hostile capitalism, without successful socialist revolutions in the more advanced capitalist countries.
Today the question of socialism in oiie country does not appear as a “sectarian quibble” to the Yugoslav peoples. It is an immediate life-and-death question for them. We read the declaration of Tito that he recognizes the limitations' of a small, backward peasant country, that he does not seek to achieve “socialism in one country” and appeals for economic and political cooperation of the other East-European countries, and above all, of the Soviet Union.
No Aid from Stalin
But the Soviet Union under Stalin – that prime example of “socialism in one country” – gives no aid. The Nationalistic Kremlin clique can only try to loot from the Yugoslav people the little they now have. Stalin – the author of the theory of “socialism in one country” – comes to the other peoples not as a socialist emancipator, but as a brigand trying to maintain his own “socialist” regime with the stolen goods of others.
We hear the cry from the cadres of the Stalinized Yugoslav Communist Party about the “degeneration of the Soviet Union.” What are they speaking of but the predictions of Trotsky in 1923 made real today?
For already in. 1923, Trotsky wrote his articles gathered together in the book, The New Course, in which he described the growing bureaucratism within the Soviet Union and the Russian Communist Party and warned of inevitable bureaucratic degeneration if the Soviet leaders did not return to the paths of party democracy.
Trotsky’s Program
As against reactionary nationalism, Trotsky represented revolutionary internationalism. As against bureaucratic repression, Trotsky stood for working-class democracy. As against political collaboration with the imperialists and Peoples Frontism, Trotsky called for international workers solidarity and unremitting class struggle against imperialism. As against Stalinism, in short, Trotsky upheld the program of Marxism-Leninism.
To destroy his implacable foe armed with, the power of a correct program, Stalin mobilized all the resources of a great state. He sought to expunge Trotsky’s name. from the Russian text books, to rewrite history. He unloosed a campaign of falsification, vilification and slander – not without encouragement and support from the camp of imperialism. – such as the world had never known. He murdered Trotsky’s co-thinkers in Russia by the tens of thousands. He staged monstrous frame-up trials in which the leading Old Bolsheviks were represented as “agents of Hitler.” He hounded Trotsky from country to country and thought to settle the issue once and for all by driving a pick-axe into Trotsky’s brain.
But Stalin has again proved what history has long taught. You can murder men; you cannot murder ideas. The ideas of Trotsky are today an indestructible force in the world – an organized force. They live on, more dynamic, more powerful, more widespread by far than on the day he died. For Trotsky left the inheritance not only of his program, but of his organization, the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
Last April the Fourth International held its Second World Congress in France. Since Trotsky’s death and during the war, it had been forced to work without the living guidance of Trotsky’s genius. But armed with his program, it survived the cruelest blows ever dealt any revolutionary organization.
In some countries, whole sections of the Fourth International had been physically exterminated by war, disease and famine, by Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s GPU. But the Fourth International endured, revived and emerged from the war stronger than ever.
Its Second World Congress was attended by delegates of sections in 19 countries, from all continents. Adhering to the program of the Fourth International today are groups and organizations in 32 countries.
The Second World Congress, of the Fourth International cemented together more firmly,the vanguard of the world revolutionary socialist movement. It drew up a program of action, worldwide in scope and objective; to rally s arid mobilize humanity for the triumphant struggle for international socialism.
The building of his world party, the continuation: and development of his struggle through this party, is the greatest monument to Trotsky’s memory. He would have wanted no other.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Walter Reuther</h1>
<h3>(November 1950)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi50_11" target="new">Vol.11 No.6</a>, November-December 1950, pp.176-182.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Walter Reuther, president since 1946 of the powerful and strategically placed CIO United Automobile Workers, is generally regarded as the most “up-and-coming” of the new generation of labor leaders who began their rise with the CIO. Of all who rose to prominence and leadership in the UAW’s early days – including some of not inconsiderable talents – not one has survived save Reuther. Homer Martin, Wyndham Mortimer, R.J. Thomas, George Addes, Richard Frankensteen and many others were forced out or dropped by the wayside. Reuther alone stayed on top. Today, he holds almost undisputed control of this key union in the CIO.</p>
<p>“Smart” and “shrewd” are adjectives frequently applied to Reuther. But for all his adroitness and cunning, he is by no means the “master of his fate” He has been shaped by powerful social forces, pressures and conflicts, particularly as these have affected and been reflected in the development of the UAW.</p>
<p>To understand Reuther’s aims, methods, role in the labor movement and the direction in which he is traveling, it is essential to understand the kind of union in which he grew up and on whose mighty shoulders he now stands. For whatever is “unique” about Reuther is due, in the main, to the fact that he has come out of what has been, and in some respects remains, a unique union.</p>
<p>The UAW has been described most frequently as “dynamic.” Until the past few years, this adjective was fully justified and even today, as a “settled” union with a hardening bureaucratic crust, the UAW still retains the sources of its dynamic character.</p>
<p>In its rise the UAW exemplified the spontaneous rank-and-file character of that titanic upsurge of industrial labor in the Thirties which built the CIO. The auto union’s militancy became a by-word. If the auto workers did not invent the sit-down strike, they nevertheless perfected it and their use of it in the 1936-37 General Motors strike inspired its spread into a national phenomenon. They developed the famous “flying squadrons,” those mobile shock troops of the picket lines which have become permanent institutions in many UAW locals.</p>
<p>This “dynamism” of the UAW was due not to fighting qualities exceptional to auto workers, but rather to the exceptional factors in the origin and traditions of the UAW. Its unique development was a direct reflection of its internal democracy, which permitted the workers’ native militancy to find expression and allowed their initiative to flower.<br>
</p>
<h4>Democratic Traditions of the UAW</h4>
<p class="fst">The independence of the membership, their insistence on “running the show,” revealed itself from the start when they fought the AFL bureaucracy’s attempts to impose outside leadership upon them. Without exception, the auto workers’ leadership has been raised from their own ranks. For most of its history, UAW conventions saw stormy revolts against any moves to strengthen the bureaucratic powers of the top leaders against the ranks.</p>
<p>They jealously guarded the right to maintain caucuses and the open factional struggles of tendencies in the UAW was a constant source of astonishment – and dismay – to the old-line officialdom who ran their own unions with an iron hand and never let anyone “talk out of turn.” All political views found expression in the continuous struggle for program and leadership. New ideas found a favorable climate and the membership was educated in progressive social and political views. Far from weakening the auto workers’ union, this internal democracy became the wellspring of its power and tremendous growth.</p>
<p>The UAW did not come by its militant and democratic traditions accidentally. Their foundation was consciously laid in the decisive early stages of the union by politically radical workers who were responsible for the first successful organization in auto and who led the auto workers to their initial victories.</p>
<p>The Toledo Auto-Lite strike in May 1934, a virtual mass insurrection which won the first major contract in the auto industry, set the pattern. This crucial battle was led by members of the American Workers Party, which a few months later merged with the Communist League of America (Trotskyist) to form the Workers Party (now the Socialist Workers Party). A year later Trotskyist’s played the chief role in organizing and leading the Toledo Chevrolet strike that established the first union beach-head in General Motors. In this strike the Trotskyists gave leadership to the opposition against the old-line AFL leaders whose policies of class-collaboration and reliance on government intervention were the chief stumbling-block to unionization of the auto workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Spearhead of Revolt</h4>
<p class="fst">It was these Toledo auto workers, as the largest delegation at the UAW’s founding convention in August 1935, who organized and spearheaded a revolt against the imposition of Frances Dillon, AFL President William Green’s personal representative, as appointed head of the newly founded international. They submitted finally under threat of losing their new charter. But a year later – again with the Toledo delegation in the lead – the militants, organized as a caucus, overwhelmingly rejected Dillon and elected their own officers from their own ranks.</p>
<p>These first two conventions not only freed the auto union from the deadly grip of an established bureaucracy, but incorporated into the very structure of the new international the principles of democratic unionism. Thus, in 1936, when reactionary elements red-baited Homer Martin, who was subsequently to become the first elected president, the convention delegates rose up and wrote into their constitution those justly famous provisions against discrimination for race, creed, national origin and <em>political beliefs</em>. In 1941, Reuther’s faction was to make the first major breach in this democratic constitution.</p>
<p>The May 1936 convention provided a remarkable demonstration of advanced political consciousness when the delegates voted overwhelmingly for the formation of an independent farmer-labor party. Direct intervention by John L. Lewis was required to force the delegates to attach a rider to this resolution endorsing Roosevelt for re-election.</p>
<p>The crucial test of the fledgling union came in the 1936-37 battle with General Motors. Here again it was radicals who gave decisive direction to the struggle. In Flint, Mich., where the battle centered, Kermit Johnson and Roy Reuther, both socialists, and Robert Travis, a leader of the earlier Toledo Chevrolet strike and by 1937 with the Stalinists, were the chief organizers and leaders of the great sitdown that brought victory. Contrary to a persistent legend, Walter Reuther entered the picture only toward the end of the strike and played no important role in its organization, strategy and leadership. But he did give it valuable assistance at its most critical juncture when thousands of workers from Toledo, Detroit and other auto centers poured into Flint. Reuther led a large contingent of his big, newly amalgamated Detroit West Side local, of which he was president, to support the sit-downers.</p>
<p>In those days Reuther was not exceptional for militancy and political radicalism. Everyone spoke – or pretended to speak – the language of mass action, rank-and-file control and advanced social and political ideas. The union in which young Walter Reuther got his start breathed mass action and democracy. It was led by zealous young men, in many instances radical-minded, most of whom had earned their spurs on the picket lines. This union, moreover, was pressing toward far-reaching social and political goals.</p>
<p>For these very reasons, the top CIO leaders regarded the UAW as a “problem child.” They feared the spread of its example. What would happen to <em>them</em> if their members got notions about rank-and-file control, union democracy, modest salaries for officers, annual conventions, the right to caucus and to oppose the leadership? Moreover, the CIO leaders were schooled in class collaboration, believers in the conference table and government favors rather than in strikes and class struggle methods. The UAW, in their opinion, had to be “tamed.”</p>
<p>The new UAW leaders themselves were beginning to get a taste for power. Homer Martin, who was elected president in 1936, by 1937 saw himself in the role of “boss” of a big union. The Stalinists, with a strong machine, were pushing for control with a program to tie the union to Roosevelt’s coattails.</p>
<p>The CIO leaders and the Roosevelt administration feared above all that the UAW might get “out-of-hand” politically. They had received one bad shock at the 1936 convention. They did not want to risk any more, especially since Roosevelt was already moving on the course that was to lead this country into war. For American imperialism and its labor supporters, it was imperative to curb the militancy of this “dangerous and explosive” union, harness it with a conservative bureaucracy and stifle its internal democracy.<br>
</p>
<h4>His Credentials</h4>
<p class="fst">There were not a few candidates for the job – Homer Martin, the Stalinists and careerists of all stripes. But, in the end, the forces of conservatism found their man in Walter Reuther. He had the proper qualifications, the right combination of talents and an appreciation of the nature and complexities of the task.</p>
<p>He had youth, energy, drive and ambition in a union that was young, vigorous and aggressive. He had a sharp mind and a fluent tongue that could express his ideas forcefully and clearly, although he lacked distinction in thought or style.</p>
<p>The son of an old-time Debs Socialist, Reuther got his real start in the labor movement as a Socialist agitator, when, at the age of 25, he campaigned for Norman Thomas and joined the SP. His early Socialist training and background had prepared him for the union movement, taught him how to appeal to militant workers, gave him a broader conception of the social system. A radical background was a good credential to the workers who built the UAW. And it did his reputation no harm that in 1933, after he was fired for union activity in the Detroit Ford plant, he and his brother Victor took their small savings and went to Europe, working 16 months in an auto plant in the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Not the least of Reuther’s talents was his skill at factional maneuver. In the factional game, he had the agility of a star half-back, quick to find holes in his opponents’ line, slippery in the open and adroit at pivoting and reversing his field. To reach his long-sought goal of the UAW presidency, he had to twist and straight-arm and knee his way through powerful opposition in a bitter factional struggle of 10 years’ duration.</p>
<p>Most of all, Reuther was completely identified with the auto workers. Following his return from Europe in 1934, he had plunged into the task of organizing the unorganized Detroit auto workers. By 1936, he was elected to the UAW’s national executive board at that year’s convention. By 1937, he had succeeded in amalgamating a number of small Detroit West Side shops into one big local, which gave him the original solid base in the membership on which he was to build his power.</p>
<p>Thus Reuther had grown up in the auto workers’ ranks and participated in their struggles. And he knew how to exploit this fact. No matter how high he rose above the ranks or how far he moved away from their aspirations and needs, he was always careful that it was not so high and so far as to lose connection with them. Other UAW leaders, as shrewd and talented as Reuther, lost sight of this fundamental fact and sooner or later came a cropper.</p>
<p>This history of Reuther’s rise to power is the history of the factional wars that raged inside the UAW from 1937 to 1947. There were no fundamental, well-defined differences in program between the contending leaders and there were many shifts and realignments in the unprincipled contest for posts and power.</p>
<p>Homer Martin made his bid for supreme control following the 1937 GM strike. He tried to curb “wildcat” strikes in GM with a letter to the company offering it the right to “discipline” participants in “unauthorized” walkouts. When his high-handed methods ran into opposition, he raised the hue and cry about “communists” and “socialists” and tried to change the constitution to give him more powers. He fired a number of organizers, including Walter and Victor Reuther. Ironically, a decade later in a period of strong reaction and witch-hunting, Walter Reuther was to put Martin’s program into effect with a vengeance, from one-man rule and “company security” clauses to redbaiting and expulsions.</p>
<p>Martin climaxed his headstrong course by suspending a majority of the Executive Board members. By 1939, facing defeat, he tried to take the UAW back into the AFL. But the overwhelming majority of the auto workers refused to go along. Martin split and drifted into oblivion.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Opportunist Emerges</h4>
<p class="fst">The period of the fight with Martin marked a decisive turning point for Reuther in a vital respect. It was then that he underwent and completed his political metamorphosis. Reuther never did have more than a sentimental attachment to socialism. He had a disdain for Marxist theory. He was a devotee of “realistic” politics, by which is usually meant opportunistic politics in which principles take second place to posts and immediate advantages. Once immersed in union maneuvers and the struggle for posts and power, Reuther’s socialism quickly melted away.</p>
<p>Even the light ideological baggage of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party hampered the young ambitious union leader. He figured to latch on to the political movement that offered the most promising and immediate rewards, the New Deal. In 1938 he decided to support Frank Murphy, a Democrat, for re-election as Michigan’s governor. At that time, the Socialist Party still maintained a policy of electoral independence and opposition to capitalist parties and candidates. But an amicable deal was cooked up. Reuther agreed not to embarrass the SP with a formal resignation at that time. Norman Thomas agreed to look the other way while Reuther jumped on the New Deal band wagon.</p>
<p>Another important aspect of Reuther’s political evolution was his collaboration with the Stalinists in the UAW, which did not end formally until 1939. His attitude toward the Stalinists then was in sharp contrast to his bitter hostility of today. It was the heyday of the Stalinist “People’s Front” and “collective security” program, when they .wooed Roosevelt and transformed him from a “fascist” into a “friend of labor.” Reuther could work with them then, although it was the time of the bloody Moscow Frame-up Trials and the betrayal of the Spanish revolution.</p>
<p>Significantly, his first clashes with the Stalinists were not over principles and program, but over union posts and advantages. He participated with them in the Unity Group caucus until late in 1938. But their conflict was foreshadowed at the April 1938 Michigan CIO convention. Victor Reuther was defeated for a post when the Stalinists failed to support him. This kind of blow is unforgivable to one who believes a good post is worth any number of principles. In due course, Reuther was to repay the Stalinists a hundredfold.<br>
</p>
<h4>The 1939 Convention</h4>
<p class="fst">The 1939 UAW convention, after Martin’s split, was no feast of harmony. On the one side was Reuther, who had the backing of the Socialist Party fraction, a number of powerful Detroit locals such as Hudson. Chrysler and his own West Side local, as well as partial support from the top CIO leaders. On the other side were the Stalinists, allied with a group of careerists, who had the stronger machine.</p>
<p>The Stalinist-Addes forces, despite their strength, were not anxious for any show-down fight that would put them at odds with Lewis, Murray and Hillman, while the latter wanted the semblance of “harmony.” They accepted the compromise offered by Hillman and Murray, Lewis’s representatives at the convention and agreed upon R.J. Thomas as president, whom Reuther himself supported. Hillman and Murray agreed that all vice presidential posts would be eliminated – Reuther’s included. Thus both the Stalinist-Addes and Reuther factions stepped back in favor of a man with no following at the time who had but recently jumped off Homer Martin’s band wagon.</p>
<p>In 1940 and 1941, when the Stalin-Hitler pact, the unleashing of the European war and the Finnish-Soviet war inspired anti-Soviet hostility in this country, Reuther became the leader of the most conservative elements in the UAW. He lined himself up in the CIO with Sidney Hillman against John L. Lewis and became the most open UAW supporter of the Roosevelt administration’s drive toward war. He became a vicious opponent of strikes and pushed Hillman’s policy of complete union submission to the war machine and government boards.</p>
<p>At the July 1941 convention of the UAW, Reuther’s faction commanded a majority. He took advantage of it to shove through the first anti-democratic change in the UAW’s constitution – a discriminatory amendment barring “communists” from elective and appointive offices in the International. Reuther tried to bar the delegates from the Stalinist-led Allis-Chalmers local of Milwaukee from being seated and smear their strike. He pushed through a resolution condemning the strike of the North American Aviation workers, which Roosevelt broke with the use of federal troops.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinists Outdo Reuther</h4>
<p class="fst">But fate proved momentarily unkind to Reuther. Hitler had marched against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the Stalinists were not to be outdone in servile support of American imperialism and strikebreaking. The Roosevelt-Stalin war alliance was mirrored in the unity between the Murray-Hillman and Stalinist machines in the CIO to enforce the no-strike pledge and support of War Labor Board arbitration. Reuther was outflanked from the right.</p>
<p>Now he could only try to compete with the Stalinists in demonstrations of loyalty to the war government, support of the no-strike pledge, schemes for labor-management committees to improve the speed-up, and the notorious “equality of sacrifice” program for which the auto workers were induced to give up their overtime premium pay.</p>
<p>In order to preserve his faction and differentiate himself from the Addes-Stalinist group, Reuther found it more and more necessary to maneuver with the militants. At the 1943 convention, he found a means of hitting a blow at his opponents from the <em>left</em>. He led the fight against the Stalinist resolution for the “incentive pay” system and it was defeated. Almost everyone in the CIO, outside the Stalinists, opposed “incentive pay,” so Reuther took no risk. He joined with the Stalinists at the same convention, however, in reaffirming the no-strike pledge and complete submission to the war program.</p>
<p>On the slippery terrain of the war period, Reuther’s shifty foot-work brought him close to disaster. His prestige rank to its lowest point at the 1944 convention as the result of his shabby maneuvers over the no-strike pledge, during the stormiest debate in UAW history.</p>
<p>He first tried to prevent the resolution for unconditional repeal of the no-strike pledge from being presented with proposed rule to limit debate to a “majority” and a “minority” resolution, the Addes-Stalinist group’s and Reuther’s respectively, both reaffirming support of the no-strike pledge. The delegates howled this trick down and forced a Vote on all the resolutions.</p>
<p>Reuther’s resolution upholding the no-strike pledge contained a meaningless proviso, that between the end of the war in Germany (nine months off) and the end of the war in Japan the Executive Board be empowered to “authorize strike action” in plants “reconverted to the exclusive and sole manufacture of civilian production” (of which there were none).</p>
<p>Reuther was cut to pieces by both sides in the debate.</p>
<p>The opposition to the no-strike pledge, led by the Rank and File Caucus, in which the Trotskyists played a big role, piled up 36% of the votes. The “majority” resolution was defeated with slightly less than a majority. Reuther’s resolution was backed by less than 5% of the delegates. Reuther then joined with the rest of the leaders to squeeze through the unconditional no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>Reuther was an unabashed strikebreaker against “wildcat” walk-outs of the increasingly rebellious auto workers. He personally joined with Addes in attempting to break the 1944 Chrysler strike. His name was badly tarnished until the 1945-46 GM strike. Then, through this strike, at one stroke he was able to gain enough support from the militants, added to his caucus strength, to gather a narrow majority and win his longed-for UAW presidency.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reuther and the GM Strike of 1945-46</h4>
<p class="fst">The GM strike marked the big turn in Reuther’s fortunes. The initiative was first taken at a conference of 400 local union officials from two big UAW regions in Detroit on June 14, 1945. Against the opposition of the whole UAW International Executive Board, the conference went on record for a 30% wage increase and the holding of an NLRB strike vote. As director of the UAW’s GM Department, Reuther first tried to put the lid on the question of strike, although he covered himself with militant phrases. He stalled off strike action for months. Finally, on Nov. 21, he stepped to the head of the mounting movement and announced the strike was on.</p>
<p>Due to the “one-at-a-time” strategy Reuther had put through the Executive Board, the strike was to turn into a grueling 113-day battle. Reuther’s policy was to limit the strike to GM. The most advanced militants wanted to spread it to bring the full weight of the million auto workers to bear on the entire industry and force it quickly to terms.</p>
<p>Truman first unsuccessfully ordered the GM workers to go back without a settlement, then resorted to his “fact-finding” board procedure, designed to whittle down the union’s demands. Reuther complied with this procedure – the first time it was ever used. In the end, the GM workers’ endurance and fighting spirit, augmented by the strikes in steel an dother industries, won an 18½-cent raise.</p>
<p>Reuther had proved more quick to adapt himself to the resurgent militancy of the auto workers than had Thomas, Addes and the other UAW leaders, who gave the GM strike only indifferent support. The Stalinists, with whom the latter were tied at the time, were thoroughly discredited. Thus, riding the crest of the GM victory, Reuther ousted Thomas as president at the March 1946 convention.</p>
<p>But in the very moment of his triumph, Reuther dropped his “militant” mask. He conducted his campaign for the presidency on strictly clique lines. He was silent on all the basic issues, the Ford “company security” clause which he had approved in the Executive Board, the participation of union leaders on government boards. He concentrated on winning conservative elements, making unscrupulous deals for posts to gain the backing of Jim-Crow and even gangster types, like Richard Gosser of Toledo. He talked about “responsible” leadership – meaning one opposed to class struggle. His keynote was “unity,” an end to factions (all but his own. of course) and to what CIO President Philip Murray, in his’convention address, termed “internal bickering.” Reuther demonstratively promised he would be a “source of strength” to Murray, that timid apostle of “class harmony.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Reuther Gains a Clean Sweep</h4>
<p class="fst">The 1946 convention did not give Reuther all that he sought – complete rule. His faction was in a minority on the Executive Board – the delegates didn’t trust him with undivided power. By the next convention, however, he was able to make a clean sweep. This time it was not the militants who backed him. As in 1940 and 1941, he lined up the most conservative and reactionary elements, concluding an unsavory alliance even with the priest-ridden Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. The keynote of his program was anti-communism and red-baiting.</p>
<p>The reactionary trend was deepening in the country. Truman had proclaimed his “doctrine” of “containing Communism” everywhere in the world. Apathy and conservative moods dominated many workers and this was favorable to Reuther’s cause. He pushed through the resolution ordering the UAW officers to comply with the Taft-Hartley law and rode rough-shod over the opposition to take full control.</p>
<p>With the union reins firmly in his hands, Reuther has unfolded his real program for the union. Its essential features are centralizing of power and curbing of internal democracy; crippling of militancy; collaborating with the corporations in imposing long-term contracts; restricting real wage gains while boosting speed-up and man-hour output. The auto workers are being put on a “war footing.”</p>
<p>Reuther has ruthlessly pursued his drive to extirpate opposition. At the 1949 convention, his executive board secured powers to bring to trial and expel local union members. A campaign of local trials and expulsions has been instituted, since the start of the Korean war, against those accused of not supporting the war. Reuther has endorsed contracts permitting company managements to fire alleged “subversives.”</p>
<p>“Company security” clauses – the right of managements to “discipline” participants in so-called “unauthorized” strikes – have been incorporated, in one form or another, in all major contracts. The shop-steward method of settling grievances has been supplanted by the “impartial umpire,” who on all important issues rules in favor of the company.</p>
<p>In 1949, to head off a strike at Ford, Reuther picked up the recommendations of Truman’s Steel Fact-Finding Board and agreed to no wage increase in return for a pension limited to f 100 a month, including social security, payable to workers over 65 after 30 years of service. Reuther’s “pattern” undercut the demands of the CIO Steelworkers, who, after a prolonged strike, settled for a similar pension plan without wage gains.</p>
<p>A reputation has been fabricated for Reuther as a “slick” negotiator. Much light has been shed on this during the past three years. His “slickness” consists in wangling small concessions in exchange for yielding previous gains or surrendering the union’s major demands. Thus, in 1948, he agreed to a poorly worked out cost-of-living escalator clause, but gave away most of the GM workers’ demand for higher basic hourly pay. Also, for the first time he abandoned the one-year contract and signed a two-year pact.</p>
<p>The long-term contract has become the heart of Reuther’s policy of collaboration with the corporations and stripping the union of its fighting powers. This year Reuther introduced the 5-year contract, which binds the workers not to demand anything for five years and fixes a ceiling of four cents an hour annually for increases in basic wages. This policy, begun in GM, has been extended to Ford and other companies.<br>
</p>
<h4>How Reuther Negotiates</h4>
<p class="fst">How important a victory the corporations consider the long-term contract was indicated by the satisfaction expressed by GM President Charles E. Wilson, who pointed out that GM’s rate of man-hour output will increase for the next five years. He did not fail to hail Reuther for accepting “the principle of progress” and said, “The boys (Reuther & Co.) deserve a lot of credit.” <strong>Business Week</strong> summed up GM’s gain:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“GM has bought five years of labor peace. Its workers, with nothing to fight over for the next half decade save minor grievances, will almost forget they are union men. By 1955, UAW’s GM unit may no longer be a militant bargainer.”</p>
<p class="fst">At least, that is GM’s hope. And Ford’s.</p>
<p>How has Reuther been able to put over his reactionary union policy? He has depended heavily, of course, on such classic methods of the union bureaucrats as suppression of criticism and opposition, centralization of power in the top leaders, curbing rank-and-file militancy.</p>
<p>But Reuther does not rely solely on these crude methods. He understands the traditions of the auto workers and has respect for the volcanic forces latent in the ranks. Despite his earnest desire to establish himself as an effective moderator of the class struggle and to enforce the “rule, of the conference table” for the “rule of the picket line,” he has been compelled time and again in the years since 1947 to tolerate and go along with strikes. In 1948 the Chrysler strike had to be endorsed and in 1949 the Ford anti-speed-up strike broke over his head. This past summer a wave of strikes spurred Reuther to hasty negotiations for wage increases.</p>
<p>He has not dared to move as fast as he would have liked against opposition and has been forced to impose a certain restraint and caution on the most reactionary elements in the union who want to go “all-out” at once on the “commies” and the militants. When the company stooges and ACTU gang at the outbreak of the Korean war started hoodlum attacks on alleged “communists” in several auto plants, Reuther sensed that a big kick-back would ensue from the democratic-minded auto workers and issued a warning against such methods, advising the more “legal” means of formal trial procedures and expulsions.</p>
<p>Above all, in maintaining his hold on the ranks, Reuther knows how to cover himself with a mantle of “progressivism” and “social progress.” Of all the union leaders, he is the most adept at social demagogy. He does not even disdain to borrow slogans from the most anti-capitalist revolutionary source, the Trotskyists, when this serves his ends.</p>
<p>Thus, in the 1946 GM strike he picked up the “Open the Books of the Corporations” slogan from the Socialist Workers Party. It was an effective piece of propaganda in exposing the reluctance of GM to reveal its true profits. But Reuther turned the “Open the Books” slogan into a demand not for the <em>unions</em> right to investigate the corporation’s records, but for the government’s. After the strike, Reuther quickly dropped the slogan.</p>
<p>Reuther’s cost-of-living escalator clause was likewise borrowed from the Trotskyist program of the sliding scale of wages to adjust wage rates automatically to the rising cost of living. But in his hands it was used as a device to limit gains in basic real wages and to justify the imposition of long-term contracts.</p>
<p>Reuther’s reputation and the widespread publicity he gets, however, are based on more than his role and activities as a union leader. More and more he fancies himself in the part of a “social engineer” and “labor statesman,” as the prototype of the labor leader whose functions reach out to national and world affairs.</p>
<p>His reputation as an advanced “social thinker” and “bold planner” is based on the various schemes he has elaborated from time to time for dealing with important social and political problems. All his plans have one thing in common: their brief span of life. None has survived more than a few months.</p>
<p>Typical was his scheme to convert idle aircraft factories into the production of 20,000,000 pre-fabricated housing units in 10 years and thus solve both the acute housing problem and the growing unemployment that appeared in 1949. At that time Reuther sneered at the demand for the 30-hour week at 40 hours’ pay to meet unemployment and called it “idealistic and a dream at this time.” Today his own scheme is forgotten. He had no program of action to put it into effect and, besides, the aircraft plants are producing war planes for Truman’s tremendously increased armaments program.</p>
<p>Just after the Korean war began, Reuther came forth with his most grandiose scheme. It was nothing less than “A Total Peace Offensive” to “stop Communist aggression by taking the initiative in the world contest for men’s minds, hearts and loyalties.” This was to be accomplished through a program of “both” the “building of adequate military defense” and “launching total war against poverty and human insecurity” throughout the world. His main proposition called for the expenditure by the United States of $13 billion annually for 100 years (1950-2050) – a total cost of one trillion, 300 billion dollars – for economic and social benefits, part to be made available even to the Soviet Union. This vast sum was to be spent in addition to the then already staggering federal budget of $42 billion a year. This super-duper “Marshall Plan” was offered just when a CIO committee was bringing back from Western Europe a damning report on the original Marshall Plan which, they testified, had been a “miserable failure” so far as the workers were concerned and had only further enriched the wealthy.</p>
<p>Scarcely was Reuther’s new scheme in print, when Truman demanded and Congress enacted “supplemental appropriations” even larger than Reuther talked of. But the $18½ billion a year more that Washington is extracting from the American people is going exclusively for the “adequate military defense” (read imperialist war) part of Reuther’s program. What the American people and the rest of the world are going to get from the administration which Reuther supports is higher taxes, inflation, shortages, less housing, repression, military dictatorship, wage freezes, longer hours and finally the descent into annihilating atomic war.<br>
</p>
<h4>An Apologist for Imperialism</h4>
<p class="fst">Nevertheless this latest, stillborn “plan” of Reuther’s indicates how his mind operates and what his function as a labor leader is. He is aware that the American workers – including the auto workers – are very suspicious of the aims of American capitalism in the rest of the world and at home. They are wondering why Washington is supporting reactionary, anti-labor regimes in Europe and Asia, if its aims are so democratic. Is there to be another war to fatten the corporations and tear down labor’s living standards? Reuther is convinced that to get and keep the support of the workers for militarization, it is necessary to give the war program the cover of professed progressive social aims.</p>
<p>It is as an apologist and “left” cover for American imperialism and its war program that Reuther’s greatest significance lies. He is, in fact, the most aggressive and able representative in the labor movement of that most treacherous and deceptive tendency – social imperialism – represented in classical form by the European Social Democrats.</p>
<p>“Social imperialists” was the term Lenin applied to “socialists” who supported their own imperialist rulers in the First World War – “socialists in words, imperialists in deeds.” The present-day social imperialist does not even remain “socialist” in words, but, like Reuther, speaks of grandiose reforms for capitalism.</p>
<p>Reuther is the darling of the pro-war liberals and Social Democrats, who long ago recognized him as “our boy,” embraced, publicized and praised him. It is they – with Reuther’s conscious assistance – who have contributed most to the myth of Reuther as a new-type labor leader who combines aggressive militancy in union economic struggles with streamlined organizational efficiency and, most of all, far-seeing social vision. The real Reuther is a coldly calculating opportunist, able to play the “militant” one day and the “responsible” aide to the ruling class the next, who knows how to cater to the aspirations of the ranks with high-sounding “social plans” which he never follows through with a program of action.</p>
<p>As Reuther sits in his presidential chair at the UAW headquarters in Detroit, he can, see above him and before him the presidency of the CIO. Today he is widely spoken of as a likely successor to aging and ailing Philip Murray.</p>
<p>But he sees something more. Beyond the CIO presidency looms the prospect of political power in Washington.</p>
<p>Reuther’s ambitions are not so cramped as those of an old-type union leader like Murray. He represents a new and higher stage in the development of American labor. He does not want to limit his game to that of passive apologist for Wall Street’s brutal plans for world domination. He sees himself and the labor bureaucracy, resting on the tremendous organized power of the unions, as more than propagandists and “labor advisers” on government boards, as in the last war.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Political Ambitions of a Reuther</h4>
<p class="fst">He envisions himself and the labor bureaucracy cut out for leading parts in running the government and determining its policies. He does not think that a government of “dollar-a-year” corporation executives can command the loyalty of the workers and keep them in line. For this, he believes, the labor leaders will be needed in commanding government posts.</p>
<p>He has many times indicated his admiration of the British labor leaders who have been in control of the British government since 1945. And he has had before him the example of the Social Democrats in Western Europe who have held top posts in coalition capitalist governments.</p>
<p>He has toyed around with the idea of a “third party” and even spoke of it tentatively in 1948, but dropped it when Truman was nominated for president. He has been the chief labor figure in Americans for Democratic Action, a formation of pro-war liberal and Social Democratic elements, which is seeking to build itself as an organizationally independent wing of “progressive” capitalist politics.</p>
<p>Does Reuther dream of himself as the American Attlee who will some day save US capitalism from itself? If he has not permitted himself that hope, it is not because he feels unqualified.</p>
<p>But what Walter Reuther may become will be determined not by his individual desires and ambitions, but by the self-same forces in the class struggle that have carried him to his present prominence. The decisive factor in his further career will be the auto workers and the CIO movement as a whole. He must go where they go – or he will not go with them at all.</p>
<p>Reuther must always be mindful and watchful of those hundreds of thousands of workers in the plant of Detroit. Flint and a score of other industrial centers who hold his destiny in their mighty hands. They have made Reuther what he is; they can unmake him or cause him to modify his conduct tomorrow or the day after.</p>
<p>But it would be unrealistic to expect any basic change in the characteristics and role which he has displayed in his ascent to office and his activities in it. These have become second nature to him. When it comes to the showdown, Reuther for all his bold talk readily yields to pressures from the government and the corporations. That is why he cannot give the auto workers the leadership they must have to maintain their conditions and go forward. That is why the aim of the militants is not to “reform” Reuther but to replace him.</p>
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Art Preis
Walter Reuther
(November 1950)
From Fourth International, Vol.11 No.6, November-December 1950, pp.176-182.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Walter Reuther, president since 1946 of the powerful and strategically placed CIO United Automobile Workers, is generally regarded as the most “up-and-coming” of the new generation of labor leaders who began their rise with the CIO. Of all who rose to prominence and leadership in the UAW’s early days – including some of not inconsiderable talents – not one has survived save Reuther. Homer Martin, Wyndham Mortimer, R.J. Thomas, George Addes, Richard Frankensteen and many others were forced out or dropped by the wayside. Reuther alone stayed on top. Today, he holds almost undisputed control of this key union in the CIO.
“Smart” and “shrewd” are adjectives frequently applied to Reuther. But for all his adroitness and cunning, he is by no means the “master of his fate” He has been shaped by powerful social forces, pressures and conflicts, particularly as these have affected and been reflected in the development of the UAW.
To understand Reuther’s aims, methods, role in the labor movement and the direction in which he is traveling, it is essential to understand the kind of union in which he grew up and on whose mighty shoulders he now stands. For whatever is “unique” about Reuther is due, in the main, to the fact that he has come out of what has been, and in some respects remains, a unique union.
The UAW has been described most frequently as “dynamic.” Until the past few years, this adjective was fully justified and even today, as a “settled” union with a hardening bureaucratic crust, the UAW still retains the sources of its dynamic character.
In its rise the UAW exemplified the spontaneous rank-and-file character of that titanic upsurge of industrial labor in the Thirties which built the CIO. The auto union’s militancy became a by-word. If the auto workers did not invent the sit-down strike, they nevertheless perfected it and their use of it in the 1936-37 General Motors strike inspired its spread into a national phenomenon. They developed the famous “flying squadrons,” those mobile shock troops of the picket lines which have become permanent institutions in many UAW locals.
This “dynamism” of the UAW was due not to fighting qualities exceptional to auto workers, but rather to the exceptional factors in the origin and traditions of the UAW. Its unique development was a direct reflection of its internal democracy, which permitted the workers’ native militancy to find expression and allowed their initiative to flower.
Democratic Traditions of the UAW
The independence of the membership, their insistence on “running the show,” revealed itself from the start when they fought the AFL bureaucracy’s attempts to impose outside leadership upon them. Without exception, the auto workers’ leadership has been raised from their own ranks. For most of its history, UAW conventions saw stormy revolts against any moves to strengthen the bureaucratic powers of the top leaders against the ranks.
They jealously guarded the right to maintain caucuses and the open factional struggles of tendencies in the UAW was a constant source of astonishment – and dismay – to the old-line officialdom who ran their own unions with an iron hand and never let anyone “talk out of turn.” All political views found expression in the continuous struggle for program and leadership. New ideas found a favorable climate and the membership was educated in progressive social and political views. Far from weakening the auto workers’ union, this internal democracy became the wellspring of its power and tremendous growth.
The UAW did not come by its militant and democratic traditions accidentally. Their foundation was consciously laid in the decisive early stages of the union by politically radical workers who were responsible for the first successful organization in auto and who led the auto workers to their initial victories.
The Toledo Auto-Lite strike in May 1934, a virtual mass insurrection which won the first major contract in the auto industry, set the pattern. This crucial battle was led by members of the American Workers Party, which a few months later merged with the Communist League of America (Trotskyist) to form the Workers Party (now the Socialist Workers Party). A year later Trotskyist’s played the chief role in organizing and leading the Toledo Chevrolet strike that established the first union beach-head in General Motors. In this strike the Trotskyists gave leadership to the opposition against the old-line AFL leaders whose policies of class-collaboration and reliance on government intervention were the chief stumbling-block to unionization of the auto workers.
Spearhead of Revolt
It was these Toledo auto workers, as the largest delegation at the UAW’s founding convention in August 1935, who organized and spearheaded a revolt against the imposition of Frances Dillon, AFL President William Green’s personal representative, as appointed head of the newly founded international. They submitted finally under threat of losing their new charter. But a year later – again with the Toledo delegation in the lead – the militants, organized as a caucus, overwhelmingly rejected Dillon and elected their own officers from their own ranks.
These first two conventions not only freed the auto union from the deadly grip of an established bureaucracy, but incorporated into the very structure of the new international the principles of democratic unionism. Thus, in 1936, when reactionary elements red-baited Homer Martin, who was subsequently to become the first elected president, the convention delegates rose up and wrote into their constitution those justly famous provisions against discrimination for race, creed, national origin and political beliefs. In 1941, Reuther’s faction was to make the first major breach in this democratic constitution.
The May 1936 convention provided a remarkable demonstration of advanced political consciousness when the delegates voted overwhelmingly for the formation of an independent farmer-labor party. Direct intervention by John L. Lewis was required to force the delegates to attach a rider to this resolution endorsing Roosevelt for re-election.
The crucial test of the fledgling union came in the 1936-37 battle with General Motors. Here again it was radicals who gave decisive direction to the struggle. In Flint, Mich., where the battle centered, Kermit Johnson and Roy Reuther, both socialists, and Robert Travis, a leader of the earlier Toledo Chevrolet strike and by 1937 with the Stalinists, were the chief organizers and leaders of the great sitdown that brought victory. Contrary to a persistent legend, Walter Reuther entered the picture only toward the end of the strike and played no important role in its organization, strategy and leadership. But he did give it valuable assistance at its most critical juncture when thousands of workers from Toledo, Detroit and other auto centers poured into Flint. Reuther led a large contingent of his big, newly amalgamated Detroit West Side local, of which he was president, to support the sit-downers.
In those days Reuther was not exceptional for militancy and political radicalism. Everyone spoke – or pretended to speak – the language of mass action, rank-and-file control and advanced social and political ideas. The union in which young Walter Reuther got his start breathed mass action and democracy. It was led by zealous young men, in many instances radical-minded, most of whom had earned their spurs on the picket lines. This union, moreover, was pressing toward far-reaching social and political goals.
For these very reasons, the top CIO leaders regarded the UAW as a “problem child.” They feared the spread of its example. What would happen to them if their members got notions about rank-and-file control, union democracy, modest salaries for officers, annual conventions, the right to caucus and to oppose the leadership? Moreover, the CIO leaders were schooled in class collaboration, believers in the conference table and government favors rather than in strikes and class struggle methods. The UAW, in their opinion, had to be “tamed.”
The new UAW leaders themselves were beginning to get a taste for power. Homer Martin, who was elected president in 1936, by 1937 saw himself in the role of “boss” of a big union. The Stalinists, with a strong machine, were pushing for control with a program to tie the union to Roosevelt’s coattails.
The CIO leaders and the Roosevelt administration feared above all that the UAW might get “out-of-hand” politically. They had received one bad shock at the 1936 convention. They did not want to risk any more, especially since Roosevelt was already moving on the course that was to lead this country into war. For American imperialism and its labor supporters, it was imperative to curb the militancy of this “dangerous and explosive” union, harness it with a conservative bureaucracy and stifle its internal democracy.
His Credentials
There were not a few candidates for the job – Homer Martin, the Stalinists and careerists of all stripes. But, in the end, the forces of conservatism found their man in Walter Reuther. He had the proper qualifications, the right combination of talents and an appreciation of the nature and complexities of the task.
He had youth, energy, drive and ambition in a union that was young, vigorous and aggressive. He had a sharp mind and a fluent tongue that could express his ideas forcefully and clearly, although he lacked distinction in thought or style.
The son of an old-time Debs Socialist, Reuther got his real start in the labor movement as a Socialist agitator, when, at the age of 25, he campaigned for Norman Thomas and joined the SP. His early Socialist training and background had prepared him for the union movement, taught him how to appeal to militant workers, gave him a broader conception of the social system. A radical background was a good credential to the workers who built the UAW. And it did his reputation no harm that in 1933, after he was fired for union activity in the Detroit Ford plant, he and his brother Victor took their small savings and went to Europe, working 16 months in an auto plant in the Soviet Union.
Not the least of Reuther’s talents was his skill at factional maneuver. In the factional game, he had the agility of a star half-back, quick to find holes in his opponents’ line, slippery in the open and adroit at pivoting and reversing his field. To reach his long-sought goal of the UAW presidency, he had to twist and straight-arm and knee his way through powerful opposition in a bitter factional struggle of 10 years’ duration.
Most of all, Reuther was completely identified with the auto workers. Following his return from Europe in 1934, he had plunged into the task of organizing the unorganized Detroit auto workers. By 1936, he was elected to the UAW’s national executive board at that year’s convention. By 1937, he had succeeded in amalgamating a number of small Detroit West Side shops into one big local, which gave him the original solid base in the membership on which he was to build his power.
Thus Reuther had grown up in the auto workers’ ranks and participated in their struggles. And he knew how to exploit this fact. No matter how high he rose above the ranks or how far he moved away from their aspirations and needs, he was always careful that it was not so high and so far as to lose connection with them. Other UAW leaders, as shrewd and talented as Reuther, lost sight of this fundamental fact and sooner or later came a cropper.
This history of Reuther’s rise to power is the history of the factional wars that raged inside the UAW from 1937 to 1947. There were no fundamental, well-defined differences in program between the contending leaders and there were many shifts and realignments in the unprincipled contest for posts and power.
Homer Martin made his bid for supreme control following the 1937 GM strike. He tried to curb “wildcat” strikes in GM with a letter to the company offering it the right to “discipline” participants in “unauthorized” walkouts. When his high-handed methods ran into opposition, he raised the hue and cry about “communists” and “socialists” and tried to change the constitution to give him more powers. He fired a number of organizers, including Walter and Victor Reuther. Ironically, a decade later in a period of strong reaction and witch-hunting, Walter Reuther was to put Martin’s program into effect with a vengeance, from one-man rule and “company security” clauses to redbaiting and expulsions.
Martin climaxed his headstrong course by suspending a majority of the Executive Board members. By 1939, facing defeat, he tried to take the UAW back into the AFL. But the overwhelming majority of the auto workers refused to go along. Martin split and drifted into oblivion.
The Opportunist Emerges
The period of the fight with Martin marked a decisive turning point for Reuther in a vital respect. It was then that he underwent and completed his political metamorphosis. Reuther never did have more than a sentimental attachment to socialism. He had a disdain for Marxist theory. He was a devotee of “realistic” politics, by which is usually meant opportunistic politics in which principles take second place to posts and immediate advantages. Once immersed in union maneuvers and the struggle for posts and power, Reuther’s socialism quickly melted away.
Even the light ideological baggage of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party hampered the young ambitious union leader. He figured to latch on to the political movement that offered the most promising and immediate rewards, the New Deal. In 1938 he decided to support Frank Murphy, a Democrat, for re-election as Michigan’s governor. At that time, the Socialist Party still maintained a policy of electoral independence and opposition to capitalist parties and candidates. But an amicable deal was cooked up. Reuther agreed not to embarrass the SP with a formal resignation at that time. Norman Thomas agreed to look the other way while Reuther jumped on the New Deal band wagon.
Another important aspect of Reuther’s political evolution was his collaboration with the Stalinists in the UAW, which did not end formally until 1939. His attitude toward the Stalinists then was in sharp contrast to his bitter hostility of today. It was the heyday of the Stalinist “People’s Front” and “collective security” program, when they .wooed Roosevelt and transformed him from a “fascist” into a “friend of labor.” Reuther could work with them then, although it was the time of the bloody Moscow Frame-up Trials and the betrayal of the Spanish revolution.
Significantly, his first clashes with the Stalinists were not over principles and program, but over union posts and advantages. He participated with them in the Unity Group caucus until late in 1938. But their conflict was foreshadowed at the April 1938 Michigan CIO convention. Victor Reuther was defeated for a post when the Stalinists failed to support him. This kind of blow is unforgivable to one who believes a good post is worth any number of principles. In due course, Reuther was to repay the Stalinists a hundredfold.
The 1939 Convention
The 1939 UAW convention, after Martin’s split, was no feast of harmony. On the one side was Reuther, who had the backing of the Socialist Party fraction, a number of powerful Detroit locals such as Hudson. Chrysler and his own West Side local, as well as partial support from the top CIO leaders. On the other side were the Stalinists, allied with a group of careerists, who had the stronger machine.
The Stalinist-Addes forces, despite their strength, were not anxious for any show-down fight that would put them at odds with Lewis, Murray and Hillman, while the latter wanted the semblance of “harmony.” They accepted the compromise offered by Hillman and Murray, Lewis’s representatives at the convention and agreed upon R.J. Thomas as president, whom Reuther himself supported. Hillman and Murray agreed that all vice presidential posts would be eliminated – Reuther’s included. Thus both the Stalinist-Addes and Reuther factions stepped back in favor of a man with no following at the time who had but recently jumped off Homer Martin’s band wagon.
In 1940 and 1941, when the Stalin-Hitler pact, the unleashing of the European war and the Finnish-Soviet war inspired anti-Soviet hostility in this country, Reuther became the leader of the most conservative elements in the UAW. He lined himself up in the CIO with Sidney Hillman against John L. Lewis and became the most open UAW supporter of the Roosevelt administration’s drive toward war. He became a vicious opponent of strikes and pushed Hillman’s policy of complete union submission to the war machine and government boards.
At the July 1941 convention of the UAW, Reuther’s faction commanded a majority. He took advantage of it to shove through the first anti-democratic change in the UAW’s constitution – a discriminatory amendment barring “communists” from elective and appointive offices in the International. Reuther tried to bar the delegates from the Stalinist-led Allis-Chalmers local of Milwaukee from being seated and smear their strike. He pushed through a resolution condemning the strike of the North American Aviation workers, which Roosevelt broke with the use of federal troops.
Stalinists Outdo Reuther
But fate proved momentarily unkind to Reuther. Hitler had marched against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the Stalinists were not to be outdone in servile support of American imperialism and strikebreaking. The Roosevelt-Stalin war alliance was mirrored in the unity between the Murray-Hillman and Stalinist machines in the CIO to enforce the no-strike pledge and support of War Labor Board arbitration. Reuther was outflanked from the right.
Now he could only try to compete with the Stalinists in demonstrations of loyalty to the war government, support of the no-strike pledge, schemes for labor-management committees to improve the speed-up, and the notorious “equality of sacrifice” program for which the auto workers were induced to give up their overtime premium pay.
In order to preserve his faction and differentiate himself from the Addes-Stalinist group, Reuther found it more and more necessary to maneuver with the militants. At the 1943 convention, he found a means of hitting a blow at his opponents from the left. He led the fight against the Stalinist resolution for the “incentive pay” system and it was defeated. Almost everyone in the CIO, outside the Stalinists, opposed “incentive pay,” so Reuther took no risk. He joined with the Stalinists at the same convention, however, in reaffirming the no-strike pledge and complete submission to the war program.
On the slippery terrain of the war period, Reuther’s shifty foot-work brought him close to disaster. His prestige rank to its lowest point at the 1944 convention as the result of his shabby maneuvers over the no-strike pledge, during the stormiest debate in UAW history.
He first tried to prevent the resolution for unconditional repeal of the no-strike pledge from being presented with proposed rule to limit debate to a “majority” and a “minority” resolution, the Addes-Stalinist group’s and Reuther’s respectively, both reaffirming support of the no-strike pledge. The delegates howled this trick down and forced a Vote on all the resolutions.
Reuther’s resolution upholding the no-strike pledge contained a meaningless proviso, that between the end of the war in Germany (nine months off) and the end of the war in Japan the Executive Board be empowered to “authorize strike action” in plants “reconverted to the exclusive and sole manufacture of civilian production” (of which there were none).
Reuther was cut to pieces by both sides in the debate.
The opposition to the no-strike pledge, led by the Rank and File Caucus, in which the Trotskyists played a big role, piled up 36% of the votes. The “majority” resolution was defeated with slightly less than a majority. Reuther’s resolution was backed by less than 5% of the delegates. Reuther then joined with the rest of the leaders to squeeze through the unconditional no-strike pledge.
Reuther was an unabashed strikebreaker against “wildcat” walk-outs of the increasingly rebellious auto workers. He personally joined with Addes in attempting to break the 1944 Chrysler strike. His name was badly tarnished until the 1945-46 GM strike. Then, through this strike, at one stroke he was able to gain enough support from the militants, added to his caucus strength, to gather a narrow majority and win his longed-for UAW presidency.
Reuther and the GM Strike of 1945-46
The GM strike marked the big turn in Reuther’s fortunes. The initiative was first taken at a conference of 400 local union officials from two big UAW regions in Detroit on June 14, 1945. Against the opposition of the whole UAW International Executive Board, the conference went on record for a 30% wage increase and the holding of an NLRB strike vote. As director of the UAW’s GM Department, Reuther first tried to put the lid on the question of strike, although he covered himself with militant phrases. He stalled off strike action for months. Finally, on Nov. 21, he stepped to the head of the mounting movement and announced the strike was on.
Due to the “one-at-a-time” strategy Reuther had put through the Executive Board, the strike was to turn into a grueling 113-day battle. Reuther’s policy was to limit the strike to GM. The most advanced militants wanted to spread it to bring the full weight of the million auto workers to bear on the entire industry and force it quickly to terms.
Truman first unsuccessfully ordered the GM workers to go back without a settlement, then resorted to his “fact-finding” board procedure, designed to whittle down the union’s demands. Reuther complied with this procedure – the first time it was ever used. In the end, the GM workers’ endurance and fighting spirit, augmented by the strikes in steel an dother industries, won an 18½-cent raise.
Reuther had proved more quick to adapt himself to the resurgent militancy of the auto workers than had Thomas, Addes and the other UAW leaders, who gave the GM strike only indifferent support. The Stalinists, with whom the latter were tied at the time, were thoroughly discredited. Thus, riding the crest of the GM victory, Reuther ousted Thomas as president at the March 1946 convention.
But in the very moment of his triumph, Reuther dropped his “militant” mask. He conducted his campaign for the presidency on strictly clique lines. He was silent on all the basic issues, the Ford “company security” clause which he had approved in the Executive Board, the participation of union leaders on government boards. He concentrated on winning conservative elements, making unscrupulous deals for posts to gain the backing of Jim-Crow and even gangster types, like Richard Gosser of Toledo. He talked about “responsible” leadership – meaning one opposed to class struggle. His keynote was “unity,” an end to factions (all but his own. of course) and to what CIO President Philip Murray, in his’convention address, termed “internal bickering.” Reuther demonstratively promised he would be a “source of strength” to Murray, that timid apostle of “class harmony.”
Reuther Gains a Clean Sweep
The 1946 convention did not give Reuther all that he sought – complete rule. His faction was in a minority on the Executive Board – the delegates didn’t trust him with undivided power. By the next convention, however, he was able to make a clean sweep. This time it was not the militants who backed him. As in 1940 and 1941, he lined up the most conservative and reactionary elements, concluding an unsavory alliance even with the priest-ridden Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. The keynote of his program was anti-communism and red-baiting.
The reactionary trend was deepening in the country. Truman had proclaimed his “doctrine” of “containing Communism” everywhere in the world. Apathy and conservative moods dominated many workers and this was favorable to Reuther’s cause. He pushed through the resolution ordering the UAW officers to comply with the Taft-Hartley law and rode rough-shod over the opposition to take full control.
With the union reins firmly in his hands, Reuther has unfolded his real program for the union. Its essential features are centralizing of power and curbing of internal democracy; crippling of militancy; collaborating with the corporations in imposing long-term contracts; restricting real wage gains while boosting speed-up and man-hour output. The auto workers are being put on a “war footing.”
Reuther has ruthlessly pursued his drive to extirpate opposition. At the 1949 convention, his executive board secured powers to bring to trial and expel local union members. A campaign of local trials and expulsions has been instituted, since the start of the Korean war, against those accused of not supporting the war. Reuther has endorsed contracts permitting company managements to fire alleged “subversives.”
“Company security” clauses – the right of managements to “discipline” participants in so-called “unauthorized” strikes – have been incorporated, in one form or another, in all major contracts. The shop-steward method of settling grievances has been supplanted by the “impartial umpire,” who on all important issues rules in favor of the company.
In 1949, to head off a strike at Ford, Reuther picked up the recommendations of Truman’s Steel Fact-Finding Board and agreed to no wage increase in return for a pension limited to f 100 a month, including social security, payable to workers over 65 after 30 years of service. Reuther’s “pattern” undercut the demands of the CIO Steelworkers, who, after a prolonged strike, settled for a similar pension plan without wage gains.
A reputation has been fabricated for Reuther as a “slick” negotiator. Much light has been shed on this during the past three years. His “slickness” consists in wangling small concessions in exchange for yielding previous gains or surrendering the union’s major demands. Thus, in 1948, he agreed to a poorly worked out cost-of-living escalator clause, but gave away most of the GM workers’ demand for higher basic hourly pay. Also, for the first time he abandoned the one-year contract and signed a two-year pact.
The long-term contract has become the heart of Reuther’s policy of collaboration with the corporations and stripping the union of its fighting powers. This year Reuther introduced the 5-year contract, which binds the workers not to demand anything for five years and fixes a ceiling of four cents an hour annually for increases in basic wages. This policy, begun in GM, has been extended to Ford and other companies.
How Reuther Negotiates
How important a victory the corporations consider the long-term contract was indicated by the satisfaction expressed by GM President Charles E. Wilson, who pointed out that GM’s rate of man-hour output will increase for the next five years. He did not fail to hail Reuther for accepting “the principle of progress” and said, “The boys (Reuther & Co.) deserve a lot of credit.” Business Week summed up GM’s gain:
“GM has bought five years of labor peace. Its workers, with nothing to fight over for the next half decade save minor grievances, will almost forget they are union men. By 1955, UAW’s GM unit may no longer be a militant bargainer.”
At least, that is GM’s hope. And Ford’s.
How has Reuther been able to put over his reactionary union policy? He has depended heavily, of course, on such classic methods of the union bureaucrats as suppression of criticism and opposition, centralization of power in the top leaders, curbing rank-and-file militancy.
But Reuther does not rely solely on these crude methods. He understands the traditions of the auto workers and has respect for the volcanic forces latent in the ranks. Despite his earnest desire to establish himself as an effective moderator of the class struggle and to enforce the “rule, of the conference table” for the “rule of the picket line,” he has been compelled time and again in the years since 1947 to tolerate and go along with strikes. In 1948 the Chrysler strike had to be endorsed and in 1949 the Ford anti-speed-up strike broke over his head. This past summer a wave of strikes spurred Reuther to hasty negotiations for wage increases.
He has not dared to move as fast as he would have liked against opposition and has been forced to impose a certain restraint and caution on the most reactionary elements in the union who want to go “all-out” at once on the “commies” and the militants. When the company stooges and ACTU gang at the outbreak of the Korean war started hoodlum attacks on alleged “communists” in several auto plants, Reuther sensed that a big kick-back would ensue from the democratic-minded auto workers and issued a warning against such methods, advising the more “legal” means of formal trial procedures and expulsions.
Above all, in maintaining his hold on the ranks, Reuther knows how to cover himself with a mantle of “progressivism” and “social progress.” Of all the union leaders, he is the most adept at social demagogy. He does not even disdain to borrow slogans from the most anti-capitalist revolutionary source, the Trotskyists, when this serves his ends.
Thus, in the 1946 GM strike he picked up the “Open the Books of the Corporations” slogan from the Socialist Workers Party. It was an effective piece of propaganda in exposing the reluctance of GM to reveal its true profits. But Reuther turned the “Open the Books” slogan into a demand not for the unions right to investigate the corporation’s records, but for the government’s. After the strike, Reuther quickly dropped the slogan.
Reuther’s cost-of-living escalator clause was likewise borrowed from the Trotskyist program of the sliding scale of wages to adjust wage rates automatically to the rising cost of living. But in his hands it was used as a device to limit gains in basic real wages and to justify the imposition of long-term contracts.
Reuther’s reputation and the widespread publicity he gets, however, are based on more than his role and activities as a union leader. More and more he fancies himself in the part of a “social engineer” and “labor statesman,” as the prototype of the labor leader whose functions reach out to national and world affairs.
His reputation as an advanced “social thinker” and “bold planner” is based on the various schemes he has elaborated from time to time for dealing with important social and political problems. All his plans have one thing in common: their brief span of life. None has survived more than a few months.
Typical was his scheme to convert idle aircraft factories into the production of 20,000,000 pre-fabricated housing units in 10 years and thus solve both the acute housing problem and the growing unemployment that appeared in 1949. At that time Reuther sneered at the demand for the 30-hour week at 40 hours’ pay to meet unemployment and called it “idealistic and a dream at this time.” Today his own scheme is forgotten. He had no program of action to put it into effect and, besides, the aircraft plants are producing war planes for Truman’s tremendously increased armaments program.
Just after the Korean war began, Reuther came forth with his most grandiose scheme. It was nothing less than “A Total Peace Offensive” to “stop Communist aggression by taking the initiative in the world contest for men’s minds, hearts and loyalties.” This was to be accomplished through a program of “both” the “building of adequate military defense” and “launching total war against poverty and human insecurity” throughout the world. His main proposition called for the expenditure by the United States of $13 billion annually for 100 years (1950-2050) – a total cost of one trillion, 300 billion dollars – for economic and social benefits, part to be made available even to the Soviet Union. This vast sum was to be spent in addition to the then already staggering federal budget of $42 billion a year. This super-duper “Marshall Plan” was offered just when a CIO committee was bringing back from Western Europe a damning report on the original Marshall Plan which, they testified, had been a “miserable failure” so far as the workers were concerned and had only further enriched the wealthy.
Scarcely was Reuther’s new scheme in print, when Truman demanded and Congress enacted “supplemental appropriations” even larger than Reuther talked of. But the $18½ billion a year more that Washington is extracting from the American people is going exclusively for the “adequate military defense” (read imperialist war) part of Reuther’s program. What the American people and the rest of the world are going to get from the administration which Reuther supports is higher taxes, inflation, shortages, less housing, repression, military dictatorship, wage freezes, longer hours and finally the descent into annihilating atomic war.
An Apologist for Imperialism
Nevertheless this latest, stillborn “plan” of Reuther’s indicates how his mind operates and what his function as a labor leader is. He is aware that the American workers – including the auto workers – are very suspicious of the aims of American capitalism in the rest of the world and at home. They are wondering why Washington is supporting reactionary, anti-labor regimes in Europe and Asia, if its aims are so democratic. Is there to be another war to fatten the corporations and tear down labor’s living standards? Reuther is convinced that to get and keep the support of the workers for militarization, it is necessary to give the war program the cover of professed progressive social aims.
It is as an apologist and “left” cover for American imperialism and its war program that Reuther’s greatest significance lies. He is, in fact, the most aggressive and able representative in the labor movement of that most treacherous and deceptive tendency – social imperialism – represented in classical form by the European Social Democrats.
“Social imperialists” was the term Lenin applied to “socialists” who supported their own imperialist rulers in the First World War – “socialists in words, imperialists in deeds.” The present-day social imperialist does not even remain “socialist” in words, but, like Reuther, speaks of grandiose reforms for capitalism.
Reuther is the darling of the pro-war liberals and Social Democrats, who long ago recognized him as “our boy,” embraced, publicized and praised him. It is they – with Reuther’s conscious assistance – who have contributed most to the myth of Reuther as a new-type labor leader who combines aggressive militancy in union economic struggles with streamlined organizational efficiency and, most of all, far-seeing social vision. The real Reuther is a coldly calculating opportunist, able to play the “militant” one day and the “responsible” aide to the ruling class the next, who knows how to cater to the aspirations of the ranks with high-sounding “social plans” which he never follows through with a program of action.
As Reuther sits in his presidential chair at the UAW headquarters in Detroit, he can, see above him and before him the presidency of the CIO. Today he is widely spoken of as a likely successor to aging and ailing Philip Murray.
But he sees something more. Beyond the CIO presidency looms the prospect of political power in Washington.
Reuther’s ambitions are not so cramped as those of an old-type union leader like Murray. He represents a new and higher stage in the development of American labor. He does not want to limit his game to that of passive apologist for Wall Street’s brutal plans for world domination. He sees himself and the labor bureaucracy, resting on the tremendous organized power of the unions, as more than propagandists and “labor advisers” on government boards, as in the last war.
The Political Ambitions of a Reuther
He envisions himself and the labor bureaucracy cut out for leading parts in running the government and determining its policies. He does not think that a government of “dollar-a-year” corporation executives can command the loyalty of the workers and keep them in line. For this, he believes, the labor leaders will be needed in commanding government posts.
He has many times indicated his admiration of the British labor leaders who have been in control of the British government since 1945. And he has had before him the example of the Social Democrats in Western Europe who have held top posts in coalition capitalist governments.
He has toyed around with the idea of a “third party” and even spoke of it tentatively in 1948, but dropped it when Truman was nominated for president. He has been the chief labor figure in Americans for Democratic Action, a formation of pro-war liberal and Social Democratic elements, which is seeking to build itself as an organizationally independent wing of “progressive” capitalist politics.
Does Reuther dream of himself as the American Attlee who will some day save US capitalism from itself? If he has not permitted himself that hope, it is not because he feels unqualified.
But what Walter Reuther may become will be determined not by his individual desires and ambitions, but by the self-same forces in the class struggle that have carried him to his present prominence. The decisive factor in his further career will be the auto workers and the CIO movement as a whole. He must go where they go – or he will not go with them at all.
Reuther must always be mindful and watchful of those hundreds of thousands of workers in the plant of Detroit. Flint and a score of other industrial centers who hold his destiny in their mighty hands. They have made Reuther what he is; they can unmake him or cause him to modify his conduct tomorrow or the day after.
But it would be unrealistic to expect any basic change in the characteristics and role which he has displayed in his ascent to office and his activities in it. These have become second nature to him. When it comes to the showdown, Reuther for all his bold talk readily yields to pressures from the government and the corporations. That is why he cannot give the auto workers the leadership they must have to maintain their conditions and go forward. That is why the aim of the militants is not to “reform” Reuther but to replace him.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman’s “State of Union” Speech<br>
Is Futile Bid to Halt Labor Crisis</h1>
<h3>(12 January 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_02" target="new">Vol. X No. 2</a>, 12 January 1946, p. 7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Attempting to project a program to allay the deepening and spreading class struggle between American labor and Big Business, President Truman on January 3 addressed the country by radio on “The State of the Union.”</p>
<p>The “state of the union,” Truman confessed, is not a happy one. “First among the obstacles” to the universal security and prosperity which the war government promised for peace, said Truman, “have been labor-management disputes?’</p>
<p>Thus, Truman dealt primarily with the decisive problem vexing American political life since V-J Day – the tremendous conflict between American labor and capital.<br>
</p>
<h4>Truman’s “Solution”</h4>
<p class="fst">Truman proposed to alleviate this conflict by passage of a single piece of legislation, the “fact-finding” bill initiated by him on December 3 when he made his strike-breaking “request” for the GM workers to end their strike. In his speech, he again called for a federal law to establish semi-compulsory aribitration government “fact-finding boards” and to prohibit the right to strike for a “30-day ‘cooling-off’ period.”</p>
<p>This proposition was met with bitter hostility and denunciation by virtually all sections of organized labor when it was first propounded. But once more it is advanced by Truman as his “solution” to the irrepressible class warfare provoked by the union-busting, wage-slashing offensive of America’s war-profits bloated corporations.</p>
<p>Truman, of course, claimed his program to restrict the right to strike “contains nothing harmful to labor.” For, he argued, “there is no reason why a strike cannot be postponed for thirty days” so that the government can “step in to obtain all the facts and report its findings to the country.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Danger to Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">In general, any law to restrict the right to strike would be an opening wedge for more drastic anti-labor legislation and in its very essence can be only dangerous to labor.</p>
<p>Under the particular circumstances now prevailing, Truman’s measure would have a specifically pernicious effect upon labor’s struggle. The present strikes are being called after months of delay and stalling, as a last desperate resort of the workers to win their just demands. The proposal to enforce a further 30-day delay would serve only to interpose another obstacle to strike action at the most timely and strategic moment.</p>
<p>If, in addition to this, the workers cannot strike before they submit their demands to a hand-picked government “fact- finding” board, we have nothing less than the establishment, even though in limited form, of compulsory arbitration. Moreover, the American workers have had a sufficient and bitter experience with these red-tape government boards.</p>
<p>But along with his attempt to show what a “good thing” his “fact-finding” plan is for labor, Truman also claims, with far more truth, that “on the other hand there is nothing harmful to management in this proposal.”</p>
<p>He explains carefully that “no detailed information obtained from the books of any company is to be revealed.” This is simply assurance to the corporations that the administration proposes to suppress any facts whose publication might be injurious to the interests of the profiteers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Talking into Vacuum</h4>
<p class="fst">But even with this proposition, so favorable to the corporate interests, Truman has found himself talking into a vacuum.</p>
<p>For the reality of the situation is that America’s power- drunk ruling class, the clique of Wall Street monopolists, is determined on nothing less than unconditional surrender of the labor movement.</p>
<p>This was made patent by the arrogant action of General Motors in walking out of Truman’s fact-finding hearings in the GM strike – an action which evoked only the feeble complaint from Truman that “you have seen how the General Motors Corporation has refused to cooperate with this fact-finding board.”</p>
<p>Moreover, Congress, which so completely reflects the interests and desires of Big Business, has pigeon-holed Truman’s “fact-finding” proposal, a matter of considerable distress to the President. Congress is preparing far more savage anti-labor laws.</p>
<p>For its part, organized labor, 15,000,000 strong, is no longer amenable to the type of government intervention it experienced during the war under the War Labor Board. Whatever the inclinations of the labor leaders may be, the union ranks are determined to fight for their rights tooth and nail with their most effective economic weapon – strike action.<br>
</p>
<h4>Truman’s Choices</h4>
<p class="fst">In this situation of a remorseless Big Business union-busting offensive and a defiant, militant resistance by labor, Truman’s attempt to dampen the conflict with a proposal inacceptable to both class contenders, is a futile one.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, he is impelled to this futile course, at this moment, by considerations of political expediency. Fundamentally he represents the interests of Big Business. But he is fearful of any decisive move against labor which will irremediably sever labor’s powerful political support from the Democratic administration.</p>
<p>Truman’s attempt to reconcile the bitter class opponents without sacrificing the basic Interests of Big Business or granting genuine gains to labor is utterly utopian. He will soon have to make the choice: either to crack down with full ferocity and all the power of government compulsion upon the striking workers, as Wall Street demands, or yield, substantial concessions to the mighty insurgent labor movement.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman’s “State of Union” Speech
Is Futile Bid to Halt Labor Crisis
(12 January 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 2, 12 January 1946, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Attempting to project a program to allay the deepening and spreading class struggle between American labor and Big Business, President Truman on January 3 addressed the country by radio on “The State of the Union.”
The “state of the union,” Truman confessed, is not a happy one. “First among the obstacles” to the universal security and prosperity which the war government promised for peace, said Truman, “have been labor-management disputes?’
Thus, Truman dealt primarily with the decisive problem vexing American political life since V-J Day – the tremendous conflict between American labor and capital.
Truman’s “Solution”
Truman proposed to alleviate this conflict by passage of a single piece of legislation, the “fact-finding” bill initiated by him on December 3 when he made his strike-breaking “request” for the GM workers to end their strike. In his speech, he again called for a federal law to establish semi-compulsory aribitration government “fact-finding boards” and to prohibit the right to strike for a “30-day ‘cooling-off’ period.”
This proposition was met with bitter hostility and denunciation by virtually all sections of organized labor when it was first propounded. But once more it is advanced by Truman as his “solution” to the irrepressible class warfare provoked by the union-busting, wage-slashing offensive of America’s war-profits bloated corporations.
Truman, of course, claimed his program to restrict the right to strike “contains nothing harmful to labor.” For, he argued, “there is no reason why a strike cannot be postponed for thirty days” so that the government can “step in to obtain all the facts and report its findings to the country.”
Danger to Labor
In general, any law to restrict the right to strike would be an opening wedge for more drastic anti-labor legislation and in its very essence can be only dangerous to labor.
Under the particular circumstances now prevailing, Truman’s measure would have a specifically pernicious effect upon labor’s struggle. The present strikes are being called after months of delay and stalling, as a last desperate resort of the workers to win their just demands. The proposal to enforce a further 30-day delay would serve only to interpose another obstacle to strike action at the most timely and strategic moment.
If, in addition to this, the workers cannot strike before they submit their demands to a hand-picked government “fact- finding” board, we have nothing less than the establishment, even though in limited form, of compulsory arbitration. Moreover, the American workers have had a sufficient and bitter experience with these red-tape government boards.
But along with his attempt to show what a “good thing” his “fact-finding” plan is for labor, Truman also claims, with far more truth, that “on the other hand there is nothing harmful to management in this proposal.”
He explains carefully that “no detailed information obtained from the books of any company is to be revealed.” This is simply assurance to the corporations that the administration proposes to suppress any facts whose publication might be injurious to the interests of the profiteers.
Talking into Vacuum
But even with this proposition, so favorable to the corporate interests, Truman has found himself talking into a vacuum.
For the reality of the situation is that America’s power- drunk ruling class, the clique of Wall Street monopolists, is determined on nothing less than unconditional surrender of the labor movement.
This was made patent by the arrogant action of General Motors in walking out of Truman’s fact-finding hearings in the GM strike – an action which evoked only the feeble complaint from Truman that “you have seen how the General Motors Corporation has refused to cooperate with this fact-finding board.”
Moreover, Congress, which so completely reflects the interests and desires of Big Business, has pigeon-holed Truman’s “fact-finding” proposal, a matter of considerable distress to the President. Congress is preparing far more savage anti-labor laws.
For its part, organized labor, 15,000,000 strong, is no longer amenable to the type of government intervention it experienced during the war under the War Labor Board. Whatever the inclinations of the labor leaders may be, the union ranks are determined to fight for their rights tooth and nail with their most effective economic weapon – strike action.
Truman’s Choices
In this situation of a remorseless Big Business union-busting offensive and a defiant, militant resistance by labor, Truman’s attempt to dampen the conflict with a proposal inacceptable to both class contenders, is a futile one.
Nevertheless, he is impelled to this futile course, at this moment, by considerations of political expediency. Fundamentally he represents the interests of Big Business. But he is fearful of any decisive move against labor which will irremediably sever labor’s powerful political support from the Democratic administration.
Truman’s attempt to reconcile the bitter class opponents without sacrificing the basic Interests of Big Business or granting genuine gains to labor is utterly utopian. He will soon have to make the choice: either to crack down with full ferocity and all the power of government compulsion upon the striking workers, as Wall Street demands, or yield, substantial concessions to the mighty insurgent labor movement.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>No Thanks to Philip Murray</h1>
<h3>(26 July 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_30" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 30</a>, 26 July 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Well, the CIO steel workers are finally getting a wage increase – no thanks to Philip Murray. This boost comes after almost every other industry had already granted increases. The steel increase was won by the miners, auto workers, packinghouse workers and others who fought on. the picket lines and broke the back of corporation resistance. The big “labor statesman,” Murray, just managed to sneak the steel workers to the end of the chow line.</p>
<p>Naturally, the steel corporations “give nothing for nothing, and damn little of that.” They’re hiking steel prices $10 a ton, which is several times what the pay increase will cost. So it won’t be long before rising prices will strip the steel workers of their gains once more.</p>
<p>The steel workers can count themselves lucky that they got anything, with Murray’s belly-crawling policy and two-year no-strike surrender in the old contract. If the auto workers hadn’t cracked industry’s front; if John L. Lewis’s miners hadn’t forced the steel companies to kick through with a pay increase in the captive mines, the steel workers would still be the “Little Orphan Annies” of the labor movement.</p>
<p>As it is, they’ve lost three months of wage increases, an average of $65 apiece for 170,000 workers. There is no retroactive clause back to last April, when negotiations began. Murray’s policy has fed $13,000,000 more into the cash balance of the steel barons.</p>
<p>The companies claim the raise is 13 cents an hour. That’s an average. Actually a few of the highest paid skilled workers will get more than a 13 cent raise. But the majority of lower paid workers will get less than 11 cents. Thus, the steel raise is less than in other industries where the workers put up a scrap.</p>
<p>Moreover, the wage reopening date has been extended an additional three months beyond the contract expiration date of April 30, 1949, to July 15, 1949. The new wage rates are frozen for three more months.</p>
<p>In his autobiographical article in the June issue of <b>American Magazine</b>, Murray said he is always ready to step out of his office, if a better man can be found. That’s not a tall order.</p>
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Joseph Keller
No Thanks to Philip Murray
(26 July 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 30, 26 July 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Well, the CIO steel workers are finally getting a wage increase – no thanks to Philip Murray. This boost comes after almost every other industry had already granted increases. The steel increase was won by the miners, auto workers, packinghouse workers and others who fought on. the picket lines and broke the back of corporation resistance. The big “labor statesman,” Murray, just managed to sneak the steel workers to the end of the chow line.
Naturally, the steel corporations “give nothing for nothing, and damn little of that.” They’re hiking steel prices $10 a ton, which is several times what the pay increase will cost. So it won’t be long before rising prices will strip the steel workers of their gains once more.
The steel workers can count themselves lucky that they got anything, with Murray’s belly-crawling policy and two-year no-strike surrender in the old contract. If the auto workers hadn’t cracked industry’s front; if John L. Lewis’s miners hadn’t forced the steel companies to kick through with a pay increase in the captive mines, the steel workers would still be the “Little Orphan Annies” of the labor movement.
As it is, they’ve lost three months of wage increases, an average of $65 apiece for 170,000 workers. There is no retroactive clause back to last April, when negotiations began. Murray’s policy has fed $13,000,000 more into the cash balance of the steel barons.
The companies claim the raise is 13 cents an hour. That’s an average. Actually a few of the highest paid skilled workers will get more than a 13 cent raise. But the majority of lower paid workers will get less than 11 cents. Thus, the steel raise is less than in other industries where the workers put up a scrap.
Moreover, the wage reopening date has been extended an additional three months beyond the contract expiration date of April 30, 1949, to July 15, 1949. The new wage rates are frozen for three more months.
In his autobiographical article in the June issue of American Magazine, Murray said he is always ready to step out of his office, if a better man can be found. That’s not a tall order.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Fascists, Colonial Despots<br>
in New Imperialist Line-Up</h1>
<h3>(28 March 1949)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_13" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 13</a>, 28 March 1949, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Among the fascist dictatorships and colonial despotisms that American imperialism is lining up or has already lined up in its military alliance for the “defense of democracy” in a third world war, are Spain, Portugal and Holland.</p>
<p>Fascist Spain, where daily executions of opponents of Franco’s regime continue ten years after the Civil War, has not yet been formally invited to join the “democracies” in preparing war against the Soviet Union. But it won’t be long.</p>
<p>Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in his press conference on the Atlantic Pact, gave a strong intimation that the United States will seek to include Spain in the alliance. <em>In reply to a question on Spain, he emphasized that the present parties to the pact “may invite any country with certain qualifications,” and that the section of the pact describing the “democratic” qualifications for membership “wasn’t a bar.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Policy Shift</h4>
<p class="fst">More explicitly, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on March 12 indicated to a meeting of the American Association for the United Nations that the State Department is moving for a major shift in policy toward Spain. “He strongly implied that the United States will give vigorous support to a move at the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly to repeal the anti-Franco resolution, of 1946.” (<strong>Christian Science Monitor</strong>, March 16.) Rusk “made it clear, that many of his official associates frowned on any continuation of the world organization’s anti-Franco policy as an unrealistic program ... that officials in Washington believed that Madrid’s Nationalist regime no longer Constituted a threat to the peace of the world.” (<strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, March 13.)</p>
<p><em>It is obvious that as soon as the U.S. State Department can effect a UN whitewash of Franco, he will be the honored recipient of an invitation to accept money and arms from the United States to bolster his shaky regime and provide another military base for the planned assault on the Soviet Union.</em></p>
<p>Meanwhile, Wall Street has already anticipated Washington’s approval and support of Franco through the private loan of $25 million recently extended him by the Chase National Bank, with other loans under negotiation. This is a risk no American bank would take without the certainty of Washington’s backing for the bankrupt Franco regime.</p>
<p>Another fascist dictatorship that has been every bit as bestial as Franco’s and, in fact, provided him with a model, has already been invited to join Washington’s war alliance. That is the clerical fascist regime of Dictator Salazar of Portugal.</p>
<p>Since 1926, when Salazar’s coup abolished the democratic parliamentary system, the Portuguese people have lived under the iron heel. The U.S. capitalist press has given little publicity to Salazar’s crimes – and Salazar has not gone in for the spectacle of public executions, as in Spain. As Del Vayo wrote in the March 12 <strong>Nation</strong>, “<em>Portuguese rebels disappear more discreetly – doomed to a slow death on islands of which people outside of Portugal have never heard.”</em></p>
<p>Early this year, Salazar decided to put up enough of a show of “democracy” to give Washington a basis for justifying Portugal’s membership in the United .Nations and inclusion in the forthcoming Atlantic Pact. He permitted opposition to himself in an election for the first time in 23 years. The enormous response to the liberal opposition candidate, 82-year old General Norton de Mattos, so frightened Salazar that he “persuaded” Mattos to withdraw the day before the election. Del Vayo states that Salazar was so scared at first, he was preparing to retire, but was advised against this by the American embassy in Lisbon. “<em>His friends in the embassy are said to have convinced him that this was no time for democratic experiments in a country of such great strategic importance to the Western powers,” reports Del Vayo.</em></p>
<p>Imperialist Holland, butcher of the Indonesian Republic, is an original member of the Atlantic Pact. Dutch officials have expressed their satisfaction with the pact, particularly that section which provides for U.S. aid to the signatory governments against internal revolutionary activity “inspired from outside.” A spokesman for Foreign Minister D.U. Stikker revealed that “Wide latitude purposely was given in the wording of this article ‘because you never know where danger will crop up’.” (<strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, March 19.)</p>
<p>The Dutch monarchy has already received or had earmarked for it more than $900 million in U.S. funds and arms under the ERP. Even the American capitalist press was forced to criticize the use of these funds for the bloody assault on Indonesia, particularly after the Dutch government renewed its war against the Indonesians fighting for national independence. Now the Dutch imperialists are the beneficiaries of a pact that assures them a great increase in American arms and the promise of direct military aid in the event of “attack” both from the outside and “internal revolution ... inspired from the outside.”</p>
<p><em>The inclusion of Holland in the pact, the invitation to Portugal, and the preparations to invite Spain are three clear tokens of the true aims of this new military alliance – an alliance not to bring peace and democracy to the world, but to crush it under capitalist dictatorship.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Fascists, Colonial Despots
in New Imperialist Line-Up
(28 March 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 13, 28 March 1949, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Among the fascist dictatorships and colonial despotisms that American imperialism is lining up or has already lined up in its military alliance for the “defense of democracy” in a third world war, are Spain, Portugal and Holland.
Fascist Spain, where daily executions of opponents of Franco’s regime continue ten years after the Civil War, has not yet been formally invited to join the “democracies” in preparing war against the Soviet Union. But it won’t be long.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in his press conference on the Atlantic Pact, gave a strong intimation that the United States will seek to include Spain in the alliance. In reply to a question on Spain, he emphasized that the present parties to the pact “may invite any country with certain qualifications,” and that the section of the pact describing the “democratic” qualifications for membership “wasn’t a bar.”
Policy Shift
More explicitly, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on March 12 indicated to a meeting of the American Association for the United Nations that the State Department is moving for a major shift in policy toward Spain. “He strongly implied that the United States will give vigorous support to a move at the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly to repeal the anti-Franco resolution, of 1946.” (Christian Science Monitor, March 16.) Rusk “made it clear, that many of his official associates frowned on any continuation of the world organization’s anti-Franco policy as an unrealistic program ... that officials in Washington believed that Madrid’s Nationalist regime no longer Constituted a threat to the peace of the world.” (N.Y. Times, March 13.)
It is obvious that as soon as the U.S. State Department can effect a UN whitewash of Franco, he will be the honored recipient of an invitation to accept money and arms from the United States to bolster his shaky regime and provide another military base for the planned assault on the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Wall Street has already anticipated Washington’s approval and support of Franco through the private loan of $25 million recently extended him by the Chase National Bank, with other loans under negotiation. This is a risk no American bank would take without the certainty of Washington’s backing for the bankrupt Franco regime.
Another fascist dictatorship that has been every bit as bestial as Franco’s and, in fact, provided him with a model, has already been invited to join Washington’s war alliance. That is the clerical fascist regime of Dictator Salazar of Portugal.
Since 1926, when Salazar’s coup abolished the democratic parliamentary system, the Portuguese people have lived under the iron heel. The U.S. capitalist press has given little publicity to Salazar’s crimes – and Salazar has not gone in for the spectacle of public executions, as in Spain. As Del Vayo wrote in the March 12 Nation, “Portuguese rebels disappear more discreetly – doomed to a slow death on islands of which people outside of Portugal have never heard.”
Early this year, Salazar decided to put up enough of a show of “democracy” to give Washington a basis for justifying Portugal’s membership in the United .Nations and inclusion in the forthcoming Atlantic Pact. He permitted opposition to himself in an election for the first time in 23 years. The enormous response to the liberal opposition candidate, 82-year old General Norton de Mattos, so frightened Salazar that he “persuaded” Mattos to withdraw the day before the election. Del Vayo states that Salazar was so scared at first, he was preparing to retire, but was advised against this by the American embassy in Lisbon. “His friends in the embassy are said to have convinced him that this was no time for democratic experiments in a country of such great strategic importance to the Western powers,” reports Del Vayo.
Imperialist Holland, butcher of the Indonesian Republic, is an original member of the Atlantic Pact. Dutch officials have expressed their satisfaction with the pact, particularly that section which provides for U.S. aid to the signatory governments against internal revolutionary activity “inspired from outside.” A spokesman for Foreign Minister D.U. Stikker revealed that “Wide latitude purposely was given in the wording of this article ‘because you never know where danger will crop up’.” (N.Y. Times, March 19.)
The Dutch monarchy has already received or had earmarked for it more than $900 million in U.S. funds and arms under the ERP. Even the American capitalist press was forced to criticize the use of these funds for the bloody assault on Indonesia, particularly after the Dutch government renewed its war against the Indonesians fighting for national independence. Now the Dutch imperialists are the beneficiaries of a pact that assures them a great increase in American arms and the promise of direct military aid in the event of “attack” both from the outside and “internal revolution ... inspired from the outside.”
The inclusion of Holland in the pact, the invitation to Portugal, and the preparations to invite Spain are three clear tokens of the true aims of this new military alliance – an alliance not to bring peace and democracy to the world, but to crush it under capitalist dictatorship.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(13 April 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_15" target="new">Vol. X No. 15</a>, 13 April 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>The Bigger The Lie ...</h3>
<p class="fst">Someone observing <strong>Daily Worker</strong> reporter George Morris slowly and laboriously punching away at his typewriter in the press room during the CIO United Auto Workers convention last week, wisecracked: “Well, creative writing is always harder than straight reporting ”</p>
<p>Morris gave an example of Stalinist “creative” writing in the March 26 <strong>Daily Worker</strong> where he described the UAW convention debate on the proposal for the establishment of a special Executive Board post for a Negro representative. Both the Thomas-Addes group, which the Stalinists supported, and the Reuther group opposed the proposal. Both groups in this respect catered to the prejudices of the more backward among the white delegates.</p>
<p>In Morris’ story, however, we learn that “the debate for the Reuther forces was led off by Trotskyite Ben Garrison” in opposition to the proposal.</p>
<p>It is true that Garrison, a member of the convention Resolutions Committee, made a vicious and red-baiting speech against the proposal for a Negro board member. But, contrary to Morris’ account, Garrison “led off” the debate for the Thomas-Addes group – he subsequently made the nominating speech for former UAW President R.J. Thomas. And delegates who were sympathetic to Trotskyist views supported the proposal for a Negro board member.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Doing the Dirty Work for the Bureaucrats</h3>
<p class="fst">Aside from supplying the Thomas-Addes clique with most of its slanderous ammunition against the militants in the Reuther caucus, the chief function of the Stalinists at the UAW convention was to take the lead in arguing for all organizational measures calculated to strengthen the top bureaucracy.</p>
<p>When none of the top officers were willing to “stick their necks out” in open support of such proposals as increasing the length of officers’ terms, doubling the dues and raising officers’ salaries, the Stalinists obligingly did the dirty work for them. It was the Stalinists who made the loudest and longest speeches in favor of these proposals.</p>
<p>One of the big laughs of the convention was to hear Stalinist delegates solemnly affirm that the’ officers should be given two-year instead of one-year terms in order to “eliminate factional politics.” They even brought in a minority report of the Constitution Committee to increase the top officers’ annual salaries by $1,500, instead of the $1,000 proposed by the committee majority.</p>
<p>Despite the Stalinist pleadings, the UAW delegates overwhelmingly voted down all proposals to strengthen the hand of the top bureaucrats.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Rail Arbitration Gives Bitter Fruit</h3>
<p class="fst">Two railway labor arbitration boards on April 3 handed down a decision for a 16-cent hourly wage increase for 1,220,000 railway workers. This is in contrast with the average 18½-cent awards approved by the government for most of the big CIO unions which went on strike.</p>
<p>Fifteen non-operating rail unions had been demanding a 30-cent increase. Three operating brotherhoods had demanded a flat $2.50 daily raise, instead of the $1.28 the government proposes to allow them.</p>
<p>Leaders of most of the rail unions, except for the engineers and trainmen, had agreed to binding arbitration of the issues. Now they are making an outcry against an award which is typical of the rotten deals the workers usually get from arbitration.</p>
<p>B.M. Jewell, chairman of the National Conference Committee of the 15 non-operating employees unions, declared “the award is wholly unsatisfactory ... There is no justification in the world for expecting railway employees to accept lesser rates of pay than workers in other industries ...” He further complained that the railway workers “have absorbed the shock of three defeats – one in 1941 one in 1943 and this one today.”</p>
<p>This admission of three defeats is a sufficient commentary on the policies of the rail union leaders who have opposed militant struggle. It wasn’t arbitration but strike action that won bigger gains for the CIO unions.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Goodrich Local 5 Sets Record Straight</h3>
<p class="fst"><strong>Air Bag</strong>, the excellent paper of Akron Goodrich Local 5, CIO Rubber Workers, in its April issue nails the misleading accounts in such papers as the <strong>Cleveland Plain Dealer</strong> and <strong>N.Y. Times</strong> which tried to give credit to government conciliators for the fine settlement won by the rubber union in its new contract.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The fact is that no governmental agency had any formal part in these negotiations. On the contrary this was an outstanding case in which the union representatives and company representatives fought it out without any outside interference or government meddling,” states the <strong>Air Bag</strong>.</p>
<p class="quote">“We do not believe it is necessary to go through complicated governmental machinery and red tape. The results of the negotiations show that it is better to battle it out union to company directly.”</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(13 April 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 15, 13 April 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Bigger The Lie ...
Someone observing Daily Worker reporter George Morris slowly and laboriously punching away at his typewriter in the press room during the CIO United Auto Workers convention last week, wisecracked: “Well, creative writing is always harder than straight reporting ”
Morris gave an example of Stalinist “creative” writing in the March 26 Daily Worker where he described the UAW convention debate on the proposal for the establishment of a special Executive Board post for a Negro representative. Both the Thomas-Addes group, which the Stalinists supported, and the Reuther group opposed the proposal. Both groups in this respect catered to the prejudices of the more backward among the white delegates.
In Morris’ story, however, we learn that “the debate for the Reuther forces was led off by Trotskyite Ben Garrison” in opposition to the proposal.
It is true that Garrison, a member of the convention Resolutions Committee, made a vicious and red-baiting speech against the proposal for a Negro board member. But, contrary to Morris’ account, Garrison “led off” the debate for the Thomas-Addes group – he subsequently made the nominating speech for former UAW President R.J. Thomas. And delegates who were sympathetic to Trotskyist views supported the proposal for a Negro board member.
* * *
Doing the Dirty Work for the Bureaucrats
Aside from supplying the Thomas-Addes clique with most of its slanderous ammunition against the militants in the Reuther caucus, the chief function of the Stalinists at the UAW convention was to take the lead in arguing for all organizational measures calculated to strengthen the top bureaucracy.
When none of the top officers were willing to “stick their necks out” in open support of such proposals as increasing the length of officers’ terms, doubling the dues and raising officers’ salaries, the Stalinists obligingly did the dirty work for them. It was the Stalinists who made the loudest and longest speeches in favor of these proposals.
One of the big laughs of the convention was to hear Stalinist delegates solemnly affirm that the’ officers should be given two-year instead of one-year terms in order to “eliminate factional politics.” They even brought in a minority report of the Constitution Committee to increase the top officers’ annual salaries by $1,500, instead of the $1,000 proposed by the committee majority.
Despite the Stalinist pleadings, the UAW delegates overwhelmingly voted down all proposals to strengthen the hand of the top bureaucrats.
* * *
Rail Arbitration Gives Bitter Fruit
Two railway labor arbitration boards on April 3 handed down a decision for a 16-cent hourly wage increase for 1,220,000 railway workers. This is in contrast with the average 18½-cent awards approved by the government for most of the big CIO unions which went on strike.
Fifteen non-operating rail unions had been demanding a 30-cent increase. Three operating brotherhoods had demanded a flat $2.50 daily raise, instead of the $1.28 the government proposes to allow them.
Leaders of most of the rail unions, except for the engineers and trainmen, had agreed to binding arbitration of the issues. Now they are making an outcry against an award which is typical of the rotten deals the workers usually get from arbitration.
B.M. Jewell, chairman of the National Conference Committee of the 15 non-operating employees unions, declared “the award is wholly unsatisfactory ... There is no justification in the world for expecting railway employees to accept lesser rates of pay than workers in other industries ...” He further complained that the railway workers “have absorbed the shock of three defeats – one in 1941 one in 1943 and this one today.”
This admission of three defeats is a sufficient commentary on the policies of the rail union leaders who have opposed militant struggle. It wasn’t arbitration but strike action that won bigger gains for the CIO unions.
* * *
Goodrich Local 5 Sets Record Straight
Air Bag, the excellent paper of Akron Goodrich Local 5, CIO Rubber Workers, in its April issue nails the misleading accounts in such papers as the Cleveland Plain Dealer and N.Y. Times which tried to give credit to government conciliators for the fine settlement won by the rubber union in its new contract.
“The fact is that no governmental agency had any formal part in these negotiations. On the contrary this was an outstanding case in which the union representatives and company representatives fought it out without any outside interference or government meddling,” states the Air Bag.
“We do not believe it is necessary to go through complicated governmental machinery and red tape. The results of the negotiations show that it is better to battle it out union to company directly.”
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<hr>
<h1><big>News & Letters</big>
<br><small><span class="sub">[Detroit]<br> (1955— present ) </span></small></h1>
<hr class="section">
<p class="intro">News and Letters Committees is a small revolutionary-socialist organization in the United States. It is the world’s most prominent Marxist-Humanist organization[citation needed].</p>
<p class="intro">Founded in 1955 by <a href="../../../../archive/dunayevskaya/index.htm">Raya Dunayevskaya</a>, the Committees trace their origin to a split in the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which had been led by <a href="../../../../archive/james-clr/index.htm">C. L. R. James</a> and Dunayevskaya. The organization publishes a newspaper, News & Letters, that tries to unite activist struggles to transform the world with what it calls the "philosophy of liberation" of Karl Marx and Marxist-Humanism.</p>
<p class="intro">News and Letters Committees is committed to the abolition of capitalism, the establishment of what it calls "a new human society," and women’s liberation. It supports freedom struggles of workers, African-Americans and other people of color, women, and youth, and it opposes heterosexism against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals. It has opposed both "private" capitalism and the former Stalinist states, which it regarded as state-capitalist, and has opposed the imperialism of both. In recent years, it has opposed what it regards as imperialist wars waged by the U.S. (and its allies) in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Islamic fundamentalism and non-state terrorism. Arguing that a new, human society is the only viable alternative to permanent war and terrorism, it supports the struggles of what it regards as democratic, secular, anti-imperialist organizations of women and workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p class="intro">Partly as a response to the past decade’s movement against global capitalism and its slogan, "Another World is Possible," News and Letters Committees calls for and seeks to help develop what it calls a "philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism," rooted in the theory of post-capitalist human development that Marx sketched in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The organization has also paid particular attention to the rights of prisoners in the United States and published a short book, Voices from Within the Prison Walls on the topic in 1998.</p>
<p class="intro">There are News and Letters Committees in a small number of cities in the United States, including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.</p>
<p class="intro">Members of News and Letters Committees occasionally contribute to other political journals with somewhat related outlooks, such as <em>New Politics</em>, and to theoretical journals. In addition, one of the two Co-National Organizers, Olga Domanski, is listed as an editor of Lexington Books’ Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism, which includes books by Dunayevskaya and others including <em>The Power of Negativity</em>, a posthumous collection of Dunayevskaya’s writings on the dialectic in G. W. F. Hegel and in Marx.</p>
<p class="intro"><em>—Wikipedia</em>
</p><hr>
<p class="fst">The <a href="http://newsandletters.org/category/newspaper/">News & Letters Committees</a> has graciously allowed us to place their collection of these digital version of their newspaper here on the Marxists Internet Archive. While not a Trotskyist organization the Committees did grow out of two of the most important Trotskyist organizations in the United States: the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party. For this reason these papers are placed here in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line</p>
<p> </p>
<hr class="section">
<h2>LINKS TO The Issues (by decade)</h2>
<h4><a href="1950s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 1950s</a></h4>
<h4><a href="1960s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 1960s</a></h4>
<h4><a href="1970s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 1970s</a></h4>
<h4><a href="1980s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 1980s</a></h4>
<h4><a href="1990s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 1990s</a></h4>
<h4><a href="2000s/index.htm">News & Letters for the 2000s</a></h4>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
News & Letters
[Detroit] (1955— present )
News and Letters Committees is a small revolutionary-socialist organization in the United States. It is the world’s most prominent Marxist-Humanist organization[citation needed].
Founded in 1955 by Raya Dunayevskaya, the Committees trace their origin to a split in the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which had been led by C. L. R. James and Dunayevskaya. The organization publishes a newspaper, News & Letters, that tries to unite activist struggles to transform the world with what it calls the "philosophy of liberation" of Karl Marx and Marxist-Humanism.
News and Letters Committees is committed to the abolition of capitalism, the establishment of what it calls "a new human society," and women’s liberation. It supports freedom struggles of workers, African-Americans and other people of color, women, and youth, and it opposes heterosexism against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals. It has opposed both "private" capitalism and the former Stalinist states, which it regarded as state-capitalist, and has opposed the imperialism of both. In recent years, it has opposed what it regards as imperialist wars waged by the U.S. (and its allies) in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Islamic fundamentalism and non-state terrorism. Arguing that a new, human society is the only viable alternative to permanent war and terrorism, it supports the struggles of what it regards as democratic, secular, anti-imperialist organizations of women and workers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Partly as a response to the past decade’s movement against global capitalism and its slogan, "Another World is Possible," News and Letters Committees calls for and seeks to help develop what it calls a "philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism," rooted in the theory of post-capitalist human development that Marx sketched in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The organization has also paid particular attention to the rights of prisoners in the United States and published a short book, Voices from Within the Prison Walls on the topic in 1998.
There are News and Letters Committees in a small number of cities in the United States, including Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Members of News and Letters Committees occasionally contribute to other political journals with somewhat related outlooks, such as New Politics, and to theoretical journals. In addition, one of the two Co-National Organizers, Olga Domanski, is listed as an editor of Lexington Books’ Raya Dunayevskaya Series in Marxism and Humanism, which includes books by Dunayevskaya and others including The Power of Negativity, a posthumous collection of Dunayevskaya’s writings on the dialectic in G. W. F. Hegel and in Marx.
—Wikipedia
The News & Letters Committees has graciously allowed us to place their collection of these digital version of their newspaper here on the Marxists Internet Archive. While not a Trotskyist organization the Committees did grow out of two of the most important Trotskyist organizations in the United States: the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party. For this reason these papers are placed here in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line
LINKS TO The Issues (by decade)
News & Letters for the 1950s
News & Letters for the 1960s
News & Letters for the 1970s
News & Letters for the 1980s
News & Letters for the 1990s
News & Letters for the 2000s
Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 19 June 2015
|
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<p class="title">Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973<br>
Philosophy & Revolution<br>
Chapter 9</p>
<hr class="end">
<h3>New Passions and New Forces<br>The Black Dimension, The Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women’s Liberation</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="quoteb">
Individualism which lets nothing interfere with its Universalism, i.e., Freedom. <i>Hegel</i></p>
<p class="quoteb">
New forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society ... <i>Marx, Capital</i></p>
<p class="quoteb">
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster.... For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. <i>Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth</i></p>
<p>
Black was the colour that helped make the 1960s so exciting a decade. We became witness simultaneously to the African Revolutions and the Black Revolution in America. By their self-activity, self-organisation, self-development, the black youth struck out against white supremacy in the quiescent South, and with unparalleled courage took everything that was dished out to them – from beatings, bombings, and prisons to cattle prods, shootings, and even death – and still, unarmed, continued fighting back. They initiated a new epoch of youth revolt, white as well as black, throughout the land. There was not a single method of struggle, from sit-ins, teach-ins, dwell-ins, wade-ins, to Freedom Rides, Freedom Marches, Freedom Schools, and confrontations with the Establishment, Bull Connors’ bulldogs and whips in Alabama, or the smartly uniformed soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., that did not have its origin in the black movement. Moreover, this was so not only as strategy and tactic but also as underlying philosophy and perspectives for the future.</p>
<p>
By February 1965, when the government’s rain of bombs on Hanoi produced the anti-Vietnam War movement here, the students who had gone South and then returned to Berkeley to confront the multiversity talked a very different language than when they had left. As Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, put it: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
America may be the most poverty-stricken country in the world. Not materially. But intellectually it is bankrupt. And morally it’s poverty-stricken. But in such a way that it’s not clear to you that you’re poor. It’s very hard to know you’re poor if you’re eating well.... </p>
<p class="quoteb">
Students are excited about political ideas. They’re not yet inured to the apolitical society they’re going to enter. But being interested in ideas means you have no use in American society ... unless they are ideas which are useful to the military-industrial complex.... </p>
<p class="quoteb">
Factories are run in authoritarian fashion – non-union factories anyway – and that’s the nearest parallel to the university.... </p>
<p>
In contrast, Savio kept driving home about his fellow students the point that “they are people who have not learned to compromise.”</p>
<p>
The fact that the first important schism in the movement itself arose at the very moment when it did become a mass anti-Vietnam War movement was not due to any differences over the slogan, which indeed a black spoke first, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” There was alienation from the white students who all too quickly migrated back North without so much as a “by your leave” to the civil rights movement. To the blacks it was a manifestation of just how all-pervasive racism was in the racist U.S.A., not excluding its white revolutionaries who considered themselves, and not the black masses, as “the vanguard.” Blacks and whites moved separate ways and, once again, the <i>objectivity</i> of their struggle for freedom was inseparable from a self-developing subjectivity.</p>
<p>
Black consciousness, Afro-American roots, awareness of themselves as a people, a nation, a race: “Black is beautiful.” Black is <i>revolutionary</i>. Many a youth was memorising Malcolm X’s records. That they identified with him most after he broke with Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims, when he was moving toward a new revolutionary universalism, is no accident whatever. In 1966, when Stokely Carmichael (on that famous march through the South, alongside Reverend King and James Meredith) first raised the slogan “Black Power,” he signalled more than the end of Dr. King’s predominance in the leadership of the Movement. It was also the beginning of the division between ranks and all leaders, himself included. It is true he electrified the crowd, when he first expounded on the slogan: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
The only way we gonna stop them white men from huppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is black power.... Ain’t nothin’ wrong with anything all black ’cause I’m all black and I’m all good. Now don’t you be afraid. And from now on when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them. </p>
<p>
All answered: “Black Power! <i>Black Power!</i> BLACK POWER!” But as the slogan caught on, Stokely himself was off elsewhere. Neither he nor any other black leader was around when the 1967 explosion burst on the U.S. stage. Neither he nor any other black militant leader was listening to the voices that came from below, least of all from black workers. One black worker from Oakland, California, disgusted with what became of the “Black Power” slogan, wrote: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
Black power has become a gigantic reindeer – hat rack with many opposing hats hanging there, including the hat of Black capitalism. The possible unity of Black and white workers to destroy the system of capitalism is a punch at the gut nerve of all middle class intellectuals and elitist groups, Black or white. </p>
<p>
To the masses, “Hell, no, we won’t go” meant we should fight the enemies at home – poor jobs and no jobs at all; poor homes and no homes at all; racism; “the system.” What they were not saying, much less having money to do it with, is travel abroad, or any other form of escapism. More than just not having learned to compromise, as the white youth had, or to talk endlessly as the black leaders did, what sprang up from ghettoised hunger and racism in white affluent society was the elemental outburst, North, South, East, West, in the year 1967. The predominant note was, of course, “Whitey ain’t about to get up off of anything unless you make him.” And yet when the explosion reached Detroit, a still newer stage of black revolt matured. In common with the outbursts occurring throughout the land – from Boston to Spanish Harlem, from Tucson to Newark, from Cleveland to Sacramento, and some eighty other cities – the voice of anger against, frustration with, and rejection of their conditions of life was loud and clear. Watts had sounded the tocsin in 1965, and Detroit in 1967 set a still newer stage.</p>
<p>
When the wrath of the blacks exploded in Detroit, it was vented not only against the police in their own neighbourhoods, or even the police in general, who were the prime targets of the snipers. In Detroit, blacks made a direct attack on police stations. Many other things were new in the Detroit revolt. Unlike other cities, here the repossession, as well as the sniping later, was integrated. As one reporter on the scene put it: “It was just like Negroes and whites were shopping together, only they weren’t paying for anything.” Or as one white and one black worker expressed it: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
By looting, they ain’t taking what they ain’t paid for. We’ve been paying for that stuff for over a thousand years, ever since we was born. </p>
<p class="quoteb">
We want the right that we ought not to be beat on the head all the time just because we’re black. </p>
<p>
Unlike almost all other outbursts, Detroit’s was not so much against “whitey” as such, as against the white landlords, white merchants, and of course the white police. And while the ubiquitous sign “SOUL BROTHER” saved many black stores from the torch, black merchants who had also gouged the community were not spared. In fact, one black-owned drugstore that had been picketed by CORE the week earlier was among the very first to go. It was a revolt against a class society.</p>
<p>
Law and order from the barrel of a gun meant 43 lay dead, some 1500 were wounded, 4000 were jailed with bail set at such impossible figures (up to $100,000!) that constitutional rights were nullified. Though no “foreign invaders” had landed anywhere in the United States, though no insurrection against the state – “constituted authority” – was in progress, though only one side was thrice armed, the city was, to all intents and purposes, under occupation. “Emergency measures” turned out to be a pseudonym for martial law.</p>
<p>
To try to deny the new stage that the black revolt had reached in Detroit – to make the revolt appear purely racist – the power structure, including the liberal Establishment, had to quote Stokely Carmichael. He, however, was in Havana; the action was in Detroit. He was talking, not acting. Those who were the actual participants in the revolt made their actions stark and clear: Down with the black slums: Let’s not have two nations, one filthy rich and the other miserably poor; Let’s have one nation with truly human relationships.</p>
<p>
To the extent to which the elitist black nationalists did operate in the ghettos, whether in Cambridge (Maryland) or in Detroit, in Wichita or Elgin (Illinois), in Newark or Milwaukee, they were just trying to get credit for that which the masses themselves did, did spontaneously. They revolted against the class system wearing a white face, rather than against “whitey” where he was not part of the exploitative system.</p>
<p>
The simple truth is that it is the Government – national, state, city; the police, the prisons and the courts – and not the “outside agitators” who breed racism and evoke the wrath of the people.</p>
<p>
The black people have always been the touchstone of American civilisation precisely because they could both expose its Achilles’ heel – its racism – and because they were always in the vanguard of its forward movement. It was so in the struggle against slavery when they fought together with the white Abolitionists. It was so during the birth of imperialism when the blacks stood alone in their opposition, sensing the racist repercussions of imperialism’s white conquest of Latin America and the Philippines, and its forcing open the gates of trade with the Orient. It was so when, with white labor, they reshaped the industrial face of America through the creation of the CIO. And it is so now when the Black Revolution has reached the crossroads between nationalism and proletarian internationalism.</p>
<p>
In 1967 the vitality of the black people, full of purpose, attacked only the symptoms of oppression – the white landlord in the slums, the white merchant, the white middleman. This is not because they did not know who Mr. Big was. Rather, it was because they did not see white labor ready to join them in their determination to undermine the whole system. They know better than the elitist leaders that, without white labor, the system cannot be torn up by its roots. The black revolt reached a peak in Detroit because for the first time in years, outside and inside the shop, there was the first appearance of white and black solidarity. It was but the faintest of beginnings, but it did appear.</p>
<p>
A still newer element in the struggles at the point of production arose after these eruptions, when capitalists had been sufficiently frightened by the destruction and fear of outright revolution to begin hiring young blacks. The black caucuses in factories that until then had thought the most important thing to do was to remove some bureaucrats from office in order to democratise the union structure, now would stop at nothing short, as one worker put it, “of a complete change – of revolution.” Thus one group at a Dodge plant in Detroit called itself the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Other plants did the same. A few years earlier black workers would have shied away from them, but by 1968 even a moderate worker explained: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
<i>The</i> most popular word in the shop these days is: revolutionary. In the past, even when we didn’t parrot the union leadership and call workers “Communists,” we would shy away from any worker who declared himself to be a “revolutionary.” Now we say to him: “Why be for foreign revolutions? We need one here, right here.” </p>
<p>
In May 1968, however, all eyes turned to France, for it was there that the highest point of development for all “new passions and new forces” erupted. The vastness and expansiveness of the spontaneous mass outburst, the range and multiplicity of the actions – from barricades in the Latin Quarter to occupation of factories to mass marches – marked a turning-point of historic dimensions. For the first time in the turbulent 1960s a near-revolution erupted in a technologically advanced country. For the first time since the birth of the new generation of revolutionaries, the student youth and the workers united in mass activities. For the first time the worker-student alliance showed itself to be not only a new form of struggle but an overpowering force, as thousands of students in revolt became 10 million workers on general strike, became millions of marching feet of workers and students and housewives, of oldsters as well as youth, became a near revolution undermining De Gaulle. Yet the fact that it was only a near, not an actual revolution; the fact that the French Communist Party, through the CGT, could keep the workers confined to reformist demands and make it unnecessary for De Gaulle, once he organised the counterrevolution, to need a bloodbath to keep the mass revolt from becoming social revolution; these things cast a cloud not only over revolution but also over the “vanguardists” like the Trotskyists who, though they fought the C.P. counter-revolutionary activities, held on to the same concept of a “vanguard Party to lead the revolution.”</p>
<p>
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was absolutely right when he said that the movement was beyond the small parties which wanted to lead. But he was wrong to hold to so abstract a view of a philosophy of liberation as to think that theory can be picked up “en route.” Without theory the road to revolution leads “en route” to nowhere; the revolution-to-be was a stillbirth. Which only increased the endless output of books on it. As one young American revolutionary who was a participant put it: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
At no time, 1848 to 1968, have there been more analyses, more solutions, more answers thrust upon the revolutionary actions of the Polish, the German, the Czechoslovak, and most specifically the French masses than what we are witnessing today. For Sartre, the barricades of France and the general strike had a certain resemblance to the Castro type of insurrection. For Marcuse, the May revolt was Maoist-like, i.e., there were aspects of China’s Cultural Revolution. For the Trotskyists, it was a revolution minus one ingredient – a “real” vanguard party. For some existentialist-anarchists it was a collective madness which proudly had no goal, no definite aims, no alternative.... For Cohn-Bendit and others their role is that of “planting seeds.” [But] going from the possible to the actual is not only a task of the workers. It is a task for theoreticians. </p>
<p>
Different as France, May 1968, was from Cuba, January 1959, the underlying philosophy of much of the New Left seemed to be one or another form of “guerrilla warfare” that became most famous under the title “Revolution Within the Revolution?” The youth especially came under its spell, even those who did not accept the view that only in the countryside and only in technologically underdeveloped countries could the revolution be “made.” To self-proclaimed “urban guerrillas,” the point of attraction, more so in the U.S. than in France, was its newness, unburdened by the past.</p>
<p>
So empirical-minded is the American youth, black included, that even revolutionaries who have separated themselves from Communism of the Russian and the Chinese varieties, have fully and uncritically embraced Castro. So exhilarating was the Cuban experience that they never questioned the direction, much less the philosophy, of its development since achieving power. One famous exception seemed to have been the young black Communist philosopher, Angela Davis, who from prison posed the question “What happens after?”: “the most difficult period of all is the building of the revolutionary society after the seizure of power.” This did not, however, predominate over her Cuban experience, “my first prolonged contact with a socialist country through my own eyes and limbs, I might add, since I cut cane for a while.” Contrast this view of a leader with the view of a black woman from the ranks of the Women’s Liberation movement: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
I’m not thoroughly convinced that Black Liberation, the way it’s being spelled out, will really and truly mean my liberation. I’m not so sure that when it comes time “to put down my gun,” that I won’t have a broom shoved in my hands, as so many of my Cuban sisters have. </p>
<p>
For that matter, once Angela was freed, she refused to sign the appeal of a Czechoslovak fighter for freedom, Jiri Pelikan, who had written to her: “We too have many Angela Davises and Soledad brothers.”</p>
<p>
As against the voices from below, the whole of Regis Debray’s <i>Revolution in the Revolution?</i> burns with zeal, “to free the present from the past” (pp. 19-91). This is further bound by a “principal lesson” (pp. 95-116), and held on to tightly as the spokesman for Castro expounds “some consequences for the future” (pp. 119-26). In place of “traditions” or theoretic abstractions we must face the facts, “the concrete,” <i>the</i> experience (Cuban), topped by “the military foco.” Anything, anything whatever that stands in the way of this veritable miracle, “the military foco,” is to be thrown into the dustbin of history. In the guise of non-theory the French philosopher thus presents us with a “theory” that departs in toto from Marx’s most fundamental concept, that of a social revolution. He proclaims a “<i>new dialectic of tasks</i>” (p. 119): unquestioning obedience to the “Equivalent Substitution” (military command). Outside of the penchant for monolithism – “There is no longer a place for verbal ideological relation to the revolution, nor for a certain type of polemic” (p. 123) – which characterises this manual on how “to make” revolutions, its 126 pages are an endless paean of praise for the guerrilla: “the staggering novelty introduced by the Cuban Revolution is this: the <i>guerrilla</i> force is the party in embryo” (p. 106).</p>
<p>
So supreme is the military as means and end, as strategy and tactic, as leadership and manhood itself, that it does indeed swallow up not only theory and party but the masses themselves: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
One finds that a working class of restricted size or under the influence of a reformist trade union aristocracy, and an isolated and humiliated peasantry, are willing to accept this group, of bourgeois origin, as their political leadership. </p>
<p>
At this point enters the Leader Maximum, for the end result of the Army’s replacing the Party, replacing the Proletariat, replacing the Peasantry, is that all are replaced by the know-it-all, see-it-all, be-it-all “Equivalent Substitution.”</p>
<p>
Now, suppose that, for the moment, we are willing to forget that the first modern theorist and greatest practitioner of guerrilla warfare was <i>not</i> Fidel Castro, but Mao Tse-Tung; suppose, further, that we close our eyes to the truth that “the present” (1965) was <i>not</i> a Cuban Revolution but the on-going Vietnam War of liberation engaged in direct combat with the mightiest world imperialist, the U.S.A.; and finally, suppose we agree that a guerrilla force is “the party in embryo” – where exactly do all these suppositions lead? If the achievements are the proof that “<i>insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity</i>” (p. 116), does the old Stalinist monolithism of forbidding factions in order “to free us” from “the vice of excessive deliberation” thereby become “the present,” “the theoretical and historical novelty of this [Cuban] situation” (p. 123) ? And do Marx’s and Lenin’s deliberations on revolution, as actuality and as theory, become consigned to “the past” and allow Debray to point “a warning finger ... to indicate a shortcut”? Guerrilla warfare is a shortcut to nowhere. It is a protracted war that leads more often to defeat than to “victory,” and where it does lead to state power, hardly keeps the revolution from souring.</p>
<p>
When Che spoke with his own voice rather than Debray’s, he did not flinch from direct confrontation with Lenin’s theory by consigning it to the past: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
This is a unique Revolution which some people maintain contradicts one of the most orthodox premises of the revolutionary movement, expressed by Lenin: “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” It would be suitable to say that revolutionary theory as the expression of a social truth, surpasses any declaration of it; that is to say, even if the theory is not known, the revolution can succeed if historical reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved in it are utilised correctly.</p>
<p>
Were we even to forget the martyrdom of Che Guevara in the very period when Debray’s nimble-penned panacea became the New Left’s manual on how “to make revolutions,” our post-World War II world is not short of guerrilla wars, from the Philippines to Burma, from Malaya to Japan, that have failed. The post-World War I world, on the other hand, exuded true magic, the “magic” of the Russian Revolution, which set the world aflame. Even today, with a half-century’s lapse and the first workers’ state having been transformed into its opposite, a state-capitalist society, the perspectives unfolded by 1917 remain the greatest form of world revolution. This is the Marxist heritage, the past from which Castro’s chosen theoretician wishes “to free the present.” Marx’s concept of revolution – great masses in motion, in spontaneous, forward movement – is not something that can be “made” from above.</p>
<p>
When that black Women’s Liberationist expressed a fear that when it comes to putting down the gun, she may once again have a broom shoved into her hands, she was expressing one of the most anti-elitist new forces and new passions that had come on the historic stage and were raising altogether new questions. It is true that, on the whole, these were questions addressed to the private capitalistic world, specifically the U.S. But the women were saying: “We will no longer be objects – mindless sex objects, or robots that keep house, or cheap manual labor you can call in when there are no men available and discard when there are.” These women were also demanding their heads back, and it is this which surprised none more than the New Left, since though born out of the New Left, it was the New Left men whom Women’s Liberation opposed. The same women who had participated in every phase of the freedom movements refused to continue being the typists, the mimeographers, the “ladies’ auxiliaries” to the Left. They demanded an end to the separation of mental and manual labor, not only as a “goal,” not only against capitalist society, but as an immediate need of the Left itself, especially regarding women. Nor were they afraid to attack the male chauvinism in the black movement as well. Black and white women joined together to do battle with the arrogance of a Stokely Carmichael, who had said that “the only position for women in the movement is prone.”</p>
<p>
So uncompromising as well as adamant was their attack on elitism and authoritarianism that the very structure of the new Women’s Liberation groups, the small groups that sprang up everywhere, were an effort to find a form that would allow for the self-development of the individual woman. They disregarded the established women’s groups because they too were structured and too concerned with the middle-class professional women. They wished to release all women – most of all black, working-class, Chicano, Indian. Whether it was a question of the right to abortion, or equal pay, or having control over their own lives, the single word was NOW. Freedom meant now, today, not tomorrow, much less the day after. “Now” meant not waiting for the day of revolution, much less excluding from the political struggle the question of the relationship of man to woman. Women no longer considered that question a merely private matter, for that was only the standard way of making women feel isolated and helpless. The very fact that freedom was in the air meant that she no longer was alone, that there were thousands forming a movement, a force. Individuality and collectivity became inseparable from the mass demonstrations in August 1970. And for the first time also, history was not past but <i>in the making</i>. And now that they were making it, there was no feeling that they were lost in a collectivity, but rather that each was individualised through this historic process.</p>
<p>
Thus, in spite of adverse publicity about “ugly girls burning bras” and whatever other nonsense the male chauvinists played up in order to make the movement look silly, more and more women kept joining it. Different kinds of women who had never joined anything before became activists – and thinkers. In addition to those who called themselves members of the movement, thousands more expressed the same ideas, from the welfare mothers’ organisations to the new drives to unionise women’s industries and fight the discrimination sanctioned by existing unions. And the many voices expressing the ideas of Women’s Liberation were the result not of women reading Kate Millett’s <i>Sexual Politics</i> or the hundreds of less serious works on the subject, but of the hunger for new roles in society and new relationships for them here and now.</p>
<p>
Instead of grasping the link of continuity of today’s strivings with that which Marx saw emerging, or of listening to new voices, today’s “Marxists” themselves are the best examples of Marx’s concept of ideology as false consciousness. They look upon themselves as the leaders, or at least the politicos, who can offer “a rational reassessment of feminist ideology” and look down upon today’s new women rebels as apolitical, as if that meant they had nothing to say worth listening to and that there were no objective validity to the movement. It is true that with the mass demonstrations by women, especially in New York in 1970, all parties want to use them. That precisely is the trouble.</p>
<p>
The uniqueness of today’s Women’s Liberation movement is that it dares to challenge what is, including the male chauvinism not only under capitalism but within the revolutionary movement itself. To fear to expose this male chauvinism leads to helplessness. To face reality, and to face it not through sheer voluntarism, but with full awareness of all the forces lined up against us, is the one way to assure the coalescence with other revolutionary forces, especially labor, which is so strategically placed in production and has its own black dimension. But the fact that it will not be possible fully to overcome male chauvinism as long as class society exists does not invalidate the movement any more than any struggle for freedom is invalidated. On the contrary, the very fact that there is a widespread Women’s Liberation movement proves that it is an idea whose time has come and that it is an integral part of the very organism of liberation.</p>
<p>
One advantage in pointing to the self-development of “Subjectivity” in the Black Revolution is that it has none of the perjorative connotation that old radicals give it when they declaim against “petty-bourgeois subjectivism.” Whether or not consciously related to the Hegelian concept – "the transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality, and the unity which is the truth, rest upon subjectivity alone” – it is clear that for the black masses, black consciousness, awareness of themselves as Afro-Americans with a dual history and special pride, is a drive toward wholeness. Far from being a separation from the objective, it means an end to the separation between objective and subjective. Not even the most elitist black has quite the same arrogant attitude as the white intellectual toward the worker, not to mention the prisoner.</p>
<p>
Thus, it is stressed that a worker is not dumb, has thought of his own, wants to have a say in “philosophy” and not just in action. It took all the way to 1973 before the long-lasting and persistent 1972 strikes in the auto industry – especially among young workers in the GM plants in Lordstown and Norwood – compelled the union bureaucrats to acknowledge the existence of “blue collar blues.” The press began to speak of job alienation as the “new social issue of the decade.” The UAW bureaucrats finally called for a special meeting on February 28, 1973 – not with their own rank-and-file, but with management executives. They have still to recognise the alienated labor that Marx described 100 years ago, produced by “the automaton": “An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton ... in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power ... breaks out into the fast and furious whirl ... The lightening of the labor, even, becomes a sort of torture since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest ..."</p>
<p>
Thus, the Soledad prisoner wrote against inhuman prison conditions, and also, “I met Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao – they redeemed me.” Thus, the Angela Davis case brought responses, not only for her defence – from the thousands that Aretha Franklin offered to the dollar the housewife donated – but declarations, Communist or otherwise, that the FBI had hunted her because she is a woman, she is black, she is a professor. The black community is tired and sick of having whites think them dumb.</p>
<p>
I do not mean that there is complete unity in the black community, although the rampant racism – which makes all economic burdens fall heaviest on blacks – and every conceivable and inconceivable subtle and not so subtle discrimination and segregation practiced against them by whites, certainly does draw them together as a people, as a race, as a nation within a nation. Thus, as late as 1970, at the very moment when the black students were coming out in solidarity with the murdered white students at Kent State University, the experience with whites, not bigots but revolutionary whites, was shattering. In contrast to the mass outpouring of protest all over the country to the Kent killings and the Cambodian invasion, there was very nearly total silence on the part of whites to the happenings in the South, the murder of blacks by police and the planned and massive gunfire poured out at the black women’s dormitory at Jackson State. All the blacks, no matter in what stratum, avowed that racism was in fact so deeply ingrained and irreversible as to hold all whites in its throes. Thus, the black GIs, the very ones who were still in Vietnam, experienced the same discrimination as in the South and, as a two-year survey revealed, they hailed the Black Panthers as “an equaliser.” “The beast (the white man) got his Ku Klux Klan. The Black Panthers give the beast something to fear, like we feared the KKK all of our lives.” </p>
<p>
What I <i>do</i> mean is that their critiques of each other, even when it comes to the fantastic slander slung against each other by Newton and Cleaver when they suddenly split, are viewed with sober sense in the community. What a Michigan university student stated at a conference of black and white revolutionaries will illuminate the solidarity in the black community and the philosophic divisions: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
The issue of the split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver left many Black people troubled.... The support that the Panthers still get emanates, not from the Black masses’ espousal of their ideology, but from the communal solidarity of Black and oppressed people everywhere. The same is true for Angela Davis. Everybody may not care for “Communism,” but they care for Angela because she is a Black woman. One sister, pointing to a much-Orientalised picture of Angela that appeared in the Chinese press and was reproduced in Muhammad Speaks, told me that this shows how even the Russians and Chinese are racist. </p>
<p class="quoteb">
People I’ve talked to are pretty much fed up with the pragmatic, elitist philosophy most vanguards express. We’re looking for a total philosophy. Pan-Africanism, American style, is cliche. It is being used as an escape hatch and commercial fad by whites. True Pan-Africanism, like true brotherhood, is a beautiful ideal that is worth fighting for. But now that the Black capitalist cat has been let out of the bag, we see, or are beginning to see, that Black, too, can be corrupt. </p>
<p class="quoteb">
Black youth are looking for something, something total, something that would, once and for all, end the division between the real and the ideal. </p>
<p>
The end of the discussion seemed to call for a reconsideration of black consciousness, or at least more of an international view of it, as in Fanon’s <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i>, which had long been greatly praised by the Black Panthers, though the concentration was always just on the question of violence. Yet Fanon had much to say on many other questions; he was especially critical of leaders. Fanon devotes a whole chapter to the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” and “the laziness of the intellectuals": </p>
<p class="quoteb">
History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism... . It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. (p. 121) </p>
<p>
He draws a sharp line between masses and leaders not only before conquest of power, but after as well. Finally, it is true that Fanon exposes the horrors of Western civilisation, rejects it as any model to follow. He tells his African comrades: “Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them ...” (p. 252). But it is not true that he has only the black in mind. He is most specific that with the disappearance of colonialism and “colonised man,” “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others” (p. 197). Clearly, the dialectics of liberation is not anything pragmatic, nor something only black, much less narrowly nationalistic. It is global as well as revolutionary; it is total as well as historically continuous. It is, as he put it, a “new humanism."</p>
<p>
It is this Humanism which was indeed the unifying thread in the revolts in East Europe as in Africa, among white youth rebels and blacks, and that despite the radical sneers that Humanism was “petty-bourgeois nonsense.” But it was a black auto worker who gave it the sharpest edge: </p>
<p class="quoteb">
There is no middle road any more. The days we accepted, “we have to take the lesser of two evils,” are gone. You have to go to the extreme now. Racism is the issue here, and to rid ourselves of that, to be Humanist, we need a revolution. </p>
<p>
We may not be on the threshold of revolution, but the fact that the <i>idea</i> revolution simply refuses to be silent even when we are not in a prerevolutionary situation speaks volumes about the philosophical-political maturity of our age. We may not have a Hegel or a Marx or a Lenin, but we do have what no other age has had in such depth – the movement from praxis whose quest for universality does not stop with practice but hungers for a uniting of theory to practice. It is this – and therein lies the uniqueness of the dialectic – which resists any retrogressionism <i>within</i> the revolution. Retrogressionism seeks to particularise tasks, to “fix” the universal, to confine the tasks of the masses to “making” the revolution and not bothering their heads about “self-development."</p>
<p>
What the movement from practice has revealed over these last two decades of revolt and striving to establish new societies – whether via the African revolutions against Western imperialism and private capitalism, or through East European struggles for freedom from state-capitalism calling itself Communism, or within each land, be it the bastion of world imperialism, the U.S., or one as different as China – was that the masses wish not only to overthrow exploitative societies, but they will no longer accept cultural substitutes for uprooting the old and new managers over their conditions of labor and life. Anything short of a <i>total</i> reorganisation of life, totally new human relations, was now retrogressionist. That is what was new in these revolutions as against the revolutions following the First World War, when it seemed sufficient to overthrow the old and not worry about what came after the revolution succeeded. If any such illusions were still left when World War II ended and the Afro-Asian-Middle Eastern-Latin American Revolutions created a Third World, the 1950s ended them. The new frontiers opened with the end of illusions, with the start of revolutions <i>within</i> the successful revolutions, with the permanence of self-development so that there should end, once and for all, the difference between the Individual and the Universal. Philosophic-political maturity marks the uniqueness of our age. The need for “second negativity,” that is, a second revolution, has become <i>concrete</i>.</p>
<p>
Take Africa again. It faced the reality that political independence does not mean economic dependence has ended, but, on the contrary, the ugly head of neo-imperialism then first appears. Yet equally crucial were the new divisions that arose between the leaders and the led once national independence was achieved. At the same time new divisions also arose between Arab leadership and the “uneducated masses.” Whether we look at Zanzibar, which did succeed in overthrowing its Arab rulers, or to the southern Sudan, which had not, the need remained the same: a second revolution.</p>
<p>
Or take China, which certainly during the “Cultural Revolution” never seemed to stop espousing the slogan “It is right to revolt.” Why, then, did it turn to a “cultural” rather than an actual, a proletarian, a social revolution? Hegel and Marx can shed greater illumination on that <i>type</i> of cultural escapism than can the contemporary “China specialists,” who bow to every revolutionary-<i>sounding</i> slogan. It was no “preMarxian” Marx who insisted that Hegel’s philosophic abstractions were in fact the <i>historic</i> movement of mankind through various stages of freedom, that the stages of consciousness in the <i>Phenomenology</i> were in fact a critique of “whole spheres like religion, the state, bourgeois society and so forth.” Hegel himself saw that “pure culture” was “the absolute and universal inversion of reality and thought, their estrangement, one into the other ... each is the opposite of itself” (p. 541). Where Hegel moved from “culture” to “science,” i.e., the unity of history and its philosophic comprehension, Marx stressed that thought can transcend only other thought; but to reconstruct society itself, only actions of men and women, masses in motion, will do the “transcending,” and thereby “realize” philosophy, make freedom and whole men and women a reality.</p>
<p>
The genius of Hegel, his relevance for today, is that he <i>summed up</i> “the experiences of consciousness” in so comprehensive, so profound a manner over so long a stretch of man’s development – from the Greek city-states to the French Revolution – that the tendencies in the summation of the past give us a glimpse of the future, especially when materialistically understood in a Marxist-Humanist, not vulgar economist, manner.</p>
<p>
What we have shown throughout is this: There is a dialectic of thought from consciousness through culture to philosophy. There is a dialectic of history from slavery through serfdom to free wage labor. There is a dialectic of the class struggle in general and under capitalism in particular – and as it develops through certain specific stages from competition through monopoly to state, in each case it calls forth new forms of revolt and new aspects of the philosophy of revolution.</p>
<p>
Only a Marx could work out the latter. What Hegel had shown were the dangers inherent in the French Revolution which did not end in the millennium. The dialectic disclosed that the counter-revolution is <i>within</i> the revolution. It is the greatest challenge man has ever had to face. We are living that challenge today. Mao, not daring to release the elemental striving of the masses to control their conditions of labor, retrogresses to “cultural,” to “epiphenomenal” changes. One could say that Mao may not have recognised philosophy, but <i><b>philosophy, Hegelian dialectics, recognised him so long ago it predicted his coming</b></i>. The fetishistic character of the so-called cultural revolution struck out, not against exploitative production, but the bland “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits). All sound and fury and no class content. Only he who has no future is frightened of the past! By any other name, including that of Red Guards, the elitist character of Party, Army, Red Guards, and what now merged into the one and only “helmsman at the ship of state,” is as unmistakable as was Louis XIV’s “L’etat c’est moi.” Which is why Sheng Wu-lien demanded that instead of rhetoric, real “Paris Communes” must cover the land. That self-development, self-activity, self-movement in the Hegelian dialectic which became so alive to Lenin in 1914-23, is that which caused Stalin to order the exclusion of “the negation of the negation” from the “laws” of the dialectic as if, by fiat, state-capitalist tyranny could indeed change the course of history. Lack of confidence in the masses is the common root of all objections to “idealistic, mystical Hegelianism.” That includes not only outright betrayers, but also intellectuals committed to proletarian revolution; outsiders looking in; academic Marxists who (even when independent of any state power) are permeated to the marrow of their bones with the capitalistic concept of the backwardness of the proletariat. One and all, they are blind to the relationship of theory to history as a historical relationship <i>made by masses in motion</i>.</p>
<p>
The one element of truth that all these detractors of Hegel express is the need to break with bourgeois idealism, including that of Hegel. For, without Marx’s unique discovery of the materialist foundations of history, Hegelian dialectics remained imprisoned in an idealism that was abstract enough to allow for its usage as apology for the Prussian state. Had Marx not broken with bourgeois idealism in its philosophic form as well as its class nature, he would not have been able either to disclose the algebraic formula of revolution inherent in the Hegelian dialectic, or to recreate the dialectic that emerged out of the actual class struggles and proletarian revolutions, and sketch out that, <i>just that, self-movement</i> into “permanent revolution.” In our age, however, we have to contend with Communism’s, and its fellow travellers’, perversions of the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic.</p>
<p>
Mankind has evidently reached the end of something, when the richest and most powerful military might on earth shouts to the heavens, not about the wonders of its production, affluence, or nuclear gigantism, but about the “strange spirit of malaise throughout the land.” This is not all due to “spirit.” It has very deep economic roots: whether one looks at the money crisis or the unemployment that will not go away; whether one’s sights are on the ceaseless militarisation and nuclear gigantism or the depth of the poverty and its deepening black colour in the midst of the affluence of white imperialism; whether one’s eyes are on reaching the barren moon or on the hollowness of America’s so-called democracy. But the overwhelming fact is that the U.S.’s GNP hitting the trillion-dollar mark, far from winning the battle for the minds of men, lost not only the battle but its mind, its spirit.<br> </p>
<p>
The constant tug-of-war with “Hegelianism” on the part of the “New Left” just when there is such hunger for a new philosophy of liberation, is only proof that there is no “third way” in the mode of thought any more than there is in the class struggle. Petty-bourgeois subjectivism has always ended by holding on to some state power, and never more so than in our state-capitalist age, whose intellectuals are so ridden through with the administrative mentality of the Plan, the Vanguard Party, the “cultural” revolution as the substitute for the proletarian revolution. The totality of the crisis demands not only <i>listening</i> to the voices from below, but also <i>building</i> on that foundation as the reality and as the link to historic continuity.</p>
<p>
Furthest from the minds of elitist intellectuals, of leaders in particular, is the self-development of the masses who themselves would master the principles of the dialectic. Yet all the new beginnings for theory, for philosophy as well as for revolutionary reconstruction of society on totally new human foundations, have in our age come from the spontaneous outbursts the world over. “Self-determination in which alone the Idea is is to hear itself speak” was heard by those fighting for selfdetermination. They were “experiencing” second negativity. Clearly the struggle was against not only exploiters, but also those who set themselves up as leaders.</p>
<p>
The days are long since past when these voices from below could be treated, at best, as mere sources of theory. The movement from practice which is itself a form of theory demands a totally new relationship of theory to practice. Lenin was right when he declared that Hegel’s route from Logic to Nature meant “stretching a hand to materialism,” and when he proclaimed, “Cognition not only reflects the world but creates it.” As can be seen from his concretisation of this – “the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity” – it was no mere restatement of his former thesis that “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.” This time Lenin kept stressing “Subject,” man, “subjective” as “most concrete,” cognition as dialectics, as philosophy – “<i>Science is a circle of circles</i>. The various sciences ... are fragments of this chain.” Whether it is theory or the Party – by 1920 Lenin was to stress that “Socialism cannot be introduced by a minority, a Party” – Lenin’s emphasis was on philosophy: “absolute subjectivity,” Subject as man and Notion, the unity of object and subject, of mental and manual, the whole.</p>
<p>
The tragedy of the Russian Revolution was that this was never achieved after the conquest of state power, and the Bolshevik co-leaders, in ruling a state power, also took advantage of the philosophic ambivalence of Lenin to turn their backs on “idealist philosophy."</p>
<p>
It is true, of course – and indeed there would be something fundamentally amiss if it were otherwise – that Marx and Lenin solved the problems of their age, not ours. But powerful foundations have been laid for this age which we would disregard at our peril, even as it would be fatal not to build on the theoretic-practical Humanist ground rediscovered since the mid-1950s, and which Marx in his day called “positive Humanism, beginning from itself.” The restatement, by the mature proletarian revolutionary author of <i>Capital</i>, of the young Marx’s exuberance of 1844 – “the development of human power which is its own end” – demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt how Europe’s 1848 revolutions, America’s Civil War, 1861-65, and the Paris Commune, 1871, verified Marx’s “new Humanism.” Any other foundation, any other ground, such as “nationalised propertyless with or without military “focos,” can only lead to still another tyranny.</p>
<p>
There is no way to end the reappearance of still another exploitative, alienated, and alienating society except through a social revolution, beginning with the relations between people <i>at the point of production</i>, and continuing as that elemental outburst involving the population “to a man, woman, child” which ends once and for all the dichotomy between mental and manual labor so that “individuality [is] freed from all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., freedom."</p>
<p>
To labor under the illusion that one could pick up theory “en route” and thereby avoid going through “the labor of the negative” in the theoretic preparation for revolution as in the actual class struggles is every bit as false a consciousness as that which befalls the ruling class.</p>
<p>
As against the concept that endless activism, though it be mindless, is sufficient “to make the revolution,” what is needed is a restatement for our age of Marx’s concept of the “realisation” of philosophy, that is, the inseparability of philosophy and revolution.</p>
<p>
The mature Marx, like the young Marx, rejected Feuerbachian materialism and held instead that the Hegelian dialectic of “second negativity” was <i>the</i> “creative principle,” the turning-point which puts an end to the division between mental and manual labor. The mature, as well as the young, Marx grounded “the development of human power which is its own end” in the “absolute movement of becoming.” Only with such a Promethean vision could one be certain that a new Paris Commune would not only be “a historic initiative – working, thinking, bleeding Paris ... radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative” – but continue its self-development so that a totally new social order on a world scale was established. </p>
<p>
The<i> new</i> that characterises our era, the “energising principle” that has determined the direction of the two decades of the movement <i>from practice</i>, simultaneously rejects false consciousness and aborted revolutions.</p>
<p>
The reality is stifling. The transformation of reality has a dialectic all its own. It demands a unity of the struggles for freedom with a philosophy of liberation. Only then does the elemental revolt release new sensibilities, new passions, and new forces – a whole new human dimension.</p>
<p>
Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognise that this is the task history has “assigned,” to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.</p>
<p> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="index.htm">Contents</a> |
<a href="../../../james-clr/works/1948/revolutionary-answer.htm">C L R James on Black Power</a> |
<a href="../../../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/fanon.htm">Frantz Fanon</a><br>
<a href="../../index.htm">Dunayevskaya Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> |
Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973
Philosophy & Revolution
Chapter 9
New Passions and New ForcesThe Black Dimension, The Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women’s Liberation
Individualism which lets nothing interfere with its Universalism, i.e., Freedom. Hegel
New forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society ... Marx, Capital
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster.... For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Black was the colour that helped make the 1960s so exciting a decade. We became witness simultaneously to the African Revolutions and the Black Revolution in America. By their self-activity, self-organisation, self-development, the black youth struck out against white supremacy in the quiescent South, and with unparalleled courage took everything that was dished out to them – from beatings, bombings, and prisons to cattle prods, shootings, and even death – and still, unarmed, continued fighting back. They initiated a new epoch of youth revolt, white as well as black, throughout the land. There was not a single method of struggle, from sit-ins, teach-ins, dwell-ins, wade-ins, to Freedom Rides, Freedom Marches, Freedom Schools, and confrontations with the Establishment, Bull Connors’ bulldogs and whips in Alabama, or the smartly uniformed soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., that did not have its origin in the black movement. Moreover, this was so not only as strategy and tactic but also as underlying philosophy and perspectives for the future.
By February 1965, when the government’s rain of bombs on Hanoi produced the anti-Vietnam War movement here, the students who had gone South and then returned to Berkeley to confront the multiversity talked a very different language than when they had left. As Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, put it:
America may be the most poverty-stricken country in the world. Not materially. But intellectually it is bankrupt. And morally it’s poverty-stricken. But in such a way that it’s not clear to you that you’re poor. It’s very hard to know you’re poor if you’re eating well....
Students are excited about political ideas. They’re not yet inured to the apolitical society they’re going to enter. But being interested in ideas means you have no use in American society ... unless they are ideas which are useful to the military-industrial complex....
Factories are run in authoritarian fashion – non-union factories anyway – and that’s the nearest parallel to the university....
In contrast, Savio kept driving home about his fellow students the point that “they are people who have not learned to compromise.”
The fact that the first important schism in the movement itself arose at the very moment when it did become a mass anti-Vietnam War movement was not due to any differences over the slogan, which indeed a black spoke first, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” There was alienation from the white students who all too quickly migrated back North without so much as a “by your leave” to the civil rights movement. To the blacks it was a manifestation of just how all-pervasive racism was in the racist U.S.A., not excluding its white revolutionaries who considered themselves, and not the black masses, as “the vanguard.” Blacks and whites moved separate ways and, once again, the objectivity of their struggle for freedom was inseparable from a self-developing subjectivity.
Black consciousness, Afro-American roots, awareness of themselves as a people, a nation, a race: “Black is beautiful.” Black is revolutionary. Many a youth was memorising Malcolm X’s records. That they identified with him most after he broke with Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims, when he was moving toward a new revolutionary universalism, is no accident whatever. In 1966, when Stokely Carmichael (on that famous march through the South, alongside Reverend King and James Meredith) first raised the slogan “Black Power,” he signalled more than the end of Dr. King’s predominance in the leadership of the Movement. It was also the beginning of the division between ranks and all leaders, himself included. It is true he electrified the crowd, when he first expounded on the slogan:
The only way we gonna stop them white men from huppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is black power.... Ain’t nothin’ wrong with anything all black ’cause I’m all black and I’m all good. Now don’t you be afraid. And from now on when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.
All answered: “Black Power! Black Power! BLACK POWER!” But as the slogan caught on, Stokely himself was off elsewhere. Neither he nor any other black leader was around when the 1967 explosion burst on the U.S. stage. Neither he nor any other black militant leader was listening to the voices that came from below, least of all from black workers. One black worker from Oakland, California, disgusted with what became of the “Black Power” slogan, wrote:
Black power has become a gigantic reindeer – hat rack with many opposing hats hanging there, including the hat of Black capitalism. The possible unity of Black and white workers to destroy the system of capitalism is a punch at the gut nerve of all middle class intellectuals and elitist groups, Black or white.
To the masses, “Hell, no, we won’t go” meant we should fight the enemies at home – poor jobs and no jobs at all; poor homes and no homes at all; racism; “the system.” What they were not saying, much less having money to do it with, is travel abroad, or any other form of escapism. More than just not having learned to compromise, as the white youth had, or to talk endlessly as the black leaders did, what sprang up from ghettoised hunger and racism in white affluent society was the elemental outburst, North, South, East, West, in the year 1967. The predominant note was, of course, “Whitey ain’t about to get up off of anything unless you make him.” And yet when the explosion reached Detroit, a still newer stage of black revolt matured. In common with the outbursts occurring throughout the land – from Boston to Spanish Harlem, from Tucson to Newark, from Cleveland to Sacramento, and some eighty other cities – the voice of anger against, frustration with, and rejection of their conditions of life was loud and clear. Watts had sounded the tocsin in 1965, and Detroit in 1967 set a still newer stage.
When the wrath of the blacks exploded in Detroit, it was vented not only against the police in their own neighbourhoods, or even the police in general, who were the prime targets of the snipers. In Detroit, blacks made a direct attack on police stations. Many other things were new in the Detroit revolt. Unlike other cities, here the repossession, as well as the sniping later, was integrated. As one reporter on the scene put it: “It was just like Negroes and whites were shopping together, only they weren’t paying for anything.” Or as one white and one black worker expressed it:
By looting, they ain’t taking what they ain’t paid for. We’ve been paying for that stuff for over a thousand years, ever since we was born.
We want the right that we ought not to be beat on the head all the time just because we’re black.
Unlike almost all other outbursts, Detroit’s was not so much against “whitey” as such, as against the white landlords, white merchants, and of course the white police. And while the ubiquitous sign “SOUL BROTHER” saved many black stores from the torch, black merchants who had also gouged the community were not spared. In fact, one black-owned drugstore that had been picketed by CORE the week earlier was among the very first to go. It was a revolt against a class society.
Law and order from the barrel of a gun meant 43 lay dead, some 1500 were wounded, 4000 were jailed with bail set at such impossible figures (up to $100,000!) that constitutional rights were nullified. Though no “foreign invaders” had landed anywhere in the United States, though no insurrection against the state – “constituted authority” – was in progress, though only one side was thrice armed, the city was, to all intents and purposes, under occupation. “Emergency measures” turned out to be a pseudonym for martial law.
To try to deny the new stage that the black revolt had reached in Detroit – to make the revolt appear purely racist – the power structure, including the liberal Establishment, had to quote Stokely Carmichael. He, however, was in Havana; the action was in Detroit. He was talking, not acting. Those who were the actual participants in the revolt made their actions stark and clear: Down with the black slums: Let’s not have two nations, one filthy rich and the other miserably poor; Let’s have one nation with truly human relationships.
To the extent to which the elitist black nationalists did operate in the ghettos, whether in Cambridge (Maryland) or in Detroit, in Wichita or Elgin (Illinois), in Newark or Milwaukee, they were just trying to get credit for that which the masses themselves did, did spontaneously. They revolted against the class system wearing a white face, rather than against “whitey” where he was not part of the exploitative system.
The simple truth is that it is the Government – national, state, city; the police, the prisons and the courts – and not the “outside agitators” who breed racism and evoke the wrath of the people.
The black people have always been the touchstone of American civilisation precisely because they could both expose its Achilles’ heel – its racism – and because they were always in the vanguard of its forward movement. It was so in the struggle against slavery when they fought together with the white Abolitionists. It was so during the birth of imperialism when the blacks stood alone in their opposition, sensing the racist repercussions of imperialism’s white conquest of Latin America and the Philippines, and its forcing open the gates of trade with the Orient. It was so when, with white labor, they reshaped the industrial face of America through the creation of the CIO. And it is so now when the Black Revolution has reached the crossroads between nationalism and proletarian internationalism.
In 1967 the vitality of the black people, full of purpose, attacked only the symptoms of oppression – the white landlord in the slums, the white merchant, the white middleman. This is not because they did not know who Mr. Big was. Rather, it was because they did not see white labor ready to join them in their determination to undermine the whole system. They know better than the elitist leaders that, without white labor, the system cannot be torn up by its roots. The black revolt reached a peak in Detroit because for the first time in years, outside and inside the shop, there was the first appearance of white and black solidarity. It was but the faintest of beginnings, but it did appear.
A still newer element in the struggles at the point of production arose after these eruptions, when capitalists had been sufficiently frightened by the destruction and fear of outright revolution to begin hiring young blacks. The black caucuses in factories that until then had thought the most important thing to do was to remove some bureaucrats from office in order to democratise the union structure, now would stop at nothing short, as one worker put it, “of a complete change – of revolution.” Thus one group at a Dodge plant in Detroit called itself the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Other plants did the same. A few years earlier black workers would have shied away from them, but by 1968 even a moderate worker explained:
The most popular word in the shop these days is: revolutionary. In the past, even when we didn’t parrot the union leadership and call workers “Communists,” we would shy away from any worker who declared himself to be a “revolutionary.” Now we say to him: “Why be for foreign revolutions? We need one here, right here.”
In May 1968, however, all eyes turned to France, for it was there that the highest point of development for all “new passions and new forces” erupted. The vastness and expansiveness of the spontaneous mass outburst, the range and multiplicity of the actions – from barricades in the Latin Quarter to occupation of factories to mass marches – marked a turning-point of historic dimensions. For the first time in the turbulent 1960s a near-revolution erupted in a technologically advanced country. For the first time since the birth of the new generation of revolutionaries, the student youth and the workers united in mass activities. For the first time the worker-student alliance showed itself to be not only a new form of struggle but an overpowering force, as thousands of students in revolt became 10 million workers on general strike, became millions of marching feet of workers and students and housewives, of oldsters as well as youth, became a near revolution undermining De Gaulle. Yet the fact that it was only a near, not an actual revolution; the fact that the French Communist Party, through the CGT, could keep the workers confined to reformist demands and make it unnecessary for De Gaulle, once he organised the counterrevolution, to need a bloodbath to keep the mass revolt from becoming social revolution; these things cast a cloud not only over revolution but also over the “vanguardists” like the Trotskyists who, though they fought the C.P. counter-revolutionary activities, held on to the same concept of a “vanguard Party to lead the revolution.”
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was absolutely right when he said that the movement was beyond the small parties which wanted to lead. But he was wrong to hold to so abstract a view of a philosophy of liberation as to think that theory can be picked up “en route.” Without theory the road to revolution leads “en route” to nowhere; the revolution-to-be was a stillbirth. Which only increased the endless output of books on it. As one young American revolutionary who was a participant put it:
At no time, 1848 to 1968, have there been more analyses, more solutions, more answers thrust upon the revolutionary actions of the Polish, the German, the Czechoslovak, and most specifically the French masses than what we are witnessing today. For Sartre, the barricades of France and the general strike had a certain resemblance to the Castro type of insurrection. For Marcuse, the May revolt was Maoist-like, i.e., there were aspects of China’s Cultural Revolution. For the Trotskyists, it was a revolution minus one ingredient – a “real” vanguard party. For some existentialist-anarchists it was a collective madness which proudly had no goal, no definite aims, no alternative.... For Cohn-Bendit and others their role is that of “planting seeds.” [But] going from the possible to the actual is not only a task of the workers. It is a task for theoreticians.
Different as France, May 1968, was from Cuba, January 1959, the underlying philosophy of much of the New Left seemed to be one or another form of “guerrilla warfare” that became most famous under the title “Revolution Within the Revolution?” The youth especially came under its spell, even those who did not accept the view that only in the countryside and only in technologically underdeveloped countries could the revolution be “made.” To self-proclaimed “urban guerrillas,” the point of attraction, more so in the U.S. than in France, was its newness, unburdened by the past.
So empirical-minded is the American youth, black included, that even revolutionaries who have separated themselves from Communism of the Russian and the Chinese varieties, have fully and uncritically embraced Castro. So exhilarating was the Cuban experience that they never questioned the direction, much less the philosophy, of its development since achieving power. One famous exception seemed to have been the young black Communist philosopher, Angela Davis, who from prison posed the question “What happens after?”: “the most difficult period of all is the building of the revolutionary society after the seizure of power.” This did not, however, predominate over her Cuban experience, “my first prolonged contact with a socialist country through my own eyes and limbs, I might add, since I cut cane for a while.” Contrast this view of a leader with the view of a black woman from the ranks of the Women’s Liberation movement:
I’m not thoroughly convinced that Black Liberation, the way it’s being spelled out, will really and truly mean my liberation. I’m not so sure that when it comes time “to put down my gun,” that I won’t have a broom shoved in my hands, as so many of my Cuban sisters have.
For that matter, once Angela was freed, she refused to sign the appeal of a Czechoslovak fighter for freedom, Jiri Pelikan, who had written to her: “We too have many Angela Davises and Soledad brothers.”
As against the voices from below, the whole of Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? burns with zeal, “to free the present from the past” (pp. 19-91). This is further bound by a “principal lesson” (pp. 95-116), and held on to tightly as the spokesman for Castro expounds “some consequences for the future” (pp. 119-26). In place of “traditions” or theoretic abstractions we must face the facts, “the concrete,” the experience (Cuban), topped by “the military foco.” Anything, anything whatever that stands in the way of this veritable miracle, “the military foco,” is to be thrown into the dustbin of history. In the guise of non-theory the French philosopher thus presents us with a “theory” that departs in toto from Marx’s most fundamental concept, that of a social revolution. He proclaims a “new dialectic of tasks” (p. 119): unquestioning obedience to the “Equivalent Substitution” (military command). Outside of the penchant for monolithism – “There is no longer a place for verbal ideological relation to the revolution, nor for a certain type of polemic” (p. 123) – which characterises this manual on how “to make” revolutions, its 126 pages are an endless paean of praise for the guerrilla: “the staggering novelty introduced by the Cuban Revolution is this: the guerrilla force is the party in embryo” (p. 106).
So supreme is the military as means and end, as strategy and tactic, as leadership and manhood itself, that it does indeed swallow up not only theory and party but the masses themselves:
One finds that a working class of restricted size or under the influence of a reformist trade union aristocracy, and an isolated and humiliated peasantry, are willing to accept this group, of bourgeois origin, as their political leadership.
At this point enters the Leader Maximum, for the end result of the Army’s replacing the Party, replacing the Proletariat, replacing the Peasantry, is that all are replaced by the know-it-all, see-it-all, be-it-all “Equivalent Substitution.”
Now, suppose that, for the moment, we are willing to forget that the first modern theorist and greatest practitioner of guerrilla warfare was not Fidel Castro, but Mao Tse-Tung; suppose, further, that we close our eyes to the truth that “the present” (1965) was not a Cuban Revolution but the on-going Vietnam War of liberation engaged in direct combat with the mightiest world imperialist, the U.S.A.; and finally, suppose we agree that a guerrilla force is “the party in embryo” – where exactly do all these suppositions lead? If the achievements are the proof that “insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity” (p. 116), does the old Stalinist monolithism of forbidding factions in order “to free us” from “the vice of excessive deliberation” thereby become “the present,” “the theoretical and historical novelty of this [Cuban] situation” (p. 123) ? And do Marx’s and Lenin’s deliberations on revolution, as actuality and as theory, become consigned to “the past” and allow Debray to point “a warning finger ... to indicate a shortcut”? Guerrilla warfare is a shortcut to nowhere. It is a protracted war that leads more often to defeat than to “victory,” and where it does lead to state power, hardly keeps the revolution from souring.
When Che spoke with his own voice rather than Debray’s, he did not flinch from direct confrontation with Lenin’s theory by consigning it to the past:
This is a unique Revolution which some people maintain contradicts one of the most orthodox premises of the revolutionary movement, expressed by Lenin: “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” It would be suitable to say that revolutionary theory as the expression of a social truth, surpasses any declaration of it; that is to say, even if the theory is not known, the revolution can succeed if historical reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved in it are utilised correctly.
Were we even to forget the martyrdom of Che Guevara in the very period when Debray’s nimble-penned panacea became the New Left’s manual on how “to make revolutions,” our post-World War II world is not short of guerrilla wars, from the Philippines to Burma, from Malaya to Japan, that have failed. The post-World War I world, on the other hand, exuded true magic, the “magic” of the Russian Revolution, which set the world aflame. Even today, with a half-century’s lapse and the first workers’ state having been transformed into its opposite, a state-capitalist society, the perspectives unfolded by 1917 remain the greatest form of world revolution. This is the Marxist heritage, the past from which Castro’s chosen theoretician wishes “to free the present.” Marx’s concept of revolution – great masses in motion, in spontaneous, forward movement – is not something that can be “made” from above.
When that black Women’s Liberationist expressed a fear that when it comes to putting down the gun, she may once again have a broom shoved into her hands, she was expressing one of the most anti-elitist new forces and new passions that had come on the historic stage and were raising altogether new questions. It is true that, on the whole, these were questions addressed to the private capitalistic world, specifically the U.S. But the women were saying: “We will no longer be objects – mindless sex objects, or robots that keep house, or cheap manual labor you can call in when there are no men available and discard when there are.” These women were also demanding their heads back, and it is this which surprised none more than the New Left, since though born out of the New Left, it was the New Left men whom Women’s Liberation opposed. The same women who had participated in every phase of the freedom movements refused to continue being the typists, the mimeographers, the “ladies’ auxiliaries” to the Left. They demanded an end to the separation of mental and manual labor, not only as a “goal,” not only against capitalist society, but as an immediate need of the Left itself, especially regarding women. Nor were they afraid to attack the male chauvinism in the black movement as well. Black and white women joined together to do battle with the arrogance of a Stokely Carmichael, who had said that “the only position for women in the movement is prone.”
So uncompromising as well as adamant was their attack on elitism and authoritarianism that the very structure of the new Women’s Liberation groups, the small groups that sprang up everywhere, were an effort to find a form that would allow for the self-development of the individual woman. They disregarded the established women’s groups because they too were structured and too concerned with the middle-class professional women. They wished to release all women – most of all black, working-class, Chicano, Indian. Whether it was a question of the right to abortion, or equal pay, or having control over their own lives, the single word was NOW. Freedom meant now, today, not tomorrow, much less the day after. “Now” meant not waiting for the day of revolution, much less excluding from the political struggle the question of the relationship of man to woman. Women no longer considered that question a merely private matter, for that was only the standard way of making women feel isolated and helpless. The very fact that freedom was in the air meant that she no longer was alone, that there were thousands forming a movement, a force. Individuality and collectivity became inseparable from the mass demonstrations in August 1970. And for the first time also, history was not past but in the making. And now that they were making it, there was no feeling that they were lost in a collectivity, but rather that each was individualised through this historic process.
Thus, in spite of adverse publicity about “ugly girls burning bras” and whatever other nonsense the male chauvinists played up in order to make the movement look silly, more and more women kept joining it. Different kinds of women who had never joined anything before became activists – and thinkers. In addition to those who called themselves members of the movement, thousands more expressed the same ideas, from the welfare mothers’ organisations to the new drives to unionise women’s industries and fight the discrimination sanctioned by existing unions. And the many voices expressing the ideas of Women’s Liberation were the result not of women reading Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics or the hundreds of less serious works on the subject, but of the hunger for new roles in society and new relationships for them here and now.
Instead of grasping the link of continuity of today’s strivings with that which Marx saw emerging, or of listening to new voices, today’s “Marxists” themselves are the best examples of Marx’s concept of ideology as false consciousness. They look upon themselves as the leaders, or at least the politicos, who can offer “a rational reassessment of feminist ideology” and look down upon today’s new women rebels as apolitical, as if that meant they had nothing to say worth listening to and that there were no objective validity to the movement. It is true that with the mass demonstrations by women, especially in New York in 1970, all parties want to use them. That precisely is the trouble.
The uniqueness of today’s Women’s Liberation movement is that it dares to challenge what is, including the male chauvinism not only under capitalism but within the revolutionary movement itself. To fear to expose this male chauvinism leads to helplessness. To face reality, and to face it not through sheer voluntarism, but with full awareness of all the forces lined up against us, is the one way to assure the coalescence with other revolutionary forces, especially labor, which is so strategically placed in production and has its own black dimension. But the fact that it will not be possible fully to overcome male chauvinism as long as class society exists does not invalidate the movement any more than any struggle for freedom is invalidated. On the contrary, the very fact that there is a widespread Women’s Liberation movement proves that it is an idea whose time has come and that it is an integral part of the very organism of liberation.
One advantage in pointing to the self-development of “Subjectivity” in the Black Revolution is that it has none of the perjorative connotation that old radicals give it when they declaim against “petty-bourgeois subjectivism.” Whether or not consciously related to the Hegelian concept – "the transcendence of the opposition between Notion and Reality, and the unity which is the truth, rest upon subjectivity alone” – it is clear that for the black masses, black consciousness, awareness of themselves as Afro-Americans with a dual history and special pride, is a drive toward wholeness. Far from being a separation from the objective, it means an end to the separation between objective and subjective. Not even the most elitist black has quite the same arrogant attitude as the white intellectual toward the worker, not to mention the prisoner.
Thus, it is stressed that a worker is not dumb, has thought of his own, wants to have a say in “philosophy” and not just in action. It took all the way to 1973 before the long-lasting and persistent 1972 strikes in the auto industry – especially among young workers in the GM plants in Lordstown and Norwood – compelled the union bureaucrats to acknowledge the existence of “blue collar blues.” The press began to speak of job alienation as the “new social issue of the decade.” The UAW bureaucrats finally called for a special meeting on February 28, 1973 – not with their own rank-and-file, but with management executives. They have still to recognise the alienated labor that Marx described 100 years ago, produced by “the automaton": “An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton ... in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power ... breaks out into the fast and furious whirl ... The lightening of the labor, even, becomes a sort of torture since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest ..."
Thus, the Soledad prisoner wrote against inhuman prison conditions, and also, “I met Marx and Engels and Lenin and Mao – they redeemed me.” Thus, the Angela Davis case brought responses, not only for her defence – from the thousands that Aretha Franklin offered to the dollar the housewife donated – but declarations, Communist or otherwise, that the FBI had hunted her because she is a woman, she is black, she is a professor. The black community is tired and sick of having whites think them dumb.
I do not mean that there is complete unity in the black community, although the rampant racism – which makes all economic burdens fall heaviest on blacks – and every conceivable and inconceivable subtle and not so subtle discrimination and segregation practiced against them by whites, certainly does draw them together as a people, as a race, as a nation within a nation. Thus, as late as 1970, at the very moment when the black students were coming out in solidarity with the murdered white students at Kent State University, the experience with whites, not bigots but revolutionary whites, was shattering. In contrast to the mass outpouring of protest all over the country to the Kent killings and the Cambodian invasion, there was very nearly total silence on the part of whites to the happenings in the South, the murder of blacks by police and the planned and massive gunfire poured out at the black women’s dormitory at Jackson State. All the blacks, no matter in what stratum, avowed that racism was in fact so deeply ingrained and irreversible as to hold all whites in its throes. Thus, the black GIs, the very ones who were still in Vietnam, experienced the same discrimination as in the South and, as a two-year survey revealed, they hailed the Black Panthers as “an equaliser.” “The beast (the white man) got his Ku Klux Klan. The Black Panthers give the beast something to fear, like we feared the KKK all of our lives.”
What I do mean is that their critiques of each other, even when it comes to the fantastic slander slung against each other by Newton and Cleaver when they suddenly split, are viewed with sober sense in the community. What a Michigan university student stated at a conference of black and white revolutionaries will illuminate the solidarity in the black community and the philosophic divisions:
The issue of the split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver left many Black people troubled.... The support that the Panthers still get emanates, not from the Black masses’ espousal of their ideology, but from the communal solidarity of Black and oppressed people everywhere. The same is true for Angela Davis. Everybody may not care for “Communism,” but they care for Angela because she is a Black woman. One sister, pointing to a much-Orientalised picture of Angela that appeared in the Chinese press and was reproduced in Muhammad Speaks, told me that this shows how even the Russians and Chinese are racist.
People I’ve talked to are pretty much fed up with the pragmatic, elitist philosophy most vanguards express. We’re looking for a total philosophy. Pan-Africanism, American style, is cliche. It is being used as an escape hatch and commercial fad by whites. True Pan-Africanism, like true brotherhood, is a beautiful ideal that is worth fighting for. But now that the Black capitalist cat has been let out of the bag, we see, or are beginning to see, that Black, too, can be corrupt.
Black youth are looking for something, something total, something that would, once and for all, end the division between the real and the ideal.
The end of the discussion seemed to call for a reconsideration of black consciousness, or at least more of an international view of it, as in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which had long been greatly praised by the Black Panthers, though the concentration was always just on the question of violence. Yet Fanon had much to say on many other questions; he was especially critical of leaders. Fanon devotes a whole chapter to the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” and “the laziness of the intellectuals":
History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism... . It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. (p. 121)
He draws a sharp line between masses and leaders not only before conquest of power, but after as well. Finally, it is true that Fanon exposes the horrors of Western civilisation, rejects it as any model to follow. He tells his African comrades: “Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them ...” (p. 252). But it is not true that he has only the black in mind. He is most specific that with the disappearance of colonialism and “colonised man,” “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others” (p. 197). Clearly, the dialectics of liberation is not anything pragmatic, nor something only black, much less narrowly nationalistic. It is global as well as revolutionary; it is total as well as historically continuous. It is, as he put it, a “new humanism."
It is this Humanism which was indeed the unifying thread in the revolts in East Europe as in Africa, among white youth rebels and blacks, and that despite the radical sneers that Humanism was “petty-bourgeois nonsense.” But it was a black auto worker who gave it the sharpest edge:
There is no middle road any more. The days we accepted, “we have to take the lesser of two evils,” are gone. You have to go to the extreme now. Racism is the issue here, and to rid ourselves of that, to be Humanist, we need a revolution.
We may not be on the threshold of revolution, but the fact that the idea revolution simply refuses to be silent even when we are not in a prerevolutionary situation speaks volumes about the philosophical-political maturity of our age. We may not have a Hegel or a Marx or a Lenin, but we do have what no other age has had in such depth – the movement from praxis whose quest for universality does not stop with practice but hungers for a uniting of theory to practice. It is this – and therein lies the uniqueness of the dialectic – which resists any retrogressionism within the revolution. Retrogressionism seeks to particularise tasks, to “fix” the universal, to confine the tasks of the masses to “making” the revolution and not bothering their heads about “self-development."
What the movement from practice has revealed over these last two decades of revolt and striving to establish new societies – whether via the African revolutions against Western imperialism and private capitalism, or through East European struggles for freedom from state-capitalism calling itself Communism, or within each land, be it the bastion of world imperialism, the U.S., or one as different as China – was that the masses wish not only to overthrow exploitative societies, but they will no longer accept cultural substitutes for uprooting the old and new managers over their conditions of labor and life. Anything short of a total reorganisation of life, totally new human relations, was now retrogressionist. That is what was new in these revolutions as against the revolutions following the First World War, when it seemed sufficient to overthrow the old and not worry about what came after the revolution succeeded. If any such illusions were still left when World War II ended and the Afro-Asian-Middle Eastern-Latin American Revolutions created a Third World, the 1950s ended them. The new frontiers opened with the end of illusions, with the start of revolutions within the successful revolutions, with the permanence of self-development so that there should end, once and for all, the difference between the Individual and the Universal. Philosophic-political maturity marks the uniqueness of our age. The need for “second negativity,” that is, a second revolution, has become concrete.
Take Africa again. It faced the reality that political independence does not mean economic dependence has ended, but, on the contrary, the ugly head of neo-imperialism then first appears. Yet equally crucial were the new divisions that arose between the leaders and the led once national independence was achieved. At the same time new divisions also arose between Arab leadership and the “uneducated masses.” Whether we look at Zanzibar, which did succeed in overthrowing its Arab rulers, or to the southern Sudan, which had not, the need remained the same: a second revolution.
Or take China, which certainly during the “Cultural Revolution” never seemed to stop espousing the slogan “It is right to revolt.” Why, then, did it turn to a “cultural” rather than an actual, a proletarian, a social revolution? Hegel and Marx can shed greater illumination on that type of cultural escapism than can the contemporary “China specialists,” who bow to every revolutionary-sounding slogan. It was no “preMarxian” Marx who insisted that Hegel’s philosophic abstractions were in fact the historic movement of mankind through various stages of freedom, that the stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology were in fact a critique of “whole spheres like religion, the state, bourgeois society and so forth.” Hegel himself saw that “pure culture” was “the absolute and universal inversion of reality and thought, their estrangement, one into the other ... each is the opposite of itself” (p. 541). Where Hegel moved from “culture” to “science,” i.e., the unity of history and its philosophic comprehension, Marx stressed that thought can transcend only other thought; but to reconstruct society itself, only actions of men and women, masses in motion, will do the “transcending,” and thereby “realize” philosophy, make freedom and whole men and women a reality.
The genius of Hegel, his relevance for today, is that he summed up “the experiences of consciousness” in so comprehensive, so profound a manner over so long a stretch of man’s development – from the Greek city-states to the French Revolution – that the tendencies in the summation of the past give us a glimpse of the future, especially when materialistically understood in a Marxist-Humanist, not vulgar economist, manner.
What we have shown throughout is this: There is a dialectic of thought from consciousness through culture to philosophy. There is a dialectic of history from slavery through serfdom to free wage labor. There is a dialectic of the class struggle in general and under capitalism in particular – and as it develops through certain specific stages from competition through monopoly to state, in each case it calls forth new forms of revolt and new aspects of the philosophy of revolution.
Only a Marx could work out the latter. What Hegel had shown were the dangers inherent in the French Revolution which did not end in the millennium. The dialectic disclosed that the counter-revolution is within the revolution. It is the greatest challenge man has ever had to face. We are living that challenge today. Mao, not daring to release the elemental striving of the masses to control their conditions of labor, retrogresses to “cultural,” to “epiphenomenal” changes. One could say that Mao may not have recognised philosophy, but philosophy, Hegelian dialectics, recognised him so long ago it predicted his coming. The fetishistic character of the so-called cultural revolution struck out, not against exploitative production, but the bland “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits). All sound and fury and no class content. Only he who has no future is frightened of the past! By any other name, including that of Red Guards, the elitist character of Party, Army, Red Guards, and what now merged into the one and only “helmsman at the ship of state,” is as unmistakable as was Louis XIV’s “L’etat c’est moi.” Which is why Sheng Wu-lien demanded that instead of rhetoric, real “Paris Communes” must cover the land. That self-development, self-activity, self-movement in the Hegelian dialectic which became so alive to Lenin in 1914-23, is that which caused Stalin to order the exclusion of “the negation of the negation” from the “laws” of the dialectic as if, by fiat, state-capitalist tyranny could indeed change the course of history. Lack of confidence in the masses is the common root of all objections to “idealistic, mystical Hegelianism.” That includes not only outright betrayers, but also intellectuals committed to proletarian revolution; outsiders looking in; academic Marxists who (even when independent of any state power) are permeated to the marrow of their bones with the capitalistic concept of the backwardness of the proletariat. One and all, they are blind to the relationship of theory to history as a historical relationship made by masses in motion.
The one element of truth that all these detractors of Hegel express is the need to break with bourgeois idealism, including that of Hegel. For, without Marx’s unique discovery of the materialist foundations of history, Hegelian dialectics remained imprisoned in an idealism that was abstract enough to allow for its usage as apology for the Prussian state. Had Marx not broken with bourgeois idealism in its philosophic form as well as its class nature, he would not have been able either to disclose the algebraic formula of revolution inherent in the Hegelian dialectic, or to recreate the dialectic that emerged out of the actual class struggles and proletarian revolutions, and sketch out that, just that, self-movement into “permanent revolution.” In our age, however, we have to contend with Communism’s, and its fellow travellers’, perversions of the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic.
Mankind has evidently reached the end of something, when the richest and most powerful military might on earth shouts to the heavens, not about the wonders of its production, affluence, or nuclear gigantism, but about the “strange spirit of malaise throughout the land.” This is not all due to “spirit.” It has very deep economic roots: whether one looks at the money crisis or the unemployment that will not go away; whether one’s sights are on the ceaseless militarisation and nuclear gigantism or the depth of the poverty and its deepening black colour in the midst of the affluence of white imperialism; whether one’s eyes are on reaching the barren moon or on the hollowness of America’s so-called democracy. But the overwhelming fact is that the U.S.’s GNP hitting the trillion-dollar mark, far from winning the battle for the minds of men, lost not only the battle but its mind, its spirit.
The constant tug-of-war with “Hegelianism” on the part of the “New Left” just when there is such hunger for a new philosophy of liberation, is only proof that there is no “third way” in the mode of thought any more than there is in the class struggle. Petty-bourgeois subjectivism has always ended by holding on to some state power, and never more so than in our state-capitalist age, whose intellectuals are so ridden through with the administrative mentality of the Plan, the Vanguard Party, the “cultural” revolution as the substitute for the proletarian revolution. The totality of the crisis demands not only listening to the voices from below, but also building on that foundation as the reality and as the link to historic continuity.
Furthest from the minds of elitist intellectuals, of leaders in particular, is the self-development of the masses who themselves would master the principles of the dialectic. Yet all the new beginnings for theory, for philosophy as well as for revolutionary reconstruction of society on totally new human foundations, have in our age come from the spontaneous outbursts the world over. “Self-determination in which alone the Idea is is to hear itself speak” was heard by those fighting for selfdetermination. They were “experiencing” second negativity. Clearly the struggle was against not only exploiters, but also those who set themselves up as leaders.
The days are long since past when these voices from below could be treated, at best, as mere sources of theory. The movement from practice which is itself a form of theory demands a totally new relationship of theory to practice. Lenin was right when he declared that Hegel’s route from Logic to Nature meant “stretching a hand to materialism,” and when he proclaimed, “Cognition not only reflects the world but creates it.” As can be seen from his concretisation of this – “the world does not satisfy man and man decides to change it by his activity” – it was no mere restatement of his former thesis that “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.” This time Lenin kept stressing “Subject,” man, “subjective” as “most concrete,” cognition as dialectics, as philosophy – “Science is a circle of circles. The various sciences ... are fragments of this chain.” Whether it is theory or the Party – by 1920 Lenin was to stress that “Socialism cannot be introduced by a minority, a Party” – Lenin’s emphasis was on philosophy: “absolute subjectivity,” Subject as man and Notion, the unity of object and subject, of mental and manual, the whole.
The tragedy of the Russian Revolution was that this was never achieved after the conquest of state power, and the Bolshevik co-leaders, in ruling a state power, also took advantage of the philosophic ambivalence of Lenin to turn their backs on “idealist philosophy."
It is true, of course – and indeed there would be something fundamentally amiss if it were otherwise – that Marx and Lenin solved the problems of their age, not ours. But powerful foundations have been laid for this age which we would disregard at our peril, even as it would be fatal not to build on the theoretic-practical Humanist ground rediscovered since the mid-1950s, and which Marx in his day called “positive Humanism, beginning from itself.” The restatement, by the mature proletarian revolutionary author of Capital, of the young Marx’s exuberance of 1844 – “the development of human power which is its own end” – demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt how Europe’s 1848 revolutions, America’s Civil War, 1861-65, and the Paris Commune, 1871, verified Marx’s “new Humanism.” Any other foundation, any other ground, such as “nationalised propertyless with or without military “focos,” can only lead to still another tyranny.
There is no way to end the reappearance of still another exploitative, alienated, and alienating society except through a social revolution, beginning with the relations between people at the point of production, and continuing as that elemental outburst involving the population “to a man, woman, child” which ends once and for all the dichotomy between mental and manual labor so that “individuality [is] freed from all that interferes with its universalism, i.e., freedom."
To labor under the illusion that one could pick up theory “en route” and thereby avoid going through “the labor of the negative” in the theoretic preparation for revolution as in the actual class struggles is every bit as false a consciousness as that which befalls the ruling class.
As against the concept that endless activism, though it be mindless, is sufficient “to make the revolution,” what is needed is a restatement for our age of Marx’s concept of the “realisation” of philosophy, that is, the inseparability of philosophy and revolution.
The mature Marx, like the young Marx, rejected Feuerbachian materialism and held instead that the Hegelian dialectic of “second negativity” was the “creative principle,” the turning-point which puts an end to the division between mental and manual labor. The mature, as well as the young, Marx grounded “the development of human power which is its own end” in the “absolute movement of becoming.” Only with such a Promethean vision could one be certain that a new Paris Commune would not only be “a historic initiative – working, thinking, bleeding Paris ... radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative” – but continue its self-development so that a totally new social order on a world scale was established.
The new that characterises our era, the “energising principle” that has determined the direction of the two decades of the movement from practice, simultaneously rejects false consciousness and aborted revolutions.
The reality is stifling. The transformation of reality has a dialectic all its own. It demands a unity of the struggles for freedom with a philosophy of liberation. Only then does the elemental revolt release new sensibilities, new passions, and new forces – a whole new human dimension.
Ours is the age that can meet the challenge of the times when we work out so new a relationship of theory to practice that the proof of the unity is in the Subject’s own self-development. Philosophy and revolution will first then liberate the innate talents of men and women who will become whole. Whether or not we recognise that this is the task history has “assigned,” to our epoch, it is a task that remains to be done.
Contents |
C L R James on Black Power |
Frantz Fanon
Dunayevskaya Internet Archive
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./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.subject.women.index | <body>
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MIA: Subject: Women </p>
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This subject section has been created to provide broad documentation both on women's issues and Marxism, and also a space for women's writings that are significant, but transcriptions not currently volumous or organized enough to warrant their own section. </p>
<p class="information">
Some of these writers are not Marxists, but are included for context or reference. The intention is to also include the cultural as well as political milieu in which revolutionary women have worked during their struggles.</p>
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As with the rest of MIA, most heavily represented are classic texts. The few references to contemporary Marxism-Feminism are meant to be a gateway to further exploration for interested readers. </p>
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Questions, texts or suggestions welcome to <a href="../../admin/volunteers/steering.htm">MIA
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<br><a name="authors"> </a>
<h4>Non-Fiction Authors</h4>
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<table border="0" width="95%" align="center">
<tbody><tr><td valign="top">
<a href="authors/arianzen/index.htm">Arianzen, Catalina</a> <br>
<a href="authors/armand/blonina-1920.pdf">Armand, Inessa</a> (1874-1920) <br>
<a href="authors/balabanoff/index.htm">Balabanoff, Angelica</a> (1878-1965) <br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/index.htm">Beauvoir, Simone de</a> (1908-1986)<br>
<a href="../../archive/beard/index.htm">Beard, Mary</a> (1876-1958) <br>
<a href="authors/beaton/index.htm">Beaton, Lynn</a> (1946-2016)<br>
<a href="../../archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/index.htm">Bebel, August</a> (1840-1913) <br>
<a href="../../archive/begum-rokeya/index.htm">Begum, Rokeya</a> (1880-1932) <br>
<a href="authors/benhabib-seyla/uneasy-alliance.htm">Benhabib, Seyla</a> (1950-) <br>
<a href="../../archive/besant/index.htm">Besant, Annie</a> (1847-1933)<br>
<a href="../../archive/bobrovskaya/twenty-years/index.htm">Bobrovskaya, Cecilia</a> (1873-1960) <br>
<a href="../../archive/bryant/index.htm">Bryant, Louise</a> (1885-1936)<br>
<a href="authors/carpenter/index.htm">Carpenter, Edward</a> (1844-1929)<br>
<a href="../../archive/cliff/works/1984/women/index.htm">Cliff, Tony</a> (1917-2000)<br>
<a href="authors/comyn/marx.htm">Comyn, Marian</a> (1861-1938)<br>
<a href="../../archive/connolly/1904/condel/index.htm">Connolly, James and DeLeon, Daniel</a><br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/cornell.htm">Cornell, Drucilla</a> (1950-2022)<br>
<a href="authors/darwin/index.htm">Darwin, Charles</a> (1809-1882)<br>
<a href="authors/davis-angela/housework.htm">Davis, Angela</a> (1944-)<br>
<a href="authors/dell/index.htm">Dell, Floyd</a> (1887-1969)<br>
<a href="authors/dixon-marlene/index.htm">Dixon, Marlene</a><br>
<a href="../../history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/genora.htm">Dollinger, Genora</a> (1913-1995)<br>
<a href="../../archive/dunayevskaya/index.htm">Dunayevskaya, Raya</a> (1910-1987)<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm">Ebert, Teresa</a> <br>
<a href="authors/ehrenreich-barbara/index.htm">Ehrenreich, Barbara</a> (1941-2022)<br>
<a href="../../archive/marx/works/subject/women/index.htm#engels">Engels, Frederick</a> (1820-1895)<br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/field-alice/index.html">Field, Alice Withrow</a> (1909-1960)<br>
<a href="authors/firestone-shulamith/index.htm">Firestone, Shulamith</a> (1945-2012)<br>
<a href="authors/flynn/index.html">Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley</a> (1890-1964)<br>
<a href="authors/foley/prison.html">Foley, Martha</a> (1897-1977)<br>
<a href="../../archive/fraser/index.htm">Fraser, Clara</a> (1923-1998)<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fraser-needs.htm">Fraser, Nancy</a> (1947-)<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedan.htm">Friedan, Betty</a> (1921-2006)<br>
<a href="../../archive/gandhy/index.htm">Gandhy, Anuradha</a> (1954-2008)<br>
<a href="authors/gimenez/index.htm">Gimenez, Martha</a> <br>
<a href="authors/greer-germaine/female-eunuch.htm">Greer, Germaine</a> (1939-)<br>
<a href="authors/herbst/index.html">Herbst, Josephine</a> (1892-1969)<br>
<a href="authors/inber/index.html">Inber, Vera</a> (1890-1972)<br>
<a href="authors/jones/index.html">Jones, Mother</a> (1830-1930) <br>
<a href="../../archive/jones-claudia/index.htm">Jones, Claudia</a> (1915-1964) <br>
<a href="authors/kaneko/index.htm">Kaneko, Josephine Conger</a> (1875-1934)<br>
<a href="authors/kang-hu/index.htm">Kang-Hu, Kiang</a> <br>
<a href="authors/kautsky-luise/index.htm">Kautsky, Luise</a> (1864-1944)<br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/keller-helen/index.htm">Keller, Helen</a> (1880-1968) <br>
<a href="authors/kelley/index.htm">Kelley, Florence</a> (1859-1932)<br>
<a href="authors/koedt-anne/radical-movement.htm">Koedt, Anne</a> (1941-) <br>
<a href="../../archive/kollonta/index.htm">Kollontai, Alexandra</a> (1872-1952)<br>
<a href="../../archive/krupskaya/index.htm">Krupskaya, Nadezhada</a> (1869-1939)<br>
<a href="../../archive/lafargue/index.htm">Lafargue, Paul</a> (1841-1911) <br>
<a href="../../archive/lenin/works/subject/women/index.htm">Lenin, V.I.</a> (1870-1924)<br>
<a href="authors/lesueur/index.html">Le Sueur, Meridel</a> (1900-1996)<br>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<a href="authors/lewis/index.htm">Lewis, Lena Morrow</a> (1900-1996)<br>
<a href="authors/limpus/liberation.htm">Limpus, Laurel</a><br>
<a href="../../archive/marx/bio/family/jenny/index.htm">Longuet, Jenny Marx</a> (1844-1883)<br>
<a href="../../archive/luxemburg/index.htm">Luxemburg, Rosa</a> (1871-1919)<br>
<a href="../africa/machel/1973/liberation-women.htm">Machel, Samora</a> (1933-1986)<br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/mao/works/subject/women/index.htm">Mao Tse Tung</a> (1893-1976)<br>
<a href="authors/marcy/index.htm">Marcy, Mary</a> (1877-1922)<br>
<a href="../../archive/eleanor-marx/index.htm">Marx, Eleanor Aveling</a> (1855-1898)<br>
<a href="../../archive/marx/letters/jenny/index.htm">Marx, Jenny Von Westphalen</a> (1814-1881)<br>
<a href="../../archive/marx/works/subject/women/index.htm">Marx, Karl</a> (1818-1883)<br>
<a href="authors/milhaud/prop.htm">Milhaud, Edgar</a> (1873-1964)<br>
<a href="authors/mill/index.htm">Mill, John Stuart</a> (1806-1873)<br>
<a href="authors/millett-kate/index.htm">Millett, Kate</a> (1934-2017)<br>
<a href="authors/mitchell-juliet/index.htm">Mitchell, Juliet</a> (1940- )<br>
<a href="../../archive/montefiore/index.htm">Montefiore, Dora</a> (1851-1932)<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/nichols.htm">Nicholson, Linda</a><br>
<a href="authors/ohare/index.htm">O'Hare, Kate Richards</a> (1877-1948)<br>
<a href="authors/ocalan/index.htm">Oçalan, Abdullah</a> (1949- )<br>
<a href="../../archive/pablo/1960/xx/women.htm">Pablo, Michel</a> (1911-1996)<br>
<a href="../../archive/pankhurst-sylvia/index.htm">Pankhurst, E. Sylvia</a> (1882-1960)<br>
<a href="authors/page/index.htm">Page, Myra</a> (1897-1993)<br>
<a href="authors/parker/true.htm">Parker, Dorothy</a> (1893-1967)<br>
<a href="../../history/international/social-democracy/social-democrat/1908/10/german-congress.htm">Parlow, Maud</a><br>
<a href="authors/pichugina/index.html">Pichugina M.</a> <br>
<a href="../../archive/pollitt-marjorie/index.htm">Pollitt, Marjorie</a> (1902–1991)<br>
<a href="authors/popova/1949-woman-in-the-land-of-socialism.pdf">Popova, Nina Vasilievna</a> (1908-1994)<br>
<a href="../../archive/reed-evelyn/index.htm">Reed, Evelyn</a> (1905-1979)<br>
<a href="authors/reissner/index.htm">Reissner, Larissa</a> (1895-1926)<br>
<a href="authors/rolland/artist.htm">Rolland-Holst, Henriettte</a> (1869-1952)<br>
<a href="authors/rowbotham-sheila/index.htm">Rowbotham, Sheila</a> (1943-)<br>
<a href="authors/sanger/index.htm">Sanger, Margaret</a> (1879-1966)<br>
<a href="authors/schrein/index.htm">Schreiner, Olive</a> (Ralph Iron, 1855-1920)<br>
<a href="authors/shaginyan/index.html">Shaginyan, Marietta</a> (1888-1982) <br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/shaw/index.htm">Shaw, George Bernard</a> (1856-1950) <br>
<a href="authors/simmons/index.htm">Simmons, May Wood</a> (1876-1948)<br>
<a href="../../history/etol/writers/smith-s/index.htm">Smith, Sharon</a> (1956- )<br>
<a href="authors/spadoni/realwork.htm">Spadoni, Adriana</a> <br>
<a href="authors/spargo/index.htm">Spargo, John</a> (1876-1966)<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/spender.htm">Spender, Dale</a> (1943-2023)<br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/stalin/works/subject/women/index.htm">Stalin, Joseph</a> (1879-1953)<br>
<a href="authors/stokes/index.htm">Stokes, Rose Pastor</a> (1879-1933)<br>
<a href="../../archive/trotsky/women/index.htm">Trotsky, Leon</a> (1879-1940)<br>
<a href="../../archive/sedova-natalia/index.htm">Trotsky, Natalia Sedova</a> (1882-1962)<br>
<a href="../../archive/turner-beth/index.htm">Turner, Beth</a><br>
<a href="authors/vorse/index.html">Vorse, Mary Heaton</a> (1874-1966)<br>
<a href="authors/walling/london.htm">Walling, Anna Strunsky</a> (1877-1964)<br>
<a href="authors/buch/index.html">Weisbord, Vera Buch</a> (1895-1989)<br>
<a href="../../reference/archive/wollstonecraft-mary/1792/vindication-rights-woman/index.htm">Wollstonecraft, Mary</a> (1759-1797) <br>
<a href="authors/yami/337330316-Peoples-War-Womens-Liberation-in-Nepal.pdf">
Yami, Hisila</a> (1959- )<br>
<a href="../../archive/zetkin/index.htm">Zetkin, Clara</a> (1857-1933)
</td>
</tr></tbody></table>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="index">
<a href="fiction.htm">Fiction/Poetry</a> </p>
<p class="index"><a href="iwd.htm">International Women’s Day</a></p>
<p class="index">Feminism</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="movement/index.htm">History of the Modern Women's Liberation Movement, in their own words</a><br>
<a href="feminists.htm">Library of Feminist Writers</a><br>
<a href="movement/dora-eleanor.htm">Dora Montefiore and Eleanor Marx’s Fight Against Sexism in the Party, 1895-1909</a></p>
<p class="index">Comintern Resolutions on the Woman Question, July 8 1921</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="../../history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/women-resolution.htm">Resolution on Strengthening International Contact and Tasks of the International Secretariat on Work among Women</a>;<br>
<a href="../../history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/women-work.htm">Forms and Methods of Communist Work among Women</a>;<br>
<a href="../../history/international/comintern/3rd-congress/women-theses.htm">Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women</a>;<br>
<a href="../../archive/zetkin/1921/zetkin06.htm">Report on Communist Women's Movement</a>, 3rd Comintern Congress, July 8, 1921, by Clara Zetkin<br>
<a href="../../archive/zetkin/1922/zetkin03.htm">Report on Communist Work among Women</a>, 4th Comintern Congres, November 27, 1922 by Clara Zetkin</p>
<p class="index">On Specific Subjects</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="subject.htm#question">The Woman Question; Sex Relations</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#family">Marriage; Family; Reproduction</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#labor">Labor; sweatshops; child labor</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#suffrage">Suffrage</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#womensday">International Women's Day</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#russia">Russia; Russian Revolution; USSR</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#germany">Germany</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#war">War</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#economics">Economics</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#phil">Philosophy</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#art">Art; Criticism</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#marx">On Karl Marx</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#lenin">On V.I. Lenin</a><br>
<a href="subject.htm#trotsky">On Leon Trotsky</a></p>
<p class="index">
Related sites:</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/mar.html"> Marxist / Materialist Feminism</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/soc.html">Socialist Feminism</a><br>
<a href="http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/women/">lanic: Women & Gender Studies</a><br>
<a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/woman-suffrage-movement">The Women's Suffrage Movement in the U.S.A.</a><br>
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MIA: Subject: Women
This subject section has been created to provide broad documentation both on women's issues and Marxism, and also a space for women's writings that are significant, but transcriptions not currently volumous or organized enough to warrant their own section.
Some of these writers are not Marxists, but are included for context or reference. The intention is to also include the cultural as well as political milieu in which revolutionary women have worked during their struggles.
As with the rest of MIA, most heavily represented are classic texts. The few references to contemporary Marxism-Feminism are meant to be a gateway to further exploration for interested readers.
Questions, texts or suggestions welcome to MIA
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Arianzen, Catalina
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Beaton, Lynn (1946-2016)
Bebel, August (1840-1913)
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Benhabib, Seyla (1950-)
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Bobrovskaya, Cecilia (1873-1960)
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Foley, Martha (1897-1977)
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Fraser, Nancy (1947-)
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Herbst, Josephine (1892-1969)
Inber, Vera (1890-1972)
Jones, Mother (1830-1930)
Jones, Claudia (1915-1964)
Kaneko, Josephine Conger (1875-1934)
Kang-Hu, Kiang
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Keller, Helen (1880-1968)
Kelley, Florence (1859-1932)
Koedt, Anne (1941-)
Kollontai, Alexandra (1872-1952)
Krupskaya, Nadezhada (1869-1939)
Lafargue, Paul (1841-1911)
Lenin, V.I. (1870-1924)
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Lewis, Lena Morrow (1900-1996)
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Longuet, Jenny Marx (1844-1883)
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Page, Myra (1897-1993)
Parker, Dorothy (1893-1967)
Parlow, Maud
Pichugina M.
Pollitt, Marjorie (1902–1991)
Popova, Nina Vasilievna (1908-1994)
Reed, Evelyn (1905-1979)
Reissner, Larissa (1895-1926)
Rolland-Holst, Henriettte (1869-1952)
Rowbotham, Sheila (1943-)
Sanger, Margaret (1879-1966)
Schreiner, Olive (Ralph Iron, 1855-1920)
Shaginyan, Marietta (1888-1982)
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)
Simmons, May Wood (1876-1948)
Smith, Sharon (1956- )
Spadoni, Adriana
Spargo, John (1876-1966)
Spender, Dale (1943-2023)
Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953)
Stokes, Rose Pastor (1879-1933)
Trotsky, Leon (1879-1940)
Trotsky, Natalia Sedova (1882-1962)
Turner, Beth
Vorse, Mary Heaton (1874-1966)
Walling, Anna Strunsky (1877-1964)
Weisbord, Vera Buch (1895-1989)
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Yami, Hisila (1959- )
Zetkin, Clara (1857-1933)
Fiction/Poetry
International Women’s Day
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History of the Modern Women's Liberation Movement, in their own words
Library of Feminist Writers
Dora Montefiore and Eleanor Marx’s Fight Against Sexism in the Party, 1895-1909
Comintern Resolutions on the Woman Question, July 8 1921
Resolution on Strengthening International Contact and Tasks of the International Secretariat on Work among Women;
Forms and Methods of Communist Work among Women;
Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women;
Report on Communist Women's Movement, 3rd Comintern Congress, July 8, 1921, by Clara Zetkin
Report on Communist Work among Women, 4th Comintern Congres, November 27, 1922 by Clara Zetkin
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Last updated on: 5 January 2024
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.lenin.works.1914.cons-logic.index | <body>
<h2>Vladimir Ilyich Lenin</h2>
<h1>
Conspectus of Hegel’s book<br> <em>The Science of Logic</em>
</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written:</span> September-December 1914<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> 1929 in <em>Lenin Miscellany IX</em><br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Lenin’s <a href="../../cw/index.htm"><em>Collected Works</em></a>, 4th Edition, Moscow, 1976, <a href="../../cw/volume38.htm">Volume 38</a>, p.85-241<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Progress Publishers<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> Clemence Dutt<br>
<span class="info">Editor:</span> Stewart Smith<br>
<span class="info">Original Transcription & Markup:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/rcymbala.htm">R. Cymbala</a> & <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/ablunden.htm">Andy Blunden</a><br>
<span class="info">Re-Marked up & Proofread by:</span> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/kgoins.htm">K. Goins</a> (2007)<br>
<span class="info">Public Domain:</span> Lenin Internet Archive (2003).<span class="infobloc_copyleft">
You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial
works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.</span>
</p>
<p class="pagenoteb"><em>Conspectus of Hegel’s book <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlconten.htm">“The Science
of Logic”</a></em> consists of three notebooks, which have a common pagination
from 1 to 115. On the cover of the first notebook, in addition to the inscription
"Hegel. Logic I," there is the entry: “Notebooks on Philosophy. Hegel,
Feuerbach and others.” On the cover of the second notebook, to the pagination
49-88, there is the appendage: NB p. 76 (pp. 192-193 of this volume). At the bottom
of page III, there is written: "End of <em>Logic</em>. 17.XII.1914.” The
conspectus was probably begun during the first half of September 1914, when Lenin
moved from Poronin to Bern, Switzerland.
<br>
<br>
Note that this document has undergone special formating to ensure that Lenin’s
sidenotes fit on the page, marking as best as possible where they were
located in the original manuscript.
</p>
<hr>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<a href="cover.jpg">
<img src="th-cover.jpg" width="243" height="301" alt="Cover of First Notebook" align="right" hspace="30" border="1"></a>
<p class="toc"><a href="preface.htm">Prefaces & Introduction:</a></p>
<p class="index">
<a href="preface.htm#LCW38_87">Preface to the First Edition</a><br>
<a href="preface.htm#LCW38_88c">Preface to the Second Edition</a><br>
<a href="preface.htm#LCW38_95"><em>Introduction</em>: General Concept of Logic</a>
</p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch01.htm">Book One: The Doctrine of Being</a>
</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch01.htm#LCW38_103">With What Should One Begin Science?</a><br>
Section One: <a href="ch01.htm#LCW38_105">Determinateness (Quality)</a><br>
Section Two: <a href="ch01.htm#LCW38_116">Magnitude (Quantity)</a><br>
Section Three: <a href="ch01.htm#LCW38_120">Measure</a>
</p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch02.htm">Book Two: Essence</a>
</p>
<a href="p100.jpg">
<img src="th-p100.jpg" width="250" height="300" alt="page 100" align="right" hspace="30" border="1"></a>
<p class="index">
Section One: <a href="ch02.htm#LCW38_129">Essence as Reflection in Itself</a><br>
Section Two: <a href="ch02.htm#LCW38_147">Appearance</a><br>
Section Three: <a href="ch02.htm#LCW38_156">Actuality</a>
</p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch03.htm">Book Three: Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion</a>
</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch03.htm#LCW38_165">On the Notion in General</a><br>
Section One: <a href="ch03.htm#LCW38_176">Subjectivity</a><br>
Section Two: <a href="ch03.htm#LCW38_185">Objectivity </a><br>
Section Three: <a href="ch03.htm#LCW38_192">The Idea</a>
</p>
<!-- ???
<p class="toc">
<strong><u>See also:</u></strong>
</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="summary.htm">Summary of Dialectics</a>
</p>
Add link to 'Questions':
<p class="index">
<a href="summary.htm#LCW38_359">On the Question of Dialectics</a>
</p>
-->
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<div align="center">
<table class="t2h-foot" align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="right" width="43%">
<span class="footer"><a href="../../index.htm">Works Index</a></span>
| <span class="footer"><a href="../../cw/volume38.htm">
Volume 38</a></span>
</td>
<td width="3%"> | </td>
<td align="left" width="49%">
<span class="footer"><a href="../../cw/index.htm">Collected Works</a></span>
| <span class="footer"><a href="../../../index.htm">L.I.A. Index</a></span>
</td>
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<p class="margin-bottom"> </p>
</body> |
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Conspectus of Hegel’s book The Science of Logic
Written: September-December 1914
First Published: 1929 in Lenin Miscellany IX
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th Edition, Moscow, 1976, Volume 38, p.85-241
Publisher: Progress Publishers
Translated: Clemence Dutt
Editor: Stewart Smith
Original Transcription & Markup: R. Cymbala & Andy Blunden
Re-Marked up & Proofread by: K. Goins (2007)
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2003).
You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial
works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Conspectus of Hegel’s book “The Science
of Logic” consists of three notebooks, which have a common pagination
from 1 to 115. On the cover of the first notebook, in addition to the inscription
"Hegel. Logic I," there is the entry: “Notebooks on Philosophy. Hegel,
Feuerbach and others.” On the cover of the second notebook, to the pagination
49-88, there is the appendage: NB p. 76 (pp. 192-193 of this volume). At the bottom
of page III, there is written: "End of Logic. 17.XII.1914.” The
conspectus was probably begun during the first half of September 1914, when Lenin
moved from Poronin to Bern, Switzerland.
Note that this document has undergone special formating to ensure that Lenin’s
sidenotes fit on the page, marking as best as possible where they were
located in the original manuscript.
Prefaces & Introduction:
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction: General Concept of Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being
With What Should One Begin Science?
Section One: Determinateness (Quality)
Section Two: Magnitude (Quantity)
Section Three: Measure
Book Two: Essence
Section One: Essence as Reflection in Itself
Section Two: Appearance
Section Three: Actuality
Book Three: Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion
On the Notion in General
Section One: Subjectivity
Section Two: Objectivity
Section Three: The Idea
Works Index
|
Volume 38
|
Collected Works
| L.I.A. Index
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.fromm.index | <body>
<p class="title">M.I.A. Library: Erich Fromm</p>
<blockquote>
<div class="border">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p><img src="../../glossary/people/f/pics/fromm-erich.jpg" align="right" alt="Fromm" width="270" hspace="10" border="1"></p>
<h1>Erich Fromm Archive</h1>
<h3>1900-1980</h3>
<p class="information">The most important misunderstanding seems to me
to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part
of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives,
needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is
not very different from Marx’s concept of “human nature in general”,
to be distinguished from “human nature as modified in each historical
period.” The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes
between “constant” or “fixed” drives and “relative” drives. The
constant drives “exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by
social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned.” The
relative drives “owe their origin only to a certain type of social
organization.” <a href="works/1969/human.htm"> Human Nature and Social
Theory</a>, 1969</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="toc"><a href="../../glossary/people/f/r.htm#fromm-erich">Biography</a></p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="toc">Works:</p>
<p class="indentb"><a href="works/1935/trotsky.htm">Trotzky's Diary in Exile</a>, 1935<a href="works/1942/character.htm"><br>
Character and Social Process,</a> 1942<a href="works/1944/neurosis.htm"><br>
Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis</a>, 1944<br>
<a href="works/1957/authoritarian.htm">The Authoritarian Personality</a>, 1957<br>
<a href="works/1958/social.htm">The Influence of Social Factors in Child Development</a>, 1958<br>
<a href="works/1960/summerhill.htm">Summerhill - A Radical Approach to Child Rearing,</a> 1960<br>
<a href="works/1961/man/index.htm">Marx's Concept of Man</a>, 1961<br>
<a href="works/1965/introduction.htm">Introduction to Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium</a>, 1965<br>
<a href="works/1966/psychoanalysis.htm">Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Reality</a>, 1966<br>
The Present Crisis in Psychoanalysis in <em><a href="../../subject/praxis/praxis-international-edition/pdf/1967-no.1.pdf#page=74">Praxis</a></em>, International edition, No. 1, 1967<br>
<a href="works/1968/marx.htm">Marx's Contribution to the Knowledge of Man</a>, 1968<br>
<a href="works/1969/human.htm">Human Nature and Social Theory</a>, 1969</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="section">
<p class="toc">Further reading:</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="../dunayevskaya/works/1980/erich-fromm.htm">On the Anniversary of the Birth of Erich Fromm</a>, Raya Dunayevskaya, 1980<br>
<a href="../mattick-paul/1956/fromm.htm">Fromm’s <i>Sane Society</i></a>, Paul Mattick, 1956<br>
<a href="../../reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm">Weltanschauung</a> by Sigmund Freud, 1932<br>
<a href="../dunayevskaya/index.htm">Raya Dunayevskaya Archive</a><br>
<a href="../vygotsky/index.htm">L.S. Vygotsky Archive</a></p>
<p class="information" style="text-align: right;">
Archive maintained by <a href="../../admin/volunteers/biographies/ablunden.htm">Andy Blunden</a>.</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../subject/psychology/index.htm">Psychology and Marxism</a> |
<a href="../../subject/frankfurt-school/index.htm" target="_top">Frankfurt School</a> |
<a href="../index.htm" target="_top">M.I.A. Library</a></p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p class="updat">Last updated on <!-- WebWriter AutoDato -->10 April 2024<!-- WW --></p>
</body> |
M.I.A. Library: Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm Archive
1900-1980
The most important misunderstanding seems to me
to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part
of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives,
needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is
not very different from Marx’s concept of “human nature in general”,
to be distinguished from “human nature as modified in each historical
period.” The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes
between “constant” or “fixed” drives and “relative” drives. The
constant drives “exist under all circumstances and ... can be changed by
social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned.” The
relative drives “owe their origin only to a certain type of social
organization.” Human Nature and Social
Theory, 1969
Biography
Works:
Trotzky's Diary in Exile, 1935
Character and Social Process, 1942
Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis, 1944
The Authoritarian Personality, 1957
The Influence of Social Factors in Child Development, 1958
Summerhill - A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, 1960
Marx's Concept of Man, 1961
Introduction to Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, 1965
Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Reality, 1966
The Present Crisis in Psychoanalysis in Praxis, International edition, No. 1, 1967
Marx's Contribution to the Knowledge of Man, 1968
Human Nature and Social Theory, 1969
Further reading:
On the Anniversary of the Birth of Erich Fromm, Raya Dunayevskaya, 1980
Fromm’s Sane Society, Paul Mattick, 1956
Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud, 1932
Raya Dunayevskaya Archive
L.S. Vygotsky Archive
Archive maintained by Andy Blunden.
Psychology and Marxism |
Frankfurt School |
M.I.A. Library
Last updated on 10 April 2024
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.dunayevskaya.works.biography.index | <body><h2>RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA</h2>
<h1>Biographies and reviews</h1>
<img src="RD-Trotsky+Rivera-1939.jpg" hspace="16" align="centre" alt="Raya Dunayevskaya with Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera, Mexico 1939" border="1">
<img src="JFT.jpg" alt="The Johnston-Forest Tendency" align="centre" hspace="16" border="1">
<img src="N&L-v1-n1-small.jpg" alt="Front page of first issue of News & Letters, June 24, 1955" align="centre" hspace="16" border="1">
<img src="RD-bust.jpg" alt="Raya Dunayevskaya delivering a lecture in 1980s" align="centre" hspace="16" border="1">
<hr>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Info:</span> This page contains background information on Raya Dunayevskaya, including biographies, obituaries, prefaces to her major works and reviews of her writings<br>
<span class="info">Digitalisation, proof-reading & html markup:</span> Chris Gilligan<br>
</p><hr>
<h2><a href="RD-collection.html">Theory/practice biography</a> (author: Raya Dunayevskaya/Raya Dunayevskaya Collection)</h2>
<hr>
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm">Raya Dunayevskaya Archive</a><br>
<a href="../../../../archive/index.htm">Marxists Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> | RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA
Biographies and reviews
Info: This page contains background information on Raya Dunayevskaya, including biographies, obituaries, prefaces to her major works and reviews of her writings
Digitalisation, proof-reading & html markup: Chris Gilligan
Theory/practice biography (author: Raya Dunayevskaya/Raya Dunayevskaya Collection)
Raya Dunayevskaya Archive
Marxists Internet Archive
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.archive.marcuse.index | <body>
<p class="title">M.I.A. Library: Herbert Marcuse</p>
<blockquote>
<div class="border">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<h1>Herbert Marcuse Archive</h1>
<h2>1898-1979</h2>
<p class="quoteb">
“Hegel's system brings to a close the entire epoch in modern philosophy that had begun with Descartes and had embodied the basic ideas of modern society. Hegel was the last to interpret the world as reason, subjecting nature and history alike to the standards of thought and freedom. At the same time, he recognised the social and political order men had achieved as the basis on which reason had to be realised. His system brought philosophy to the threshold of its negation and thus constituted the sole link between the old and the new form of critical theory, between philosophy and social theory.” <a href="works/reason/marcuse2.htm">Reason & Revolution</a></p>
<hr width="94%" size="2" align="right"><br>
<img src="index.jpg" width="200" height="249" alt="Herbert Marcuse - sketch taken from Hegel Made Easy of old man with rather withered features" align="right"><br>
<p class="index">
<a href="../../../glossary/people/m/a.htm#marcuse-herbert">Biography</a></p>
<p class="index">
<a href="works/historical-materialism/index.htm">The Foundation of Historical Materialism</a>, 1932</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="works/reason/index.htm">Reason & Revolution</a>, 1941</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="works/eros-civilisation/index.htm">Eros & Civilisation</a>, 1955</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odmcontents.html">One Dimensional Man</a>, 1964</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="works/1969/essay-liberation.htm">An Essay on Liberation</a>, 1969</p>
<p class="toc">
Lectures and Essays</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="works/1965/socialist-humanism.htm">Socialist Humanism?</a>, 1965<br>
<a href="works/aggressiveness.htm">Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society</a>, 1967<br>
<a href="works/1967/end-utopia.htm">The End of Utopia</a>, 1967<br>
<a href="works/1967/violence.htm">The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition</a><br>
<a href="works/1967/questions-answers.htm">Questions and Answers</a>, 1967<br>
<a href="works/1969/interview.htm">Interview with Pierrre Viansson-Ponte</a>, 1969<br>
<a href="works/1969/babeuf.htm">The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vend�me</a>, 1969</p>
<hr class="section">
<p class="toc">Further reading:</p>
<p class="information">
<a href="http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm">Herbert Marcuse By Douglas Kellner</a> [off-site link]<br>
<a href="http://www.marcuse.org/herbert">Marcuse Home Page</a> [off-site link]</p>
<p class="information">
<a href="../adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception</a>, Adorno, 1927<br>
<a href="../../../archive/korsch/index.htm">Karl Korsch Archive</a><br>
<a href="../../../archive/mattick-paul/1956/marcuse.htm">Marx and Freud</a>, Review of Marcuse by Paul Mattick, 1956<br>
<a href="../sartre/index.htm">Jean-Paul Sartre Archive</a><br>
<a href="../../../archive/lukacs/index.htm">Georg Lukacs Archive</a><br>
<a href="../habermas/index.htm">Jürgen Habermas Archive</a><br>
<a href="../../../archive/fromm/index.htm">Erich Fromm Archive</a><br>
<a href="../hegel/works/pr/prconten.htm">Philosophy of Right</a>, Hegel, 1821<br>
<a href="../../subject/philosophy/works/ot/pelczyns.htm">Political community and individual freedom in Hegel</a>, Pelczynski, 1984<br>
<a href="../../subject/philosophy/works/ot/avineri7.htm">Hegel & Modern Society </a>, Avineri<br></p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../../ebooks/marcuse/index.htm" target="_top">eBooks</a> |
<a href="../../../archive/index.htm" target="_top">M.I.A. Library</a> |
<a href="../../subject/philosophy/index.htm" target="_top">Philosophy</a> |
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M.I.A. Library: Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse Archive
1898-1979
“Hegel's system brings to a close the entire epoch in modern philosophy that had begun with Descartes and had embodied the basic ideas of modern society. Hegel was the last to interpret the world as reason, subjecting nature and history alike to the standards of thought and freedom. At the same time, he recognised the social and political order men had achieved as the basis on which reason had to be realised. His system brought philosophy to the threshold of its negation and thus constituted the sole link between the old and the new form of critical theory, between philosophy and social theory.” Reason & Revolution
Biography
The Foundation of Historical Materialism, 1932
Reason & Revolution, 1941
Eros & Civilisation, 1955
One Dimensional Man, 1964
An Essay on Liberation, 1969
Lectures and Essays
Socialist Humanism?, 1965
Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society, 1967
The End of Utopia, 1967
The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition
Questions and Answers, 1967
Interview with Pierrre Viansson-Ponte, 1969
The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vend�me, 1969
Further reading:
Herbert Marcuse By Douglas Kellner [off-site link]
Marcuse Home Page [off-site link]
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno, 1927
Karl Korsch Archive
Marx and Freud, Review of Marcuse by Paul Mattick, 1956
Jean-Paul Sartre Archive
Georg Lukacs Archive
Jürgen Habermas Archive
Erich Fromm Archive
Philosophy of Right, Hegel, 1821
Political community and individual freedom in Hegel, Pelczynski, 1984
Hegel & Modern Society , Avineri
eBooks |
M.I.A. Library |
Philosophy |
Frankfurt School
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./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.history.etol.writers.boggs.index | <body>
<p class="title"><a href="../../../../index.htm" class="title">MIA</a>: <a href="../index.htm" class="title">ETOL Writers</a>: Grace Lee Boggs</p>
<blockquote>
<div class="border">
<h3>Grace Lee Boggs Archive</h3>
<table align="center" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="graceleeboggs.jpg" width="197" height="264" alt="Grace Lee Boggs" border="0"> </td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h1>Grace Lee Boggs</h1>
<h1>1915–2015</h1>
<hr class="end" style="width: 200px;">
<br>
<img src="../../../../glossary/people/b/pics/boggs-grace.jpg" hspace="16" align="right" alt="Grace Lee Boggs Archive" border="1">
<p class="toc">Biography</p>
<p class="indentb"><a href="obituary.htm" target="new">Grace Lee Boggs</a>, by Christian Høgsbjerg (<strong>Socialist Review</strong>, November 2015)</p>
<p class="indentb"><a href="../../newspape/atc/4519.html" target="new">Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015)</a> (<strong>Against the Current</strong>, No. 179, November/December 2015)</p>
<p class="toc">Works:</p>
<p class="indentb"><a href="1942/02/thomas.htm">Norman Thomas in Display of Political Impotence</a>, February 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/04/mutiny.htm">The Chinese Sailors “Mutiny”</a>, April 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/06/march.htm">“March on Washington” Movement Stirs Again</a>, June 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/06/march2.htm">Negroes, March on Washington!</a>, June 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="../abern/1942/06/ww1.html" target="new">World War I in Retrospect</a>, June–August 1942 (as R. Stone, series with H. Allen)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/07/mowprog.htm">The Program of the March on Washington Committee</a>, July 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/07/runaround.htm">Randolph Reports: “President and Government Have Failed Us”</a>, July 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/08/jimcrow.htm">Jim-Crow Menaces White as Well as Negro Labor</a>, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/08/labase.htm">A Labor Base for Negro Struggles</a>, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/08/mineterror.htm">Mine Strike Hits Terrorism</a>, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/08/parr.htm">Trackmen Strike Pa.R.R.</a>, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/09/mowconf.htm">MOW Announces Policy Conference</a>, September 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1942/09/polltax.htm">Poll Tax Issue Concerns Every Worker</a>, September 1942 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1943/02/wages.htm">There Is Only One Real Solution – Socialism!</a>, February 1943 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1943/03/socialism.htm">Socialism – Its Victory Must Be Labor’s Goal</a>, March 1943 (as Ruth Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1943/07/china.htm">China: A ‘Poor Relation’ in the ‘Big Four’</a>, July 1943 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1943/09/censor.htm">Censorship Hides Truth About Europe</a>, September 1943 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1944/china.htm">China: Colossus of the East</a>, February–May 1944 (series, as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1946/germany-key.htm">Germany – Still the Key</a>, May 1946 (with Willie Gorman, as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1948/01/china.htm">Anti-Imperialist Struggle Sweeps Key China Cities</a>, January 1948 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1948/01/educrisis.htm">The Crisis of the Educational System in America</a>, January 1948 (as Ria Stone)<br>
<br>
<a href="1948/06/safrica.htm">South Africa: A “Free” Election – For Whites Only!</a>, June 1948 (as R. Stone, identification of authorship tentative)<br>
<br>
<a href="1948/06/safrica2.htm">South Africa: Forces and Issues in Recent Election</a>, June 1948 (as R. Stone, identification of authorship tentative)<br>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="information" style="text-align: right;">Archive maintained by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/ablunden.htm">Andy Blunden</a>.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p> </p>
<p class="footer"><a href="../index.htm" target="_top">ETOL Writers</a> | <a href="../../../../archive/index.htm" target="_top">M.I.A. Library</a></p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p class="updat">Last updated on: 2 October 2020</p>
</body> |
MIA: ETOL Writers: Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs Archive
Grace Lee Boggs
1915–2015
Biography
Grace Lee Boggs, by Christian Høgsbjerg (Socialist Review, November 2015)
Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015) (Against the Current, No. 179, November/December 2015)
Works:
Norman Thomas in Display of Political Impotence, February 1942 (as Ria Stone)
The Chinese Sailors “Mutiny”, April 1942 (as Ria Stone)
“March on Washington” Movement Stirs Again, June 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Negroes, March on Washington!, June 1942 (as Ria Stone)
World War I in Retrospect, June–August 1942 (as R. Stone, series with H. Allen)
The Program of the March on Washington Committee, July 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Randolph Reports: “President and Government Have Failed Us”, July 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Jim-Crow Menaces White as Well as Negro Labor, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)
A Labor Base for Negro Struggles, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Mine Strike Hits Terrorism, August 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Trackmen Strike Pa.R.R., August 1942 (as Ria Stone)
MOW Announces Policy Conference, September 1942 (as Ria Stone)
Poll Tax Issue Concerns Every Worker, September 1942 (as Ria Stone)
There Is Only One Real Solution – Socialism!, February 1943 (as Ria Stone)
Socialism – Its Victory Must Be Labor’s Goal, March 1943 (as Ruth Stone)
China: A ‘Poor Relation’ in the ‘Big Four’, July 1943 (as Ria Stone)
Censorship Hides Truth About Europe, September 1943 (as Ria Stone)
China: Colossus of the East, February–May 1944 (series, as Ria Stone)
Germany – Still the Key, May 1946 (with Willie Gorman, as Ria Stone)
Anti-Imperialist Struggle Sweeps Key China Cities, January 1948 (as Ria Stone)
The Crisis of the Educational System in America, January 1948 (as Ria Stone)
South Africa: A “Free” Election – For Whites Only!, June 1948 (as R. Stone, identification of authorship tentative)
South Africa: Forces and Issues in Recent Election, June 1948 (as R. Stone, identification of authorship tentative)
Archive maintained by Andy Blunden.
ETOL Writers | M.I.A. Library
Last updated on: 2 October 2020
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.mattick-paul.1958.dunayevskaya | <body>
<p class="title">Paul Mattick 1958</p>
<h1>A Marxian Oddity</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source</span>: <cite>Western Socialist</cite>, Boston, USA, March-April, 1958;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: by Adam Buick.</p>
<p class="information"><strong><cite>MARXISM AND FREEDOM. FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY</cite></strong>. By Raya Dunayevskaya. New York, 1958, pp. 384, $6.00.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">In writing this strange book the author’s intentions were
no doubt the best. But there is a wide gap between intentions and performance.
And although Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Marxian doctrine is
occasionally true and eloquent, the book as a whole is an embarrassing,
scatterbrained hodge-podge of philosophical, economic and political ideas that
defy description and serious criticism. It may, however, serve as an example of
how Marxism cannot be “re-examined” and thus recovered from the
Russians.</p>
<p>The impulse for writing this book, the author relates, came from two
sources: the American and the East German workers. The former, between 1950 and
1953 “began to come to grips with the realities of Automation by moving
the question of productivity from one dealing with . . . wages to one dealing
with the conditions of labor and the need for a totally new way of life.”
This was also the period “when East German workers challenged the
Communist regime” and of slave-labor rising in Siberia, which sounded the
tocsin “for the beginning of the end of Russian
totalitarianism.”</p>
<p>While the workers have established the “unity of theory and
practice” by their actual struggles and aspirations, the intellectuals
are now urged to establish it in the realm of theory by reorganizing their
thinking in the direction of a “new Humanism.” This “new
Humanism,” however is as old as and even older than Marxism and dates, in
fact, from 1776. It is implicit in the Hegelian Dialectic and was made explicit
by Marx.</p>
<p>As practice leads to theory, the Hegelian Dialectic is seen as a product of
the bourgeois revolution in both its political and economic aspects. Hegel also
noticed the “negative phenomenon — alienated labor” in
capitalism and Dunayevskaya finds this “reminiscent of Marx’s
works,” even though Hegel failed to see the “positive elements of
alienated labor.” She then plays with the concept of “alienated
labor” which for Marx became another expression for the workers’
divorce from the means of production, from control over production and its
products and for a variety of consequences. Dunayevskaya’s exposition,
however, leads back into the murk of Hegelianism where it gets lost in
incomprehensible philosophical gibberish.</p>
<p>While it serves no purpose to detect Hegelianism in the attitudes of
today’s workers and to discover their attitudes in Hegelian philosophy,
Dunayevskaya’s direct and indirect connection of both yields only the
term “freedom” as a synonym for the “new Humanism.” But
even if, according to Hegel, “freedom is the essence of mind,” this
tells us nothing with respect to the specific freedoms required for a socialist
humanism. Dunayevskaya, unperturbed, however, points to the workers’
opposition to both Automation and totalitarian domination as the developing
realization of men’s essence — freedom.</p>
<p>This opposition, she says, contains the quest for a new type of labor that
does away with the division of labor. It is true, of course, that Marx spoke of
the end of the division of labor and even of labor itself. These improbable
“goals” serve nevertheless to indicate the direction of further
social development and humanization. Yet, what is of real concern is the
abolition of class-determined capitalist division of labor. This does not spell
the end of all labor division which is determined by social production. It
should, however, lose its negative significance through social innovations and
institutions — such as the increasing interchangeability of functions
— which has eliminated its class connotations. Whereas the capitalist
division of labor will disappear with capitalism, labor division of itself is
not necessarily an obstacle to socialism. Neither does it need to stand in
opposition to a concept of work as human activity that develops all of
man’s natural and acquired talents. It is even possible to describe
socialism as the full realization of the positive possibilities inherent in the
division of labor. When all kinds of labor are recognized as being of equal
importance, it no longer matters what particular work the individual, realizing
his humanity in sociality, is doing.</p>
<p>However this problem may be resolved, it is obvious that associating it with
current left-wing anti-Bolshevism, with Automation, sit-down strikes and
bus-boycotts is too far-fetched to have real meaning. It is mere wishful
thinking on Dunayevskaya’s part to see in these activities not only the
beginnings of proletarian self-determination but also the manifestation of the
dialectical movement towards absolute freedom — whatever that may
mean.</p>
<p>Apparently, Dunayevskaya lives in a semi-private world. Whatever happens in
the real world or is said by some of its inhabitants, she looks at it or
listens to it only to the extent that it justifies her own notions, made up of
Hegelian mysticism, Marxian economics and Leninist demagogy. As regards Hegel,
she contributes only fancy language without adding anything either to the
understanding of him or of the world at large. As regards Marx, interpretations
are often deviations in order to fit Marxism into her own scheme of
thought.</p>
<p>According to her, it is not capitalism which creates the capitalist division
of labor but rather “the division of labor, characteristic of all class
societies” creates capital. When “all science, all intellect, all
skill goes into the machine while the labor of man becomes a simple, monotonous
grind,” she writes, “labor of man can produce nothing but its
opposite, capital.” But science, intellect and skill are also part of the
laboring process. Some workers produce machines, others produce other
commodities with these machines, the very existence of which shows that not
“all concrete labors have been reduced to one abstract, congealed
mass.”</p>
<p>It is not “dead, accumulated, materialized labor which oppresses
living labor” in that literal sense in which Dunayevskaya conceives it.
But the means of production as capital, owned or controlled by a definite
social class, subject the working population and the capitalists as well to the
vagaries of the competitive accumulation process and determine its anarchic
character. In order to remain such, capitalists must accumulate regardless of
actual social needs. And in order to accumulate, they must oppress the working
class so that under capitalist production relations the drive for additional
capital appears as a production for the sake of production. This fetishistic
situation, where the products of labor control their producers, exists only
because of class relations under conditions of social production. Without these
relations, the means of production are just that, unable to oppress
anything.</p>
<p>To be sure, Dunayevskaya also sees the “mastery of dead over living
labor” as a class relationship. But for her “private property
arises not because the <em>products</em> of labor are alienated from the
laborer. That is only the <em>consequence</em> of the fact that his very
activity is an alien activity.” To restore “the charm of work to
work” requires, in her view, not only the end of class relations but an
entirely new type of labor, the character of which is not made clear.</p>
<p>By now it is becoming clear what Dunayevskaya is driving at. The enemy today
is state-capitalism, the “planned” capitalist society, which
perpetuates the exploitative class relations of the capitalism of old.
Planners, managers and intellectuals have taken the controlling position
formerly held by capitalists and continue the capitalist accumulation process
for the sake of accumulation. To replace one set of “planners” with
another cannot affect the system. The transformation of state-capitalism into
the new Humanism requires then a radical, total solution: abolishing the
division of society into planners and planned and the establishment of a
“new unity of manual and mental labor in the worker.”</p>
<p>She detects a definite trend in this direction in every type of worker
activity. But, again, these activities are recognized only in so far as they
support her own picture of the shape of things to come. For instance, she
celebrates the proletarian aspects of the East German and Hungarian risings but
she neglects to pay attention to their nationalist implications. She applauds
the bus boycotts by Negroes in America’s South. She sees in them
expressions of working-class self-determination yet overlooks the striving for
racial equality within the existing social system. She supports — as is
proper — sporadic wild-cat and sit-down strikes but fails to notice their
relative insignificance within the total American situation and with a working
class fully in the sway of capitalist ideology. Perhaps, just because the
<em>total</em> solution to the social problem lies for her in the far-away
future, she looks for favorable evidence to support her position in the
far-away past; in the muttering of Hegel, who both accepted and disliked the
capitalist system and its industrialization.</p>
<p>The dialectical unity of theory and practice which is destined to culminate
in a new unity of mental and manual work Dunayevskaya demonstrates in great
detail with Marx’s <cite>Capital</cite>. While writing
<cite>Capital</cite> Marx decided, for strictly and clearly methodological
reasons, to change its structure, to start all over again. Thus we have the
first version in <cite>Critique of Political Economy</cite> and the second in
<cite>Capital</cite>. According to Dunayevskaya, this change of plan was the
result not of methodological consideration but of the political upheavals of
the time and particularly of the workers’ struggle for a shorter
working-day. In this manner the workers themselves participated in producing
<cite>Capital</cite>, which, in turn, could not have been written — in
the way it was — without their participation.</p>
<p>As a revolutionary socialist, Marx could not very well overlook the workers
and their struggles since it was their plight that first led him to analyze
capitalist society. What is too obvious to be worth mentioning Dunayevskaya
presents, however, as her own and as a new discovery, quoting chapter and page
to show that because there was a struggle for a shorter working-day, Marx
“made <em>this</em> the historical framework of capitalism itself.”
While in the <cite>Critique</cite>, “history is the history of
theory,” she writes, “in <cite>Capital</cite>, history is the
history of the class struggle” — as if Marx’s writings prior
to the <cite>Critique</cite> and down to the <cite>Communist Manifesto</cite>
never existed.</p>
<p>In her view, furthermore, not only the workers’ aspirations but all
struggles for “freedom” associated in one way or another with the
laboring classes determined the content and structure of <cite>Capital</cite>.
“It wasn’t Marx,” she says, “who decided that the Civil
war in the United States was a holy war. It was the working class of England,
the very ones who suffered most, who decided that.” Later it is the Paris
Commune “that illuminates and deepens the content of
<cite>Capital</cite>,” as the “treason of the ruling classes
necessitates the saving of French civilization by the proletariat.”
French civilization, she says, was saved from Bismarck and the French Quislings
through the abolition of “the division of labor between the legislative
and the executive” and the transformation of parliament “from a
talking to a working body.” And thus the Commune “created new
conditions of labor.”</p>
<p>And so it goes on and on from one fantasy to another, alternating between
sheer nonsense and mere misunderstandings, interrupted by valid statements that
look silly in this amazing melee of contradictions and half-truths.
Abstractions are taken for concrete realities, as, for instance,
“abstract labor” which is not related to labor itself but to the
fact that all kinds of labor differ only quantitatively in the capitalist
exchange process. The Marxian concept of total capital in his model of the
system as presented in <cite>Capital</cite> is regarded not as a mental
construction but as an actual “national” capital in distinction to
“private” or “world capital.” And thus Dunayevskaya is
able to identify “aggregate capitalist” with Russian
state-capitalism and to declare that Marx was the first anti-Bolshevik who
predicted the collapse of the totalitarian economy.</p>
<p>The most astonishing part of Dunayevskaya’s book, however, is her
treatment of Lenin. “Confronted with the appearance of counter-revolution
(the 2nd International) <em>within</em> the revolutionary movement,” she
says, “Lenin was driven to search for a philosophy that could restore his
own reason.” And “as soon as Lenin opened the <cite>Science of
Logic</cite> (Hegel),” “he grasped the importance of
dialectics.” He came to the conclusion, as he himself stated, that
“it is impossible completely to grasp Marx’s <cite>Capital</cite>
... if you have not studied through and understood the <em>whole</em> of
Hegel’s <cite>Logic</cite>.” Consequently, Lenin added, “none
of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx.” It was a
good thing that Lenin opened Hegel’s <cite>Logic</cite>. If he had not,
there would not have been a true Marxist for a whole century — until the
day, that is, when Dunayevskaya herself opened the <cite>Logic</cite>.</p>
<p>Sharing the Hegelian key to Marx with Lenin, Dunayevskaya has a rather
difficult time reconciling Lenin’s authoritarianism with her own concept
of the “spontaneous self-organization of the proletariat.” After
all, Lenin was the founder of the “vanguard party” and the promoter
of the party dictatorship. He did not care for a spontaneity which makes life
difficult for the professional revolutionist and interferes with
state-planning. But Dunayevskaya manages just the same to turn Lenin into his
exact opposite. Prior to his taking power there are some statements of
Lenin’s that woo and flatter the rebellious masses and encourage them to
act independently. But in contrast to this stand the Leninist authoritarian
theory and practice in relation to Lenin’s own party, to other
organizations, and, as the party in power, in relation to the working class.
All this Dunayevskaya either ignores or twists out of recognition, so that
Lenin emerges as the greatest of all anti-Bolsheviks, who “never at any
time had any conception of the party as an elite in the sense in which our age
uses the term.” — Unfortunately, however, neither Stalin nor any of
the other bolshevik leaders opened Hegel’s <cite>Logic</cite>, and thus,
according to her, Leninism became Stalinism and state-capitalism — the
greatest enemy of the new Humanism.</p>
<p>What remains to be said is that the book has appendices consisting of
fragmentary early writings of Marx on <cite>Private Property and
Communism</cite> and the <cite>Hegelian Dialectic</cite>. They represent a
stage of Marx’s intellectual development which he himself was glad to get
behind him. And though they are of some interest, as is almost anything that
Marx wrote, they do not enhance the understanding of either Marxism or
capitalism. The last appendix is a translation of Lenin’s <cite>Abstracts
of Hegel’s Science of Logic</cite>; marginal notes made for his own use
while reading this work. Although they have, perhaps, their place in a complete
collection of Lenin’s works, by themselves they are of small importance
and will really fascinate only those who indulge in collecting scraps of
manuscript, letters, autographs, doodles and even the cigar-butts of famous
men.</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../index.htm">Paul Mattick Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Paul Mattick 1958
A Marxian Oddity
Source: Western Socialist, Boston, USA, March-April, 1958;
Transcribed: by Adam Buick.
MARXISM AND FREEDOM. FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY. By Raya Dunayevskaya. New York, 1958, pp. 384, $6.00.
In writing this strange book the author’s intentions were
no doubt the best. But there is a wide gap between intentions and performance.
And although Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Marxian doctrine is
occasionally true and eloquent, the book as a whole is an embarrassing,
scatterbrained hodge-podge of philosophical, economic and political ideas that
defy description and serious criticism. It may, however, serve as an example of
how Marxism cannot be “re-examined” and thus recovered from the
Russians.
The impulse for writing this book, the author relates, came from two
sources: the American and the East German workers. The former, between 1950 and
1953 “began to come to grips with the realities of Automation by moving
the question of productivity from one dealing with . . . wages to one dealing
with the conditions of labor and the need for a totally new way of life.”
This was also the period “when East German workers challenged the
Communist regime” and of slave-labor rising in Siberia, which sounded the
tocsin “for the beginning of the end of Russian
totalitarianism.”
While the workers have established the “unity of theory and
practice” by their actual struggles and aspirations, the intellectuals
are now urged to establish it in the realm of theory by reorganizing their
thinking in the direction of a “new Humanism.” This “new
Humanism,” however is as old as and even older than Marxism and dates, in
fact, from 1776. It is implicit in the Hegelian Dialectic and was made explicit
by Marx.
As practice leads to theory, the Hegelian Dialectic is seen as a product of
the bourgeois revolution in both its political and economic aspects. Hegel also
noticed the “negative phenomenon — alienated labor” in
capitalism and Dunayevskaya finds this “reminiscent of Marx’s
works,” even though Hegel failed to see the “positive elements of
alienated labor.” She then plays with the concept of “alienated
labor” which for Marx became another expression for the workers’
divorce from the means of production, from control over production and its
products and for a variety of consequences. Dunayevskaya’s exposition,
however, leads back into the murk of Hegelianism where it gets lost in
incomprehensible philosophical gibberish.
While it serves no purpose to detect Hegelianism in the attitudes of
today’s workers and to discover their attitudes in Hegelian philosophy,
Dunayevskaya’s direct and indirect connection of both yields only the
term “freedom” as a synonym for the “new Humanism.” But
even if, according to Hegel, “freedom is the essence of mind,” this
tells us nothing with respect to the specific freedoms required for a socialist
humanism. Dunayevskaya, unperturbed, however, points to the workers’
opposition to both Automation and totalitarian domination as the developing
realization of men’s essence — freedom.
This opposition, she says, contains the quest for a new type of labor that
does away with the division of labor. It is true, of course, that Marx spoke of
the end of the division of labor and even of labor itself. These improbable
“goals” serve nevertheless to indicate the direction of further
social development and humanization. Yet, what is of real concern is the
abolition of class-determined capitalist division of labor. This does not spell
the end of all labor division which is determined by social production. It
should, however, lose its negative significance through social innovations and
institutions — such as the increasing interchangeability of functions
— which has eliminated its class connotations. Whereas the capitalist
division of labor will disappear with capitalism, labor division of itself is
not necessarily an obstacle to socialism. Neither does it need to stand in
opposition to a concept of work as human activity that develops all of
man’s natural and acquired talents. It is even possible to describe
socialism as the full realization of the positive possibilities inherent in the
division of labor. When all kinds of labor are recognized as being of equal
importance, it no longer matters what particular work the individual, realizing
his humanity in sociality, is doing.
However this problem may be resolved, it is obvious that associating it with
current left-wing anti-Bolshevism, with Automation, sit-down strikes and
bus-boycotts is too far-fetched to have real meaning. It is mere wishful
thinking on Dunayevskaya’s part to see in these activities not only the
beginnings of proletarian self-determination but also the manifestation of the
dialectical movement towards absolute freedom — whatever that may
mean.
Apparently, Dunayevskaya lives in a semi-private world. Whatever happens in
the real world or is said by some of its inhabitants, she looks at it or
listens to it only to the extent that it justifies her own notions, made up of
Hegelian mysticism, Marxian economics and Leninist demagogy. As regards Hegel,
she contributes only fancy language without adding anything either to the
understanding of him or of the world at large. As regards Marx, interpretations
are often deviations in order to fit Marxism into her own scheme of
thought.
According to her, it is not capitalism which creates the capitalist division
of labor but rather “the division of labor, characteristic of all class
societies” creates capital. When “all science, all intellect, all
skill goes into the machine while the labor of man becomes a simple, monotonous
grind,” she writes, “labor of man can produce nothing but its
opposite, capital.” But science, intellect and skill are also part of the
laboring process. Some workers produce machines, others produce other
commodities with these machines, the very existence of which shows that not
“all concrete labors have been reduced to one abstract, congealed
mass.”
It is not “dead, accumulated, materialized labor which oppresses
living labor” in that literal sense in which Dunayevskaya conceives it.
But the means of production as capital, owned or controlled by a definite
social class, subject the working population and the capitalists as well to the
vagaries of the competitive accumulation process and determine its anarchic
character. In order to remain such, capitalists must accumulate regardless of
actual social needs. And in order to accumulate, they must oppress the working
class so that under capitalist production relations the drive for additional
capital appears as a production for the sake of production. This fetishistic
situation, where the products of labor control their producers, exists only
because of class relations under conditions of social production. Without these
relations, the means of production are just that, unable to oppress
anything.
To be sure, Dunayevskaya also sees the “mastery of dead over living
labor” as a class relationship. But for her “private property
arises not because the products of labor are alienated from the
laborer. That is only the consequence of the fact that his very
activity is an alien activity.” To restore “the charm of work to
work” requires, in her view, not only the end of class relations but an
entirely new type of labor, the character of which is not made clear.
By now it is becoming clear what Dunayevskaya is driving at. The enemy today
is state-capitalism, the “planned” capitalist society, which
perpetuates the exploitative class relations of the capitalism of old.
Planners, managers and intellectuals have taken the controlling position
formerly held by capitalists and continue the capitalist accumulation process
for the sake of accumulation. To replace one set of “planners” with
another cannot affect the system. The transformation of state-capitalism into
the new Humanism requires then a radical, total solution: abolishing the
division of society into planners and planned and the establishment of a
“new unity of manual and mental labor in the worker.”
She detects a definite trend in this direction in every type of worker
activity. But, again, these activities are recognized only in so far as they
support her own picture of the shape of things to come. For instance, she
celebrates the proletarian aspects of the East German and Hungarian risings but
she neglects to pay attention to their nationalist implications. She applauds
the bus boycotts by Negroes in America’s South. She sees in them
expressions of working-class self-determination yet overlooks the striving for
racial equality within the existing social system. She supports — as is
proper — sporadic wild-cat and sit-down strikes but fails to notice their
relative insignificance within the total American situation and with a working
class fully in the sway of capitalist ideology. Perhaps, just because the
total solution to the social problem lies for her in the far-away
future, she looks for favorable evidence to support her position in the
far-away past; in the muttering of Hegel, who both accepted and disliked the
capitalist system and its industrialization.
The dialectical unity of theory and practice which is destined to culminate
in a new unity of mental and manual work Dunayevskaya demonstrates in great
detail with Marx’s Capital. While writing
Capital Marx decided, for strictly and clearly methodological
reasons, to change its structure, to start all over again. Thus we have the
first version in Critique of Political Economy and the second in
Capital. According to Dunayevskaya, this change of plan was the
result not of methodological consideration but of the political upheavals of
the time and particularly of the workers’ struggle for a shorter
working-day. In this manner the workers themselves participated in producing
Capital, which, in turn, could not have been written — in
the way it was — without their participation.
As a revolutionary socialist, Marx could not very well overlook the workers
and their struggles since it was their plight that first led him to analyze
capitalist society. What is too obvious to be worth mentioning Dunayevskaya
presents, however, as her own and as a new discovery, quoting chapter and page
to show that because there was a struggle for a shorter working-day, Marx
“made this the historical framework of capitalism itself.”
While in the Critique, “history is the history of
theory,” she writes, “in Capital, history is the
history of the class struggle” — as if Marx’s writings prior
to the Critique and down to the Communist Manifesto
never existed.
In her view, furthermore, not only the workers’ aspirations but all
struggles for “freedom” associated in one way or another with the
laboring classes determined the content and structure of Capital.
“It wasn’t Marx,” she says, “who decided that the Civil
war in the United States was a holy war. It was the working class of England,
the very ones who suffered most, who decided that.” Later it is the Paris
Commune “that illuminates and deepens the content of
Capital,” as the “treason of the ruling classes
necessitates the saving of French civilization by the proletariat.”
French civilization, she says, was saved from Bismarck and the French Quislings
through the abolition of “the division of labor between the legislative
and the executive” and the transformation of parliament “from a
talking to a working body.” And thus the Commune “created new
conditions of labor.”
And so it goes on and on from one fantasy to another, alternating between
sheer nonsense and mere misunderstandings, interrupted by valid statements that
look silly in this amazing melee of contradictions and half-truths.
Abstractions are taken for concrete realities, as, for instance,
“abstract labor” which is not related to labor itself but to the
fact that all kinds of labor differ only quantitatively in the capitalist
exchange process. The Marxian concept of total capital in his model of the
system as presented in Capital is regarded not as a mental
construction but as an actual “national” capital in distinction to
“private” or “world capital.” And thus Dunayevskaya is
able to identify “aggregate capitalist” with Russian
state-capitalism and to declare that Marx was the first anti-Bolshevik who
predicted the collapse of the totalitarian economy.
The most astonishing part of Dunayevskaya’s book, however, is her
treatment of Lenin. “Confronted with the appearance of counter-revolution
(the 2nd International) within the revolutionary movement,” she
says, “Lenin was driven to search for a philosophy that could restore his
own reason.” And “as soon as Lenin opened the Science of
Logic (Hegel),” “he grasped the importance of
dialectics.” He came to the conclusion, as he himself stated, that
“it is impossible completely to grasp Marx’s Capital
... if you have not studied through and understood the whole of
Hegel’s Logic.” Consequently, Lenin added, “none
of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx.” It was a
good thing that Lenin opened Hegel’s Logic. If he had not,
there would not have been a true Marxist for a whole century — until the
day, that is, when Dunayevskaya herself opened the Logic.
Sharing the Hegelian key to Marx with Lenin, Dunayevskaya has a rather
difficult time reconciling Lenin’s authoritarianism with her own concept
of the “spontaneous self-organization of the proletariat.” After
all, Lenin was the founder of the “vanguard party” and the promoter
of the party dictatorship. He did not care for a spontaneity which makes life
difficult for the professional revolutionist and interferes with
state-planning. But Dunayevskaya manages just the same to turn Lenin into his
exact opposite. Prior to his taking power there are some statements of
Lenin’s that woo and flatter the rebellious masses and encourage them to
act independently. But in contrast to this stand the Leninist authoritarian
theory and practice in relation to Lenin’s own party, to other
organizations, and, as the party in power, in relation to the working class.
All this Dunayevskaya either ignores or twists out of recognition, so that
Lenin emerges as the greatest of all anti-Bolsheviks, who “never at any
time had any conception of the party as an elite in the sense in which our age
uses the term.” — Unfortunately, however, neither Stalin nor any of
the other bolshevik leaders opened Hegel’s Logic, and thus,
according to her, Leninism became Stalinism and state-capitalism — the
greatest enemy of the new Humanism.
What remains to be said is that the book has appendices consisting of
fragmentary early writings of Marx on Private Property and
Communism and the Hegelian Dialectic. They represent a
stage of Marx’s intellectual development which he himself was glad to get
behind him. And though they are of some interest, as is almost anything that
Marx wrote, they do not enhance the understanding of either Marxism or
capitalism. The last appendix is a translation of Lenin’s Abstracts
of Hegel’s Science of Logic; marginal notes made for his own use
while reading this work. Although they have, perhaps, their place in a complete
collection of Lenin’s works, by themselves they are of small importance
and will really fascinate only those who indulge in collecting scraps of
manuscript, letters, autographs, doodles and even the cigar-butts of famous
men.
Paul Mattick Archive
|
./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.marx.works.1844.manuscripts.preface | <body>
<p class="title">Karl Marx Works 1844</p>
<h3>Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts<br>
of 1844 <sup class="enote"><a href="footnote.htm#fn01"><sup class="enote">[1]</sup></a></sup></h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Written:</span> Between April and August 1844;<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> 1932;<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844;<br>
<span class="info">Publisher:</span> Progress Publishers, Moscow 1959;<br>
<span class="info">Translated:</span> by Martin Milligan;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed:</span> for marxists.org by <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/ablunden.htm">Andy Blunden</a> in 2000;<br>
<span class="info">Proofed:</span> and corrected by Matthew Carmody 2009;<br>
See <a href="../epm/index.htm">alternate translation</a>.</p>
<p class="information">
See also <a href="../../download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf">PDF version in one file</a>.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<h4>Contents</h4>
<p class="index">
<a href="#Preface">Preface</a></p>
<p class="index">
<em>First Manuscript</em></p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="wages.htm">Wages of Labour</a><br>
<a href="capital.htm">Profit of Capital</a></p>
<p class="indentc">
<a href="capital.htm#1">1. Capital</a><br>
<a href="capital.htm#2">2. The Profit of Capital</a><br>
<a href="capital.htm#3">3. The Rule of Capital Over Labour and the Motives of the Capitalist</a><br>
<a href="capital.htm#4">4. The Accumulation of Capitals and the Competition Among the Capitalists</a><br>
</p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="rent.htm">Rent of Land</a><br>
<a href="labour.htm">Estranged Labour</a></p>
<p class="index">
<em>Second Manuscript</em></p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="second.htm">Antithesis of Capital and Labour. Landed Property and Capital</a></p>
<p class="index">
<em>Third Manuscript</em></p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="third.htm">Private Property and Labour</a><br>
<a href="comm.htm">Private Property and Communism</a><br>
<a href="needs.htm">Human Needs & Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property</a><br>
<a href="power.htm">The Power Of Money</a><br>
<a href="hegel.htm">Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole</a></p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="index">
<em>and</em></p>
<p class="indentb">
<a href="../11/phenom.htm">Hegel’s Construction of The Phenomenology</a>, November 1844<br>
<a href="../11/state.htm">Plan for a Work on The Modern State</a>, November 1844<br>
</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"><a name="Preface"> </a>
</p>
<h3>Preface</h3>
<p class="fst">
<span class="context">||XXXIX|</span> I have already announced in the <a href="../../../../../glossary/periodicals/d/e.htm#dfj"><em>Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher</em></a> the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a <a href="../../1843/critique-hpr/index.htm">critique of the <em>Hegelian</em> philosophy of law</a>. While preparing it for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover, the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the <em>impression </em>of arbitrary systematism. I shall therefore publish the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and afterwards try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and lastly attempt a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched upon in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself expressly touches upon these subjects.<a name="001"> </a></p>
<p>
It is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been attained by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.<a name="002"> </a></p>
<p>
(Whereas the uninformed reviewer who tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the “<em>utopian phrase</em>” at the positive critic’s head, or again such phrases as “quite pure, quite resolute, quite critical criticism,” the “not merely legal but social – utterly social – society,” the “compact, massy mass,” the “outspoken spokesmen of the massy mass,” <a href="footnote.htm#fn02"><sup class="enote">[2]</sup></a> this reviewer has yet to furnish the first proof that besides his theological family affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of <em>worldly </em>matters.)<a name="003"> </a></p>
<p>
It goes without saying that besides the French and English socialists I have also used German socialist works. The only original German works of substance in this science, however – other than <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/w/e.htm#weitling-wilhelm">Weitling’s</a> writings – are the essays by <em>Hess </em>published in <em>Einundzwanzig Bogen </em><a href="footnote.htm#fn03"><sup class="enote">[3]</sup></a><em> and Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie by </em>Engels in the <em>Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, </em>where also the basic elements of this work have been indicated by me in a very general way.<a name="004"> </a></p>
<p>
(Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole – and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy – owes its true foundation to the discoveries of <em><a href="../../../../../glossary/people/f/e.htm#feuerbach-ludwig">Feuerbach</a></em>, against whose <em>Philosophie der Zukunft</em> and <em>Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie </em>in the <em>Anekdota,</em> despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of <em>silence.</em><a name="005"> </a></p>
<p>
It is only with <em>Feuerbach</em> that <em>positive, </em>humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, extensive, and enduring is the effect of <em>Feuerbach’s </em>writings, the only writings since <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/h/e.htm#hegel">Hegel’s</a> <em>Phänomenologie</em> and <em>Logik </em>to contain a real theoretical revolution.<a name="006"> </a></p>
<p>
In contrast to the <em>critical theologians</em> of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of this work – a critical discussion of <em>Hegelian dialectic </em>and philosophy as a whole to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This <em>lack of thoroughness </em>is not accidental, since even the <em>critical </em>theologian remains a <em>theologian. </em>Hence, either he has to start from certain presuppositions of philosophy accepted as authoritative; or, if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people’s discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them in a cowardly and unwarrantable fashion, <em>abstracts</em> from them, thus showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this servility merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner.<a name="007"> </a></p>
<p>
(He does this either by constantly repeating assurances concerning the <em>purity </em>of his own criticism, or by trying to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other limited form of criticism outside itself – say eighteenth-century criticism – and also the limitations of the <em>masses, </em>in order to divert the observer’s attention as well as his own from the <em>necessary </em>task of settling accounts between <em>criticism </em>and its point of origin – Hegelian <em>dialectic </em>and German philosophy as a whole – that is, from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity. Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as <em>Feuerbach’s</em>) are made regarding the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if <em>he </em>were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of <em>catch-phrases </em>at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy. He partly even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by asserting in a mysterious way and in a veiled, malicious and skeptical fashion elements of the Hegelian <em>dialectic </em>which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism – not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, asserting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, self-originating truth, (...) in a way <em>peculiar </em>to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be <em>done </em>by philosophy, so that he can <em>chatter away </em>about purity, resoluteness, and quite critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true <em>conqueror of philosophy</em> whenever he happens to <em>feel </em>some element <a href="footnote.htm#fn04"><sup class="enote">[4]</sup></a> in Hegel to be lacking in Feuerbach – for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of “<em>self-consciousness</em>” and “mind” the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.)<a name="008"> </a></p>
<p>
On close inspection <em>theological </em>criticism – genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement – is seen in the final analysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old <em>philosophical, </em>and especially the <em>Hegelian, transcendentalism, </em>twisted into a <em>theological caricature. </em>This interesting example of historical justice, which now assigns to theology, ever philosophy’s spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy, i.e., the process of its decay – this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion. <a href="footnote.htm#fn05"><sup class="enote">[5]</sup></a><a name="009"> </a></p>
<p>
(How far, on the other hand, <em>Feuerbach’s </em>discoveries about the nature of philosophy still, for their <em>proof </em>at least, called for a critical discussion of philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.)<span class="context">||LX|</span> </p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="footer">
<a href="wages.htm">Wages of Labour</a> – First Section<br>
<a href="../index.htm">1844 Index</a> |
<a href="guide.htm">Study Guide</a> |
<a href="../../../index.htm">Marx-Engels Internet Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Karl Marx Works 1844
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 [1]
Written: Between April and August 1844;
First Published: 1932;
Source: Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow 1959;
Translated: by Martin Milligan;
Transcribed: for marxists.org by Andy Blunden in 2000;
Proofed: and corrected by Matthew Carmody 2009;
See alternate translation.
See also PDF version in one file.
Contents
Preface
First Manuscript
Wages of Labour
Profit of Capital
1. Capital
2. The Profit of Capital
3. The Rule of Capital Over Labour and the Motives of the Capitalist
4. The Accumulation of Capitals and the Competition Among the Capitalists
Rent of Land
Estranged Labour
Second Manuscript
Antithesis of Capital and Labour. Landed Property and Capital
Third Manuscript
Private Property and Labour
Private Property and Communism
Human Needs & Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property
The Power Of Money
Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole
and
Hegel’s Construction of The Phenomenology, November 1844
Plan for a Work on The Modern State, November 1844
Preface
||XXXIX| I have already announced in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher the critique of jurisprudence and political science in the form of a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law. While preparing it for publication, the intermingling of criticism directed only against speculation with criticism of the various subjects themselves proved utterly unsuitable, hampering the development of the argument and rendering comprehension difficult. Moreover, the wealth and diversity of the subjects to be treated could have been compressed into one work only in a purely aphoristic style; whilst an aphoristic presentation of this kind, for its part, would have given the impression of arbitrary systematism. I shall therefore publish the critique of law, ethics, politics, etc., in a series of distinct, independent pamphlets, and afterwards try in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts, and lastly attempt a critique of the speculative elaboration of that material. For this reason it will be found that the interconnection between political economy and the state, law, ethics, civil life, etc., is touched upon in the present work only to the extent to which political economy itself expressly touches upon these subjects.
It is hardly necessary to assure the reader conversant with political economy that my results have been attained by means of a wholly empirical analysis based on a conscientious critical study of political economy.
(Whereas the uninformed reviewer who tries to hide his complete ignorance and intellectual poverty by hurling the “utopian phrase” at the positive critic’s head, or again such phrases as “quite pure, quite resolute, quite critical criticism,” the “not merely legal but social – utterly social – society,” the “compact, massy mass,” the “outspoken spokesmen of the massy mass,” [2] this reviewer has yet to furnish the first proof that besides his theological family affairs he has anything to contribute to a discussion of worldly matters.)
It goes without saying that besides the French and English socialists I have also used German socialist works. The only original German works of substance in this science, however – other than Weitling’s writings – are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen [3] and Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie by Engels in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, where also the basic elements of this work have been indicated by me in a very general way.
(Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive criticism as a whole – and therefore also German positive criticism of political economy – owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach, against whose Philosophie der Zukunft and Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie in the Anekdota, despite the tacit use that is made of them, the petty envy of some and the veritable wrath of others seem to have instigated a regular conspiracy of silence.
It is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins. The less noise they make, the more certain, profound, extensive, and enduring is the effect of Feuerbach’s writings, the only writings since Hegel’s Phänomenologie and Logik to contain a real theoretical revolution.
In contrast to the critical theologians of our day, I have deemed the concluding chapter of this work – a critical discussion of Hegelian dialectic and philosophy as a whole to be absolutely necessary, a task not yet performed. This lack of thoroughness is not accidental, since even the critical theologian remains a theologian. Hence, either he has to start from certain presuppositions of philosophy accepted as authoritative; or, if in the process of criticism and as a result of other people’s discoveries doubts about these philosophical presuppositions have arisen in him, he abandons them in a cowardly and unwarrantable fashion, abstracts from them, thus showing his servile dependence on these presuppositions and his resentment at this servility merely in a negative, unconscious and sophistical manner.
(He does this either by constantly repeating assurances concerning the purity of his own criticism, or by trying to make it seem as though all that was left for criticism to deal with now was some other limited form of criticism outside itself – say eighteenth-century criticism – and also the limitations of the masses, in order to divert the observer’s attention as well as his own from the necessary task of settling accounts between criticism and its point of origin – Hegelian dialectic and German philosophy as a whole – that is, from this necessary raising of modern criticism above its own limitation and crudity. Eventually, however, whenever discoveries (such as Feuerbach’s) are made regarding the nature of his own philosophic presuppositions, the critical theologian partly makes it appear as if he were the one who had accomplished this, producing that appearance by taking the results of these discoveries and, without being able to develop them, hurling them in the form of catch-phrases at writers still caught in the confines of philosophy. He partly even manages to acquire a sense of his own superiority to such discoveries by asserting in a mysterious way and in a veiled, malicious and skeptical fashion elements of the Hegelian dialectic which he still finds lacking in the criticism of that dialectic (which have not yet been critically served up to him for his use) against such criticism – not having tried to bring such elements into their proper relation or having been capable of doing so, asserting, say, the category of mediating proof against the category of positive, self-originating truth, (...) in a way peculiar to Hegelian dialectic. For to the theological critic it seems quite natural that everything has to be done by philosophy, so that he can chatter away about purity, resoluteness, and quite critical criticism; and he fancies himself the true conqueror of philosophy whenever he happens to feel some element [4] in Hegel to be lacking in Feuerbach – for however much he practises the spiritual idolatry of “self-consciousness” and “mind” the theological critic does not get beyond feeling to consciousness.)
On close inspection theological criticism – genuinely progressive though it was at the inception of the movement – is seen in the final analysis to be nothing but the culmination and consequence of the old philosophical, and especially the Hegelian, transcendentalism, twisted into a theological caricature. This interesting example of historical justice, which now assigns to theology, ever philosophy’s spot of infection, the further role of portraying in itself the negative dissolution of philosophy, i.e., the process of its decay – this historical nemesis I shall demonstrate on another occasion. [5]
(How far, on the other hand, Feuerbach’s discoveries about the nature of philosophy still, for their proof at least, called for a critical discussion of philosophical dialectic will be seen from my exposition itself.)||LX|
Wages of Labour – First Section
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<p class="title">M.I.A. Library: C.L.R. James</p>
<blockquote>
<div class="border"><br>
<h1>C.L.R. James Archive</h1>
<table align="center">
<tbody><tr>
<td><img src="clr-james.jpg" border="1" vspace="0" hspace="10" width="183" height="262" alt="CLR James as a young man"></td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<h2>1901 – 1989</h2>
<p class="information">“This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”.<br>
<a href="works/1948/revolutionary-answer.htm">Revolutionary Answer</a>, 1948</p>
<h3>* * *<br>
<a href="biograph.htm">Biography</a><br>
</h3>
<br>
<hr class="section">
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="toc">Works:</p>
<p class="index"><a href="works/dialecti/index.htm">Notes on Dialectics</a></p>
<p class="index"><a href="works/diamat/diamat47.htm">Dialectical Materialism & the Fate of Humanity</a></p>
<p class="index"><a href="works/world/index.htm">World Revolution 1917–1936</a></p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="toc">Translations:</p>
<p class="index"><a href="../../history/etol/writers/souvar/works/stalin/index.htm" target="new">Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism</a>, <em>by Boris Souvarine</em> <span class="inote">(translated by C.L.R. James, 1939)</span></p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<p class="toc">Articles on Marxism, Revolution and Black History:</p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/10/geneva.html">The Game at Geneva</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, October 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/10/abyssinia.html">Is This Worth a War?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, October 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/abyssinia.htm">I.L.P. Abyssinian Policy</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>I.L.P. Discussion</em>, October 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/new-leader.htm">Intervening in Abyssinia</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, October 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/10/sanctions.htm">The Workers and Sanctions</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, October 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/11/miners-strike.htm">National Stay-In Strike?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, November 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/12/inafix.html">‘Honest’ Stanley in a Fix</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, December 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1935/12/peaceplan.html">Truth about ‘Peace Plan’ – Britain’s Imperialist Game</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, December 1935.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1936/01/nextmove.html">Baldwin’s Next Move</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, January 1936.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1936/civilising-blacks.htm">“Civilising” the “Blacks”; Why Britain needs to Maintain Her African Possessions</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, May 1936.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1936/06/abyssinia.html">Fighting for the Abyssinian Emperor</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New Leader</em>, June 1936.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1936/12/pf.htm">Popular Front in Past Times</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, December 1936.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/01/war.htm">The Leninist Attitude to War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, January 1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/02/moscow-trials1.htm">The Second Moscow Trial [Part I]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, February 1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/04/spain.htm">The Leninist Attitude for Spain</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, April 1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/04/trials.htm">The Second Moscow Trial</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, April–May 1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/trotskyism.htm">Trotskyism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Controversy</em>, October 1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1937/red-spanish.htm">Introduction to Mary Low and Juan Breá’s <em>Red Spanish Notebook</em></a><br>
<span class="inote">1937.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/six-questions.htm">Six Questions to Trotskyists – And Their Answers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Controversy</em>, February–March 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/04/rsl.htm">Revolutionary Socialist League</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, April 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/06/britbarbarism.html">British Barbarism in Jamaica –Support the Negro Workers’ Struggle</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fight</em>, June 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/voice-africa.htm">The Voice of Africa</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>International African Opinion</em>, August 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/stafford-cripps.htm">Sir Stafford Cripps and “Trusteeship”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>International African Opinion</em>, September 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1938/11/homeland.htm">An African “Homeland” for the Jewish Refugees?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 26 November 1938.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/06/preliminary.html">Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote">SWP <em>Internal Bulletin</em>, June 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/06/notes.html">Notes Following the Discussions</a><br>
<span class="inote">SWP <em>Internal Bulletin</em>, June 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/07/self-determination.htm">The Right of Self-Determination and the Negro in the US</a><br>
<span class="inote">SWP New York Convention Resolutions, July 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/07/negro-work.htm">The SWP and Negro Work</a><br>
<span class="inote">SWP New York Convention Resolutions, July 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/08/cpzigzags.html">The Communist Party’s Zigzags on Negro Policy</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 15 August 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/08/negro1.htm">The Negro Question: The SWP Tackles Negro Work</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 15 August 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/08/negro2.htm">The Negro Question: The American Negro and the Proletarian Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 22 August 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/08/negro3.htm">The Negro Question: Chauvinism Must Be Driven Out</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 25 August 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/08/chicago-1919.html">The Negro Question: The 1919 Race Riots in Chicago</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 29 August 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/09/negro-war.html">The Negro Question: Negroes and the War</a><br>
<span class="inote">Series in <em>Socialist Appeal</em>, September–October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/09/negro01.htm">The Negro Question: The Effects of Capitalist Propaganda</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 1 September 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/09/negro02.htm">The Negro Question: Negroes and the Hitler-Stalin Pact</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 5 September 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/09/africansoldiers.htm">African Soldiers and the Armies of “Democracy”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 13 September 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/lab-ww2.html">Labor and the Second World War</a><br>
<span class="inote">Series in <em>Socialist Appeal</em>, October–November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro2.htm">The Negro Question: [The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 6 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro3.htm">The Negro Question: [In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 10 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro4.htm">The Negro Question: [Like the Red of an Apple Rotten at the Heart]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 13 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro5.htm">The Negro Question: [There Is No Evil Without Good]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 17 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro6.htm">The Negro Question: What Do the Negroes Themselves Think About the War?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 20 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro7.htm">The Negro Question: [The Negro Petty-Bourgeoisie]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 24 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro8.htm">The Negro Question: [Negroes! On Guard Against the New Stalinist Line – 1]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 27 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/10/negro9.htm">The Negro Question: [Negroes! On Guard Against the New Stalinist Line – 2]</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 31 October 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/negroq1.html">The Negro Question: The Negroes in Industry</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 3 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/negroq2.html">The Negro Question: Industry and the Negro</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 7 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/negroq3.html">The Negro Question: Industry and the Negro – 2</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 10 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/greatest.html">The Negro Question: The Greatest Event in History</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 14 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/negroq5.html">The Negro Question: The Negro in Steel</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 17 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/negroq7.html">The Negro Question: The Negro in Steel</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 24 November 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/11/overview.html">The Negro Question: The Destiny of the Negro – An Historical Overview</a><br>
<span class="inote">Series in <em>Socialist Appeal</em>, November–December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/12/negro-revolution.htm">Revolution and the Negro</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/xx/war.htm">Why Negroes Should Oppose the War</a><br>
<span class="inote">Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/12/negroq3.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 16 December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/12/negroq4.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 23 December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/12/gonewind.html">On <em>Gone with the Wind</em></a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 30 December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1939/12/negroq5.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 30 December 1939.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/01/negroq1.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 6 January 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/01/negroq2.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 13 January 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/01/gonewind.html">On <em>Gone with the Wind</em></a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 13 January 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/01/negroq3.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 20 January 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/01/negroq4.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 27 January 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/02/negroq1.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 3 February 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/02/lynching.html">The Negro Question –The Economics of Lynching</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 10 February 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/02/negroq3.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 17 February 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/02/negroq4.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 24 February 1940.</span>/p>
</p><p class="information"><a href="works/1940/03/negroq1.html">The Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Appeal</em>, 9 March 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/05/nativeson.htm"><em>Native Son</em> and Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, May 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/05/nativeson.html">On <em>Native Son</em> by Richard Wright</a><br>
<span class="inote">Book review in <em>Labor Action</em>, 27 May 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/06/chat.html">“My Friends”: A Fireside Chat on the War</a><br>
<span class="inote">Workers Party pamphlet, June 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/06/refugees.htm">Refugees – in Belgium and the Congo – in War, in Peace</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 10 June 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/06/garvey.html">Marcus Garvey</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 June 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/07/capitalism-war.htm">Capitalist Society and the War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, July 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/07/unmadespeech.htm">The Speech That Was Not Made at NAACP Meet</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 July 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/07/problems.htm">Labor Will Take Care of Its Own Union Problems</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 29 July 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/08/state-counterrevolution.htm">State and Counter-Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, August 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/08/south.htm">Labor Will Take Care of Its Own Union Problems</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 August 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/08/together.htm">Negro and White Workers Must Stand Together</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 12 August 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/08/army.htm">We Must Fight Against Any Kind of Enslavement</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 August 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/08/beware.htm">Beware of Those Who Act for the Boss Class!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 August 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/trotsky-history.htm">Trotsky’s Place In History</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/trotsky.htm">A Tribute to Our Fallen Leader, Leon Trotsky</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/leader.htm">Which Type of Leader Should Negroes Follow?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/friends.htm">Where Will You Find Friends of the Negroes?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/sharejobs.htm">The Negro Must Have His Share of the New Jobs</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1940/09/together.htm">Stand Together, Fight For Jobs – That’s the Way</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 September 1940.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/01/history-opposition.htm">On the History of the Left Opposition</a><br>
<span class="inote">Discussion with Trotsky from <em>Fourth International</em>, January 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/02/bolsheviksinwar.htm">The Bolsheviks in the War</a><br>
<span class="inote">Review of a book on the Bolsheviks during WWI from <em>New International</em>, February 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/03/ethiopia1.html">Negroes! Beware the Imperialist Use of Ethiopia! – 1</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 10 March 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/03/ethiopia2.htm">Negroes! Beware the Imperialist Use of Ethiopia! – 2</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 17 March 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/03/wafrica.htm">We Must Aid Africa’s Anti-War Militants</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 March 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/03/bus.htm">Negro Committee Asks Jobs for 100 Bus Drivers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 31 March 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/russia-fascist.htm">Russia – A Fascist State</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/bus.htm">It Is Up to The Transport Workers Now!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/ford.htm">Guard Against the Trap Set by Henry Ford</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/easterweek.htm">Ireland and the Revolutionary Tradition of Easter Week</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/merguson.htm">Merguson Has an Obligation to the Negroes</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/04/masses.htm">Negro Masses and the Struggle for World Socialism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 April 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/05/joke.htm">A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 May 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/05/bait.htm">Ford Tries to Feed the Negro Poisoned Bait</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 12 May 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/05/field.htm">Marshall Field, Negro-Hater, Turns “Friend”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 May 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/05/pickens.htm">Judas Pickens Takes the Stump for War Bonds</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 May 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/05/eastman.htm">Max Eastman Dives Into Jingo Waters – So Perish All Traitors!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 May 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/imperialism-africa.htm">Imperialism in Africa</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/finlandstation.htm">To and From the Finland Station</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/jobs.htm">From Jobs to the Struggle for Socialism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/strikeblow.htm">We Must Strike a Mighty Blow at Jim-Crow Now</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/allout.htm">All Out July 1 for the March on Washington</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/06/tricks.htm">FDR’s Latest Trick Is So Old It’s Moth-Eaten</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 June 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/07/beware.htm">Beware of Those Pushing You Into the War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 July 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/07/ourselves.htm">Negroes, We Can Depend Only on Ourselves!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 July 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/07/toodeep.htm">Negro Protest Runs Too Deep to Be Squashed</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 July 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/07/forceissue.htm">We Must Force the Job Issue by Mass Action</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 July 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/09/russia-marxism.htm">Russia and Marxism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, September 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/09/sharecroppers.html">With The Sharecroppers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, September 1941.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1941/09/russia.htm">Resolution on the Russian Question</a><br>
<span class="inote">Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/04/russian-economy.htm">Letter on the nature of the Russian economy</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, April 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/11/england.htm">A Report on Conditions in England – Working Class Grows More Restive</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 November 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/11/india.htm">India and the International Situation</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 November 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/12/india.htm">India and Its Relation to the Conduct of the War</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 December 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/12/india2.htm">On the Role of the Indian Ruling Class</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 December 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1942/12/india3.htm">A Brief Outline of Indian Economy</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 December 1942.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/01/india4.htm">The Role of the Indian Capitalist Class</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 January 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/01/india5.htm">A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution – 1</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 January 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/01/india6.htm">A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution – 2</a> (series)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 January 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/04/production.htm">Production for the Sake of Production</a><br>
<span class="inote">Polemic against Joseph Carter on Marxist Political Economy <em>Workers Party Bulletin</em>, April 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/04/way-out-europe.html">The Way Out for Europe</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, April/May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/04/britemp.htm">Greatest Empire in History Is Collapsing</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 April 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/05/webb.htm">Beatrice Webb, Reformist</a> (obituary)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/05/saveus.htm">Save Us from These Noble “Friends of the Negro”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 3 May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/05/miners.htm">Two Coal Strikes – What We Can Learn – United States, 1943 – Britain, 1926</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 10 May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/05/hollywood.htm">Hollywood Does a Re-Take on the War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/05/jimcrow.htm">Pamphlet Points at Scandal of “Jim-Crow in Uniform”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 May 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/06/westindies.htm">The West Indies in Review</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, June 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/06/lerner.html">Mr. Lerner: Ideas Are Weapons, But How Use Them?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7/14 June 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/06/wlb.htm">The Negro: Several Aspects of the WLB Decision</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 June 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/06/beaumont.htm">Beaumont Bosses and KKK Behind Attack on Negroes</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 June 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/07/pogroms.htm">The Race Pogroms and the Negro</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, July 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/07/hook.htm">The Philosophy of History and Necessity</a><br>
<span class="inote">Polemic against Sidney Hook from <em>New International</em>, July/October 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/07/giraud.html">Giraud – Disciple of Roosevelt</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19/26 July 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/08/indanger.htm">Negro People Are Still in Danger</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 August 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/08/harlem.htm">Harlem Negroes Protest Jim Crow Discrimination</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 August 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/08/italy.htm">Italian Workers Blaze Path for European Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 August 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/08/union.htm">Union Labor Must Lead the Fight for Negro Rights</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 August 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/09/churchill.htm">Still Defending the British Empire</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 13 September 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/09/fepc.htm">FEPC Program No Aid to Negro Labor</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 20 September 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/09/fepc2.htm">Speech of Railroad Lawyer at FEPC Hearing Shows Up Hypocrisy of American Racial Policy</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 27 September 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/10/national-question.htm">Socialism and the National Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, October 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/10/fepc.htm">The Labor Unions Must Smash Jim Crow</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 October 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/10/fepc2.htm">This Is Labor’s Own Problem!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 October 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/10/fepc3.htm">FEPC Has Failed – Committee Appointed by Labor Needed</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 October 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/11/american-tradition.htm">In the American Tradition</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, November 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/11/fepc.htm">On Comptroller Warren’s Ruling – How He Strangled the FEPC</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 November 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/11/fepc2.htm">Warren Ruling Upholds Race Discrimination</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 November 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/12/european-revolution.htm">The European Socialist Revolution</a> (with Harry Allen & Tom Brown)<br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, December 1943</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/negro43.htm">The Historical Development of the Negro in the United States</a><br>
<span class="inote">Workers Party document, December 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/12/negroes-civil-war.htm">Negroes in the Civil War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, December 1943</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/12/randolph.htm">Randolph Prepares a New ‘Demarche’</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 6 December 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1943/12/future.htm">Negroes Must Fight for a Labor Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 6 December 1943.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/01/international-tradition.htm">In the International Tradition</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, January 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/01/tubman.htm">The Story of Harriet Tubman and the American Civil War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 3 January 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/06/laski.htm">Laski, St. Paul and Stalin</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, June 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/06/helpers.htm">The British Empire’s Little Helpers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 June 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/06/france.htm">Who Will Govern France?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 June 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/one-world.htm">The American People in ‘One World’</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/apathy.htm">Labor’s Apathy to the War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 3 July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/prejudice.htm">Great Britain: People Revolted by U.S. Race Prejudice</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 17 July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/corruption.htm">Hillman and the Corruption in U.S. Politics</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 17 July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/labparty.htm">Negroes Need a Labor Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/07/germany.htm">What Russia Wants in Germany</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 July 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/course-war.htm">The Course of the War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/labparty.htm">No Alternative for Negroes but to Fight for Labor Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/patronage.htm">Does Cheap Patronage Cancel Oppression?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/taboos.htm">Capitalism Taboos ‘Equal Opportunity’ for Negro People</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/natlib.htm">Why U.S. Workers Should Support National Liberation Struggles</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/minor.htm">Mr. Minor, This War Is NOT Like the Civil War of 1861</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/08/wolfpack.htm">Stalin Leads Wolf Pack in Shameful Lust for Blood of German Workers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 August 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/09/french-rats.htm">The French Rats and the Sinking Ship</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, September 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/09/edict.htm">Ban on GI Jim Crow a Paper Edict Unless Negroes and Labor Enforce It</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 September 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/09/paris.htm">Paris Masses Did It Themselves!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 September 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/09/events.htm">World Events Are of Great Importance to U.S. Labor</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 September 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/gravedigers.htm"><em>The Gravediggers</em>: How French Rulers Sold Out to Hitler</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/egad.htm">Egad! Stalin Fears “Contamination” of Red Army by Rumanian “Luxuries”!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/dumbarton.htm">Re-Heating an Old Dish at Dumbarton</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/newleague.htm">Preparing a New League of Nations</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/dumbarton2.htm">The Hoax of Dumbarton Oaks</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/willkie.htm">The Late Wendell Willkie: The Politician Who Came Too Late</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/10/dumbarton3.htm">Hoax at Dumbarton Oaks – II</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 30 October 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/11/germany-civilisation.htm">Germany and European Civilization</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, November 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/11/falsification.htm"><em>Daily Worker</em> on Negroes and the Elections – A Falsification of History</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 20 November 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/11/pac.htm">What Should Be the Future of PAC?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 20 November 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/11/2negroes.htm">Two Negroes: Labor Leader, Labor Traitor</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 27 November 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/11/pac2.htm">What Should Be the Future of PAC? – II</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 27 November 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/12/pac.htm">Which Way for PAC</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, December 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/12/douglass.htm">A Great Figure in American History</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 December 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/12/onetenth1.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 December 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/12/onetenth2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 December 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1944/12/socvfe.htm">Socialism <em>versus</em> Free Enterprise</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 December 1944.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/01/nation1.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 January 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/01/nation2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 January 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/01/nation3.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 January 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/01/nation4.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 29 January 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/02/nation1.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 12 February 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/02/nation2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 February 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/03/reconversion.htm">Reconversion –</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, March 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/03/nation1.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 March 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/03/hillman.htm">PAC’s Hillman Repudiates Need of the Hour – A Labor Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 March 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/03/miners.htm">Economics of Miners’ Fight</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 12 March 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/04/awareness.html">Public Awareness of the Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 April 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/04/tenth2.htm">Danger Signals</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 9 April 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/04/prejudices.html">White Workers’ Prejudices</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 April 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/05/lesson-germany.htm">The Lesson of Germany</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, May 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/05/tenth.htm">Roosevelt and Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 May 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/tenth1.htm">Balance Sheet of the War – 1</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/tenth2.htm">Balance Sheet of the War – 2</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/portrait.htm">Portrait: A “Friend of the Negroes”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/tenth3.htm">Southern Liberal and FEPC</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/tenth4.htm">The Case of the 92nd</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/06/layoffs.htm">Negroes Get Priority in Layoffs</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 June 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/07/tenth.htm">Eisenhower and Jim Crow</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 July 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/08/tenth1.htm">An Answer to a Reader</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 13 August 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/08/tenth2.htm">Basis for Anti-Negro Prejudice</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 27 August 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/09/british-socialism.htm">The British Vote For Socialism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, September 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/09/britlabor.html">British Labor and the Colonies</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 3 September 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/09/tenth.htm">Negroes and Full Employment</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 September 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/01/ikd1.htm">Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution: A Discussion Article on the Thesis of the IKD – Part I</a> – <a href="works/1946/01/ikd2.html">Part II</a><br>
<span class="inote">Written September 1945, published <em>New International</em>, January & February 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/10/tenth1.htm">Anti-Negro School Strikes</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 15 October 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1945/10/tenth2.htm">Problems of Negro Vets</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 October 1945.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/master-slave.htm">From the Master-Slave Dialectic to Revolt in Capitalist Production</a><br>
<span class="inote">Extract from a polemic by C.L.R. James, against the IKD, 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/01/giants.html">Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg – Three Giants of Socialism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 January 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/02/tenth.html">Negroes and the Strike Wave</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 February 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/02/tenth2.html">FEPC and the Labor Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 February 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/02/1stround.html">First Round of Post-War Social Crisis</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 February 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/02/tenth3.html">Southern Negro Vets Fight for Vote</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 February 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/03/party.htm">The Task of Building the American Bolshevik Party</a><br>
<span class="inote">Document from <em>Bulletin of the Workers Party</em>, March 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/03/tenth1.html">Freeport and Columbia Murders</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 March 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/03/paris-commune.htm">On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune – They Showed the Way to Labor Emancipation!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 March 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/03/tenth1a.html">A Warning Against Stalinist Maneuvers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 March 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/03/tenth2.html">Labor’s Responsibility to the Negro</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 25 March 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/minority.htm">The Program of the Minority</a><br>
<span class="inote">Minority document for Workers Party convention, May 1946, with Dunayevskaya <em>et al.</em></span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/chicago.html"><strong>Black Metropolis</strong>: Chicago’s South Side</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/tenth1.html">On Organizing the South</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/stalinism1.html">The Stalinist Menace to World Labor<br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 April 1946.</span></a></p><a href="works/1946/04/stalinism1.html">
</a><p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/stalinism1.html"></a><a href="works/1946/04/tenth2.html">The Negro and Political Action</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/stalinism2.html">Russia No Workers’ State</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/tenth3.html">On Organizing the South II</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 15 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/tenth4.html">CIO’s Drive to Organize the South</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/04/stalinism3.html">Stalinism – Imperialist Policy in Iran</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 April 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/05/tenth.html">Negroes Watch “Operation Dixie”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 20 May 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/05/tenth2.html">>Race Prejudice Is Capitalist Product</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 27 May 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/07/louis-johnson.html">Joe Louis and Jack Johnson</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 July 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/07/wcpower.html">Post-War Strike Wave Demonstrated Working Class Power</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 1 July 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/07/tenth2.html">Bilbo – Murderer of the FEPC</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 8 July 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/07/tenth3.html">Economic Upheaval in the South</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 22 July 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/08/italy.html">How the Italian Workers Seized the Factories in Their Strike Wave</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 August 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/08/tenth.html">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 5 August 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/08/tenth2.html">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 August 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/08/trotsky.html">Trotsky – A Revolutionary Internationalist Who Never Compromised with Social Oppression</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 19 August 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/08/tenth3.html">“Law and Order” Wink at Lynch Terror in South</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 26 August 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/laments.htm">Business Reporter Laments over Capitalists’ Lack of Confidence in Their Own System</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/tenth.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/tenth2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 16 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/tenth3.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/wallace.htm">Wallace’s Speech a Plea for Imperialist Deal with Stalinist Russia to Divide the World</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 23 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/09/wallace.htm">Henry Wallace Proposes to Divide the World</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 30 September 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/revbetrayed.htm">After Ten Years: On Trotsky’s <em>The Revolution Betrayed</em></a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>New International</em>, October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/tenth.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/nextstep.htm">Next Step in Meat Crisis Up to Labor</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/tenth2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/windies.htm">Movements for Independence Grow in West Indian Islands</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/10/tenth3.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 28 October 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/tenth.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/europe.htm">What Does the GI Think as He Sees Hungry Europe?</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 4 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/disarmament.htm">Nations Talk Disarmament But Prepare for New War</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 11 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/bustamente.htm">Bustamente – “Uncrowned King” of Jamaica</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/ni.htm"><strong>New International</strong> Is a Socialist Weapon</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/anniversary.htm">Russia: 29th Anniversary of Its Great Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/11/tenth2.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 18 November 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1946/12/survey.htm">1946 – Survey of the Old Year Poses Labor’s Tasks – 1947</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 30 December 1946.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/01/tenth.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 6 January 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/01/pac.htm">We Say “Transform PAC Into a Labor Party”</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 6 January 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/01/lenin.html">One-Tenth of the Nation – Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 13 January 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/01/tenth3.html">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 20 January 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/02/one-tenth.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 February 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/03/contrast.htm">A Contrast: Lenin’s Method and Attlee’s</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 3 March 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/03/goldman.htm">An Exchange on the Socialist Attitude to the Bilbo Problem</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 24 March 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/04/bolshevi.htm">One-Tenth of the Nation: Negroes and Bolshevism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 7 April 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/04/agony.htm">The Capitalist Class Is Responsible for Agony of the Miners</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 14 April 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/04/trotsky.htm">Trotsky’s Summation Speech</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 21 April 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/06/wrong.htm">The Feeling Is Growing – Something Is Wrong!</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Labor Action</em>, 2 June 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/09/naacp.html">The Rapid Growth of the NAACP</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 22 September 1947.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/balance-sheet/index.htm">Trotskyism in the United States, 1940–1947. Balance Sheet.</a><br>
<span class="inote">Published by the Workers Party and the Johnson-Forest tendency.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1947/invading/index.htm">The Invading Socialist Society</a><br>
<span class="inote">With Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, published by the Johnson-Forest tendency.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/02/segregation.htm">Bourbon Campaign to Keep Jim Crow in Education</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 2 February 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/02/gandhi.htm">Gandhi – His Role in Fight for India’s Independence</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 9 February 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/02/wallace.htm">Wallace’s program and the fight against monopoly</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 16 February 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/04/luce.htm">Henry Luce and Karl Marx</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fourth International</em>, March–April 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/03/malraux.htm">Malraux, with Aid of <em>Times</em>, Slanders Trotskyism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 1 March 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/03/decay.htm">UN Economic Report Shows Decay of World Capitalism</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 29 March 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/04/draft.htm">Resist Jim-Crow Draft, Randolph Urges</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 12 April 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/04/divides.htm">Randolph’s Anti-Draft Proposal Sharply Divides Negro Leaders</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 19 April 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/04/campaign.htm">The Negro Struggle – Randolph’s Campaign</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 26 April 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/05/resist.htm">Logical Conclusion of Randolph’s Program to Resist Jim Crow Draft</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 3 May 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/05/recruits.htm">New Recruits for Norman Thomas’ Campaign</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 17 May 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/07/report.htm">Summary of Report on Negro Question</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 12 July 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1948/07/meyer.htm">The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fourth International</em>, Vol. 9 No. 8, December 1948.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/02/churchill.htm">Winston Churchill – Tory War-dog</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fourth International</em>, February 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/02/neg-history.htm">Negro History Week and the Workers</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 7 February 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/02/lincoln.html">The Two Sides of Abraham Lincoln</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 14 February 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/03/letter.htm">Answer Shows What Powell and Wallace Really Stand For</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 28 March 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/04/talented-tenth.htm">“The Talented Tenth”: Negro Leadership and Civil Rights</a>, <a href="works/1949/06/road-ahead.htm">Road Ahead in Negro Struggle</a><br>
<span class="inote">2 articles on the problems of the Civil Rights struggle from <em>Fourth International</em>, April 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/05/english-revolution.htm">Cromwell and the Levellers</a>, <a href="works/1949/09/english-revolution.htm">Ancestors of the Proletariat</a><br>
<span class="inote">2 articles on the English Revolution of 1649 from <em>Fourth International</em>, 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/08/price-imperialism.htm">Price of Imperialism to the People</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Fourth International</em>, August 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1949/11/stalinism-negro.htm">Stalinism and Negro History</a>, <a href="works/1949/12/aptheker.htm">Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions</a><br>
<span class="inote">2 articles on Stalinism from <em>Fourth International</em>, November and December 1949.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1950/02/problems.html">Key Problems in the Study of Negro History</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>The Militant</em>, 13 February 1950</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1950/03/american-writers.htm">Two Young American Writers</a><br>
<span class="inote">Book review in <em>Fourth International</em>, March–April 1950.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1950/05/welfare.html">Capitalism and the Welfare State</a><br>
<span class="inote">Extract from an unsigned editorial in <em>Fourth International</em>, May–June 1950.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1950/08/state-capitalism.htm">State Capitalism and World Revolution</a><br>
<span class="inote">Written in 1950 in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1951/09/woman-question.htm">On the Woman Question: An Orientation</a><br>
<span class="inote">A discussion held on September 3rd, 1951.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1956/06/every-cook.htm">Every Cook can Govern</a><br>
<span class="inote">A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, 1956.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1958/06/federation.htm">Lecture on Federation (West Indies and British Guiana)</a><br>
<span class="inote">Speech delivered at Queens College in then British Guiana on West Indian Federation, June 1958.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1962/destruction-paper/index.htm">Marxism and the Intellectuals</a><br>
<span class="inote">Pamphlet published with Martin Glaberman, 1962.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1963/deutscher.htm">Indomitable Rebel</a><br>
<span class="inote">Review of <em>The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929–40</em> by Isaac Deutscher, 1963.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1963/lenin-vanguard.htm">Lenin and the Vanguard Party</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Controversy</em>, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1963.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1964/creative.htm">Revolutionary Creativity</a><br>
<span class="inote">Review of two books on Russian Marxism, 1964.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1965/eastindians.htm">West Indians of East Indian Descent</a><br>
<span class="inote">Exploring race relations between Trinidadians of East Indian descent and Trinidadians of African descent.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1965/10/vanguard.htm">On <em>The Vanguard</em></a><br>
<span class="inote">Speech at a Conference of Oilfield Workers Trade Union in Trinidad, October 1965.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1967/black-power.htm">Black Power</a><br>
<span class="inote">Talk in London in 1967.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1967/world-politics.htm">World Politics Today</a><br>
<span class="inote">Article in <em>Speak Out</em>, March 1967.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1967/che-guevara.htm">Che Guevara</a><br>
<span class="inote">Article in <em>Speak Out</em>, November 1967.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1967/forces/index.html">The Gathering Forces</a><br>
<span class="inote">Document published in November 1967.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1968/world-revolution.htm">World Revolution: 1968</a><br>
<span class="inote">Article in <em>Speak Out</em>, June/July 1968.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1973/panafricanism.htm">Reflections on Pan-Africanism</a><br>
<span class="inote">Transcript of speech given on 20 & 21 November 1973.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1978/11/fanon.htm">Fanon and the Caribbean</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>International Tribute to Frantz Fanon: Record of the Special Meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid</em>, 3 November 1978.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1980/07/tariq-ali.htm">Tariq Ali and C.L.R. James: A Conversation</a><br>
<span class="inote"><em>Socialist Challenge</em>, 3 July 1980.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1980/09/banyan.htm">Interview with Ken Ramchand in San Fernando</a><br>
<span class="inote">Trinidad & Tobago, September 5th, 1980.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1981/01/rodney.htm">Walter Rodney and the Question of Power</a><br>
<span class="inote">Talk given a memorial symposium titled, <em>Walter Rodney, Revolutionary & Scholar: A Tribute</em>, held on 30 January 1981 at the University of California, USA.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1982/free-for-all.htm">Free For All: The nine year old leader</a><br>
<span class="inote">Article in <em>Race Today</em>, Vol. 14 No. 3, May–June, 1982.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1986/11/revhis-interview.htm">Interview with British Trotskyists</a><br>
<span class="inote">South London, November 16th, 1986.</span></p>
<p class="information"><a href="works/1989/04/interview.html">‘You never know when it is going to explode’</a><br>
<span class="inote">Interview in <em>Living Marxism</em>, April 1989.</span></p>
<hr class="section">
<p class="toc">Further reading:</p>
<p class="information"><a href="../rawick/index.htm" target="new">George Rawick Archive</a><br>
<a href="../dunayevskaya/index.htm" target="new">Raya Dunayevskaya Archive</a><br>
<a href="../padmore/index.htm" target="new">George Padmore Archive</a><br>
<a href="../lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm" target="new">Lenin’s Annotations on Hegel’s <em>Logic</em></a><br>
<a href="../../subject/africa/fanon/index.htm" target="new">Frantz Fanon Archive</a><br>
<a href="https://hackney.gov.uk/dalston-library" target="new">The C.L.R. James Library</a>, Dalston [off-site link]<br>
</p>
<p class="information" style="text-align: right;">Archive maintained by <a href="../../admin/volunteers/steering.htm">Einde O’Callaghan</a>.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer"><a href="../../history/etol/index.htm" target="_top">Trotskyist Archive</a> | <a href="../../subject/humanism/index.htm" target="_top">Marxist Humanism</a> | <a href="../index.htm" target="_top">M.I.A. Library</a></p>
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</blockquote>
<p class="updat">Last updated on: 27 March 2024</p>
</body> |
M.I.A. Library: C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James Archive
1901 – 1989
“This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”.
Revolutionary Answer, 1948
* * *
Biography
Works:
Notes on Dialectics
Dialectical Materialism & the Fate of Humanity
World Revolution 1917–1936
Translations:
Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, by Boris Souvarine (translated by C.L.R. James, 1939)
Articles on Marxism, Revolution and Black History:
The Game at Geneva
New Leader, October 1935.
Is This Worth a War?
New Leader, October 1935.
I.L.P. Abyssinian Policy
I.L.P. Discussion, October 1935.
Intervening in Abyssinia
New Leader, October 1935.
The Workers and Sanctions
New Leader, October 1935.
National Stay-In Strike?
New Leader, November 1935.
‘Honest’ Stanley in a Fix
New Leader, December 1935.
Truth about ‘Peace Plan’ – Britain’s Imperialist Game
New Leader, December 1935.
Baldwin’s Next Move
New Leader, January 1936.
“Civilising” the “Blacks”; Why Britain needs to Maintain Her African Possessions
New Leader, May 1936.
Fighting for the Abyssinian Emperor
New Leader, June 1936.
Popular Front in Past Times
Fight, December 1936.
The Leninist Attitude to War
Fight, January 1937.
The Second Moscow Trial [Part I]
Fight, February 1937.
The Leninist Attitude for Spain
Fight, April 1937.
The Second Moscow Trial
Fight, April–May 1937.
Trotskyism
Controversy, October 1937.
Introduction to Mary Low and Juan Breá’s Red Spanish Notebook
1937.
Six Questions to Trotskyists – And Their Answers
Controversy, February–March 1938.
Revolutionary Socialist League
Fight, April 1938.
British Barbarism in Jamaica –Support the Negro Workers’ Struggle
Fight, June 1938.
The Voice of Africa
International African Opinion, August 1938.
Sir Stafford Cripps and “Trusteeship”
International African Opinion, September 1938.
An African “Homeland” for the Jewish Refugees?
Socialist Appeal, 26 November 1938.
Preliminary Notes on the Negro Question
SWP Internal Bulletin, June 1939.
Notes Following the Discussions
SWP Internal Bulletin, June 1939.
The Right of Self-Determination and the Negro in the US
SWP New York Convention Resolutions, July 1939.
The SWP and Negro Work
SWP New York Convention Resolutions, July 1939.
The Communist Party’s Zigzags on Negro Policy
Socialist Appeal, 15 August 1939.
The Negro Question: The SWP Tackles Negro Work
Socialist Appeal, 15 August 1939.
The Negro Question: The American Negro and the Proletarian Revolution
Socialist Appeal, 22 August 1939.
The Negro Question: Chauvinism Must Be Driven Out
Socialist Appeal, 25 August 1939.
The Negro Question: The 1919 Race Riots in Chicago
Socialist Appeal, 29 August 1939.
The Negro Question: Negroes and the War
Series in Socialist Appeal, September–October 1939.
The Negro Question: The Effects of Capitalist Propaganda
Socialist Appeal, 1 September 1939.
The Negro Question: Negroes and the Hitler-Stalin Pact
Socialist Appeal, 5 September 1939.
African Soldiers and the Armies of “Democracy”
Socialist Appeal, 13 September 1939.
Labor and the Second World War
Series in Socialist Appeal, October–November 1939.
The Negro Question: [The Place of the Negro Is in the Vanguard]
Socialist Appeal, 6 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [In Politics Instinct Is Not Enough]
Socialist Appeal, 10 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [Like the Red of an Apple Rotten at the Heart]
Socialist Appeal, 13 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [There Is No Evil Without Good]
Socialist Appeal, 17 October 1939.
The Negro Question: What Do the Negroes Themselves Think About the War?
Socialist Appeal, 20 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [The Negro Petty-Bourgeoisie]
Socialist Appeal, 24 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [Negroes! On Guard Against the New Stalinist Line – 1]
Socialist Appeal, 27 October 1939.
The Negro Question: [Negroes! On Guard Against the New Stalinist Line – 2]
Socialist Appeal, 31 October 1939.
The Negro Question: The Negroes in Industry
Socialist Appeal, 3 November 1939.
The Negro Question: Industry and the Negro
Socialist Appeal, 7 November 1939.
The Negro Question: Industry and the Negro – 2
Socialist Appeal, 10 November 1939.
The Negro Question: The Greatest Event in History
Socialist Appeal, 14 November 1939.
The Negro Question: The Negro in Steel
Socialist Appeal, 17 November 1939.
The Negro Question: The Negro in Steel
Socialist Appeal, 24 November 1939.
The Negro Question: The Destiny of the Negro – An Historical Overview
Series in Socialist Appeal, November–December 1939.
Revolution and the Negro
New International, December 1939.
Why Negroes Should Oppose the War
Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, 1939.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 16 December 1939.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 23 December 1939.
On Gone with the Wind
Socialist Appeal, 30 December 1939.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 30 December 1939.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 6 January 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 13 January 1940.
On Gone with the Wind
Socialist Appeal, 13 January 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 20 January 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 27 January 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 3 February 1940.
The Negro Question –The Economics of Lynching
Socialist Appeal, 10 February 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 17 February 1940.
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 24 February 1940./p>
The Negro Question
Socialist Appeal, 9 March 1940.
Native Son and Revolution
New International, May 1940.
On Native Son by Richard Wright
Book review in Labor Action, 27 May 1940.
“My Friends”: A Fireside Chat on the War
Workers Party pamphlet, June 1940.
Refugees – in Belgium and the Congo – in War, in Peace
Labor Action, 10 June 1940.
Marcus Garvey
Labor Action, 24 June 1940.
Capitalist Society and the War
New International, July 1940.
The Speech That Was Not Made at NAACP Meet
Labor Action, 8 July 1940.
Labor Will Take Care of Its Own Union Problems
Labor Action, 29 July 1940.
State and Counter-Revolution
New International, August 1940.
Labor Will Take Care of Its Own Union Problems
Labor Action, 5 August 1940.
Negro and White Workers Must Stand Together
Labor Action, 12 August 1940.
We Must Fight Against Any Kind of Enslavement
Labor Action, 19 August 1940.
Beware of Those Who Act for the Boss Class!
Labor Action, 26 August 1940.
Trotsky’s Place In History
New International, September 1940.
A Tribute to Our Fallen Leader, Leon Trotsky
Labor Action, 2 September 1940.
Which Type of Leader Should Negroes Follow?
Labor Action, 2 September 1940.
Where Will You Find Friends of the Negroes?
Labor Action, 9 September 1940.
The Negro Must Have His Share of the New Jobs
Labor Action, 16 September 1940.
Stand Together, Fight For Jobs – That’s the Way
Labor Action, 23 September 1940.
On the History of the Left Opposition
Discussion with Trotsky from Fourth International, January 1941.
The Bolsheviks in the War
Review of a book on the Bolsheviks during WWI from New International, February 1941.
Negroes! Beware the Imperialist Use of Ethiopia! – 1
Labor Action, 10 March 1941.
Negroes! Beware the Imperialist Use of Ethiopia! – 2
Labor Action, 17 March 1941.
We Must Aid Africa’s Anti-War Militants
Labor Action, 24 March 1941.
Negro Committee Asks Jobs for 100 Bus Drivers
Labor Action, 31 March 1941.
Russia – A Fascist State
New International, April 1941.
It Is Up to The Transport Workers Now!
Labor Action, 7 April 1941.
Guard Against the Trap Set by Henry Ford
Labor Action, 14 April 1941.
Ireland and the Revolutionary Tradition of Easter Week
Labor Action, 14 April 1941.
Merguson Has an Obligation to the Negroes
Labor Action, 21 April 1941.
Negro Masses and the Struggle for World Socialism
Labor Action, 21 April 1941.
A New Joke – “Jim-Crow Helps The Negro Race”
Labor Action, 5 May 1941.
Ford Tries to Feed the Negro Poisoned Bait
Labor Action, 12 May 1941.
Marshall Field, Negro-Hater, Turns “Friend”
Labor Action, 19 May 1941.
Judas Pickens Takes the Stump for War Bonds
Labor Action, 26 May 1941.
Max Eastman Dives Into Jingo Waters – So Perish All Traitors!
Labor Action, 26 May 1941.
Imperialism in Africa
New International, June 1941.
To and From the Finland Station
New International, June 1941.
From Jobs to the Struggle for Socialism
Labor Action, 2 June 1941.
We Must Strike a Mighty Blow at Jim-Crow Now
Labor Action, 9 June 1941.
All Out July 1 for the March on Washington
Labor Action, 16 June 1941.
FDR’s Latest Trick Is So Old It’s Moth-Eaten
Labor Action, 23 June 1941.
Beware of Those Pushing You Into the War
Labor Action, 7 July 1941.
Negroes, We Can Depend Only on Ourselves!
Labor Action, 14 July 1941.
Negro Protest Runs Too Deep to Be Squashed
Labor Action, 21 July 1941.
We Must Force the Job Issue by Mass Action
Labor Action, 28 July 1941.
Russia and Marxism
New International, September 1941.
With The Sharecroppers
Labor Action, September 1941.
Resolution on the Russian Question
Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States
Letter on the nature of the Russian economy
New International, April 1942.
A Report on Conditions in England – Working Class Grows More Restive
Labor Action, 9 November 1942.
India and the International Situation (series)
Labor Action, 16 November 1942.
India and Its Relation to the Conduct of the War (series)
Labor Action, 7 December 1942.
On the Role of the Indian Ruling Class (series)
Labor Action, 14 December 1942.
A Brief Outline of Indian Economy (series)
Labor Action, 28 December 1942.
The Role of the Indian Capitalist Class (series)
Labor Action, 4 January 1943.
A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution – 1 (series)
Labor Action, 11 January 1943.
A Socialist India Is the Only Genuine Solution – 2 (series)
Labor Action, 18 January 1943.
Production for the Sake of Production
Polemic against Joseph Carter on Marxist Political Economy Workers Party Bulletin, April 1943.
The Way Out for Europe
New International, April/May 1943.
Greatest Empire in History Is Collapsing
Labor Action, 26 April 1943.
Beatrice Webb, Reformist (obituary)
New International, May 1943.
Save Us from These Noble “Friends of the Negro”
Labor Action, 3 May 1943.
Two Coal Strikes – What We Can Learn – United States, 1943 – Britain, 1926
Labor Action, 10 May 1943.
Hollywood Does a Re-Take on the War
Labor Action, 24 May 1943.
Pamphlet Points at Scandal of “Jim-Crow in Uniform”
Labor Action, 24 May 1943.
The West Indies in Review
New International, June 1943.
Mr. Lerner: Ideas Are Weapons, But How Use Them?
Labor Action, 7/14 June 1943.
The Negro: Several Aspects of the WLB Decision
Labor Action, 21 June 1943.
Beaumont Bosses and KKK Behind Attack on Negroes
Labor Action, 28 June 1943.
The Race Pogroms and the Negro
New International, July 1943.
The Philosophy of History and Necessity
Polemic against Sidney Hook from New International, July/October 1943.
Giraud – Disciple of Roosevelt
Labor Action, 19/26 July 1943.
Negro People Are Still in Danger
Labor Action, 2 August 1943.
Harlem Negroes Protest Jim Crow Discrimination
Labor Action, 9 August 1943.
Italian Workers Blaze Path for European Revolution
Labor Action, 16 August 1943.
Union Labor Must Lead the Fight for Negro Rights
Labor Action, 16 August 1943.
Still Defending the British Empire
Labor Action, 13 September 1943.
FEPC Program No Aid to Negro Labor
Labor Action, 20 September 1943.
Speech of Railroad Lawyer at FEPC Hearing Shows Up Hypocrisy of American Racial Policy
Labor Action, 27 September 1943.
Socialism and the National Question
New International, October 1943.
The Labor Unions Must Smash Jim Crow
Labor Action, 4 October 1943.
This Is Labor’s Own Problem!
Labor Action, 18 October 1943.
FEPC Has Failed – Committee Appointed by Labor Needed
Labor Action, 25 October 1943.
In the American Tradition
New International, November 1943.
On Comptroller Warren’s Ruling – How He Strangled the FEPC
Labor Action, 8 November 1943.
Warren Ruling Upholds Race Discrimination
Labor Action, 22 November 1943.
The European Socialist Revolution (with Harry Allen & Tom Brown)
New International, December 1943
The Historical Development of the Negro in the United States
Workers Party document, December 1943.
Negroes in the Civil War
New International, December 1943
Randolph Prepares a New ‘Demarche’
Labor Action, 6 December 1943.
Negroes Must Fight for a Labor Party
Labor Action, 6 December 1943.
In the International Tradition
New International, January 1944.
The Story of Harriet Tubman and the American Civil War
Labor Action, 3 January 1944.
Laski, St. Paul and Stalin
New International, June 1944.
The British Empire’s Little Helpers
Labor Action, 19 June 1944.
Who Will Govern France?
Labor Action, 26 June 1944.
The American People in ‘One World’
New International, July 1944.
Labor’s Apathy to the War
Labor Action, 3 July 1944.
Great Britain: People Revolted by U.S. Race Prejudice
Labor Action, 17 July 1944.
Hillman and the Corruption in U.S. Politics
Labor Action, 17 July 1944.
Negroes Need a Labor Party
Labor Action, 24 July 1944.
What Russia Wants in Germany
Labor Action, 24 July 1944.
The Course of the War
New International, August 1944.
No Alternative for Negroes but to Fight for Labor Party
Labor Action, 7 August 1944.
Does Cheap Patronage Cancel Oppression?
Labor Action, 14 August 1944.
Capitalism Taboos ‘Equal Opportunity’ for Negro People
Labor Action, 21 August 1944.
Why U.S. Workers Should Support National Liberation Struggles
Labor Action, 21 August 1944.
Mr. Minor, This War Is NOT Like the Civil War of 1861
Labor Action, 28 August 1944.
Stalin Leads Wolf Pack in Shameful Lust for Blood of German Workers
Labor Action, 28 August 1944.
The French Rats and the Sinking Ship
New International, September 1944.
Ban on GI Jim Crow a Paper Edict Unless Negroes and Labor Enforce It
Labor Action, 4 September 1944.
Paris Masses Did It Themselves!
Labor Action, 4 September 1944.
World Events Are of Great Importance to U.S. Labor
Labor Action, 25 September 1944.
The Gravediggers: How French Rulers Sold Out to Hitler
Labor Action, 2 October 1944.
Egad! Stalin Fears “Contamination” of Red Army by Rumanian “Luxuries”!
Labor Action, 9 October 1944.
Re-Heating an Old Dish at Dumbarton
Labor Action, 9 October 1944.
Preparing a New League of Nations
Labor Action, 16 October 1944.
The Hoax of Dumbarton Oaks
Labor Action, 23 October 1944.
The Late Wendell Willkie: The Politician Who Came Too Late
Labor Action, 23 October 1944.
Hoax at Dumbarton Oaks – II
Labor Action, 30 October 1944.
Germany and European Civilization
New International, November 1944.
Daily Worker on Negroes and the Elections – A Falsification of History
Labor Action, 20 November 1944.
What Should Be the Future of PAC?
Labor Action, 20 November 1944.
Two Negroes: Labor Leader, Labor Traitor
Labor Action, 27 November 1944.
What Should Be the Future of PAC? – II
Labor Action, 27 November 1944.
Which Way for PAC
New International, December 1944.
A Great Figure in American History
Labor Action, 4 December 1944.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 11 December 1944.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 18 December 1944.
Socialism versus Free Enterprise
Labor Action, 25 December 1944.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 1 January 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 8 January 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 22 January 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 29 January 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 12 February 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 19 February 1945.
Reconversion –
New International, March 1945.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 5 March 1945.
PAC’s Hillman Repudiates Need of the Hour – A Labor Party
Labor Action, 5 March 1945.
Economics of Miners’ Fight
Labor Action, 12 March 1945.
Public Awareness of the Negro Question
Labor Action, 2 April 1945.
Danger Signals
Labor Action, 9 April 1945.
White Workers’ Prejudices
Labor Action, 23 April 1945.
The Lesson of Germany
New International, May 1945.
Roosevelt and Negro Question
Labor Action, 7 May 1945.
Balance Sheet of the War – 1
Labor Action, 4 June 1945.
Balance Sheet of the War – 2
Labor Action, 11 June 1945.
Portrait: A “Friend of the Negroes”
Labor Action, 11 June 1945.
Southern Liberal and FEPC
Labor Action, 18 June 1945.
The Case of the 92nd
Labor Action, 25 June 1945.
Negroes Get Priority in Layoffs
Labor Action, 25 June 1945.
Eisenhower and Jim Crow
Labor Action, 2 July 1945.
An Answer to a Reader
Labor Action, 13 August 1945.
Basis for Anti-Negro Prejudice
Labor Action, 27 August 1945.
The British Vote For Socialism
New International, September 1945.
British Labor and the Colonies
Labor Action, 3 September 1945.
Negroes and Full Employment
Labor Action, 24 September 1945.
Historical Retrogression or Socialist Revolution: A Discussion Article on the Thesis of the IKD – Part I – Part II
Written September 1945, published New International, January & February 1946.
Anti-Negro School Strikes
Labor Action, 15 October 1945.
Problems of Negro Vets
Labor Action, 22 October 1945.
From the Master-Slave Dialectic to Revolt in Capitalist Production
Extract from a polemic by C.L.R. James, against the IKD, 1946.
Lenin, Liebknecht, Luxemburg – Three Giants of Socialism
Labor Action, 28 January 1946.
Negroes and the Strike Wave
Labor Action, 4 February 1946.
FEPC and the Labor Party
Labor Action, 18 February 1946.
First Round of Post-War Social Crisis
Labor Action, 25 February 1946.
Southern Negro Vets Fight for Vote
Labor Action, 25 February 1946.
The Task of Building the American Bolshevik Party
Document from Bulletin of the Workers Party, March 1946.
Freeport and Columbia Murders
Labor Action, 11 March 1946.
On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune – They Showed the Way to Labor Emancipation!
Labor Action, 18 March 1946.
A Warning Against Stalinist Maneuvers
Labor Action, 18 March 1946.
Labor’s Responsibility to the Negro
Labor Action, 25 March 1946.
The Program of the Minority
Minority document for Workers Party convention, May 1946, with Dunayevskaya et al.
Black Metropolis: Chicago’s South Side
Labor Action, 1 April 1946.
On Organizing the South
Labor Action, 1 April 1946.
The Stalinist Menace to World Labor
Labor Action, 1 April 1946.
The Negro and Political Action
Labor Action, 8 April 1946.
Russia No Workers’ State
Labor Action, 8 April 1946.
On Organizing the South II
Labor Action, 15 April 1946.
CIO’s Drive to Organize the South
Labor Action, 22 April 1946.
Stalinism – Imperialist Policy in Iran
Labor Action, 22 April 1946.
Negroes Watch “Operation Dixie”
Labor Action, 20 May 1946.
>Race Prejudice Is Capitalist Product
Labor Action, 27 May 1946.
Joe Louis and Jack Johnson
Labor Action, 1 July 1946.
Post-War Strike Wave Demonstrated Working Class Power
Labor Action, 1 July 1946.
Bilbo – Murderer of the FEPC
Labor Action, 8 July 1946.
Economic Upheaval in the South
Labor Action, 22 July 1946.
How the Italian Workers Seized the Factories in Their Strike Wave
Labor Action, 5 August 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 5 August 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 19 August 1946.
Trotsky – A Revolutionary Internationalist Who Never Compromised with Social Oppression
Labor Action, 19 August 1946.
“Law and Order” Wink at Lynch Terror in South
Labor Action, 26 August 1946.
Business Reporter Laments over Capitalists’ Lack of Confidence in Their Own System
Labor Action, 2 September 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 2 September 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 16 September 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 23 September 1946.
Wallace’s Speech a Plea for Imperialist Deal with Stalinist Russia to Divide the World
Labor Action, 23 September 1946.
Henry Wallace Proposes to Divide the World
Labor Action, 30 September 1946.
After Ten Years: On Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed
New International, October 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 7 October 1946.
Next Step in Meat Crisis Up to Labor
Labor Action, 21 October 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 21 October 1946.
Movements for Independence Grow in West Indian Islands
Labor Action, 28 October 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 28 October 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 4 November 1946.
What Does the GI Think as He Sees Hungry Europe?
Labor Action, 4 November 1946.
Nations Talk Disarmament But Prepare for New War
Labor Action, 11 November 1946.
Bustamente – “Uncrowned King” of Jamaica
Labor Action, 18 November 1946.
New International Is a Socialist Weapon
Labor Action, 18 November 1946.
Russia: 29th Anniversary of Its Great Revolution
Labor Action, 18 November 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 18 November 1946.
1946 – Survey of the Old Year Poses Labor’s Tasks – 1947
Labor Action, 30 December 1946.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 6 January 1947.
We Say “Transform PAC Into a Labor Party”
Labor Action, 6 January 1947.
One-Tenth of the Nation – Lenin on Agriculture and the Negro Question
Labor Action, 13 January 1947.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 20 January 1947.
One-Tenth of the Nation
Labor Action, 24 February 1947.
A Contrast: Lenin’s Method and Attlee’s
Labor Action, 3 March 1947.
An Exchange on the Socialist Attitude to the Bilbo Problem
Labor Action, 24 March 1947.
One-Tenth of the Nation: Negroes and Bolshevism
Labor Action, 7 April 1947.
The Capitalist Class Is Responsible for Agony of the Miners
Labor Action, 14 April 1947.
Trotsky’s Summation Speech
Labor Action, 21 April 1947.
The Feeling Is Growing – Something Is Wrong!
Labor Action, 2 June 1947.
The Rapid Growth of the NAACP
The Militant, 22 September 1947.
Trotskyism in the United States, 1940–1947. Balance Sheet.
Published by the Workers Party and the Johnson-Forest tendency.
The Invading Socialist Society
With Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, published by the Johnson-Forest tendency.
Bourbon Campaign to Keep Jim Crow in Education
The Militant, 2 February 1948.
Gandhi – His Role in Fight for India’s Independence
The Militant, 9 February 1948.
Wallace’s program and the fight against monopoly
The Militant, 16 February 1948.
Henry Luce and Karl Marx
Fourth International, March–April 1948.
Malraux, with Aid of Times, Slanders Trotskyism
The Militant, 1 March 1948.
UN Economic Report Shows Decay of World Capitalism
The Militant, 29 March 1948.
Resist Jim-Crow Draft, Randolph Urges
The Militant, 12 April 1948.
Randolph’s Anti-Draft Proposal Sharply Divides Negro Leaders
The Militant, 19 April 1948.
The Negro Struggle – Randolph’s Campaign
The Militant, 26 April 1948.
Logical Conclusion of Randolph’s Program to Resist Jim Crow Draft
The Militant, 3 May 1948.
New Recruits for Norman Thomas’ Campaign
The Militant, 17 May 1948.
Summary of Report on Negro Question
The Militant, 12 July 1948.
The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA
Fourth International, Vol. 9 No. 8, December 1948.
Winston Churchill – Tory War-dog
Fourth International, February 1949.
Negro History Week and the Workers
The Militant, 7 February 1949.
The Two Sides of Abraham Lincoln
The Militant, 14 February 1949.
Answer Shows What Powell and Wallace Really Stand For
The Militant, 28 March 1949.
“The Talented Tenth”: Negro Leadership and Civil Rights, Road Ahead in Negro Struggle
2 articles on the problems of the Civil Rights struggle from Fourth International, April 1949.
Cromwell and the Levellers, Ancestors of the Proletariat
2 articles on the English Revolution of 1649 from Fourth International, 1949.
Price of Imperialism to the People
Fourth International, August 1949.
Stalinism and Negro History, Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions
2 articles on Stalinism from Fourth International, November and December 1949.
Key Problems in the Study of Negro History
The Militant, 13 February 1950
Two Young American Writers
Book review in Fourth International, March–April 1950.
Capitalism and the Welfare State
Extract from an unsigned editorial in Fourth International, May–June 1950.
State Capitalism and World Revolution
Written in 1950 in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya.
On the Woman Question: An Orientation
A discussion held on September 3rd, 1951.
Every Cook can Govern
A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece, 1956.
Lecture on Federation (West Indies and British Guiana)
Speech delivered at Queens College in then British Guiana on West Indian Federation, June 1958.
Marxism and the Intellectuals
Pamphlet published with Martin Glaberman, 1962.
Indomitable Rebel
Review of The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929–40 by Isaac Deutscher, 1963.
Lenin and the Vanguard Party
Controversy, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1963.
Revolutionary Creativity
Review of two books on Russian Marxism, 1964.
West Indians of East Indian Descent
Exploring race relations between Trinidadians of East Indian descent and Trinidadians of African descent.
On The Vanguard
Speech at a Conference of Oilfield Workers Trade Union in Trinidad, October 1965.
Black Power
Talk in London in 1967.
World Politics Today
Article in Speak Out, March 1967.
Che Guevara
Article in Speak Out, November 1967.
The Gathering Forces
Document published in November 1967.
World Revolution: 1968
Article in Speak Out, June/July 1968.
Reflections on Pan-Africanism
Transcript of speech given on 20 & 21 November 1973.
Fanon and the Caribbean
International Tribute to Frantz Fanon: Record of the Special Meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, 3 November 1978.
Tariq Ali and C.L.R. James: A Conversation
Socialist Challenge, 3 July 1980.
Interview with Ken Ramchand in San Fernando
Trinidad & Tobago, September 5th, 1980.
Walter Rodney and the Question of Power
Talk given a memorial symposium titled, Walter Rodney, Revolutionary & Scholar: A Tribute, held on 30 January 1981 at the University of California, USA.
Free For All: The nine year old leader
Article in Race Today, Vol. 14 No. 3, May–June, 1982.
Interview with British Trotskyists
South London, November 16th, 1986.
‘You never know when it is going to explode’
Interview in Living Marxism, April 1989.
Further reading:
George Rawick Archive
Raya Dunayevskaya Archive
George Padmore Archive
Lenin’s Annotations on Hegel’s Logic
Frantz Fanon Archive
The C.L.R. James Library, Dalston [off-site link]
Archive maintained by Einde O’Callaghan.
Trotskyist Archive | Marxist Humanism | M.I.A. Library
Last updated on: 27 March 2024
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./articles/Forest-F.-(Raya-Dunayevskaya)/https:..www.marxists.org.archive.dunayevskaya.works.1951.women.index | <body>
<p class="title">Selma James 1951</p>
<h1>On the Woman Question: An Orientation</h1>
<h4>A discussion held on September third, 1951</h4>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source:</span> document of the Johnson-Forest Tendency;<br>
<span class="info">Transcribed and HTML Markup:</span> Sally Ryan;<br>
<span class="info">Proofed:</span> and corrected by Chris Clayton 2006.</p>
<p class="information">
Selma James delivered this report on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Selma James was an important figure in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a co-author of the pamphlet, <i>A Woman’s Place</i>, during the Correspondence period. In the 1955 split with Dunayevskaya, she sided with C.L.R. James and married him after he divorced Constance Webb. She eventually separated from James and became a leader in the radical women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s. She was also closely associated with the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the wages for housework campaign. She is involved now with the Global Women’s Strike organization (www.globalwomenstrike.net).</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">A new stage has been reached. We are finished with endless discussions on male chauvinism. We have no more time for individual attacks against individual men who are backward or against individual women who do not want to be “emancipated.” These people will reorient themselves and will be drawn into their own struggles.</p>
<p>Now for the first time we know where we are going. We did not develop accidentally. The ideas explicit in this document are the concrete manifestations of the movement of capitalism and the reaction of the masses of women today. It is this reaction that we shall attempt to concretize in this document.</p>
<p><a href="../../../../../glossary/people/b/e.htm#august-bebel">Bebel</a> and the other historians on the woman question have analysed women in other ages, other struggles, other cultures. But it is we who must express women in 1951, what they feel about their lives, what they want and how they plan to get it.</p>
<p>We counterpose this to any external plan of the bourgeoisie, put forth by social workers, magazine writers, psychoanalysts, and any section of women who place themselves not within the struggle of women but above it, and therefore in opposition to it.</p>
<h3>The Woman in the Home</h3>
<p class="fst">We start from the position of women in the home for that is where the majority of women are, that is where the problem of women begins and that is the place to which all working women must return daily.</p>
<p>Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships. The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last
stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation. Here, existing in the home outside the mainstream of society – the factory – the woman prepares her husband for a social labor process which is denied to her.</p>
<p>The repetitious, monotonous, lonely, unceasing and incomplete work of women in this society is opposed to women as human beings. Working for individuals whom she knows and loves does not compensate for the fragmented and meaningless labor she is forced to perform. Even her imaginative enterprises in the home are limited to certain spheres and are always individual. Contrast the glamorizing of women's work by women' s magazines and radio soap operas to what the wife of one worker said in generalizing the position of women under capitalism: “What I gotta do for the check!”</p>
<p>Women want the technological advances of modern society in their own surroundings. But a new Bendix washing machine or a GE garbage disposal will no more satisfy the most pressing social needs of women than a new Ford will substitute to the worker for new social relations in production. The modern machine divorces woman from her work but ties her to the monotony of it.</p>
<p>Even those middle class women for whom servants and machines do the physical labor in the home are involved in hollow relationships with their families and society, so little is demanded of all women; less is demanded of the woman who is divorced from physical labor.</p>
<p>The evolution of women from production and men from the home creates a barrier between them and neither is capable of understanding the life of the other.</p>
<p>“I've been working for about two months now and I really like it. I was getting sick and tired of staying home all the time. Housework gets so monotonous – the same thing day in, day out – no one to talk to but your neighbor, then pretty soon your neighbor begins to get on your nerves. No kidding, I think I would have been ready for a sanitarium if I stayed home another month. I was getting to the point where I couldn't stand it. You do the same thing, you see the same people, everything is the same. Down here, there is something different to do every minute. Talking to people and getting acquainted. Now when I get home I really enjoy doing my housework. The funny thing about it is that I have much more to talk to my husband about, too. I didn't used to have a thing to say at the supper table, but now when my husband talks about things that are happening at work, I tell him what I've been doing too. We seem to have a lot more fun together.”</p>
<p>The most obvious oppression that weighs heavily on most woman is their dependence an their husbands for food and shelter and for whatever money they are to spend as they wish. One housewife placed all her old clothing on a clothes line strung across the living room of her home and put a “used clothing” sign outside. She explained to her neighbor that she was giving away most of the clothing, but she added: “I just have to have same money of my own.”</p>
<p>The man makes all final decisions. Even in those homes where the woman plans and organizes the household affairs, he has the last word.</p>
<p>When a man goes out to work it is generally understood that he is earning a living for himself and his family. He brings home the pay check and among us (I mean the Mexicans) as a rule, this check is turned over to the wife who is supposed to see that this money is used to pay the bills, buy the groceries and so on. It' s the money of the family. Even if he hands it to me, I never quite feel that it's mine. I still have to ask him how it should be spent. And what I don't see is, if my husband needs money, he just gets it, no explanations. He gets his hair cut, cigarettes or what have you. He needs more money? He gets some more. Me, on the other hand, I see a dress I like, I have to think twice before I get it. Usually, I end up by telling him about it. Even if he suggests I get the dress, half the fun of getting the dress is gone. I had to let him know I was getting it. I never had the feeling of the money belonging to me to do with as I please. Who is the boss in this house? He is, though this he will never admit. But nothing can be done without his consent. If, on occasion, as it has happened, I let the children go, he gets angry with me for not having them ask his permission. When he orders something to be done around the yard or house (and I said orders!) he expects it done, no excuses accepted. What am I supposed to be doing around here but to see that he is obeyed. About fifteen minutes before he gets home, we are rustling around trying to get things done so there won't be any complaints.</p>
<p>When we were buying furniture, we needed a refrigerator, so we got it. We got everything we really needed, but I wanted an ironer. He didn't think it was important enough to buy. So I went to work and bought it. Even if it wasn' t a necessity, I wanted it. My reason for going to work is so that I can get what I want without asking him first or letting him know about it. If I have my money, I go get what I want. I don't ask him.</p>
<p>The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together – in their sexual relationship. (Very often sex becomes a weapon in the hands of the woman but this weapon is turned against her.) Without a solution to the social problems of society there can be no solution to the sexual problem.</p>
<p>The separation between the lives of men and women expresses itself in many different ways. Men and women enjoy their children neither together nor separately. Society has placed the woman in the isolation of the home and as a result has made her incapable of producing a social being. The woman tries to control her children for her whole life generally revolves around them. The child senses and resents this and says: “Mommy, I can't love you, because you love me too much.” The woman is ruthless in crushing all signs of independence in the child, since independence means loss of control. Most women prefer babies because the baby cannot successfully rebel and is completely dependent upon the mother.</p>
<p>As the child develops, the mother stands as a policeman defending the home from the child. All the child's activities are seen in terms of the work it will bring her. She in turn tries to pass off her work on the child who instinctively rebels. One pregnant woman was told by her neighbor: “If you have a, girl, she will help you with the dishes; if you have a boy, he will help your husband in the yard, so you better pray for a girl.”</p>
<p>The woman's most creative work turns against her. She has devoted her life to her child but at each point of his development, he has been further alienated from her, and in the final analysis, the only social relationship that has been built up between them is based on pity and obligation. Today's children develop in conflict with their parents.</p>
<h4>The Woman in the Factory</h4>
<p class="fst">Support of the modern family is no longer completely the man's burden. Today a woman marries knowing that the man will need her financial help.</p>
<p>It used to be that when you got married, you had a home all ready and you stayed home and took care of it. But nowadays a girl gets married and goes right on working. A man just can't manage all by himself.</p>
<p>The isolation in the home also drives many working class women to seek a socialized existence in the factory. She wants to be with other men and women.</p>
<p>“At home all I do is to sit end mend and watch the budget and wash the same old kitchen sink day in and day out. Almost anyone would rather work than do that all the time. There's always something happening at work, sort of an excitement to it. When you get home, it makes housework seem like a pretty quiet routine business.”</p>
<p>Women show their desire to be independent of their husbands by going to work. The whole family relationship is changed when the woman faces the man as an equal partner.</p>
<p>“Since I've been working my husband says I am too damn independent and I suppose it's true. Be says I never have time for him any more and that I always want my own way and I can see it. Working every day I get used to doing what I please; then I go home I keep on doing it.</p>
<p>Nowadays women are independent, so that they know if they can't get along with a man, they can get along without him and that makes a big difference.”</p>
<p>For whatever reasons women work, the responsibility of the home is theirs even while they are working. “Full-time wage earner and part-time housewife” describes the dilemma of the working woman. The woman is compelled to organize her housework. The husband and children must participate in caring for the home.</p>
<p>“Nowadays, I have to plan my housework down to the last minute. I usually sit here at work and plan what I have to do for the next few days ahead. If I didn't do it that way, I never would get anything done. When I was home I used to do things more or less as I went along, but now I have to stick to some sort of schedule.</p>
<p>Before I began working my husband hardly came into the kitchen. When he came home from work he sat down and read the paper. He didn't give housework a thought. But before I began to work, my husband and I decided that he would have to help out, so now both he and the children work a lot more around the home. They help me with the dishes and the washing and the ironing. I guess if my husband didn't help me out I wouldn't be working too long.</p>
<p>Yes, I run my home differently. I learned to cut a lot of corners and now I just do the things that I have to do, like washing and ironing. Before I began to work, I liked to cook fancy dishes and do a lot of baking,
but now my family says that they haven't tasted a cake or pie of mine for months. And it's true, I just don't have time to bake or do things like that.”</p>
<p>Managing a home while working is difficult, but caring for the children is the major concern of most working women. Although they are willing and sometimes glad to cut corners on household work, it is with great feelings of resentment and guilt that the working mother leaves her children.</p>
<p>Working means that children must be cared for by others or left to their own devices and the latter alternative in the minds of many working women, particularly those belonging to minority groups, means juvenile delinquency.</p>
<p>“I think it's hard for a woman to work and look after her children the way she would like to. I know with myself I leave the house at seven in the morning and I don't get home until six o'clock and I have no way of knowing what they are doing; they are by themselves all day long. I tell them what to do. I tell them to be good but when I'm gone I can't really see what they are doing and it's easy for boys that age to get into trouble.”</p>
<p>Working mothers also wish that they weren't so abrupt and irritable with their families after a day's work, with cooking, cleaning and ironing yet to be done when they get home. As more and more women enter the factory, the home seems to become a place in which to eat and sleep while recreational activities occur outside the home. To many single women, the home no longer exists as the real center for family activity and marriage does not seem to offer to these women the personal fulfillment it once represented.</p>
<p>“My girl who is working is 26 years old but I don't know if that girl is going to marry. She doesn't want to very much. She says she has a good job and no worries why should she take a chance on marriage. Girls these days aren't like they were – not nearly so anxious to get married. Nowadays they earn their own money and don't need a man to support them.”</p>
<p>Although the woman is involved in new social relationships in the factory, she finds her work there hard and exhausting.</p>
<p>“It's a long grind, working eight hours on this machine. People say, “All you're doing is putting stock into the machine.” But it is hard, you know you've been working and then you go home to begin on the dishes and all the housework. It seems as if some folks never get a break. I could work from now until doomsday and never get anything done – and heaven knows a lot of women do .”</p>
<p>The Negro woman, oppressed as a woman, as a worker and as a Negro, bears the heaviest burden of all workers today. One Negro woman says:</p>
<p>'Domestic' has long been a term associated with Negro....Women in general, doing the same labor as a man, receive less in pay solely because they are a woman. The Negro woman receives even less because she is not only a woman, but a Negro woman. The problem magnifies because the Negro man is
also underpaid and the combined wages of husband and wife is equal to about the same wage of one partner of another race.”</p>
<p>The Negro woman must build a relationship with a husband who does the dirtiest jobs capitalism can create. Her struggles in the home and in the factory are the sharpest of any group of women. The Negro woman struggles the most, and from her oppressed position in American society today, the Negro woman will lead the vanguard struggle for a human existence for women and all workers. She is the closest to the solution implicit in the problems of all working people.</p>
<p>Like the woman's life in the home, woman's work in the factory is opposed to her as a human being and as a woman. The insoluble dilemma of the woman under capitalism is expressed by this factory worker:</p>
<p>“I really wish that I knew how to do something. I mean, something I like. Nursing maybe. I don' t want to work in a factory on a machine all my life. You know it's funny I really couldn't stand staying home, I know that. I would get tired of it. Just staying in the house all day isn't any life for women. You have to have something that holds your interest. I guess I'd almost have to work or I would go nuts.”</p>
<p>Factory women recognize clearly the degrading kind of work they are forced to do in the factory. Yet this work, because it is part of a social existence and provides a social arena for struggle, is still preferable to woman's life in the home. As always, capitalism is creating it's own grave-digger. For, as the needs of capitalist society force the women into the factory, she finds herself united with the man against bourgeoise society. Woman' s struggle against the individual man in the home is transcended by the class struggle against the domination of the machine, against capitalism. The advanced stage that the struggle enters today is a progression from the individual to the social struggle – from the individual to the social solution.</p>
<h4>Today's Children</h4>
<p class="fst">The child expresses the new society and is the concrete embodiment of the inevitability of socialism. In the creative energies which children display, in the free relationships which they attempt to establish between themselves and adults, in the manner in which they organize themselves at every opportunity, children help us to understand the potentialities of all workers.</p>
<p>Children's play is work – work which constantly challenges the child as an individual and as a social being. It is the new mode of labor – cooperative, creative, planned by the children themselves, developing a natural and spontaneous leadership, and obliterating all division between manual and mental labor. Children express in play what the worker is denied in production. Free and spontaneous play makes it possible for the child to organize himself, to associate and work with other children in his own way. The activity of a child shows us not only what he wants but what we all want.</p>
<p>Yet children live on the fringe of society, developing deep feelings of hostility and aggression toward the adult world. Lacking integration into the heart of capitalist society – production – the child feels that he is an appendage to society, not a dynamic part of it. His mother and father and teacher embody for him the tyranny of an alien world, the tyranny of a bureaucratic plan; yet the adults are tyrannized in turn by the same oppressive forces which do not allow the child to develop naturally.</p>
<p>Children in a socialist society must not be made to feel necessary (as the bourgeoises, progressive educators attempt to do); they must be necessary. There will be a pleasure and a satisfaction in living and working with a developing human being in a socialist society which every adult will need in order for him to completely mature.</p>
<p>As the child develops into a youth, he seeks to further integrate himself into adult society. He wants to play a role in production. As a child he knew that he was not complete (all human beings knows this) and in his play he expressed his incompleteness and his development. For the youth, his play – his sports and hobbies – must be transformed into productive and creative work in society.</p>
<p>The bourgeoisie are acutely aware of the struggle of the children and the youth against capitalist society. They try to satisfy these groups by attempting to force them to live in the future, to contain their energies and their desires until the day when they become adults – when they go to work for capitalism, either in the home or in the factory.</p>
<p>The progressive educators among the bourgeoisie try to soften the blow. The teacher is asked to arrange a cooperative attitude among the children, just as the industrial relations manager tries to manipulate the workers in the factory. Progressive education creates an artificial world for the child. It's insoluble dilemma is it's attempt to make the child adjust to society and to himself. This he cannot do and continue to live with himself.</p>
<p>Progressive education is the plan of the bureaucracy to plan away the child's oppression by isolating the child in a world of children, where he has little opportunity to challenge himself and the adults, who matter a great deal to him, for it is only through a constant and changing relationship, not only with other children but with adults, that the child develops. It is only in a socialist society that the child will have the opportunity to establish what is needed – a new relationship with adults, a relationship into which both will enter as freely associated individuals not competing with each other, not hostile to each other, but complementing each other.</p>
<h4>Conclusion</h4>
<p class="fst">We have shown that woman's place in the home is merely an extension of man's place in the factory. It is clear that woman's life in the home is totally opposed to her as a human being and as a woman.</p>
<p>Today women know they can no longer stay in the home as it is now constituted; nor can they allow men to leave the home as freely as they have in the past. Women do not want to leave the home entirely but have men enter it for the first time. Women do not want to he free of their children but for the first time free with them.</p>
<p>Women are striving to unite what has been so long divided – the home and the factory. They want not to be as oppressed as men, but free with them. The unity of home and factory is in reality the unification of men and women, the plan of freely associated men and women as opposed to the more systematic exploitation of woman and the exclusion of men from the home.</p>
<p>The lack of socialization in the home has prevented women from forming the concrete organizations found among the workers and other exploited sections. Nevertheless, the solution will come from woman for the universality of the individual experience in the home has at this stage forced the problems of women and the solution implicit in these problems into the consciousness of the working class.</p>
<h4>Panel Discussion on the Woman Question</h4>
<p class="fst">The schedule for the woman's panel is as follows – From 11:15 to 11:45 the main speaker, Simpson, will hold the floor. Then there will be discussion from 11:45 to 12:30. We will have a break for lunch and discussion will resume at 1:30, to 2:00. I'd last like to say one word about the Los Angeles women: Simpson, Jane and Nanette have written a document on the woman question which is available. They started developing this orientation and this line in L.A. when we were still in the old organization. One of the reasons I think it started there was because of the actions of one of the leaders of that organization who was very verbose on the woman question, but in a very limited way. She thought that it was a struggle between men and women and it stopped there. Our people got very sick and tired of all the talking and began discussing with women, proletarian women around them and began developing a line. They held a panel in L.A, which was very successful. It was presented six times. What you will hear today is more or less a result of all of this discussing with women outside of the organization and a development of an orientation. There is no resolution, “We're just beginning the discussion of the woman question here. Now I give you Simpson:</p>
<p>We have just left the radical movement in order to became revolutionists in the real sense of the word. Now the radical movement has had a program on everything. It has never had a total conception because it has never had a conception of total crisis and a total conception to meet that social crisis. We're the first group of revolutionists to go to all sections of society. Every grouping in society is for us a sounding board for our ideas and the place where we can learn the ideas of others.</p>
<p>Now the radical movement, contrary to popular belief, has always had a position on the woman question. It was a wrong position, but they had a position. Their position consisted of two main categories. They were very interested in the history of women. They were interested in their history under feudalism and under primitive communism. They were interested in the biological development of women, what constituted women, not as people, but as human animals. They were interested in another sense, too. They were interested in the woman question as a moral question, as a question of whether or not women have sexual emancipation. They had a basic solution to all this that runs like a thread, not only in their conception of the woman question, but through every other conception that they have ever put forth, and that is that kindness solves all evil. We'll go into that a little later.</p>
<p>It's extremely interesting that we find today far more discussions on the woman question than at any other time. They are going on everywhere. Over the radio, in soap operas, among psycho-analysts, in popular magazines; everyone is discussing the woman question. They discuss it well, they discuss it badly, but they discuss it. And that is extremely important for us. Now the psycho-analysts are going to solve the woman question by psycho-analyzing – that is pretty obvious. The social worker is going to arrange a cooperative attitude between the husband and wife. And between the children and parents, too, of course. Just as the industrial relations manager in the factory is going to arrange a cooperative attitude between the employer and the employee.</p>
<p>But there is one section of the opposition to the program for women
that has become obvious to us only in the last period and. particularly as a result of our experiences with the radical movement. That is a group of women, in particular, who place themselves above the struggle of women, who conceive of their position in society as an individual question and who have a particular
attitude toward men and toward women, as a result of a total conception of society in general.</p>
<p>These women are mainly petty-bourgeois women. They have careers. They do everything. They generally refuse to be confined to any of the things that women are naturally confined to in this society. Raising a family, for instance. Having to stay at hone. Being dependent upon the man financially, (which in many cases is necessary). They completely and absolutely disassociate themselves from whatever women are doing or saying. They have an attitude toward men. They don't like them, and they imitate them to the “t". We've seen that in the organization of the past; we've seen that in the outside world as well.</p>
<p>Now it is extremely interesting that in the radical movement it is precisely these women who most clearly express the incorrect position on the woman question. But in a certain sense it is pretty obvious why. There is no section of society today that can harness women except a section of women themselves. Women have no respect for anyone else.</p>
<p>Now in our conception we start with women in the home. We do so because that is precisely where women are and if they are not there – if they are in a factory, they still have to return home daily. That is where the basis of the woman question begins.</p>
<p>We start from the position that the struggle of the woman in the home is not a conflict which has nothing to do with the class struggle; that her position in the home is an extension of what the position of the man is in the factory; that her entire life and existence is dependent upon what happens to him there; that the home is not the center of society, although the bourgeoisie tries to say it is, but that the factory is and that she is excluded from this center of society.</p>
<p>She is excluded from production and as a result is excluded from the
socialization which has been one of the greatest accomplishments of modern capitalism. She is placed in the home and in a sense exposed to as feudal an existence as anyone can reach under this society. She is isolated in the sense that she doesn't work with people and any social relationships that she
establishes must be outside of her work area. They must be established outside with other women in the neighborhood perhaps, but not in her work.</p>
<p>She is tied to a monotonous and repetitious job which for her is never ended and which (this is less important, of course,) is never appreciated. She finds that in the home the slave-driver is her husband who has just come home from being slave-driven. She finds that she must fight with him in order to gain some sense of her own personality, her own individuality, and in order for the first time to raise off her knees and to get some self-respect.</p>
<p>Now, it is true that the isolation I have mentioned before is not very conducive to bringing about these mass organizations that we find among workers, among Negroes and even among the youth. But the women are organized, nevertheless. They are organized in two senses. First, today the experience
in the home of women and the reaction of women to the home is no longer an individual reaction. It is too universal for that. Divorce today is not one woman rebelling against society; it is all women breaking up the home as it is now constituted.</p>
<p>Secondly, they are organized in another manner – in the same manner as youth and in the same manner that workers are organized. They are organized in coffee klatsches in the morning and in beer parties in the afternoon. And the one thing that women discuss is the woman question. It is extremely difficult to get them to discuss anything else, as a matter of fact. That is what they are concerned with, that's what they talk about and that's where they find their solution. That's where they judge other women's behavior, either accept them or condemn then, and in these cases, incidentally, it is not a question of condemning men. If, for instance, one woman has a bad relationship with her husband and, doesn't separate, they do not attack the man. They attack the woman and say it's her fault, it's her job to do something about it. He's not to blame, he's a fool, it's not our business. It's her job to solve the problem and they judge women back and forth that way in this type of organization.</p>
<p>Now the relationship of the woman with her children is extremely indicative of her relationship to society as a whole. She looks at the child in the same way she looks at the kitchen sink. It is work which has a meaning for her because her life revolves about the child, but still leaves her incapable of forming any real social ties with the child which mean anything to her and mean anything to the child. She puts a great deal into that child, not in the sense that the bourgeois propagandists talk about, but in the sense that her whole life and existence generally revolve around the child, and more important than anything else to her is establishing with him a good relationship which the whole surroundings of the home and her whole relationship with society prohibits.</p>
<p>We find that the woman's most creative work in the home, in opposition to any work that she must perform on dishes or washing the floor is dealing with human beings. Yet this creative work turns against her and generally after years and years of imposed sacrifice, the child has nothing but pity and a sense of obligation left for his mother.</p>
<p>Now we find that the youth have a reaction, particularly to the home as it is now constituted – in two senses. They disassociate themselves from the discipline which the mother and the father are forced to impose upon them, and secondly, they go out of the home because they find no relationship there for them, and they oppose the relationship that generally exists between their parents. They don't want that, and they don't want to be involved in that. They are free new people and reject it all.</p>
<p>Now it's pretty obvious from this why women would want to go out to work. There are a lot of women in factories. You can talk a lot, you can
discuss a lot, most of all, you can work with other people and really lead a social existence. You can really find out what other people are thinking on
a larger scale, work with them, and cooperate with them.</p>
<p>As soon as the woman does go out to work, at complete change takes place in her relationship with society, with her husband, and with her child. With her husband, he's been left out of the vote, he comes home and takes his slippers and pipe, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. When she works that isn't true. He has got to participate in either washing the dishes or he must have a chore in the home – he must enter the home and participate in the work of the home.</p>
<p>With the child it isn't as good a relationship that is established
there, because the one thing that the woman fully regrets in going to work is leaving the child. She doesn't care very much about leaving the house, but it's leaving the child and the stability of the relationship which she wants to give him that she feels very guilty about. And she is very worried that as a result he will get into bad bands and into juvenile delinquency. Incidentally, that's one of the greatest discussions among women in the plant who have children. What they discuss is: how do you manage with your child, do they have good friends, and who takes care of him, and how do you make arrangements with him, etc. Women have devised the most wonderful plans of caring for the children while the child is at home and they at the factory – systems of calling up the children, of the children visiting certain people at certain times, of having the children sleep in the afternoon so that the mother can visit with them in the evening, and all sorts of devices so that they can break the separation down, and develop a relationship with their children, even though they are alienated from their children, separated from them a good part of the day.</p>
<p>Now it is extremely significant in our document that the one thing that we really lack is a discussion on the Negro woman. We haven't, not until the last couple of weeks, anyway, been able to really approach Negro women to get in contact with them and to get their ideas most clearly, but from what we already have, I would just like to say this: The Negro woman, when she goes out to work, is a woman, a Negro, and a worker. She doesn't separate these things, she unites them. She doesn't say – I am a Negro, therefore I most go to the N.A.A.C.P.; or a woman, therefore I must join the women' s organizations, the women's auxiliaries of the trade unions; and I am a worker, therefore I must join the trade union. She does none of these things. In each point in her struggle she unites all of the questions, and fights for them at each time. In the church, in the trade union, in the home. She is not a Negro, a woman, or a worker, she is a Negro woman worker.</p>
<p>In the document that we have just written we have discussed children. It isn't accidental that children should enter into the discussion on the woman question. This question involves the social relationships of all the family,
so children must of necessity be part of it. It is also interesting that we bring up the children question for another reason. The woman is mainly responsible for what happens outside of the factory, and if is her task to attempt a solution to the social relationships outside of the factory.</p>
<p>Despite the conflicts that exist between children and their parents in this society, and the inhibiting influence of these conflicts, and the bad relationships that of necessity must be established, children show, in their
relations to each other (not necessarily in their relations to adults), a new mode of labor, the same mode of labor that we speak of for all society. Children's play is cooperative; they get together and play “You do this, and when you come over to me you say this, and you should say that.” It's creative; they do as they please, and they come out with the most creative things that adults have ever seen. As a matter of fact, most adults have not seen most things that children come out with. It's planned, and very well planned, by themselves, in a free manner, in a manner that adults are not accustomed to. When adults come in they immediately interfere and interrupt. The leadership of children in their play is children, and it could be no other leadership, and they pick and choose their leadership, not by election, but by a natural system of leadership, by choosing. Now it's precisely because of the free activity that children manifest, that as soon as they come in conflict with adults (and the relationship between children and adults now becoming their class struggle), the play and the whole creative apparatus is immediately overthrown. At each point when the adult comes in, and starts to plan, and says: “Now we should have this sort of activity, and this sort of thing should go on", immediately it disrupts the whole activity and creativity of the child.</p>
<p>Now the social workers, knowing this very well, have a plan. They are going to plan the relationships between children and adults. Cooperation, they must cooperate. They must cooperate like the worker cooperates with the boss, (bosses should, that is), and like the woman must cooperate with her husband. The child must cooperate with the parents, the youth must cooperate with the parents, and so on down the line. Just as the industrial relations manager in the factory does it to the worker, the social worker does it to the woman, so the progressive educator does it to the children. The progressive educator has another contribution to make, since only the child's activity is really free, outside of the work of adults. The progressive educator tries to keep it exactly that way, outside of the world of adults. He sees absolutely no possibility of establishing, not possibility but inevitability, of establishing a relationship which is a cooperative relationship, a human relationship and not a conflict and a struggle. We must not isolate children, but for the first time integrate them into society and find in their play and in their relationship with adults, a new development, for themselves and for adults as well.</p>
<p>As the child grows older, it's quite obvious that he must be integrated in a new sense, not in the sense of his creative play being recognized and expanded, but that he must also be integrated into production. And education can no longer be separated and isolated from the real world. He can't live in an ivory tower of public school or high school while his mother and father are working in a factory, they have nothing in common between the two of them, and his education as was said before must of necessity be integrated with production, become part of society.</p>
<p>Now it's interesting to note that it is clear to all, except radical groups, what women are doing today. Everybody knows about it, except people like our old organizations. Either the people who know about it are horrified, or glad about it, but they know about it. The radical movement doesn't know. They are still in the peculiar stage of thinking that women don't know that they are oppressed. We finished with that two years ago and we are able to go on as a result.</p>
<p>Now it is interesting to note what women are doing today, aside from what they say: their actions are very explicit. They take no nonsense. They don't give unless they get. By that I mean, that unless the man is willing to establish a relationship with them which is different, they will not go out to help him when there is a financial crisis in the family. They say: “If you don't help me with my job, I won't help you with yours.” They get divorced very easily, and discuss divorce in a manner in which it has never been discussed before, as an everyday occurrence, and as a development for themselves. Every once in a while the women in my neighborhood would say, “If I get divorced", and sometimes they would slip and say, “When I get divorced.”</p>
<p>It' s something that people do nowadays. It's sort of a fad. And they look upon divorce also as a solution to the question of the morals that they plan to have without being married. I heard many women say today that they don't plan to get married ever again after they get divorced, because people are going to think that they are doing things anyway, and they may as well have a good time. What they think amounts to a complete abolition of bourgeoisie morals, ideas and relations with men. I feel, although there's no real proof that we have of this, that the relationship that is established between men and women after they are divorced. is on a much higher and freer level than it was in the first marriage. Of course that will have to be studied, and we will have to talk to a lot of women before we can say that is definite.</p>
<p>Now, in contrast to what women are doing, going into the factory in large numbers, breaking up the home, there is an opposition to them, a counter revolution to their activity. It is precisely three main groups that are putting out different programs for women in opposition to their own activity. There is the exceptional woman that we have mentioned before. Her program is planning for the masses of women and her being integrated into the male world and accepting all the morals and attitudes of men, isolating herself from women, and in planning the housework, isolating both men and women from the home, allowing the women to be free of the home in order to be more systematically exploited in the factory.</p>
<p>There is the American bourgeosie. They have a program. They say that women should stay home unless the government needs them. “Stay home. You are the backbone of society.” They tell women that day in, day out, from Helen Trent to Life with Father, from True Confessions to True Story; in every appeal they ever make, they say: “Please, please be happy. Look what you have: you have a washing machine, a garbage disposal, your husband has a new Ford, you have children who are well dressed, they are the best educated children in the world, you have great, tremendous stores in which to shop, with beautiful new factories made of steel. You have everything that a woman can want. Why aren't you happy? You've got to get into your heads that if you go out of the home, you are going, to go exactly where the Russian women are going, to exploitation in the factory. Therefore you have no alternative but to stay home.” Women listen to this, and very often, when they decide to go out to work, they go with great feelings of guilt. But they go nevertheless. They find new social relationships wherever they go.</p>
<p>Now the Russian bourgeoisie has already “solved” it's problem. There is no home in the real sense of the word in Russia. The woman works and the man works. I don't know what the situation is with the youth in Russia, I assume that there is a lot of planning in nursery schools and I am sure that they go through about twelve hours a day, and the mother is allowed to see them for about one hour a day. All the laws that have been passed in Russia, opposing divorce, etc., are mainly aimed, as far as I can see, at separating women from men, just where there is the greatest chance for their unification, in the factory, where they both are. There has to be a division made between them: woman has to be, so to speak, put in her place, and every once in a while be burdened down with nine or ten children so she knows that this is her place and she must come back to it.</p>
<p>It is very clear that as soon as women leave the home and go into industry they are breaking down every bourgeoisie conception that women have been told for at least the last hundred years. They are for the first time facing a unity between the home and the factory, a unity which has been made as a result of separation over many long years. The unity between the home and the factory represents to them the unification for the first time of men and women.</p>
<p>Women know better than anyone else that they are completely capable
of establishing any relationship they wish if they are let alone to do it and if they are able to establish a milieu in which to do it; that is, a milieu which for the first time will not have man at one extreme in society and woman at the other, meeting for two hours at night to discuss the happenings of the day.</p>
<p>Now women know something else as well. They are very dissatisfied with the relationship with their children. They know that their children are going to turn against them when they grow older and they don't want it. They see clearly that something else has to be established. They talk about it all the time. “What should I do with him? He does this to me. He doesn't respect me.” That's generally the way it's put. “He doesn't respect me.” In other words: “I have absolutely no relationship with him and what shall I do?” And they know also that it is they who must establish a new relationship between the father, the mother and the child. That is between parents in general and children in general and men and women in general. That is their responsibility and they feel completely capable of carrying it out.</p>
<p>This is the opening of the discussion. We wrote a document as has been mentioned and we're going to take that and circulate it around to the women that we know and, believe me in Los Angeles, we know a lot of women who are working with us on the women question. I think that with this as a basis we can begin to go to women and understand that they are not backward and the fact that they have rejected the radical movement is not a backwardness, but a sign of a revolutionary personality that the old radical movements could not
reach, but that we shall reach with our new stage and development.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> The floor is now open for discussion, but Jane and Nanette, two other women from Los Angeles, wrote that document with Simpson, and I just wonder whether or not they would like to speak first. Would you like it arranged that way? Jane, you'd like to speak now? All right, Don't forget. Announce your name before you speak and where you're from.</p>
<p>I'm Jane from Los Angeles. I'd just like to elaborate on a few of the points Simpson has made in her talk. First of all, on the question of convincing women that they're oppressed, a conception that the old organization and many other sections of society have long held. One woman in the housing project, in which I live said to me: “You don' t have to convert women to their own cause.” I think that takes care of the women and I think it's a feeling that we have concerning workers too. You don't have to convert women; you
don't have to convert Negroes; you don' t have to convert workers to their own cause.</p>
<p>On the subject of children, I'd like to elaborate just a little bit on the remarks of Simpson. I think we should emphasize that children's activities and play, which is work, and, which is serious business, is not away from society, is not conducted away from the adult world, but is in opposition to the adult world. It's not divorced from reality; it's in opposition to reality. There has been a great deal of talk on the subject of children in which educators discuss the imaginary play of children versus reality, the child's world versus the real world and the child's activities away from the real world. That is the theory which has long been held by most progressive educators concerning the imaginary play of children. But it's not imaginary play it's very real; it's concrete work; it's serious business. It's not divorced from reality; it's in opposition to reality, which is a completely different thing. In the play of children, in their ideas, is to be seen not only what children want but what we all want from them. From them we can also learn, if we watch them, and allow them to express themselves without constantly interfering and opposing our ideas to those of our children.</p>
<p>Now, in the children and in the children question – I sort of hate that term, but for want of a better one right now, we'll call it the question of children – is the real synthesis of the woman and the men. It is the one
work in bourgeois society which they have created together. In children one really sees the unity of the woman question and the man question clearly. And yet there are tremendous antagonisms between them and the subject of their children and their relationship to their children.</p>
<p>I'd like to make a few remarks about the petty-bourgeois woman which has been overlooked in the document we have written so far. There is also a lot of talk about the fact that the petty-bourgeois woman is not as
degraded or not as oppressed as the working woman. This isn't so. The petty-bourgeois woman is more degraded than the working class woman because nothing is demanded of her: She lives on the fringe of society. She may have machines in her home working for her, but actually, nothing is demanded of her. The working class woman at least has something demanded of her. She works in the home. She works outside the home – in the factory. The petty-bourgeois woman leads a completely meaningless existence, usually within the home where she has very little to do. I'm speaking now, by the way, of the middle or upper middle class woman, not of the petty-bourgeois woman who is very close to the working class woman and will unite with her in many struggles. I'm speaking of the woman who has a little more money and a little more material comfort. If she's not in the home, she's outside playing canasta – she has no real socialized existence, no opportunity at all to integrate herself into society. Furthermore, she takes out in consumption what she's denied in production. She shops and shops and shops for hats, shoes and dresses and thus in consumption she takes out what she's denied in production.</p>
<p>I think that for the time being this is as much as I want to say. There are some other questions which I think are perhaps better said at the youth panel – having to do with role that progressive education has played with children and with the youth. Because one thing is clear: the concepts of progressive education truly break down most completely and most sharply when the educators deal with the question of the youth. The progressive educator can manipulate the younger child somewhat and to some degree establish for him an artificial world, a world that is different from the adult world. But when progressive education faces the problems of the youth in the junior and senior high schools, the conceptions of progressive education break down completely.</p>
<p>Bryant of Los Angeles speaking: Friends, I would like to say that the work that has been done on the woman question, the memorandum that has been prepared, was for me a tremendous education. For the first time, our people were able to go to the women and find out what they were saying, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and what they wanted. This was a direct manifestation of our basic ideas in saying we are going into the working class section of the population to find out what people want.</p>
<p>I think, however, there is one section in this memorandum that does not flow easily with the ideas as they were presented. I do not think that our people have done for the children that we have done for the women, in the sense that we have not been able to state what children want, what is the manifestation of their rebellion. It is stated in the children section of the document that children are the concrete embodiment of the inevitability of socialism. I do not understand that. I do not know what it means. I don't see how we can get any ideas from that of what children want and how that is manifested. How can adults learn from the play activity of children? Tell me how. What do the children want to teach the adult? I have prepared a memorandum also, which I would like to read to you, which I think may help to explain what I mean.</p>
<p>Children do not feel that they are a necessary part of society. They do not feel at all needed. Everything they do points to the fact that what they want is to be necessary and important in what the educators call the “adult world".</p>
<p>Every toy, no matter how simple or complex, (from a stick and a can of mud, to a bicycle or anything else they are allowed to play with) immediately becomes transformed in their imaginations into some socially necessary object. A bicycle becomes an automobile, or a truck, a boat or a tractor, etc. If it's turned over and the wheel allowed to run freely, it becomes a cement mixer. A bucket of mud becomes tar to fix a street, the stick is the spreader. The children in my group have a plastic swimming pool. I watch them and wonder why they don't just relax in the water and enjoy the elements like any adult would. They don' t do this. They are no sooner in the water than they're out of it. This pool becomes a huge ocean with boats which the children navigate.</p>
<p>During all this hard work the children assume an air of great importance. They choose names for themselves which are synonymous with America's workingman. We have half a dozen “Joes” roaming around with as many “Chucks” and “Jims". The girls also assume those aliases. They are important people during this play period. To whom are they important? To society. They are doing important tasks, such as fixing, building, creating new tools, transporting, and a million other things which are necessary to the modern world.</p>
<p>The most “progressive” nurseries today are bringing into their play areas not expensive toys, but cast-off automobiles and broken radios and the like. I am told by several people whose parents could not afford to buy them beautiful toys that these things are exactly what their folks gave them to play with. These were the toys they enjoyed most.</p>
<p>This cast-off junk that the children like so well aid the imaginary play. But they are only aids. They do not compensate for what the child really wants. He is not really needed to fix, or build, or create. He can
only pretend that he is. When the play period is over he is again faced with the domination of the adult world. He is once again thrown into the blunt realities of his position.</p>
<p>One little boy filled a can with water only to find that the can had a hole in the bottom of it. As the water dribbled out and splattered on the ground it suddenly occurred to him that he had a wonderful sprinkling
can. He was not satisfied, however, because the water was coming through so slowly. He then put the can to his mouth and began to blow into it, forcing the water out. As he did so a two-year-old, in imitation, raised a similar can of water and began to drink it. The “mechanic” in question quickly pulled the can away from the tot, and in great agitation, explained that it was dirty water, and not to drink. “Mine is a sprinkler 'cause it has a hole in the bottom, but yours isn't.”</p>
<p>He knows that what he is playing with is an old battered can. It is what it appears to be. But when he plays with it he transforms it into something that he wants it to be. When the game is over and the children must put their equipment away, all the magic falls away from these objects and they are faced with the drudgery of what the army calls “fatigue".</p>
<p>The child realizes only too well the difference between fantasy and reality. He can not lose himself completely in his imaginary world. I heard one little boy say to another during a “free” play period, “This is what real people do.” He speaks to his mother of “real people” all the time. She does not know what he means. He means that he is not a real person. He will not be a real person until he grows up, and does in the community what he is now playing at.</p>
<p>Are they satisfied to simply wait peacefully until they become “real people” at some God knows what future date? No! They fight the adult constantly; they are in constant rebellion.</p>
<p>One mother said: “I give him everything he could want. He's got more toys than he knows what to do with. But look at the way he acts!”</p>
<p>It is not an abundance of toys that he wants. He wants to be needed.</p>
<p>How can he help rebelling when he feels the strain that not only exists between himself and the adult but among the adults themselves. Father and mother are constantly at each other's throats or at his. No one in the family is pulling together to achieve a common goal. Each suffers in his own way. Each fails to understand the other's problems. He does not belong to a family unit that works closely together. He simply lives with some people under one roof whom he abstractly loves and who abstractly love him.</p>
<p>It seems silly to think that toys or an abundance of anything the child might like can compensate for this lack of belongingness. Yet some parents try to bribe their children as if they themselves could be bribed. “If you're a good girl I'll give you a new doll.” The parents don't understand his problems just as they don't understand each other's. Not only does the child suffer form the same problems that beset the rest of the family, he suffers the added humiliation of not being able to express himself. What he can't express in words, he cries about. Exasperated parents “fall” on him and demand: “What the hell are you crying for now?”</p>
<p>This is the family structure in the modern world. Very little can be done about it on an individual basis. It remains for the structure of society to change before the relation of people to society and to each other can change.</p>
<p>The child is constantly striving to reach the goal of adulthood. He is not accepted now. He feels that then he will be. They hunger for age. They will fight at the mere suggestion that they are younger than another child. A birthday is a great celebration, not only because it means ice cream and cake, (with the young children a cookie and juice will suffice), but because to them it means, very concretely, a whole year has been added. The only date they fully comprehend is their birthday. All other great days fade away in light of this day which marks for each child his own advancement toward the adult world. He must wait until some great day, when he is pronounced “grown up,” before he can share with adults their society.</p>
<p>As new children enter the nursery, I am introduced to them by my director as their “new friend". The children know very well that this is not so. I asked one of the children if I were her friend. She looked at me in astonishment and said “NO! The children is my friends. You're my teacher! Teacher is teacher, not friend.” Another child has not talked to me in the entire eight months that I have worked with him. He plays and talks freely to the other children but he comes to me only with complaints. I understand from the teacher that preceded me that this was the case with her also.</p>
<p>The teacher is trained never to laugh at the child and his imaginary games. “Always laugh with.” The child appreciates this serious attitude towards his play because it gives the situation a touch of reality. Sometimes
she joins him in his play and he welcomes her with open arms. Does this make them friends? No! She is allowed to enter his world, but he is not allowed to enter hers.</p>
<p>Very soon she must stop the play and take all the children to the bathroom. She must also insist that they pick up all their toys and put them away. The old tyranny is back again.</p>
<p>The question is raised, “Well, won't it always be like that? Won' t children always resent the domination of adults over them?” No, because there need not be any domination. Guidance, yes. But no domination.</p>
<p>It is impossible now to visualize exactly what form of work the child will do for the community, but work he must. There is no reason why the child can not be given some task to do which will in reality be necessary to the functioning of the community. He has shown that he is capable of comprehending a tremendous amount of information. He soaks it up like a sponge soaks up water. The adults around him with whom he comes in daily contact are the ones to show him and guide him. He doesn't have to go to some school which is separated from his daily living experiences. He can learn more in one minute about the three R's from someone busily incorporating these things in some productive labor and anxious to teach him, than he can in twelve years from a paid teacher with chalk in hand, scribbling on a blackboard.</p>
<p>Someone might say, “Well, I give my child things to do and he doesn't want to do them.” One mother told me that her child is supposed to clean his room. “You should see it,” she says, “it's like a pig sty.”</p>
<p>Here is quite a difference between drudgery and real work. So what if the room is finally cleaned. It only gets dirty again. He might feel good or satisfied after he's done the job, but does it make him feel important? Does a woman feel important after she's washed the floor? He may have helped somebody who didn't want to do it but there is really very little satisfaction in knowing that.</p>
<p>Work is quite different. Work is creative. When one can say, “This is what I've done,”, or “I have a part in this,” that's work.</p>
<p>That is what the child wants as much as anyone else.</p>
<p>Having something in common is what binds people together. It will bind children and adults together, too. There is no need for domination in such a relationship. There is only need for help and guidance.</p>
<p>To me the child is a human being who has the same emotions as any adult. He is not, as was explained to me, an incomplete person. He is an inexperienced person. I think that's all I have to say.</p>
<p>I'm Sue from Philadelphia. I've done a lot of work on this particular question which started when I was in a former organization. I was absolutely amazed at the extraordinary work, that I found was being done independently within our own organization. I think that from the work I've done, the one thing I want to bring out is what are the key notes of the woman question and what is signified by the absence of a certain type of argument.</p>
<p>The first time I presented the woman question in that organization, I was very much complimented by the entire group, but the argument bogged down into “What are women's limitations because of biological Imitations” and “Could women ever really leave the home and the whole nursery problem?” For my own part, the type of presentation I gave in that organization was one where I tried to bring out that more and more women were being taken into the factory and being made a part of the industrial process and that to understand the women question fully, you were forced to take up what stage of capitalist production we're at today. I was constantly challenged as to “why” the woman question, and it finally forced me into studying the whole capitalist structure of society, and that is the emphasis I gave it. The “why” finally forced me to say: “This question is not just the woman question, but the woman and man and today's social relationship and what lines it must take due to the capitalist productive method. I took up Engels on the various societies, primitive societies and all that and until the last minute, I had to memorize the stages. But I did give that. When I went into the organization of the past, it was within a half a year after I had given the talk in a previous organization. I had to reconstruct my talk – one part I could not recall. What happened was that instinctively when I got up, I tried to repeat the history of women in the various types of society and I completely bogged down in it. I finally learned that the only essential point in studying the history of women is to see that relationships between men end women are constantly changing, as a reflection of the particular type of productive society existing. Then I just threw out the entire history and went right into the woman question today.</p>
<p>Now it's interesting that in our past organization the majority bogged down on the question of sexual morality and what this freedom would mean, and the fact that in the back room husbands were going around and saying to each other: “Well, I help my wife with the dishes.”</p>
<p>Now our own friends acted a certain way too, and it showed me that we had gone through a stage. Our own leading friend got up and gave me the most challenging blow of all. On that note the meeting had to end and I went home and vowed I would prove the point.</p>
<p>The question was: We agree women should have their rights. But the problem of women, unlike the Negro who has the CIO, the AFL, etc., is that women don' t organize. They have no organizational form so how can you deal with that? Ever since then I have avidly clipped every little thing showing a woman picketing being beaten up by the police or where a group got together and took up a petition. I tried to seek out the organizational forms that the struggle of women takes because when I was challenged with that, I felt that our own people had given me a most devastating blow.</p>
<p>Now here we've already leaped over that. Just at the very same time we were arguing the trade union question within our own group. There was a question of: “Do we go to the shop steward or to the rank and file?” Well, the woman question here has obviously fallen right into line with our whole way of thinking and our whole political argument of going to deeper and deeper layers of the masses. Our own people as I said, were very anxious to protest the rights of women, but none of the group had taken the woman question seriously and tried to show what it represented.</p>
<p>Bryant's talk has made me just want to rush on through this women question and take up some of the things that she has revealed on the children question. Her work on that is really some of the most original work I have ever heard.</p>
<p>Now what I think is important in what is being done is that we all acknowledge that the woman question can only be understood by studying it from a certain stage in capitalism today. That falls exactly in line with what we say about the Negro question. The Negro question in the South cannot be solved under capitalism. The woman question cannot be solved under capitalism. For the capitalists to do that would automatically mean the entire breakdown of their entire system. They themselves are caught in the crisis of the woman question. Just as they want to solve the Negro question and everyone is concerned with that, the same thing holds true with all the literature coming out now about the woman question. They want to retain the old social standards – “woman in the home” – but crises of war, of needing greater and greater reserve power in production forces them to want women orientated into the factories and into the shops. Their conflict is shown in that they understand what juvenile delinquency is – it's a breakdown of the family – but they cannot formulate a clear program of whether women should stay home and raise their children to see if she can solve juvenile delinquency that way, or have nurseries so that they can free the women. (In general, I think it's acknowledged that the nursery is no solution today.)</p>
<p>Under the highest form of state capitalism, in Russia (as was pointed out), that is solved. The woman's freedom is that she is permitted to work just as hard or harder than the man. That is solved; they know where they stand in Russia – but not in America. That the problem is still in existence shows what stage we are at.</p>
<p>One of the finest contributions of all is this new tie-up of the factory with the home and of home relationships with the factory relationships.</p>
<p>One of the things that I still think is lacking, although I think it is a correct orientation to start out from the home, is the acknowledgment that a greater and greater number of women are being forced into the factory.
That means that when you are discussing productive relationships, you have to incorporate the woman question as part of it constantly.</p>
<p>I'm not positive of the figures but my impression is that about one-half or one-fourth of the married women work and these women have one or more children to take care of when they go home. Incidentally, a point to watch is this large number of married women who are forced to work. The necessity of their working is absolutely enormous.</p>
<p>Another point on this is that some of us, I think, are still bogged down by the idea that if it's a woman panel on the woman question, only the women would want to be the delegates. If we take this question seriously, there will be more and more men involved in this question. We are serious about the Negro question. When we discuss the problem, everyone, not only Negroes, wants to speak. In the same way, everyone should want to discuss on the woman question, even though we acknowledge that the woman is the one we can learn from because she represents the actual experience. Just as we say: “We must listen to the Negroes, but, it is equally important that white people feel free to speak their minds,”</p>
<p>Bryant's speech really just woke up my whole experience as a person who took up two years of practice teaching, then just walked out of the whole thing without even collecting my certificate.</p>
<p>Now these are some of the things that I saw in the schools as a teacher and what happened to me. I had a marvelous group of children and at first I went in with the idea that I was going to be their friend. I was a socialist at the time.</p>
<p>We had some wonderful discussions. One day I got a film – it was during the war – on Japanese customs. We showed it and everybody was excited. (When we studied grammar and things like that, I just couldn't pull a word out of anyone's mouth.) After this film, everybody's hand was up; everyone wanted to discuss it. It was just like American children; if was just like the American customs. They also discussed what the differences were and then we went into the fact that customs are different all over but the basic thing is that we are just the same.</p>
<p>Right in the midst of this my supervisor walked in. And I as a teacher, regardless of being a socialist, cut this discussion so short that, after the students left and he was discussing my progress, he made the criticism that I seemed to jump around too much in the discussion, that these children seemed to be very, very interested In the discussion. but that I took the initiative and seemed to be cutting them off. Well, I was in a dilemma and I said: “To be perfectly frank with you, we're in a war situation and I didn t know how you felt. I knew how the children felt.” I got a mediocre mark.</p>
<p>It was constantly pointed out that once you're teaching, you either must go with the children or you must go with the administration.</p>
<p>I had a study period. The way it worked out, I was given a class of just two fellows and they were to come and study in the three-quarters of an hour. One day I walked out of the room for a moment and when I came back, there was no one there. I knew it was impossible for them to have left the room, so I sat down at my desk and I just pretended I was reading. I figured I'd sit it out and I kept thinking: I have a choice: I can rant, rave, call the principal or do anything of that type. But if I do, I'll never be respected by these children. The word will spread. I'll never be able to control this class. They'll prevent me. But if I really respect them, I'll go along with the game. They are someplace in this room. Well, I sat there praying that the superintendent wouldn't come in. Eventually, I heard a lot of giggling and the two fellows just tumbled out of the flue that was in the wall.</p>
<p>After that they were wonderful friends of mine, but the point is that no teacher who is seriously carrying on with a job where she is getting paid can possibly be completely allied with the children. What would have happened if I had that job and had taken it seriously would have been that I would have been forced to report it to some authority to let them know that I was in complete control of that situation, that I was master over those children and that those children knew, too, that I was the authoritarian – the person with authority. That brings us to the biggest oppression that children have.</p>
<p>Just as we say in a sense that the man is the oppressor of the woman in the home, and represents the bourgeois standards, the adult represents the bourgeois standards to the children. It seems to be commonly agreed, all psychologists and such say, that the one way you can confuse children, is by a breakdown of discipline where the parents cannot come to an agreement. Now the other side of this is that all the adults should ally together in keeping this child down when he gets out of hand.</p>
<p>Recently, I was at my sister's home and her husband wanted to discipline the child. They have a marvelous relationship but he gave the child a little slap, nothing outstanding, and the child slapped him back as hard as he could. The child is three years old, but he came out with a word that they never heard before. After the father hit him, the child said, “You're a damn rot!” My sister couldn't figure out where he had gotten it. His father said, “Why did you hit me?” His father was on the defensive, and the little boy said, “You were slapping me.” My sister, the wife, said, “Yes, why did you hit the child?” And I suddenly realized this is what the psychologists were talking about. If my sister wouldn't support her husband, her child would freely do what he wants. My sister realized this too, and she quickly quieted down as her husband mumbled, “Well, he shouldn't slap so freely.” They joined together and they quietly let the child know that they were the authorities.</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> We have twenty minutes before lunch and one of the co-authors would like to take twenty minutes to present her views. After that, we have lunch from 12:30 to 1:30, and there is one-half hour following left for discussion. I think what we have to do is to limit the time of the speakers. We won't be able to get everyone in unless we do that, so is there a motion that we do so? Yes? O.K., let's have a list of speakers. (The chair
takes a speakers' list. Ed. note.) This need not close the list. We're just going to try to get a rough idea of how much time each speaker can have. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten... that's eleven people. That's thirty minutes, eleven people. Someone who's good a math, figure it out for me quick. Three minutes per person...that's what it will have to be.</p>
<p class="information">From the floor: Some of the people may decide not to speak if they hear someone else take up their point, so it would be preferable for the speakers to have at least five minutes.</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> Chairman: All right.</p>
<p class="information">From the floor: After the break for lunch, you might ask if anybody wants to take the floor.</p>
<p>Nanette: I'm staying here in Detroit in a family of five children and I've been shown a pamphlet put out by General Motors for women, “Ladies, this is for you.” I'd like to read you just a little of it:</p>
<p>“At the turn of the century, you got a new stake in the success of American business. Along came, for one thing, the canning industry. Your cleaning and preparing of many vegetables, your making of soup in a kettle, a dozen other labors went out the kitchen window when cans came in the kitchen door....Now let's get out of the kitchen. Let's go downstairs. The laundry industry, the washing machine, electric iron people and other American enterprises saw you standing by the wash boiler, hot, tired, tied down...All but a fraction of the other women in the world still spend a solid ten hour day every week bending over washtubs, washboards or stones.....The home sewing machine took more than a stitch in saving you time. The development of dress pattern concerns, the low price, the beautiful cloth and rayon by other companies added to your stake in the process of additional enterprises. Now, of course, the reduction of all this tiresome and restricting housework is the very essence of the American way of life. The result could not possibly be more personal to you. So let' s go on. Other enterprises gave you electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and a dozen other magic time-saving, work-saving devices. No wonder the European women that I know who visit here say that the average American home they see is a fairyland.”</p>
<p>What I would like to say from my experiences as a housewife is that in spite of this fairyland that we live in, American housewives and mothers are not happy. They are torn apart by internal conflict. They find the isolation of their home a sharp contrast to the socialization they know their men experience daily. The modern appliances which they have divorce them from their work but tie them to the monotony of it. They have more time to think about what unsatisfactory lives they lead. These wonderful machines cannot substitute for new social relations.</p>
<p>In traveling across the country, we had to stop in order to wash some diapers, and we had a little trouble finding laundry shops. The first one we came to was just wash tubs. There weren't very many women there. Just wash tubs! Scrub boards! I guess it was very cheap; the women who had absolutely nothing at all at home would use then. I rejected it immediately; it wasn't efficient enough; it would take me too long; it would tire me out too much. We walked a little farther.</p>
<p>Then we found one that had the wash tub but it also had the machine and the wringer. It had the washing machine, not the automatic. Here there were a great many women; the place was really crowded; there were women standing in line. They all carried big bags of laundry. They were talking; they seemed very happy and very busy. They were talking to one another, discussing their problems, sharing experiences. I thought immediately that if I had had time to stay there, that would have been the place I would have gotten the most out of. I would have chosen, had I lived in that city, to go to that place for the socialization despite the fact that it was a little more work.</p>
<p>Finally, we found an automatic laundry. There were not quite as many women in there as there were in the other one. It was more expensive, but of course, the work was all done very quickly and efficiently. No-one was talking. The few women there sat around reading.</p>
<p>The woman in the home is concerned mainly with cooking meals, making clothes, seeing that they're clean and in a wearable condition, caring properly for her children, and planning her life an a budget. This work is very lonely. It is monotonous; it goes on day after day, endless, without ever any sense of completion. It really demands very little of her compared to what she is capable of. It demands only routine. The women who do try to express themselves creatively, in their sewing, or in their home decorating, find that it turns against them; they only have more work to do.</p>
<p>But the women we see, become efficient even though they organize their own work, they're efficient and they assume a great load of responsibility. There's a round of work with children that's endless. We're isolated in our homes but we're expected to produce social beings. All our children's activities are seen in terms of the work they will bring us. Our children, we find, develop in conflict with us. We can't seem to get next to them. They pull away. I myself feel a desire to control my child. It's the only thing there is to control, but it means dominate. We know that this is going to develop eventually to the point when the child will have nothing left but pity and obligation to us when he's an adult.</p>
<p>In some homes the father is the authority, but more often the woman takes the responsibility for disciplining the child. Her day is devoted to seeing that he behaves and to getting along with him. But it turns out that she is yelling at him most of the time because he's on her nerves or else because he doesn't behave the way she wants him to. She has to protect her home against her child.</p>
<p>Women resent the father coming home and relaxing with the child that they have spent all day working on – not just working on in the sense of the laundry, the housecleaning, the tub baths, but also the discipline. She has put a lot of effort into this product of hers and the father comes home and plays with the child, relaxes and really enjoys him. She doesn't have a chance to do that. It isn't always true that the father does it. But to the extent that he does have a limited happy experience with his child, the mother cannot help but resent it, because she hasn't time for this. Babies are easy to take care of; women love babies. They're no strain. They're no conflict with the mother. Often when women want girls, the reason is because they know the girls will help them with their work and not only that, but they know they'll have someone who will understand their particular problems.</p>
<p>One of the most disturbing things about being a housewife is the isolation. Women move in many directions to solve it. Far example, take the church, where you find them doing the same old work, planning and saving food,
but the socialization attracts them. Here they can do it with other women. The whole thing has a new meaning.</p>
<p>Often I feel that the bourgeoisie understand women and their problems better than the radical movement. They understand very well how lonely women are, what their work is. Over the radio they try and give them some adventure. Even if a woman can't afford it, she will often allow a house to house salesman come in and talk to her because of the company he brings. These men talk to the women in a way they hear no other place. The salesmen tell them about themselves; they spend time with their personalities. They talk about makeup; they get the women to think of herself and to talk about themselves, something she doesn't have a chance to do with her husband.</p>
<p>Today a car, more and more, means a greet deal to a woman. A woman who once has a car finds she can no longer live without it. It means freedom; otherwise she feels her home is a prison.</p>
<p>Aside from this daily repetition of monotonous work, there is an accumulation of feeling imprisoned by the home. I'd like to read a quote to you from one woman:</p>
<p>“My husband feels a relief after eight hours of steady labor and knows that for the next period he does the things he wants to. He daily experiences a great feeling of relief and escape. He comes home to have attention showered upon him, a meal that he loves and looks forward to, and complete relaxation with the knowledge that someone is there to take care of all the countless errands that add to his comfort. I get up from the table at least three times a meal to bring in anything extra he desires. If he bathes or dresses the children, it's a job purely of pleasure for him; there's no pressure felt. With me, this daily oppression of routine tasks lasts for weeks before I have an experience of relief by leaving the children with their father for several hours and when I do feel this freedom, I haven't any of the happy satisfaction in the knowledge that someone is going to wait on me for a while to make up for the indignities I have suffered. There's no one to cook me a delicious hot meal that I won' t even have to think about or plan, or to see that my home surroundings are not only orderly and clean but cheerful and restful. I have to return after a few hours of freedom to cook the dinner and pick up the mess that has accumulated.”</p>
<p>I found an article in the newspaper a year ago on July 16, something that happened in Norway, showing how much the pressure of the women feeling as they do has done in this particular country.</p>
<p>“One thousand five hundred Norwegian housewives will be given a two weeks holiday at a mountain and seaside resort this year free of expense by the Norway Trade Unions Health and Welfare Association. The housewives will be chosen from women with three or more children living in big towns. In order to make it a more restful holiday for them, their children will be sent to children's camps where they will be taken care of during their mothers' vacation. Children under two years will accompany their mothers to the holiday resorts, where kindergarten facilities and trained nurses will be provided. This year the Trade Union has leased 20 resorts for the tired housewives; they are located in beautiful, healthy surroundings remote from tourist centers. Everything will be done to create a friendly, intimate atmosphere and to help the housewives relax. Welfare sisters will arrange sightseeing trips and organize games and entertainment. The dominating idea is to take the minds of the housewives off their everyday worries and to help them enjoy the good food, fresh air, and beautiful scenery.”</p>
<p>Nearly every day housewives have revolutionary conversations. I can' t go out in my backyard where my neighbor is constantly hanging her laundry (She has four little boys.), without exchanging problems and troubles. She tells me how they come in tracking mud, how she has to do her housework at night because they are there all day. She cleans the house up at night and it's clean in the morning, but by noon it's filthy again.</p>
<p>She discusses her husband's attitude. He comes in and makes a mess but says: “It isn't a mess; it's only my clothes.” Women feel very close to other women in the same position. They're rebelling as a whole group in their individual homes.</p>
<p>Maggie: I want to deal with one phase of the woman question and that is that a section of the women that felt it necessary to organize themselves within a certain organization, namely, the ladies auxiliary movement, and to point out and explain and describe an experience that I went through within the ladies' auxiliary when we were in Philadelphia. Now it would be interesting for us to study the ladies auxiliary because I think that at that time, when the C.I.O. and what led the degeneration of that movement and to the complete collapse was being formed, we saw a certain fusion of the social groupings which led to the birth of the C.I.O. was being formed, we saw a certain fusion of the social groupings which led to the birth of the C.I.O. I think that the same thing took place within the women's groups who were home and who felt a certain impulse and a certain movement to go out to organize with the men and to help the men in the formation of the C.I.O.</p>
<p>Now a few years ago, as a result of the strike at Westinghouse, a number of women felt that they wanted a ladies' auxiliary. These women were all the wives of the shop stewards, the executive board members. I want to point out that it was a certain stratum of women who wanted the organization. They hounded the president of the local until finally he wrote a letter and sent it out to all the men, addressed to their wives, and said: “Let's form a ladies' auxiliary.”</p>
<p>I and another person went down since we were wives of workers in the shop. When we got there, we were quite surprised at the response that the letter had gotten. It was a horrible letter; it was addressed to Mrs. John Jones; it was on official union stationary, and many of the women didn't realize that it was addressed to them. They assumed it was a letter from the union. They gave it to their husbands; the husbands probably tore it up, just like they tore up everything else that they got from the union.</p>
<p>But we were very surprised. There were several Negro women who came down to the auxiliary and there were a great many rank and file women who came down in the initial period. Well when they came down, as was natural, they didn't find what they were looking for, and within about six or seven months, it had collapsed into a group of maybe seven or eight women, and we got together and we had a wonderful time! The point is that there were no outside people; there was the wife of the president, the wife of the recording secretary and we had some members of the newspaper committee, their wives, and we had some shop stewards' wives, all very active – their men were very active within the union.</p>
<p>So we set about a project of how to get the women to join the auxiliary. I might add that at this point, my heart was not in this organization. I thought that there was nothing for a ladies' auxiliary to do at this time.
The only time that a ladies' auxiliary can do anything is in time of struggle. When the men were out on a picket line, that was when the women had a certain function to perform. There was nothing for them to do, so we set about the organization of a Christmas party for the kids. Now these women went about, and here you can see organization. When these gals get together, they know that to do. They forgot all about their housewives work. Their husbands complained bitterly that they never saw their wives. But the women said: “We're going to get some ice cream for the kids; where can we get toys?”</p>
<p>I learned much from the way they organized the work. I was amazed at what they were able to do. They gathered the toys; they wrote letters, and then they came up against a problem: they needed money. What do you do in order to finance the buying of whatever was needed? They all agreed: it's very simple; you go out and hit the gate. We planned among ourselves the hours that we would hit the gate. Those gals got up early in the morning to hit the men at eight o'clock. Those of us who worked went out there at twelve o'clock and you know what December is in Philadelphia. It was damn cold, but we went out there and we got the dough. These guys were amazed that there were a group of women who were serious about a damn Christmas party. We planned to have about 500 toys for the kids. We didn't know exactly who was coming. We asked the
women and we asked the men: Please notify your shop steward as to who is coming, so as to make a reservation.” We got absolutely no response. But when we opened the hall, I never saw so many kids in all my life. We had an absolutely marvelous time. In Westinghouse, they still talk about this Christmas party. But when this activity ended for us, it was a letdown for the women. We had nothing to do. Then the whole question of the IUE and the UE came up. We just met once and severed our relationships, because the lines
were sharply drawn among us and our husbands, and never the twain shall meet again. But we saw here, I mean, for me, here were some women who were among a certain stratum, wives of the union activists, who came and stuck to the organization because they saw their husbands doing a certain thing and certainly they were expressing their husbands. But we never could get the rank and file women, who stayed away because their husbands stayed away from the union and they in turn stayed away from the ladies auxiliary. When we look for how the women are going to organize themselves, we have to look for a new form that they re going to take on and this will show us how they will organize themselves in their future struggles.</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> That was Maggie from Philadelphia.</p>
<p>I'm Chester from New York: You know, there's a little precedent for a man talking on a women's panel. In 1851, when Wendell Phillips addressed a meeting on women' a rights, one of the resolutions passed by that meeting stated: “Resolved: we are not discussing here whether women are or are not capable of equal rights.” Now it's a funny thing that it's a hundred years ago since that resolution was passed by Wendell Phillips and the others, and now another meeting dealing with the question of women doesn't have to pass that resolution again, but acts on the basis that what is involved here is not the relative merits of the sexes. Quite apart from anything else, I listened here with my mouth open, that isn' t quite true, but with a big gin on my face,
because we were really moving some place. We were moving. Any other place in the radical movement that I have seen (I haven' t seen many, but I've seen them since '34.), the woman question has become a question of men vs. women. Men, the brutes, were abusing women and had the attitude that if you kept them barefoot and pregnant, you'd keep them out of trouble. And women, in turn, were rebelling against men, but what could the poor man do and what could the poor woman do to cut across this whole confusion? The answer to this has never appeared before, never before, not since I have known the radical movement, and I'm pretty sure not in the one hundred years of the revolutionary movement in the United States. What we have said today, and this is the thing that is so very important for what we're going to develop, is not that men and women are in antagonistic relationship to each other, but that women, and here is the thing that we are beginning to learn, because of the fine work that our Los Angeles women friends have begun to do, that women are doing things for
themselves, positive things, not fooling around with the other business. Because, actually, women abuse men in the home, men abuse women in the home, and together they abuse the kids and it's a great mess. Unless, and we have this in our “Balance Sheet Completed,” we pose this clearly, we'll go off again. In the “Balance Sheet Completed,” there's that little section on women. We say that in the old. organization the woman question appeared as a struggle between the sexes. Why? Because each person had a certain impulse for revolt, a certain desire to break through the shackles, but unable to find a revolutionary line, they had to grind against each other and it all went to hell. It happened for the youth and for the Negroes in the same way in the old organization. We're leaving that behind. That is the question that we had started to pose abstractly in the Balance Sheet Completed before the women actually began to work it out and this is a leap.</p>
<p>Just a word on the children, and then I'll be finished, It isn't an accident that such close attention should be paid to children, in the discussion of the Woman Question, not at all, because they have actually the task of raising the children all day long. But it isn't an exclusive question for women. Let me trade on my prerogative as a father and comment on this subject. Fathers get concerned about kids, plenty concerned, but it takes a different form. The authoritarian attitude of adults toward kids is what is involved here. We see it one way from the women. As we go further, we'll see that it's the transformation, the revolutionary changes in the method of production, that's involved here. The thing moves into its proper perspective when we see that the proletariat emancipates itself and all of humanity. Just a last word, in the kids. I have an eight and a half year old son. He got mad at me one day and I suspect it was with good reason. He looked up at me and said, “You know, the trouble with the adults is that they all want to be big shots.” It's true, out of the mouths of babes, it's true. They all want to be big shots.</p>
<p>Bill from Los Angeles: Now we've learned today that the struggle of women will be carried out by women themselves. And I'm painfully aware, of that, being a slightly chastised bourgeois on the whole. I know quite clearly some of the problems. Well, anyway, I had quite an interesting experience, something that I thought was extremely important, dealing with the relationship of the man to the home. I came home from work one day and I came into our house and suddenly, the neighbor woman and her child ran out of our house. I felt kind of peculiar and I said, “My God, what kind of fellow am I that I chase these women out? Well, believe me, it took me many months before I was able to break that down.” </p>
<p>It seems that as soon as the husband comes home, the neighboring women just run out of the house they are visiting because the master is coming home and they cannot get in his way. Everything has to be done to make him comfortable. It took me many, many months before I could break down some of this, and I felt very elated when we finally set down and had some beer with some of the neighboring women and they even cussed in front of me. Oh boy, that was really a new advancement, because they felt more natural with me!</p>
<p>Roberts of New York: Friends, as we were listening to Simpson speak on the woman question this morning, some of the friends looked at each other and said, “This reminds us of the 1948 convention and the report on the Negro question. It was one of most comprehensive analyses that I have ever heard in the movement, the conception of total crisis, the conception of concrete social relations, the conception of revolt, of the whole world scene, and of the Russian question. It went from the Russian question, where we were in 1941, to the woman question, where we are in 1951. Stated clearly was our opposition to all other political groupings, the differentiation from them, and this road on which we have started so surely.</p>
<p>I remembered also 1947, when we wrote in the “American Worker” about the women, and said it was not a question of the antagonism between men and women, but the alienation of the emancipated woman. It was quite abstract at the time, and I hope that our abstractions will always move so surely, and in reality, so quickly to the concrete.</p>
<p>Now I can remember at the 1950 convention last year when the old organization took the position on Pablo. We did two things. On the one hand, Minelli got up and warned them: “We're not debating with you any longer,” We put aside that old type of debating in the abstract, one political group recruiting from the other. And, on the other hand, Simpson came in from Los Angeles and started telling us what she was doing on the woman question.</p>
<p>It was a fresh start for us; the two things took place at the same time. We put them aside and we started on this new road. So many philosophical problems are resolved here. You are a vulgar materialist in reality, and we have been for so many years ridding ourselves of all conceptions of vulgar materialism and thinking only of the way in which the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy thinks of human beings as things. You get rid of vulgar materialism only when you are able to deal with these most intimate social relations in social terms, in terms of a world conception. That is what has happened here.</p>
<p>I forget which of the friends said that “machines cannot substitute for new social relations.” That's the summation of our attitude on vulgar materialism, a whole century of our attitude on dialectical materialism is contained therein. Trotsky said that we should come to grips with American Imperialism and American pragmatism. I listened to the friend speak about education and plan, and progressive education and the way in which ideas are imposed on children, in reality, we've made our analysis of Dewey. We really have no problem with Deweyism which has dominated American thought, with the ideas that you have to enlighten the masses and enlighten the children starting in the schools and in the home. We have no problem with them any longer; we've settled our debt with them, with that type of American thought.</p>
<p>Now, having said that, I want to say one word about the children. I am, as you know, in favor of going to lower and lower layers, but I would suggest that we do not start the discussion on children, even though the woman question certainly involves the question of the woman's relationship to her children and the man's relationship to his children. It certainly involves that, but I would suggest that we don't start the woman question with a lot of various aspects or a disproportionate emphasis on the question of children.</p>
<p>First of all, I believe that some children would like to speak for themselves and they don't happen to be here. Apart from that, the idea that we speak for children, which I am sure no one wants to do, is not correct. Then there is the fact that we are just beginning on the woman question. It took us five years before we wrote a resolution on the Negro question. We have been battling with certain questions with regard to the informal social groupings in the plant for many, many months and I can assure you, friends, that in New York we went around and around the question. We talked with friends in Detroit; we didn't even want to put forward views of that sort until we had a chance to see what the friends thought about it!</p>
<p>There are different ways of handling some of these questions. You don't start a question with a lot of differences, sharpened differences, and so forth. I can assure you, friends, from some years of experience, that when you do it that way, you don' t develop your line concretely; instead, you begin freezing positions; you begin freezing your ideas into abstractions. The firm manner in which we have gone on the woman question, from our abstractions in 1947 to the magnificently concrete analysis of Simpson this morning, was accomplished by keeping our eyes upon the concrete, the development of the concrete, and, the way in which our organization has always developed these questions, by seeing where we are going and developing them among ourselves.</p>
<p>Orlando from Pittsburgh: I'd just like to share with the convention a few of the many millions of things that I learned about women in the factory from the women in the factory that I worked in for two years, two very short years. The women in the shop in which I worked were mature women. Most of them were married. Of those who were single when they came in, at least 95% of them were married when I left a year ago. Most of them had children and they had the double duty of working for ten hours, six days a week on the line and then going home and taking care of their families and trying to sandwich in taking care of the children.</p>
<p>In addition to this, it was the policy of the company in the shop in which I worked to try to keep a greater hold on the workers, to try to prevent a little bit of militancy on their part, by hiring the wives of the men who worked in the shop. This meant that if the shop went out on strike, the whole family went out on strike. It was a means which the company used to try to hinder a little bit of the militancy of the workers in the shop.</p>
<p>The women in the shop in which I worked weren't kidding themselves at all: they were working because they had to work. There wasn't any desire to go into the factory. It's true that once they got into the shop the thing that kept them there and enabled them to endure the hard physical labor which they were subjected to were the social relations and the social contacts and the intimate relationships that they established with the group of women in the shop. But that was something they found after they went into the shop and it wasn't the reason that any of them went into the shop. None of them were kidding themselves about liking the work or about liking to get up every morning. Nevertheless, what kept them in the shop was that the girls themselves were so wonderful.</p>
<p>The shop was organized about a month before I was hired in. The conditions were pretty horrible in the beginning. The girls used to gather in the rest room before work started and share liniment with each other,
and bathe each other's hands in the basin. A common remark that could be heard up and down the line all through the day was: “Gee, the only thing that gets me through the day is how swell the girls are.” It meant a lot to know that no matter how miserable you were everyone of the other girls there was just as miserable, if not more miserable. It did make you feel wonderful if somebody else had sorer muscles than you did. You could give somebody else a tip, instead of getting a tip yourself.</p>
<p>The reaction of the girls to a choice between what they found in the factory and what they would find at home was a fifty-fifty proposition. The way they expressed it was “Well, if the alternative was to work in the home, stay home and drudge in the home alone and isolated, or to come into the factory and drudge for eight and ten hours a day under conditions like these with a lot of other people, well, it was a hell of an alternative to have to make.” They didn't really went either choice. Their problems were not solved by the social relations that they found in the shop. But that was the good thing that they found in the shop. But that wasn't the real solution. It wasn't what they wanted fundamentally any more than the conditions of freedom they had in the home were what they wanted.</p>
<p>While they were in the shop working on the line, the girls used to talk about the things that they could do if they were home, a new cake recipe that they wanted to try or the fact that they were away from their children, the suit or garment that they wanted to make, the kind of a home they wanted to make for their husbands and themselves and their children. These are the things they missed and. they used to talk about it in terms of, “Well, it's a hell of a life when you must stay home and stay isolated.” Only they didn't use the word isolated. Nevertheless, they felt that in the home you can move about when you want to, something you couldn't do in the shop. You can go to the can when you want to. If you feel like baking a cake, you can bake a cake. You don't have to do the same operation all day long for eight or ten hours.</p>
<p>It is clear that what they wanted was the social relationships. They wanted to be social beings and they wanted to be absorbed in the social process, but at the same time, they wanted this under conditions of free associations and the alternative that was left to them in bourgeois society of the home such as it is or the shop such as it is, was not a solution for them.</p>
<p>When children came, there was great bitterness on the part of most of the girls and there were about a dozen girls who took maternity leave while I was there. Everybody knew that when the girls took maternity leave they would be back within a year. Most of the girls did come back as soon as the period allotted to have a child was up.</p>
<p>I only have one minute and I want to make one point on the intimacy that developed among the women workers. It's been pointed out by the men that there is an intimacy that develops among women workers that is part of a relationship that men workers do not have with each other on a group basis, although they may have it with some particular buddy or another. The girls tore their husbands apart and compared husbands. They were unanimous in their unexpressed (that is, formally unexpressed) contempt for exceptional women. They were greatly resentful at having to do equal work with men, and frequently harder work than men, without getting equal pay. They resented having men as supervisors, overseers and in every conceivable post of authority. Everyone who wore a white shirt and had any position of authority over them, including the committeemen, were men.</p>
<p>This resentment manifested itself in the form of bitterness toward men in general, but, except for very rare instances, the women workers that I knew never reacted to the situation in the way that has been pointed out as being characteristic of the exceptional woman, by trying to imitate men or by trying to be as good as men or do the work better or say that they could do exactly the same as men. As a matter of fact, it was just the opposite, and the girls in our shop used their status as women to better their status. I think this must be common among all women workers. Everybody knew that you could use your status as a woman during your menstrual period to get your relief period lengthened, that you could use a particular state law, such as the law which provides seats for women. Of course, we had to fight a year and a half to have the law put into effect in our shop, but when we did get the seats, the men used to come over and try to swipe them in a very comradely fashion of course. The women would always go and bring their seats back to their own little section, or harem, and pat the guys on the shoulder, saying, “It's tough, but after all that's your problem. You get seats; we got ours.”</p>
<p>Ryan, Los Angeles: There are three groupings in the woman question, the woman in the home, the woman who works and the Negro woman. I would like to take up just for a few minutes the Negro woman, which will also take up the working woman. The Negro women in this society have to face three problems: one, being a Negro, two, being a worker, three, being a woman. The woman in this society today has a better chance than the women of the olden days. In my opinion, one of the greatest women of the olden days was Sojourner Truth.</p>
<p>Sojourner Truth was a woman who not only dealt with the Negro slavery problem, but she also dealt with the woman question. She traveled by foot across the country, from one end to another. She would speak on street corners, in churches, or anywhere people would gather to listen to her. She defied anyone who tried to stop her, man or law, and in doing so, she won the respect of men and women all over the country, not only proving that she was a great Negro, but that also she was a great woman.</p>
<p>The woman today has a better chance of starting. She has social clubs, church groups and other organizations, but the most important one of these is the trade union. The Negro woman has, in the past few years, had the most difficult time finding a job. She has had to pound the pavement seven or eight months out of the year. If she was lucky, she got a job in a factory. If she didn't, she had to take what she could get.</p>
<p>But once inside the factory, she did not hesitate to start to work on the problem as a whole and on her special problem. She talked with the workers next to her on the line and she would get their experiences and give them hers. These talks sometimes would result in groups being formed and then these groups would take on forms of organizations. Sometimes they were only groups of Negroes or sometimes they were mixed groups. In these groups, they would try to decide what to do and the best way to do it. Some of their expressions in these groups would be breaking down discrimination.</p>
<p>I remember back during the war there was one such group in New York. This group of women were discussing the events of the day, which at the time were events of the war. They were discussing the discrimination that was being carried on by the Army and the navy and the experiences of the boys overseas.
The women would go out in these groups together and sometimes if they were barred from theaters, a skating rink or someplace else, they would fight the case and take it to court, and these were some of their ways of expressing themselves through this organization.</p>
<p>Now the women of today are discussing the coming war in their plants and shops. I happen to be working in a hospital where there is a mixed group, although the woman are mostly Negroes. We eat together at the same table. The discussion they have is what's going to happen when the next world war comes, or will there be a next world war? One girl thought there would be no world war. She was a Negro and she had no affiliations with any political group. She'd worked in shops before, but she was very new to a situation of this kind and she said that before there would he a next world war, the people in this country would have a war right here. Not understanding what she meant, all the rest of the girls joined in the conversation immediately and said that what she said was true. They said that we would fight here. They said that they would go out and get guns and help the men fight too, if it came to a question of our fighting, if Truman or the rest of them would bring on another war.</p>
<p>I happen to be the vice-president of my local union. I didn't want to, but I had to. Very little discrimination is shown in the hospital, except from the workers. But this is going to be found in any shop until these people are educated to the point of understanding the Negroes or any minority and their problems.</p>
<p>I was told to announce my name, but I have none, so I'll leave it anonymous. I'd like to relate a little incident that happened over at my local this week. I was serving on the election committee so I had to be down
at the local. I come in and one of the secretaries say to me: “How come you're inside? I thought you wouldn't cross the picket line.” I asked her, “What picket line?” I said, “I didn't see any.” So she tells me that there is some woman picketing the local. So I said to her, “Where will I find out more information about this?” She says, “Oh, some of the guys probably are around. You can ask them.”</p>
<p>Well, I went outside and sure enough, there were some of the local bureaucrats and they were standing around talking and griping about the women that had been picketing them. I went over and I asked a few questions and they told me that there were a few woman that had been picketing the local. These women had very little seniority. They wanted their jobs back and they came to picket the local for the local to get their jobs back. Well, naturally, the bureaucrats saw it only one way, that Reuther had put these women up to doing that. He may or may not have; that isn't too important to us.</p>
<p>I remember about a month ago, or about two months ago, there was a small article in the Detroit Times, which quoted some woman who had worked in the Press Steel Building, who was leading this group. She was the representative of the group. She said that she had gone down to the local time and again and had spoken to the vice president of her unit, which was the Press Steel Unit where they had had some big layoffs about five, six months ago on account of the runaway shop.</p>
<p>It seems that in Ford, there's a long tradition, especially since the end of the war, of the company giving the women a raw deal. I imagine that exists in most other places. As a matter of fact, I remember after I was at Ford about six months, they had a big change-over and they laid off the people without seniority and then they laid all the women off regardless of their seniority. Then they went to the others according to their seniority. But that's aside from this little incident anyway. Well, the bureaucrats were standing around and naturally, they were cussing out the women. They were saying: “They got ten months seniority and they want their jobs back.” They started complaining about the fact that the women won't go on any job the company puts them on. It's an old trick of the company to put the women on the roughest jobs in order to force them out of the shop. The rule is that if you bump somebody from another job and you have more seniority than the other person, you can stay in the shop. But if you refuse to go on the job the company puts you on, you are out. Obviously, the company had done that to these women.</p>
<p>Well, these bureaucrats were in their own way justifying the company. They were blaming the women for refusing to do some of these heavy jobs. They had done nothing about it. These guys were just cussing them out. I have a policy of not arguing with them or discussing with them but just asking questions, and I found this out: this group of women who got this raw deal came down to the local and obviously didn't get satisfaction there. They tried to reach their own unit chairman. He gave them the run-around. They probably went to the international and the international, playing union politics, sent them out to picket the local. This may be true or it may not be true, I'm not sure.</p>
<p>The point is, these women got together themselves, there were no politicos involved in it. If there were Stalinists involved in it I'm sure they wouldn't have picketed the Local, because right now the Stalinists have
a honeymoon with Stelletto, president of the Local.</p>
<p>So these women followed the regular procedure and in a way you can say they mobilized themselves. That's what I liked about the whole thing, and that's why I thought I would relate the incident here. I didn't organize this material because it just dawned on me while I was sitting back there that this is the woman question being discussed and that maybe this is the agenda for it. So there's your little story.</p>
<p>I'm Tressa from Philadelphia. There were several points that struck me as I heard the talk, especially on self-creativity of children. I remarked to somebody, “Everybody knows that children are self-creative,” and somebody said, “No, they don't know that,” and that made me think about Bryant's talk.</p>
<p>I thought it was excellent in many respects but I wondered if there wasn' t a plan in her talk about the child in the future society. Now we have no blueprint for the future society. We don't know whether a child, (as in the primitive society), has to help his mother or father do some sort of work. We don't know what the future will have but we do know that the bourgeoisie have been imposing all sorts of plans on people, making them feel that they must do something with themselves, and I think we should keep that very clear.</p>
<p>I also felt that the child should feel that he is needed and I think this ties in very concretely with our society. A woman feels that she needs something and a child feels that he needs something and I think this is definitely tied up with what we're seeking, Socialism.</p>
<p>Now how to go about it? That's the thing I'll be waiting to hear, some program to attack this problem at this point. There was another point made about the plan, was it Norway where women get vacations? Well, I think that's a rather dangerous thing to play around with because Russia gives women vacations. I think that we should strive for something that has something more to it than just getting vacations. I think all these things will be solved.</p>
<p>Coming back to self-creativity, I happened to be in a camp that is mainly working class children, in fact you couldn't go there unless you couldn' t afford a pay camp. I want to tell you that I saw self-creativity in children that you never see in the bourgeoisie. These children, in three days, created plays and costumes and things that no child that I have bean in contact with, who have had music and dancing, could have done under those circumstances. I want to say that this self-creativity is certainly in the masses and we know it's there. Well, I wanted to clear that point in Bryant's speech.</p>
<p>Greg of Los Angeles: I think one thing that escapes a lot of tie is the tremendous breadth of the woman question. First of all, it's not just something that is characteristic of this period, but it spans three historical
periods.</p>
<p>Today you find feudal manifestations right along side of the manifestations of the future of socialism and in this sense the three periods of feudalism, capitalism and socialism are incorporated in the woman question, and I think we should realize the breadth of that.</p>
<p>In the home you have this feudal aspect, this feudal structure, this hang-over, which is completely hollow in terms of any meaning for this age. The structure of the home is a form without essence, that is, the woman is restricted to a completely meaningless, artificial straight-jacket of social customs and mores against which she rebels. She sort of lives in a haunted house, so to speak, and I think a lot of women feel the same. They are living meaningless lives and an empty social pattern.</p>
<p>On the other hand you have the revolutionary aspects of the woman question; you have the woman in the factory, where you have this socialization which is characteristic of the coming society counterposed against this medieval phase. The woman in the factory, it seems to me, is a very revolutionary element from the standpoint of her not having any managerial unionist bureaucratic element in her, since in the working class she is relatively new. She's uncontaminated by bureaucratism and pretty much spontaneous in her reactions to the oppressors of the union bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the bosses on the other. I think the recent document on the woman in the factory is a concrete statement of this.</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> We are an hour behind schedule which isn't good because we've got a lot to take up and we still have to take up the most important part of the convention and that is program and perspectives. There is a question by the presiding committee that the discussion be cut short right now and that the main speaker make her summary and that all conclude the woman's panel. Is there any objection to this procedure?</p>
<p class="information">You see this is just the beginning of the discussion, we've got lots of time. I mean people will have to write and develop these ideas in the coming months so I don't think that there's any question of not enough discussion.</p>
<p class="information">From the floor: I just want to know how many more want the floor!</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> There are four more speakers and five minutes apiece makes it twenty minutes and that's too long. We've got to get on with the proceedings.</p>
<p>Simpson: I would like to renounce five minutes to give Jane the time she needs.</p>
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> All right then, five minutes for Jane and five minutes for Simpson.</p>
<p>Jane from Los Angeles: I thoroughly agree with Roberts that the discussion on children should not be the starting off place or the central theme of the discussion on the woman question. It's a later stage. For that reason I spoke for just a few minutes this morning on children.</p>
<p>But in view of the line that the discussion has taken, particularly in view of Bryant's remarks, we felt impelled, those of us who are responsible for the writing of the document, to reply to some of the remarks made.</p>
<p>After ten years as a practitioner of progressive education in the public and private grade schools throughout the country, in Harlem during the 1943 race riots, among Mexican children in Denver who couldn't speak English, among bourgeois children throughout the country, I have made my break with progressive education. This document and the section in it on children represents that break with progressive education, with which I was intimately associated for ten years.</p>
<p>We are primarily concerned today with the relationship between the child and his parent, and his relationship to bourgeois society. Now the differences between our point of view and Bryant's have been expressed quite well, quite clearly by the friend from Philadelphia who spoke a few minutes ago. She sums it up very well in her references to the plan contained in Bryant's document. We are not discussing Bryant's concrete experiences with children, many of which are valid. What we are concerned with is her solution which contains in it the essence of progressive education.</p>
<p>The “guidance and direction” and her own plan, which is contained in these words, “work they must,” and then some other words following it which go something to this effect: “Tasks must be found for children in the future society.” This is exactly what we are breaking with. We don't want to do things to children and for children. We are not imposing any plan on children. We're not trying to make them feel necessary by finding tasks for them to do, this is what progressive education has done for children. They will be necessary to society, they're not going to be made to feel necessary, they will be necessary to society. They'll be necessary as 'developing' social beings and every stage of their development will be enjoyed by adults. We will learn from them, we will work with them, we will cooperate with them and so forth and so on.</p>
<p>The bourgeoisie today are very much aware of the struggle of the youth and the children against capitalist society and their solution is to contain the energy of the adults and the children until the day that they
can go to work for capitalism, either in the home or in the factory. They force the children and the youth, or they try to force them, to live in the future. The progressive educators among the bourgeoisie try to soften this
blow by finding tasks, by making them feel necessary, by somehow trying to subordinate their energy to the capitalist society.</p>
<p>In conclusion I just want to make the point again that we have no plan for children in the future society – that we're not imposing anything on them. We feel that we will enjoy them as developing social beings and out of that enjoyment will come certain practices, certain developments, of adults and children in this society. This will be the future.</p>
<p>Simpson: I just want to say first of all that all of us very happy that the woman question is finally on the book, so to speak, and we're very, very glad about that. I'd just like to say a few words about what one of the friends said about her development in other organizations and what she has come to today.</p>
<p>I would like to say that our development was almost an exact parallel to that and that it isn't accidental that we develop in the same way and we finally come to the same conclusion, that is, the conclusions that have been expressed today. It's wonderful to hear in the discussion, all of the things that we have left out and are conscious of having left out. All of the other woman and a lot of the men too, have filled these things in for us. And in the discussion we've gotten a far more rounded picture than what we came with. We know a little more about the effect of the factory on a woman.</p>
<p>There is really a summary that has been made of all of the discussion on the workers' question that has not been made an the youth question or on the woman question, and that is the conception of forced labor.</p>
<p>I think that that conception sums up all of our ideas on the woman question and particularly on what one of the others said about not liking home work and not liking factory work and rejecting society wherever women are. It is precisely because of the nature of the work being forced and pushed upon them, that they absolutely refuse to accept it.</p>
<p>Now another problem immediately arises with the middle class woman, whom we really haven't discussed too much. I feel that that point should be a little more elaborated in relation to the point that we're making about other women, that is, working class women. The women of the petty bourgeoisie, unlike any other section of the petty bourgeoisie, have absolutely no ties with this society. The man of the petty bourgeoisie has perhaps a business that he would like to keep and to hold on to, or a practice of same sort. The woman has absolutely no ties and we have found that the petty bourgeois woman is extremely receptive to our ideas, does not mind being referred to as the petty bourgeois woman, and as a matter of fact appreciates it because everybody has not shown her problem up, as in the case of the working class woman in the radical movement.</p>
<p>O.K., the proletarian woman is exploited here, here and here. What about the petty bourgeois woman; she's over there. She's not really part of us and cannot be included with us. That isn't true; she's really one of the petty bourgeoisie that can be easily included with us and can easily accept our ideas on every question precisely because she can accept our ideas on the woman question.</p>
<p>I want to clear up a point that the friends make on vacations, just in passing. It isn't that we find that vacations are a solution, but that it is extremely indicative today that the labor bureaucracy, as well as other sections of society, are trying to mend the women question with tape, or whatever they have, (it is vacations in this case). They'll give out anything these days. They give out twenty five thousand dollar prizes for slogans; they'll do anything to keep her quiet and to keep her confused, if they can, that is.</p>
<p>Now I'd like to say that as a result of this discussion, which has been, for me, one of the most wonderful discussions I've ever attended, and as a result of the wonderful responses from all of the people involved, we feel, and all of us felt, during lunch, that we can go out and really give them hell.
</p><p class="information">
<span class="info">Chairman:</span> That concludes the woman panel.</p>
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Selma James 1951
On the Woman Question: An Orientation
A discussion held on September third, 1951
Source: document of the Johnson-Forest Tendency;
Transcribed and HTML Markup: Sally Ryan;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris Clayton 2006.
Selma James delivered this report on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Selma James was an important figure in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a co-author of the pamphlet, A Woman’s Place, during the Correspondence period. In the 1955 split with Dunayevskaya, she sided with C.L.R. James and married him after he divorced Constance Webb. She eventually separated from James and became a leader in the radical women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s. She was also closely associated with the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the wages for housework campaign. She is involved now with the Global Women’s Strike organization (www.globalwomenstrike.net).
A new stage has been reached. We are finished with endless discussions on male chauvinism. We have no more time for individual attacks against individual men who are backward or against individual women who do not want to be “emancipated.” These people will reorient themselves and will be drawn into their own struggles.
Now for the first time we know where we are going. We did not develop accidentally. The ideas explicit in this document are the concrete manifestations of the movement of capitalism and the reaction of the masses of women today. It is this reaction that we shall attempt to concretize in this document.
Bebel and the other historians on the woman question have analysed women in other ages, other struggles, other cultures. But it is we who must express women in 1951, what they feel about their lives, what they want and how they plan to get it.
We counterpose this to any external plan of the bourgeoisie, put forth by social workers, magazine writers, psychoanalysts, and any section of women who place themselves not within the struggle of women but above it, and therefore in opposition to it.
The Woman in the Home
We start from the position of women in the home for that is where the majority of women are, that is where the problem of women begins and that is the place to which all working women must return daily.
Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships. The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last
stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation. Here, existing in the home outside the mainstream of society – the factory – the woman prepares her husband for a social labor process which is denied to her.
The repetitious, monotonous, lonely, unceasing and incomplete work of women in this society is opposed to women as human beings. Working for individuals whom she knows and loves does not compensate for the fragmented and meaningless labor she is forced to perform. Even her imaginative enterprises in the home are limited to certain spheres and are always individual. Contrast the glamorizing of women's work by women' s magazines and radio soap operas to what the wife of one worker said in generalizing the position of women under capitalism: “What I gotta do for the check!”
Women want the technological advances of modern society in their own surroundings. But a new Bendix washing machine or a GE garbage disposal will no more satisfy the most pressing social needs of women than a new Ford will substitute to the worker for new social relations in production. The modern machine divorces woman from her work but ties her to the monotony of it.
Even those middle class women for whom servants and machines do the physical labor in the home are involved in hollow relationships with their families and society, so little is demanded of all women; less is demanded of the woman who is divorced from physical labor.
The evolution of women from production and men from the home creates a barrier between them and neither is capable of understanding the life of the other.
“I've been working for about two months now and I really like it. I was getting sick and tired of staying home all the time. Housework gets so monotonous – the same thing day in, day out – no one to talk to but your neighbor, then pretty soon your neighbor begins to get on your nerves. No kidding, I think I would have been ready for a sanitarium if I stayed home another month. I was getting to the point where I couldn't stand it. You do the same thing, you see the same people, everything is the same. Down here, there is something different to do every minute. Talking to people and getting acquainted. Now when I get home I really enjoy doing my housework. The funny thing about it is that I have much more to talk to my husband about, too. I didn't used to have a thing to say at the supper table, but now when my husband talks about things that are happening at work, I tell him what I've been doing too. We seem to have a lot more fun together.”
The most obvious oppression that weighs heavily on most woman is their dependence an their husbands for food and shelter and for whatever money they are to spend as they wish. One housewife placed all her old clothing on a clothes line strung across the living room of her home and put a “used clothing” sign outside. She explained to her neighbor that she was giving away most of the clothing, but she added: “I just have to have same money of my own.”
The man makes all final decisions. Even in those homes where the woman plans and organizes the household affairs, he has the last word.
When a man goes out to work it is generally understood that he is earning a living for himself and his family. He brings home the pay check and among us (I mean the Mexicans) as a rule, this check is turned over to the wife who is supposed to see that this money is used to pay the bills, buy the groceries and so on. It' s the money of the family. Even if he hands it to me, I never quite feel that it's mine. I still have to ask him how it should be spent. And what I don't see is, if my husband needs money, he just gets it, no explanations. He gets his hair cut, cigarettes or what have you. He needs more money? He gets some more. Me, on the other hand, I see a dress I like, I have to think twice before I get it. Usually, I end up by telling him about it. Even if he suggests I get the dress, half the fun of getting the dress is gone. I had to let him know I was getting it. I never had the feeling of the money belonging to me to do with as I please. Who is the boss in this house? He is, though this he will never admit. But nothing can be done without his consent. If, on occasion, as it has happened, I let the children go, he gets angry with me for not having them ask his permission. When he orders something to be done around the yard or house (and I said orders!) he expects it done, no excuses accepted. What am I supposed to be doing around here but to see that he is obeyed. About fifteen minutes before he gets home, we are rustling around trying to get things done so there won't be any complaints.
When we were buying furniture, we needed a refrigerator, so we got it. We got everything we really needed, but I wanted an ironer. He didn't think it was important enough to buy. So I went to work and bought it. Even if it wasn' t a necessity, I wanted it. My reason for going to work is so that I can get what I want without asking him first or letting him know about it. If I have my money, I go get what I want. I don't ask him.
The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together – in their sexual relationship. (Very often sex becomes a weapon in the hands of the woman but this weapon is turned against her.) Without a solution to the social problems of society there can be no solution to the sexual problem.
The separation between the lives of men and women expresses itself in many different ways. Men and women enjoy their children neither together nor separately. Society has placed the woman in the isolation of the home and as a result has made her incapable of producing a social being. The woman tries to control her children for her whole life generally revolves around them. The child senses and resents this and says: “Mommy, I can't love you, because you love me too much.” The woman is ruthless in crushing all signs of independence in the child, since independence means loss of control. Most women prefer babies because the baby cannot successfully rebel and is completely dependent upon the mother.
As the child develops, the mother stands as a policeman defending the home from the child. All the child's activities are seen in terms of the work it will bring her. She in turn tries to pass off her work on the child who instinctively rebels. One pregnant woman was told by her neighbor: “If you have a, girl, she will help you with the dishes; if you have a boy, he will help your husband in the yard, so you better pray for a girl.”
The woman's most creative work turns against her. She has devoted her life to her child but at each point of his development, he has been further alienated from her, and in the final analysis, the only social relationship that has been built up between them is based on pity and obligation. Today's children develop in conflict with their parents.
The Woman in the Factory
Support of the modern family is no longer completely the man's burden. Today a woman marries knowing that the man will need her financial help.
It used to be that when you got married, you had a home all ready and you stayed home and took care of it. But nowadays a girl gets married and goes right on working. A man just can't manage all by himself.
The isolation in the home also drives many working class women to seek a socialized existence in the factory. She wants to be with other men and women.
“At home all I do is to sit end mend and watch the budget and wash the same old kitchen sink day in and day out. Almost anyone would rather work than do that all the time. There's always something happening at work, sort of an excitement to it. When you get home, it makes housework seem like a pretty quiet routine business.”
Women show their desire to be independent of their husbands by going to work. The whole family relationship is changed when the woman faces the man as an equal partner.
“Since I've been working my husband says I am too damn independent and I suppose it's true. Be says I never have time for him any more and that I always want my own way and I can see it. Working every day I get used to doing what I please; then I go home I keep on doing it.
Nowadays women are independent, so that they know if they can't get along with a man, they can get along without him and that makes a big difference.”
For whatever reasons women work, the responsibility of the home is theirs even while they are working. “Full-time wage earner and part-time housewife” describes the dilemma of the working woman. The woman is compelled to organize her housework. The husband and children must participate in caring for the home.
“Nowadays, I have to plan my housework down to the last minute. I usually sit here at work and plan what I have to do for the next few days ahead. If I didn't do it that way, I never would get anything done. When I was home I used to do things more or less as I went along, but now I have to stick to some sort of schedule.
Before I began working my husband hardly came into the kitchen. When he came home from work he sat down and read the paper. He didn't give housework a thought. But before I began to work, my husband and I decided that he would have to help out, so now both he and the children work a lot more around the home. They help me with the dishes and the washing and the ironing. I guess if my husband didn't help me out I wouldn't be working too long.
Yes, I run my home differently. I learned to cut a lot of corners and now I just do the things that I have to do, like washing and ironing. Before I began to work, I liked to cook fancy dishes and do a lot of baking,
but now my family says that they haven't tasted a cake or pie of mine for months. And it's true, I just don't have time to bake or do things like that.”
Managing a home while working is difficult, but caring for the children is the major concern of most working women. Although they are willing and sometimes glad to cut corners on household work, it is with great feelings of resentment and guilt that the working mother leaves her children.
Working means that children must be cared for by others or left to their own devices and the latter alternative in the minds of many working women, particularly those belonging to minority groups, means juvenile delinquency.
“I think it's hard for a woman to work and look after her children the way she would like to. I know with myself I leave the house at seven in the morning and I don't get home until six o'clock and I have no way of knowing what they are doing; they are by themselves all day long. I tell them what to do. I tell them to be good but when I'm gone I can't really see what they are doing and it's easy for boys that age to get into trouble.”
Working mothers also wish that they weren't so abrupt and irritable with their families after a day's work, with cooking, cleaning and ironing yet to be done when they get home. As more and more women enter the factory, the home seems to become a place in which to eat and sleep while recreational activities occur outside the home. To many single women, the home no longer exists as the real center for family activity and marriage does not seem to offer to these women the personal fulfillment it once represented.
“My girl who is working is 26 years old but I don't know if that girl is going to marry. She doesn't want to very much. She says she has a good job and no worries why should she take a chance on marriage. Girls these days aren't like they were – not nearly so anxious to get married. Nowadays they earn their own money and don't need a man to support them.”
Although the woman is involved in new social relationships in the factory, she finds her work there hard and exhausting.
“It's a long grind, working eight hours on this machine. People say, “All you're doing is putting stock into the machine.” But it is hard, you know you've been working and then you go home to begin on the dishes and all the housework. It seems as if some folks never get a break. I could work from now until doomsday and never get anything done – and heaven knows a lot of women do .”
The Negro woman, oppressed as a woman, as a worker and as a Negro, bears the heaviest burden of all workers today. One Negro woman says:
'Domestic' has long been a term associated with Negro....Women in general, doing the same labor as a man, receive less in pay solely because they are a woman. The Negro woman receives even less because she is not only a woman, but a Negro woman. The problem magnifies because the Negro man is
also underpaid and the combined wages of husband and wife is equal to about the same wage of one partner of another race.”
The Negro woman must build a relationship with a husband who does the dirtiest jobs capitalism can create. Her struggles in the home and in the factory are the sharpest of any group of women. The Negro woman struggles the most, and from her oppressed position in American society today, the Negro woman will lead the vanguard struggle for a human existence for women and all workers. She is the closest to the solution implicit in the problems of all working people.
Like the woman's life in the home, woman's work in the factory is opposed to her as a human being and as a woman. The insoluble dilemma of the woman under capitalism is expressed by this factory worker:
“I really wish that I knew how to do something. I mean, something I like. Nursing maybe. I don' t want to work in a factory on a machine all my life. You know it's funny I really couldn't stand staying home, I know that. I would get tired of it. Just staying in the house all day isn't any life for women. You have to have something that holds your interest. I guess I'd almost have to work or I would go nuts.”
Factory women recognize clearly the degrading kind of work they are forced to do in the factory. Yet this work, because it is part of a social existence and provides a social arena for struggle, is still preferable to woman's life in the home. As always, capitalism is creating it's own grave-digger. For, as the needs of capitalist society force the women into the factory, she finds herself united with the man against bourgeoise society. Woman' s struggle against the individual man in the home is transcended by the class struggle against the domination of the machine, against capitalism. The advanced stage that the struggle enters today is a progression from the individual to the social struggle – from the individual to the social solution.
Today's Children
The child expresses the new society and is the concrete embodiment of the inevitability of socialism. In the creative energies which children display, in the free relationships which they attempt to establish between themselves and adults, in the manner in which they organize themselves at every opportunity, children help us to understand the potentialities of all workers.
Children's play is work – work which constantly challenges the child as an individual and as a social being. It is the new mode of labor – cooperative, creative, planned by the children themselves, developing a natural and spontaneous leadership, and obliterating all division between manual and mental labor. Children express in play what the worker is denied in production. Free and spontaneous play makes it possible for the child to organize himself, to associate and work with other children in his own way. The activity of a child shows us not only what he wants but what we all want.
Yet children live on the fringe of society, developing deep feelings of hostility and aggression toward the adult world. Lacking integration into the heart of capitalist society – production – the child feels that he is an appendage to society, not a dynamic part of it. His mother and father and teacher embody for him the tyranny of an alien world, the tyranny of a bureaucratic plan; yet the adults are tyrannized in turn by the same oppressive forces which do not allow the child to develop naturally.
Children in a socialist society must not be made to feel necessary (as the bourgeoises, progressive educators attempt to do); they must be necessary. There will be a pleasure and a satisfaction in living and working with a developing human being in a socialist society which every adult will need in order for him to completely mature.
As the child develops into a youth, he seeks to further integrate himself into adult society. He wants to play a role in production. As a child he knew that he was not complete (all human beings knows this) and in his play he expressed his incompleteness and his development. For the youth, his play – his sports and hobbies – must be transformed into productive and creative work in society.
The bourgeoisie are acutely aware of the struggle of the children and the youth against capitalist society. They try to satisfy these groups by attempting to force them to live in the future, to contain their energies and their desires until the day when they become adults – when they go to work for capitalism, either in the home or in the factory.
The progressive educators among the bourgeoisie try to soften the blow. The teacher is asked to arrange a cooperative attitude among the children, just as the industrial relations manager tries to manipulate the workers in the factory. Progressive education creates an artificial world for the child. It's insoluble dilemma is it's attempt to make the child adjust to society and to himself. This he cannot do and continue to live with himself.
Progressive education is the plan of the bureaucracy to plan away the child's oppression by isolating the child in a world of children, where he has little opportunity to challenge himself and the adults, who matter a great deal to him, for it is only through a constant and changing relationship, not only with other children but with adults, that the child develops. It is only in a socialist society that the child will have the opportunity to establish what is needed – a new relationship with adults, a relationship into which both will enter as freely associated individuals not competing with each other, not hostile to each other, but complementing each other.
Conclusion
We have shown that woman's place in the home is merely an extension of man's place in the factory. It is clear that woman's life in the home is totally opposed to her as a human being and as a woman.
Today women know they can no longer stay in the home as it is now constituted; nor can they allow men to leave the home as freely as they have in the past. Women do not want to leave the home entirely but have men enter it for the first time. Women do not want to he free of their children but for the first time free with them.
Women are striving to unite what has been so long divided – the home and the factory. They want not to be as oppressed as men, but free with them. The unity of home and factory is in reality the unification of men and women, the plan of freely associated men and women as opposed to the more systematic exploitation of woman and the exclusion of men from the home.
The lack of socialization in the home has prevented women from forming the concrete organizations found among the workers and other exploited sections. Nevertheless, the solution will come from woman for the universality of the individual experience in the home has at this stage forced the problems of women and the solution implicit in these problems into the consciousness of the working class.
Panel Discussion on the Woman Question
The schedule for the woman's panel is as follows – From 11:15 to 11:45 the main speaker, Simpson, will hold the floor. Then there will be discussion from 11:45 to 12:30. We will have a break for lunch and discussion will resume at 1:30, to 2:00. I'd last like to say one word about the Los Angeles women: Simpson, Jane and Nanette have written a document on the woman question which is available. They started developing this orientation and this line in L.A. when we were still in the old organization. One of the reasons I think it started there was because of the actions of one of the leaders of that organization who was very verbose on the woman question, but in a very limited way. She thought that it was a struggle between men and women and it stopped there. Our people got very sick and tired of all the talking and began discussing with women, proletarian women around them and began developing a line. They held a panel in L.A, which was very successful. It was presented six times. What you will hear today is more or less a result of all of this discussing with women outside of the organization and a development of an orientation. There is no resolution, “We're just beginning the discussion of the woman question here. Now I give you Simpson:
We have just left the radical movement in order to became revolutionists in the real sense of the word. Now the radical movement has had a program on everything. It has never had a total conception because it has never had a conception of total crisis and a total conception to meet that social crisis. We're the first group of revolutionists to go to all sections of society. Every grouping in society is for us a sounding board for our ideas and the place where we can learn the ideas of others.
Now the radical movement, contrary to popular belief, has always had a position on the woman question. It was a wrong position, but they had a position. Their position consisted of two main categories. They were very interested in the history of women. They were interested in their history under feudalism and under primitive communism. They were interested in the biological development of women, what constituted women, not as people, but as human animals. They were interested in another sense, too. They were interested in the woman question as a moral question, as a question of whether or not women have sexual emancipation. They had a basic solution to all this that runs like a thread, not only in their conception of the woman question, but through every other conception that they have ever put forth, and that is that kindness solves all evil. We'll go into that a little later.
It's extremely interesting that we find today far more discussions on the woman question than at any other time. They are going on everywhere. Over the radio, in soap operas, among psycho-analysts, in popular magazines; everyone is discussing the woman question. They discuss it well, they discuss it badly, but they discuss it. And that is extremely important for us. Now the psycho-analysts are going to solve the woman question by psycho-analyzing – that is pretty obvious. The social worker is going to arrange a cooperative attitude between the husband and wife. And between the children and parents, too, of course. Just as the industrial relations manager in the factory is going to arrange a cooperative attitude between the employer and the employee.
But there is one section of the opposition to the program for women
that has become obvious to us only in the last period and. particularly as a result of our experiences with the radical movement. That is a group of women, in particular, who place themselves above the struggle of women, who conceive of their position in society as an individual question and who have a particular
attitude toward men and toward women, as a result of a total conception of society in general.
These women are mainly petty-bourgeois women. They have careers. They do everything. They generally refuse to be confined to any of the things that women are naturally confined to in this society. Raising a family, for instance. Having to stay at hone. Being dependent upon the man financially, (which in many cases is necessary). They completely and absolutely disassociate themselves from whatever women are doing or saying. They have an attitude toward men. They don't like them, and they imitate them to the “t". We've seen that in the organization of the past; we've seen that in the outside world as well.
Now it is extremely interesting that in the radical movement it is precisely these women who most clearly express the incorrect position on the woman question. But in a certain sense it is pretty obvious why. There is no section of society today that can harness women except a section of women themselves. Women have no respect for anyone else.
Now in our conception we start with women in the home. We do so because that is precisely where women are and if they are not there – if they are in a factory, they still have to return home daily. That is where the basis of the woman question begins.
We start from the position that the struggle of the woman in the home is not a conflict which has nothing to do with the class struggle; that her position in the home is an extension of what the position of the man is in the factory; that her entire life and existence is dependent upon what happens to him there; that the home is not the center of society, although the bourgeoisie tries to say it is, but that the factory is and that she is excluded from this center of society.
She is excluded from production and as a result is excluded from the
socialization which has been one of the greatest accomplishments of modern capitalism. She is placed in the home and in a sense exposed to as feudal an existence as anyone can reach under this society. She is isolated in the sense that she doesn't work with people and any social relationships that she
establishes must be outside of her work area. They must be established outside with other women in the neighborhood perhaps, but not in her work.
She is tied to a monotonous and repetitious job which for her is never ended and which (this is less important, of course,) is never appreciated. She finds that in the home the slave-driver is her husband who has just come home from being slave-driven. She finds that she must fight with him in order to gain some sense of her own personality, her own individuality, and in order for the first time to raise off her knees and to get some self-respect.
Now, it is true that the isolation I have mentioned before is not very conducive to bringing about these mass organizations that we find among workers, among Negroes and even among the youth. But the women are organized, nevertheless. They are organized in two senses. First, today the experience
in the home of women and the reaction of women to the home is no longer an individual reaction. It is too universal for that. Divorce today is not one woman rebelling against society; it is all women breaking up the home as it is now constituted.
Secondly, they are organized in another manner – in the same manner as youth and in the same manner that workers are organized. They are organized in coffee klatsches in the morning and in beer parties in the afternoon. And the one thing that women discuss is the woman question. It is extremely difficult to get them to discuss anything else, as a matter of fact. That is what they are concerned with, that's what they talk about and that's where they find their solution. That's where they judge other women's behavior, either accept them or condemn then, and in these cases, incidentally, it is not a question of condemning men. If, for instance, one woman has a bad relationship with her husband and, doesn't separate, they do not attack the man. They attack the woman and say it's her fault, it's her job to do something about it. He's not to blame, he's a fool, it's not our business. It's her job to solve the problem and they judge women back and forth that way in this type of organization.
Now the relationship of the woman with her children is extremely indicative of her relationship to society as a whole. She looks at the child in the same way she looks at the kitchen sink. It is work which has a meaning for her because her life revolves about the child, but still leaves her incapable of forming any real social ties with the child which mean anything to her and mean anything to the child. She puts a great deal into that child, not in the sense that the bourgeois propagandists talk about, but in the sense that her whole life and existence generally revolve around the child, and more important than anything else to her is establishing with him a good relationship which the whole surroundings of the home and her whole relationship with society prohibits.
We find that the woman's most creative work in the home, in opposition to any work that she must perform on dishes or washing the floor is dealing with human beings. Yet this creative work turns against her and generally after years and years of imposed sacrifice, the child has nothing but pity and a sense of obligation left for his mother.
Now we find that the youth have a reaction, particularly to the home as it is now constituted – in two senses. They disassociate themselves from the discipline which the mother and the father are forced to impose upon them, and secondly, they go out of the home because they find no relationship there for them, and they oppose the relationship that generally exists between their parents. They don't want that, and they don't want to be involved in that. They are free new people and reject it all.
Now it's pretty obvious from this why women would want to go out to work. There are a lot of women in factories. You can talk a lot, you can
discuss a lot, most of all, you can work with other people and really lead a social existence. You can really find out what other people are thinking on
a larger scale, work with them, and cooperate with them.
As soon as the woman does go out to work, at complete change takes place in her relationship with society, with her husband, and with her child. With her husband, he's been left out of the vote, he comes home and takes his slippers and pipe, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. When she works that isn't true. He has got to participate in either washing the dishes or he must have a chore in the home – he must enter the home and participate in the work of the home.
With the child it isn't as good a relationship that is established
there, because the one thing that the woman fully regrets in going to work is leaving the child. She doesn't care very much about leaving the house, but it's leaving the child and the stability of the relationship which she wants to give him that she feels very guilty about. And she is very worried that as a result he will get into bad bands and into juvenile delinquency. Incidentally, that's one of the greatest discussions among women in the plant who have children. What they discuss is: how do you manage with your child, do they have good friends, and who takes care of him, and how do you make arrangements with him, etc. Women have devised the most wonderful plans of caring for the children while the child is at home and they at the factory – systems of calling up the children, of the children visiting certain people at certain times, of having the children sleep in the afternoon so that the mother can visit with them in the evening, and all sorts of devices so that they can break the separation down, and develop a relationship with their children, even though they are alienated from their children, separated from them a good part of the day.
Now it is extremely significant in our document that the one thing that we really lack is a discussion on the Negro woman. We haven't, not until the last couple of weeks, anyway, been able to really approach Negro women to get in contact with them and to get their ideas most clearly, but from what we already have, I would just like to say this: The Negro woman, when she goes out to work, is a woman, a Negro, and a worker. She doesn't separate these things, she unites them. She doesn't say – I am a Negro, therefore I most go to the N.A.A.C.P.; or a woman, therefore I must join the women' s organizations, the women's auxiliaries of the trade unions; and I am a worker, therefore I must join the trade union. She does none of these things. In each point in her struggle she unites all of the questions, and fights for them at each time. In the church, in the trade union, in the home. She is not a Negro, a woman, or a worker, she is a Negro woman worker.
In the document that we have just written we have discussed children. It isn't accidental that children should enter into the discussion on the woman question. This question involves the social relationships of all the family,
so children must of necessity be part of it. It is also interesting that we bring up the children question for another reason. The woman is mainly responsible for what happens outside of the factory, and if is her task to attempt a solution to the social relationships outside of the factory.
Despite the conflicts that exist between children and their parents in this society, and the inhibiting influence of these conflicts, and the bad relationships that of necessity must be established, children show, in their
relations to each other (not necessarily in their relations to adults), a new mode of labor, the same mode of labor that we speak of for all society. Children's play is cooperative; they get together and play “You do this, and when you come over to me you say this, and you should say that.” It's creative; they do as they please, and they come out with the most creative things that adults have ever seen. As a matter of fact, most adults have not seen most things that children come out with. It's planned, and very well planned, by themselves, in a free manner, in a manner that adults are not accustomed to. When adults come in they immediately interfere and interrupt. The leadership of children in their play is children, and it could be no other leadership, and they pick and choose their leadership, not by election, but by a natural system of leadership, by choosing. Now it's precisely because of the free activity that children manifest, that as soon as they come in conflict with adults (and the relationship between children and adults now becoming their class struggle), the play and the whole creative apparatus is immediately overthrown. At each point when the adult comes in, and starts to plan, and says: “Now we should have this sort of activity, and this sort of thing should go on", immediately it disrupts the whole activity and creativity of the child.
Now the social workers, knowing this very well, have a plan. They are going to plan the relationships between children and adults. Cooperation, they must cooperate. They must cooperate like the worker cooperates with the boss, (bosses should, that is), and like the woman must cooperate with her husband. The child must cooperate with the parents, the youth must cooperate with the parents, and so on down the line. Just as the industrial relations manager in the factory does it to the worker, the social worker does it to the woman, so the progressive educator does it to the children. The progressive educator has another contribution to make, since only the child's activity is really free, outside of the work of adults. The progressive educator tries to keep it exactly that way, outside of the world of adults. He sees absolutely no possibility of establishing, not possibility but inevitability, of establishing a relationship which is a cooperative relationship, a human relationship and not a conflict and a struggle. We must not isolate children, but for the first time integrate them into society and find in their play and in their relationship with adults, a new development, for themselves and for adults as well.
As the child grows older, it's quite obvious that he must be integrated in a new sense, not in the sense of his creative play being recognized and expanded, but that he must also be integrated into production. And education can no longer be separated and isolated from the real world. He can't live in an ivory tower of public school or high school while his mother and father are working in a factory, they have nothing in common between the two of them, and his education as was said before must of necessity be integrated with production, become part of society.
Now it's interesting to note that it is clear to all, except radical groups, what women are doing today. Everybody knows about it, except people like our old organizations. Either the people who know about it are horrified, or glad about it, but they know about it. The radical movement doesn't know. They are still in the peculiar stage of thinking that women don't know that they are oppressed. We finished with that two years ago and we are able to go on as a result.
Now it is interesting to note what women are doing today, aside from what they say: their actions are very explicit. They take no nonsense. They don't give unless they get. By that I mean, that unless the man is willing to establish a relationship with them which is different, they will not go out to help him when there is a financial crisis in the family. They say: “If you don't help me with my job, I won't help you with yours.” They get divorced very easily, and discuss divorce in a manner in which it has never been discussed before, as an everyday occurrence, and as a development for themselves. Every once in a while the women in my neighborhood would say, “If I get divorced", and sometimes they would slip and say, “When I get divorced.”
It' s something that people do nowadays. It's sort of a fad. And they look upon divorce also as a solution to the question of the morals that they plan to have without being married. I heard many women say today that they don't plan to get married ever again after they get divorced, because people are going to think that they are doing things anyway, and they may as well have a good time. What they think amounts to a complete abolition of bourgeoisie morals, ideas and relations with men. I feel, although there's no real proof that we have of this, that the relationship that is established between men and women after they are divorced. is on a much higher and freer level than it was in the first marriage. Of course that will have to be studied, and we will have to talk to a lot of women before we can say that is definite.
Now, in contrast to what women are doing, going into the factory in large numbers, breaking up the home, there is an opposition to them, a counter revolution to their activity. It is precisely three main groups that are putting out different programs for women in opposition to their own activity. There is the exceptional woman that we have mentioned before. Her program is planning for the masses of women and her being integrated into the male world and accepting all the morals and attitudes of men, isolating herself from women, and in planning the housework, isolating both men and women from the home, allowing the women to be free of the home in order to be more systematically exploited in the factory.
There is the American bourgeosie. They have a program. They say that women should stay home unless the government needs them. “Stay home. You are the backbone of society.” They tell women that day in, day out, from Helen Trent to Life with Father, from True Confessions to True Story; in every appeal they ever make, they say: “Please, please be happy. Look what you have: you have a washing machine, a garbage disposal, your husband has a new Ford, you have children who are well dressed, they are the best educated children in the world, you have great, tremendous stores in which to shop, with beautiful new factories made of steel. You have everything that a woman can want. Why aren't you happy? You've got to get into your heads that if you go out of the home, you are going, to go exactly where the Russian women are going, to exploitation in the factory. Therefore you have no alternative but to stay home.” Women listen to this, and very often, when they decide to go out to work, they go with great feelings of guilt. But they go nevertheless. They find new social relationships wherever they go.
Now the Russian bourgeoisie has already “solved” it's problem. There is no home in the real sense of the word in Russia. The woman works and the man works. I don't know what the situation is with the youth in Russia, I assume that there is a lot of planning in nursery schools and I am sure that they go through about twelve hours a day, and the mother is allowed to see them for about one hour a day. All the laws that have been passed in Russia, opposing divorce, etc., are mainly aimed, as far as I can see, at separating women from men, just where there is the greatest chance for their unification, in the factory, where they both are. There has to be a division made between them: woman has to be, so to speak, put in her place, and every once in a while be burdened down with nine or ten children so she knows that this is her place and she must come back to it.
It is very clear that as soon as women leave the home and go into industry they are breaking down every bourgeoisie conception that women have been told for at least the last hundred years. They are for the first time facing a unity between the home and the factory, a unity which has been made as a result of separation over many long years. The unity between the home and the factory represents to them the unification for the first time of men and women.
Women know better than anyone else that they are completely capable
of establishing any relationship they wish if they are let alone to do it and if they are able to establish a milieu in which to do it; that is, a milieu which for the first time will not have man at one extreme in society and woman at the other, meeting for two hours at night to discuss the happenings of the day.
Now women know something else as well. They are very dissatisfied with the relationship with their children. They know that their children are going to turn against them when they grow older and they don't want it. They see clearly that something else has to be established. They talk about it all the time. “What should I do with him? He does this to me. He doesn't respect me.” That's generally the way it's put. “He doesn't respect me.” In other words: “I have absolutely no relationship with him and what shall I do?” And they know also that it is they who must establish a new relationship between the father, the mother and the child. That is between parents in general and children in general and men and women in general. That is their responsibility and they feel completely capable of carrying it out.
This is the opening of the discussion. We wrote a document as has been mentioned and we're going to take that and circulate it around to the women that we know and, believe me in Los Angeles, we know a lot of women who are working with us on the women question. I think that with this as a basis we can begin to go to women and understand that they are not backward and the fact that they have rejected the radical movement is not a backwardness, but a sign of a revolutionary personality that the old radical movements could not
reach, but that we shall reach with our new stage and development.
Chairman: The floor is now open for discussion, but Jane and Nanette, two other women from Los Angeles, wrote that document with Simpson, and I just wonder whether or not they would like to speak first. Would you like it arranged that way? Jane, you'd like to speak now? All right, Don't forget. Announce your name before you speak and where you're from.
I'm Jane from Los Angeles. I'd just like to elaborate on a few of the points Simpson has made in her talk. First of all, on the question of convincing women that they're oppressed, a conception that the old organization and many other sections of society have long held. One woman in the housing project, in which I live said to me: “You don' t have to convert women to their own cause.” I think that takes care of the women and I think it's a feeling that we have concerning workers too. You don't have to convert women; you
don't have to convert Negroes; you don' t have to convert workers to their own cause.
On the subject of children, I'd like to elaborate just a little bit on the remarks of Simpson. I think we should emphasize that children's activities and play, which is work, and, which is serious business, is not away from society, is not conducted away from the adult world, but is in opposition to the adult world. It's not divorced from reality; it's in opposition to reality. There has been a great deal of talk on the subject of children in which educators discuss the imaginary play of children versus reality, the child's world versus the real world and the child's activities away from the real world. That is the theory which has long been held by most progressive educators concerning the imaginary play of children. But it's not imaginary play it's very real; it's concrete work; it's serious business. It's not divorced from reality; it's in opposition to reality, which is a completely different thing. In the play of children, in their ideas, is to be seen not only what children want but what we all want from them. From them we can also learn, if we watch them, and allow them to express themselves without constantly interfering and opposing our ideas to those of our children.
Now, in the children and in the children question – I sort of hate that term, but for want of a better one right now, we'll call it the question of children – is the real synthesis of the woman and the men. It is the one
work in bourgeois society which they have created together. In children one really sees the unity of the woman question and the man question clearly. And yet there are tremendous antagonisms between them and the subject of their children and their relationship to their children.
I'd like to make a few remarks about the petty-bourgeois woman which has been overlooked in the document we have written so far. There is also a lot of talk about the fact that the petty-bourgeois woman is not as
degraded or not as oppressed as the working woman. This isn't so. The petty-bourgeois woman is more degraded than the working class woman because nothing is demanded of her: She lives on the fringe of society. She may have machines in her home working for her, but actually, nothing is demanded of her. The working class woman at least has something demanded of her. She works in the home. She works outside the home – in the factory. The petty-bourgeois woman leads a completely meaningless existence, usually within the home where she has very little to do. I'm speaking now, by the way, of the middle or upper middle class woman, not of the petty-bourgeois woman who is very close to the working class woman and will unite with her in many struggles. I'm speaking of the woman who has a little more money and a little more material comfort. If she's not in the home, she's outside playing canasta – she has no real socialized existence, no opportunity at all to integrate herself into society. Furthermore, she takes out in consumption what she's denied in production. She shops and shops and shops for hats, shoes and dresses and thus in consumption she takes out what she's denied in production.
I think that for the time being this is as much as I want to say. There are some other questions which I think are perhaps better said at the youth panel – having to do with role that progressive education has played with children and with the youth. Because one thing is clear: the concepts of progressive education truly break down most completely and most sharply when the educators deal with the question of the youth. The progressive educator can manipulate the younger child somewhat and to some degree establish for him an artificial world, a world that is different from the adult world. But when progressive education faces the problems of the youth in the junior and senior high schools, the conceptions of progressive education break down completely.
Bryant of Los Angeles speaking: Friends, I would like to say that the work that has been done on the woman question, the memorandum that has been prepared, was for me a tremendous education. For the first time, our people were able to go to the women and find out what they were saying, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and what they wanted. This was a direct manifestation of our basic ideas in saying we are going into the working class section of the population to find out what people want.
I think, however, there is one section in this memorandum that does not flow easily with the ideas as they were presented. I do not think that our people have done for the children that we have done for the women, in the sense that we have not been able to state what children want, what is the manifestation of their rebellion. It is stated in the children section of the document that children are the concrete embodiment of the inevitability of socialism. I do not understand that. I do not know what it means. I don't see how we can get any ideas from that of what children want and how that is manifested. How can adults learn from the play activity of children? Tell me how. What do the children want to teach the adult? I have prepared a memorandum also, which I would like to read to you, which I think may help to explain what I mean.
Children do not feel that they are a necessary part of society. They do not feel at all needed. Everything they do points to the fact that what they want is to be necessary and important in what the educators call the “adult world".
Every toy, no matter how simple or complex, (from a stick and a can of mud, to a bicycle or anything else they are allowed to play with) immediately becomes transformed in their imaginations into some socially necessary object. A bicycle becomes an automobile, or a truck, a boat or a tractor, etc. If it's turned over and the wheel allowed to run freely, it becomes a cement mixer. A bucket of mud becomes tar to fix a street, the stick is the spreader. The children in my group have a plastic swimming pool. I watch them and wonder why they don't just relax in the water and enjoy the elements like any adult would. They don' t do this. They are no sooner in the water than they're out of it. This pool becomes a huge ocean with boats which the children navigate.
During all this hard work the children assume an air of great importance. They choose names for themselves which are synonymous with America's workingman. We have half a dozen “Joes” roaming around with as many “Chucks” and “Jims". The girls also assume those aliases. They are important people during this play period. To whom are they important? To society. They are doing important tasks, such as fixing, building, creating new tools, transporting, and a million other things which are necessary to the modern world.
The most “progressive” nurseries today are bringing into their play areas not expensive toys, but cast-off automobiles and broken radios and the like. I am told by several people whose parents could not afford to buy them beautiful toys that these things are exactly what their folks gave them to play with. These were the toys they enjoyed most.
This cast-off junk that the children like so well aid the imaginary play. But they are only aids. They do not compensate for what the child really wants. He is not really needed to fix, or build, or create. He can
only pretend that he is. When the play period is over he is again faced with the domination of the adult world. He is once again thrown into the blunt realities of his position.
One little boy filled a can with water only to find that the can had a hole in the bottom of it. As the water dribbled out and splattered on the ground it suddenly occurred to him that he had a wonderful sprinkling
can. He was not satisfied, however, because the water was coming through so slowly. He then put the can to his mouth and began to blow into it, forcing the water out. As he did so a two-year-old, in imitation, raised a similar can of water and began to drink it. The “mechanic” in question quickly pulled the can away from the tot, and in great agitation, explained that it was dirty water, and not to drink. “Mine is a sprinkler 'cause it has a hole in the bottom, but yours isn't.”
He knows that what he is playing with is an old battered can. It is what it appears to be. But when he plays with it he transforms it into something that he wants it to be. When the game is over and the children must put their equipment away, all the magic falls away from these objects and they are faced with the drudgery of what the army calls “fatigue".
The child realizes only too well the difference between fantasy and reality. He can not lose himself completely in his imaginary world. I heard one little boy say to another during a “free” play period, “This is what real people do.” He speaks to his mother of “real people” all the time. She does not know what he means. He means that he is not a real person. He will not be a real person until he grows up, and does in the community what he is now playing at.
Are they satisfied to simply wait peacefully until they become “real people” at some God knows what future date? No! They fight the adult constantly; they are in constant rebellion.
One mother said: “I give him everything he could want. He's got more toys than he knows what to do with. But look at the way he acts!”
It is not an abundance of toys that he wants. He wants to be needed.
How can he help rebelling when he feels the strain that not only exists between himself and the adult but among the adults themselves. Father and mother are constantly at each other's throats or at his. No one in the family is pulling together to achieve a common goal. Each suffers in his own way. Each fails to understand the other's problems. He does not belong to a family unit that works closely together. He simply lives with some people under one roof whom he abstractly loves and who abstractly love him.
It seems silly to think that toys or an abundance of anything the child might like can compensate for this lack of belongingness. Yet some parents try to bribe their children as if they themselves could be bribed. “If you're a good girl I'll give you a new doll.” The parents don't understand his problems just as they don't understand each other's. Not only does the child suffer form the same problems that beset the rest of the family, he suffers the added humiliation of not being able to express himself. What he can't express in words, he cries about. Exasperated parents “fall” on him and demand: “What the hell are you crying for now?”
This is the family structure in the modern world. Very little can be done about it on an individual basis. It remains for the structure of society to change before the relation of people to society and to each other can change.
The child is constantly striving to reach the goal of adulthood. He is not accepted now. He feels that then he will be. They hunger for age. They will fight at the mere suggestion that they are younger than another child. A birthday is a great celebration, not only because it means ice cream and cake, (with the young children a cookie and juice will suffice), but because to them it means, very concretely, a whole year has been added. The only date they fully comprehend is their birthday. All other great days fade away in light of this day which marks for each child his own advancement toward the adult world. He must wait until some great day, when he is pronounced “grown up,” before he can share with adults their society.
As new children enter the nursery, I am introduced to them by my director as their “new friend". The children know very well that this is not so. I asked one of the children if I were her friend. She looked at me in astonishment and said “NO! The children is my friends. You're my teacher! Teacher is teacher, not friend.” Another child has not talked to me in the entire eight months that I have worked with him. He plays and talks freely to the other children but he comes to me only with complaints. I understand from the teacher that preceded me that this was the case with her also.
The teacher is trained never to laugh at the child and his imaginary games. “Always laugh with.” The child appreciates this serious attitude towards his play because it gives the situation a touch of reality. Sometimes
she joins him in his play and he welcomes her with open arms. Does this make them friends? No! She is allowed to enter his world, but he is not allowed to enter hers.
Very soon she must stop the play and take all the children to the bathroom. She must also insist that they pick up all their toys and put them away. The old tyranny is back again.
The question is raised, “Well, won't it always be like that? Won' t children always resent the domination of adults over them?” No, because there need not be any domination. Guidance, yes. But no domination.
It is impossible now to visualize exactly what form of work the child will do for the community, but work he must. There is no reason why the child can not be given some task to do which will in reality be necessary to the functioning of the community. He has shown that he is capable of comprehending a tremendous amount of information. He soaks it up like a sponge soaks up water. The adults around him with whom he comes in daily contact are the ones to show him and guide him. He doesn't have to go to some school which is separated from his daily living experiences. He can learn more in one minute about the three R's from someone busily incorporating these things in some productive labor and anxious to teach him, than he can in twelve years from a paid teacher with chalk in hand, scribbling on a blackboard.
Someone might say, “Well, I give my child things to do and he doesn't want to do them.” One mother told me that her child is supposed to clean his room. “You should see it,” she says, “it's like a pig sty.”
Here is quite a difference between drudgery and real work. So what if the room is finally cleaned. It only gets dirty again. He might feel good or satisfied after he's done the job, but does it make him feel important? Does a woman feel important after she's washed the floor? He may have helped somebody who didn't want to do it but there is really very little satisfaction in knowing that.
Work is quite different. Work is creative. When one can say, “This is what I've done,”, or “I have a part in this,” that's work.
That is what the child wants as much as anyone else.
Having something in common is what binds people together. It will bind children and adults together, too. There is no need for domination in such a relationship. There is only need for help and guidance.
To me the child is a human being who has the same emotions as any adult. He is not, as was explained to me, an incomplete person. He is an inexperienced person. I think that's all I have to say.
I'm Sue from Philadelphia. I've done a lot of work on this particular question which started when I was in a former organization. I was absolutely amazed at the extraordinary work, that I found was being done independently within our own organization. I think that from the work I've done, the one thing I want to bring out is what are the key notes of the woman question and what is signified by the absence of a certain type of argument.
The first time I presented the woman question in that organization, I was very much complimented by the entire group, but the argument bogged down into “What are women's limitations because of biological Imitations” and “Could women ever really leave the home and the whole nursery problem?” For my own part, the type of presentation I gave in that organization was one where I tried to bring out that more and more women were being taken into the factory and being made a part of the industrial process and that to understand the women question fully, you were forced to take up what stage of capitalist production we're at today. I was constantly challenged as to “why” the woman question, and it finally forced me into studying the whole capitalist structure of society, and that is the emphasis I gave it. The “why” finally forced me to say: “This question is not just the woman question, but the woman and man and today's social relationship and what lines it must take due to the capitalist productive method. I took up Engels on the various societies, primitive societies and all that and until the last minute, I had to memorize the stages. But I did give that. When I went into the organization of the past, it was within a half a year after I had given the talk in a previous organization. I had to reconstruct my talk – one part I could not recall. What happened was that instinctively when I got up, I tried to repeat the history of women in the various types of society and I completely bogged down in it. I finally learned that the only essential point in studying the history of women is to see that relationships between men end women are constantly changing, as a reflection of the particular type of productive society existing. Then I just threw out the entire history and went right into the woman question today.
Now it's interesting that in our past organization the majority bogged down on the question of sexual morality and what this freedom would mean, and the fact that in the back room husbands were going around and saying to each other: “Well, I help my wife with the dishes.”
Now our own friends acted a certain way too, and it showed me that we had gone through a stage. Our own leading friend got up and gave me the most challenging blow of all. On that note the meeting had to end and I went home and vowed I would prove the point.
The question was: We agree women should have their rights. But the problem of women, unlike the Negro who has the CIO, the AFL, etc., is that women don' t organize. They have no organizational form so how can you deal with that? Ever since then I have avidly clipped every little thing showing a woman picketing being beaten up by the police or where a group got together and took up a petition. I tried to seek out the organizational forms that the struggle of women takes because when I was challenged with that, I felt that our own people had given me a most devastating blow.
Now here we've already leaped over that. Just at the very same time we were arguing the trade union question within our own group. There was a question of: “Do we go to the shop steward or to the rank and file?” Well, the woman question here has obviously fallen right into line with our whole way of thinking and our whole political argument of going to deeper and deeper layers of the masses. Our own people as I said, were very anxious to protest the rights of women, but none of the group had taken the woman question seriously and tried to show what it represented.
Bryant's talk has made me just want to rush on through this women question and take up some of the things that she has revealed on the children question. Her work on that is really some of the most original work I have ever heard.
Now what I think is important in what is being done is that we all acknowledge that the woman question can only be understood by studying it from a certain stage in capitalism today. That falls exactly in line with what we say about the Negro question. The Negro question in the South cannot be solved under capitalism. The woman question cannot be solved under capitalism. For the capitalists to do that would automatically mean the entire breakdown of their entire system. They themselves are caught in the crisis of the woman question. Just as they want to solve the Negro question and everyone is concerned with that, the same thing holds true with all the literature coming out now about the woman question. They want to retain the old social standards – “woman in the home” – but crises of war, of needing greater and greater reserve power in production forces them to want women orientated into the factories and into the shops. Their conflict is shown in that they understand what juvenile delinquency is – it's a breakdown of the family – but they cannot formulate a clear program of whether women should stay home and raise their children to see if she can solve juvenile delinquency that way, or have nurseries so that they can free the women. (In general, I think it's acknowledged that the nursery is no solution today.)
Under the highest form of state capitalism, in Russia (as was pointed out), that is solved. The woman's freedom is that she is permitted to work just as hard or harder than the man. That is solved; they know where they stand in Russia – but not in America. That the problem is still in existence shows what stage we are at.
One of the finest contributions of all is this new tie-up of the factory with the home and of home relationships with the factory relationships.
One of the things that I still think is lacking, although I think it is a correct orientation to start out from the home, is the acknowledgment that a greater and greater number of women are being forced into the factory.
That means that when you are discussing productive relationships, you have to incorporate the woman question as part of it constantly.
I'm not positive of the figures but my impression is that about one-half or one-fourth of the married women work and these women have one or more children to take care of when they go home. Incidentally, a point to watch is this large number of married women who are forced to work. The necessity of their working is absolutely enormous.
Another point on this is that some of us, I think, are still bogged down by the idea that if it's a woman panel on the woman question, only the women would want to be the delegates. If we take this question seriously, there will be more and more men involved in this question. We are serious about the Negro question. When we discuss the problem, everyone, not only Negroes, wants to speak. In the same way, everyone should want to discuss on the woman question, even though we acknowledge that the woman is the one we can learn from because she represents the actual experience. Just as we say: “We must listen to the Negroes, but, it is equally important that white people feel free to speak their minds,”
Bryant's speech really just woke up my whole experience as a person who took up two years of practice teaching, then just walked out of the whole thing without even collecting my certificate.
Now these are some of the things that I saw in the schools as a teacher and what happened to me. I had a marvelous group of children and at first I went in with the idea that I was going to be their friend. I was a socialist at the time.
We had some wonderful discussions. One day I got a film – it was during the war – on Japanese customs. We showed it and everybody was excited. (When we studied grammar and things like that, I just couldn't pull a word out of anyone's mouth.) After this film, everybody's hand was up; everyone wanted to discuss it. It was just like American children; if was just like the American customs. They also discussed what the differences were and then we went into the fact that customs are different all over but the basic thing is that we are just the same.
Right in the midst of this my supervisor walked in. And I as a teacher, regardless of being a socialist, cut this discussion so short that, after the students left and he was discussing my progress, he made the criticism that I seemed to jump around too much in the discussion, that these children seemed to be very, very interested In the discussion. but that I took the initiative and seemed to be cutting them off. Well, I was in a dilemma and I said: “To be perfectly frank with you, we're in a war situation and I didn t know how you felt. I knew how the children felt.” I got a mediocre mark.
It was constantly pointed out that once you're teaching, you either must go with the children or you must go with the administration.
I had a study period. The way it worked out, I was given a class of just two fellows and they were to come and study in the three-quarters of an hour. One day I walked out of the room for a moment and when I came back, there was no one there. I knew it was impossible for them to have left the room, so I sat down at my desk and I just pretended I was reading. I figured I'd sit it out and I kept thinking: I have a choice: I can rant, rave, call the principal or do anything of that type. But if I do, I'll never be respected by these children. The word will spread. I'll never be able to control this class. They'll prevent me. But if I really respect them, I'll go along with the game. They are someplace in this room. Well, I sat there praying that the superintendent wouldn't come in. Eventually, I heard a lot of giggling and the two fellows just tumbled out of the flue that was in the wall.
After that they were wonderful friends of mine, but the point is that no teacher who is seriously carrying on with a job where she is getting paid can possibly be completely allied with the children. What would have happened if I had that job and had taken it seriously would have been that I would have been forced to report it to some authority to let them know that I was in complete control of that situation, that I was master over those children and that those children knew, too, that I was the authoritarian – the person with authority. That brings us to the biggest oppression that children have.
Just as we say in a sense that the man is the oppressor of the woman in the home, and represents the bourgeois standards, the adult represents the bourgeois standards to the children. It seems to be commonly agreed, all psychologists and such say, that the one way you can confuse children, is by a breakdown of discipline where the parents cannot come to an agreement. Now the other side of this is that all the adults should ally together in keeping this child down when he gets out of hand.
Recently, I was at my sister's home and her husband wanted to discipline the child. They have a marvelous relationship but he gave the child a little slap, nothing outstanding, and the child slapped him back as hard as he could. The child is three years old, but he came out with a word that they never heard before. After the father hit him, the child said, “You're a damn rot!” My sister couldn't figure out where he had gotten it. His father said, “Why did you hit me?” His father was on the defensive, and the little boy said, “You were slapping me.” My sister, the wife, said, “Yes, why did you hit the child?” And I suddenly realized this is what the psychologists were talking about. If my sister wouldn't support her husband, her child would freely do what he wants. My sister realized this too, and she quickly quieted down as her husband mumbled, “Well, he shouldn't slap so freely.” They joined together and they quietly let the child know that they were the authorities.
Chairman: We have twenty minutes before lunch and one of the co-authors would like to take twenty minutes to present her views. After that, we have lunch from 12:30 to 1:30, and there is one-half hour following left for discussion. I think what we have to do is to limit the time of the speakers. We won't be able to get everyone in unless we do that, so is there a motion that we do so? Yes? O.K., let's have a list of speakers. (The chair
takes a speakers' list. Ed. note.) This need not close the list. We're just going to try to get a rough idea of how much time each speaker can have. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten... that's eleven people. That's thirty minutes, eleven people. Someone who's good a math, figure it out for me quick. Three minutes per person...that's what it will have to be.
From the floor: Some of the people may decide not to speak if they hear someone else take up their point, so it would be preferable for the speakers to have at least five minutes.
Chairman: Chairman: All right.
From the floor: After the break for lunch, you might ask if anybody wants to take the floor.
Nanette: I'm staying here in Detroit in a family of five children and I've been shown a pamphlet put out by General Motors for women, “Ladies, this is for you.” I'd like to read you just a little of it:
“At the turn of the century, you got a new stake in the success of American business. Along came, for one thing, the canning industry. Your cleaning and preparing of many vegetables, your making of soup in a kettle, a dozen other labors went out the kitchen window when cans came in the kitchen door....Now let's get out of the kitchen. Let's go downstairs. The laundry industry, the washing machine, electric iron people and other American enterprises saw you standing by the wash boiler, hot, tired, tied down...All but a fraction of the other women in the world still spend a solid ten hour day every week bending over washtubs, washboards or stones.....The home sewing machine took more than a stitch in saving you time. The development of dress pattern concerns, the low price, the beautiful cloth and rayon by other companies added to your stake in the process of additional enterprises. Now, of course, the reduction of all this tiresome and restricting housework is the very essence of the American way of life. The result could not possibly be more personal to you. So let' s go on. Other enterprises gave you electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and a dozen other magic time-saving, work-saving devices. No wonder the European women that I know who visit here say that the average American home they see is a fairyland.”
What I would like to say from my experiences as a housewife is that in spite of this fairyland that we live in, American housewives and mothers are not happy. They are torn apart by internal conflict. They find the isolation of their home a sharp contrast to the socialization they know their men experience daily. The modern appliances which they have divorce them from their work but tie them to the monotony of it. They have more time to think about what unsatisfactory lives they lead. These wonderful machines cannot substitute for new social relations.
In traveling across the country, we had to stop in order to wash some diapers, and we had a little trouble finding laundry shops. The first one we came to was just wash tubs. There weren't very many women there. Just wash tubs! Scrub boards! I guess it was very cheap; the women who had absolutely nothing at all at home would use then. I rejected it immediately; it wasn't efficient enough; it would take me too long; it would tire me out too much. We walked a little farther.
Then we found one that had the wash tub but it also had the machine and the wringer. It had the washing machine, not the automatic. Here there were a great many women; the place was really crowded; there were women standing in line. They all carried big bags of laundry. They were talking; they seemed very happy and very busy. They were talking to one another, discussing their problems, sharing experiences. I thought immediately that if I had had time to stay there, that would have been the place I would have gotten the most out of. I would have chosen, had I lived in that city, to go to that place for the socialization despite the fact that it was a little more work.
Finally, we found an automatic laundry. There were not quite as many women in there as there were in the other one. It was more expensive, but of course, the work was all done very quickly and efficiently. No-one was talking. The few women there sat around reading.
The woman in the home is concerned mainly with cooking meals, making clothes, seeing that they're clean and in a wearable condition, caring properly for her children, and planning her life an a budget. This work is very lonely. It is monotonous; it goes on day after day, endless, without ever any sense of completion. It really demands very little of her compared to what she is capable of. It demands only routine. The women who do try to express themselves creatively, in their sewing, or in their home decorating, find that it turns against them; they only have more work to do.
But the women we see, become efficient even though they organize their own work, they're efficient and they assume a great load of responsibility. There's a round of work with children that's endless. We're isolated in our homes but we're expected to produce social beings. All our children's activities are seen in terms of the work they will bring us. Our children, we find, develop in conflict with us. We can't seem to get next to them. They pull away. I myself feel a desire to control my child. It's the only thing there is to control, but it means dominate. We know that this is going to develop eventually to the point when the child will have nothing left but pity and obligation to us when he's an adult.
In some homes the father is the authority, but more often the woman takes the responsibility for disciplining the child. Her day is devoted to seeing that he behaves and to getting along with him. But it turns out that she is yelling at him most of the time because he's on her nerves or else because he doesn't behave the way she wants him to. She has to protect her home against her child.
Women resent the father coming home and relaxing with the child that they have spent all day working on – not just working on in the sense of the laundry, the housecleaning, the tub baths, but also the discipline. She has put a lot of effort into this product of hers and the father comes home and plays with the child, relaxes and really enjoys him. She doesn't have a chance to do that. It isn't always true that the father does it. But to the extent that he does have a limited happy experience with his child, the mother cannot help but resent it, because she hasn't time for this. Babies are easy to take care of; women love babies. They're no strain. They're no conflict with the mother. Often when women want girls, the reason is because they know the girls will help them with their work and not only that, but they know they'll have someone who will understand their particular problems.
One of the most disturbing things about being a housewife is the isolation. Women move in many directions to solve it. Far example, take the church, where you find them doing the same old work, planning and saving food,
but the socialization attracts them. Here they can do it with other women. The whole thing has a new meaning.
Often I feel that the bourgeoisie understand women and their problems better than the radical movement. They understand very well how lonely women are, what their work is. Over the radio they try and give them some adventure. Even if a woman can't afford it, she will often allow a house to house salesman come in and talk to her because of the company he brings. These men talk to the women in a way they hear no other place. The salesmen tell them about themselves; they spend time with their personalities. They talk about makeup; they get the women to think of herself and to talk about themselves, something she doesn't have a chance to do with her husband.
Today a car, more and more, means a greet deal to a woman. A woman who once has a car finds she can no longer live without it. It means freedom; otherwise she feels her home is a prison.
Aside from this daily repetition of monotonous work, there is an accumulation of feeling imprisoned by the home. I'd like to read a quote to you from one woman:
“My husband feels a relief after eight hours of steady labor and knows that for the next period he does the things he wants to. He daily experiences a great feeling of relief and escape. He comes home to have attention showered upon him, a meal that he loves and looks forward to, and complete relaxation with the knowledge that someone is there to take care of all the countless errands that add to his comfort. I get up from the table at least three times a meal to bring in anything extra he desires. If he bathes or dresses the children, it's a job purely of pleasure for him; there's no pressure felt. With me, this daily oppression of routine tasks lasts for weeks before I have an experience of relief by leaving the children with their father for several hours and when I do feel this freedom, I haven't any of the happy satisfaction in the knowledge that someone is going to wait on me for a while to make up for the indignities I have suffered. There's no one to cook me a delicious hot meal that I won' t even have to think about or plan, or to see that my home surroundings are not only orderly and clean but cheerful and restful. I have to return after a few hours of freedom to cook the dinner and pick up the mess that has accumulated.”
I found an article in the newspaper a year ago on July 16, something that happened in Norway, showing how much the pressure of the women feeling as they do has done in this particular country.
“One thousand five hundred Norwegian housewives will be given a two weeks holiday at a mountain and seaside resort this year free of expense by the Norway Trade Unions Health and Welfare Association. The housewives will be chosen from women with three or more children living in big towns. In order to make it a more restful holiday for them, their children will be sent to children's camps where they will be taken care of during their mothers' vacation. Children under two years will accompany their mothers to the holiday resorts, where kindergarten facilities and trained nurses will be provided. This year the Trade Union has leased 20 resorts for the tired housewives; they are located in beautiful, healthy surroundings remote from tourist centers. Everything will be done to create a friendly, intimate atmosphere and to help the housewives relax. Welfare sisters will arrange sightseeing trips and organize games and entertainment. The dominating idea is to take the minds of the housewives off their everyday worries and to help them enjoy the good food, fresh air, and beautiful scenery.”
Nearly every day housewives have revolutionary conversations. I can' t go out in my backyard where my neighbor is constantly hanging her laundry (She has four little boys.), without exchanging problems and troubles. She tells me how they come in tracking mud, how she has to do her housework at night because they are there all day. She cleans the house up at night and it's clean in the morning, but by noon it's filthy again.
She discusses her husband's attitude. He comes in and makes a mess but says: “It isn't a mess; it's only my clothes.” Women feel very close to other women in the same position. They're rebelling as a whole group in their individual homes.
Maggie: I want to deal with one phase of the woman question and that is that a section of the women that felt it necessary to organize themselves within a certain organization, namely, the ladies auxiliary movement, and to point out and explain and describe an experience that I went through within the ladies' auxiliary when we were in Philadelphia. Now it would be interesting for us to study the ladies auxiliary because I think that at that time, when the C.I.O. and what led the degeneration of that movement and to the complete collapse was being formed, we saw a certain fusion of the social groupings which led to the birth of the C.I.O. was being formed, we saw a certain fusion of the social groupings which led to the birth of the C.I.O. I think that the same thing took place within the women's groups who were home and who felt a certain impulse and a certain movement to go out to organize with the men and to help the men in the formation of the C.I.O.
Now a few years ago, as a result of the strike at Westinghouse, a number of women felt that they wanted a ladies' auxiliary. These women were all the wives of the shop stewards, the executive board members. I want to point out that it was a certain stratum of women who wanted the organization. They hounded the president of the local until finally he wrote a letter and sent it out to all the men, addressed to their wives, and said: “Let's form a ladies' auxiliary.”
I and another person went down since we were wives of workers in the shop. When we got there, we were quite surprised at the response that the letter had gotten. It was a horrible letter; it was addressed to Mrs. John Jones; it was on official union stationary, and many of the women didn't realize that it was addressed to them. They assumed it was a letter from the union. They gave it to their husbands; the husbands probably tore it up, just like they tore up everything else that they got from the union.
But we were very surprised. There were several Negro women who came down to the auxiliary and there were a great many rank and file women who came down in the initial period. Well when they came down, as was natural, they didn't find what they were looking for, and within about six or seven months, it had collapsed into a group of maybe seven or eight women, and we got together and we had a wonderful time! The point is that there were no outside people; there was the wife of the president, the wife of the recording secretary and we had some members of the newspaper committee, their wives, and we had some shop stewards' wives, all very active – their men were very active within the union.
So we set about a project of how to get the women to join the auxiliary. I might add that at this point, my heart was not in this organization. I thought that there was nothing for a ladies' auxiliary to do at this time.
The only time that a ladies' auxiliary can do anything is in time of struggle. When the men were out on a picket line, that was when the women had a certain function to perform. There was nothing for them to do, so we set about the organization of a Christmas party for the kids. Now these women went about, and here you can see organization. When these gals get together, they know that to do. They forgot all about their housewives work. Their husbands complained bitterly that they never saw their wives. But the women said: “We're going to get some ice cream for the kids; where can we get toys?”
I learned much from the way they organized the work. I was amazed at what they were able to do. They gathered the toys; they wrote letters, and then they came up against a problem: they needed money. What do you do in order to finance the buying of whatever was needed? They all agreed: it's very simple; you go out and hit the gate. We planned among ourselves the hours that we would hit the gate. Those gals got up early in the morning to hit the men at eight o'clock. Those of us who worked went out there at twelve o'clock and you know what December is in Philadelphia. It was damn cold, but we went out there and we got the dough. These guys were amazed that there were a group of women who were serious about a damn Christmas party. We planned to have about 500 toys for the kids. We didn't know exactly who was coming. We asked the
women and we asked the men: Please notify your shop steward as to who is coming, so as to make a reservation.” We got absolutely no response. But when we opened the hall, I never saw so many kids in all my life. We had an absolutely marvelous time. In Westinghouse, they still talk about this Christmas party. But when this activity ended for us, it was a letdown for the women. We had nothing to do. Then the whole question of the IUE and the UE came up. We just met once and severed our relationships, because the lines
were sharply drawn among us and our husbands, and never the twain shall meet again. But we saw here, I mean, for me, here were some women who were among a certain stratum, wives of the union activists, who came and stuck to the organization because they saw their husbands doing a certain thing and certainly they were expressing their husbands. But we never could get the rank and file women, who stayed away because their husbands stayed away from the union and they in turn stayed away from the ladies auxiliary. When we look for how the women are going to organize themselves, we have to look for a new form that they re going to take on and this will show us how they will organize themselves in their future struggles.
Chairman: That was Maggie from Philadelphia.
I'm Chester from New York: You know, there's a little precedent for a man talking on a women's panel. In 1851, when Wendell Phillips addressed a meeting on women' a rights, one of the resolutions passed by that meeting stated: “Resolved: we are not discussing here whether women are or are not capable of equal rights.” Now it's a funny thing that it's a hundred years ago since that resolution was passed by Wendell Phillips and the others, and now another meeting dealing with the question of women doesn't have to pass that resolution again, but acts on the basis that what is involved here is not the relative merits of the sexes. Quite apart from anything else, I listened here with my mouth open, that isn' t quite true, but with a big gin on my face,
because we were really moving some place. We were moving. Any other place in the radical movement that I have seen (I haven' t seen many, but I've seen them since '34.), the woman question has become a question of men vs. women. Men, the brutes, were abusing women and had the attitude that if you kept them barefoot and pregnant, you'd keep them out of trouble. And women, in turn, were rebelling against men, but what could the poor man do and what could the poor woman do to cut across this whole confusion? The answer to this has never appeared before, never before, not since I have known the radical movement, and I'm pretty sure not in the one hundred years of the revolutionary movement in the United States. What we have said today, and this is the thing that is so very important for what we're going to develop, is not that men and women are in antagonistic relationship to each other, but that women, and here is the thing that we are beginning to learn, because of the fine work that our Los Angeles women friends have begun to do, that women are doing things for
themselves, positive things, not fooling around with the other business. Because, actually, women abuse men in the home, men abuse women in the home, and together they abuse the kids and it's a great mess. Unless, and we have this in our “Balance Sheet Completed,” we pose this clearly, we'll go off again. In the “Balance Sheet Completed,” there's that little section on women. We say that in the old. organization the woman question appeared as a struggle between the sexes. Why? Because each person had a certain impulse for revolt, a certain desire to break through the shackles, but unable to find a revolutionary line, they had to grind against each other and it all went to hell. It happened for the youth and for the Negroes in the same way in the old organization. We're leaving that behind. That is the question that we had started to pose abstractly in the Balance Sheet Completed before the women actually began to work it out and this is a leap.
Just a word on the children, and then I'll be finished, It isn't an accident that such close attention should be paid to children, in the discussion of the Woman Question, not at all, because they have actually the task of raising the children all day long. But it isn't an exclusive question for women. Let me trade on my prerogative as a father and comment on this subject. Fathers get concerned about kids, plenty concerned, but it takes a different form. The authoritarian attitude of adults toward kids is what is involved here. We see it one way from the women. As we go further, we'll see that it's the transformation, the revolutionary changes in the method of production, that's involved here. The thing moves into its proper perspective when we see that the proletariat emancipates itself and all of humanity. Just a last word, in the kids. I have an eight and a half year old son. He got mad at me one day and I suspect it was with good reason. He looked up at me and said, “You know, the trouble with the adults is that they all want to be big shots.” It's true, out of the mouths of babes, it's true. They all want to be big shots.
Bill from Los Angeles: Now we've learned today that the struggle of women will be carried out by women themselves. And I'm painfully aware, of that, being a slightly chastised bourgeois on the whole. I know quite clearly some of the problems. Well, anyway, I had quite an interesting experience, something that I thought was extremely important, dealing with the relationship of the man to the home. I came home from work one day and I came into our house and suddenly, the neighbor woman and her child ran out of our house. I felt kind of peculiar and I said, “My God, what kind of fellow am I that I chase these women out? Well, believe me, it took me many months before I was able to break that down.”
It seems that as soon as the husband comes home, the neighboring women just run out of the house they are visiting because the master is coming home and they cannot get in his way. Everything has to be done to make him comfortable. It took me many, many months before I could break down some of this, and I felt very elated when we finally set down and had some beer with some of the neighboring women and they even cussed in front of me. Oh boy, that was really a new advancement, because they felt more natural with me!
Roberts of New York: Friends, as we were listening to Simpson speak on the woman question this morning, some of the friends looked at each other and said, “This reminds us of the 1948 convention and the report on the Negro question. It was one of most comprehensive analyses that I have ever heard in the movement, the conception of total crisis, the conception of concrete social relations, the conception of revolt, of the whole world scene, and of the Russian question. It went from the Russian question, where we were in 1941, to the woman question, where we are in 1951. Stated clearly was our opposition to all other political groupings, the differentiation from them, and this road on which we have started so surely.
I remembered also 1947, when we wrote in the “American Worker” about the women, and said it was not a question of the antagonism between men and women, but the alienation of the emancipated woman. It was quite abstract at the time, and I hope that our abstractions will always move so surely, and in reality, so quickly to the concrete.
Now I can remember at the 1950 convention last year when the old organization took the position on Pablo. We did two things. On the one hand, Minelli got up and warned them: “We're not debating with you any longer,” We put aside that old type of debating in the abstract, one political group recruiting from the other. And, on the other hand, Simpson came in from Los Angeles and started telling us what she was doing on the woman question.
It was a fresh start for us; the two things took place at the same time. We put them aside and we started on this new road. So many philosophical problems are resolved here. You are a vulgar materialist in reality, and we have been for so many years ridding ourselves of all conceptions of vulgar materialism and thinking only of the way in which the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy thinks of human beings as things. You get rid of vulgar materialism only when you are able to deal with these most intimate social relations in social terms, in terms of a world conception. That is what has happened here.
I forget which of the friends said that “machines cannot substitute for new social relations.” That's the summation of our attitude on vulgar materialism, a whole century of our attitude on dialectical materialism is contained therein. Trotsky said that we should come to grips with American Imperialism and American pragmatism. I listened to the friend speak about education and plan, and progressive education and the way in which ideas are imposed on children, in reality, we've made our analysis of Dewey. We really have no problem with Deweyism which has dominated American thought, with the ideas that you have to enlighten the masses and enlighten the children starting in the schools and in the home. We have no problem with them any longer; we've settled our debt with them, with that type of American thought.
Now, having said that, I want to say one word about the children. I am, as you know, in favor of going to lower and lower layers, but I would suggest that we do not start the discussion on children, even though the woman question certainly involves the question of the woman's relationship to her children and the man's relationship to his children. It certainly involves that, but I would suggest that we don't start the woman question with a lot of various aspects or a disproportionate emphasis on the question of children.
First of all, I believe that some children would like to speak for themselves and they don't happen to be here. Apart from that, the idea that we speak for children, which I am sure no one wants to do, is not correct. Then there is the fact that we are just beginning on the woman question. It took us five years before we wrote a resolution on the Negro question. We have been battling with certain questions with regard to the informal social groupings in the plant for many, many months and I can assure you, friends, that in New York we went around and around the question. We talked with friends in Detroit; we didn't even want to put forward views of that sort until we had a chance to see what the friends thought about it!
There are different ways of handling some of these questions. You don't start a question with a lot of differences, sharpened differences, and so forth. I can assure you, friends, from some years of experience, that when you do it that way, you don' t develop your line concretely; instead, you begin freezing positions; you begin freezing your ideas into abstractions. The firm manner in which we have gone on the woman question, from our abstractions in 1947 to the magnificently concrete analysis of Simpson this morning, was accomplished by keeping our eyes upon the concrete, the development of the concrete, and, the way in which our organization has always developed these questions, by seeing where we are going and developing them among ourselves.
Orlando from Pittsburgh: I'd just like to share with the convention a few of the many millions of things that I learned about women in the factory from the women in the factory that I worked in for two years, two very short years. The women in the shop in which I worked were mature women. Most of them were married. Of those who were single when they came in, at least 95% of them were married when I left a year ago. Most of them had children and they had the double duty of working for ten hours, six days a week on the line and then going home and taking care of their families and trying to sandwich in taking care of the children.
In addition to this, it was the policy of the company in the shop in which I worked to try to keep a greater hold on the workers, to try to prevent a little bit of militancy on their part, by hiring the wives of the men who worked in the shop. This meant that if the shop went out on strike, the whole family went out on strike. It was a means which the company used to try to hinder a little bit of the militancy of the workers in the shop.
The women in the shop in which I worked weren't kidding themselves at all: they were working because they had to work. There wasn't any desire to go into the factory. It's true that once they got into the shop the thing that kept them there and enabled them to endure the hard physical labor which they were subjected to were the social relations and the social contacts and the intimate relationships that they established with the group of women in the shop. But that was something they found after they went into the shop and it wasn't the reason that any of them went into the shop. None of them were kidding themselves about liking the work or about liking to get up every morning. Nevertheless, what kept them in the shop was that the girls themselves were so wonderful.
The shop was organized about a month before I was hired in. The conditions were pretty horrible in the beginning. The girls used to gather in the rest room before work started and share liniment with each other,
and bathe each other's hands in the basin. A common remark that could be heard up and down the line all through the day was: “Gee, the only thing that gets me through the day is how swell the girls are.” It meant a lot to know that no matter how miserable you were everyone of the other girls there was just as miserable, if not more miserable. It did make you feel wonderful if somebody else had sorer muscles than you did. You could give somebody else a tip, instead of getting a tip yourself.
The reaction of the girls to a choice between what they found in the factory and what they would find at home was a fifty-fifty proposition. The way they expressed it was “Well, if the alternative was to work in the home, stay home and drudge in the home alone and isolated, or to come into the factory and drudge for eight and ten hours a day under conditions like these with a lot of other people, well, it was a hell of an alternative to have to make.” They didn't really went either choice. Their problems were not solved by the social relations that they found in the shop. But that was the good thing that they found in the shop. But that wasn't the real solution. It wasn't what they wanted fundamentally any more than the conditions of freedom they had in the home were what they wanted.
While they were in the shop working on the line, the girls used to talk about the things that they could do if they were home, a new cake recipe that they wanted to try or the fact that they were away from their children, the suit or garment that they wanted to make, the kind of a home they wanted to make for their husbands and themselves and their children. These are the things they missed and. they used to talk about it in terms of, “Well, it's a hell of a life when you must stay home and stay isolated.” Only they didn't use the word isolated. Nevertheless, they felt that in the home you can move about when you want to, something you couldn't do in the shop. You can go to the can when you want to. If you feel like baking a cake, you can bake a cake. You don't have to do the same operation all day long for eight or ten hours.
It is clear that what they wanted was the social relationships. They wanted to be social beings and they wanted to be absorbed in the social process, but at the same time, they wanted this under conditions of free associations and the alternative that was left to them in bourgeois society of the home such as it is or the shop such as it is, was not a solution for them.
When children came, there was great bitterness on the part of most of the girls and there were about a dozen girls who took maternity leave while I was there. Everybody knew that when the girls took maternity leave they would be back within a year. Most of the girls did come back as soon as the period allotted to have a child was up.
I only have one minute and I want to make one point on the intimacy that developed among the women workers. It's been pointed out by the men that there is an intimacy that develops among women workers that is part of a relationship that men workers do not have with each other on a group basis, although they may have it with some particular buddy or another. The girls tore their husbands apart and compared husbands. They were unanimous in their unexpressed (that is, formally unexpressed) contempt for exceptional women. They were greatly resentful at having to do equal work with men, and frequently harder work than men, without getting equal pay. They resented having men as supervisors, overseers and in every conceivable post of authority. Everyone who wore a white shirt and had any position of authority over them, including the committeemen, were men.
This resentment manifested itself in the form of bitterness toward men in general, but, except for very rare instances, the women workers that I knew never reacted to the situation in the way that has been pointed out as being characteristic of the exceptional woman, by trying to imitate men or by trying to be as good as men or do the work better or say that they could do exactly the same as men. As a matter of fact, it was just the opposite, and the girls in our shop used their status as women to better their status. I think this must be common among all women workers. Everybody knew that you could use your status as a woman during your menstrual period to get your relief period lengthened, that you could use a particular state law, such as the law which provides seats for women. Of course, we had to fight a year and a half to have the law put into effect in our shop, but when we did get the seats, the men used to come over and try to swipe them in a very comradely fashion of course. The women would always go and bring their seats back to their own little section, or harem, and pat the guys on the shoulder, saying, “It's tough, but after all that's your problem. You get seats; we got ours.”
Ryan, Los Angeles: There are three groupings in the woman question, the woman in the home, the woman who works and the Negro woman. I would like to take up just for a few minutes the Negro woman, which will also take up the working woman. The Negro women in this society have to face three problems: one, being a Negro, two, being a worker, three, being a woman. The woman in this society today has a better chance than the women of the olden days. In my opinion, one of the greatest women of the olden days was Sojourner Truth.
Sojourner Truth was a woman who not only dealt with the Negro slavery problem, but she also dealt with the woman question. She traveled by foot across the country, from one end to another. She would speak on street corners, in churches, or anywhere people would gather to listen to her. She defied anyone who tried to stop her, man or law, and in doing so, she won the respect of men and women all over the country, not only proving that she was a great Negro, but that also she was a great woman.
The woman today has a better chance of starting. She has social clubs, church groups and other organizations, but the most important one of these is the trade union. The Negro woman has, in the past few years, had the most difficult time finding a job. She has had to pound the pavement seven or eight months out of the year. If she was lucky, she got a job in a factory. If she didn't, she had to take what she could get.
But once inside the factory, she did not hesitate to start to work on the problem as a whole and on her special problem. She talked with the workers next to her on the line and she would get their experiences and give them hers. These talks sometimes would result in groups being formed and then these groups would take on forms of organizations. Sometimes they were only groups of Negroes or sometimes they were mixed groups. In these groups, they would try to decide what to do and the best way to do it. Some of their expressions in these groups would be breaking down discrimination.
I remember back during the war there was one such group in New York. This group of women were discussing the events of the day, which at the time were events of the war. They were discussing the discrimination that was being carried on by the Army and the navy and the experiences of the boys overseas.
The women would go out in these groups together and sometimes if they were barred from theaters, a skating rink or someplace else, they would fight the case and take it to court, and these were some of their ways of expressing themselves through this organization.
Now the women of today are discussing the coming war in their plants and shops. I happen to be working in a hospital where there is a mixed group, although the woman are mostly Negroes. We eat together at the same table. The discussion they have is what's going to happen when the next world war comes, or will there be a next world war? One girl thought there would be no world war. She was a Negro and she had no affiliations with any political group. She'd worked in shops before, but she was very new to a situation of this kind and she said that before there would he a next world war, the people in this country would have a war right here. Not understanding what she meant, all the rest of the girls joined in the conversation immediately and said that what she said was true. They said that we would fight here. They said that they would go out and get guns and help the men fight too, if it came to a question of our fighting, if Truman or the rest of them would bring on another war.
I happen to be the vice-president of my local union. I didn't want to, but I had to. Very little discrimination is shown in the hospital, except from the workers. But this is going to be found in any shop until these people are educated to the point of understanding the Negroes or any minority and their problems.
I was told to announce my name, but I have none, so I'll leave it anonymous. I'd like to relate a little incident that happened over at my local this week. I was serving on the election committee so I had to be down
at the local. I come in and one of the secretaries say to me: “How come you're inside? I thought you wouldn't cross the picket line.” I asked her, “What picket line?” I said, “I didn't see any.” So she tells me that there is some woman picketing the local. So I said to her, “Where will I find out more information about this?” She says, “Oh, some of the guys probably are around. You can ask them.”
Well, I went outside and sure enough, there were some of the local bureaucrats and they were standing around talking and griping about the women that had been picketing them. I went over and I asked a few questions and they told me that there were a few woman that had been picketing the local. These women had very little seniority. They wanted their jobs back and they came to picket the local for the local to get their jobs back. Well, naturally, the bureaucrats saw it only one way, that Reuther had put these women up to doing that. He may or may not have; that isn't too important to us.
I remember about a month ago, or about two months ago, there was a small article in the Detroit Times, which quoted some woman who had worked in the Press Steel Building, who was leading this group. She was the representative of the group. She said that she had gone down to the local time and again and had spoken to the vice president of her unit, which was the Press Steel Unit where they had had some big layoffs about five, six months ago on account of the runaway shop.
It seems that in Ford, there's a long tradition, especially since the end of the war, of the company giving the women a raw deal. I imagine that exists in most other places. As a matter of fact, I remember after I was at Ford about six months, they had a big change-over and they laid off the people without seniority and then they laid all the women off regardless of their seniority. Then they went to the others according to their seniority. But that's aside from this little incident anyway. Well, the bureaucrats were standing around and naturally, they were cussing out the women. They were saying: “They got ten months seniority and they want their jobs back.” They started complaining about the fact that the women won't go on any job the company puts them on. It's an old trick of the company to put the women on the roughest jobs in order to force them out of the shop. The rule is that if you bump somebody from another job and you have more seniority than the other person, you can stay in the shop. But if you refuse to go on the job the company puts you on, you are out. Obviously, the company had done that to these women.
Well, these bureaucrats were in their own way justifying the company. They were blaming the women for refusing to do some of these heavy jobs. They had done nothing about it. These guys were just cussing them out. I have a policy of not arguing with them or discussing with them but just asking questions, and I found this out: this group of women who got this raw deal came down to the local and obviously didn't get satisfaction there. They tried to reach their own unit chairman. He gave them the run-around. They probably went to the international and the international, playing union politics, sent them out to picket the local. This may be true or it may not be true, I'm not sure.
The point is, these women got together themselves, there were no politicos involved in it. If there were Stalinists involved in it I'm sure they wouldn't have picketed the Local, because right now the Stalinists have
a honeymoon with Stelletto, president of the Local.
So these women followed the regular procedure and in a way you can say they mobilized themselves. That's what I liked about the whole thing, and that's why I thought I would relate the incident here. I didn't organize this material because it just dawned on me while I was sitting back there that this is the woman question being discussed and that maybe this is the agenda for it. So there's your little story.
I'm Tressa from Philadelphia. There were several points that struck me as I heard the talk, especially on self-creativity of children. I remarked to somebody, “Everybody knows that children are self-creative,” and somebody said, “No, they don't know that,” and that made me think about Bryant's talk.
I thought it was excellent in many respects but I wondered if there wasn' t a plan in her talk about the child in the future society. Now we have no blueprint for the future society. We don't know whether a child, (as in the primitive society), has to help his mother or father do some sort of work. We don't know what the future will have but we do know that the bourgeoisie have been imposing all sorts of plans on people, making them feel that they must do something with themselves, and I think we should keep that very clear.
I also felt that the child should feel that he is needed and I think this ties in very concretely with our society. A woman feels that she needs something and a child feels that he needs something and I think this is definitely tied up with what we're seeking, Socialism.
Now how to go about it? That's the thing I'll be waiting to hear, some program to attack this problem at this point. There was another point made about the plan, was it Norway where women get vacations? Well, I think that's a rather dangerous thing to play around with because Russia gives women vacations. I think that we should strive for something that has something more to it than just getting vacations. I think all these things will be solved.
Coming back to self-creativity, I happened to be in a camp that is mainly working class children, in fact you couldn't go there unless you couldn' t afford a pay camp. I want to tell you that I saw self-creativity in children that you never see in the bourgeoisie. These children, in three days, created plays and costumes and things that no child that I have bean in contact with, who have had music and dancing, could have done under those circumstances. I want to say that this self-creativity is certainly in the masses and we know it's there. Well, I wanted to clear that point in Bryant's speech.
Greg of Los Angeles: I think one thing that escapes a lot of tie is the tremendous breadth of the woman question. First of all, it's not just something that is characteristic of this period, but it spans three historical
periods.
Today you find feudal manifestations right along side of the manifestations of the future of socialism and in this sense the three periods of feudalism, capitalism and socialism are incorporated in the woman question, and I think we should realize the breadth of that.
In the home you have this feudal aspect, this feudal structure, this hang-over, which is completely hollow in terms of any meaning for this age. The structure of the home is a form without essence, that is, the woman is restricted to a completely meaningless, artificial straight-jacket of social customs and mores against which she rebels. She sort of lives in a haunted house, so to speak, and I think a lot of women feel the same. They are living meaningless lives and an empty social pattern.
On the other hand you have the revolutionary aspects of the woman question; you have the woman in the factory, where you have this socialization which is characteristic of the coming society counterposed against this medieval phase. The woman in the factory, it seems to me, is a very revolutionary element from the standpoint of her not having any managerial unionist bureaucratic element in her, since in the working class she is relatively new. She's uncontaminated by bureaucratism and pretty much spontaneous in her reactions to the oppressors of the union bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the bosses on the other. I think the recent document on the woman in the factory is a concrete statement of this.
Chairman: We are an hour behind schedule which isn't good because we've got a lot to take up and we still have to take up the most important part of the convention and that is program and perspectives. There is a question by the presiding committee that the discussion be cut short right now and that the main speaker make her summary and that all conclude the woman's panel. Is there any objection to this procedure?
You see this is just the beginning of the discussion, we've got lots of time. I mean people will have to write and develop these ideas in the coming months so I don't think that there's any question of not enough discussion.
From the floor: I just want to know how many more want the floor!
Chairman: There are four more speakers and five minutes apiece makes it twenty minutes and that's too long. We've got to get on with the proceedings.
Simpson: I would like to renounce five minutes to give Jane the time she needs.
Chairman: All right then, five minutes for Jane and five minutes for Simpson.
Jane from Los Angeles: I thoroughly agree with Roberts that the discussion on children should not be the starting off place or the central theme of the discussion on the woman question. It's a later stage. For that reason I spoke for just a few minutes this morning on children.
But in view of the line that the discussion has taken, particularly in view of Bryant's remarks, we felt impelled, those of us who are responsible for the writing of the document, to reply to some of the remarks made.
After ten years as a practitioner of progressive education in the public and private grade schools throughout the country, in Harlem during the 1943 race riots, among Mexican children in Denver who couldn't speak English, among bourgeois children throughout the country, I have made my break with progressive education. This document and the section in it on children represents that break with progressive education, with which I was intimately associated for ten years.
We are primarily concerned today with the relationship between the child and his parent, and his relationship to bourgeois society. Now the differences between our point of view and Bryant's have been expressed quite well, quite clearly by the friend from Philadelphia who spoke a few minutes ago. She sums it up very well in her references to the plan contained in Bryant's document. We are not discussing Bryant's concrete experiences with children, many of which are valid. What we are concerned with is her solution which contains in it the essence of progressive education.
The “guidance and direction” and her own plan, which is contained in these words, “work they must,” and then some other words following it which go something to this effect: “Tasks must be found for children in the future society.” This is exactly what we are breaking with. We don't want to do things to children and for children. We are not imposing any plan on children. We're not trying to make them feel necessary by finding tasks for them to do, this is what progressive education has done for children. They will be necessary to society, they're not going to be made to feel necessary, they will be necessary to society. They'll be necessary as 'developing' social beings and every stage of their development will be enjoyed by adults. We will learn from them, we will work with them, we will cooperate with them and so forth and so on.
The bourgeoisie today are very much aware of the struggle of the youth and the children against capitalist society and their solution is to contain the energy of the adults and the children until the day that they
can go to work for capitalism, either in the home or in the factory. They force the children and the youth, or they try to force them, to live in the future. The progressive educators among the bourgeoisie try to soften this
blow by finding tasks, by making them feel necessary, by somehow trying to subordinate their energy to the capitalist society.
In conclusion I just want to make the point again that we have no plan for children in the future society – that we're not imposing anything on them. We feel that we will enjoy them as developing social beings and out of that enjoyment will come certain practices, certain developments, of adults and children in this society. This will be the future.
Simpson: I just want to say first of all that all of us very happy that the woman question is finally on the book, so to speak, and we're very, very glad about that. I'd just like to say a few words about what one of the friends said about her development in other organizations and what she has come to today.
I would like to say that our development was almost an exact parallel to that and that it isn't accidental that we develop in the same way and we finally come to the same conclusion, that is, the conclusions that have been expressed today. It's wonderful to hear in the discussion, all of the things that we have left out and are conscious of having left out. All of the other woman and a lot of the men too, have filled these things in for us. And in the discussion we've gotten a far more rounded picture than what we came with. We know a little more about the effect of the factory on a woman.
There is really a summary that has been made of all of the discussion on the workers' question that has not been made an the youth question or on the woman question, and that is the conception of forced labor.
I think that that conception sums up all of our ideas on the woman question and particularly on what one of the others said about not liking home work and not liking factory work and rejecting society wherever women are. It is precisely because of the nature of the work being forced and pushed upon them, that they absolutely refuse to accept it.
Now another problem immediately arises with the middle class woman, whom we really haven't discussed too much. I feel that that point should be a little more elaborated in relation to the point that we're making about other women, that is, working class women. The women of the petty bourgeoisie, unlike any other section of the petty bourgeoisie, have absolutely no ties with this society. The man of the petty bourgeoisie has perhaps a business that he would like to keep and to hold on to, or a practice of same sort. The woman has absolutely no ties and we have found that the petty bourgeois woman is extremely receptive to our ideas, does not mind being referred to as the petty bourgeois woman, and as a matter of fact appreciates it because everybody has not shown her problem up, as in the case of the working class woman in the radical movement.
O.K., the proletarian woman is exploited here, here and here. What about the petty bourgeois woman; she's over there. She's not really part of us and cannot be included with us. That isn't true; she's really one of the petty bourgeoisie that can be easily included with us and can easily accept our ideas on every question precisely because she can accept our ideas on the woman question.
I want to clear up a point that the friends make on vacations, just in passing. It isn't that we find that vacations are a solution, but that it is extremely indicative today that the labor bureaucracy, as well as other sections of society, are trying to mend the women question with tape, or whatever they have, (it is vacations in this case). They'll give out anything these days. They give out twenty five thousand dollar prizes for slogans; they'll do anything to keep her quiet and to keep her confused, if they can, that is.
Now I'd like to say that as a result of this discussion, which has been, for me, one of the most wonderful discussions I've ever attended, and as a result of the wonderful responses from all of the people involved, we feel, and all of us felt, during lunch, that we can go out and really give them hell.
Chairman: That concludes the woman panel.
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<h2><a href="1949-51-philcorr/index.html">Philosophic Correspondence on Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel's <i>Science of Logic</i> (1949-51)</a> (authors: Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James & Grace Lee (Boggs))</h2>
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Thematic collections
Info: This page contains works by Raya Dunayevskaya collected together by theme
Digitalisation, proof-reading & html markup: Chris Gilligan
Philosophic Correspondence on Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic (1949-51) (authors: Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James & Grace Lee (Boggs))
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<h2>Meryl Fernando</h2>
<h1>Edmund Samarakkody, 1912-1992</h1>
<p class="intro">"Mankind, when after some progress it succumbs to a stampede, allows those who urge it forward to be abused, vilified, and trampled to death. Only when it has resumed the forward movement, does it pay rueful tribute to the victims, cherish their memory and piously collect their relics; then it is grateful to them for every drop of blood they gave, for it knows that with their blood they nourished the seed of the future."<br>
—<strong>Isaac Deutscher, <em>The Prophet Outcast</em></strong></p>
<p>
EDMUND SAMARAKKODY was born on 19 April 1912. He belonged to family of the low country landed gentry, and was educated at St Thomas College, Mount Lavinia, which was close to the hearts of British Governors of Ceylon and the bishops of the Anglican faith. It is very rarely that from such a background would emerge a young man who would want to overhaul the existing social order and build on its ashes a new order. Edmund Samarakkody proved to be the exception. He broke away from the moorings in home and school, and abandoned his social class to commit himself entirely to the workers� movement.</p>
<p>The winds of change originating from the October 1917 revolution in Russia had wafted across the Indian subcontinent, but had not touched the shores of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, in the Indian ocean, which British imperialism had transformed into a British sea. Thus the Communist Party of India was formed in 1920, which became a constituent of the Communist (Third) International, but there was no counterpart of it in Ceylon. So when Philip Gunawardena, Colvin R. de Silva, N.M. Perera and Leslie Goonewardene, arrived in Ceylon in 1932-33, having been influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Lenin while they were in Britain, there was a virgin field in which they could introduce the concept of socialism and develop it in various ways.</p>
<p>When poppies were sold on Armistice Day (11 November) to commemorate soldiers who were killed in the first imperialist war of 1914-18, the Suriya Mal movement was founded in 1933 to sell Suriya flowers on the same day, in competition with the poppy sellers, on an anti-imperialist and anti-war basis.</p>
<p>When the malaria epidemic, in which over 100,000 deaths occurred between September 1934 and December 1935, struck the Kegalle district, Suriya Mal workers played an important role and did valuable relief work in the malaria-stricken villages.</p>
<p>In February 1933, when the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills workers struck work against a proposal by the management to reduce wages as a result of the economic depression and the increased competition of Japanese textiles on the market, and the workers appealed to A.E. Goonesinha to intervene on their behalf, he advised them to return to work. The workers refused to heed his advice. They then turned to Colvin R. de Silva, who had recently returned from England. This gave Colvin, Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera and members of the Colombo South Youth League an opportunity to support the workers� strike and provide leadership. This was the beginning of the challenge to the trade union leadership of A.E. Goonesinha, who in the 1920s had fought militant battles on behalf of the workers in the Colombo port, the railways and the tramway strike and riot in 1929, which had marked, according to Philip Gunawardena, the culmination of a period of offensive action by the workers.</p>
<p>At a time when the Board of Ministers of the State Council who belonged to the Ceylon National Congress (CNC) were asking Whitehall to transfer more power to the elected Ministers and submitted a petition to Whitehall the Youth Leagues opposed the manoeuvre as an abject capitulation to imperialism. The ministers did not demand even Dominion status. This showed that the CNC as the representative of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie was very weak and that the bourgeoisie as a class was very weak and completely incapable of fighting for independence. Edmund Samarakkody was then a member of the Colombo South Youth League.</p>
<p><strong>Edmund enters the political arena of struggle</strong><br>
It was in this milieu that Edmund Samarakkody threw in his lot to help found the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in December 1935 as a broad Left party with complete independence for Ceylon from British rule and socialism as its aims</p>
<p>When Philip Gunawardena contested the Avissawella seat in the State Council election of 1936, Edmund presided at one of his election meetings; a few hundred yards away, his father presided at an election meeting in support of the rival candidate, a blue-blooded aristocrat. As a result he was disinherited by his father.</p>
<p>In 1937 Edmund was already helping to lead strikes at the Vavasseur Coconut Mill and the Colombo Commercial Company Fertiliser Works at Hunupitiya just north of Colombo. For his role at the latter strike Edmund was arrested along with Leslie Goonewardene.</p>
<p>After passing out of the Law College as a Proctor (Attorney-At-Law), Edmund married Dagmar Samarakkody and the young couple settled down in Badulla, the capital of the Uva Province, on the eastern slope of the South Central mountain mass, where tea grows luxuriantly. Edmund practised as lawyer and engaged in political work. When the strike wave of 1939-40 spread to the Uva Province the Samasamajists were in the leadership. Edmund Samarakkody along with Willie Jayatilleke and V. Sittampalam did invaluable work in the struggle in Uva (Leslie Goonewardene, <em>Short History of the LSSP</em>, p.13).</p>
<p>The second imperialist war started in September 1939 and the LSSP opposed it. After the strike wave of 1939-40, in which the LSSP provided militant leadership in Uva, the colonial government in April 1940 arrested four leaders � Philip Gunawardena, Colvin R. de Silva, N.M. Perera and Edmund Samarakkody. Japan entered the war towards the end of 1941 and bombed Colombo in early April 1942. After making a quick decision, the four detenus escaped from jail along with jail guard Solomon on 21 April 1942. Since there were jail guards sympathetic to the detenus it was a simple business to open the doors of the prison and come out. In fact, on two previous occasions also they had left the jail in the night for consultations with the party and had returned to jail before dawn (<em>Short History of the LSSP</em>, p.19)</p>
<p><strong>Expulsion of the Stalinists � Towards Trotskyism</strong><br>
Edmund was a member of the "T" group, which was a secret Trotskyist group within the party. In 1939 the Stalinists in the LSSP, S.A. Wickremasinghe, M.G. Mendis, A. Vaidialingam et al, were expelled from the LSSP and the party took a turn towards building a Trotskyist party. Incidentally this was the first occasion where the Trotskyists expelled the Stalinists � elsewhere, in parties of the Communist (Third) International, the reverse took place.</p>
<p>In April 1942, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI) was formed as a section of the Fourth International with the LSSP as its Ceylon unit. However, the party was soon in the throes of a factional struggle and Edmund sided with the Bolshevik-Leninist faction as opposed to a grouping around Philip and N.M. Perera which called itself the Workers� Opposition.</p>
<p>After the war ended in August 1945, Philip and N.M. broke away from the BLPI and its Ceylon unit, the LSSP, and formed a new party which they too called the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, claiming that it was the real LSSP and it was Fourth Internationalist. <em>Fight</em>, the English organ of the LSSP, Ceylon unit of the BLPI, in its first issue of 13 November 1945 editorially attacked the grouping around Philip and N.M. as a petty bourgeois grouping calling themselves Samasamajists who had separated themselves from proletarian politics and made strides towards petty bourgeois opportunism. Colvin and Leslie remained in India and Edmund was the best known public figure in the LSSP, the Ceylon unit of the BLPI. A public meeting of this organisation which was held at the Colombo Town Hall (then housed in the Municipal Council Building) on 25 October 1945 was presided over by Edmund. An attempt to break up the meeting by an LSSP group with the use of pure thuggery was foiled.</p>
<p><strong>Edmund contests D.S. Senanayake</strong><br>
During a short-lived merger of the two parties in 1946, an agreed list of candidates was drawn up for the parliamentary elections due to take place under a new constitution, imposed by Britain, to take effect in 1947. After the two parties split again, this list was honoured at the election held in September 1947. Edmund was pitted against D. S. Senanayake � the leader of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie and future Prime Minister � for the Mirigama seat, a coconut and rice growing area. The down-trodden people and particularly those belonging to the so-called "depressed castes" who had never had the experience of voting (D.S. Senanayake was elected uncontested in two previous State Council elections under universal franchise) rallied round Edmund in their thousands. It was a new experience, an awakening and a bout of newly found freedom to express their disgust at the landed gentry and their exploiters. Edmund�s and the party�s resources were limited. Edmund had an old motor car and he suffered from financial constraints. However, he polled over 10,000 votes. It is said that at the counting of votes D.S. Senanayake was utterly surprised</p>
<p>In 1948 the BLPI entered the Congress Socialist Party of India and the Ceylon unit became the section of the Fourth International. It took the name Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP). In the rivalry between the BSP and the LSSP, the BSP was in the ascendant, and the LSSP�s fortunes were declining. It was in this situation that Edmund as the BSP candidate defeated Robert Gunawardena of the LSSP in a triangular contest for a vacant seat in a by-election of the Dehiwela-Mount Lavinia Urban Council. Later he became the Chairman of this Council.</p>
<p>In the parliamentary elections of 1952, following the death of D.S. Senanayake in March of that year, and after Ceylon enjoyed a boom in the rubber industry due to the Korean war, Edmund was elected to represent Dehiowita in Parliament, in an unfavourable situation for the Left. The United National Party (UNP) commanded 74 seats out of 101 in that Parliament. The LSSP was down to nine! Edmund was re-elected in 1956 for Dehiowita and in July 1960 for Bulathsinghala.</p>
<p><strong>Opposition to coalition government with SLFP</strong><br>
In May 1960 the LSSP at a special conference adopted a proposal by N.M. Perera to form a coalition government with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the central committee a group emerged that was totally opposed to this proposal. Edmund became the leader of this group. At the conference Colvin, Leslie, Doric de Souza and Bernard Soysa opposed the proposal, but they began to waver, and finally capitulated. In 1964 they accepted N.M.�s position. Eighteen years later, Leslie Goonewardene, in a pamphlet titled <em>The History of the LSSP in Perspective</em> issued on the 43rd anniversary, justified the formation of a coalition government with the SLFP (p.9). Analysing the class character of the SLFP, he calls it a petty bourgeois party with an upper petty bourgeois leadership. In the period 1956-9 the LSSP in political resolutions adopted at conference characterised the SLFP as a capitalist party and referred to the UNP and SLFP as two sides of the same coin!</p>
<p>The masses became disillusioned with the SLFP government in 1962. In August 1963 the United Left Front (ULF) comprising the LSSP, the Communist Party and Philip Gunawardena�s MEP was formed, ostensibly to oppose the UNP and SLFP. The minority in the LSSP central committee opposed the ULF on the ground that its programme was a parliamentary reformist programme and was not anti-capitalist. Further, that the LSSP had abandoned its policy on the state language question. In the above-mentioned pamphlet Leslie Goonewardene states: "The immediate occasion for the change of the LSSP�s position from both Sinhala and Tamil as state languages to that of Sinhala as the sole official language with the reasonable use of Tamil, a position that had already been put into law, had been the pact with the VLSSP of Philip Gunawardena which led to the United Left Front composed of these parties along with the Communist Party" (p.14).</p>
<p>Disillusionment and discontent of the masses with the policies and performance of the SLFP government increased and assumed crisis proportions. The Prime Minister, Sirima Bandaranaike, prorogued parliament for four months and sought the help of the LSSP leader N.M. Perera to form a coalition. A special conference in June 1964 gave N.M. a mandate to form a coalition. The minority in the central committee opposed it vehemently and walked out of the conference with about 100 members to break away from the LSSP and form the LSSP (Revolutionary) with Edmund as the Secretary. The two LSSP(R) MPs, Edmund and Meryl Fernando, opposed the coalition government in Parliament. On 3 December 1964 the two MPs voted for an amendment to the second throne speech of the coalition government, moved by the independent rightist MP Dahanayaka, who was supported by the UNP and 13 MPs of the SLFP who crossed over to the opposition. The amendment was carried and the government was defeated.</p>
<p>The 3 December vote of the two LSSP(R) MPs was criticised within the party. The burden of the criticism was that they should not have voted for the right-wing MP�s amendment. However, the party approved the vote as politically correct. Nevertheless it ushered in a period of deep crisis, and some weeks later V. Karalasingham and the Sakthi group left the party to rejoin the LSSP.</p>
<p>(Several years later the 3 December vote was reviewed by the RSP central committee which decided that it was a tactical mistake, although politically correct.)</p>
<p><strong>LSSP(R) not a viable group</strong><br>
The group that broke away from the LSSP at the 1964 June special conference to form the LSSP(R) was not homogeneous and comprised several tendencies. Other splits followed. But Edmund continued to function as secretary of a group now known as the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (RSP). When the April 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection took place, the RSP while criticising the adventurism of the JVP leadership condemned the massacre of the insurgents by the government troops. The RSP in a communication addressed to the Prime Minister, Mrs Bandaranaike, registered its vehement protest against the massacre. Undaunted by the smallness of the political group of which he was secretary, Edmund continued to write on important matters like the Tamil National Question, the United Socialist Alliance, Gorbachev�s reforms ...</p>
<p>Apart from his unflinching loyalty to the revolutionary Marxist programme, and steadfast opposition to coalition politics, two things stand out in the last three decades of Edmund�s political life.</p>
<p>Firstly, his internationalism. He was happy to take upon himself the task of attending world congresses. In June 1963 the LSSP selected him to attend the seventh world congress of the Fourth International in Rome, which ratified the re-unification with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, thus giving birth to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec). At this point in time the leadership of the LSSP did not have much interest in the Fourth International and was more concerned with finding a way to form an anti-UNP government in parliament. Subsequently Edmund attended the eighth world congress of the USec in Germany in December 1965 and the ninth world congress held in Italy in April 1969. His link with the USec snapped in 1969. In 1973 the RSP came to be known as the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP), which in the mid-1970s established fraternal relations with the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) of the United States. Edmund carried on a debate with James Robertson of the iSt on the National Question, support for left parties within a bourgeois coalition, by the exchange of documents. He also wrote a document on "The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon" which the iSt published. The liaison ended in 1979.</p>
<p>The Gruppo Operaio Rivoluzionario, a breakaway group from the iSt, established contact with the RWP in the early 1980s, and after discussions the two organisations decided to work together with the aim of building an International Trotskyist Tendency. In the 1980s, despite advancing in age, Edmund had the will to attend several conferences of a few small groups in Europe. In 1985 he was the main speaker at a meeting for the defence of the rights of the Tamil people which had been organised in Holland. In 1989 he attended a conference of the Trotskyist Co-ordination Committee held in San Francisco.</p>
<p>Edmund accepted not merely in words but in deeds that working men and women in all countries should unite under a revolutionary Communist banner to fight against imperialist barbarity, against the privileged classes, against the bourgeois state and bourgeois property, against all kinds and forms of social and national oppression. He persisted in working with small groups to build the nucleus of a new International. He could not have succeeded.</p>
<p>Secondly, his views on the National Question. He showed great interest in it and would often refer to Trotsky�s famous dictum that it is the problem of problems. In a document titled "The Tamil Minority Question and the RWP", he stated:</p>
<p>"The oppression of the Tamil Minority by the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and their governments, is only an aspect of bourgeois class oppression of the workers and toilers of Sri Lanka. The Majority ruling bourgeois group, the Sinhalese, has the need to keep the Tamil Minority deprived of their just rights, and in a state of subordination, even as this bourgeoisie needs to keep the working class and toilers in a state of oppression for capitalist exploitation and the maintenance of capitalist class-rule.</p>
<p>"It is thus, that in the capitalist society of Sri Lanka, the Tamil minority, the working class, students and youth, poor peasants are in a state of oppression. The oppression of all these sections of the people is inextricably linked to the continuation of the capitalist system and the maintenance of capitalist class-rule.</p>
<p>"It is thus, that the struggle of the Tamil minority for its just rights is linked to the struggle of the workers and toilers of the whole of Sri Lanka against capitalism and class rule. This struggle must necessarily be based on an anti-capitalist program which will include the just demands of the Tamil minority, above all the right of the Tamils for self-determination � the recognition of the right to a separate Tamil state."</p>
<p>Edmund distinguished himself from the first generation leaders of the LSSP by stubbornly refusing to take the coalition road to parliamentary office. After dissociating himself from coalition politics in 1964 he attempted to help build, albeit unsuccessfully, a combat revolutionary party of the working class and a revolutionary working men�s International. His life and work have demonstrated that unflinching revolutionary principle and transparent integrity<a name="BM_1_"></a><a name="BM_2_"></a> are not enough to achieve these aims.</p>
<p>Edmund�s wife, Dagmar, passed away a few years after Edmund�s death. In his last years of political isolation she stood bravely by his side. They are survived by their daughter, Chulanganee, and several grandchildren.</p>
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Meryl Fernando
Edmund Samarakkody, 1912-1992
"Mankind, when after some progress it succumbs to a stampede, allows those who urge it forward to be abused, vilified, and trampled to death. Only when it has resumed the forward movement, does it pay rueful tribute to the victims, cherish their memory and piously collect their relics; then it is grateful to them for every drop of blood they gave, for it knows that with their blood they nourished the seed of the future."
—Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast
EDMUND SAMARAKKODY was born on 19 April 1912. He belonged to family of the low country landed gentry, and was educated at St Thomas College, Mount Lavinia, which was close to the hearts of British Governors of Ceylon and the bishops of the Anglican faith. It is very rarely that from such a background would emerge a young man who would want to overhaul the existing social order and build on its ashes a new order. Edmund Samarakkody proved to be the exception. He broke away from the moorings in home and school, and abandoned his social class to commit himself entirely to the workers� movement.
The winds of change originating from the October 1917 revolution in Russia had wafted across the Indian subcontinent, but had not touched the shores of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, in the Indian ocean, which British imperialism had transformed into a British sea. Thus the Communist Party of India was formed in 1920, which became a constituent of the Communist (Third) International, but there was no counterpart of it in Ceylon. So when Philip Gunawardena, Colvin R. de Silva, N.M. Perera and Leslie Goonewardene, arrived in Ceylon in 1932-33, having been influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Lenin while they were in Britain, there was a virgin field in which they could introduce the concept of socialism and develop it in various ways.
When poppies were sold on Armistice Day (11 November) to commemorate soldiers who were killed in the first imperialist war of 1914-18, the Suriya Mal movement was founded in 1933 to sell Suriya flowers on the same day, in competition with the poppy sellers, on an anti-imperialist and anti-war basis.
When the malaria epidemic, in which over 100,000 deaths occurred between September 1934 and December 1935, struck the Kegalle district, Suriya Mal workers played an important role and did valuable relief work in the malaria-stricken villages.
In February 1933, when the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills workers struck work against a proposal by the management to reduce wages as a result of the economic depression and the increased competition of Japanese textiles on the market, and the workers appealed to A.E. Goonesinha to intervene on their behalf, he advised them to return to work. The workers refused to heed his advice. They then turned to Colvin R. de Silva, who had recently returned from England. This gave Colvin, Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera and members of the Colombo South Youth League an opportunity to support the workers� strike and provide leadership. This was the beginning of the challenge to the trade union leadership of A.E. Goonesinha, who in the 1920s had fought militant battles on behalf of the workers in the Colombo port, the railways and the tramway strike and riot in 1929, which had marked, according to Philip Gunawardena, the culmination of a period of offensive action by the workers.
At a time when the Board of Ministers of the State Council who belonged to the Ceylon National Congress (CNC) were asking Whitehall to transfer more power to the elected Ministers and submitted a petition to Whitehall the Youth Leagues opposed the manoeuvre as an abject capitulation to imperialism. The ministers did not demand even Dominion status. This showed that the CNC as the representative of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie was very weak and that the bourgeoisie as a class was very weak and completely incapable of fighting for independence. Edmund Samarakkody was then a member of the Colombo South Youth League.
Edmund enters the political arena of struggle
It was in this milieu that Edmund Samarakkody threw in his lot to help found the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in December 1935 as a broad Left party with complete independence for Ceylon from British rule and socialism as its aims
When Philip Gunawardena contested the Avissawella seat in the State Council election of 1936, Edmund presided at one of his election meetings; a few hundred yards away, his father presided at an election meeting in support of the rival candidate, a blue-blooded aristocrat. As a result he was disinherited by his father.
In 1937 Edmund was already helping to lead strikes at the Vavasseur Coconut Mill and the Colombo Commercial Company Fertiliser Works at Hunupitiya just north of Colombo. For his role at the latter strike Edmund was arrested along with Leslie Goonewardene.
After passing out of the Law College as a Proctor (Attorney-At-Law), Edmund married Dagmar Samarakkody and the young couple settled down in Badulla, the capital of the Uva Province, on the eastern slope of the South Central mountain mass, where tea grows luxuriantly. Edmund practised as lawyer and engaged in political work. When the strike wave of 1939-40 spread to the Uva Province the Samasamajists were in the leadership. Edmund Samarakkody along with Willie Jayatilleke and V. Sittampalam did invaluable work in the struggle in Uva (Leslie Goonewardene, Short History of the LSSP, p.13).
The second imperialist war started in September 1939 and the LSSP opposed it. After the strike wave of 1939-40, in which the LSSP provided militant leadership in Uva, the colonial government in April 1940 arrested four leaders � Philip Gunawardena, Colvin R. de Silva, N.M. Perera and Edmund Samarakkody. Japan entered the war towards the end of 1941 and bombed Colombo in early April 1942. After making a quick decision, the four detenus escaped from jail along with jail guard Solomon on 21 April 1942. Since there were jail guards sympathetic to the detenus it was a simple business to open the doors of the prison and come out. In fact, on two previous occasions also they had left the jail in the night for consultations with the party and had returned to jail before dawn (Short History of the LSSP, p.19)
Expulsion of the Stalinists � Towards Trotskyism
Edmund was a member of the "T" group, which was a secret Trotskyist group within the party. In 1939 the Stalinists in the LSSP, S.A. Wickremasinghe, M.G. Mendis, A. Vaidialingam et al, were expelled from the LSSP and the party took a turn towards building a Trotskyist party. Incidentally this was the first occasion where the Trotskyists expelled the Stalinists � elsewhere, in parties of the Communist (Third) International, the reverse took place.
In April 1942, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI) was formed as a section of the Fourth International with the LSSP as its Ceylon unit. However, the party was soon in the throes of a factional struggle and Edmund sided with the Bolshevik-Leninist faction as opposed to a grouping around Philip and N.M. Perera which called itself the Workers� Opposition.
After the war ended in August 1945, Philip and N.M. broke away from the BLPI and its Ceylon unit, the LSSP, and formed a new party which they too called the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, claiming that it was the real LSSP and it was Fourth Internationalist. Fight, the English organ of the LSSP, Ceylon unit of the BLPI, in its first issue of 13 November 1945 editorially attacked the grouping around Philip and N.M. as a petty bourgeois grouping calling themselves Samasamajists who had separated themselves from proletarian politics and made strides towards petty bourgeois opportunism. Colvin and Leslie remained in India and Edmund was the best known public figure in the LSSP, the Ceylon unit of the BLPI. A public meeting of this organisation which was held at the Colombo Town Hall (then housed in the Municipal Council Building) on 25 October 1945 was presided over by Edmund. An attempt to break up the meeting by an LSSP group with the use of pure thuggery was foiled.
Edmund contests D.S. Senanayake
During a short-lived merger of the two parties in 1946, an agreed list of candidates was drawn up for the parliamentary elections due to take place under a new constitution, imposed by Britain, to take effect in 1947. After the two parties split again, this list was honoured at the election held in September 1947. Edmund was pitted against D. S. Senanayake � the leader of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie and future Prime Minister � for the Mirigama seat, a coconut and rice growing area. The down-trodden people and particularly those belonging to the so-called "depressed castes" who had never had the experience of voting (D.S. Senanayake was elected uncontested in two previous State Council elections under universal franchise) rallied round Edmund in their thousands. It was a new experience, an awakening and a bout of newly found freedom to express their disgust at the landed gentry and their exploiters. Edmund�s and the party�s resources were limited. Edmund had an old motor car and he suffered from financial constraints. However, he polled over 10,000 votes. It is said that at the counting of votes D.S. Senanayake was utterly surprised
In 1948 the BLPI entered the Congress Socialist Party of India and the Ceylon unit became the section of the Fourth International. It took the name Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP). In the rivalry between the BSP and the LSSP, the BSP was in the ascendant, and the LSSP�s fortunes were declining. It was in this situation that Edmund as the BSP candidate defeated Robert Gunawardena of the LSSP in a triangular contest for a vacant seat in a by-election of the Dehiwela-Mount Lavinia Urban Council. Later he became the Chairman of this Council.
In the parliamentary elections of 1952, following the death of D.S. Senanayake in March of that year, and after Ceylon enjoyed a boom in the rubber industry due to the Korean war, Edmund was elected to represent Dehiowita in Parliament, in an unfavourable situation for the Left. The United National Party (UNP) commanded 74 seats out of 101 in that Parliament. The LSSP was down to nine! Edmund was re-elected in 1956 for Dehiowita and in July 1960 for Bulathsinghala.
Opposition to coalition government with SLFP
In May 1960 the LSSP at a special conference adopted a proposal by N.M. Perera to form a coalition government with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In the central committee a group emerged that was totally opposed to this proposal. Edmund became the leader of this group. At the conference Colvin, Leslie, Doric de Souza and Bernard Soysa opposed the proposal, but they began to waver, and finally capitulated. In 1964 they accepted N.M.�s position. Eighteen years later, Leslie Goonewardene, in a pamphlet titled The History of the LSSP in Perspective issued on the 43rd anniversary, justified the formation of a coalition government with the SLFP (p.9). Analysing the class character of the SLFP, he calls it a petty bourgeois party with an upper petty bourgeois leadership. In the period 1956-9 the LSSP in political resolutions adopted at conference characterised the SLFP as a capitalist party and referred to the UNP and SLFP as two sides of the same coin!
The masses became disillusioned with the SLFP government in 1962. In August 1963 the United Left Front (ULF) comprising the LSSP, the Communist Party and Philip Gunawardena�s MEP was formed, ostensibly to oppose the UNP and SLFP. The minority in the LSSP central committee opposed the ULF on the ground that its programme was a parliamentary reformist programme and was not anti-capitalist. Further, that the LSSP had abandoned its policy on the state language question. In the above-mentioned pamphlet Leslie Goonewardene states: "The immediate occasion for the change of the LSSP�s position from both Sinhala and Tamil as state languages to that of Sinhala as the sole official language with the reasonable use of Tamil, a position that had already been put into law, had been the pact with the VLSSP of Philip Gunawardena which led to the United Left Front composed of these parties along with the Communist Party" (p.14).
Disillusionment and discontent of the masses with the policies and performance of the SLFP government increased and assumed crisis proportions. The Prime Minister, Sirima Bandaranaike, prorogued parliament for four months and sought the help of the LSSP leader N.M. Perera to form a coalition. A special conference in June 1964 gave N.M. a mandate to form a coalition. The minority in the central committee opposed it vehemently and walked out of the conference with about 100 members to break away from the LSSP and form the LSSP (Revolutionary) with Edmund as the Secretary. The two LSSP(R) MPs, Edmund and Meryl Fernando, opposed the coalition government in Parliament. On 3 December 1964 the two MPs voted for an amendment to the second throne speech of the coalition government, moved by the independent rightist MP Dahanayaka, who was supported by the UNP and 13 MPs of the SLFP who crossed over to the opposition. The amendment was carried and the government was defeated.
The 3 December vote of the two LSSP(R) MPs was criticised within the party. The burden of the criticism was that they should not have voted for the right-wing MP�s amendment. However, the party approved the vote as politically correct. Nevertheless it ushered in a period of deep crisis, and some weeks later V. Karalasingham and the Sakthi group left the party to rejoin the LSSP.
(Several years later the 3 December vote was reviewed by the RSP central committee which decided that it was a tactical mistake, although politically correct.)
LSSP(R) not a viable group
The group that broke away from the LSSP at the 1964 June special conference to form the LSSP(R) was not homogeneous and comprised several tendencies. Other splits followed. But Edmund continued to function as secretary of a group now known as the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (RSP). When the April 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection took place, the RSP while criticising the adventurism of the JVP leadership condemned the massacre of the insurgents by the government troops. The RSP in a communication addressed to the Prime Minister, Mrs Bandaranaike, registered its vehement protest against the massacre. Undaunted by the smallness of the political group of which he was secretary, Edmund continued to write on important matters like the Tamil National Question, the United Socialist Alliance, Gorbachev�s reforms ...
Apart from his unflinching loyalty to the revolutionary Marxist programme, and steadfast opposition to coalition politics, two things stand out in the last three decades of Edmund�s political life.
Firstly, his internationalism. He was happy to take upon himself the task of attending world congresses. In June 1963 the LSSP selected him to attend the seventh world congress of the Fourth International in Rome, which ratified the re-unification with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, thus giving birth to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec). At this point in time the leadership of the LSSP did not have much interest in the Fourth International and was more concerned with finding a way to form an anti-UNP government in parliament. Subsequently Edmund attended the eighth world congress of the USec in Germany in December 1965 and the ninth world congress held in Italy in April 1969. His link with the USec snapped in 1969. In 1973 the RSP came to be known as the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP), which in the mid-1970s established fraternal relations with the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) of the United States. Edmund carried on a debate with James Robertson of the iSt on the National Question, support for left parties within a bourgeois coalition, by the exchange of documents. He also wrote a document on "The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon" which the iSt published. The liaison ended in 1979.
The Gruppo Operaio Rivoluzionario, a breakaway group from the iSt, established contact with the RWP in the early 1980s, and after discussions the two organisations decided to work together with the aim of building an International Trotskyist Tendency. In the 1980s, despite advancing in age, Edmund had the will to attend several conferences of a few small groups in Europe. In 1985 he was the main speaker at a meeting for the defence of the rights of the Tamil people which had been organised in Holland. In 1989 he attended a conference of the Trotskyist Co-ordination Committee held in San Francisco.
Edmund accepted not merely in words but in deeds that working men and women in all countries should unite under a revolutionary Communist banner to fight against imperialist barbarity, against the privileged classes, against the bourgeois state and bourgeois property, against all kinds and forms of social and national oppression. He persisted in working with small groups to build the nucleus of a new International. He could not have succeeded.
Secondly, his views on the National Question. He showed great interest in it and would often refer to Trotsky�s famous dictum that it is the problem of problems. In a document titled "The Tamil Minority Question and the RWP", he stated:
"The oppression of the Tamil Minority by the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and their governments, is only an aspect of bourgeois class oppression of the workers and toilers of Sri Lanka. The Majority ruling bourgeois group, the Sinhalese, has the need to keep the Tamil Minority deprived of their just rights, and in a state of subordination, even as this bourgeoisie needs to keep the working class and toilers in a state of oppression for capitalist exploitation and the maintenance of capitalist class-rule.
"It is thus, that in the capitalist society of Sri Lanka, the Tamil minority, the working class, students and youth, poor peasants are in a state of oppression. The oppression of all these sections of the people is inextricably linked to the continuation of the capitalist system and the maintenance of capitalist class-rule.
"It is thus, that the struggle of the Tamil minority for its just rights is linked to the struggle of the workers and toilers of the whole of Sri Lanka against capitalism and class rule. This struggle must necessarily be based on an anti-capitalist program which will include the just demands of the Tamil minority, above all the right of the Tamils for self-determination � the recognition of the right to a separate Tamil state."
Edmund distinguished himself from the first generation leaders of the LSSP by stubbornly refusing to take the coalition road to parliamentary office. After dissociating himself from coalition politics in 1964 he attempted to help build, albeit unsuccessfully, a combat revolutionary party of the working class and a revolutionary working men�s International. His life and work have demonstrated that unflinching revolutionary principle and transparent integrity are not enough to achieve these aims.
Edmund�s wife, Dagmar, passed away a few years after Edmund�s death. In his last years of political isolation she stood bravely by his side. They are survived by their daughter, Chulanganee, and several grandchildren.
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<h2>Edmund Samarakkody</h2>
<h1>The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon</h1>
<hr>
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://www.bolshevik.org/history/smk/SMK01.htm">International Bolshevik Tendency</a><br>
<span class="info">Orignal Publication:</span> <em>Spartacist</em> No. 22, Winter 1973–74<br>
<span class="info">Transcription:</span> Originally transribe by the International Bolshevik Tendency in 2005.<br>
Reformatted for the ETOL in 2009 by D. Walters<br>
<span class="info">Note by Transcriber:</span> The numbered footnotes are from the original article in <em>Spartacist</em>. The linked terms go to the Marxist Internet Archive Glossary and do not reflect the point of view of either the author or <em>Spartacist</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p class="quote"><em>The Editorial Board of</em> Spartacist <em>is proud to bring to our readers an important article making accessible to Trotskyists in the U.S. and internationally an analysis of the history and degeneration of the Trotskyist movement in Ceylon. This understanding is crucial for the rebirth of Trotskyism in Ceylon. The Ceylon experience has profound lessons for our movement, especially in the underdeveloped countries, in the struggle to build sections of an authentic Fourth International rooted in the working class.</em></p>
<p class="quote">The author, <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/s/a.htm#samarakkody">Edmund Samarakkody</a>, is uniquely qualified to comment on this experience. A veteran Trotskyist militant and currently spokesman for the Revolutionary Workers Party of Ceylon, Comrade Samarakkody was a founding leader of the Ceylon section of the Fourth International. His early experience dates back to trade-union organizing for the <a href="../../../../../glossary/orgs/l/a.htm#lssp">Lanka Sama Samaja Party</a> (LSSP) in the years before World War II. During the war, Comrade Samarakkody, along with other central leaders of the LSSP, was interned by the British and, following his escape, was involved in coordinating the activities of the illegalized LSSP. He then joined other leaders of the LSSP in temporary emigration to India—a crucial internationalizing experience for the Ceylonese Trotskyists—until the end of the war.</p>
<p class="quote">Comrade Samarakkody’s oppositional history began in 1957, when he and other left militants in the LSSP resisted the LSSP’s accommodation to the bourgeois nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Particularly crucial in understanding the degeneration of the international Trotskyist movement is the light cast by Comrade Samarakkody’s article on the wretched role of the Pabloist International Secretariat (now United Secretariat) in acquiescing to the LSSP’s accommodationist policy toward the SLFP until the USec revisionists were at last forced to disavow the LSSP when the LSSP entered the SLFP-led popular-front government of Mrs. Bandaranaike in 1964. As the article demonstrates, both the Pabloists of the USec and the Healyites (International Committee) must seek to ignore the real history of the LSSP before 1964 in order to conceal their own complicity, dictated by their pervasive opportunism.</p>
<p class="quote">After the 1964 debacle, the USec revisionists denounced the LSSP’s entry into the government and backed the LSSP(Revolutionary), led by the trade-union bureaucrat Bala Tampoe, which split in opposition to the entry into the government. Within the LSSP(R) Comrade Samarakkody led a left opposition against the Tampoe leadership. After two years of struggle, Comrade Samarakkody and his supporters left the LSSP(R) following a Special Conference (18-19 April 1968) and constituted the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (now Revolutionary Workers Party) of Ceylon.</p>
<p class="quote">As part of his continuing political battle against the revisionists, Comrade Samarakkody was instrumental in bringing to the attention of the world Trotskyist movement the fundamentally corrupt role of Bala Tampoe, through forcing a special Commission on Ceylon at the “Ninth World Congress” of the USec in April 1969. Following the USec’s suppression of the accusations against Tampoe , and the findings of the USec’s own Commission, Comrade Samarakkody transmitted to us the actual reports of this Commission, which we published in Spartacist <em># 21 (Fall 1972).</em></p>
<p class="quote">—The Editors</p>
<hr>
<p class="c1">During a period of two decades up to 1964, it was the claim of the leaders of the “United Secretariat of the Fourth International”<a href="#n1">[1]</a> that the LSSP<a href="#n2">[2]</a> was the strongest Trotskyist mass party within the “world organisation.” Undoubtedly, the LSSP was the working-class-based party with the widest mass base. It was in the leadership of a considerable sector of the trade-union movement and had strong support among sections of the peasantry and of the urban petty bourgeoisie. It had a reputation for intransigence in its opposition to capitalism-imperialism and for its incorruptible and militant leadership of the working class and toilers, and as a champion of the rights of the Tamil-speaking minority.<a href="#n3">[3]</a> In the words of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/m/a.htm#mandel-ernest">Ernest Mandel</a>, a leader of the United Secretariat, “<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/s/i.htm#silva-c">Colvin R. de Silva</a> and Leslie Gunawardena were brilliant Marxist thinkers who have written some of the best revolutionary pamphlets in South East Asia…. They undoubtedly assimilated the whole body of the basic Trotskyist concepts.”<a href="#n4">[4]</a></p>
<p>However, it was the same party, the LSSP, with its reputation for revolutionary intransigence, and with its “brilliant Marxist thinkers,” that ignominiously collapsed in June 1964, when, by a majority decision, it entered a coalition government with the SLFP,<a href="#n5">[5]</a> the party of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie, just when the bankruptcy of the policies of the Sirima Bandaranaike government was becoming manifest to the working class and toilers and when conditions were ripening for the development of mass struggle against the government and the capitalist class.</p>
<p>Not only did this reputed Trotskyist party join the ranks of the opportunists by this alliance with the bourgeoisie for the betrayal of the masses, but in 1971, it became directly responsible for the worst massacre of youth ever known in Ceylon or elsewhere—the police-army killings by shooting and torture of thousands of youth who rose in revolt against the capitalist coalition government. And, it is this party that today, together with the Stalinists, is sustaining a capitalist regime which is preparing the road, in the manner of the Allendes, for an open military dictatorship.</p>
<p>But why did this happen? How did this “Trotskyist” party collapse and join the ranks of Stalinist and social-democratic betrayers?</p>
<p>We shall let the same Ernest Mandel of the United Secretariat answer this question. Here is his explanation in his article published in the <em>International Socialist Review</em> in the fall of 1964. “It was never a secret to any member of the world Trotskyist movement, informed about the special problems of the Fourth International, that the section in Ceylon, the <em>Lanka Sama Samaja Party,</em> was an organisation to which the term ‘Trotskyist’ had to be applied with a series of specific reservations….” Mandel, it would appear, had never any doubts about the character of the LSSP. According to him “the group of Trotskyist intellectuals suddenly found themselves at the head of the largest working-class organisation in the country…. However, the party which they led could not really be called ‘Bolshevik’.”</p>
<p>Mandel’s dilemma in characterisation of this party is understandable. For over two decades, the LSSP was the Ceylon unit of the International Secretariat (I.S.) and later United Secretariat (USec), which claimed to be the continuation of the organisation founded by Trotsky. Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat were called upon to explain how such a party as the LSSP could have remained a unit of an international organisation claiming to be Trotskyist! It was this question that Mandel has failed to answer. And his failure to face up to this question could well be the reason why he resorted to equivocation in regard to the character of this party.</p>
<p>In the view of Mandel, the LSSP had a hybrid character. “It was a party that combined left-socialist trade-union cadres, revolutionary workers who had gained class consciousness but not specifically revolutionary-Marxist education, and a few hundred genuine revolutionary-Marxist cadres….</p>
<p class="quote">“In fact, while being formally a Trotskyist party, the LSSP functioned in several areas comparably to a left Social Democratic party in a relatively ‘prosperous’ semi-colonial country; <em>i.e.</em> it was the main electoral vehicle of the poor masses, it provided the main leadership of the trade unions.”</p>
<p>If indeed “the LSSP functioned in several areas comparably to a left Social Democratic party,” and if indeed it was functioning as “the main electoral vehicle of the poor masses,” it was by no means difficult to understand how the leaders of this party accepted portfolios in a bourgeois government in 1964 and have continued along this road thereafter.</p>
<p>But if, as Mandel insists, this was a “defeat for Trotskyism in Ceylon” it is necessary to ascertain what precisely in his view led to this defeat. “The defeat suffered by Trotskyism in Ceylon,” says Mandel, “is therefore essentially the story of how and why the Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Gunawardena group ["Marxist"—E.S.] lost leadership of the party through their own weaknesses and inner contradictions….”</p>
<p>Mandel mentions these “weaknesses and inner contradictions"—the fatal flaw was that these key political leaders did not occupy themselves with full time party work—they remained part-time leaders… the leaders of the genuinely Trotskyist wing of the LSSP did not change their daily lives to accord with their revolutionary convictions.<a href="#n6">[6]</a></p>
<p>While the “weaknesses and inner contradictions of the leaders” were real, it is necessary for revolutionary Marxists to go beyond the personal qualities of the leaders of an ostensibly revolutionary party to ascertain why such a party betrayed the revolutionary movement and the masses. Mandel is completely wrong in stating that the weaknesses of the leaders were “essentially” the cause of the LSSP collapse. This is plain subjectivism.</p>
<p>Mandel’s dilemma remains. He and the other leaders of the United Secretariat were not prepared to accept their share of responsibility for the collapse of the LSSP, which for two decades was accepted as a section of the International Secretariat, later United Secretariat.</p>
<p>The formal acceptance of the program can never be the test of a revolutionary Marxist party. That is of course a commonplace. On the other hand, what is basic to the Leninist concept of the party is the basing of the politics of the party on the revolutionary program and above all on activity in a revolutionary perspective.</p>
<p>And, in regard to the LSSP, there was not even a formal acceptance of a Trotskyist program, because in reality there was no program as such. What was termed the program, as late as 1950 (unity congress) was only a listing of “fundamental aims,” a brief explanation of a transitional program, a list of transitional demands and the positions of the party on imperialist war, defense of the Soviet Union, on Stalinist parties and popular-frontism.</p>
<p>A Marxist analysis of the socio-economic factors in the country, class forces and class relations, the character of the Ceylon revolution and the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution—all these issues had no place in this “program"! Documents on programmatic questions were never the heritage of the party. Nor could the leaders of the United Secretariat, the Mandels and <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/f/r.htm#frank-pierre">Pierre Franks</a>, point to any intervention on their part with the LSSP in this regard.</p>
<h3>1942 Split</h3>
<p>The existence, from the beginning, of a Marxist wing in this social-democratic type party was the real hope for this party. And indeed, the leaders of the [International] correctly looked to this group for the revolutionary orientation of this party.</p>
<p>And the opportunity came to this group and also to the leaders of the [International], when the first split took place in the LSSP between the <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/g/u.htm#gunawardena-p">Philip Gunawardena</a>/<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/p/e.htm#perera-n">N.M. Perera</a> reformist section and the Leslie [Gunawardena]/Colvin [R. de Silva]/Bernard [Soysa] Marxist section in 1942.</p>
<p>It was the attempt on the part of the Marxist wing to re-organise the party programmatically and organisationally on Bolshevik lines that led to opposition from the Philip Gunawardena/N.M. Perera reformist wing and to the split of 1942. The expulsion of Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera from the International and the acceptance of the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP)<a href="#n7">[7]</a> as the Ceylon unit created favourable conditions for the building of the revolutionary party.</p>
<p>Although at the commencement the politics of the split were not altogether clear to the rank and file of the BSP, the further evolution of the N.M./Philip group brought into the open the different orientations. For instance, the N.M./Philip group gave proof of its deep-seated opportunism when the parliamentary fraction of their party refused to vote against the status of “independence” granted by the British in 1947. The BSP fraction however voted against this fake independence.<a href="#n8">[8]</a></p>
<p>On the other hand, during the seven years of its independent existence, the BSP took meaningful steps to raise the ideological level of the party, develop revolutionary cadre and direct trade-union and other mass activities in a revolutionary perspective.</p>
<h3>Unification</h3>
<p>However, this favourable development for Trotskyism in Ceylon received a setback when the BSP decided on unification with the reformist N.M. Perera/Philip Gunawardena group (LSSP), which had, during this period, only strengthened its reformism, both in its trade-union and parliamentary activities.</p>
<p>And what is more, the unification was effected without any discussion on the fundamental problems of the Ceylon revolution, strategy and tactics, on Stalinism, reformism and parliamentarism. It was the failure of the Marxist wing (BSP) that no document giving the correct orientation on these relevant issues was adopted at this unification. Only the “program” which we have already referred to was adopted. This “program” was so sketchy and only in outline, that the N.M. Perera wing had no difficulty in taking the party along their reformist course.</p>
<p>This unification, which proved disastrous for the future of Trotskyism in Ceylon, nevertheless received the approval of the leaders of the United Secretariat (then the International Secretariat). And what is more, it was their view that a policy of co-existence with the N.M. Perera reformist wing was correct for the Marxist group. In the view of Mandel, “the problem of overcoming the old divisions and of blocking anything that could precipitate a new split with N.M. Perera became an obsession among the key political leaders. <em>The policy was correct</em> in itself since <em>unification had taken place on a principled basis</em> and since the party’s activities as a whole were proceeding in <em>accordance with the general program of Trotskyism.”<a href="#n9">[9]</a></em> [our emphasis—E.S.]</p>
<h3>General Program of Trotskyism</h3>
<p>The program of Trotskyism in Ceylon had to be linked to the problems of the Ceylon revolution.</p>
<p>As in all backward countries, Ceylon had (1950) and still continues to have uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution. The “Soulbury Constitution,” which was a deal between the Ceylonese bourgeoisie and the British imperialists, brought only fake independence. While there was political independence over a large area, yet there was room for imperialist interference and control, even politically. In any event, the economic dominance of British imperialism continued through the ownership and control by the British of the best tea and rubber plantations and the agency houses, which controlled the exports of all agricultural products and which also had a major share of the imports for the plantation sector. The operation of British and other foreign-owned banks, and the open-door policy for British and other imperialist investments reduced political freedom to a fiction.</p>
<p>Twenty-five years after the grant of so-called Independence and the adoption of a new constitution with republican status (1971), the socio-economic policies of Ceylon, over a large area, cannot be decided by a Ceylon Cabinet, but by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the imperialists!</p>
<p>The revolutionary wing (BSP) which correctly denounced and rejected the Soulbury Constitution as “fake independence” while the N.M. Perera wing silently endorsed the bourgeois interpretations in that regard, failed to raise this question of the Soulbury Constitution with the N.M. Perera wing at the 1950 unification. Thus by implication the BSP endorsed the opportunism of the N.M. Perera wing.</p>
<p>This meant that the unified LSSP adopted, by implication, a view that the bourgeoisie of a backward country in the middle of the 20th century has been able to accomplish a basic task of the bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e. the achievement of national liberation from imperialism. This meant that the LSSP was in conflict with the central thesis of the permanent revolution, that, having arrived belatedly, a congenitally weak bourgeoisie in a backward country is incapable of playing a leading role in the democratic revolution; that on the contrary, this bourgeoisie is counter-revolutionary; that the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution could be accomplished only by the proletariat (dictatorship of the proletariat) in alliance with the peasantry and in the teeth of the opposition of the native bourgeoisie—whether they be the compradors or the so-called national bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The false and untenable assumption that the bourgeois democratic tasks had been accomplished by the Ceylonese bourgeoisie led the LSSP to virtually ignore thereafter—(a) the struggle for completing Ceylon’s independence; (b) the struggle for minority rights of the 2 million Tamil-speaking people; (c) the struggle of the peasants for the land; and (d) the ending of the oppression and discrimination of the so-called depressed castes.</p>
<p>It was thus that the LSSP had no program to develop the anti-imperialist struggle although the party was opposed to imperialism. And it was thus that the LSSP had no program to develop the struggle of the peasants for land although the LSSP did demand land for the landless.</p>
<p>Although the LSSP supported the language and other rights of the Tamil minority and called for the acceptance of Tamil as an official language together with the Sinhala language, and also called for citizenship rights for the Tamil plantation workers, it did not have a strategy for implementing these demands.</p>
<p>It was thus that the LSSP failed to carry on a consistent struggle for the completion of Ceylon’s independence, for the abolition of the Soulbury Constitution. The party failed to raise the slogan of a Constituent Assembly.</p>
<p>The refusal of the LSSP to face the reality of the uncompleted democratic tasks gave the Ceylon bourgeoisie an unexpected opportunity to pose as the friends of the peasantry and to win over the petty-bourgeois masses generally, by putting on the mask of nationalism and talking the language of freedom fighters.</p>
<h3>Enter Bandaranaike</h3>
<p>S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who broke with the UNP<a href="#n10">[10]</a> on the succession to D.S. Senanayake, was quick to take the opportunity. Raising the slogans of “Sinhalese language only” as the official language to replace English, “Give back the military bases,” “Take over of foreign-owned estates,” “End feudal relations in land,” Bandaranaike was soon leading the mass movement, especially the peasants and lower middle class intelligentsia. From a leader of a small party of eight members in parliament, Bandaranaike found himself swept to power in 1956 (MEP—the 1st Bandaranaike Government).<a href="#n11">[11]</a></p>
<p>Although Bandaranaike and his SLFP soon showed their state of bankruptcy in regard to (a) the anti-imperialist struggle; (b) winning of land to the peasants; and (c) the grant of minority rights and so-called economic development, this party (SLFP) of the so-called national bourgeoisie was able to keep itself at the centre of the political stage during a period of nearly 17 years up to the present due to the wrong policies of the LSSP in regard to the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The Ceylonese bourgeoisie had, right up to the war period, remained a plantation and mercantile bourgeoisie. Their interests more or less dove-tailed with imperialist interests; they functioned in the perspective of continued co-existence with imperialism. They were the classic compradors.</p>
<p>However, it was inevitable that capitalist development in Ceylon would, even late, take the road of industrialisation. This meant that a differentiation within the bourgeoisie would sooner or later lead to the emergence of the industrial-minded bourgeoisie. And it could have been expected that this new section of the bourgeoisie would be in a state of conflict with the older plantation bourgeoisie or their party, the UNP, which had control of state power.</p>
<p>It was the existence of this new sector of the bourgeoisie—the industrial-minded sector—that found its reflection in the split away of Bandaranaike from the UNP (1951). Further, it was precisely the significance of this differentiation within the bourgeoisie that the LSSP, which according to Mandel, “functioned in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism,” failed to understand.</p>
<h3>“National” or “Liberal” Bourgeoisie</h3>
<p>The character and the role of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie in the backward countries was too well known, especially in the Trotskyist movement, by the time this differentiation took place in Ceylon. The tragedy of the Chinese revolution (1927), the triumph of Franco in Spain (1936-39), and the failure of the revolutionary movements in India and the other countries of Asia were basically linked to the failure of ostensible revolutionaries to understand the nature of the so-called national bourgeoisie, who seek to use the masses, not for struggle against imperialism but to win concessions from the imperialist masters.</p>
<p>The principal lesson derived from Marxist experience in this regard was that this sector of the bourgeoisie, while being capable of occasional but weak oppositional actions against imperialism, cannot, with any degree of consistency, develop any real confrontation with imperialism. In the context of the reality of the class struggle, the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie must necessarily betray the struggle for national liberation and enter into treacherous compromises with imperialism. “The more to the East,” said Trotsky, “the more treacherous were the bourgeoisie.” That meant, the more belatedly they arrive, the more treacherous they are.</p>
<p>While revolutionary Marxists would give critical support to some oppositional actions of the so-called national bourgeoisie, they are unequivocally opposed to national bourgeois regimes; it remains their task to carry on a consistent and irreconcilable struggle to expose their real role of treachery to the national liberation struggle and to wrest the leadership of the national struggle from their hands.</p>
<p>The regimes of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie in Ceylon (SLFP, SLFP-LSSP, SLFP-LSSP-CP) have brought about a belated but limited development of the manufacturing industries, not in conflict with imperialism, but jointly with foreign capitalists, whether in the public or private sector, undermining in this process the political independence of the country.</p>
<p>It is precisely this question of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie—the Bandaranaike question—that LSSP leaders failed to understand in the light of Marxist experience. In the result, the leadership followed empirically a zig zag policy, which inevitably led them into the coalition government with the SLFP in 1964.</p>
<h3>The 1953 Hartal—A Semi-Insurrection</h3>
<p>It was in this state of ideological confusion and uncertainty that the LSSP was confronted with the opportunity of leading the masses in Ceylon’s first revolutionary mass struggle against the government and the capitalist class reaching to the level of a semi-insurrection.</p>
<p>With the end of the Korean boom and the fall in the prices of the main exports, tea and rubber, the capitalist UNP government decided to maintain the profit levels of the capitalist and vested interests by imposing drastic cuts on social services and by the increase in price of rationed rice. While the price of rice was raised from =/25 cents to =/70 cents [Ceylon currency] per measure, the government withdrew the free mid-day meal to school children and increased postal fares and train fares.</p>
<p>The LSSP took the lead in developing mass agitation on these issues. But even while the mass movement was visibly growing around these issues, the leaders of the LSSP, who had empirically moved into a struggle situation, failed to see the revolutionary possibilities in the situation. Their perspectives did not go beyond mass protest action against the actions and policies of the government.</p>
<p>In this context, the LSSP leaders were taken by surprise by the response of the masses to the one-day protest action that was decided upon.</p>
<p>Though acting empirically, the LSSP correctly applied the tactic of the united front. The Philip Gunawardena group (MEP), the Stalinists and even the Federal Party (bourgeois-led Tamil minority Party) were pushed into becoming the co-sponsors of the Hartal<a href="#n12">[12]</a> action.</p>
<p>The withdrawal of work (strike action) of the workers supported by the closing of business and the stoppage of work by peasants and other self-employed people, all of whom resorted to direct action struggle by barricading roads, cutting down trees and telephone posts, stopping of buses and trains—all this turned into a real confrontation with the armed forces of the government. What occurred was a semi-insurrection in which the masses fought the police and the army with stones and clubs and whatever they found by way of weapons. Nine persons were killed by police shooting.</p>
<p>What the working class and the masses that were in the struggle looked forward to was not a mere one-day protest action and a return to work the following day. They were in readiness for a struggle to overthrow the hated UNP government. In fact, this direct action of the masses continued on the next day also. There were clear possibilities of this Hartal action being continued for several days thereafter. But the LSSP leadership, despite the unmistakable moods of the workers and other sections of the masses, decided to keep to their plan of a mere protest action and called off the Hartal and prevented the masses from continuing the struggle.</p>
<h3>Dynamics of the Ceylon Revolution</h3>
<p>What the LSSP leadership had failed to develop theoretically—the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution—the Hartal struggle showed in practise, even in outline. The following features were prominently silhouetted in the political scene:</p>
<p>1. Contrary to the misgivings of the LSSP leaders (which some of them developed into theories later), the Ceylonese masses were not so steeped in parliamentarism that they would first have to go through a long parliamentary period before they got on to the road of revolutionary struggle. The Hartal showed that, given a revolutionary leadership, the masses could soon shed their parliamentary illusions and enter the road of mass struggle leading to the revolution itself.</p>
<p>2. The masses did not divide the Ceylon revolution into two stages, (a) an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stage and (b) an anti-capitalist stage. The democratic revolution and the socialist revolution were telescoped in a single struggle. The issues that brought the masses into revolutionary struggle were issues arising out of imperialist capitalist oppression—increase of price of rice, train fares, postal fares, etc. The capitalist class had the need to save foreign exchange through a cut in the ration of rice and cutting down of social services for the maintaining of capitalist profit levels. The uncompleted democratic tasks, completing of independence, and the ending of minority and caste oppression could be accomplished only in the course of the socialist revolution.</p>
<p>Despite their so-called two-stage theory, the Stalinists found themselves taken along into an anti-capitalist struggle and an uprising against a capitalist government. Also, contrary to their so-called theory, they were shown in practise that the anti-UNP struggle could not be separated from the anti-capitalist struggle.</p>
<p>3. Again, contrary to the orientation of the Stalinists and later also of the LSSP, it was not the so-called progressive bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie that led the masses in this struggle, but the proletariat. Led by the LSSP, it was the working class that took the leading role in this struggle. The urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the students and youth all followed the leadership of the working class. The party of the so-called progressive bourgeoisie, the Bandaranaike-led SLFP, was not ready even to be one of the sponsors of the Hartal action.</p>
<p>4. The alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is basic to the Ceylon revolution, was achieved in action. The struggle showed that it was not necessary for the proletariat to form a political alliance with a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois party in order to win the peasantry. The peasantry can be won to the side of the proletariat on the basis of support for their burning issues in opposition to the bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The LSSP leadership failed to draw the lessons of this Hartal experience. It failed to theoretically evaluate the events of this semi-insurrection and relate them to the theory of the permanent revolution as it applied to Ceylon, a backward country. The LSSP leadership failed to realise that what was urgent and un-postponable was the raising of the ideological level of the party in the perspective of developing into a Bolshevik-type revolutionary combat party.</p>
<h3>Politics of the International Secretariat</h3>
<p>We have already noted that in the view of Mandel, in the post unification years (LSSP-BSP), the LSSP’s “activities as a whole were proceeding in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism.”</p>
<p>Thus, in the view of the International Secretariat, there was no occasion for any serious intervention on its part in regard to the LSSP.</p>
<p>The truth in this regard was that, with the new turn of the I.S. in 1951 (3rd Congress) under the guidance of Pablo, there could not be, in their view, any problems for the LSSP in regard to ideological development or the building of a Bolshevik-type party.</p>
<p>According to the thesis of the 3rd Congress there was no need to build independent Trotskyist parties; what was necessary was to take the “quickest road to the masses” where-ever they be, in the Stalinist or other reformist parties, for “the integrating” of the revolutionary Marxist cadre deeply into the so-called real movement of the masses.</p>
<p>The same thesis of the 3rd Congress left the door open for an interpretation that the Stalinist parties have transformed themselves from road-blocks to the proletarian revolution into parties that are capable of taking the revolutionary road.</p>
<p>It was against this liquidationist turn of the International that the SWP (United States)-led minority revolted and split in 1953. On the first news of the split the LSSP leadership leaned on the side of the minority and appeared to be willing to take up the struggle against Pabloist revisionism and liquidationism. But in the state of ideological confusion that reigned in the LSSP and its leadership, and in the context of the theoretical weakness of the International Committee (IC),<a href="#n13">[13]</a> the leaders of the LSSP wavered and jumped on to the bandwagon of the majority led by the Mandels, Pierre Franks and the Livios.</p>
<p>In reality, the liquidationist and revisionist line of Pablo, according to which there is no need to build independent Marxist parties, and according to which what was urgent was the “integration into the living movement of the masses"—all this dovetailed into the orientation of the LSSP leaders whose pre-occupation was developing mass activity—in the trade unions and in the electorates without revolutionary perspective.</p>
<h3>1953 Split</h3>
<p>On the other hand, the Pabloist pro-Stalinist orientation found more than a responsive echo with the Henry Peiris-led faction which emerged in the party in the fall of 1952. A resolution of this faction, led by Henry Peiris, <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/s/i.htm#silva-w">William Silva</a> and <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/s/u.htm#subasinghe">T.B. Subasinghe</a>, “declared that in the elections the party should have put forward the slogan of a ‘Democratic Government which would have meant, at its lowest level, a Bandaranaike government, and at its highest level, a Government by a Sama Samaja majority’.” It also took the position “that the party should enter into the closest possible agreement and co-operation with the CP and Philip group in the trade union and political fields” <em>(Short History of the LSSP).</em></p>
<p>This was clearly the moment to investigate into the roots of reformism and Stalinism that had grown within the LSSP, to draw up a balance sheet of the efforts of the LSSP to move in a Trotskyist direction. In fact, all the basic questions of Trotskyism, the program, the application of the theory of the permanent revolution, the character of the Ceylon revolution, the role of the “national” bourgeoisie, questions of strategy and tactics, the Leninist concept of the party, were the issues that were involved in this factional struggle that burst into the open.</p>
<p>But the LSSP leadership conducted the fight against the reformists and Stalinists within the party by their own empirical methods and in an ad hoc manner, counterposing Trotskyist orthodoxy to the politics of the revisionists, very much in the manner of the SWP in 1953 when it opposed the line of the 3rd Congress. In the result, the factional struggle did not lead to the focusing of attention on the fundamental questions that were clearly posed before the entire party. Nor did the factional struggle help even to educate the membership of the party and to raise their ideological level, especially when the party was moving deeper into parliamentary politics, where Bandaranaike was soon to become the principal actor.</p>
<h3>Responsive Co-operation</h3>
<p>Having failed to understand the role of the so-called national bourgeoisie, the LSSP leadership was at a loss to know how to deal with the Bandaranaike-led MEP government that was formed after the 1956 parliamentary elections.</p>
<p>Succumbing to the mass hysteria and enthusiasm at the election victory of the MEP to office, the LSSP announced its attitude to the new government as one of “responsive co-operation.” It was of course necessary to note the popularity of the MEP government. It was undoubtedly imperative for the LSSP to take note of the prevailing mass sentiment and the mass moods in relation to the first Bandaranaike government, before the party decided on its tactics in the situation. But it was unpardonable for a party claiming to be revolutionary Marxist to resort to equivocal formulae, and echo mass illusions when it was imperative to categorically state party positions. And in this case, it was the question of correctly characterising the MEP government which was a bourgeois bonapartist government that was seeking to deceive the masses with nationalist and socialist phraseology. It was the duty of the LSSP to patiently explain to the masses regarding the truth about the character of this government. On the contrary, the LSSP chose the occasion to opportunistically go along with the masses, whilst keeping the door open for later criticism of the government when the mass moods underwent a change.</p>
<p>The Mandels, Pierre Franks and the Livios of the I.S. looked on from a distance. They never once in this regard expressed their views on the LSSP line on this question. Either it was the case of the I.S. approving the LSSP line in this regard, or the I.S. did not seek to interfere in the internal affairs of a section of the International on the basis of its real orientation, that the Revolutionary International is a sum of several national parties that function independently of the International centre!</p>
<p>However, it was the Bandaranaike MEP regime itself that gave the LSSP the opportunity to re-assess the character of this government. Before long, the bankruptcy of “Bandaranaike principles” became evident to a section of the masses. It was to conceal this bankruptcy that Bandaranaike resorted to communalism that led to the worst anti-Tamil riots in Ceylon (1956-1958). And what was particularly helpful to the LSSP was that the organised working class lost faith in the promises of Bandaranaike and moved into strike action to win their wage demands.</p>
<p>But the LSSP, as before, acted only empirically. In a tail-endist fashion, the LSSP supported the working-class strikes and adapted only a more critical attitude to Bandaranaike.</p>
<p>Although the LSSP correctly noted that the Bandaranaike government (MEP) was bonapartist in character, it failed to draw the conclusion that mass illusions in such a government cannot easily disappear, that the LSSP had to launch consistent struggle on many fronts on reformism and Stalinism to win the masses away from “Bandaranaike politics.” On the other hand, the LSSP naively believed that, with the assassination of Bandaranaike, “Bandaranaike politics” had come to an end. The LSSP even believed that the road was now open for the party to ride to parliamentary power.</p>
<p>It was thus that the LSSP decided to throw all its forces in the 1960 elections (March) with the aim of winning a majority to form an LSSP government in parliament. And the International Secretariat, the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, looked on approvingly with hope that the LSSP would win a majority in this election.</p>
<p>But the SLFP, led by the widow of Bandaranaike, came out of the elections (March 1960), as the party with the largest number of seats, although it failed to win an overall majority to form the government. The LSSP was reduced from 12 to 10 seats and was thrown into a state of confusion.</p>
<p>But this outcome of the elections might well have been the opportunity for the party to review its election policy which contributed in a large way to increasing mass illusions in parliament and also to disorienting the party membership. In fact the decision of the party to bid for a parliamentary majority was evidence that the party had lost all revolutionary perspective and had accepted the reformist and Stalinist parliamentary or so-called peaceful road to socialism.</p>
<p>Nor did the Mandels and Pierre Franks of the International Secretariat intervene correctly even after the event, in this regard. The leaders of the I.S. could not realise that what was involved here was the disease of parliamentarism and reformism that had got a stranglehold on the party, and not a question of miscalculation or wrong evaluation. Here is a sample of their orientation in this regard—</p>
<p class="quote">“The starting point must be a frank self criticism of the errors in analysis and evaluation committed by the party prior to the 20th March elections, namely—</p>
<p class="quote">(a) It thought that the objective situation was favourable to the victory of the revolutionary movement;</p>
<p class="quote">(b) It supposed that the masses have already had enough experience with the SLFP and that as a result they might in their majority turn towards the LSSP.”</p>
<p class="quote">(I.S. Document on Ceylon, October 1960)</p>
<p>In this context, it was no surprise that the leadership of the LSSP, which was now steeped in parliamentarism continued to look desperately for solutions within the same parliamentarist perspective. And it was thus that the next step was taken by the right-wing leader N.M. Perera who challenged all the basic positions of Trotskyism, pronounced that the proletariat in Ceylon was petty-bourgeois in outlook, that revolutionary mass struggle leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible and crudely proposed that the LSSP enter a coalition front with the SLFP “on an agreed program.”</p>
<p>And as for the “brilliant Marxists” like Mandel, the Colvins and the Leslies, they were only a step behind N.M. Perera. In fact, it was Leslie Gunawardena that sought to give theoretical justification for the betrayal that Perera found no difficulty in proposing in the manner of the Social Democrats. Leslie Gunawardena, you see, was, in keeping with the traditions of the Trotskyist movement, against the popular front! But according to Leslie Gunawardena a popular front with an anti-capitalist program was in accordance with the program of Trotskyism! Thus Leslie Gunawardena was opposed to N.M. Perera’s proposal to form a coalition government on an agreed minimum program. “This action” wrote Leslie “was light-minded and unworthy of a party that claims to employ the Marxist method"!</p>
<p>Four years later, in June 1964, these same “brilliant Marxists” led by this same Leslie had moved far and away from Leslie’s own theory of 1960. They were opposed to the proposal of N.M. Perera not on the absence of an anti-capitalist program. Their difference with N.M. Perera was that they wanted a coalition government between the entire ULF]<a href="#n14">14]</a>-LSSP-MEP, CP and the SLFP—They wanted a complete and proper popular front!</p>
<h3>Opposition</h3>
<p>Though late, left oppositional elements in the LSSP began to intervene. In 1957, one year after Bandaranaike assumed office, the opposition to the policy of “responsive co-operation” manifested itself through a small group in the Central Committee. In its amendment to the political resolution of the Central Committee, this group (W. Dharmasena, Robert Gunawardena, Edmund [Samarakkody], Chandra Gunasekera) stated—</p>
<p class="quote">“When the MEP government came into power the masses were intoxicated with illusions regarding this government. Large sections of the masses close to the party expected the party to support the MEP government. In this situation, partly due to lack of clarity (of the party) regarding the MEP government, the party offered co-operation (responsive) to the government whilst directing the parliamentary group to sit in the opposition. As the party failed to characterise the MEP government as a capitalist government, the fact that the parliamentary group sat in the opposition did not signalise its fundamental opposition or of being against the government. Whatever was the intention of the party, in the eyes of the masses, the key to the understanding of the fundamental position of the party in relation to the government was the offer of co-operation (responsive) by the party. This offer of co-operation to the capitalist government was wrong. The party could have and should have offered support to the progressive measures of the government while stating categorically that the MEP government was a capitalist government. However unpalatable and unacceptable it may have been to the masses, the party should have characterised this government as a capitalist government and thereafter proceeded to explain.” (Amendment of Edmund-Robert group in the CC, 1957).</p>
<p>In the further efforts to combat parliamentarism and to take the party along the path of mass struggle the group insisted that “the aim of the party in relation to the MEP government is revolutionary overthrow of the government, i.e. by the method of the mass uprising. The masses are not ready now (today) for the overthrow of the government. But in view of the failure of the government to solve the pressing problems of the people, in view of the ever increasing dissension in the MEP, and the demoralisation of its own ranks, in view of the growing militancy of the working class, the situation can change very rapidly, and at any moment from now, the masses could well raise the slogan ‘Down with the MEP government.’ As a bridge between their present consciousness and the stage when they will be ready for the call for the overthrow of the Government, the party will adopt as a central agitational slogan ‘We do not want the capitalist MEP government, we want a <em>workers and peasants government’.”</em></p>
<p>Undoubtedly this group failed to come to grips with the roots of reformism in the party. It only focused attention on some aspects of party policy. Nevertheless, the orientation of this group gave promise of possibilities for the growth of a real revolutionary tendency.</p>
<p>It was thus an opportune moment for the leaders of the I.S. to intervene on the side of the left oppositional elements that were definitively emerging. But there was no such intervention, for the reason that these leaders, the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, had no differences with the LSSP leadership in regard to their policy of “responsive co-operation” to the Bandaranaike government.</p>
<p>It was only when the LSSP leaders took the inevitable step from “responsive co-operation” to the call for support of an SLFP government that the leaders of the International Secretariat intervened with a document to register their opposition.</p>
<p>The leaders of the I.S. were in a dilemma. If the LSSP was right when it offered co-operation (responsive co-operation) to the first Bandaranaike government (MEP) how could the LSSP be wrong when it called for and supported the formation of an SLFP government in parliament?</p>
<p>The answer to this question is that the LSSP was completely wrong in offering co-operation (responsive) to the bourgeois MEP government of Bandaranaike in 1956. The LSSP was once again wrong in calling for support of the bourgeois SLFP in 1960.</p>
<p>But the leaders of the I.S. were not prepared to admit that it was their failure that they did not state categorically that the policy of “responsive co-operation” was wrong. It was thus that the Mandels and Pierre Franks found themselves on the defensive before the LSSP reformists in their attempt to explain what they really meant by “critical support” to the SLFP government. These leaders of the I.S. were guilty of a serious distortion of the Leninist-Trotskyist position in regard to the governments of the so-called national progressive bourgeoisie! And here is their orientation in that regard— “We do not forget that, in the case of colonial and semi-colonial countries, the revolutionary party can give its <em>critical support to governments with a non-proletarian leadership, be they petty-bourgeois or bourgeois</em>“<em>!</em> [our emphasis—E.S.] (Document of the I.S. on Ceylon).</p>
<p>However, in the same breath, the document continued, “The support of a revolutionary party for a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government cannot be other than critical, namely strictly conditional and limited. That means in practise that this support can be granted for progressive, effectively anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist measures, either planned or carried out, measures that must be defended against any manoeuvre or sabotage by the reactionary forces.” But why this equivocation? A revolutionary Marxist party will not and cannot give even critical support to any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government. If the Mandels and the Pierre Franks mean thereby critical support to only “progressive and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist measures” then how do they talk of “giving critical support to governments with a non-proletarian leadership, be they petty-bourgeois or bourgeois"? They knew that what was involved here was the attitude of the revolutionary party to a bourgeois government in a colonial or semi-colonial country, and not to its attitude to certain measures of such a government. They know well that a revolutionary Marxist party could well give critical support to certain measures of bourgeois governments, even of military governments. But the attitude of a revolutionary Marxist party to a bourgeois government with even a “progressive” coloration can be nothing but irreconcilable opposition, although the manner of opposition to such a government will depend on the mass sentiment in relation to the government.</p>
<p>It is thus that support to a government, whether disguised as “responsive co-operation” or critical support, must be rejected as being in direct conflict with the fundamental programmatic position of the party.</p>
<p>But whatever were the weaknesses and equivocations of the International Secretariat, the reformist leadership of the LSSP had by their unequivocal call for support of an SLFP government in May 1960 exposed the hollowness of their claims to be a Trotskyist party. This meant that the task of revolutionary Marxists within the LSSP was to begin the struggle for a Trotskyist program and the organisation of a revolutionary tendency with or without the support of the International Secretariat.</p>
<p>However, the left oppositionists in the LSSP allowed themselves to be disarmed when the LSSP leadership empirically put on an oppositional stance in relation to the SLFP government, especially when sectors of the working class moved into strike action under the leadership of the LSSP. And, for its part, the International Secretariat even believed that an appeal to the party leadership from the World Congress would suffice to make these, now confirmed reformists, take a revolutionary road!</p>
<p class="quote">“The World Congress appeals to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party for a radical change in the political course in the direction indicated by the document of the leadership of the International.”</p>
<p class="quote">“The Congress is confident that the next National Conference of the LSSP in whose political preparation the whole International must participate, will know how to adopt all the political and organisational decisions necessary to overcome the crisis which was revealed following on the results of the March 1960 election campaign.” (Letter of 6th World Congress to LSSP)</p>
<p>Far from any effective participation of the International or any participation at all by the I.S. in any national conference of the LSSP “for a radical change in its political course,” the Mandels and Pierre Franks were once again traversing the same parliamentarist road with the LSSP leadership, just when the working class had achieved, as never before, unity for struggle around 21 demands which could well develop into political struggle against the SLFP government and the capitalist class.</p>
<h3>United Left Front</h3>
<p>The Marxist tactic of the united front with Stalinist and reformist working-class parties and even bourgeois parties means nothing more than unity in action in concrete anti-imperialist or class-struggle situations. It can never mean a political alliance with such parties, which cannot have any other objective than the winning of reforms from the capitalists or the capitalist government.</p>
<p>The problem of the alternative government, alternative to the bourgeois government, is often posed before the revolutionary Marxists. But this question of an alternative government is linked to the dynamics of the revolution.</p>
<p>This means that revolutionary Marxists do not project a transitional reformist government prior to a workers government. But this was precisely the orientation of the LSSP leaders who in their search for an alternative to a bourgeois government, proposed a government of the so-called “United Left Front” composed of the two working-class-based parties—the LSSP and CP—and the petty-bourgeois MEP (Philip Gunawardena) on an agreed program (July 1963).</p>
<p>The concluding paragraph of the preamble to this agreement, containing a “General Program” (maximum) and an immediate program, revealed the reformist and Stalinist character of this “Front".</p>
<p class="quote">“In accordance with the needs of this situation and in response to this mass urge, the Ceylon Communist Party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna have agreed to form a United Left Front in order to mobilise and lead all anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and socialist forces in Ceylon in the fight to establish a government that will give effect to the following general program.”</p>
<p>The “immediate” or the minimum part of this program, which was the real program of the Front, speaks for itself. The following are among the demands of the “immediate” or minimum program: (a) Bring down Prices! Let the State import and undertake the wholesale trade in all essential commodities. (b) End the wage freeze! Political and trade union rights for teachers and other employees of the Government…. (c) Participation of workers in each work place in the management of state and nationalised undertakings. (d) Nationalise the 13 Foreign Banks!</p>
<h3>Revolutionary Tendency</h3>
<p>The minority in the Central Committee (14 members), that had for some time been moving in a revolutionary orientation, were categorically opposed to the so-called United Left Front.</p>
<p>The minority (which included Meryl [Fernando], Edmund [Samarakkody], Karlo [<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/a.htm#karalasingham">Karalasingham</a>], [Bala] <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/t/a.htm#tampoe">Tampoe</a>, D.S. Mallawaratchi, S.A. Martinus, W. Dharmasena) was quick to see the reformist nature of this ULF which it correctly characterised as popular frontism!</p>
<p class="quote">“The situation which now faces the party is one in which it is clear that the MEP and the CP are not contemplating the type of United Front activity that will in fact provide a united left lead to the masses against the SLFP government and the forces of capitalist reaction. These two parties are seeking instead, to secure the party’s consent to putting forward an agreed governmental program before the masses in the name of the United Left Front for the purpose of canvassing support for the establishment of a popular front type of government in parliament. This parliamentary reformist perspective for united front activity must be rejected by the party….</p>
<p class="quote">“…. The party must avoid any course of action which is likely to strengthen the illusions already created amongst the left minded masses that the road forward to socialism in Ceylon lies through the setting up of a United Left Front with the objective of establishing a coalition government in parliament, on the basis of any agreed program for that purpose.”<br> (Resolution of the CC minority)</p>
<p>With the emergence of a revolutionary tendency led by 14 members of the Central Committee, the time was opportune to begin in an organised manner the struggle against parliamentarism and reformism and for orienting the party in a revolutionary direction. And this was clearly the moment for the International Secretariat to come down decisively on the side of the CC minority, for a joint struggle for the building of the revolutionary party.</p>
<p>It was thus that the CC minority looked forward hopefully for support from the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially when the International Secretariat had once again, in the fall of 1961, reminded the LSSP leaders that it was urgent for the party to be re-oriented on the lines suggested by the I.S. and endorsed by the Sixth World Congress. By its August (1961) resolution on Ceylon, the I.S. reiterated the following matters.</p>
<p class="quote">(a) “The impossibility of the conquest of power by the parliamentary way and the necessity for never forgetting that the smashing of the bourgeois apparatus and the creation by the masses in the course of a revolutionary process as a whole, of new organs of power, remain the condition for the victory of the proletariat and its revolutionary party";</p>
<p class="quote">(b) “The necessity of working to make possible a close alliance between the worker masses and the peasants and more particularly for the operation of the real junction with the Indian agricultural workers, who remain one of the motive forces of the revolution in Ceylon; the necessity to underline the principled attitude favourable to trade union unity.”</p>
<p class="quote">(c) The International Secretariat even reminded the LSSP leadership that “up till now, the conference of the LSSP, which should have discussed all these questions, has not been convoked and there is consequently no official stand of the party.”</p>
<p>All this and the initial reactions of the International Secretariat to the parliamentarism that was reflected through the first draft of the ULF agreement gave promise of principled positions in this regard by the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially in the context of the categorical opposition of the CC minority (14 members out of 44).</p>
<p>But it was just when the CC minority looked to cooperation from the Mandels and Pierre Franks to continue their struggle against the LSSP reformists that they were abandoned by these leaders who took the side of the N.M. Pereras and Leslies when the latter signed the so-called agreement of the United Left Front which was nothing but a modest programme of reforms to fight the next parliamentary elections in the perspective of forming a joint government in parliament. The I.S. issued a public statement hailing the formation of the LSSP-MEP-CP “Left United Front.”</p>
<p>Was the International Secretariat correct in supporting the United Left Front formed in August 1963? What was their justification in this regard? Were they acting in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism?</p>
<h3>Workers and Peasants Government</h3>
<p>The call of the Bolsheviks in 1917 for a government of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks and their readiness to designate such a government as a workers and peasants government has been the excuse for revisionists of the United Secretariat and of the Healyite variety to call for support of governments of reformist working-class parties and petty-bourgeois parties, which are nothing but governments for bourgeois reform. And this was precisely the orientation of the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially since the 3rd Congress (1951).</p>
<p>Here is for example the section of the resolution of the 3rd Congress in regard to the tactics concretely proposed for Chile:</p>
<p>“It [our section] will develop its propaganda for the slogan of the workers and peasants government which will eventually be concretised in this country as a government of parties claiming to represent the working class, notably the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.” (This meant that the coalition government of Allende that was recently overthrown by the military coup was the concretisation of the slogan workers and peasants government!)</p>
<p>And this was specifically the advice of the I.S. to the LSSP when these leaders intervened with the party in 1960 against their proposal to support an SLFP government in that year.</p>
<p class="quote">“It would be rather dangerous, however for the, workers parties to restrict themselves to the framework of the parliamentary aims and not look for a new, effective contact with the masses, through vigorous, extra-parliamentary activity among the worker and peasant masses; <em>and at an electoral policy which puts forward a radical program to be realised by the United Front of the parties which claim to</em> be <em>working class.</em>“ [our emphasis—E.S.]<br>
(I.S., Document on Ceylon, 18 May 1960)</p>
<p>But it is precisely against this reformist interpretation of the Bolshevik experience that Trotsky himself had warned.</p>
<p>Trotsky mentions the specific conditions under which the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan to the S.R.’s and the Mensheviks—“break with the bourgeoisie and take power.” Here are these specific conditions:</p>
<p>1. It was a slogan put forward during a particular phase in the pre-revolutionary situation of 1917—the period from April to September 1917.</p>
<p>2. In this context “the Bolshevik party promised the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s, as the petty-bourgeois representatives of the workers and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie…”</p>
<p>3. The Bolshevik party categorically refused either to enter the government of the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s or to carry political responsibility for it.</p>
<p>4. In the specific context in which this slogan was projected “If the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s had actually broken with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then ‘the workers’ and peasants’ government’ created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”<a href="#n15">[15]</a></p>
<p>The Transitional Programme (of the 4th International) left no room for any misunderstanding in regard to this slogan—“This formula, ‘Workers and Peasants Government,’ first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the October Insurrection. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat.</p>
<p class="quote">“... The slogan ‘Workers and Farmers Government’ is thus acceptable to us only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks—i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that democratic sense which later the epigones gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into the chief barrier upon its path.”</p>
<p>The International Secretariat was completely wrong in regard to the so-called tactics of forming governments of working-class based parties and other petty-bourgeois parties which they proposed for the backward countries in 1951 (3rd Congress) and specifically to the LSSP in 1960 and when they gave their sanction to the United Left Front in August 1963. And; it is this wrong policy that the USec as well as the Healyites continue to follow up to the present.</p>
<h3>The Coalition Government</h3>
<p>From the United Left Front (LSSP-MEP-CP Coalition) to an SLFP-LSSP coalition was but a step. And this happened in June 1964. Of course the Mandels and the Pierre Franks were frantically wringing their hands when N.M. Perera took the lead to make this proposal. And this time “Barkis was willing.” The bourgeois SLFP government was in crisis and conditions were maturing for massive working-class action against the government at a time when its ranks were depleting. Sirima Bandaranaike needed a coalition with the strongest working-class based party. The SLFP leader readily agreed to form a coalition government with the LSSP which was ready to betray the working class and the toilers.</p>
<p>The revolutionary tendency categorically opposed coalition and denounced it as betrayal. However, even at this eleventh hour, the I.S. failed to establish direct contact with the revolutionary tendency led by the CC opposition of 14 members to jointly fight the reformists in this struggle. Instead, the I.S. sent a letter to the Secretary, Leslie Gunawardena, the contents of which were known to the minority and the party only on the day of the National Conference to decide on coalition.</p>
<p>Nor did the arrival of Pierre Frank, the USec representative, one day before the Conference, give any added strength to the revolutionary tendency that had through its own efforts organised for the final confrontation. And what is more, when the revolutionary tendency informed Pierre Frank that the coalitionists were certain to win at conference and that the only course of action that appeared to the minority as correct was the split from the coalitionists on this issue, the representative of the I.S. had no views to offer. His only words were—“that is for you to decide!” Thus, contrary to the claims of the I.S., its representative would not even associate himself with the decision of the revolutionary tendency to break with N.M. Perera, Colvin [R. de Silva] and Leslie [Gunawardena] when they took the road of open betrayal and when they struck a frontal blow at the World Trotskyist movement. Of course, later, the I.S. expelled the coalitionists from the International and recognised the LSSP(R) as its Ceylon section.</p>
<h3>LSSP (R)</h3>
<p>The task before the LSSP(R) was to draw up a full balance sheet of the whole of the LSSP experience and on the basis of these lessons to begin the building of the revolutionary party.</p>
<p>But, from the outset, the contradictions within itself made it impossible for the LSSP(R) to undertake any systematic efforts at party building. And the truth about the opposition that split from the LSSP in June 1964 was that there were four groups.</p>
<h3>Karalasingham Group</h3>
<p class="c1">A basic contradiction in the LSSP(R) arose from the Karalasingham group.</p>
<p>Within the left opposition in the LSSP prior to the split Karalasingham gave promise of playing an important role in the struggle against revisionism and for the building of the revolutionary party. Karalasingham intervened sharply against the coalition line of the LSSP leaders. In his pamphlet for the special conference, which later he included in his book on “Coalition Politics,” Karalasingham effectively exposed the revisionism of the LSSP leaders especially by reference to Marxist theory and experience.</p>
<p>Significantly, however, from the outset Karalasingham stood categorically opposed to a split of the left oppositionists in the event of the acceptance of coalition by the party at special conference. Karalasingham did not clarify his perspectives for remaining within the LSSP in such a situation. And, on the other hand, he was vehemently opposed to any attempt to even form a faction when this was mooted about by some of those in left-opposition long before the proposal of coalition was made by the N.M. Perera group. And undoubtedly, the failure to organize a faction by the revolutionary tendency on a platform, which would have brought out clearly the differences among the oppositionists, was the most serious mistake of those who sought to fight the revisionism of the LSSP leaders.</p>
<p>Despite his orientation in this regard, Karalasingham, though reluctantly, joined the left-oppositionists who organised themselves as the LSSP(R). Karalasingham did not reveal his perspectives in regard to his decision to be in the LSSP(R).</p>
<p>But it was not long before Karalasingham’s motivation became manifest. In December 1964 the two party (LSSP-R) M.P.’s made a tactical mistake on the issue of the voting on the Throne Speech of the Coalition government.<a href="#n16">[16]</a> Voting against the government on this issue was not the mistake. The LSSP(R) CC had rightly taken a decision to vote against the Throne Speech. Their mistake was that they voted on the motion of the Independent (rightist) Member Dahanayake. As a result, the party was exposed to the attacks of the coalitionists, who alleged that the LSSP(R) M.P.’s joined the UNP and the rightists to defeat the government. That was the gravamen of the charge that could justifiably be leveled against them.</p>
<p>However, Karalasingham took the opportunity to launch an attack, not on the tactical question but on the question of the principal position of the party, that is the opposition to coalition politics. Without specifically stating so, Karalasingham developed his attack on the independent existence of the LSSP(R). His first move was to call for the defeat of the UNP in the election that was due (March 1965). He further proposed that the party call for support of Sirima Bandaranaike, SLFP leader, in her constituency. The next step was the organisation of a pro-coalitionist faction—the “Sakthi group"—which published a paper, which in direct opposition to the party line called for support publicly for a SLFP-LSSP government, to replace the UNP government that was elected in the March 1965 elections.</p>
<p>With the Healy group also supporting the Karalasingham-led “Sakthi” group, it was no easy task for the revolutionary tendency to fight successfully these revisionists, especially in the context of the USec’s calling for tolerance for this group. Mandel disagreed with the Provisional Committee of the LSSP(R) when it expelled two of the Karalasingham coalitionists who were responsible for the “Sakthi” paper and were not ready to admit that they had violated party discipline.</p>
<p>That Karalasingham’s perspective when he participated in the organisation of the LSSP(R) was none other than the betrayal of the left-oppositionists to the LSSP coalitionists received confirmation in his virtual confessions in the introduction to his book “Senile Leftism—A reply to Edmund Samarakkody,” which he produced as a passport to enter his “parental” party, the reformist LSSP. In a denunciation of the leaders of the LSSP(R) for their decision to split from the reformists, Karalasingham contended that “without reference to the process that was in motion within the LSSP, without regard to the consciousness and thinking of the advanced elements in the mass movement behind the LSSP and ignoring the deep divisions in their own ranks between the United Secretariat and the Healy caucus, they arbitrarily proclaimed themselves a new party.” Thus Karalasingham’s motivation for being one of the mid-wives of the “new party,” was to strangle it at its birth!</p>
<p>While Karalasingham sought to say that the split in 1964 was too premature and that he had a perspective of fighting the coalitionists from within, his real orientation was revealed in the very next paragraph: “The political tendency to which the writer belongs has decided to rejoin the parent organisation.” So it was a case of the prodigal son returning to the parental home not to continue his feud with the parents but to ask their forgiveness for his own past sins and to remain a loyal member of the parental home!</p>
<p>Nor did Karalasingham fail to give the “misguided” or “senile leftists” of the LSSP(R) the benefit of his superior understanding of Leninism-Trotskyism: “Equally important political considerations have made this necessary.” He then quotes from the <em>Sakthi</em> which he claimed as his factional paper…</p>
<p class="quote">“But between the regime of imperialism and the compradore bourgeoisie which exists today and the definite regime of the dictatorship of the working-class, it is likely that there would be a sequence of intermediate regimes initially reflecting the very backwardness, and subsequently in consequence of the growing political maturity of the masses, representative of the more advanced elements. Whatever be the manner of the down fall of the UNP government, so long as it is the result of the new mass uprising, it can be stated that its successor would be the government of the SLFP-LSSP coalition. The untimely defeat of the coalition, and that too at the hands of the class enemy of the working-class, has placed a coalition government of this type on the order of the day.</p>
<p class="quote"> “But genuine revolutionaries, far from being dismayed by such a development—viz: that a SLFP-LSSP coalition should replace the UNP’s national government, would do everything to facilitate its formation….”</p>
<p>“Therefore,” concluded Karalasingham, “the place of all serious revolutionaries today is in the LSSP, so that in participating fully in the task ahead they could intervene energetically, when the inevitable class differentiation of the mass movement takes place.”</p>
<p>Karalasingham thus unmasked himself. This is nothing else than the Stalinist “two-stage theory” with the projection of the transitional regimes of coalition with the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie. With the tradition of LSSP opposition to this so-called theory of the Stalinists, the N.M.’s [Perera] and the Leslies [Gunawardena] and now Karalasingham could not give this designation to their “theory” and acknowledge Joseph Stalin as their “Marxist” mentor. But in any event now, the hollowness of Karalasingham’s claims to Marxist theory, his audacity in invoking the authority of Lenin and Trotsky in his attempt to mask his reformism and his unbreakable links with coalition politics and revisionism, stood exposed.</p>
<p>But even this complete unmasking of himself by Karalasingham did not prevent the Mandels and Franks from inviting him to participate in the 9th World Congress in 1968, several months after he had been re-admitted to the reformist LSSP!</p>
<h3>Tampoe Group</h3>
<p>The CMU<a href="#n17">[17]</a> leader Tampoe showed no interest in the building of a revolutionary leadership. His main preoccupation was the building of himself as a trade-union leader whilst talking “revolution.” What Tampoe wanted was to use the LSSP(R) to give himself a coloration as a revolutionary trade-union leader. And in his trade union he was the boss who maintained excellent relations with the employers, mainly the imperialist agency houses, while staging “token strikes” with the usual demonstrations and public meetings, at which Tampoe was invariably the only speaker.</p>
<p>Trotskyists in Ceylon could not hope to take even the first steps in the task of building the revolutionary leadership without, among other matters, effecting a sharp break with the trade-union reformist politics which was a heritage from the LSSP. In fact Tampoe’s break with the LSSP was to free himself for closer relations with the employers and with all bourgeois governments including the UNP for concessions for workers in the CMU.</p>
<p>And it was Tampoe’s rightist trade-union politics that led him to oppose, in the Provisional Committee of the LSSP(R), the proposal to develop the struggle against the UNP government on the concrete issues of the declaration of state of emergency (1966) and the police shooting, the victimization of workers for the strike (communal) led by the coalitionists, the cut in the rice ration in the latter part of the year followed by the devaluation of the rupee at the dictates of the IMF.</p>
<p>Tampoe even supported the declaration of the state of emergency (January 1966) in a letter he sent to Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake. Tampoe opposed joint (united-front) action with other trade unions against the UNP government on the issue of the victimization of the workers after the January 8 (1966) strike.</p>
<p>However, the Tampoe group maintained friendly relations with both the Karlo [Karalasingham] coalitionist group and with the Healyites. Healy’s special envoy, Mike Banda, paid several visits to Ceylon in his attempt to win over Tampoe to Healy. The SLL press gave Tampoe headline publicity for his two-hour token strikes which he called out on chosen occasions.</p>
<p>The break away of Karlo coalitionists from the LSSP(R) found the revolutionary tendency (Meryl [Fernando], D.S. Mallawaratchi, [Tulsiri] Andrade, Edmund [Samarakkody]) opposed by the Tampoe-Healyite alliance. Their common objective was to oust the revolutionary tendency from its position of leadership within the LSSP(R). And with regard to the Healyites, disruption of the LSSP(R) and not the building of a revolutionary party, was their chief preoccupation.</p>
<p>Despite the efforts of the unprincipled Tampoe-Healyite combination to disrupt the LSSP(R) there was a real possibility for the revolutionary tendency to win against these opportunists and rightists, but for the part played by Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat.</p>
<p>As previously, Mandel followed his policy of conciliationism, at first with the Karlo coalitionists, and thereafter with the rightist trade-union leader Tampoe whose 30,000 strong CMU and token strikes and demonstrations could provide occasional headline news of “Trotskyist militant struggles in Ceylon” in the journals of the United Secretariat.</p>
<p>It was thus that Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat closed their eyes to the politics of the split in 1968 of the RSP (now RWP)<a href="#n18">[18]</a> from the Tampoe-led LSSP(R) and adopted the Tampoe group as the Ceylon section of the United Secretariat, despite the fact that a commission appointed at the open sessions of the 9th World Congress unanimously condemned the politics of Tampoe.<a href="#n19">[19]</a> Here are some relevant extracts of this report:</p>
<p class="quote">“The Commission felt that some of the actions and policies of Com. Bala [Tampoe] and the LSSP(R) brought to our notice by Com. Edmund, and not denied by Com. Bala, could have seriously damaged the reputation of Com. Bala as a revolutionary leader, compromised the Fourth International in Ceylon and have been exploited by all the enemies of our movement….</p>
<p class="quote">“The evidence placed before the Commission tends to support the conclusion that the policies followed by Com. Bala, especially in his dual role as CMU Secretary and as LSSP(R) Secretary were gravely compromising to the 4th International. The Commission was not in a position to get a clear enough picture of the policies of Com. Bala in the concrete circumstances of Ceylon and the LSSP(R) to propose that this section be disaffiliated by the World Congress. But we strongly feel the need for the further investigation of this matter.”</p>
<p>Despite this devastating condemnation of Tampoe and his politics unanimously by its own Commission, the 9th World Congress, which was manipulated throughout by the bureaucratic leaders—the Mandels, Franks and the Livios—accepted Tampoe’s group as the Ceylon Section and decided to file the report of the Ceylon Commission! Incidentally, for alleged security reasons, the leaders of the United Secretariat decided to abruptly end the Conference allowing only a half hour (!) to the discussion of the Ceylon question.</p>
<p>It was clearly not possible for the Mandels, Pierre Franks, the Livios and the Hansens to reconcile their acceptance of the Tampoe group as their Ceylon section with their claim to be Leninists-Trotskyists. And that is why they used one “Vitarne” as their tool to “dispose of” the question by merely denying that there was any Commission at all on the Ceylon question at the 9th Congress. For, if there was no Commission there could not be a report to talk about! But it is relevant in this regard to ask why the leadership of the USec (Mandel, Pierre Frank, Livio and Hansen) allowed a person who was not a member of the Fourth International, a mere observer and an outsider, who had been invited among several such persons to this Congress, to report on the truth of what took place at the 9th World Congress in regard to the Ceylon question and the Tampoe group. We are certain that this question will remain unanswered by the leaders of the United Secretariat.</p>
<h3>Tampoe Group Since 1969</h3>
<p>The orientation of the United Secretariat as manifested in the documents and decisions of the 9th Congress, and Tampoe’s real aims left no future for the Tampoe group to develop as a viable political formation whether linked to the right-opportunist wing led by the Hansens and Novacks or the ultra-left opportunist wing led by the Livios, Mandels and Franks of the USec</p>
<p>The question has been and remains—“who is using whom?” Is it the case that the Mandel wing of the USec is using Tampoe to further their aims—i.e. to have a large trade union in Ceylon, through whose boss Tampoe, to get the United Secretariat an appearance of a strong base, though in reality without substance; or is it that Tampoe is using the Mandels, Franks and Livios to further his own interests as a trade-union boss-type leader?</p>
<p>The reality is that there is no political party or even a group that functions independently as the LSSP(R). The LSSP(R) has no political activity to its credit ever since the RSP split in 1969. It has long ago ceased to publish even an occasional newspaper.</p>
<p>With the rise of the JVP<a href="#n20">[20]</a> youth movement Tampoe, apparently with the approval of the Mandels, sought to opportunistically associate with Rohana Wijeweera<a href="#n21">[21]</a> and other leaders who were visibly growing in popularity. In order to win a place for himself at a time when this movement did not give any indications of preparing any confrontation with the coalition government, Tampoe rushed to befriend them in the courts during the first days of police action against them. Tampoe even went so far as to give a certificate to Wijeweera that he was no communalist and that he was a true Marxist, when he knew well that ex-Stalinist Rohana Wijeweera was consciously seeking to win over the Sinhalese petty bourgeois through his talk of the need to fight so-called Indian expansionism.</p>
<p>However, when the police were hot on the trails of the JVP, Tampoe judiciously moved away from the JVP and took a vow of silence during the period. And when the murderous campaign of the government against the youth was on, during which thousands were killed by shooting or torture, Tampoe had lost his voice. While within the first week of this campaign against the youth the RSP (now RWP) unequivocally condemned the actions of the government, demanded the end to killings and torture, and also invited the trade unions including the CMU to communicate their views in this regard, Tampoe continued to remain silent.</p>
<p>However, when it appeared quite safe, Tampoe very late in the day appealed to the Prime Minister that “it would be an act of inhumanity for you to order a concerted military offensive by the armed services against the insurgents,” etc.</p>
<p>And, as it happens in periods of crisis, it was not easy for Tampoe to indulge even in tilting at wind-mills especially under emergency conditions. It was thus that Tampoe did not move a finger during the 100-day strike of the bank clerks, led by the Bank Employees Union, whose leader was Oscar Perera, a member of the LSSP(R). Tampoe failed to take the initiative to get trade-union action in support of this strike. He only reluctantly participated in a joint trade-union meeting organised on the initiative of the RSP (now RWP) leader Tulsiri Andrade of the Central Bank Union. He thereafter washed his hands of this strike and silently watched this strike being smashed by the coalition government supported especially by the LSSP.</p>
<h3>Healy Group</h3>
<p>Having kept aloof from the politics of the LSSP from the time of the 1953 split of the International, the leader of the so-called International Committee and of the SLL, Gerry Healy, parachuted himself into the Ceylon scene in June 1964. Having arrived in the same plane with Pierre Frank a day before the LSSP conference, Healy, who had a few followers in the LSSP opposition, sought to gate-crash into the conference hall of the LSSP. Of course, he was not permitted to enter.</p>
<p>What Healy’s politics were in relation to the issues at the conference was unknown. Nor did he seek to place his views before the LSSP membership through documentation prior to the conference. Instead, what he sought to do was to take the left opposition into the fold of the International Committee by disruption.</p>
<p>It was this same line of disruption that his followers—Prins Rajasooriya (now with Tampoe), Sydney Wanasinghe (now with the LSSP coalitionists), Wilfred Perera and R.S. Baghavan pursued. It was thus that the Healy group gave full co-operation to the Karlo coalitionists to fight the revolutionary tendency. In fact, a section of the Healy group actively participated in the organisation of the Karlo faction, “the Sakthi group,” which in their factional paper publicly called for the support of a coalition government.</p>
<p>Nor were the Healyites strange bed-fellows with the Karlo coalitionists. While denouncing the Mandels and the Franks for the betrayal of the LSSP leaders, and while also denouncing the [Edmund] Samarakkody-Meryl Fernando group for advocating united-front action to include the coalition trade unions against the victimisation by the UNP government, the local Healyite “theoretician” Wilfred Perera was in fact pursuing coalition politics.</p>
<p>Here is a sample of Wilfred Perera’s theory which he put out in 1967 during the UNP regime.</p>
<p class="quote">“We should propose to the rank and file of the left parties [referring to LSSP and CP] and of the trade-unions under their control to bring pressure on the Left party leaders to demand—</p>
<p class="quote">“1. a revision of the Joint Program [coalition program] so as to include working-class demands and socialist measures [!], and that the demands should be formulated by a united front of the trade-unions. And we should make our own proposal regarding the demands;</p>
<p class="quote">“2. a more equitable apportionment of the parliamentary seats for the next election, say on a 50-50 basis as between the SLFP and the left parties.</p>
<p class="quote">“The first demand will show how far Mrs. Bandaranaike is prepared to go towards socialism, and at the same time expose the impotence of the left fakers to push her leftwards. The second will show how sincere Mrs. Bandaranaike is when she says she needs the co-operation of the working-class to defeat the UNP-led coalition.”</p>
<p class="quote"><em>Advocating coalition politics could not be more explicit than this!</em></p>
<p>In this “theory” Wilfred Perera left the road open to a link up with Tampoe whose syndicalism he correctly denounced in an earlier part of the same document.</p>
<p>It was the contention of the Healy “theoretician” that they supported the resolution of the Tampoe group (1967 Conference) as against the Samarakkody group in order to “save” the party from the pro-coalition line of the latter! That was Wilfred Perera’s justification for supporting the syndicalism of Tampoe, which he explained as the meaning of his (Tampoe’s) line of “unification of the working-class under its own independent class banner": “We see here,” wrote Wilfred Perera, “the illusions fostered by a blind faith in trade-union militancy without political perspectives and, a lack of understanding of the political issues involved.”</p>
<p>But here is a sample of Wilfred Perera’s own syndicalism cum coalition politics in this same document:</p>
<p class="quote">“The left fakers say they can achieve socialism by parliamentary means. Let them prove it by breaking their ties with the SLFP which are hindering them and make a bid for governmental power on their own and on a working-class program which the trade-unions will jointly formulate. In place of the coalition program we will propose a trade-union joint program” [!].</p>
<h3>Healy Group Since the Split</h3>
<p>Having helped the Tampoe rightists to defeat the revolutionary tendency at the 1968 (April) Conference, which led to the split away of the latter tendency and the formation of the RSP (now RWP), the Healy group found its task in the LSSP(R) was over. Without any explanation for their conduct the Healyites led by Wilfred Perera broke away from Tampoe, whom they had helped to install as leader of the LSSP(R).</p>
<p>Claiming that the mantle of Trotskyism had fallen on them, the Healyites announced their separate organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League.</p>
<p>From the outset however, the policies and practice of this league were at variance and in conflict with the program of Trotskyism. Whilst their reputed leader Healy, of the so-called International Committee, continues to rightly castigate the Mandels and the Pierre Franks for their responsibility for the LSSP debacle, the RSL (the Ceylon Unit of this Healyite IC) called for and supported the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition in the elections of May 1970, the outcome of which was the present SLFP-led coalition government.</p>
<p>The Healyites were thus consistent with their policy within the LSSP(R), when they compacted with the Karalasingham-led coalitionists, who in their factional paper “Sakthi” called for support of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. However, the RSL suddenly somersaulted. About two months after the coalition government was formed (May 1970), when sections of the masses that supported these parties were expressing their disappointment at the policies of the government, the Healy group announced that they had made a mistake when they supported the coalition at the elections.</p>
<p>The new line of the Healyites, which they claimed was in accordance with Leninism-Trotskyism, is their call to the LSSP and CP to break away from the coalition and form a government. Of course, they had with them the history book of the Russian revolution. Apparently, with confidence, they referred to the Bolshevik experience in 1917, when in the special conditions and in the context of a revolutionary situation, Lenin called upon the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to break with the bourgeoisie and take the power.</p>
<p>But in the hands of the Healyites it was a complete misapplication of the Bolshevik tactic. The concretisation of the slogan “workers and farmers government” through a government of the LSSP and CP is a farcical concept apart from the disorientation that such a slogan must lead to. There is no revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation in Ceylon. It is not possible today to attempt a concretisation of the slogan workers and peasants government, that is, to indicate which organisation of the working class and toilers could constitute the new power or government.</p>
<p>On the contrary, the consciousness of the masses is at a stage when they are only seriously dissatisfied and disappointed with the coalition government. Of course sections of these masses are moving into opposition against the government without any perspectives yet of any struggle against this government. The working class, whose living standards are being systematically attacked by the coalition government, has not yet launched any large-scale trade-union action against the policies of this government. In fact, in the absence of a revolutionary party, with influence among the working class, it is possible that the masses including sections of the working class could well move in a rightist direction.</p>
<p>What is imperative today is to help the working class and toilers to understand that the blows struck against their living standards are the result of the treacherous politics of coalition—i.e. of the LSSP and CP betrayers. Those claiming to be Trotskyists cannot conceive of helping to create further illusions that the way forward is a labour government of the LSSP-CP which must necessarily be reformist in character. But this is just what the Healyite slogan does.</p>
<p>And, in regard to this slogan, it is necessary once more to state what Trotsky himself categorically stated—“The slogan ‘workers and farmers government’ is thus acceptable to us only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that ‘democratic’ sense which later the epigones gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into the chief barrier upon its path.”</p>
<h3>Struggle for Trotskyism Today</h3>
<p>Having participated in the left opposition (1962) as consistent oppositionists to the coalition and reformist politics of the LSSP leaders who betrayed the party, having continued the struggle against the Karalasingham coalitionists in the LSSP(R), having successfully faced the combined opposition of the Healyites and Tampoe, who was supported by the Pabloist United Secretariat, the revolutionary tendency that separated from these centrists, and which re-grouped itself as the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party, is today reorganised as the Revolutionary Workers Party.</p>
<p>During the first two years the revolutionary tendency had the task of drawing up a proper balance sheet of the experience of the LSSP and the LSSP(R) and to cleanse itself of the hangovers of Pabloism, which substituted empiricism and pragmatism for dialectical materialism and which abandoned the task of building the revolutionary party to the participation and “integration” in the so-called living movement of the masses, leading the Pabloites to parliamentarism and syndicalism. The Revolutionary Workers Party cannot but reject the politics of both wings of the United Secretariat—the ultra-left opportunist mixture of Mandel, Livio, Frank, as well as the opportunist group of Hansen-Novack.</p>
<p>While seeking to participate with its co-thinkers in the unpostponable task of regrouping of the Trotskyists in other countries in the perspective of contributing to the rebuilding of the revolutionary International, the Revolutionary Workers Party is bending its energies to the construction of the Trotskyist party in Ceylon on the firm foundations of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and the relevant programmatic documents that remain the heritage of the Leninist-Trotskyist movement.</p>
<h3>Present Situation</h3>
<p>Objective conditions today are more favourable than ever before for the development of mass struggle for the overthrow of capitalist class rule in Ceylon and for the establishment of socialism.</p>
<p>World capitalism has entered into a new period of decline, reflected for a long time now in economic recessions in advanced capitalist countries, leading to fierce inter-imperialist rivalry, which has driven the capitalist class in each country to impose severe burdens on the workers and the wage earners in these countries.</p>
<p>For nearly a decade now the organised working class in these advanced countries has been engaged in wage struggles to defend their living standards. The French working class showed in their now famous struggle (1968) the revolutionary potentialities of the proletariat in these advanced capitalist countries.</p>
<p>An aspect of this new phase of decline of capitalism on a world scale is that Ceylon and other backward countries are more intensely exploited by imperialism in numerous ways. The economies in these countries, ruled invariably by the bonapartist “national” bourgeois regimes, face deepening crises, manifested by unbalanced budgets and serious lack of foreign exchange to pay for necessary imports, leading to increased burdens on the workers and toilers. The masses in these countries, despite the betrayals of the Stalinists, reformists and centrists, must sooner or later move on to the road of struggle.</p>
<p>Three years of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition government have brought unprecedented suffering to the working class and all the toilers. While extending the state sector without any real encroachment on the private capitalists, while appearing to strike blows at the capitalists and imperialists, the government is desperately seeking to maintain the profit levels of these very same capitalists and imperialists, at the dictates of the IMF.</p>
<p>In this perspective, this government adopted a policy of severe restriction of consumer imports and has even totally banned the imports of a large number of essential food imports, which has led to serious inflation. Also, at the dictates of the IMF, the government is implementing a virtual wage freeze. And since the April youth armed struggle, a state of emergency continues and strikes are virtually banned. The repressive apparatus of the State has been strengthened in an unprecedented manner.</p>
<p>The reality today, especially with the newest blows struck at the masses by further cuts in rationed rice, flour and sugar, and also by further increase of the price of these and numerous other commodities, is that the government is facing increasing unpopularity. This means, that from now on, sections of the masses who supported and identified themselves with the government will inevitably move away from the coalition parties and the government. There is now a real possibility of developing mass opposition leading to mass action against the measures of the government and the government itself.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the rightist forces led by the UNP are even now growing as a result of the policies of the government, which have in an unprecedented way impoverished the masses and increased their misery.</p>
<p>Up to now the working class has been held down from pressing their demands in the perspective of trade-union action, principally by the LSSP and CP—the partners in coalition, on the pretext of the need for the workers to sacrifice and produce more for “Socialism.”</p>
<p>While “sacrifice” was the key note of the LSSP propaganda, the CP (pro-Moscow) led by the [S.A.] Wickremasinghe wing had adopted, from the outset, more opportunistically, a critical stance in relation to the policies of the government which affected adversely the living standards of the workers and toilers.</p>
<p>With the severity of the government’s measures against the masses, the CP(M) became more “critical” and called upon the government not to increase the burdens of the masses, but instead, to strike at the imperialists and to move on to more nationalisations.</p>
<p>The motivation of the CP(M), Wickremasinghe wing, was not to weaken the coalition but to gather the coalition masses around itself as the most “progressive” and “dynamic” force in the coalition. However, unexpectedly for the Wickremasinghe-led CP, despite its expressions of continued loyalty, the coalition partners, SLFP and LSSP, in furtherance of the rightward course of their government, have shown them the door. This wing of the CP(M) has been expelled from the coalition government.</p>
<p>In response to the pressures of the rank and file of their trade unions, the bureaucratic leaders of the LSSP and the Keneuman wing of the CP(M) have sought to give themselves the appearance of being in readiness to lead the workers in struggle to defend their living standards. They have recently presented through the coalition trade union centre (JCTU) twenty-eight (28) demands to the employers and their own government.</p>
<p>The fraudulent nature of the moves of the LSSP trade-union leaders as well as both wings of the Stalinists (CP [Moscow]) already stands exposed by their defense of the coalition government in regard to the latest measures (October 1st cuts in rationed rice, flour and sugar with increase of prices). Far from seeking to mobilise the workers for struggle, they are vying with each other in calling upon the workers for further sacrifices in a so-called national food crisis.</p>
<p>In the plantation sector the two largest trade unions are the CWC (Ceylon Workers Congress-led by Thondaman) and CDC (Ceylon Democratic Congress-led by Aziz, allied to coalition). As an extreme right wing trade-union leader, who has affiliation with the U.S.-oriented ICFTU,<a href="#n22">[22]</a> Thondaman has been threatening to launch trade-union action to win the monthly wage demand for the plantation workers. However, Thondaman and some lesser union leaders allied to him have already abandoned all talk of strike action at the appeal of the Minister of Labour.</p>
<p>With regard to Tampoe, his usual fake fighting has been displayed now quite for some time. With the assistance of his centrist friends of the United Secretariat Tampoe obtained publicity in their journals for a “One-Day Hunger Strike” of workers in protest at the actions and policies of the government. In fact, during all this time, workers in a number of work places belonging to other non-coalition unions came out on strike despite the possibilities of government action against them. It was thus a false picture which Tampoe sought to paint, that where no one dared to call strikes under emergency conditions, he at least called a “Hunger Strike” of workers against the government! In fact, the journals of the United Secretariat had referred to a “Hunger Strike” of one million workers! But this so-called one-day hunger strike was farcical.</p>
<p>The response from vested interests was especially interesting. In its editorial comments of the <em>Ceylon Daily News</em> which congratulated Tampoe on this one-day non-violent “Hunger Strike,” called upon him to continue longer this strike as Finance Minister N.M. Perera himself would readily approve in view of the worsening food situation in the country!</p>
<p>And Tampoe’s reaction to the talk of presenting “twenty-eight demands” of the coalition unions was to call his usual “short leave” strike (2-hour strike) for a mass rally of the CMU at which he was the only speaker, and at which he called upon Ceylon’s working class to abandon the coalition and other trade-union leaders and adopt the banner of the CMU!</p>
<p>Tampoe’s political line in the present context is the same treacherous line of “Left Unity” that the LSSP and CP peddled before they finally adopted coalition with the SLFP. Tampoe has issued a call to “Re-Build the Left Movement” when what is imperative is to consistently and uncompromisingly expose the “Leftism” of the LSSP, of both wings of the CP(M), of the groups of the CP(Peking) and all other “left” fakers. It is the task of the revolutionary vanguard to expose the fraudulent politics of Tampoe which he continues in the name of Trotskyism.</p>
<p>The revolutionary vanguard has the task of exposing both the fraud of the CP(M) Wickremasinghe wing which continues to peddle coalition class-collaborationist politics and also the rightist course which the SLFP and LSSP are pursuing to please the vested interests, local and foreign.</p>
<p>It is necessary more especially to warn the working class that the coalition government is now moving, not to woo the working class, but to suppress and destroy the trade-union movement and all the organisations of the working class, which could well pave the way for a fully fledged military police regime.</p>
<p>It is clear that in the present state of the trade-union leadership, both of the pro-government coalition unions and of the so-called independent unions, the task of mobilising the workers for united struggle against the government and the capitalist class is far from easy. Nevertheless, this remains the burning question for the working class today. This means it is the task of the revolutionary vanguard to begin now the struggle against the latest measures of the government and for other pressing demands of the workers and toilers including demands of a transitional character, in the teeth of the opposition of the bureaucratic trade-union leaders—of the coalition as well as of the so-called independent unions, including the Tampoe-led CMU.</p>
<p>In fact, in recent times anti-bureaucratic tendencies have appeared in many trade unions both pro-government and in others. In certain unions the anti-bureaucratic oppositions have succeeded in ousting the conservative and bureaucratic leaderships in such unions. This process could well grow.</p>
<p>The revolutionary vanguard, while taking active steps to root itself within the working class will fight for a program of demands which will include trade-union demands and also demands of a transitional character, e.g., nationalisation without compensation of the whole of the plantations, of manufacturing industries, workers control in all nationalised undertakings. It will also include demands for the withdrawal of the state of emergency and for the release of all political prisoners. In this regard the tradition of reformists and centrists has been to merely list transitional demands without seeking to develop any struggle around these demands.</p>
<p>It is in this perspective that the Revolutionary Workers Party is seeking today to intervene in the Ceylon situation. And it is not the futile and divisive policy of building new trade unions that is needed, but a policy of giving revolutionary perspective and bringing revolutionary politics to the advanced elements in the existing trade unions, by the building of political caucuses in them; that is the task.</p>
<p>This intervention by the Revolutionary Workers Party is necessarily limited by its present forces and resources. But it is to the extent that the Revolutionary Workers Party succeeds in intervening in the living working class and mass movement in a revolutionary perspective, and to the extent that it succeeds in carrying on an uncompromising and consistent struggle against Stalinism, Maoism and all forms of reformism and revisionism, whether of the United Secretariat variety or of the Healy variety, that it will be able to engage with success in the struggle for Trotskyism, for the building of the revolutionary leadership, i.e. the revolutionary party, in Ceylon.</p>
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p><em>Note: All footnotes and bracketed material, except that initialed “E.S.,” are by the</em> Spartacist <em>editors.</em></p>
<p><a name="n1">1.</a> The fake-Trotskyist “United Secretariat” was formed in 1963 as a result of the reunification of the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) led by Farrell Dobbs with the “International Secretariat” (I.S.) of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan. The SWP had broken with the I.S. in 1953 in protest against Pablo’s liquidation of the sections of the Fourth International into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties. The “reunification” amounted to a non-agression pact, sweeping under the rug issues which had divided ostensibly Trotskyist forces for a decade, and codified the SWP’s capitulation to Pabloism by calling for support to bourgeois nationalists and peasant guerrillaists in the backward countries.</p>
<p><a name="n2">2.</a> The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP—Ceylon Socialist Party) was founded in 1935 by a group of young, British-trained intellectuals. During its early years the LSSP was a loose mass organization committed to socialism but with a basically reformist program. The Stalinist wing led by Pieter Keuneman was expelled in 1940 in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Stalinists’ flipflops in their attitudes toward the Second World War. The LSSP opposed the war, causing the British to jail its leaders.</p>
<p><a name="n3">3.</a> A minority of southern Indian descent. One section of the Tamils has been on the island from early, pre-colonial, times. The great majority, who make up the bulk of Ceylonese plantation workers, were originally imported by the British in the middle and late 19th century to work on coffee and later tea estates. Tamils make up roughly 10 percent of Ceylon’s population. However, in 1949 several hundred thousand Tamil plantation workers (who had had the right to vote since 1931) were disenfranchised. Since then discriminatory citizenship requirements have made the great majority of Tamils officially stateless, without legal rights in either Ceylon or India.</p>
<p><a name="n4">4.</a> Ernest Germain, “Peoples Frontism in Ceylon: From Wavering to Capitulation,” <em>International Socialist Review,</em> Fall 1964.</p>
<p><a name="n5">5.</a> The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) originated in 1951 when S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike split from the until-then dominant United National Party (UNP) amid widespread uneasiness in the ruling class over the rampant corruption of the UNP government. Bandaranaike, former right-hand man of UNP leader D.S. Senanayake, combined a program of virulent Sinhalese chauvinism and Buddhist clericalism with timid land reform. His SLFP appealed particularly to the Sinhalese peasantry and rural intelligentsia.</p>
<p><a name="n6">6.</a> Germain, <em>op. cit.</em></p>
<p><a name="n7">7.</a> The Bolshevik Samasamaja Party grew out of a 1942 factional polarization and split in the LSSP, which resulted in two groups both calling themselves “the LSSP” operating in Ceylon during the later years of the war. The more leftist group remained affiliated with the BLP(India) and after the war a BLPI letter of 8 October 1945 expelling the leaders of the rightist group (N.M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena) formalized the split. Following an abortive attempt in late 1946 to reunify the two groups, the leftist group led by Leslie Goonewardene, Colin de Silva, Samarakkody, de Souza and others, which was the smaller group, changed its name to the BSP. However, on 4 June 1950 the two groups were reunified to form the LSSP, with a grouping around Philip Gunawardena splitting away to the right.</p>
<p><a name="n8">8.</a> The British government granted Ceylon a Constitution recommended by the Soulbury Commission in 1946 in order to placate demands for political independence following the war. This constitution retained an appointed Governor-General who retained control over foreign affairs, defense and minority rights. The constitution did not even provide dominion status—“independence” within the Commonwealth—which was granted separately in 1948. Other agreements guaranteed the British continued use of military bases on Ceylon and other privileges.</p>
<p><a name="n9">9.</a> Germain, <em>op. cit.</em></p>
<p><a name="n10">10.</a> The United National Party (UNP) was established by the plutocrat D.S. Senanayake in June 1946 and took over the government from the British in the 1947 election. Senanayake had split from the Ceylon National Congress, a loose pro-independence, exclusively Sinhalese, bourgeois formation when the CNC admitted the Stalinists during World War II.</p>
<p><a name="n11">11.</a> The Mahajama Eksath Peramuna (MEP—People’s United Front) was formed in February 1956 as a coalition of the SLFP with various religious and Sinhalese chauvinist groups and the “LSSP” of Philip Gunawardena. When the Bandaranaike government collapsed in 1958-59, the Gunawardena group took the name MEP for themselves in subsequent election campaigns.</p>
<p><a name="n12">12.</a> A political mass strike.</p>
<p><a name="n13">13.</a> The International Committee was formed by those sections of the Fourth International who broke from the Pabloist International Secretariat in 1953. The IC included the SWP led by J.P. Cannon, the majority of the French section led by Bleibtreu-Lambert, and the British grouping led by G. Healy.</p>
<p><a name="n14">14.</a> The United Left Front (ULF) was an electoral bloc in the 1963 elections of the LSSP, the Communist Party and Philip Gunawardena’s MEP on a joint program of minimal reforms.</p>
<p><a name="n15">15.</a> L.D. Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program),” 1938.</p>
<p><a name="n16">16.</a> The Throne Speech, given by the prime minister, presents the government program at the beginning of a parliamentary term. The vote cast by a party on the Throne Speech is an important indication of that party’s attitude toward the government.</p>
<p><a name="n17">17.</a> The Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) is a medium-sized union of government employees, white collar workers and miscellaneous other office employees. Led by Bala Tampoe of the LSSP(R), it was one of the few important unions standing outside the federations led by the by-now thoroughly reformist LSSP and pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Stalinists.</p>
<p><a name="n18">18.</a> The Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (RSP), which at a convention in late 1972 changed its name to the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP).</p>
<p><a name="n19">19.</a> For further information on the attempted cover-up of the Tampoe scandal by the USec, see “The Case of Bala Tampoe” in <em>Spartacist</em> No. 21, Fall 1972.</p>
<p><a name="n20">20.</a> The Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna (JVP-Peoples Liberation Front), a Guevarist organization of student and peasant youth, led a large-scale youth revolt in the Sinhalese rural areas in the spring of 1971 which was directed against the coalition government of the SLFP, LSSP and CP (Moscow). In a remarkable demonstration of counterrevolutionary solidarity, the government was aided by the U.S., Britain, the USSR, India, Pakistan and Egypt, while China gave its explicit political endorsement of the bloody repression of the uprising!</p>
<p><a name="n21">21.</a> Wijeweera is a former member of the pro-Moscow CP who had begun organizing the JVP in 1966, building a large following among university students and unemployed graduates. His own politics were essentially “insurrectionary Stalinism” of the Guevarist type. As Comrade Samarakkody noted in “Politics of Deceit,” “… the JVP had completely discounted the plantation workers (largely of Indian Tamil origin) and that it did not have any position on the burning question of the Tamil minority—their language and other rights … Sinhalese chauvinism was clearly evident in their politics.”</p>
<p><a name="n22">22.</a> The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), formed in December 1949 under the sponsorship of U.S. American Federation of Labor leaders, was a CIA-backed international center for anti-communist unions. The CIO immediately entered it, accepting CIA funds in the process. Many of the ICFTU unions had earlier been part of the Stalinist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions and their split was one of the first steps of the “Cold War” launched by U.S. imperialism.</p>
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Edmund Samarakkody
The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon
Source: International Bolshevik Tendency
Orignal Publication: Spartacist No. 22, Winter 1973–74
Transcription: Originally transribe by the International Bolshevik Tendency in 2005.
Reformatted for the ETOL in 2009 by D. Walters
Note by Transcriber: The numbered footnotes are from the original article in Spartacist. The linked terms go to the Marxist Internet Archive Glossary and do not reflect the point of view of either the author or Spartacist.
The Editorial Board of Spartacist is proud to bring to our readers an important article making accessible to Trotskyists in the U.S. and internationally an analysis of the history and degeneration of the Trotskyist movement in Ceylon. This understanding is crucial for the rebirth of Trotskyism in Ceylon. The Ceylon experience has profound lessons for our movement, especially in the underdeveloped countries, in the struggle to build sections of an authentic Fourth International rooted in the working class.
The author, Edmund Samarakkody, is uniquely qualified to comment on this experience. A veteran Trotskyist militant and currently spokesman for the Revolutionary Workers Party of Ceylon, Comrade Samarakkody was a founding leader of the Ceylon section of the Fourth International. His early experience dates back to trade-union organizing for the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in the years before World War II. During the war, Comrade Samarakkody, along with other central leaders of the LSSP, was interned by the British and, following his escape, was involved in coordinating the activities of the illegalized LSSP. He then joined other leaders of the LSSP in temporary emigration to India—a crucial internationalizing experience for the Ceylonese Trotskyists—until the end of the war.
Comrade Samarakkody’s oppositional history began in 1957, when he and other left militants in the LSSP resisted the LSSP’s accommodation to the bourgeois nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Particularly crucial in understanding the degeneration of the international Trotskyist movement is the light cast by Comrade Samarakkody’s article on the wretched role of the Pabloist International Secretariat (now United Secretariat) in acquiescing to the LSSP’s accommodationist policy toward the SLFP until the USec revisionists were at last forced to disavow the LSSP when the LSSP entered the SLFP-led popular-front government of Mrs. Bandaranaike in 1964. As the article demonstrates, both the Pabloists of the USec and the Healyites (International Committee) must seek to ignore the real history of the LSSP before 1964 in order to conceal their own complicity, dictated by their pervasive opportunism.
After the 1964 debacle, the USec revisionists denounced the LSSP’s entry into the government and backed the LSSP(Revolutionary), led by the trade-union bureaucrat Bala Tampoe, which split in opposition to the entry into the government. Within the LSSP(R) Comrade Samarakkody led a left opposition against the Tampoe leadership. After two years of struggle, Comrade Samarakkody and his supporters left the LSSP(R) following a Special Conference (18-19 April 1968) and constituted the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (now Revolutionary Workers Party) of Ceylon.
As part of his continuing political battle against the revisionists, Comrade Samarakkody was instrumental in bringing to the attention of the world Trotskyist movement the fundamentally corrupt role of Bala Tampoe, through forcing a special Commission on Ceylon at the “Ninth World Congress” of the USec in April 1969. Following the USec’s suppression of the accusations against Tampoe , and the findings of the USec’s own Commission, Comrade Samarakkody transmitted to us the actual reports of this Commission, which we published in Spartacist # 21 (Fall 1972).
—The Editors
During a period of two decades up to 1964, it was the claim of the leaders of the “United Secretariat of the Fourth International”[1] that the LSSP[2] was the strongest Trotskyist mass party within the “world organisation.” Undoubtedly, the LSSP was the working-class-based party with the widest mass base. It was in the leadership of a considerable sector of the trade-union movement and had strong support among sections of the peasantry and of the urban petty bourgeoisie. It had a reputation for intransigence in its opposition to capitalism-imperialism and for its incorruptible and militant leadership of the working class and toilers, and as a champion of the rights of the Tamil-speaking minority.[3] In the words of Ernest Mandel, a leader of the United Secretariat, “Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Gunawardena were brilliant Marxist thinkers who have written some of the best revolutionary pamphlets in South East Asia…. They undoubtedly assimilated the whole body of the basic Trotskyist concepts.”[4]
However, it was the same party, the LSSP, with its reputation for revolutionary intransigence, and with its “brilliant Marxist thinkers,” that ignominiously collapsed in June 1964, when, by a majority decision, it entered a coalition government with the SLFP,[5] the party of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie, just when the bankruptcy of the policies of the Sirima Bandaranaike government was becoming manifest to the working class and toilers and when conditions were ripening for the development of mass struggle against the government and the capitalist class.
Not only did this reputed Trotskyist party join the ranks of the opportunists by this alliance with the bourgeoisie for the betrayal of the masses, but in 1971, it became directly responsible for the worst massacre of youth ever known in Ceylon or elsewhere—the police-army killings by shooting and torture of thousands of youth who rose in revolt against the capitalist coalition government. And, it is this party that today, together with the Stalinists, is sustaining a capitalist regime which is preparing the road, in the manner of the Allendes, for an open military dictatorship.
But why did this happen? How did this “Trotskyist” party collapse and join the ranks of Stalinist and social-democratic betrayers?
We shall let the same Ernest Mandel of the United Secretariat answer this question. Here is his explanation in his article published in the International Socialist Review in the fall of 1964. “It was never a secret to any member of the world Trotskyist movement, informed about the special problems of the Fourth International, that the section in Ceylon, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, was an organisation to which the term ‘Trotskyist’ had to be applied with a series of specific reservations….” Mandel, it would appear, had never any doubts about the character of the LSSP. According to him “the group of Trotskyist intellectuals suddenly found themselves at the head of the largest working-class organisation in the country…. However, the party which they led could not really be called ‘Bolshevik’.”
Mandel’s dilemma in characterisation of this party is understandable. For over two decades, the LSSP was the Ceylon unit of the International Secretariat (I.S.) and later United Secretariat (USec), which claimed to be the continuation of the organisation founded by Trotsky. Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat were called upon to explain how such a party as the LSSP could have remained a unit of an international organisation claiming to be Trotskyist! It was this question that Mandel has failed to answer. And his failure to face up to this question could well be the reason why he resorted to equivocation in regard to the character of this party.
In the view of Mandel, the LSSP had a hybrid character. “It was a party that combined left-socialist trade-union cadres, revolutionary workers who had gained class consciousness but not specifically revolutionary-Marxist education, and a few hundred genuine revolutionary-Marxist cadres….
“In fact, while being formally a Trotskyist party, the LSSP functioned in several areas comparably to a left Social Democratic party in a relatively ‘prosperous’ semi-colonial country; i.e. it was the main electoral vehicle of the poor masses, it provided the main leadership of the trade unions.”
If indeed “the LSSP functioned in several areas comparably to a left Social Democratic party,” and if indeed it was functioning as “the main electoral vehicle of the poor masses,” it was by no means difficult to understand how the leaders of this party accepted portfolios in a bourgeois government in 1964 and have continued along this road thereafter.
But if, as Mandel insists, this was a “defeat for Trotskyism in Ceylon” it is necessary to ascertain what precisely in his view led to this defeat. “The defeat suffered by Trotskyism in Ceylon,” says Mandel, “is therefore essentially the story of how and why the Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Gunawardena group ["Marxist"—E.S.] lost leadership of the party through their own weaknesses and inner contradictions….”
Mandel mentions these “weaknesses and inner contradictions"—the fatal flaw was that these key political leaders did not occupy themselves with full time party work—they remained part-time leaders… the leaders of the genuinely Trotskyist wing of the LSSP did not change their daily lives to accord with their revolutionary convictions.[6]
While the “weaknesses and inner contradictions of the leaders” were real, it is necessary for revolutionary Marxists to go beyond the personal qualities of the leaders of an ostensibly revolutionary party to ascertain why such a party betrayed the revolutionary movement and the masses. Mandel is completely wrong in stating that the weaknesses of the leaders were “essentially” the cause of the LSSP collapse. This is plain subjectivism.
Mandel’s dilemma remains. He and the other leaders of the United Secretariat were not prepared to accept their share of responsibility for the collapse of the LSSP, which for two decades was accepted as a section of the International Secretariat, later United Secretariat.
The formal acceptance of the program can never be the test of a revolutionary Marxist party. That is of course a commonplace. On the other hand, what is basic to the Leninist concept of the party is the basing of the politics of the party on the revolutionary program and above all on activity in a revolutionary perspective.
And, in regard to the LSSP, there was not even a formal acceptance of a Trotskyist program, because in reality there was no program as such. What was termed the program, as late as 1950 (unity congress) was only a listing of “fundamental aims,” a brief explanation of a transitional program, a list of transitional demands and the positions of the party on imperialist war, defense of the Soviet Union, on Stalinist parties and popular-frontism.
A Marxist analysis of the socio-economic factors in the country, class forces and class relations, the character of the Ceylon revolution and the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution—all these issues had no place in this “program"! Documents on programmatic questions were never the heritage of the party. Nor could the leaders of the United Secretariat, the Mandels and Pierre Franks, point to any intervention on their part with the LSSP in this regard.
1942 Split
The existence, from the beginning, of a Marxist wing in this social-democratic type party was the real hope for this party. And indeed, the leaders of the [International] correctly looked to this group for the revolutionary orientation of this party.
And the opportunity came to this group and also to the leaders of the [International], when the first split took place in the LSSP between the Philip Gunawardena/N.M. Perera reformist section and the Leslie [Gunawardena]/Colvin [R. de Silva]/Bernard [Soysa] Marxist section in 1942.
It was the attempt on the part of the Marxist wing to re-organise the party programmatically and organisationally on Bolshevik lines that led to opposition from the Philip Gunawardena/N.M. Perera reformist wing and to the split of 1942. The expulsion of Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera from the International and the acceptance of the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party (BSP)[7] as the Ceylon unit created favourable conditions for the building of the revolutionary party.
Although at the commencement the politics of the split were not altogether clear to the rank and file of the BSP, the further evolution of the N.M./Philip group brought into the open the different orientations. For instance, the N.M./Philip group gave proof of its deep-seated opportunism when the parliamentary fraction of their party refused to vote against the status of “independence” granted by the British in 1947. The BSP fraction however voted against this fake independence.[8]
On the other hand, during the seven years of its independent existence, the BSP took meaningful steps to raise the ideological level of the party, develop revolutionary cadre and direct trade-union and other mass activities in a revolutionary perspective.
Unification
However, this favourable development for Trotskyism in Ceylon received a setback when the BSP decided on unification with the reformist N.M. Perera/Philip Gunawardena group (LSSP), which had, during this period, only strengthened its reformism, both in its trade-union and parliamentary activities.
And what is more, the unification was effected without any discussion on the fundamental problems of the Ceylon revolution, strategy and tactics, on Stalinism, reformism and parliamentarism. It was the failure of the Marxist wing (BSP) that no document giving the correct orientation on these relevant issues was adopted at this unification. Only the “program” which we have already referred to was adopted. This “program” was so sketchy and only in outline, that the N.M. Perera wing had no difficulty in taking the party along their reformist course.
This unification, which proved disastrous for the future of Trotskyism in Ceylon, nevertheless received the approval of the leaders of the United Secretariat (then the International Secretariat). And what is more, it was their view that a policy of co-existence with the N.M. Perera reformist wing was correct for the Marxist group. In the view of Mandel, “the problem of overcoming the old divisions and of blocking anything that could precipitate a new split with N.M. Perera became an obsession among the key political leaders. The policy was correct in itself since unification had taken place on a principled basis and since the party’s activities as a whole were proceeding in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism.”[9] [our emphasis—E.S.]
General Program of Trotskyism
The program of Trotskyism in Ceylon had to be linked to the problems of the Ceylon revolution.
As in all backward countries, Ceylon had (1950) and still continues to have uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution. The “Soulbury Constitution,” which was a deal between the Ceylonese bourgeoisie and the British imperialists, brought only fake independence. While there was political independence over a large area, yet there was room for imperialist interference and control, even politically. In any event, the economic dominance of British imperialism continued through the ownership and control by the British of the best tea and rubber plantations and the agency houses, which controlled the exports of all agricultural products and which also had a major share of the imports for the plantation sector. The operation of British and other foreign-owned banks, and the open-door policy for British and other imperialist investments reduced political freedom to a fiction.
Twenty-five years after the grant of so-called Independence and the adoption of a new constitution with republican status (1971), the socio-economic policies of Ceylon, over a large area, cannot be decided by a Ceylon Cabinet, but by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the imperialists!
The revolutionary wing (BSP) which correctly denounced and rejected the Soulbury Constitution as “fake independence” while the N.M. Perera wing silently endorsed the bourgeois interpretations in that regard, failed to raise this question of the Soulbury Constitution with the N.M. Perera wing at the 1950 unification. Thus by implication the BSP endorsed the opportunism of the N.M. Perera wing.
This meant that the unified LSSP adopted, by implication, a view that the bourgeoisie of a backward country in the middle of the 20th century has been able to accomplish a basic task of the bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e. the achievement of national liberation from imperialism. This meant that the LSSP was in conflict with the central thesis of the permanent revolution, that, having arrived belatedly, a congenitally weak bourgeoisie in a backward country is incapable of playing a leading role in the democratic revolution; that on the contrary, this bourgeoisie is counter-revolutionary; that the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution could be accomplished only by the proletariat (dictatorship of the proletariat) in alliance with the peasantry and in the teeth of the opposition of the native bourgeoisie—whether they be the compradors or the so-called national bourgeoisie.
The false and untenable assumption that the bourgeois democratic tasks had been accomplished by the Ceylonese bourgeoisie led the LSSP to virtually ignore thereafter—(a) the struggle for completing Ceylon’s independence; (b) the struggle for minority rights of the 2 million Tamil-speaking people; (c) the struggle of the peasants for the land; and (d) the ending of the oppression and discrimination of the so-called depressed castes.
It was thus that the LSSP had no program to develop the anti-imperialist struggle although the party was opposed to imperialism. And it was thus that the LSSP had no program to develop the struggle of the peasants for land although the LSSP did demand land for the landless.
Although the LSSP supported the language and other rights of the Tamil minority and called for the acceptance of Tamil as an official language together with the Sinhala language, and also called for citizenship rights for the Tamil plantation workers, it did not have a strategy for implementing these demands.
It was thus that the LSSP failed to carry on a consistent struggle for the completion of Ceylon’s independence, for the abolition of the Soulbury Constitution. The party failed to raise the slogan of a Constituent Assembly.
The refusal of the LSSP to face the reality of the uncompleted democratic tasks gave the Ceylon bourgeoisie an unexpected opportunity to pose as the friends of the peasantry and to win over the petty-bourgeois masses generally, by putting on the mask of nationalism and talking the language of freedom fighters.
Enter Bandaranaike
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who broke with the UNP[10] on the succession to D.S. Senanayake, was quick to take the opportunity. Raising the slogans of “Sinhalese language only” as the official language to replace English, “Give back the military bases,” “Take over of foreign-owned estates,” “End feudal relations in land,” Bandaranaike was soon leading the mass movement, especially the peasants and lower middle class intelligentsia. From a leader of a small party of eight members in parliament, Bandaranaike found himself swept to power in 1956 (MEP—the 1st Bandaranaike Government).[11]
Although Bandaranaike and his SLFP soon showed their state of bankruptcy in regard to (a) the anti-imperialist struggle; (b) winning of land to the peasants; and (c) the grant of minority rights and so-called economic development, this party (SLFP) of the so-called national bourgeoisie was able to keep itself at the centre of the political stage during a period of nearly 17 years up to the present due to the wrong policies of the LSSP in regard to the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie.
The Ceylonese bourgeoisie had, right up to the war period, remained a plantation and mercantile bourgeoisie. Their interests more or less dove-tailed with imperialist interests; they functioned in the perspective of continued co-existence with imperialism. They were the classic compradors.
However, it was inevitable that capitalist development in Ceylon would, even late, take the road of industrialisation. This meant that a differentiation within the bourgeoisie would sooner or later lead to the emergence of the industrial-minded bourgeoisie. And it could have been expected that this new section of the bourgeoisie would be in a state of conflict with the older plantation bourgeoisie or their party, the UNP, which had control of state power.
It was the existence of this new sector of the bourgeoisie—the industrial-minded sector—that found its reflection in the split away of Bandaranaike from the UNP (1951). Further, it was precisely the significance of this differentiation within the bourgeoisie that the LSSP, which according to Mandel, “functioned in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism,” failed to understand.
“National” or “Liberal” Bourgeoisie
The character and the role of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie in the backward countries was too well known, especially in the Trotskyist movement, by the time this differentiation took place in Ceylon. The tragedy of the Chinese revolution (1927), the triumph of Franco in Spain (1936-39), and the failure of the revolutionary movements in India and the other countries of Asia were basically linked to the failure of ostensible revolutionaries to understand the nature of the so-called national bourgeoisie, who seek to use the masses, not for struggle against imperialism but to win concessions from the imperialist masters.
The principal lesson derived from Marxist experience in this regard was that this sector of the bourgeoisie, while being capable of occasional but weak oppositional actions against imperialism, cannot, with any degree of consistency, develop any real confrontation with imperialism. In the context of the reality of the class struggle, the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie must necessarily betray the struggle for national liberation and enter into treacherous compromises with imperialism. “The more to the East,” said Trotsky, “the more treacherous were the bourgeoisie.” That meant, the more belatedly they arrive, the more treacherous they are.
While revolutionary Marxists would give critical support to some oppositional actions of the so-called national bourgeoisie, they are unequivocally opposed to national bourgeois regimes; it remains their task to carry on a consistent and irreconcilable struggle to expose their real role of treachery to the national liberation struggle and to wrest the leadership of the national struggle from their hands.
The regimes of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie in Ceylon (SLFP, SLFP-LSSP, SLFP-LSSP-CP) have brought about a belated but limited development of the manufacturing industries, not in conflict with imperialism, but jointly with foreign capitalists, whether in the public or private sector, undermining in this process the political independence of the country.
It is precisely this question of the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie—the Bandaranaike question—that LSSP leaders failed to understand in the light of Marxist experience. In the result, the leadership followed empirically a zig zag policy, which inevitably led them into the coalition government with the SLFP in 1964.
The 1953 Hartal—A Semi-Insurrection
It was in this state of ideological confusion and uncertainty that the LSSP was confronted with the opportunity of leading the masses in Ceylon’s first revolutionary mass struggle against the government and the capitalist class reaching to the level of a semi-insurrection.
With the end of the Korean boom and the fall in the prices of the main exports, tea and rubber, the capitalist UNP government decided to maintain the profit levels of the capitalist and vested interests by imposing drastic cuts on social services and by the increase in price of rationed rice. While the price of rice was raised from =/25 cents to =/70 cents [Ceylon currency] per measure, the government withdrew the free mid-day meal to school children and increased postal fares and train fares.
The LSSP took the lead in developing mass agitation on these issues. But even while the mass movement was visibly growing around these issues, the leaders of the LSSP, who had empirically moved into a struggle situation, failed to see the revolutionary possibilities in the situation. Their perspectives did not go beyond mass protest action against the actions and policies of the government.
In this context, the LSSP leaders were taken by surprise by the response of the masses to the one-day protest action that was decided upon.
Though acting empirically, the LSSP correctly applied the tactic of the united front. The Philip Gunawardena group (MEP), the Stalinists and even the Federal Party (bourgeois-led Tamil minority Party) were pushed into becoming the co-sponsors of the Hartal[12] action.
The withdrawal of work (strike action) of the workers supported by the closing of business and the stoppage of work by peasants and other self-employed people, all of whom resorted to direct action struggle by barricading roads, cutting down trees and telephone posts, stopping of buses and trains—all this turned into a real confrontation with the armed forces of the government. What occurred was a semi-insurrection in which the masses fought the police and the army with stones and clubs and whatever they found by way of weapons. Nine persons were killed by police shooting.
What the working class and the masses that were in the struggle looked forward to was not a mere one-day protest action and a return to work the following day. They were in readiness for a struggle to overthrow the hated UNP government. In fact, this direct action of the masses continued on the next day also. There were clear possibilities of this Hartal action being continued for several days thereafter. But the LSSP leadership, despite the unmistakable moods of the workers and other sections of the masses, decided to keep to their plan of a mere protest action and called off the Hartal and prevented the masses from continuing the struggle.
Dynamics of the Ceylon Revolution
What the LSSP leadership had failed to develop theoretically—the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution—the Hartal struggle showed in practise, even in outline. The following features were prominently silhouetted in the political scene:
1. Contrary to the misgivings of the LSSP leaders (which some of them developed into theories later), the Ceylonese masses were not so steeped in parliamentarism that they would first have to go through a long parliamentary period before they got on to the road of revolutionary struggle. The Hartal showed that, given a revolutionary leadership, the masses could soon shed their parliamentary illusions and enter the road of mass struggle leading to the revolution itself.
2. The masses did not divide the Ceylon revolution into two stages, (a) an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal stage and (b) an anti-capitalist stage. The democratic revolution and the socialist revolution were telescoped in a single struggle. The issues that brought the masses into revolutionary struggle were issues arising out of imperialist capitalist oppression—increase of price of rice, train fares, postal fares, etc. The capitalist class had the need to save foreign exchange through a cut in the ration of rice and cutting down of social services for the maintaining of capitalist profit levels. The uncompleted democratic tasks, completing of independence, and the ending of minority and caste oppression could be accomplished only in the course of the socialist revolution.
Despite their so-called two-stage theory, the Stalinists found themselves taken along into an anti-capitalist struggle and an uprising against a capitalist government. Also, contrary to their so-called theory, they were shown in practise that the anti-UNP struggle could not be separated from the anti-capitalist struggle.
3. Again, contrary to the orientation of the Stalinists and later also of the LSSP, it was not the so-called progressive bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie that led the masses in this struggle, but the proletariat. Led by the LSSP, it was the working class that took the leading role in this struggle. The urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the students and youth all followed the leadership of the working class. The party of the so-called progressive bourgeoisie, the Bandaranaike-led SLFP, was not ready even to be one of the sponsors of the Hartal action.
4. The alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is basic to the Ceylon revolution, was achieved in action. The struggle showed that it was not necessary for the proletariat to form a political alliance with a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois party in order to win the peasantry. The peasantry can be won to the side of the proletariat on the basis of support for their burning issues in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
The LSSP leadership failed to draw the lessons of this Hartal experience. It failed to theoretically evaluate the events of this semi-insurrection and relate them to the theory of the permanent revolution as it applied to Ceylon, a backward country. The LSSP leadership failed to realise that what was urgent and un-postponable was the raising of the ideological level of the party in the perspective of developing into a Bolshevik-type revolutionary combat party.
Politics of the International Secretariat
We have already noted that in the view of Mandel, in the post unification years (LSSP-BSP), the LSSP’s “activities as a whole were proceeding in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism.”
Thus, in the view of the International Secretariat, there was no occasion for any serious intervention on its part in regard to the LSSP.
The truth in this regard was that, with the new turn of the I.S. in 1951 (3rd Congress) under the guidance of Pablo, there could not be, in their view, any problems for the LSSP in regard to ideological development or the building of a Bolshevik-type party.
According to the thesis of the 3rd Congress there was no need to build independent Trotskyist parties; what was necessary was to take the “quickest road to the masses” where-ever they be, in the Stalinist or other reformist parties, for “the integrating” of the revolutionary Marxist cadre deeply into the so-called real movement of the masses.
The same thesis of the 3rd Congress left the door open for an interpretation that the Stalinist parties have transformed themselves from road-blocks to the proletarian revolution into parties that are capable of taking the revolutionary road.
It was against this liquidationist turn of the International that the SWP (United States)-led minority revolted and split in 1953. On the first news of the split the LSSP leadership leaned on the side of the minority and appeared to be willing to take up the struggle against Pabloist revisionism and liquidationism. But in the state of ideological confusion that reigned in the LSSP and its leadership, and in the context of the theoretical weakness of the International Committee (IC),[13] the leaders of the LSSP wavered and jumped on to the bandwagon of the majority led by the Mandels, Pierre Franks and the Livios.
In reality, the liquidationist and revisionist line of Pablo, according to which there is no need to build independent Marxist parties, and according to which what was urgent was the “integration into the living movement of the masses"—all this dovetailed into the orientation of the LSSP leaders whose pre-occupation was developing mass activity—in the trade unions and in the electorates without revolutionary perspective.
1953 Split
On the other hand, the Pabloist pro-Stalinist orientation found more than a responsive echo with the Henry Peiris-led faction which emerged in the party in the fall of 1952. A resolution of this faction, led by Henry Peiris, William Silva and T.B. Subasinghe, “declared that in the elections the party should have put forward the slogan of a ‘Democratic Government which would have meant, at its lowest level, a Bandaranaike government, and at its highest level, a Government by a Sama Samaja majority’.” It also took the position “that the party should enter into the closest possible agreement and co-operation with the CP and Philip group in the trade union and political fields” (Short History of the LSSP).
This was clearly the moment to investigate into the roots of reformism and Stalinism that had grown within the LSSP, to draw up a balance sheet of the efforts of the LSSP to move in a Trotskyist direction. In fact, all the basic questions of Trotskyism, the program, the application of the theory of the permanent revolution, the character of the Ceylon revolution, the role of the “national” bourgeoisie, questions of strategy and tactics, the Leninist concept of the party, were the issues that were involved in this factional struggle that burst into the open.
But the LSSP leadership conducted the fight against the reformists and Stalinists within the party by their own empirical methods and in an ad hoc manner, counterposing Trotskyist orthodoxy to the politics of the revisionists, very much in the manner of the SWP in 1953 when it opposed the line of the 3rd Congress. In the result, the factional struggle did not lead to the focusing of attention on the fundamental questions that were clearly posed before the entire party. Nor did the factional struggle help even to educate the membership of the party and to raise their ideological level, especially when the party was moving deeper into parliamentary politics, where Bandaranaike was soon to become the principal actor.
Responsive Co-operation
Having failed to understand the role of the so-called national bourgeoisie, the LSSP leadership was at a loss to know how to deal with the Bandaranaike-led MEP government that was formed after the 1956 parliamentary elections.
Succumbing to the mass hysteria and enthusiasm at the election victory of the MEP to office, the LSSP announced its attitude to the new government as one of “responsive co-operation.” It was of course necessary to note the popularity of the MEP government. It was undoubtedly imperative for the LSSP to take note of the prevailing mass sentiment and the mass moods in relation to the first Bandaranaike government, before the party decided on its tactics in the situation. But it was unpardonable for a party claiming to be revolutionary Marxist to resort to equivocal formulae, and echo mass illusions when it was imperative to categorically state party positions. And in this case, it was the question of correctly characterising the MEP government which was a bourgeois bonapartist government that was seeking to deceive the masses with nationalist and socialist phraseology. It was the duty of the LSSP to patiently explain to the masses regarding the truth about the character of this government. On the contrary, the LSSP chose the occasion to opportunistically go along with the masses, whilst keeping the door open for later criticism of the government when the mass moods underwent a change.
The Mandels, Pierre Franks and the Livios of the I.S. looked on from a distance. They never once in this regard expressed their views on the LSSP line on this question. Either it was the case of the I.S. approving the LSSP line in this regard, or the I.S. did not seek to interfere in the internal affairs of a section of the International on the basis of its real orientation, that the Revolutionary International is a sum of several national parties that function independently of the International centre!
However, it was the Bandaranaike MEP regime itself that gave the LSSP the opportunity to re-assess the character of this government. Before long, the bankruptcy of “Bandaranaike principles” became evident to a section of the masses. It was to conceal this bankruptcy that Bandaranaike resorted to communalism that led to the worst anti-Tamil riots in Ceylon (1956-1958). And what was particularly helpful to the LSSP was that the organised working class lost faith in the promises of Bandaranaike and moved into strike action to win their wage demands.
But the LSSP, as before, acted only empirically. In a tail-endist fashion, the LSSP supported the working-class strikes and adapted only a more critical attitude to Bandaranaike.
Although the LSSP correctly noted that the Bandaranaike government (MEP) was bonapartist in character, it failed to draw the conclusion that mass illusions in such a government cannot easily disappear, that the LSSP had to launch consistent struggle on many fronts on reformism and Stalinism to win the masses away from “Bandaranaike politics.” On the other hand, the LSSP naively believed that, with the assassination of Bandaranaike, “Bandaranaike politics” had come to an end. The LSSP even believed that the road was now open for the party to ride to parliamentary power.
It was thus that the LSSP decided to throw all its forces in the 1960 elections (March) with the aim of winning a majority to form an LSSP government in parliament. And the International Secretariat, the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, looked on approvingly with hope that the LSSP would win a majority in this election.
But the SLFP, led by the widow of Bandaranaike, came out of the elections (March 1960), as the party with the largest number of seats, although it failed to win an overall majority to form the government. The LSSP was reduced from 12 to 10 seats and was thrown into a state of confusion.
But this outcome of the elections might well have been the opportunity for the party to review its election policy which contributed in a large way to increasing mass illusions in parliament and also to disorienting the party membership. In fact the decision of the party to bid for a parliamentary majority was evidence that the party had lost all revolutionary perspective and had accepted the reformist and Stalinist parliamentary or so-called peaceful road to socialism.
Nor did the Mandels and Pierre Franks of the International Secretariat intervene correctly even after the event, in this regard. The leaders of the I.S. could not realise that what was involved here was the disease of parliamentarism and reformism that had got a stranglehold on the party, and not a question of miscalculation or wrong evaluation. Here is a sample of their orientation in this regard—
“The starting point must be a frank self criticism of the errors in analysis and evaluation committed by the party prior to the 20th March elections, namely—
(a) It thought that the objective situation was favourable to the victory of the revolutionary movement;
(b) It supposed that the masses have already had enough experience with the SLFP and that as a result they might in their majority turn towards the LSSP.”
(I.S. Document on Ceylon, October 1960)
In this context, it was no surprise that the leadership of the LSSP, which was now steeped in parliamentarism continued to look desperately for solutions within the same parliamentarist perspective. And it was thus that the next step was taken by the right-wing leader N.M. Perera who challenged all the basic positions of Trotskyism, pronounced that the proletariat in Ceylon was petty-bourgeois in outlook, that revolutionary mass struggle leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible and crudely proposed that the LSSP enter a coalition front with the SLFP “on an agreed program.”
And as for the “brilliant Marxists” like Mandel, the Colvins and the Leslies, they were only a step behind N.M. Perera. In fact, it was Leslie Gunawardena that sought to give theoretical justification for the betrayal that Perera found no difficulty in proposing in the manner of the Social Democrats. Leslie Gunawardena, you see, was, in keeping with the traditions of the Trotskyist movement, against the popular front! But according to Leslie Gunawardena a popular front with an anti-capitalist program was in accordance with the program of Trotskyism! Thus Leslie Gunawardena was opposed to N.M. Perera’s proposal to form a coalition government on an agreed minimum program. “This action” wrote Leslie “was light-minded and unworthy of a party that claims to employ the Marxist method"!
Four years later, in June 1964, these same “brilliant Marxists” led by this same Leslie had moved far and away from Leslie’s own theory of 1960. They were opposed to the proposal of N.M. Perera not on the absence of an anti-capitalist program. Their difference with N.M. Perera was that they wanted a coalition government between the entire ULF]14]-LSSP-MEP, CP and the SLFP—They wanted a complete and proper popular front!
Opposition
Though late, left oppositional elements in the LSSP began to intervene. In 1957, one year after Bandaranaike assumed office, the opposition to the policy of “responsive co-operation” manifested itself through a small group in the Central Committee. In its amendment to the political resolution of the Central Committee, this group (W. Dharmasena, Robert Gunawardena, Edmund [Samarakkody], Chandra Gunasekera) stated—
“When the MEP government came into power the masses were intoxicated with illusions regarding this government. Large sections of the masses close to the party expected the party to support the MEP government. In this situation, partly due to lack of clarity (of the party) regarding the MEP government, the party offered co-operation (responsive) to the government whilst directing the parliamentary group to sit in the opposition. As the party failed to characterise the MEP government as a capitalist government, the fact that the parliamentary group sat in the opposition did not signalise its fundamental opposition or of being against the government. Whatever was the intention of the party, in the eyes of the masses, the key to the understanding of the fundamental position of the party in relation to the government was the offer of co-operation (responsive) by the party. This offer of co-operation to the capitalist government was wrong. The party could have and should have offered support to the progressive measures of the government while stating categorically that the MEP government was a capitalist government. However unpalatable and unacceptable it may have been to the masses, the party should have characterised this government as a capitalist government and thereafter proceeded to explain.” (Amendment of Edmund-Robert group in the CC, 1957).
In the further efforts to combat parliamentarism and to take the party along the path of mass struggle the group insisted that “the aim of the party in relation to the MEP government is revolutionary overthrow of the government, i.e. by the method of the mass uprising. The masses are not ready now (today) for the overthrow of the government. But in view of the failure of the government to solve the pressing problems of the people, in view of the ever increasing dissension in the MEP, and the demoralisation of its own ranks, in view of the growing militancy of the working class, the situation can change very rapidly, and at any moment from now, the masses could well raise the slogan ‘Down with the MEP government.’ As a bridge between their present consciousness and the stage when they will be ready for the call for the overthrow of the Government, the party will adopt as a central agitational slogan ‘We do not want the capitalist MEP government, we want a workers and peasants government’.”
Undoubtedly this group failed to come to grips with the roots of reformism in the party. It only focused attention on some aspects of party policy. Nevertheless, the orientation of this group gave promise of possibilities for the growth of a real revolutionary tendency.
It was thus an opportune moment for the leaders of the I.S. to intervene on the side of the left oppositional elements that were definitively emerging. But there was no such intervention, for the reason that these leaders, the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, had no differences with the LSSP leadership in regard to their policy of “responsive co-operation” to the Bandaranaike government.
It was only when the LSSP leaders took the inevitable step from “responsive co-operation” to the call for support of an SLFP government that the leaders of the International Secretariat intervened with a document to register their opposition.
The leaders of the I.S. were in a dilemma. If the LSSP was right when it offered co-operation (responsive co-operation) to the first Bandaranaike government (MEP) how could the LSSP be wrong when it called for and supported the formation of an SLFP government in parliament?
The answer to this question is that the LSSP was completely wrong in offering co-operation (responsive) to the bourgeois MEP government of Bandaranaike in 1956. The LSSP was once again wrong in calling for support of the bourgeois SLFP in 1960.
But the leaders of the I.S. were not prepared to admit that it was their failure that they did not state categorically that the policy of “responsive co-operation” was wrong. It was thus that the Mandels and Pierre Franks found themselves on the defensive before the LSSP reformists in their attempt to explain what they really meant by “critical support” to the SLFP government. These leaders of the I.S. were guilty of a serious distortion of the Leninist-Trotskyist position in regard to the governments of the so-called national progressive bourgeoisie! And here is their orientation in that regard— “We do not forget that, in the case of colonial and semi-colonial countries, the revolutionary party can give its critical support to governments with a non-proletarian leadership, be they petty-bourgeois or bourgeois“! [our emphasis—E.S.] (Document of the I.S. on Ceylon).
However, in the same breath, the document continued, “The support of a revolutionary party for a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government cannot be other than critical, namely strictly conditional and limited. That means in practise that this support can be granted for progressive, effectively anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist measures, either planned or carried out, measures that must be defended against any manoeuvre or sabotage by the reactionary forces.” But why this equivocation? A revolutionary Marxist party will not and cannot give even critical support to any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois government. If the Mandels and the Pierre Franks mean thereby critical support to only “progressive and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist measures” then how do they talk of “giving critical support to governments with a non-proletarian leadership, be they petty-bourgeois or bourgeois"? They knew that what was involved here was the attitude of the revolutionary party to a bourgeois government in a colonial or semi-colonial country, and not to its attitude to certain measures of such a government. They know well that a revolutionary Marxist party could well give critical support to certain measures of bourgeois governments, even of military governments. But the attitude of a revolutionary Marxist party to a bourgeois government with even a “progressive” coloration can be nothing but irreconcilable opposition, although the manner of opposition to such a government will depend on the mass sentiment in relation to the government.
It is thus that support to a government, whether disguised as “responsive co-operation” or critical support, must be rejected as being in direct conflict with the fundamental programmatic position of the party.
But whatever were the weaknesses and equivocations of the International Secretariat, the reformist leadership of the LSSP had by their unequivocal call for support of an SLFP government in May 1960 exposed the hollowness of their claims to be a Trotskyist party. This meant that the task of revolutionary Marxists within the LSSP was to begin the struggle for a Trotskyist program and the organisation of a revolutionary tendency with or without the support of the International Secretariat.
However, the left oppositionists in the LSSP allowed themselves to be disarmed when the LSSP leadership empirically put on an oppositional stance in relation to the SLFP government, especially when sectors of the working class moved into strike action under the leadership of the LSSP. And, for its part, the International Secretariat even believed that an appeal to the party leadership from the World Congress would suffice to make these, now confirmed reformists, take a revolutionary road!
“The World Congress appeals to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party for a radical change in the political course in the direction indicated by the document of the leadership of the International.”
“The Congress is confident that the next National Conference of the LSSP in whose political preparation the whole International must participate, will know how to adopt all the political and organisational decisions necessary to overcome the crisis which was revealed following on the results of the March 1960 election campaign.” (Letter of 6th World Congress to LSSP)
Far from any effective participation of the International or any participation at all by the I.S. in any national conference of the LSSP “for a radical change in its political course,” the Mandels and Pierre Franks were once again traversing the same parliamentarist road with the LSSP leadership, just when the working class had achieved, as never before, unity for struggle around 21 demands which could well develop into political struggle against the SLFP government and the capitalist class.
United Left Front
The Marxist tactic of the united front with Stalinist and reformist working-class parties and even bourgeois parties means nothing more than unity in action in concrete anti-imperialist or class-struggle situations. It can never mean a political alliance with such parties, which cannot have any other objective than the winning of reforms from the capitalists or the capitalist government.
The problem of the alternative government, alternative to the bourgeois government, is often posed before the revolutionary Marxists. But this question of an alternative government is linked to the dynamics of the revolution.
This means that revolutionary Marxists do not project a transitional reformist government prior to a workers government. But this was precisely the orientation of the LSSP leaders who in their search for an alternative to a bourgeois government, proposed a government of the so-called “United Left Front” composed of the two working-class-based parties—the LSSP and CP—and the petty-bourgeois MEP (Philip Gunawardena) on an agreed program (July 1963).
The concluding paragraph of the preamble to this agreement, containing a “General Program” (maximum) and an immediate program, revealed the reformist and Stalinist character of this “Front".
“In accordance with the needs of this situation and in response to this mass urge, the Ceylon Communist Party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna have agreed to form a United Left Front in order to mobilise and lead all anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and socialist forces in Ceylon in the fight to establish a government that will give effect to the following general program.”
The “immediate” or the minimum part of this program, which was the real program of the Front, speaks for itself. The following are among the demands of the “immediate” or minimum program: (a) Bring down Prices! Let the State import and undertake the wholesale trade in all essential commodities. (b) End the wage freeze! Political and trade union rights for teachers and other employees of the Government…. (c) Participation of workers in each work place in the management of state and nationalised undertakings. (d) Nationalise the 13 Foreign Banks!
Revolutionary Tendency
The minority in the Central Committee (14 members), that had for some time been moving in a revolutionary orientation, were categorically opposed to the so-called United Left Front.
The minority (which included Meryl [Fernando], Edmund [Samarakkody], Karlo [Karalasingham], [Bala] Tampoe, D.S. Mallawaratchi, S.A. Martinus, W. Dharmasena) was quick to see the reformist nature of this ULF which it correctly characterised as popular frontism!
“The situation which now faces the party is one in which it is clear that the MEP and the CP are not contemplating the type of United Front activity that will in fact provide a united left lead to the masses against the SLFP government and the forces of capitalist reaction. These two parties are seeking instead, to secure the party’s consent to putting forward an agreed governmental program before the masses in the name of the United Left Front for the purpose of canvassing support for the establishment of a popular front type of government in parliament. This parliamentary reformist perspective for united front activity must be rejected by the party….
“…. The party must avoid any course of action which is likely to strengthen the illusions already created amongst the left minded masses that the road forward to socialism in Ceylon lies through the setting up of a United Left Front with the objective of establishing a coalition government in parliament, on the basis of any agreed program for that purpose.” (Resolution of the CC minority)
With the emergence of a revolutionary tendency led by 14 members of the Central Committee, the time was opportune to begin in an organised manner the struggle against parliamentarism and reformism and for orienting the party in a revolutionary direction. And this was clearly the moment for the International Secretariat to come down decisively on the side of the CC minority, for a joint struggle for the building of the revolutionary party.
It was thus that the CC minority looked forward hopefully for support from the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially when the International Secretariat had once again, in the fall of 1961, reminded the LSSP leaders that it was urgent for the party to be re-oriented on the lines suggested by the I.S. and endorsed by the Sixth World Congress. By its August (1961) resolution on Ceylon, the I.S. reiterated the following matters.
(a) “The impossibility of the conquest of power by the parliamentary way and the necessity for never forgetting that the smashing of the bourgeois apparatus and the creation by the masses in the course of a revolutionary process as a whole, of new organs of power, remain the condition for the victory of the proletariat and its revolutionary party";
(b) “The necessity of working to make possible a close alliance between the worker masses and the peasants and more particularly for the operation of the real junction with the Indian agricultural workers, who remain one of the motive forces of the revolution in Ceylon; the necessity to underline the principled attitude favourable to trade union unity.”
(c) The International Secretariat even reminded the LSSP leadership that “up till now, the conference of the LSSP, which should have discussed all these questions, has not been convoked and there is consequently no official stand of the party.”
All this and the initial reactions of the International Secretariat to the parliamentarism that was reflected through the first draft of the ULF agreement gave promise of principled positions in this regard by the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially in the context of the categorical opposition of the CC minority (14 members out of 44).
But it was just when the CC minority looked to cooperation from the Mandels and Pierre Franks to continue their struggle against the LSSP reformists that they were abandoned by these leaders who took the side of the N.M. Pereras and Leslies when the latter signed the so-called agreement of the United Left Front which was nothing but a modest programme of reforms to fight the next parliamentary elections in the perspective of forming a joint government in parliament. The I.S. issued a public statement hailing the formation of the LSSP-MEP-CP “Left United Front.”
Was the International Secretariat correct in supporting the United Left Front formed in August 1963? What was their justification in this regard? Were they acting in accordance with the general program of Trotskyism?
Workers and Peasants Government
The call of the Bolsheviks in 1917 for a government of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks and their readiness to designate such a government as a workers and peasants government has been the excuse for revisionists of the United Secretariat and of the Healyite variety to call for support of governments of reformist working-class parties and petty-bourgeois parties, which are nothing but governments for bourgeois reform. And this was precisely the orientation of the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, especially since the 3rd Congress (1951).
Here is for example the section of the resolution of the 3rd Congress in regard to the tactics concretely proposed for Chile:
“It [our section] will develop its propaganda for the slogan of the workers and peasants government which will eventually be concretised in this country as a government of parties claiming to represent the working class, notably the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.” (This meant that the coalition government of Allende that was recently overthrown by the military coup was the concretisation of the slogan workers and peasants government!)
And this was specifically the advice of the I.S. to the LSSP when these leaders intervened with the party in 1960 against their proposal to support an SLFP government in that year.
“It would be rather dangerous, however for the, workers parties to restrict themselves to the framework of the parliamentary aims and not look for a new, effective contact with the masses, through vigorous, extra-parliamentary activity among the worker and peasant masses; and at an electoral policy which puts forward a radical program to be realised by the United Front of the parties which claim to be working class.“ [our emphasis—E.S.]
(I.S., Document on Ceylon, 18 May 1960)
But it is precisely against this reformist interpretation of the Bolshevik experience that Trotsky himself had warned.
Trotsky mentions the specific conditions under which the Bolsheviks put forward the slogan to the S.R.’s and the Mensheviks—“break with the bourgeoisie and take power.” Here are these specific conditions:
1. It was a slogan put forward during a particular phase in the pre-revolutionary situation of 1917—the period from April to September 1917.
2. In this context “the Bolshevik party promised the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s, as the petty-bourgeois representatives of the workers and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the bourgeoisie…”
3. The Bolshevik party categorically refused either to enter the government of the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s or to carry political responsibility for it.
4. In the specific context in which this slogan was projected “If the Mensheviks and the S.R.’s had actually broken with the Cadets (liberals) and with foreign imperialism, then ‘the workers’ and peasants’ government’ created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[15]
The Transitional Programme (of the 4th International) left no room for any misunderstanding in regard to this slogan—“This formula, ‘Workers and Peasants Government,’ first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the October Insurrection. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat.
“... The slogan ‘Workers and Farmers Government’ is thus acceptable to us only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks—i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that democratic sense which later the epigones gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into the chief barrier upon its path.”
The International Secretariat was completely wrong in regard to the so-called tactics of forming governments of working-class based parties and other petty-bourgeois parties which they proposed for the backward countries in 1951 (3rd Congress) and specifically to the LSSP in 1960 and when they gave their sanction to the United Left Front in August 1963. And; it is this wrong policy that the USec as well as the Healyites continue to follow up to the present.
The Coalition Government
From the United Left Front (LSSP-MEP-CP Coalition) to an SLFP-LSSP coalition was but a step. And this happened in June 1964. Of course the Mandels and the Pierre Franks were frantically wringing their hands when N.M. Perera took the lead to make this proposal. And this time “Barkis was willing.” The bourgeois SLFP government was in crisis and conditions were maturing for massive working-class action against the government at a time when its ranks were depleting. Sirima Bandaranaike needed a coalition with the strongest working-class based party. The SLFP leader readily agreed to form a coalition government with the LSSP which was ready to betray the working class and the toilers.
The revolutionary tendency categorically opposed coalition and denounced it as betrayal. However, even at this eleventh hour, the I.S. failed to establish direct contact with the revolutionary tendency led by the CC opposition of 14 members to jointly fight the reformists in this struggle. Instead, the I.S. sent a letter to the Secretary, Leslie Gunawardena, the contents of which were known to the minority and the party only on the day of the National Conference to decide on coalition.
Nor did the arrival of Pierre Frank, the USec representative, one day before the Conference, give any added strength to the revolutionary tendency that had through its own efforts organised for the final confrontation. And what is more, when the revolutionary tendency informed Pierre Frank that the coalitionists were certain to win at conference and that the only course of action that appeared to the minority as correct was the split from the coalitionists on this issue, the representative of the I.S. had no views to offer. His only words were—“that is for you to decide!” Thus, contrary to the claims of the I.S., its representative would not even associate himself with the decision of the revolutionary tendency to break with N.M. Perera, Colvin [R. de Silva] and Leslie [Gunawardena] when they took the road of open betrayal and when they struck a frontal blow at the World Trotskyist movement. Of course, later, the I.S. expelled the coalitionists from the International and recognised the LSSP(R) as its Ceylon section.
LSSP (R)
The task before the LSSP(R) was to draw up a full balance sheet of the whole of the LSSP experience and on the basis of these lessons to begin the building of the revolutionary party.
But, from the outset, the contradictions within itself made it impossible for the LSSP(R) to undertake any systematic efforts at party building. And the truth about the opposition that split from the LSSP in June 1964 was that there were four groups.
Karalasingham Group
A basic contradiction in the LSSP(R) arose from the Karalasingham group.
Within the left opposition in the LSSP prior to the split Karalasingham gave promise of playing an important role in the struggle against revisionism and for the building of the revolutionary party. Karalasingham intervened sharply against the coalition line of the LSSP leaders. In his pamphlet for the special conference, which later he included in his book on “Coalition Politics,” Karalasingham effectively exposed the revisionism of the LSSP leaders especially by reference to Marxist theory and experience.
Significantly, however, from the outset Karalasingham stood categorically opposed to a split of the left oppositionists in the event of the acceptance of coalition by the party at special conference. Karalasingham did not clarify his perspectives for remaining within the LSSP in such a situation. And, on the other hand, he was vehemently opposed to any attempt to even form a faction when this was mooted about by some of those in left-opposition long before the proposal of coalition was made by the N.M. Perera group. And undoubtedly, the failure to organize a faction by the revolutionary tendency on a platform, which would have brought out clearly the differences among the oppositionists, was the most serious mistake of those who sought to fight the revisionism of the LSSP leaders.
Despite his orientation in this regard, Karalasingham, though reluctantly, joined the left-oppositionists who organised themselves as the LSSP(R). Karalasingham did not reveal his perspectives in regard to his decision to be in the LSSP(R).
But it was not long before Karalasingham’s motivation became manifest. In December 1964 the two party (LSSP-R) M.P.’s made a tactical mistake on the issue of the voting on the Throne Speech of the Coalition government.[16] Voting against the government on this issue was not the mistake. The LSSP(R) CC had rightly taken a decision to vote against the Throne Speech. Their mistake was that they voted on the motion of the Independent (rightist) Member Dahanayake. As a result, the party was exposed to the attacks of the coalitionists, who alleged that the LSSP(R) M.P.’s joined the UNP and the rightists to defeat the government. That was the gravamen of the charge that could justifiably be leveled against them.
However, Karalasingham took the opportunity to launch an attack, not on the tactical question but on the question of the principal position of the party, that is the opposition to coalition politics. Without specifically stating so, Karalasingham developed his attack on the independent existence of the LSSP(R). His first move was to call for the defeat of the UNP in the election that was due (March 1965). He further proposed that the party call for support of Sirima Bandaranaike, SLFP leader, in her constituency. The next step was the organisation of a pro-coalitionist faction—the “Sakthi group"—which published a paper, which in direct opposition to the party line called for support publicly for a SLFP-LSSP government, to replace the UNP government that was elected in the March 1965 elections.
With the Healy group also supporting the Karalasingham-led “Sakthi” group, it was no easy task for the revolutionary tendency to fight successfully these revisionists, especially in the context of the USec’s calling for tolerance for this group. Mandel disagreed with the Provisional Committee of the LSSP(R) when it expelled two of the Karalasingham coalitionists who were responsible for the “Sakthi” paper and were not ready to admit that they had violated party discipline.
That Karalasingham’s perspective when he participated in the organisation of the LSSP(R) was none other than the betrayal of the left-oppositionists to the LSSP coalitionists received confirmation in his virtual confessions in the introduction to his book “Senile Leftism—A reply to Edmund Samarakkody,” which he produced as a passport to enter his “parental” party, the reformist LSSP. In a denunciation of the leaders of the LSSP(R) for their decision to split from the reformists, Karalasingham contended that “without reference to the process that was in motion within the LSSP, without regard to the consciousness and thinking of the advanced elements in the mass movement behind the LSSP and ignoring the deep divisions in their own ranks between the United Secretariat and the Healy caucus, they arbitrarily proclaimed themselves a new party.” Thus Karalasingham’s motivation for being one of the mid-wives of the “new party,” was to strangle it at its birth!
While Karalasingham sought to say that the split in 1964 was too premature and that he had a perspective of fighting the coalitionists from within, his real orientation was revealed in the very next paragraph: “The political tendency to which the writer belongs has decided to rejoin the parent organisation.” So it was a case of the prodigal son returning to the parental home not to continue his feud with the parents but to ask their forgiveness for his own past sins and to remain a loyal member of the parental home!
Nor did Karalasingham fail to give the “misguided” or “senile leftists” of the LSSP(R) the benefit of his superior understanding of Leninism-Trotskyism: “Equally important political considerations have made this necessary.” He then quotes from the Sakthi which he claimed as his factional paper…
“But between the regime of imperialism and the compradore bourgeoisie which exists today and the definite regime of the dictatorship of the working-class, it is likely that there would be a sequence of intermediate regimes initially reflecting the very backwardness, and subsequently in consequence of the growing political maturity of the masses, representative of the more advanced elements. Whatever be the manner of the down fall of the UNP government, so long as it is the result of the new mass uprising, it can be stated that its successor would be the government of the SLFP-LSSP coalition. The untimely defeat of the coalition, and that too at the hands of the class enemy of the working-class, has placed a coalition government of this type on the order of the day.
“But genuine revolutionaries, far from being dismayed by such a development—viz: that a SLFP-LSSP coalition should replace the UNP’s national government, would do everything to facilitate its formation….”
“Therefore,” concluded Karalasingham, “the place of all serious revolutionaries today is in the LSSP, so that in participating fully in the task ahead they could intervene energetically, when the inevitable class differentiation of the mass movement takes place.”
Karalasingham thus unmasked himself. This is nothing else than the Stalinist “two-stage theory” with the projection of the transitional regimes of coalition with the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie. With the tradition of LSSP opposition to this so-called theory of the Stalinists, the N.M.’s [Perera] and the Leslies [Gunawardena] and now Karalasingham could not give this designation to their “theory” and acknowledge Joseph Stalin as their “Marxist” mentor. But in any event now, the hollowness of Karalasingham’s claims to Marxist theory, his audacity in invoking the authority of Lenin and Trotsky in his attempt to mask his reformism and his unbreakable links with coalition politics and revisionism, stood exposed.
But even this complete unmasking of himself by Karalasingham did not prevent the Mandels and Franks from inviting him to participate in the 9th World Congress in 1968, several months after he had been re-admitted to the reformist LSSP!
Tampoe Group
The CMU[17] leader Tampoe showed no interest in the building of a revolutionary leadership. His main preoccupation was the building of himself as a trade-union leader whilst talking “revolution.” What Tampoe wanted was to use the LSSP(R) to give himself a coloration as a revolutionary trade-union leader. And in his trade union he was the boss who maintained excellent relations with the employers, mainly the imperialist agency houses, while staging “token strikes” with the usual demonstrations and public meetings, at which Tampoe was invariably the only speaker.
Trotskyists in Ceylon could not hope to take even the first steps in the task of building the revolutionary leadership without, among other matters, effecting a sharp break with the trade-union reformist politics which was a heritage from the LSSP. In fact Tampoe’s break with the LSSP was to free himself for closer relations with the employers and with all bourgeois governments including the UNP for concessions for workers in the CMU.
And it was Tampoe’s rightist trade-union politics that led him to oppose, in the Provisional Committee of the LSSP(R), the proposal to develop the struggle against the UNP government on the concrete issues of the declaration of state of emergency (1966) and the police shooting, the victimization of workers for the strike (communal) led by the coalitionists, the cut in the rice ration in the latter part of the year followed by the devaluation of the rupee at the dictates of the IMF.
Tampoe even supported the declaration of the state of emergency (January 1966) in a letter he sent to Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake. Tampoe opposed joint (united-front) action with other trade unions against the UNP government on the issue of the victimization of the workers after the January 8 (1966) strike.
However, the Tampoe group maintained friendly relations with both the Karlo [Karalasingham] coalitionist group and with the Healyites. Healy’s special envoy, Mike Banda, paid several visits to Ceylon in his attempt to win over Tampoe to Healy. The SLL press gave Tampoe headline publicity for his two-hour token strikes which he called out on chosen occasions.
The break away of Karlo coalitionists from the LSSP(R) found the revolutionary tendency (Meryl [Fernando], D.S. Mallawaratchi, [Tulsiri] Andrade, Edmund [Samarakkody]) opposed by the Tampoe-Healyite alliance. Their common objective was to oust the revolutionary tendency from its position of leadership within the LSSP(R). And with regard to the Healyites, disruption of the LSSP(R) and not the building of a revolutionary party, was their chief preoccupation.
Despite the efforts of the unprincipled Tampoe-Healyite combination to disrupt the LSSP(R) there was a real possibility for the revolutionary tendency to win against these opportunists and rightists, but for the part played by Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat.
As previously, Mandel followed his policy of conciliationism, at first with the Karlo coalitionists, and thereafter with the rightist trade-union leader Tampoe whose 30,000 strong CMU and token strikes and demonstrations could provide occasional headline news of “Trotskyist militant struggles in Ceylon” in the journals of the United Secretariat.
It was thus that Mandel and the leaders of the United Secretariat closed their eyes to the politics of the split in 1968 of the RSP (now RWP)[18] from the Tampoe-led LSSP(R) and adopted the Tampoe group as the Ceylon section of the United Secretariat, despite the fact that a commission appointed at the open sessions of the 9th World Congress unanimously condemned the politics of Tampoe.[19] Here are some relevant extracts of this report:
“The Commission felt that some of the actions and policies of Com. Bala [Tampoe] and the LSSP(R) brought to our notice by Com. Edmund, and not denied by Com. Bala, could have seriously damaged the reputation of Com. Bala as a revolutionary leader, compromised the Fourth International in Ceylon and have been exploited by all the enemies of our movement….
“The evidence placed before the Commission tends to support the conclusion that the policies followed by Com. Bala, especially in his dual role as CMU Secretary and as LSSP(R) Secretary were gravely compromising to the 4th International. The Commission was not in a position to get a clear enough picture of the policies of Com. Bala in the concrete circumstances of Ceylon and the LSSP(R) to propose that this section be disaffiliated by the World Congress. But we strongly feel the need for the further investigation of this matter.”
Despite this devastating condemnation of Tampoe and his politics unanimously by its own Commission, the 9th World Congress, which was manipulated throughout by the bureaucratic leaders—the Mandels, Franks and the Livios—accepted Tampoe’s group as the Ceylon Section and decided to file the report of the Ceylon Commission! Incidentally, for alleged security reasons, the leaders of the United Secretariat decided to abruptly end the Conference allowing only a half hour (!) to the discussion of the Ceylon question.
It was clearly not possible for the Mandels, Pierre Franks, the Livios and the Hansens to reconcile their acceptance of the Tampoe group as their Ceylon section with their claim to be Leninists-Trotskyists. And that is why they used one “Vitarne” as their tool to “dispose of” the question by merely denying that there was any Commission at all on the Ceylon question at the 9th Congress. For, if there was no Commission there could not be a report to talk about! But it is relevant in this regard to ask why the leadership of the USec (Mandel, Pierre Frank, Livio and Hansen) allowed a person who was not a member of the Fourth International, a mere observer and an outsider, who had been invited among several such persons to this Congress, to report on the truth of what took place at the 9th World Congress in regard to the Ceylon question and the Tampoe group. We are certain that this question will remain unanswered by the leaders of the United Secretariat.
Tampoe Group Since 1969
The orientation of the United Secretariat as manifested in the documents and decisions of the 9th Congress, and Tampoe’s real aims left no future for the Tampoe group to develop as a viable political formation whether linked to the right-opportunist wing led by the Hansens and Novacks or the ultra-left opportunist wing led by the Livios, Mandels and Franks of the USec
The question has been and remains—“who is using whom?” Is it the case that the Mandel wing of the USec is using Tampoe to further their aims—i.e. to have a large trade union in Ceylon, through whose boss Tampoe, to get the United Secretariat an appearance of a strong base, though in reality without substance; or is it that Tampoe is using the Mandels, Franks and Livios to further his own interests as a trade-union boss-type leader?
The reality is that there is no political party or even a group that functions independently as the LSSP(R). The LSSP(R) has no political activity to its credit ever since the RSP split in 1969. It has long ago ceased to publish even an occasional newspaper.
With the rise of the JVP[20] youth movement Tampoe, apparently with the approval of the Mandels, sought to opportunistically associate with Rohana Wijeweera[21] and other leaders who were visibly growing in popularity. In order to win a place for himself at a time when this movement did not give any indications of preparing any confrontation with the coalition government, Tampoe rushed to befriend them in the courts during the first days of police action against them. Tampoe even went so far as to give a certificate to Wijeweera that he was no communalist and that he was a true Marxist, when he knew well that ex-Stalinist Rohana Wijeweera was consciously seeking to win over the Sinhalese petty bourgeois through his talk of the need to fight so-called Indian expansionism.
However, when the police were hot on the trails of the JVP, Tampoe judiciously moved away from the JVP and took a vow of silence during the period. And when the murderous campaign of the government against the youth was on, during which thousands were killed by shooting or torture, Tampoe had lost his voice. While within the first week of this campaign against the youth the RSP (now RWP) unequivocally condemned the actions of the government, demanded the end to killings and torture, and also invited the trade unions including the CMU to communicate their views in this regard, Tampoe continued to remain silent.
However, when it appeared quite safe, Tampoe very late in the day appealed to the Prime Minister that “it would be an act of inhumanity for you to order a concerted military offensive by the armed services against the insurgents,” etc.
And, as it happens in periods of crisis, it was not easy for Tampoe to indulge even in tilting at wind-mills especially under emergency conditions. It was thus that Tampoe did not move a finger during the 100-day strike of the bank clerks, led by the Bank Employees Union, whose leader was Oscar Perera, a member of the LSSP(R). Tampoe failed to take the initiative to get trade-union action in support of this strike. He only reluctantly participated in a joint trade-union meeting organised on the initiative of the RSP (now RWP) leader Tulsiri Andrade of the Central Bank Union. He thereafter washed his hands of this strike and silently watched this strike being smashed by the coalition government supported especially by the LSSP.
Healy Group
Having kept aloof from the politics of the LSSP from the time of the 1953 split of the International, the leader of the so-called International Committee and of the SLL, Gerry Healy, parachuted himself into the Ceylon scene in June 1964. Having arrived in the same plane with Pierre Frank a day before the LSSP conference, Healy, who had a few followers in the LSSP opposition, sought to gate-crash into the conference hall of the LSSP. Of course, he was not permitted to enter.
What Healy’s politics were in relation to the issues at the conference was unknown. Nor did he seek to place his views before the LSSP membership through documentation prior to the conference. Instead, what he sought to do was to take the left opposition into the fold of the International Committee by disruption.
It was this same line of disruption that his followers—Prins Rajasooriya (now with Tampoe), Sydney Wanasinghe (now with the LSSP coalitionists), Wilfred Perera and R.S. Baghavan pursued. It was thus that the Healy group gave full co-operation to the Karlo coalitionists to fight the revolutionary tendency. In fact, a section of the Healy group actively participated in the organisation of the Karlo faction, “the Sakthi group,” which in their factional paper publicly called for the support of a coalition government.
Nor were the Healyites strange bed-fellows with the Karlo coalitionists. While denouncing the Mandels and the Franks for the betrayal of the LSSP leaders, and while also denouncing the [Edmund] Samarakkody-Meryl Fernando group for advocating united-front action to include the coalition trade unions against the victimisation by the UNP government, the local Healyite “theoretician” Wilfred Perera was in fact pursuing coalition politics.
Here is a sample of Wilfred Perera’s theory which he put out in 1967 during the UNP regime.
“We should propose to the rank and file of the left parties [referring to LSSP and CP] and of the trade-unions under their control to bring pressure on the Left party leaders to demand—
“1. a revision of the Joint Program [coalition program] so as to include working-class demands and socialist measures [!], and that the demands should be formulated by a united front of the trade-unions. And we should make our own proposal regarding the demands;
“2. a more equitable apportionment of the parliamentary seats for the next election, say on a 50-50 basis as between the SLFP and the left parties.
“The first demand will show how far Mrs. Bandaranaike is prepared to go towards socialism, and at the same time expose the impotence of the left fakers to push her leftwards. The second will show how sincere Mrs. Bandaranaike is when she says she needs the co-operation of the working-class to defeat the UNP-led coalition.”
Advocating coalition politics could not be more explicit than this!
In this “theory” Wilfred Perera left the road open to a link up with Tampoe whose syndicalism he correctly denounced in an earlier part of the same document.
It was the contention of the Healy “theoretician” that they supported the resolution of the Tampoe group (1967 Conference) as against the Samarakkody group in order to “save” the party from the pro-coalition line of the latter! That was Wilfred Perera’s justification for supporting the syndicalism of Tampoe, which he explained as the meaning of his (Tampoe’s) line of “unification of the working-class under its own independent class banner": “We see here,” wrote Wilfred Perera, “the illusions fostered by a blind faith in trade-union militancy without political perspectives and, a lack of understanding of the political issues involved.”
But here is a sample of Wilfred Perera’s own syndicalism cum coalition politics in this same document:
“The left fakers say they can achieve socialism by parliamentary means. Let them prove it by breaking their ties with the SLFP which are hindering them and make a bid for governmental power on their own and on a working-class program which the trade-unions will jointly formulate. In place of the coalition program we will propose a trade-union joint program” [!].
Healy Group Since the Split
Having helped the Tampoe rightists to defeat the revolutionary tendency at the 1968 (April) Conference, which led to the split away of the latter tendency and the formation of the RSP (now RWP), the Healy group found its task in the LSSP(R) was over. Without any explanation for their conduct the Healyites led by Wilfred Perera broke away from Tampoe, whom they had helped to install as leader of the LSSP(R).
Claiming that the mantle of Trotskyism had fallen on them, the Healyites announced their separate organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League.
From the outset however, the policies and practice of this league were at variance and in conflict with the program of Trotskyism. Whilst their reputed leader Healy, of the so-called International Committee, continues to rightly castigate the Mandels and the Pierre Franks for their responsibility for the LSSP debacle, the RSL (the Ceylon Unit of this Healyite IC) called for and supported the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition in the elections of May 1970, the outcome of which was the present SLFP-led coalition government.
The Healyites were thus consistent with their policy within the LSSP(R), when they compacted with the Karalasingham-led coalitionists, who in their factional paper “Sakthi” called for support of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition. However, the RSL suddenly somersaulted. About two months after the coalition government was formed (May 1970), when sections of the masses that supported these parties were expressing their disappointment at the policies of the government, the Healy group announced that they had made a mistake when they supported the coalition at the elections.
The new line of the Healyites, which they claimed was in accordance with Leninism-Trotskyism, is their call to the LSSP and CP to break away from the coalition and form a government. Of course, they had with them the history book of the Russian revolution. Apparently, with confidence, they referred to the Bolshevik experience in 1917, when in the special conditions and in the context of a revolutionary situation, Lenin called upon the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to break with the bourgeoisie and take the power.
But in the hands of the Healyites it was a complete misapplication of the Bolshevik tactic. The concretisation of the slogan “workers and farmers government” through a government of the LSSP and CP is a farcical concept apart from the disorientation that such a slogan must lead to. There is no revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation in Ceylon. It is not possible today to attempt a concretisation of the slogan workers and peasants government, that is, to indicate which organisation of the working class and toilers could constitute the new power or government.
On the contrary, the consciousness of the masses is at a stage when they are only seriously dissatisfied and disappointed with the coalition government. Of course sections of these masses are moving into opposition against the government without any perspectives yet of any struggle against this government. The working class, whose living standards are being systematically attacked by the coalition government, has not yet launched any large-scale trade-union action against the policies of this government. In fact, in the absence of a revolutionary party, with influence among the working class, it is possible that the masses including sections of the working class could well move in a rightist direction.
What is imperative today is to help the working class and toilers to understand that the blows struck against their living standards are the result of the treacherous politics of coalition—i.e. of the LSSP and CP betrayers. Those claiming to be Trotskyists cannot conceive of helping to create further illusions that the way forward is a labour government of the LSSP-CP which must necessarily be reformist in character. But this is just what the Healyite slogan does.
And, in regard to this slogan, it is necessary once more to state what Trotsky himself categorically stated—“The slogan ‘workers and farmers government’ is thus acceptable to us only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolsheviks, i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that ‘democratic’ sense which later the epigones gave it, transforming it from a bridge to socialist revolution into the chief barrier upon its path.”
Struggle for Trotskyism Today
Having participated in the left opposition (1962) as consistent oppositionists to the coalition and reformist politics of the LSSP leaders who betrayed the party, having continued the struggle against the Karalasingham coalitionists in the LSSP(R), having successfully faced the combined opposition of the Healyites and Tampoe, who was supported by the Pabloist United Secretariat, the revolutionary tendency that separated from these centrists, and which re-grouped itself as the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party, is today reorganised as the Revolutionary Workers Party.
During the first two years the revolutionary tendency had the task of drawing up a proper balance sheet of the experience of the LSSP and the LSSP(R) and to cleanse itself of the hangovers of Pabloism, which substituted empiricism and pragmatism for dialectical materialism and which abandoned the task of building the revolutionary party to the participation and “integration” in the so-called living movement of the masses, leading the Pabloites to parliamentarism and syndicalism. The Revolutionary Workers Party cannot but reject the politics of both wings of the United Secretariat—the ultra-left opportunist mixture of Mandel, Livio, Frank, as well as the opportunist group of Hansen-Novack.
While seeking to participate with its co-thinkers in the unpostponable task of regrouping of the Trotskyists in other countries in the perspective of contributing to the rebuilding of the revolutionary International, the Revolutionary Workers Party is bending its energies to the construction of the Trotskyist party in Ceylon on the firm foundations of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International and the relevant programmatic documents that remain the heritage of the Leninist-Trotskyist movement.
Present Situation
Objective conditions today are more favourable than ever before for the development of mass struggle for the overthrow of capitalist class rule in Ceylon and for the establishment of socialism.
World capitalism has entered into a new period of decline, reflected for a long time now in economic recessions in advanced capitalist countries, leading to fierce inter-imperialist rivalry, which has driven the capitalist class in each country to impose severe burdens on the workers and the wage earners in these countries.
For nearly a decade now the organised working class in these advanced countries has been engaged in wage struggles to defend their living standards. The French working class showed in their now famous struggle (1968) the revolutionary potentialities of the proletariat in these advanced capitalist countries.
An aspect of this new phase of decline of capitalism on a world scale is that Ceylon and other backward countries are more intensely exploited by imperialism in numerous ways. The economies in these countries, ruled invariably by the bonapartist “national” bourgeois regimes, face deepening crises, manifested by unbalanced budgets and serious lack of foreign exchange to pay for necessary imports, leading to increased burdens on the workers and toilers. The masses in these countries, despite the betrayals of the Stalinists, reformists and centrists, must sooner or later move on to the road of struggle.
Three years of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition government have brought unprecedented suffering to the working class and all the toilers. While extending the state sector without any real encroachment on the private capitalists, while appearing to strike blows at the capitalists and imperialists, the government is desperately seeking to maintain the profit levels of these very same capitalists and imperialists, at the dictates of the IMF.
In this perspective, this government adopted a policy of severe restriction of consumer imports and has even totally banned the imports of a large number of essential food imports, which has led to serious inflation. Also, at the dictates of the IMF, the government is implementing a virtual wage freeze. And since the April youth armed struggle, a state of emergency continues and strikes are virtually banned. The repressive apparatus of the State has been strengthened in an unprecedented manner.
The reality today, especially with the newest blows struck at the masses by further cuts in rationed rice, flour and sugar, and also by further increase of the price of these and numerous other commodities, is that the government is facing increasing unpopularity. This means, that from now on, sections of the masses who supported and identified themselves with the government will inevitably move away from the coalition parties and the government. There is now a real possibility of developing mass opposition leading to mass action against the measures of the government and the government itself.
On the other hand, the rightist forces led by the UNP are even now growing as a result of the policies of the government, which have in an unprecedented way impoverished the masses and increased their misery.
Up to now the working class has been held down from pressing their demands in the perspective of trade-union action, principally by the LSSP and CP—the partners in coalition, on the pretext of the need for the workers to sacrifice and produce more for “Socialism.”
While “sacrifice” was the key note of the LSSP propaganda, the CP (pro-Moscow) led by the [S.A.] Wickremasinghe wing had adopted, from the outset, more opportunistically, a critical stance in relation to the policies of the government which affected adversely the living standards of the workers and toilers.
With the severity of the government’s measures against the masses, the CP(M) became more “critical” and called upon the government not to increase the burdens of the masses, but instead, to strike at the imperialists and to move on to more nationalisations.
The motivation of the CP(M), Wickremasinghe wing, was not to weaken the coalition but to gather the coalition masses around itself as the most “progressive” and “dynamic” force in the coalition. However, unexpectedly for the Wickremasinghe-led CP, despite its expressions of continued loyalty, the coalition partners, SLFP and LSSP, in furtherance of the rightward course of their government, have shown them the door. This wing of the CP(M) has been expelled from the coalition government.
In response to the pressures of the rank and file of their trade unions, the bureaucratic leaders of the LSSP and the Keneuman wing of the CP(M) have sought to give themselves the appearance of being in readiness to lead the workers in struggle to defend their living standards. They have recently presented through the coalition trade union centre (JCTU) twenty-eight (28) demands to the employers and their own government.
The fraudulent nature of the moves of the LSSP trade-union leaders as well as both wings of the Stalinists (CP [Moscow]) already stands exposed by their defense of the coalition government in regard to the latest measures (October 1st cuts in rationed rice, flour and sugar with increase of prices). Far from seeking to mobilise the workers for struggle, they are vying with each other in calling upon the workers for further sacrifices in a so-called national food crisis.
In the plantation sector the two largest trade unions are the CWC (Ceylon Workers Congress-led by Thondaman) and CDC (Ceylon Democratic Congress-led by Aziz, allied to coalition). As an extreme right wing trade-union leader, who has affiliation with the U.S.-oriented ICFTU,[22] Thondaman has been threatening to launch trade-union action to win the monthly wage demand for the plantation workers. However, Thondaman and some lesser union leaders allied to him have already abandoned all talk of strike action at the appeal of the Minister of Labour.
With regard to Tampoe, his usual fake fighting has been displayed now quite for some time. With the assistance of his centrist friends of the United Secretariat Tampoe obtained publicity in their journals for a “One-Day Hunger Strike” of workers in protest at the actions and policies of the government. In fact, during all this time, workers in a number of work places belonging to other non-coalition unions came out on strike despite the possibilities of government action against them. It was thus a false picture which Tampoe sought to paint, that where no one dared to call strikes under emergency conditions, he at least called a “Hunger Strike” of workers against the government! In fact, the journals of the United Secretariat had referred to a “Hunger Strike” of one million workers! But this so-called one-day hunger strike was farcical.
The response from vested interests was especially interesting. In its editorial comments of the Ceylon Daily News which congratulated Tampoe on this one-day non-violent “Hunger Strike,” called upon him to continue longer this strike as Finance Minister N.M. Perera himself would readily approve in view of the worsening food situation in the country!
And Tampoe’s reaction to the talk of presenting “twenty-eight demands” of the coalition unions was to call his usual “short leave” strike (2-hour strike) for a mass rally of the CMU at which he was the only speaker, and at which he called upon Ceylon’s working class to abandon the coalition and other trade-union leaders and adopt the banner of the CMU!
Tampoe’s political line in the present context is the same treacherous line of “Left Unity” that the LSSP and CP peddled before they finally adopted coalition with the SLFP. Tampoe has issued a call to “Re-Build the Left Movement” when what is imperative is to consistently and uncompromisingly expose the “Leftism” of the LSSP, of both wings of the CP(M), of the groups of the CP(Peking) and all other “left” fakers. It is the task of the revolutionary vanguard to expose the fraudulent politics of Tampoe which he continues in the name of Trotskyism.
The revolutionary vanguard has the task of exposing both the fraud of the CP(M) Wickremasinghe wing which continues to peddle coalition class-collaborationist politics and also the rightist course which the SLFP and LSSP are pursuing to please the vested interests, local and foreign.
It is necessary more especially to warn the working class that the coalition government is now moving, not to woo the working class, but to suppress and destroy the trade-union movement and all the organisations of the working class, which could well pave the way for a fully fledged military police regime.
It is clear that in the present state of the trade-union leadership, both of the pro-government coalition unions and of the so-called independent unions, the task of mobilising the workers for united struggle against the government and the capitalist class is far from easy. Nevertheless, this remains the burning question for the working class today. This means it is the task of the revolutionary vanguard to begin now the struggle against the latest measures of the government and for other pressing demands of the workers and toilers including demands of a transitional character, in the teeth of the opposition of the bureaucratic trade-union leaders—of the coalition as well as of the so-called independent unions, including the Tampoe-led CMU.
In fact, in recent times anti-bureaucratic tendencies have appeared in many trade unions both pro-government and in others. In certain unions the anti-bureaucratic oppositions have succeeded in ousting the conservative and bureaucratic leaderships in such unions. This process could well grow.
The revolutionary vanguard, while taking active steps to root itself within the working class will fight for a program of demands which will include trade-union demands and also demands of a transitional character, e.g., nationalisation without compensation of the whole of the plantations, of manufacturing industries, workers control in all nationalised undertakings. It will also include demands for the withdrawal of the state of emergency and for the release of all political prisoners. In this regard the tradition of reformists and centrists has been to merely list transitional demands without seeking to develop any struggle around these demands.
It is in this perspective that the Revolutionary Workers Party is seeking today to intervene in the Ceylon situation. And it is not the futile and divisive policy of building new trade unions that is needed, but a policy of giving revolutionary perspective and bringing revolutionary politics to the advanced elements in the existing trade unions, by the building of political caucuses in them; that is the task.
This intervention by the Revolutionary Workers Party is necessarily limited by its present forces and resources. But it is to the extent that the Revolutionary Workers Party succeeds in intervening in the living working class and mass movement in a revolutionary perspective, and to the extent that it succeeds in carrying on an uncompromising and consistent struggle against Stalinism, Maoism and all forms of reformism and revisionism, whether of the United Secretariat variety or of the Healy variety, that it will be able to engage with success in the struggle for Trotskyism, for the building of the revolutionary leadership, i.e. the revolutionary party, in Ceylon.
Footnotes
Note: All footnotes and bracketed material, except that initialed “E.S.,” are by the Spartacist editors.
1. The fake-Trotskyist “United Secretariat” was formed in 1963 as a result of the reunification of the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) led by Farrell Dobbs with the “International Secretariat” (I.S.) of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan. The SWP had broken with the I.S. in 1953 in protest against Pablo’s liquidation of the sections of the Fourth International into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties. The “reunification” amounted to a non-agression pact, sweeping under the rug issues which had divided ostensibly Trotskyist forces for a decade, and codified the SWP’s capitulation to Pabloism by calling for support to bourgeois nationalists and peasant guerrillaists in the backward countries.
2. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP—Ceylon Socialist Party) was founded in 1935 by a group of young, British-trained intellectuals. During its early years the LSSP was a loose mass organization committed to socialism but with a basically reformist program. The Stalinist wing led by Pieter Keuneman was expelled in 1940 in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Stalinists’ flipflops in their attitudes toward the Second World War. The LSSP opposed the war, causing the British to jail its leaders.
3. A minority of southern Indian descent. One section of the Tamils has been on the island from early, pre-colonial, times. The great majority, who make up the bulk of Ceylonese plantation workers, were originally imported by the British in the middle and late 19th century to work on coffee and later tea estates. Tamils make up roughly 10 percent of Ceylon’s population. However, in 1949 several hundred thousand Tamil plantation workers (who had had the right to vote since 1931) were disenfranchised. Since then discriminatory citizenship requirements have made the great majority of Tamils officially stateless, without legal rights in either Ceylon or India.
4. Ernest Germain, “Peoples Frontism in Ceylon: From Wavering to Capitulation,” International Socialist Review, Fall 1964.
5. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) originated in 1951 when S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike split from the until-then dominant United National Party (UNP) amid widespread uneasiness in the ruling class over the rampant corruption of the UNP government. Bandaranaike, former right-hand man of UNP leader D.S. Senanayake, combined a program of virulent Sinhalese chauvinism and Buddhist clericalism with timid land reform. His SLFP appealed particularly to the Sinhalese peasantry and rural intelligentsia.
6. Germain, op. cit.
7. The Bolshevik Samasamaja Party grew out of a 1942 factional polarization and split in the LSSP, which resulted in two groups both calling themselves “the LSSP” operating in Ceylon during the later years of the war. The more leftist group remained affiliated with the BLP(India) and after the war a BLPI letter of 8 October 1945 expelling the leaders of the rightist group (N.M. Perera and Philip Gunawardena) formalized the split. Following an abortive attempt in late 1946 to reunify the two groups, the leftist group led by Leslie Goonewardene, Colin de Silva, Samarakkody, de Souza and others, which was the smaller group, changed its name to the BSP. However, on 4 June 1950 the two groups were reunified to form the LSSP, with a grouping around Philip Gunawardena splitting away to the right.
8. The British government granted Ceylon a Constitution recommended by the Soulbury Commission in 1946 in order to placate demands for political independence following the war. This constitution retained an appointed Governor-General who retained control over foreign affairs, defense and minority rights. The constitution did not even provide dominion status—“independence” within the Commonwealth—which was granted separately in 1948. Other agreements guaranteed the British continued use of military bases on Ceylon and other privileges.
9. Germain, op. cit.
10. The United National Party (UNP) was established by the plutocrat D.S. Senanayake in June 1946 and took over the government from the British in the 1947 election. Senanayake had split from the Ceylon National Congress, a loose pro-independence, exclusively Sinhalese, bourgeois formation when the CNC admitted the Stalinists during World War II.
11. The Mahajama Eksath Peramuna (MEP—People’s United Front) was formed in February 1956 as a coalition of the SLFP with various religious and Sinhalese chauvinist groups and the “LSSP” of Philip Gunawardena. When the Bandaranaike government collapsed in 1958-59, the Gunawardena group took the name MEP for themselves in subsequent election campaigns.
12. A political mass strike.
13. The International Committee was formed by those sections of the Fourth International who broke from the Pabloist International Secretariat in 1953. The IC included the SWP led by J.P. Cannon, the majority of the French section led by Bleibtreu-Lambert, and the British grouping led by G. Healy.
14. The United Left Front (ULF) was an electoral bloc in the 1963 elections of the LSSP, the Communist Party and Philip Gunawardena’s MEP on a joint program of minimal reforms.
15. L.D. Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program),” 1938.
16. The Throne Speech, given by the prime minister, presents the government program at the beginning of a parliamentary term. The vote cast by a party on the Throne Speech is an important indication of that party’s attitude toward the government.
17. The Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) is a medium-sized union of government employees, white collar workers and miscellaneous other office employees. Led by Bala Tampoe of the LSSP(R), it was one of the few important unions standing outside the federations led by the by-now thoroughly reformist LSSP and pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Stalinists.
18. The Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (RSP), which at a convention in late 1972 changed its name to the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP).
19. For further information on the attempted cover-up of the Tampoe scandal by the USec, see “The Case of Bala Tampoe” in Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972.
20. The Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna (JVP-Peoples Liberation Front), a Guevarist organization of student and peasant youth, led a large-scale youth revolt in the Sinhalese rural areas in the spring of 1971 which was directed against the coalition government of the SLFP, LSSP and CP (Moscow). In a remarkable demonstration of counterrevolutionary solidarity, the government was aided by the U.S., Britain, the USSR, India, Pakistan and Egypt, while China gave its explicit political endorsement of the bloody repression of the uprising!
21. Wijeweera is a former member of the pro-Moscow CP who had begun organizing the JVP in 1966, building a large following among university students and unemployed graduates. His own politics were essentially “insurrectionary Stalinism” of the Guevarist type. As Comrade Samarakkody noted in “Politics of Deceit,” “… the JVP had completely discounted the plantation workers (largely of Indian Tamil origin) and that it did not have any position on the burning question of the Tamil minority—their language and other rights … Sinhalese chauvinism was clearly evident in their politics.”
22. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), formed in December 1949 under the sponsorship of U.S. American Federation of Labor leaders, was a CIA-backed international center for anti-communist unions. The CIO immediately entered it, accepting CIA funds in the process. Many of the ICFTU unions had earlier been part of the Stalinist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions and their split was one of the first steps of the “Cold War” launched by U.S. imperialism.
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<h3>T. Perera</h3>
<h1>Edmund Samarakkody</h1>
<p>JANUARY 4 marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Edmund Samarakkody, a pioneer of the left movement in Sri Lanka. He came from a well-off political family. His father and two of his brothers – Siripala (a member of the State Council in the 1940s) and Stephen (an MP in the 1950s) – belonged to the other end of the political spectrum. While still a student he joined a group of young intellectuals who had returned to the island in the early thirties, having completed their studies abroad where they had been influenced by the Marxist and labour movements. They enthusiastically participated in the radical activities of the newly-formed Youth Leagues. Edmund joined the South Colombo Youth League, an affiliate of the All-Ceylon Youth Congress.</p>
<p>In November 1933 the Youth League radicals initiated a dynamic revival of the <em>Suriya Mal</em> movement, which became a focus of anti-imperialist agitation among the youth. [In opposition to the official Poppy Day sponsored by the British colonial administration, the Youth Leagues sold the local <em>Suriya</em> flower, with the proceeds going to Ceylonese ex-servicemen – ed] During the malaria epidemic in 1934-5 <em>Suriya Mal</em> activists did relief work in the disease-stricken areas where over 100,000 people died. In 1933 a strike at the Wellawatte Weaving and Spinning Mills, the island’s largest textile factory at that time with 1,400 workers (two-thirds of Indian origin and one-third Sinhalese), gave the Youth Leaguers a chance for leadership as well as experience in trade union agitation. Edmund then became a union official at the South Colombo Motor Workers Union.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in the Youth Leagues there grew a nucleus of Marxists who had been influenced by the ideas of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Edmund soon joined this group, known as the "T" (after Trotsky) group, whose original members were Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Robert Gunawardena and Vernon Gunasekera. The group gradually expanded and was the precursor of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the island’s first left party. The "T" group shaped the party’s political orientation, culminating in its adherence to the Fourth International in 1941.</p>
<p>Edmund took part in the LSSP’s founding conference on 18 December 1935 and was elected to the party’s executive committee. The party’s aims were complete national independence and socialism. Its first manifesto also declared that among its other objectives were the abolition of inequalities arising from differences of race, caste, creed or sex, and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Edmund became the party organiser and at the next party conference the membership had risen from 80 to 600 members. The increase was due to the LSSP’s efforts at unionisation.</p>
<p>By the end of 1937 Edmund had played an important role in two strikes – at the Vavasseurs Coconut Mills and at the Colombo Commercial Co. Fertiliser Works. For his role in the latter action he was arrested along with Leslie Goonewardene. In the 1936 State Council elections Edmund campaigned for the LSSP candidate Philip Gunawardena, who was elected to the Avissawela seat. He found himself pitted against his father, who supported the rival candidate, a nominee of the Ceylon National Congress.</p>
<p>When the scene of the struggle for freedom shifted from the urban to rural areas the LSSP led militant plantation strikes. Edmund played a prominent role in the struggle in Uva, and he also defended strikers in court. N.M. Perera, Philip Gunawardena and Colvin R. de Silva were taken into custody on 18 June 1941. Edmund was arrested in Mount Lavinia on the following day. Leslie Goonewardene evaded arrest and went underground. After two months in Welikada, and following a hunger strike against prison conditions, the four detainees were moved to the British prison at Bogambara, Kandy, where they planned their strategy of defiance.</p>
<p>The prisoners, with the connivance of Ceylonese prison guards, left jail on two occasions for all-night party meetings. They even attended a secret party conference attended by 42 delegates. Edmund remained in the cell to cover up the absence of his comrades. On another occasion an Indian comrade from Benares visited the prisoners in their cell. On the night of 7 April 1942 the four prisoners made a daring jail-break. They escaped along with one of their guards, Solomon, who had been won over to the cause. Except for Edmund who stayed in the island to work in the underground, Philip, N.M. and Colvin crossed over to India in fishing boats from Velvettiturai. In 1944 Edmund was re-arrested, charged with escaping jail and sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment.</p>
<p>By the end of the war the party had split into two rival Samasamaja sections – the LSSP led by Philip and N.M. and the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party led by Colvin, to which Edmund belonged. In 1950 the two groups reunited as the LSSP. In the 1952 elections Edmund became LSSP MP for Dehiowita. In 1960 he represented Bulathsinghala. In the early 1950s he also engaged himself in local government politics as a councillor in the Mount Lavinia Urban Council. In 1955 Edmund seconded Dr. Perera’s motion in parliament for the declaration of both Sinhala and Tamil as official languages.</p>
<p>In June 1964, when the LSSP formed a coalition with Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike’s government, less than a quarter of the party split to found the LSSP (Revolutionary). For the first time a "Trotskyist" party had entered a capitalist government. The breakaway group included 14 central committee members and two MPs – Meryl Fernando and Edmund. It consisted of several disparate groups with conflicting aims. [Because of this, over the following years the LSSP(R) fragmented, with the tendency led by Edmund forming the Revolutionary Workers Party – ed.]</p>
<p>An English comrade in an obituary tribute said: "Edmund throughout his life had championed the rights of the Tamil minority. When the Tamil struggle escalated from one for equal rights to one of secession, he supported the right of an independent Tamil State while continuing to advocate working class unity." Although he was not able to build the Revolutionary Workers Party into a significant force, Edmund remained to the last a man of political principle.</p>
<p>
<strong>This article first appeared in the <em>Ceylon Daily News</em> of 6 January 1997.</strong></p>
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T. Perera
Edmund Samarakkody
JANUARY 4 marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Edmund Samarakkody, a pioneer of the left movement in Sri Lanka. He came from a well-off political family. His father and two of his brothers – Siripala (a member of the State Council in the 1940s) and Stephen (an MP in the 1950s) – belonged to the other end of the political spectrum. While still a student he joined a group of young intellectuals who had returned to the island in the early thirties, having completed their studies abroad where they had been influenced by the Marxist and labour movements. They enthusiastically participated in the radical activities of the newly-formed Youth Leagues. Edmund joined the South Colombo Youth League, an affiliate of the All-Ceylon Youth Congress.
In November 1933 the Youth League radicals initiated a dynamic revival of the Suriya Mal movement, which became a focus of anti-imperialist agitation among the youth. [In opposition to the official Poppy Day sponsored by the British colonial administration, the Youth Leagues sold the local Suriya flower, with the proceeds going to Ceylonese ex-servicemen – ed] During the malaria epidemic in 1934-5 Suriya Mal activists did relief work in the disease-stricken areas where over 100,000 people died. In 1933 a strike at the Wellawatte Weaving and Spinning Mills, the island’s largest textile factory at that time with 1,400 workers (two-thirds of Indian origin and one-third Sinhalese), gave the Youth Leaguers a chance for leadership as well as experience in trade union agitation. Edmund then became a union official at the South Colombo Motor Workers Union.
Meanwhile in the Youth Leagues there grew a nucleus of Marxists who had been influenced by the ideas of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Edmund soon joined this group, known as the "T" (after Trotsky) group, whose original members were Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Robert Gunawardena and Vernon Gunasekera. The group gradually expanded and was the precursor of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), the island’s first left party. The "T" group shaped the party’s political orientation, culminating in its adherence to the Fourth International in 1941.
Edmund took part in the LSSP’s founding conference on 18 December 1935 and was elected to the party’s executive committee. The party’s aims were complete national independence and socialism. Its first manifesto also declared that among its other objectives were the abolition of inequalities arising from differences of race, caste, creed or sex, and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Edmund became the party organiser and at the next party conference the membership had risen from 80 to 600 members. The increase was due to the LSSP’s efforts at unionisation.
By the end of 1937 Edmund had played an important role in two strikes – at the Vavasseurs Coconut Mills and at the Colombo Commercial Co. Fertiliser Works. For his role in the latter action he was arrested along with Leslie Goonewardene. In the 1936 State Council elections Edmund campaigned for the LSSP candidate Philip Gunawardena, who was elected to the Avissawela seat. He found himself pitted against his father, who supported the rival candidate, a nominee of the Ceylon National Congress.
When the scene of the struggle for freedom shifted from the urban to rural areas the LSSP led militant plantation strikes. Edmund played a prominent role in the struggle in Uva, and he also defended strikers in court. N.M. Perera, Philip Gunawardena and Colvin R. de Silva were taken into custody on 18 June 1941. Edmund was arrested in Mount Lavinia on the following day. Leslie Goonewardene evaded arrest and went underground. After two months in Welikada, and following a hunger strike against prison conditions, the four detainees were moved to the British prison at Bogambara, Kandy, where they planned their strategy of defiance.
The prisoners, with the connivance of Ceylonese prison guards, left jail on two occasions for all-night party meetings. They even attended a secret party conference attended by 42 delegates. Edmund remained in the cell to cover up the absence of his comrades. On another occasion an Indian comrade from Benares visited the prisoners in their cell. On the night of 7 April 1942 the four prisoners made a daring jail-break. They escaped along with one of their guards, Solomon, who had been won over to the cause. Except for Edmund who stayed in the island to work in the underground, Philip, N.M. and Colvin crossed over to India in fishing boats from Velvettiturai. In 1944 Edmund was re-arrested, charged with escaping jail and sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment.
By the end of the war the party had split into two rival Samasamaja sections – the LSSP led by Philip and N.M. and the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party led by Colvin, to which Edmund belonged. In 1950 the two groups reunited as the LSSP. In the 1952 elections Edmund became LSSP MP for Dehiowita. In 1960 he represented Bulathsinghala. In the early 1950s he also engaged himself in local government politics as a councillor in the Mount Lavinia Urban Council. In 1955 Edmund seconded Dr. Perera’s motion in parliament for the declaration of both Sinhala and Tamil as official languages.
In June 1964, when the LSSP formed a coalition with Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike’s government, less than a quarter of the party split to found the LSSP (Revolutionary). For the first time a "Trotskyist" party had entered a capitalist government. The breakaway group included 14 central committee members and two MPs – Meryl Fernando and Edmund. It consisted of several disparate groups with conflicting aims. [Because of this, over the following years the LSSP(R) fragmented, with the tendency led by Edmund forming the Revolutionary Workers Party – ed.]
An English comrade in an obituary tribute said: "Edmund throughout his life had championed the rights of the Tamil minority. When the Tamil struggle escalated from one for equal rights to one of secession, he supported the right of an independent Tamil State while continuing to advocate working class unity." Although he was not able to build the Revolutionary Workers Party into a significant force, Edmund remained to the last a man of political principle.
This article first appeared in the Ceylon Daily News of 6 January 1997.
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./articles/Samarakkody-Edward/https:..www.marxists.org.history.etol.writers.samarakkody.1984.tamils | <body><h2>Edmund Samarakkody</h2>
<h1>The National Question in Sri Lanka</h1>
<p>This article is a shortened version of a pamphlet of the same name issued by the Revolutionary Workers Party of Sri Lanka. Although it was originally published in 1984, the analysis put forward here by Edmund Samarakkody has just as much bearing on the political situation today, for his prediction that "the National Question is and will remain one of the most explosive questions in Sri Lanka for years to come" has proved entirely accurate.</p>
<p>The events which have taken place since this piece was written should be briefly summarised. The intensification of repression by J.R. Jayewardene’s United National Party (UNP) government escalated into a full-scale war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Tamil liberation movement, a phase of the conflict now known as Eelam War I. Unable to crush the Tamil movement, and fearing invasion by India, in 1987 the UNP government invited the so-called Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to enter the North-East to impose a settlement. However, the dominant Tamil militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), refused to accept this imposed settlement, and in the face of continued LTTE resistance the IPKF was forced to withdraw by early 1990. The UNP government then resumed its own war against the LTTE.</p>
<p>The emptiness of the UNP government’s assurances that this war – Eelam War II – would be over within months was soon exposed, and as the conflict dragged on with no end in sight the Sinhalese masses in the South became increasingly war-weary. The result was the election in 1994 of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s Peoples Alliance (PA) government. A coalition dominated by the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party, but also including the Communist Party and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the PA was elected largely because of its pledge to end the war. However, although a temporary cease-fire was agreed with the LTTE, once in office the PA made no real progress towards negotiating a permanent peace settlement. In April 1995 the LTTE declared that the cease-fire was over and resumed military operations against the government forces, ushering in Eelam War III.</p>
<p>Since then the Sri Lankan Army has registered some successes against the LTTE, notably in taking the Tigers’ stronghold of Jaffna. These military advances have been achieved at the cost of enormous suffering by the Tamil civilian population in the North. The LTTE, meanwhile, has not been destroyed but has retreated into the jungle to continue guerilla operations against the occupying army. A solution to the National Question in Sri Lanka seems as far away as ever.</p>
<p>
THE TAMIL people (today over 3 million) have for over half a century claimed equal rights with the Sinhalese. But the Sinhalese bourgeoisie, from prior to independence (1948), sought and achieved privileges over the Tamils. Continuing their anti-Tamil policies after political power came into their hands, all Sinhala bourgeois governments have carried out systematic discrimination against Tamils in the fields of: (a) government land colonisation; (b) employment in government service and in public corporations; (c) Tamil language rights, higher education, etc. With regard to the up-country Tamils,<sup>1</sup> nearly a million plantation workers were disfranchised by the D.S. Senanayake United National Party (UNP) government in 1948 through the notorious Citizenship Acts.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>Attempts by the Tamil people to win equal rights with the Sinhalese through agitation and peaceful methods have been used by the Sinhala bourgeoisie to develop anti-Tamil sentiment among the Sinhalese over the years. Whenever limited mobilisation of the Tamil masses in furtherance of winning equal rights took place, the Sinhala bourgeois governments have answered with repression. The Tamils found that repeated attempts of the Tamil leaders in the Tamil Congress and Federal Party to co-exist and co-operate with the Sinhala bourgeois parties, the UNP and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP),<sup>3</sup> and their governments were of no avail. It was then that in 1972 the Tamils re-organised themselves into the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and adopted the demand for a separate Tamil State – Eelam.<sup>4</sup> It is the fact that the 1977 election manifesto of the Jayewardene-led UNP government admitted that it was the failure of previous governments to grant the rights of the Tamils, that led them to demand a separate state.</p>
<p>What happened in and after 1977 when the UNP regime commenced is too well known. Systematic police harassment and violence against Tamil youth in the North led the Tamil youth to take up arms to defend themselves. Continued police and army violence against Tamil youth led to a more determined resistance and armed defensive actions by the youth. The government’s response was the use of South Africa-type repressive legislation, and the sending of an army of occupation to the North.</p>
<p>It was clear from the outset that the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom was part of the plan of the UNP government in its further repression and suppression of the Tamil people.<sup>5</sup> It was simply the implementation of a plan of genocide of the Tamil people. And the destruction by violence and arson of the residences, business houses and factories run by Tamils is proof that the break-up of the economic base of the Tamils was the aim of the planners of the pogrom. It was abundantly plain that the beneficiaries of the destruction of the economic base of the Tamils were not mere looters and vagabonds. The beneficiaries were the Sinhala bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>The further proof that the Jayewardene bourgeois government was behind the anti-Tamil movement and the pogrom is what they did, through parliament, even while this pogrom was still continuing. Through the black anti-Eelam law it rushed through parliament, the 16 TULF MPs were sacked from the Assembly.<sup>6</sup> Even as the hill-country Tamils, the plantation workers, were disfranchised in 1948 by the first government of the Sinhala bourgeoisie, even so in 1983 the rest of the Tamils have been disfranchised under this law.</p>
<p>It is the reality today that social, political and economic relations between the Tamils and the Sinhalese have been ruptured to such a degree that any kind of common or joint economic activity has become impossible. This means that 3 million Tamils have broken with the government which they see as their destroyer. This further means that the government will resort to more and more repression. And, inevitably, this means that the armed defensive actions of the Tamil youth in furtherance of Eelam will continue. <em>Thus the National Question is and will remain one of the most explosive questions in Sri Lanka for years to come.</em></p>
<p><strong>National unity and the imperialists</strong><br>
It is a fact that until the Portuguese conquered Ceylon there was a Tamil Kingdom in the North and a Sinhalese Kingdom in the South. In any event, there were at the time two separate feudal states in which there were two distinct nationalities, the Sinhalese and Tamil, each occupying politically united territories whose population spoke a single language, Sinhalese and Tamil respectively, and each with common customs and culture; and within each state separate economic activity was carried on consisting basically of agriculture, with the beginnings of commerce. It would appear that in the normal course, if foreign capitalist powers had not intervened and these states did not lose their independence, the two kingdoms, Tamil and Sinhala, might have evolved into two separate nation states in the capitalist sense.</p>
<p>However, although the Portuguese took over the Tamil kingdom and the kingdom of the Sinhalese in the South (not the Kandyan Sinhalese Kingdom), they did not seek to establish a unified state. They had no problem of realising national unity as their perspective was not to build a capitalist economy but to use their newly-won territory for trading, i.e., exporting cinnamon, etc. In fact they did not seek to bother about setting up a unified administration for these two states, the Sinhala kingdom and Tamil kingdom, that they had conquered. Instead, they had separate administrations for the areas of the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The Dutch also continued along the same lines.</p>
<p>It was only after British rule was established that for the first time there was a unified administration for the whole of Ceylon. It was easy to understand that England, which was even then to a large extent an industrially developed and developing country, needed to develop Ceylon in its own image, i.e. to develop a capitalist economy. It followed that one of the essential tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e. the break-up of the feudal state, paradoxically as it would appear, was ushered into Ceylon by the British imperialists. This revolution did not develop from the people but was imposed militarily from the top. What the British did was to superimpose capitalism over the feudal economy which they broke up. Hence, the colonialist plantation economy; that is to say they commenced with capitalism in agriculture and not capitalism in the manufacturing sector.</p>
<p>This setting up of a distorted capitalist economy, and its continuation as such, meant that the essential bourgeois democratic tasks could only be partially accomplished. The manifestation in this regard is found in the unresolved national question in the country.</p>
<p>While the British rulers set about establishing a centralised and unified administration for the whole of Ceylon, there was no attempt at the welding of the nation through uniting the Sinhala and Tamil nations into a single nation on the basis of equal rights for the Sinhala and Tamil people. Connected with the same question of welding the nation for creating the conditions for building of capitalism was the need to end not only national oppression, but also caste and religious oppression.</p>
<p>But we know that the oppression by the Sinhala nationality of the Tamil nationality not only remained but grew. We know how intolerance by Buddhists of other religious minorities remained and grew likewise. We further know caste oppression was a reality throughout the period of British rule and even continued thereafter.</p>
<p><strong>The Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and national unity</strong><br>
From the outset it was the need of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, in the interests of building capitalism and establishing their class rule, to forge the unity of all nationalities, religions, castes, creeds, workers, peasants and toilers. As we have seen, British power was substituted for the feudal state in the whole of Sri Lanka. It was then that the primordial need of the nascent bourgeoisie, to throw out imperialism and win national independence, manifested itself. From this arose the need to mobilise all the people of all nationalities, castes and creeds for this struggle. If, indeed, such a struggle for national freedom against imperialism was to become a reality, then it was inescapable that the different nationalities would come into such a struggle only on the basis of unequivocally stated and accepted equal rights. It must necessarily be so also in regard to the caste question, i.e. equal rights for all castes and also for all minority religions. And, in regard to those sections of the masses still suffering from semi-feudal forms of oppression and an oppressive landowning system, it follows that these groupings would also come into the struggle on the basis of their rights to ownership of land. In other words democracy was the only basis for the welding of the nation.</p>
<p>And with regard to nationalities and the recognition of equal rights for Tamils vis-�-vis the majority nationality – the Sinhalese cause – in all social, economic and political respects, is crystallised in the right to self-determination, i.e. the right to have a separate state. <em>The right of self-determination of a nation cannot be defined as other than the right to a separate state.</em></p>
<p>However, as it happened in other backward countries in the epoch of the proletarian revolution, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie having arrived belatedly, and facing the reality of the class struggle, was reactionary in relation to imperialism. It never wanted nor launched any struggle against imperialism, and in the context did not have the need to mobilise any nationalities or other minority groups in that regard. It obtained political power by manoeuvring against other sections of the people and through conspiracy with imperialism. Concretely, thereafter, the Sinhala bourgeoisie won privileges against the Tamils and other groups whilst the imperialist power looked on. In return the imperialists gained a neo-colonialist relationship with the Sinhala bourgeois governments.</p>
<p><strong>The right of nations to self-determination</strong><br>
It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the development of capitalism was bound up and grew with the formation and growth of the national state because the framework of the nation state was the most advantageous medium for the development of the productive forces under the native capitalist class. While in England and France, for the nascent bourgeoisie at the time of the bourgeois revolutions in these countries, such a political organisation was found ready-made. That was not so elsewhere. In Holland, the United States and later Italy they had to create the nation state by expelling their foreign overlords and amalgamating the dispersed and divided elements into a political cultural entity.</p>
<p>In its heyday, the national democratic movement was a potent generator of material, moral and cultural advancement for the people. Up to now, national movements, in so far as they are movements to overcome national oppression, remain progressive. This is so especially in the backward countries and among nationalities which are economically and politically subject to capitalist/imperialist oppression, foreign or native, and which have yet to achieve or complete their revolution.</p>
<p>On the question of the meaning and relevance of national movements, one could do no better than let Lenin speak:</p>
<p>"Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its various classes and, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer.</p>
<p>"Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of <em>national states</em>, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the national state is <em>typical</em> and normal for the capitalist period....</p>
<p>"We cannot say whether Asia will have had time to develop into a system of independent national states, like Europe, before the collapse of capitalism, but it remains as undisputed fact that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent too; that the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia; that it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism."<sup>7</sup></p>
<p>We can now see that in regard to the question of national movements we are in the sphere of bourgeois problems – problems that vitally concern the interests of capitalist development; that concretely in regard to Sri Lanka the Tamil National Question is one of the more important bourgeois democratic tasks that await solution in this country; that the tendency of this movement has been towards the formation of a separate state; and that since 1977 this movement is more pronouncedly moving towards the realisation of Eelam – a separate Tamil State.</p>
<p>Obviously, it is in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie to have the whole of Sri Lanka for capitalist development, including all the areas inhabited by the Tamils. But that means the Tamils must have equal rights with the Sinhalese, and the winning of the Tamils for an integrated Sri Lanka calls for recognition of such equal rights to the Tamils in all spheres. Concretely, this recognition must be through the recognition of the Tamils’ right to a separate state.</p>
<p>For those who say that the recognition of this right is an encouragement to divide the country and a step towards disintegration, this is what Lenin wrote: "From the viewpoint of democracy in general, the very opposite is the case: recognition of the right to secession <em>reduces</em> the danger of the disintegration of the state."<sup>8</sup></p>
<p><strong>The left movement and the national question</strong><br>
While the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and its governments were directly responsible for promoting anti-Tamil chauvinism leading to violence and pogroms against the Tamils, the left movement, through opportunism leading to wrong policies over the years, contributed in no small measure to the growth of Sinhala chauvinism and even genocidal sentiments in regard to the Tamils. The wrong policies of these parties that claimed to be Marxist, on the issue of the Tamil question, flowed from their failure to understand the reality of the uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution in Sri Lanka – i.e. the completion of national independence, the democratisation of the administration, the realisation of democracy for all the oppressed sections, and the unification of the two nationalities on the basis of equal rights for Tamils vis-�-vis the Sinhalese – was never conceived of by the left parties as a struggle to be developed against the imperialists and their local agent, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie.</p>
<p>Although the BLPI wing of the LSSP correctly referred to the Soulbury constitution as fake independence,<sup>9</sup> nothing thereafter was done by all the left parties. After 1948 they simply concentrated on what they believed to be the struggle for socialism. None of these parties understood that the uncompleted democratic tasks, and the issues involved, were powerful levers for the mobilisation of all sections of the workers, the toilers and all the oppressed nationalities, for a common struggle that could well be dovetailed into the anti-capitalist struggle. They failed to understand that the Tamils of the North, the East and the up-country plantation Tamil workers, could be the strongest and the most reliable allies of the working class in the struggle against imperialism/capitalism.</p>
<p>The failure of the left parties to take up the struggle for the uncompleted democratic tasks opened the door for the so-called progressive bourgeoisie to brandish slogans of fake anti-imperialism and democracy. Thus did Bandaranaike enter the political stage raising the slogan of "Sinhala Only" in the name of fighting remnants of colonialism in the administration.<sup>10</sup> This is a different story.</p>
<p>What is to be noted is that the left parties did not attempt to identify themselves with the movement of the Tamils for equal rights with the majority Sinhalese people. The LSSP representatives in the State Council (1936) were only pleading with the Sinhalese bourgeoisie to be fair to the Tamils.<sup>11</sup> On the issue of excluding the Tamil plantation workers from voting in the Village Council elections, N.M. Perera said: "Common decency demands that those people be treated as human beings.... <em>We only ask</em> that those ... who have permanent interests in this country ... should be given the vote."<sup>12</sup></p>
<p>It is significant that often Perera and Gunawardena specifically tried to stress that they were speaking as Sinhalese: "These excessive demands of the Tamil community are partly due to <em>our own fault</em> and the majority leadership...."<sup>13</sup> And here is what Philip Gunawardena said on 9 May 1936 in the State Council: "My Party is absolutely against communal representation ... of any nature, of any kind. But, Sir, we have to realise that in this country there is a conflict between the minority and the majority over certain matters, and unless or until we settle that conflict it is not possible for us to have a united people demanding freedom.... After all, <em>cannot the Sinhalese Members be a little more generous</em>? What is the difficulty in having a territorial basis which gives <em>a little more representation</em> to Jaffna Tamils and the Muslim population ...? I feel that it is necessary <em>sometimes to make concessions ... to the minority communities</em>. The majority community can afford to make <em>such generous concessions</em>. That is the position that my Party takes.... I stand and speak as a Sinhalese."<sup>14</sup></p>
<p>That the concept "the workers have no fatherland" or the concept of internationalism were only skin deep in the LSSP leadership is shown by the fact that in 1937 LSSP members brought a motion to parliament "<em>not to grant any recruiting licenses under any conditions whatsoever</em>", aimed at a ban on Indian immigration.<sup>15</sup></p>
<p>That the LSSP leaders were not unaffected by bourgeois nationalism comes out sharply, and is pointed out by Lerski in his history of Trotskyism in Ceylon: "Related to the official use of <em>Swabasha</em> (indigenous Tamil and Sinhalese) was another nationalistic issue, the Ceylonisation of the Civil Service, an important aspect of the wider struggle for complete independence. In this popular demand the Samasamajists often outdid their non-socialist colleagues in xenophobia."<sup>16</sup> N.M. Perera said in the State Council in 1939 on the subject of Ceylonisation: "An appeal was made in this House, and outside of it, to all private employers to get rid of their non-Ceylonese, and employ the Ceylonese.... It is much more important that the culture which is peculiar to the Ceylonese should be imparted to the Ceylonese by the Ceylonese, that our children should be made to imbibe the nature which is purely Ceylonese in our educational institutions than that they should get a foreign culture imposed by the outsiders."<sup>17</sup></p>
<p>It was left to the bourgeois liberal B.H. Aluwihare to give the Marxists a lesson in internationalism: "Ceylonese culture is like the Sinhalese people. It is one of the most hybrid things in the Earth. It is born of Portuguese and Dutch culture and it is mixed up today with the British.... When you ask what Ceylonese culture is, the answer is that the culture has come to us from all the ends of the Earth. It has enriched us ... our vision, our mind, our literature."<sup>18</sup></p>
<p><strong>Down the ladder step by step</strong><br>
It is clear that in the LSSP, not only of the early period but also of the period after the 1950s, we had a working class based party with a leadership strongly under the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology, but striving to take the organisation along the Marxist road. But obviously the Marxism of the party had no deep roots. The Leninist position on the national question – the right of nations to self-determination – was simply unknown to the party. Thus, the problem of the Tamil nationality was viewed as one of removing some inequalities. <em>That it was bound up with the dynamics of the Sri Lanka revolution was not at all understood by the party.</em></p>
<p>While the categorical position of opposition taken by the LSSP on the issue of the notorious Citizenship Acts, by which nearly one million up-country Tamil workers were disfranchised by the Sinhala bourgeois governments, was a principled one, it remained an isolated act seen as relevant to the development of the working class movement rather than the beginning of a move to suppress all the Tamils.</p>
<p>It was the year 1953 that became the year of the turning point for the left movement. Although the LSSP was clearly leaning on the Bandaranaike-led SLFP (national bourgeoisie), it was still uncertain in regard to its relations with this party. But with the 1953 split that took away one third of the party to join Philip Gunawardena, we find a sharp turn to the right. The basis of the split was that it was necessary to form a coalition with Bandaranaike.<sup>19</sup></p>
<p><strong>The language question</strong><br>
When Bandaranaike adopted the stand of "Sinhala Only" on the issue of the official language to replace English – and this movement grew overnight into a mighty Sinhala chauvinist current – it was clear that this was no mere question of the official language. It was from the outset the slogan for a pro-Sinhala and anti-Tamil movement. And, in this context, when the Philip Gunawardena-led VLSSP<sup>20</sup> lined up with Bandaranaike on "Sinhala Only", and when the Communist Party (CP) changed its position from Sinhala and Tamil as official languages to Sinhala only, it was the beginning of the capitulation of the left movement to Sinhala chauvinism.</p>
<p>Although the LSSP remained firm on its stand on Sinhala and Tamil as official languages with parity of status, between 1955 and the formation of the Bandaranaike government in May 1956, quite early changes were in the offing. The policy of responsive co-operation to the SLFP government was the beginning of the movement towards the SLFP, and away from the position of struggles for the language and other rights of the Tamils.<sup>21</sup></p>
<p>Only if the party was rooted in a revolutionary programme, and had an understanding of the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution, was it possible for the LSSP to stand firmly on the rights of the Tamils and against Sinhala bourgeois nationalism. But that was not the case. The next step came in 1963 with the formation of the United Left Front (ULF) by the LSSP, MEP<sup>22</sup> and CP.<sup>23</sup> With Philip Gunawardena standing firmly on "Sinhala Only" and the CP having adapted to the same position, and when both these parties rejected the LSSP position on the citizenship rights of Tamil plantation workers, the common programme of the ULF unambiguously adopted the SLFP position on both these issues. This was confirmed one year later when the ULF was broken by Perera leading to the formation of the SLFP-LSSP coalition government which was supported by the CP.<sup>24</sup> This was the complete betrayal of the Tamil people by the traditional left parties.</p>
<p>It is significant that it was with the presence of two left parties in the second coalition government led by the SLFP that discrimination and harassment of Tamils became worse than ever before.<sup>25</sup> This discrimination related to employment, colonisation, promotions of Tamil public servants, and, in the field of education, with so-called standardisation in regard to university admissions.<sup>26</sup> There was also systematic harassment by police of Tamil youth, arbitrary arrests, and detention without trial, etc. Thus the traditional left parties not only step by step took chauvinistic positions in regard to the Tamils, but also went as far as sanctioning, through a bourgeois government, the direct police harassment of the Tamils.</p>
<p><strong>Federalism, Eelam and the present struggle</strong><br>
Through the Federal Party, the Tamils, after the split in the Tamil Congress in 1948, put forward the demand of a federal state – put differently, regional autonomy.<sup>27</sup> All Sinhala bourgeois governments rejected the demand, and responded further by promoting anti-Tamil-chauvinist movements. Even the left parties, the LSSP and CP, failed to support this demand and remained tongue-tied, giving sustenance to the anti-federalist opposition of the Sinhalese. <em>The biggest ever mass movement in the history of modern Sri Lanka against an oppressive bourgeois government took place when the "satyagraha" movement of 1961 was launched from February to April arising from the Federal Party’s opposition to the oppressive Language of the Courts bill</em>.<sup>28</sup></p>
<p>With all its weaknesses, the non-violent <em>satyagraha</em> movement led by the Federal Party, which embraced practically all sections of the Tamil people, was clearly an anti-governmental mass struggle against the oppressive Sinhala bourgeois government, the SLFP. <em>It is not without significance that the LSSP and CP failed even to give critical support to this struggle</em>. They only voiced their opposition to government repression in parliament.</p>
<p>The next stage of the Tamil movement was the adoption of Eelam. Of course revolutionary Marxists seek to amalgamate smaller states into large states and not to split up states. But that is a general position. "From their daily experience", wrote Lenin, "the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse. In that case, the interests of capitalist development and of the freedom of the class struggle will be best served by secession."<sup>29</sup></p>
<p>If the Tamils decide to continue to pursue Eelam there is no question that it is the duty of the working class and revolutionary Marxists to support the right of the Tamils to self-determination, i.e. the right to demand a separate state. Individual armed actions against the armed forces that harass the Tamils may well be defended, but such actions cannot bring about an end to oppression or the realisation of Eelam. Struggle on the basis of mass mobilisation must replace individual actions. To the extent that the Sinhala masses break away from Sinhala chauvinism, attempts must be made to draw in these Sinhala masses for common struggle against the government on the basis of their own demands.</p>
<p><strong>The way forward for the Tamils</strong><br>
There is simply no solution to the oppression of the Tamils in Sri Lanka within the framework of capitalism – this is clear enough from all that has happened, and from the present policies of the two main Sinhala bourgeois parties, the UNP and SLFP. Only through the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism is it possible to lay the foundations for equal rights for Tamils in relation to the majority Sinhala people.</p>
<p>But there is no question of waiting for this solution to fall from the skies. The struggle for the rights of the Tamils must continue, but with different methods. It is basic to the success of this struggle that all sections of the Tamil masses must be mobilised on the basis of their separate demands for struggle against the capitalist government of Jayewardene. Such mobilisation of the Tamil masses need not and cannot be separated from the mobilisation of the Sinhala masses who are also suffering under the oppressive Jayewardene government in numerous ways. Such joint mobilisation will not be a dream if the left parties break sharply from opportunism and Sinhala chauvinism and adopt an anti-capitalist perspective.</p>
<p>It is inescapable that such mobilisation and such struggle calls for revolutionary leadership that has to be built from revolutionaries among the Tamils, the Sinhalese and all sections of the workers and toilers irrespective of nationality, religion or caste. And in regard to the problems of the Tamil people such a leadership must take its stand by unequivocally supporting the rights of the Tamils to self-determination, that is the right to a separate state.</p>
<p>
<strong>Editorial Notes</strong></p>
<p>1. The up-country Tamils, who inhabit the central hill areas of Sri Lanka, were brought over from India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work on the plantations. As a community they are distinct from the Tamil population of the North and East, which dates from before the colonial occupation of Ceylon. Sri Lanka’s Muslims form a third Tamil-speaking community, which is concentrated in the East.</p>
<p>2. The bourgeois United National Party was formed in 1947 as the result of a merger between the Ceylon National Congress and various smaller Sinhalese parties. It won a majority in that year’s elections and took over the government when Ceylon achieved independence in February 1948. One of the UNP government’s first actions was to introduce legislation which deprived a million up-country Tamils of Ceylonese citizenship and consequently of the right to vote.</p>
<p>3. In 1951, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike split from the UNP to form a new organisation, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). It employed populist rhetoric and appealed to Sinhalese nationalism. The Trotskyists regarded it as representing a national wing of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie, although in the course of its move towards coalition politics the LSSP revised this view, characterising the SLFP instead as a petty-bourgeois party.</p>
<p>4. Three Tamil organisations – the Federal Party, the Tamil Congress and the Ceylon Workers Congress (a Tamil plantation workers’ union led by S. Thondaman) – came together in 1972 to form the Tamil United Front. It changed its name to the TULF in 1976. The Ceylon Workers Congress, which had already distanced itself from the demand for a separate Tamil state, left the TULF in 1978 when Thondaman became a minister in the UNP government.</p>
<p>5. In July 1983, in response to brutalities by the Sri Lankan armed forces in the North, Tamil militants ambushed an army truck, killing 13 soldiers. Sinhalese chauvinists used this as a pretext to whip up an atmosphere of vicious anti-Tamil racism among the majority Sinhalese population. Mobs went on the rampage in Colombo and also in the up-country areas, attacking and murdering Tamils, and looting and burning their properties. UNP thugs were directly involved in these atrocities, in the course of which some 3,000 Tamils were killed and 100,000 made homeless.</p>
<p>6. The UNP government used its parliamentary majority to pass a law excluding from parliament any party which refused to swear allegiance to the unitary Sri Lankan state.</p>
<p>7. Lenin, <em>Collected Works</em>, Vol.20, pp.396-7, 399.</p>
<p>8. Ibid, p.421.</p>
<p>9. After World War II the Samasamajist movement was split between the LSSP and the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (Ceylon Unit) (BLPI), which later changed its name to the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party. The two groupings merged in 1950 to form a united LSSP. The Soulbury constitution, named after Lord Soulbury who headed the commission that drew it up, formed the basis on which Ceylon became an independent state within the British Commonwealth. The BLPI attacked this as fake independence, on the grounds that the British armed forces retained bases in Ceylon, and also because the country remained economically dependent on British imperialism.</p>
<p>10. The slogan of "Sinhala Only", representing the demand that Sinhala should replace English as the sole official language in Ceylon, was raised by the SLFP in the mid-1950s. This became law in 1956 after the election of an SLFP-led government headed by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.</p>
<p>11. The two LSSP representatives elected to the State Council in 1936 were Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera.</p>
<p>12. G.J. Lerski, <em>Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon</em>, 1968, p.52. The emphases in this and other quotations from Lerski’s book have been added by Edmund Samarakkody.</p>
<p>13. Ibid, p.53. The speaker was N.M. Perera.</p>
<p>14. Ibid, pp.54, 55, 57.</p>
<p>15. <em>Debates in the State Council of Ceylon</em>, 3 September 1937.</p>
<p>16. Lerski, p.60.</p>
<p>17. Ibid, p.61.</p>
<p>18. Ibid, pp.61-2.</p>
<p>19. A reference to the faction led by William Silva, Henry Peiris and Reggie Perera which split from the LSSP in 1953. The grouping entered into relations with Philip Gunawardena’s group and the Communist Party, but then gravitated towards the SLFP. In 1956 William Silva became a minister in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government.</p>
<p>20. Philip Gunawardena and his supporters refused to participate in the 1950 unification of the two rival Samasamajist parties. He formed a separate organisation – the Viplavakari (Revolutionary) LSSP.</p>
<p>21. When the Bandaranaike administration took office in 1956, the LSSP parliamentary group adopted a policy of "responsive co-operation" towards the new government. This policy, which was opposed by Edmund Samarakkody and others, was withdrawn the following year under the impact of mounting conflict between the government and the trade unions.</p>
<p>22. The 1956 election was won by an SLFP-dominated coalition known as the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (the Peoples United Front – MEP), which included Philip Gunawardena’s organisation. The coalition broke up, and in the 1960 elections the SLFP stood in its own name, with Philip’s party adopting the title MEP.</p>
<p>23. The United Left Front was opposed by the LSSP left wing as an unprincipled alliance. Their objections were outlined by Edmund Samarakkody in a document entitled "Whither the LSSP?"</p>
<p>24. In 1964 the LSSP entered into a coalition government with the SLFP, then led by Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike, the widow of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who had been assassinated by a Sinhalese-Buddhist extremist in 1959.</p>
<p>25. The SLFP was the main component in a coalition government elected in 1970, which also included the LSSP and the Communist Party.</p>
<p>26. Under the SLFP-LSSP-CP government, the ministry of education systematically discriminated against Tamils in university education. "Standardisation" was the name given to a system whereby Tamil students were required to score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts in entrance exams. The imposition of standardisation along with a system of district quotas resulted in a steep decline in the proportion of Tamil students accepted for science, engineering and medical courses.</p>
<p>27. The 1948 split in the Tamil Congress resulted from its failure under G.G. Ponnambalam’s leadership to defend Tamil rights against the UNP government. An opposition led by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam broke away to found the Federal Party.</p>
<p>28. The Language of the Courts bill extended the "Sinhala Only" legislation by requiring Sri Lankan courts to conduct their proceedings in Sinhala. The <em>satyagraha</em> was a method of peaceful sit-down protest which had been developed in India during resistance to British colonial rule. The Federal Party’s action, supported by thousands of Tamil volunteers, succeeded in blocking access to district administrative offices and effectively paralysed government in the North and East. The SLFP government responded by declaring a state of emergency and placing the Tamil areas under occupation by the Sri Lankan army, which suppressed the protests with considerable brutality.</p>
<p>29. Lenin, <em>Collected Works</em>, Vol.20, p.423.</p>
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</body> | Edmund Samarakkody
The National Question in Sri Lanka
This article is a shortened version of a pamphlet of the same name issued by the Revolutionary Workers Party of Sri Lanka. Although it was originally published in 1984, the analysis put forward here by Edmund Samarakkody has just as much bearing on the political situation today, for his prediction that "the National Question is and will remain one of the most explosive questions in Sri Lanka for years to come" has proved entirely accurate.
The events which have taken place since this piece was written should be briefly summarised. The intensification of repression by J.R. Jayewardene’s United National Party (UNP) government escalated into a full-scale war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Tamil liberation movement, a phase of the conflict now known as Eelam War I. Unable to crush the Tamil movement, and fearing invasion by India, in 1987 the UNP government invited the so-called Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to enter the North-East to impose a settlement. However, the dominant Tamil militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), refused to accept this imposed settlement, and in the face of continued LTTE resistance the IPKF was forced to withdraw by early 1990. The UNP government then resumed its own war against the LTTE.
The emptiness of the UNP government’s assurances that this war – Eelam War II – would be over within months was soon exposed, and as the conflict dragged on with no end in sight the Sinhalese masses in the South became increasingly war-weary. The result was the election in 1994 of Chandrika Kumaratunga’s Peoples Alliance (PA) government. A coalition dominated by the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party, but also including the Communist Party and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the PA was elected largely because of its pledge to end the war. However, although a temporary cease-fire was agreed with the LTTE, once in office the PA made no real progress towards negotiating a permanent peace settlement. In April 1995 the LTTE declared that the cease-fire was over and resumed military operations against the government forces, ushering in Eelam War III.
Since then the Sri Lankan Army has registered some successes against the LTTE, notably in taking the Tigers’ stronghold of Jaffna. These military advances have been achieved at the cost of enormous suffering by the Tamil civilian population in the North. The LTTE, meanwhile, has not been destroyed but has retreated into the jungle to continue guerilla operations against the occupying army. A solution to the National Question in Sri Lanka seems as far away as ever.
THE TAMIL people (today over 3 million) have for over half a century claimed equal rights with the Sinhalese. But the Sinhalese bourgeoisie, from prior to independence (1948), sought and achieved privileges over the Tamils. Continuing their anti-Tamil policies after political power came into their hands, all Sinhala bourgeois governments have carried out systematic discrimination against Tamils in the fields of: (a) government land colonisation; (b) employment in government service and in public corporations; (c) Tamil language rights, higher education, etc. With regard to the up-country Tamils,1 nearly a million plantation workers were disfranchised by the D.S. Senanayake United National Party (UNP) government in 1948 through the notorious Citizenship Acts.2
Attempts by the Tamil people to win equal rights with the Sinhalese through agitation and peaceful methods have been used by the Sinhala bourgeoisie to develop anti-Tamil sentiment among the Sinhalese over the years. Whenever limited mobilisation of the Tamil masses in furtherance of winning equal rights took place, the Sinhala bourgeois governments have answered with repression. The Tamils found that repeated attempts of the Tamil leaders in the Tamil Congress and Federal Party to co-exist and co-operate with the Sinhala bourgeois parties, the UNP and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP),3 and their governments were of no avail. It was then that in 1972 the Tamils re-organised themselves into the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and adopted the demand for a separate Tamil State – Eelam.4 It is the fact that the 1977 election manifesto of the Jayewardene-led UNP government admitted that it was the failure of previous governments to grant the rights of the Tamils, that led them to demand a separate state.
What happened in and after 1977 when the UNP regime commenced is too well known. Systematic police harassment and violence against Tamil youth in the North led the Tamil youth to take up arms to defend themselves. Continued police and army violence against Tamil youth led to a more determined resistance and armed defensive actions by the youth. The government’s response was the use of South Africa-type repressive legislation, and the sending of an army of occupation to the North.
It was clear from the outset that the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom was part of the plan of the UNP government in its further repression and suppression of the Tamil people.5 It was simply the implementation of a plan of genocide of the Tamil people. And the destruction by violence and arson of the residences, business houses and factories run by Tamils is proof that the break-up of the economic base of the Tamils was the aim of the planners of the pogrom. It was abundantly plain that the beneficiaries of the destruction of the economic base of the Tamils were not mere looters and vagabonds. The beneficiaries were the Sinhala bourgeoisie.
The further proof that the Jayewardene bourgeois government was behind the anti-Tamil movement and the pogrom is what they did, through parliament, even while this pogrom was still continuing. Through the black anti-Eelam law it rushed through parliament, the 16 TULF MPs were sacked from the Assembly.6 Even as the hill-country Tamils, the plantation workers, were disfranchised in 1948 by the first government of the Sinhala bourgeoisie, even so in 1983 the rest of the Tamils have been disfranchised under this law.
It is the reality today that social, political and economic relations between the Tamils and the Sinhalese have been ruptured to such a degree that any kind of common or joint economic activity has become impossible. This means that 3 million Tamils have broken with the government which they see as their destroyer. This further means that the government will resort to more and more repression. And, inevitably, this means that the armed defensive actions of the Tamil youth in furtherance of Eelam will continue. Thus the National Question is and will remain one of the most explosive questions in Sri Lanka for years to come.
National unity and the imperialists
It is a fact that until the Portuguese conquered Ceylon there was a Tamil Kingdom in the North and a Sinhalese Kingdom in the South. In any event, there were at the time two separate feudal states in which there were two distinct nationalities, the Sinhalese and Tamil, each occupying politically united territories whose population spoke a single language, Sinhalese and Tamil respectively, and each with common customs and culture; and within each state separate economic activity was carried on consisting basically of agriculture, with the beginnings of commerce. It would appear that in the normal course, if foreign capitalist powers had not intervened and these states did not lose their independence, the two kingdoms, Tamil and Sinhala, might have evolved into two separate nation states in the capitalist sense.
However, although the Portuguese took over the Tamil kingdom and the kingdom of the Sinhalese in the South (not the Kandyan Sinhalese Kingdom), they did not seek to establish a unified state. They had no problem of realising national unity as their perspective was not to build a capitalist economy but to use their newly-won territory for trading, i.e., exporting cinnamon, etc. In fact they did not seek to bother about setting up a unified administration for these two states, the Sinhala kingdom and Tamil kingdom, that they had conquered. Instead, they had separate administrations for the areas of the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The Dutch also continued along the same lines.
It was only after British rule was established that for the first time there was a unified administration for the whole of Ceylon. It was easy to understand that England, which was even then to a large extent an industrially developed and developing country, needed to develop Ceylon in its own image, i.e. to develop a capitalist economy. It followed that one of the essential tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e. the break-up of the feudal state, paradoxically as it would appear, was ushered into Ceylon by the British imperialists. This revolution did not develop from the people but was imposed militarily from the top. What the British did was to superimpose capitalism over the feudal economy which they broke up. Hence, the colonialist plantation economy; that is to say they commenced with capitalism in agriculture and not capitalism in the manufacturing sector.
This setting up of a distorted capitalist economy, and its continuation as such, meant that the essential bourgeois democratic tasks could only be partially accomplished. The manifestation in this regard is found in the unresolved national question in the country.
While the British rulers set about establishing a centralised and unified administration for the whole of Ceylon, there was no attempt at the welding of the nation through uniting the Sinhala and Tamil nations into a single nation on the basis of equal rights for the Sinhala and Tamil people. Connected with the same question of welding the nation for creating the conditions for building of capitalism was the need to end not only national oppression, but also caste and religious oppression.
But we know that the oppression by the Sinhala nationality of the Tamil nationality not only remained but grew. We know how intolerance by Buddhists of other religious minorities remained and grew likewise. We further know caste oppression was a reality throughout the period of British rule and even continued thereafter.
The Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and national unity
From the outset it was the need of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, in the interests of building capitalism and establishing their class rule, to forge the unity of all nationalities, religions, castes, creeds, workers, peasants and toilers. As we have seen, British power was substituted for the feudal state in the whole of Sri Lanka. It was then that the primordial need of the nascent bourgeoisie, to throw out imperialism and win national independence, manifested itself. From this arose the need to mobilise all the people of all nationalities, castes and creeds for this struggle. If, indeed, such a struggle for national freedom against imperialism was to become a reality, then it was inescapable that the different nationalities would come into such a struggle only on the basis of unequivocally stated and accepted equal rights. It must necessarily be so also in regard to the caste question, i.e. equal rights for all castes and also for all minority religions. And, in regard to those sections of the masses still suffering from semi-feudal forms of oppression and an oppressive landowning system, it follows that these groupings would also come into the struggle on the basis of their rights to ownership of land. In other words democracy was the only basis for the welding of the nation.
And with regard to nationalities and the recognition of equal rights for Tamils vis-�-vis the majority nationality – the Sinhalese cause – in all social, economic and political respects, is crystallised in the right to self-determination, i.e. the right to have a separate state. The right of self-determination of a nation cannot be defined as other than the right to a separate state.
However, as it happened in other backward countries in the epoch of the proletarian revolution, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie having arrived belatedly, and facing the reality of the class struggle, was reactionary in relation to imperialism. It never wanted nor launched any struggle against imperialism, and in the context did not have the need to mobilise any nationalities or other minority groups in that regard. It obtained political power by manoeuvring against other sections of the people and through conspiracy with imperialism. Concretely, thereafter, the Sinhala bourgeoisie won privileges against the Tamils and other groups whilst the imperialist power looked on. In return the imperialists gained a neo-colonialist relationship with the Sinhala bourgeois governments.
The right of nations to self-determination
It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the development of capitalism was bound up and grew with the formation and growth of the national state because the framework of the nation state was the most advantageous medium for the development of the productive forces under the native capitalist class. While in England and France, for the nascent bourgeoisie at the time of the bourgeois revolutions in these countries, such a political organisation was found ready-made. That was not so elsewhere. In Holland, the United States and later Italy they had to create the nation state by expelling their foreign overlords and amalgamating the dispersed and divided elements into a political cultural entity.
In its heyday, the national democratic movement was a potent generator of material, moral and cultural advancement for the people. Up to now, national movements, in so far as they are movements to overcome national oppression, remain progressive. This is so especially in the backward countries and among nationalities which are economically and politically subject to capitalist/imperialist oppression, foreign or native, and which have yet to achieve or complete their revolution.
On the question of the meaning and relevance of national movements, one could do no better than let Lenin speak:
"Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its various classes and, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer.
"Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilised world, the national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period....
"We cannot say whether Asia will have had time to develop into a system of independent national states, like Europe, before the collapse of capitalism, but it remains as undisputed fact that capitalism, having awakened Asia, has called forth national movements everywhere in that continent too; that the tendency of these movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia; that it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the development of capitalism."7
We can now see that in regard to the question of national movements we are in the sphere of bourgeois problems – problems that vitally concern the interests of capitalist development; that concretely in regard to Sri Lanka the Tamil National Question is one of the more important bourgeois democratic tasks that await solution in this country; that the tendency of this movement has been towards the formation of a separate state; and that since 1977 this movement is more pronouncedly moving towards the realisation of Eelam – a separate Tamil State.
Obviously, it is in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie to have the whole of Sri Lanka for capitalist development, including all the areas inhabited by the Tamils. But that means the Tamils must have equal rights with the Sinhalese, and the winning of the Tamils for an integrated Sri Lanka calls for recognition of such equal rights to the Tamils in all spheres. Concretely, this recognition must be through the recognition of the Tamils’ right to a separate state.
For those who say that the recognition of this right is an encouragement to divide the country and a step towards disintegration, this is what Lenin wrote: "From the viewpoint of democracy in general, the very opposite is the case: recognition of the right to secession reduces the danger of the disintegration of the state."8
The left movement and the national question
While the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and its governments were directly responsible for promoting anti-Tamil chauvinism leading to violence and pogroms against the Tamils, the left movement, through opportunism leading to wrong policies over the years, contributed in no small measure to the growth of Sinhala chauvinism and even genocidal sentiments in regard to the Tamils. The wrong policies of these parties that claimed to be Marxist, on the issue of the Tamil question, flowed from their failure to understand the reality of the uncompleted tasks of the democratic revolution in Sri Lanka – i.e. the completion of national independence, the democratisation of the administration, the realisation of democracy for all the oppressed sections, and the unification of the two nationalities on the basis of equal rights for Tamils vis-�-vis the Sinhalese – was never conceived of by the left parties as a struggle to be developed against the imperialists and their local agent, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie.
Although the BLPI wing of the LSSP correctly referred to the Soulbury constitution as fake independence,9 nothing thereafter was done by all the left parties. After 1948 they simply concentrated on what they believed to be the struggle for socialism. None of these parties understood that the uncompleted democratic tasks, and the issues involved, were powerful levers for the mobilisation of all sections of the workers, the toilers and all the oppressed nationalities, for a common struggle that could well be dovetailed into the anti-capitalist struggle. They failed to understand that the Tamils of the North, the East and the up-country plantation Tamil workers, could be the strongest and the most reliable allies of the working class in the struggle against imperialism/capitalism.
The failure of the left parties to take up the struggle for the uncompleted democratic tasks opened the door for the so-called progressive bourgeoisie to brandish slogans of fake anti-imperialism and democracy. Thus did Bandaranaike enter the political stage raising the slogan of "Sinhala Only" in the name of fighting remnants of colonialism in the administration.10 This is a different story.
What is to be noted is that the left parties did not attempt to identify themselves with the movement of the Tamils for equal rights with the majority Sinhalese people. The LSSP representatives in the State Council (1936) were only pleading with the Sinhalese bourgeoisie to be fair to the Tamils.11 On the issue of excluding the Tamil plantation workers from voting in the Village Council elections, N.M. Perera said: "Common decency demands that those people be treated as human beings.... We only ask that those ... who have permanent interests in this country ... should be given the vote."12
It is significant that often Perera and Gunawardena specifically tried to stress that they were speaking as Sinhalese: "These excessive demands of the Tamil community are partly due to our own fault and the majority leadership...."13 And here is what Philip Gunawardena said on 9 May 1936 in the State Council: "My Party is absolutely against communal representation ... of any nature, of any kind. But, Sir, we have to realise that in this country there is a conflict between the minority and the majority over certain matters, and unless or until we settle that conflict it is not possible for us to have a united people demanding freedom.... After all, cannot the Sinhalese Members be a little more generous? What is the difficulty in having a territorial basis which gives a little more representation to Jaffna Tamils and the Muslim population ...? I feel that it is necessary sometimes to make concessions ... to the minority communities. The majority community can afford to make such generous concessions. That is the position that my Party takes.... I stand and speak as a Sinhalese."14
That the concept "the workers have no fatherland" or the concept of internationalism were only skin deep in the LSSP leadership is shown by the fact that in 1937 LSSP members brought a motion to parliament "not to grant any recruiting licenses under any conditions whatsoever", aimed at a ban on Indian immigration.15
That the LSSP leaders were not unaffected by bourgeois nationalism comes out sharply, and is pointed out by Lerski in his history of Trotskyism in Ceylon: "Related to the official use of Swabasha (indigenous Tamil and Sinhalese) was another nationalistic issue, the Ceylonisation of the Civil Service, an important aspect of the wider struggle for complete independence. In this popular demand the Samasamajists often outdid their non-socialist colleagues in xenophobia."16 N.M. Perera said in the State Council in 1939 on the subject of Ceylonisation: "An appeal was made in this House, and outside of it, to all private employers to get rid of their non-Ceylonese, and employ the Ceylonese.... It is much more important that the culture which is peculiar to the Ceylonese should be imparted to the Ceylonese by the Ceylonese, that our children should be made to imbibe the nature which is purely Ceylonese in our educational institutions than that they should get a foreign culture imposed by the outsiders."17
It was left to the bourgeois liberal B.H. Aluwihare to give the Marxists a lesson in internationalism: "Ceylonese culture is like the Sinhalese people. It is one of the most hybrid things in the Earth. It is born of Portuguese and Dutch culture and it is mixed up today with the British.... When you ask what Ceylonese culture is, the answer is that the culture has come to us from all the ends of the Earth. It has enriched us ... our vision, our mind, our literature."18
Down the ladder step by step
It is clear that in the LSSP, not only of the early period but also of the period after the 1950s, we had a working class based party with a leadership strongly under the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology, but striving to take the organisation along the Marxist road. But obviously the Marxism of the party had no deep roots. The Leninist position on the national question – the right of nations to self-determination – was simply unknown to the party. Thus, the problem of the Tamil nationality was viewed as one of removing some inequalities. That it was bound up with the dynamics of the Sri Lanka revolution was not at all understood by the party.
While the categorical position of opposition taken by the LSSP on the issue of the notorious Citizenship Acts, by which nearly one million up-country Tamil workers were disfranchised by the Sinhala bourgeois governments, was a principled one, it remained an isolated act seen as relevant to the development of the working class movement rather than the beginning of a move to suppress all the Tamils.
It was the year 1953 that became the year of the turning point for the left movement. Although the LSSP was clearly leaning on the Bandaranaike-led SLFP (national bourgeoisie), it was still uncertain in regard to its relations with this party. But with the 1953 split that took away one third of the party to join Philip Gunawardena, we find a sharp turn to the right. The basis of the split was that it was necessary to form a coalition with Bandaranaike.19
The language question
When Bandaranaike adopted the stand of "Sinhala Only" on the issue of the official language to replace English – and this movement grew overnight into a mighty Sinhala chauvinist current – it was clear that this was no mere question of the official language. It was from the outset the slogan for a pro-Sinhala and anti-Tamil movement. And, in this context, when the Philip Gunawardena-led VLSSP20 lined up with Bandaranaike on "Sinhala Only", and when the Communist Party (CP) changed its position from Sinhala and Tamil as official languages to Sinhala only, it was the beginning of the capitulation of the left movement to Sinhala chauvinism.
Although the LSSP remained firm on its stand on Sinhala and Tamil as official languages with parity of status, between 1955 and the formation of the Bandaranaike government in May 1956, quite early changes were in the offing. The policy of responsive co-operation to the SLFP government was the beginning of the movement towards the SLFP, and away from the position of struggles for the language and other rights of the Tamils.21
Only if the party was rooted in a revolutionary programme, and had an understanding of the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution, was it possible for the LSSP to stand firmly on the rights of the Tamils and against Sinhala bourgeois nationalism. But that was not the case. The next step came in 1963 with the formation of the United Left Front (ULF) by the LSSP, MEP22 and CP.23 With Philip Gunawardena standing firmly on "Sinhala Only" and the CP having adapted to the same position, and when both these parties rejected the LSSP position on the citizenship rights of Tamil plantation workers, the common programme of the ULF unambiguously adopted the SLFP position on both these issues. This was confirmed one year later when the ULF was broken by Perera leading to the formation of the SLFP-LSSP coalition government which was supported by the CP.24 This was the complete betrayal of the Tamil people by the traditional left parties.
It is significant that it was with the presence of two left parties in the second coalition government led by the SLFP that discrimination and harassment of Tamils became worse than ever before.25 This discrimination related to employment, colonisation, promotions of Tamil public servants, and, in the field of education, with so-called standardisation in regard to university admissions.26 There was also systematic harassment by police of Tamil youth, arbitrary arrests, and detention without trial, etc. Thus the traditional left parties not only step by step took chauvinistic positions in regard to the Tamils, but also went as far as sanctioning, through a bourgeois government, the direct police harassment of the Tamils.
Federalism, Eelam and the present struggle
Through the Federal Party, the Tamils, after the split in the Tamil Congress in 1948, put forward the demand of a federal state – put differently, regional autonomy.27 All Sinhala bourgeois governments rejected the demand, and responded further by promoting anti-Tamil-chauvinist movements. Even the left parties, the LSSP and CP, failed to support this demand and remained tongue-tied, giving sustenance to the anti-federalist opposition of the Sinhalese. The biggest ever mass movement in the history of modern Sri Lanka against an oppressive bourgeois government took place when the "satyagraha" movement of 1961 was launched from February to April arising from the Federal Party’s opposition to the oppressive Language of the Courts bill.28
With all its weaknesses, the non-violent satyagraha movement led by the Federal Party, which embraced practically all sections of the Tamil people, was clearly an anti-governmental mass struggle against the oppressive Sinhala bourgeois government, the SLFP. It is not without significance that the LSSP and CP failed even to give critical support to this struggle. They only voiced their opposition to government repression in parliament.
The next stage of the Tamil movement was the adoption of Eelam. Of course revolutionary Marxists seek to amalgamate smaller states into large states and not to split up states. But that is a general position. "From their daily experience", wrote Lenin, "the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse. In that case, the interests of capitalist development and of the freedom of the class struggle will be best served by secession."29
If the Tamils decide to continue to pursue Eelam there is no question that it is the duty of the working class and revolutionary Marxists to support the right of the Tamils to self-determination, i.e. the right to demand a separate state. Individual armed actions against the armed forces that harass the Tamils may well be defended, but such actions cannot bring about an end to oppression or the realisation of Eelam. Struggle on the basis of mass mobilisation must replace individual actions. To the extent that the Sinhala masses break away from Sinhala chauvinism, attempts must be made to draw in these Sinhala masses for common struggle against the government on the basis of their own demands.
The way forward for the Tamils
There is simply no solution to the oppression of the Tamils in Sri Lanka within the framework of capitalism – this is clear enough from all that has happened, and from the present policies of the two main Sinhala bourgeois parties, the UNP and SLFP. Only through the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism is it possible to lay the foundations for equal rights for Tamils in relation to the majority Sinhala people.
But there is no question of waiting for this solution to fall from the skies. The struggle for the rights of the Tamils must continue, but with different methods. It is basic to the success of this struggle that all sections of the Tamil masses must be mobilised on the basis of their separate demands for struggle against the capitalist government of Jayewardene. Such mobilisation of the Tamil masses need not and cannot be separated from the mobilisation of the Sinhala masses who are also suffering under the oppressive Jayewardene government in numerous ways. Such joint mobilisation will not be a dream if the left parties break sharply from opportunism and Sinhala chauvinism and adopt an anti-capitalist perspective.
It is inescapable that such mobilisation and such struggle calls for revolutionary leadership that has to be built from revolutionaries among the Tamils, the Sinhalese and all sections of the workers and toilers irrespective of nationality, religion or caste. And in regard to the problems of the Tamil people such a leadership must take its stand by unequivocally supporting the rights of the Tamils to self-determination, that is the right to a separate state.
Editorial Notes
1. The up-country Tamils, who inhabit the central hill areas of Sri Lanka, were brought over from India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work on the plantations. As a community they are distinct from the Tamil population of the North and East, which dates from before the colonial occupation of Ceylon. Sri Lanka’s Muslims form a third Tamil-speaking community, which is concentrated in the East.
2. The bourgeois United National Party was formed in 1947 as the result of a merger between the Ceylon National Congress and various smaller Sinhalese parties. It won a majority in that year’s elections and took over the government when Ceylon achieved independence in February 1948. One of the UNP government’s first actions was to introduce legislation which deprived a million up-country Tamils of Ceylonese citizenship and consequently of the right to vote.
3. In 1951, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike split from the UNP to form a new organisation, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). It employed populist rhetoric and appealed to Sinhalese nationalism. The Trotskyists regarded it as representing a national wing of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie, although in the course of its move towards coalition politics the LSSP revised this view, characterising the SLFP instead as a petty-bourgeois party.
4. Three Tamil organisations – the Federal Party, the Tamil Congress and the Ceylon Workers Congress (a Tamil plantation workers’ union led by S. Thondaman) – came together in 1972 to form the Tamil United Front. It changed its name to the TULF in 1976. The Ceylon Workers Congress, which had already distanced itself from the demand for a separate Tamil state, left the TULF in 1978 when Thondaman became a minister in the UNP government.
5. In July 1983, in response to brutalities by the Sri Lankan armed forces in the North, Tamil militants ambushed an army truck, killing 13 soldiers. Sinhalese chauvinists used this as a pretext to whip up an atmosphere of vicious anti-Tamil racism among the majority Sinhalese population. Mobs went on the rampage in Colombo and also in the up-country areas, attacking and murdering Tamils, and looting and burning their properties. UNP thugs were directly involved in these atrocities, in the course of which some 3,000 Tamils were killed and 100,000 made homeless.
6. The UNP government used its parliamentary majority to pass a law excluding from parliament any party which refused to swear allegiance to the unitary Sri Lankan state.
7. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.20, pp.396-7, 399.
8. Ibid, p.421.
9. After World War II the Samasamajist movement was split between the LSSP and the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (Ceylon Unit) (BLPI), which later changed its name to the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party. The two groupings merged in 1950 to form a united LSSP. The Soulbury constitution, named after Lord Soulbury who headed the commission that drew it up, formed the basis on which Ceylon became an independent state within the British Commonwealth. The BLPI attacked this as fake independence, on the grounds that the British armed forces retained bases in Ceylon, and also because the country remained economically dependent on British imperialism.
10. The slogan of "Sinhala Only", representing the demand that Sinhala should replace English as the sole official language in Ceylon, was raised by the SLFP in the mid-1950s. This became law in 1956 after the election of an SLFP-led government headed by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
11. The two LSSP representatives elected to the State Council in 1936 were Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera.
12. G.J. Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon, 1968, p.52. The emphases in this and other quotations from Lerski’s book have been added by Edmund Samarakkody.
13. Ibid, p.53. The speaker was N.M. Perera.
14. Ibid, pp.54, 55, 57.
15. Debates in the State Council of Ceylon, 3 September 1937.
16. Lerski, p.60.
17. Ibid, p.61.
18. Ibid, pp.61-2.
19. A reference to the faction led by William Silva, Henry Peiris and Reggie Perera which split from the LSSP in 1953. The grouping entered into relations with Philip Gunawardena’s group and the Communist Party, but then gravitated towards the SLFP. In 1956 William Silva became a minister in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s government.
20. Philip Gunawardena and his supporters refused to participate in the 1950 unification of the two rival Samasamajist parties. He formed a separate organisation – the Viplavakari (Revolutionary) LSSP.
21. When the Bandaranaike administration took office in 1956, the LSSP parliamentary group adopted a policy of "responsive co-operation" towards the new government. This policy, which was opposed by Edmund Samarakkody and others, was withdrawn the following year under the impact of mounting conflict between the government and the trade unions.
22. The 1956 election was won by an SLFP-dominated coalition known as the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (the Peoples United Front – MEP), which included Philip Gunawardena’s organisation. The coalition broke up, and in the 1960 elections the SLFP stood in its own name, with Philip’s party adopting the title MEP.
23. The United Left Front was opposed by the LSSP left wing as an unprincipled alliance. Their objections were outlined by Edmund Samarakkody in a document entitled "Whither the LSSP?"
24. In 1964 the LSSP entered into a coalition government with the SLFP, then led by Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike, the widow of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who had been assassinated by a Sinhalese-Buddhist extremist in 1959.
25. The SLFP was the main component in a coalition government elected in 1970, which also included the LSSP and the Communist Party.
26. Under the SLFP-LSSP-CP government, the ministry of education systematically discriminated against Tamils in university education. "Standardisation" was the name given to a system whereby Tamil students were required to score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts in entrance exams. The imposition of standardisation along with a system of district quotas resulted in a steep decline in the proportion of Tamil students accepted for science, engineering and medical courses.
27. The 1948 split in the Tamil Congress resulted from its failure under G.G. Ponnambalam’s leadership to defend Tamil rights against the UNP government. An opposition led by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam broke away to found the Federal Party.
28. The Language of the Courts bill extended the "Sinhala Only" legislation by requiring Sri Lankan courts to conduct their proceedings in Sinhala. The satyagraha was a method of peaceful sit-down protest which had been developed in India during resistance to British colonial rule. The Federal Party’s action, supported by thousands of Tamil volunteers, succeeded in blocking access to district administrative offices and effectively paralysed government in the North and East. The SLFP government responded by declaring a state of emergency and placing the Tamil areas under occupation by the Sri Lankan army, which suppressed the protests with considerable brutality.
29. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.20, p.423.
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h4>Part II.</h4>
<h3>Chapter IV. Reality as Individual.</h3>
<p>In the preceding chapters of this study we have been concerned exclusively with Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought. We have learned that, according to his doctrine, thought is co-extensive with experience and consequently with reality itself: it has no datum opposed to and independent of it.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n166">[166]</a></sup> Thus an investigation of the nature of thought was necessary before we could arrive at a just appreciation of Hegel’s teaching concerning the nature of the ultimately real. Having now completed this investigation and having learned what Hegel has to say concerning the thought-process, we turn to the other aspect of our general problem and inquire about the details of Hegel’s doctrine of reality.</p>
<p>As we have already seen, Hegel insists that reality is the result of a process of mediation; it is not a first principle, but a last result. This is a contention upon which Hegel is constantly insisting. “If knowledge is to grasp the truth,” he tells us, “it must not remain at the standpoint of the immediately given and its determinations. On the contrary, it must penetrate this immediate being, assuming that behind it there is something other than itself, which hidden somewhat constitutes its truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n167">[167]</a></sup> “Every immediate unity is only abstract potential truth, not real truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n168">[168]</a></sup> “Concerning the Absolute, it is to be said that it is first as a result what it is in truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n169">[169]</a></sup> The real is not to be found in sense-perception: it is only the result of the process of thought.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n170">[170]</a></sup> This emphasis of the mediated aspect of reality is one of the fundamental doctrines of the Hegelian philosophy, and the author never tires of reminding us of it.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n171">[171]</a></sup> The ultimately real is not shot out of a pistol at us; truth is not given, as it were, a coin from the mint. On the contrary, the real must be defined, and its definition comes only with developing experience and the growth of knowledge. It is only the labors of thought that can lead us to the land of reality.</p>
<p>This being true, it follows at once that the form of universality is, as Hegel views the matter, an essential aspect of the real. For, on this hypothesis, reality lies exclusively within the domain of thought; and thinking <em>ipso facto </em>necessitates the form of universality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n172">[172]</a></sup> This implication of his system Hegel does not overlook. In the <em>Naturphilosophie</em>, for example, he urges that the universal aspect of objects is not to be considered as something foreign to them, a form which belongs to them only when they happen to be thought about; rather, the universal is absolutely essential to their reality, it is the <em>noumenon</em>, as it were, behind the transitory and fleeting phenomenon.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n173">[173]</a></sup> Reason, he tells us elsewhere, “is the certitude that its determinations are just as much objective, e.g., determinations of the essence of things, as they are subjective thoughts.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n174">[174]</a></sup> Again, in opposition to the atomistic view of Locke and the empiricists to the effect that the universal does not in reality belong to objects, Hegel asserts: “To say ... that the universal is not the essential reality of nature ... is tantamount to saying that we do not know real existence.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n175">[175]</a></sup> And an unknowable reality is, for Hegel, a contradiction in terms. Reality, then, does assume the form of universality; this is essential to its very being.</p>
<p>From this we may pass at once to the conclusion that the real, as Hegel conceives of it, cannot be the abstract particular. After what has just been said it is hardly necessary to argue this point further. Hegel would unhesitatingly assert that the particular, qua particular, is never found in experience at all. This is exactly what his doctrines of the inseparability of immediacy and mediation amounts to. The immediacy of reality is a mediated immediacy; and since the mediating process is that of thought which can advance only by means of universals, the immediacy of the real must transcend bare particularity. In a word, we may put the matter so: if knowledge is coextensive with experience, then the possibility that a mere particular may appear within experience is eliminated; whatever appears in knowledge must be more than a mere particular, for the universals of thought can lay hold only of that which somehow itself is universal. The abstract particular plays no part in reality. Against the idea that particularity is a form adequate to the real Hegel has some cogent objections to urge. And perhaps it would not be too much to say that those objections are rather obvious. In the first place, the particular seems to be absolutely nothing so far as experience is concerned. In order that it may be a part of experience it must, as Kant has shown us in his famous Transcendental Deduction of the categories, become universalized, must lose its abstract particularity. For the particular which is to be experienced must remain identical with itself through a period of time; and self-identity is universality. So the abstract particular has no part to play in experience, is impossible, indeed, within experience. But, in the second place, if we should grant the possibility of the abstract particular within experience, we should find ourselves in the midst of some puzzling problems. And not the least confusing is the question, What is an unrelated particular? Absolutely nothing can be said about it, because anything can be defined only in terms of its relations and a particular has no relations. Indeed, an abstract particular is simply an indefinable absolute. Hegel puts the difficulty thus: “The form of immediacy invests the particular with the character of independent or self-centered being. But such predicates contradict the very essence of the particular, – which is to be referred to something else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an absolute.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n176">[176]</a></sup> And of course it is not easy to see how experience could possibly be composed of a number of unrelated absolutes. But it seems useless to stress this point further. It is plain, as Professor Pringle-Pattison has urged, that the mere particular finds a place to exist nowhere outside a logic which is not wholly clear about its own procedure.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n177">[177]</a></sup> But, granting that Hegel is not guilty of hypostatizing the abstract particular, what are we to say about his assertions concerning the universal? Are we so sure that he does not go to the other extreme and urge that experience consists in blank universality? Have we not seen that he maintains that to think the world is to cast it in the form of the universal, and is it not true that he reduces experience to terms of thought? Is he not always insisting that the universal, the Notion, is the very quintessence of the object? It is true, as we have all along seen, that Hegel has been generally accused of reducing the real to the form of abstract universality. This is the view of Haym, of Trendelenburg, of Lotze, indeed of all the critics of the Hegelian philosophy in general Even the sympathetic critics of the system are all practically agreed in making the same assumption. It is the very nerve of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s criticism, which we reviewed in some detail in the preceding chapter; and it is the nerve also of the criticisms of Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart, which we shall presently consider. Is Hegel really guilty of this accusation that has been brought against him by so many students of his philosophy, or is he not? If he is, then there can be no question that his system is as far from concrete experience as any system well can be. If he is not, then with the assumption fall the criticisms based upon it.</p>
<p>Our answer to the question is already determined, and our reasons for it already set forth. The answer must be an unequivocal and emphatic negative, its justification being found in the entire first part of this study. There it was the aim to let Hegel speak for himself; and if we are to believe what he has said, then we are forced to admit at least that it was not his intention to champion the position that reality is simply an aggregate of blank universals, a ‘ballet of bloodless categories.’ He does grant that thought is conterminous with experience, and, consequently, with reality itself; the real for him exists only in the form of the Notion.</p>
<p>About this there need be no dispute. Again, he as frankly admits that this position forces him to assume the further position that reality can be found only in universality; for “thinking means the bringing of something into the form of universality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n178">[178]</a></sup> Upon this all may agree. But the all-important point here, the point upon which there is difference of opinion, is the determination of Hegel’s doctrine of universality. This is really the bone of contention. What does Hegel mean by the form of universality which reality assumes? Does he mean by the universal of the Notion merely formal universality? If we dare maintain our position against the cloud of witnesses on the other side, we must hold that by his doctrine of the universality of the Notion Hegel means, not abstract generality, but concrete universality. This was the central thesis of our discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought, which we saw Hegel define, not as mere cognition, but as the very life of mind itself. In this Hegelian <em>thought </em>are included all the categories of the mind, from the barest, most empty sensation which only points dimly to the factual existence of an objective world, to the fullest, most concrete expression of the essential constitution of the world. As Hegel conceives the matter, experience is not reduced to the bare universals of cognition: cognition is only one aspect of the mental life, which includes within itself the categories of feeling and volition as well. To accuse him of reducing reality to blank universality, therefore, is to misapprehend what he means by the form of the Notion.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n179">[179]</a></sup> Both Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart give their opinion against the conclusion here advanced. These two professedly close and sympathetic students of Hegel maintain that he conceives reality to be nothing more than a process of discursive knowledge, that he reduces experience to blank universality. An examination in some detail of the grounds upon which these critics base their opinions will perhaps serve to clear up the problem before us.</p>
<p>The <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>forms the point of departure for Professor Baillie’s criticism. According to the critic, Hegel arrives at his fundamental position in the following manner: “All experience involves the relation of subject to object, and all Experience is fundamentally the life of mind; it finds its meaning and explanation in self-consciousness.</p>
<p>Now in the <em>Phenomenology </em>it was further shown that self-consciousness finds its most perfect expression in Absolute Science. In other words, that while all Experience is the realization of self-consciousness, Science is its truest form: it is ‘the crown of the life of mind.’ Therefore ... the immediacy of Experience is the immediacy of Science; the mediation constituting and constructing Experience is the mediation of Science.</p>
<p>What is immediate to life in indissoluble union with environment (in the widest sense of the term) is the same as what is ‘given’ or ‘immediate’ in Knowledge. In other words, Reality in its essence is a process of Knowledge.” In the paragraph immediately following this statement of Hegel’s supposed procedure, the critic continues: “Now it is safe to say that such an identification is absolutely groundless. To assert that the whole teeming life of the world, with its boundless activity, its inexhaustible wealth of content, is for knowledge literally ‘giver’ in its entirety, and only exists as so ‘given’ – this is surely the mere perversion of Experience in the interests of a speculative preconception.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n180">[180]</a></sup> Later he gives the following as the gist of his objection: “The process of science must not for a moment be taken to be equivalent to the fullness of the life of Experience itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n181">[181]</a></sup> The central part of this accusation, we notice, is that Hegel identifies the immediacy of experience, that immediacy which is the real, with the immediacy of science. He is made to maintain that the richness of reality, “the whole teeming life of the world, with its boundless activity its inexhaustible wealth of content,” may legitimately be forced into the abstract framework of scientific formulae. The wealth of the factual world and the glory of it, he is supposed to have transformed into the poverty of general principles and universal laws. Under his hands, it is said, the flesh and blood of living reality become so attenuated that only the skeleton is left us; and such a skeleton, we are asked to believe Hegel would have us accept for the pulsing life of concrete experience.</p>
<p>Now I venture to think that Hegel cannot fairly be accused of any such absurd contention. He must have known, as well as everybody else knows, that there is more to reality than mere thoughts about it. And he did. This is quite evident from the emphasis that he places from time to time upon the factual aspect of experience. Over and over again he urges that thought is true only in so far as it sinks itself in the facts, which certainly are more than the thoughts about them. With the reader’s permission I shall quote some other passages bearing on this point, in order to show that Hegel not only is not afraid of, but insists upon, the ‘logic of the fact.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n182">[182]</a></sup> In the sixth section of the Introduction to the smaller <em>Logic </em>we read: “The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and philosophy a mere system of such phantasms. It is also opposed by the very different fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have actuality, or something too impotent to procure it for themselves.</p>
<p>This divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to the analytic understanding which looks upon its own abstractions, dreams though they are, as something true and real, and prides itself on the imperative ‘ought,’ which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even on the field of politics.... The object of philosophy is the Idea: and the Idea is not so impotent as merely to have a right or obligation to exist without actually existing.” In the twenty-fourth section we read: “If thought tries to form a notion of things, this notion (as well as its proximate phases the judgment and syllogism) cannot be composed of articles and relations which are alien and irrelevant to the things.” And in the second lecture note: “When we think, we renounce our selfish and particular being, sink ourselves in the thing, allow thought to follow its own course, and, if we add anything of our own, we think ill.” If these passages (and others of similar import) do not mean that thought and the science of thought have to do with factual existence, then I fail to see what they do mean.</p>
<p>Thought always has an objective reference, they tell us, apart from which thought is nothing more than an abstraction; if the object is neglected, if the thing is left out of account. thought is useless. Indeed, if the object is neglected, thought is nothing; for it is just the expression of the essence of the object. This would seem to be Hegel’s meaning in these passages, and it certainly is in harmony with the spirit of his system.</p>
<p>The above accusation of Professor Baillie, one seems forced to say, is based upon a complete misinterpretation of Hegel’s actual procedure.</p>
<p>In the preface to the <em>Phenomenology </em>Hegel does, indeed, identify the ‘element of science’ with the standpoint of absolute knowledge; and this category, as we saw in the first chapter of this study, is the truth of experience. Thus it is true, in a sense, that the ‘element of science’ is the truth of experience. But – this is the vital point – Hegel does not mean by science here what Professor Baillie seems to think he means by it, namely, a system of abstract and general laws. On the contrary, he means by it just that concrete point of view of the category of absolute knowledge, whose nature and whose necessity as a presupposition of all experience it was the province of the <em>Phenomenology </em>to work out and elaborate.</p>
<p>Therefore, when Hegel maintains that we arrive at the truth of experience only when we enter the realm of science and that in this realm we seize reality in its essence, he certainly does not argue that reality is nothing more than scientific laws and universal principles, nor does he assume that the content of abstract science is ‘equivalent to the fullness of life itself.’ Such abstract principles, he would say, have their part to play in experience; but their part, though unquestionably important and extremely significant for any theory of ultimate reality, is not to assume the role of absolute and exhaustive formulae or principles. That science which is exhaustive of reality is only ‘absolute science’; it is on the plane not of the Understanding, but of Reason, where all ‘finite’ categories are viewed in their true light and where mere generality is seen to be what it really is – a blank abstraction.</p>
<p>Hegel’s real position or. this point may perhaps be set forth by the following considerations. The only immediacy which he would think of equating with reality is the immediacy of what he calls ‘absolute science.’ Now what is this immediacy? The immediacy of ‘absolute science’ is completely mediated immediacy, or thoroughly rationalized experience.</p>
<p>There are various forms of immediacy, such as that of common sense, of science, of religion, of philosophy, each of which, according to Hegel, has a degree of reality attaching to it proportional to the exhaustiveness of the mediation which it involves; the immediacy of ‘absolute science’ is the highest of these forms of immediacy, and is absolutely concrete because it involves absolutely exhaustive mediation.</p>
<p>Furthermore, each more exhaustively mediated form of immediacy does not simply negate the lower; it negates and affirms it, and affirms by negating. This, as we have seen, is the unique aspect of Hegel’s doctrine of the negative function of thought. The various stages of immediacy, therefore, are not opposed to, and more or less independent of each other; on the contrary, each is involved in all and all in each. And from this it follows that the immediacy of ‘absolute science,’ which is the only completely mediated immediacy, <em>ipso facto </em>includes within itself all the other forms of immediacy; the truth of all finds its expression in this form of immediacy. Thus that immediacy with which Hegel identifies reality is an immediacy which includes within itself the entire realm of experience, in its most trivial as well as in its most momentous and sublime reaches. For such is the immediacy of ‘absolute science.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n183">[183]</a></sup> So much for Professor Baillie’s misinterpretation of Hegel. I think we have shown that his criticism is beside the mark, and that is all we are concerned to do at present. The criticism itself implies a position the tenability of which we shall have to call in question later on in this chapter. We turn now to a consideration of Mr. McTaggart’s objection.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart’s criticism, though essentially the same as that of Professor Baillie, is presented from a different point of view and so demands separate notice. The conclusion of the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>is made the basis for this attack. There, it is asserted, Hegel explicitly maintains that philosophy is the highest expression of Spirit, and thus is guilty of equating reality with philosophical knowledge. But, the critic objects, the position that in philosophy one finds the complete exposition of ultimate reality is untenable. “Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.... We are thus, it would seem, bound down to the view that Hegel considered the supreme nature of Spirit to be expressed as knowledge, and as knowledge only.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n184">[184]</a></sup> “But knowledge,” we are further informed, “does not exhaust the nature of Spirit. The simplest introspection will show us that, besides knowledge, we have also volition, and the feeling of pleasure and pain. These are prima facie different from knowledge, and it does not seem possible that they should ever be reduced to it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n185">[185]</a></sup> Therefore, the critic concludes, in the final standpoint of the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>Hegel tried “to ignore volition, and to ignore pleasure and pain.” And, of course, “a view of Spirit which does this is fatally one-sided.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n186">[186]</a></sup> The assumption involved in this criticism is quite evident. It is that Philosophy, as Hegel defines it, has to do with purely discursive knowledge, that is, with cognition as opposed to feeling and volition, and with this alone. As the critic himself puts it: ‘Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.” Now it is just this assertion that I challenge. In the first place, as I have already argued in the somewhat detailed discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of immediacy and mediation, the account which Hegel gives us of philosophical knowledge not only ‘induces’ us, but forces us, to define philosophy as a science of more than mere cognition. In point of fact, philosophy, as Hegel uses the term, is the science of experience, since it has to do with that life of mind, reason, which is nothing more nor less than experience itself. In the second place, the assumption here is the same as the assumption above, and all we have said in answer to the latter applies equally well to the former.</p>
<p>The realm of philosophy Hegel identifies with the realm of ‘absolute science’; and it must never be forgotten that the standpoint of ‘absolute science’ is to be found in the category of absolute knowledge. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, always means more than mere abstract cognition: it is an immediacy which includes within itself the whole life of Spirit.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart is willing to admit that the conclusion which he sees in the last division of the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>is palpably inconsistent with the outcome of the Logic. In the Absolute Idea, he grants, volition as well as cognition is present. Hence the Absolute Idea “must be an idea richer and fuller than that of Cognition – richer and fuller by the content of the idea of volition.... The Absolute Idea then contains within itself the idea of knowledge as a transcended moment.” Thus “in giving the abstract framework of absolute reality in the Logic,” Hegel has at the same time given “a framework for something which, whatever it is, is more than any form of mere cognition.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n187">[187]</a></sup> Now I submit that the actual result of the Philosophy of Mind is not in the least inconsistent with this result of the Logic. Hegel always and everywhere maintains that philosophical knowledge includes within itself feeling, volition, cognition, in short all the action and passion of the human mind; and that, therefore, philosophy is the science of the real, if the realm of experience be the real. This position is the presupposition of the entire <em>Encyclopaedia</em>, and it is just as much involved in the last part as it is in the first. The proof of this contention has already been given in our attempt to state Hegel’s doctrine of thought and to determine the position of the Logic in the system.</p>
<p>It is suggestive and instructive to notice that, in criticising Hegel’s contention that philosophical knowledge is conterminous with the real, Mr. McTaggart attacks the very contention which he himself immediately afterwards champions. To see that this is true, one need only compare with Hegel’s thought the critic’s ultimate synthesis of the real. In stating the characteristics of the form of unity which he thinks would be an adequate expression of reality, Mr. McTaggart says: “It must be some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome – in which we neither judge our ideas by the world, nor the world by our ideas, but are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or other it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n188">[188]</a></sup> It matters not that these lines are supposed by their author to express an idea essentially different from what Hegel means by thought; one could not want a better summary of Hegel’s doctrine. Must feeling, volition, and cognition all be blended in the expression of ultimate reality? This, Hegel says, is accomplished in that state of conscious spirit which he calls thought: “It is present in every sensation, in cognition and knowledge, in the instincts, and in volition in so far as these are attributes of the human mind.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n189">[189]</a></sup> For “in the human being there is only one reason in feeling, volition, and thought or cognition.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n190">[190]</a></sup> Must the rift in discursive knowledge have been removed in this unity? This, Hegel tells us, is the characteristic peculiar to philosophical knowledge: the sciences “are finite because their mode of thought, as a merely formal act, derives its content from without.</p>
<p>Their content therefore is not known as moulded from within through the thoughts which lie at the ground of it, and form and content do not thoroughly interpenetrate each other. This partition disappears in philosophy, and thus justifies its title of infinite knowledge.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n191">[191]</a></sup> Must the immediate be no longer alien for the expression of the ultimately real? Our demand, Hegel assures us, is satisfied in Spirit: “As Adam said to Eve, ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ so says the Spirit, ‘This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation has disappeared.’”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n192">[192]</a></sup> Should that form of expression which exhausts the real be as direct as art and as universal as philosophy? Such a combination Hegel thinks he has found in philosophy itself: “The multifarious whole is reflected in it as in a single focus, in the Notion which knows itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n193">[193]</a></sup> In short, philosophical knowledge, as Hegel has defined it for us, meets all the requirements which Mr. McTaggart sees fit to make of the medium through which reality may receive adequate expression. And it does seem rather hard that an author should be criticized for upholding exactly the same position (barring terminology) as his critic champions.</p>
<p>Further detailed discussion of this point seems superfluous. Enough has already been said to show us not only that we are justified in concluding, but that we are forced to conclude, that Hegel does not equate reality with any process of formal knowledge. Such a position would be contrary to his own frequent explicit assertions, as well as to the presuppositions and actual procedure of his system. For his fundamental contention, both by word and deed, is that thought is the unifying principle of experience which includes within its diamond net the entire sphere of the activities and interests of the human soul. It subsumes within itself sensuous experience, moral and religious experience, scientific experience, all experience of which man is capable; it is the all-pervading harmonizer that illumines every phase of experience and makes it what it is. Only such thought as this, that is to say, experience, is what Hegel claims to be an adequate expression of the ultimately real. And with this we leave these misunderstandings and pass on to ask what form reality does actually assume in Hegel’s system.</p>
<p>There occurs a passage in Professor Bosanquet’s Logic which runs as follows: “It is important that we should dismiss the notion that the higher degrees of knowledge are necessarily and in the nature of intelligence framed out of abstractions that omit whatever has interest and peculiarity in the real world. Nothing has been more fatal to the truth and vitality of ideas than this prejudice.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n194">[194]</a></sup> It is certain that no prejudice has been more fatal to an appreciation of Hegel’s philosophy, and that, too, notwithstanding the fact that the author has constantly warned against the danger. And it would seem that the time has come when such a prejudice should be laid aside and an unbiased effort made to see exactly what Hegel has taught concerning the universal aspect which he thinks every unitary experience must have. Is there any other conception of universality possible than that which sets it down to mere abstraction? If there is, may it not be such a universality as will offer us a consistent explanation of experience and a satisfactory account of the ultimately real? May it not also be just the conception of universality that Hegel has in mind when he speaks of the ‘Notion,’ with which he equates reality and which he ever and anon assures us “is not a mere sum of features common to several things"?<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n195">[195]</a></sup> An honest look at experience forces us, it would seem, to assert that the real universal of actual thought is not that of formal logic. It is a notorious fact that we contradict the rules of the time-honored syllogism in our every-day thinking. Every developing science is an enigma to the formal principles of distributed middle and negative premises; and many of the simplest arguments of common sense cannot be forced into the syllogistic form. We are not surprised, therefore, that man, qua man, exists nowhere outside the texts on formal logic: not man has being in the real world, but only men. Professors Bradley and Bosanquet, following the lead of Hegel, have so clearly and exhaustively exposed these discrepancies in the procedure and presupposition of formal logic that it would be superfluous, if not presumptuous, for me to attempt to enlarge on them here.</p>
<p>It is sufficient for our present purpose simply to point out that the fundamental difficulty with the traditional logic is that it deals with an abstraction. It separates from each other two essentially inseparable aspects of experience, namely, form and content, and then concerns itself with one, namely, form, in isolation. There should be no wonder that its results are not applicable to concrete experience; the wonder perhaps is that, when so applied, they do not land us in more numerous antinomies. Of course, there is no such thing as thinking in the abstract, as if thought were indifferent to its object; and the universals that result from such an imaginary process can be nothing more than mere make-believes.</p>
<p>These universals of formal logic, as such, can have no part in reality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n196">[196]</a></sup> What, then, we ask, is the nature of the universal of concrete thought? I know of no better or clearer definition than that given by Professor Bosanquet in the introductory chapter to his <em>Logic</em>.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n197">[197]</a></sup> He there warns us to beware of thinking of the universals as the result of the process of selective omission of differences among phenomena; this is the error which proves so fatal to the significance of formal logic. The true universal, the universal that actually has a place in concrete experience, is rather the result of a synthesis of differences, the constructive analysis of phenomena. That is to say, progression towards true universality is simply the continuous organization and systematization of the data of experience. So far from it being true that thought takes place in vacuity apart from any content, thinking is nothing but the progressive organization of its content; apart from its content thought is absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>Since form and content are thus inseparable, the true form can be realized only when it is viewed in its essential relation to its correlative; and when it is so viewed it is seen to include the content within itself.</p>
<p>The true universal, therefore, is thought-content. It does not have to wait for its filling from without, for it has within it its own filling, and lives only by virtue of the vital significance that it possesses in reference to its content. In a word, the universal of thought is concrete, a synthesis of particulars. It has no meaning whatever, not even the semblance of one, in isolation from the material aspect of experience of which it is the form.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n198">[198]</a></sup> This change of attitude towards the syllogistic logic of the Scholastics and this doctrine of the concrete universal are really the fundaments of Hegel’s system. After the first Part of the present study this statement hardly needs further proof. It is true that the change in view-point was more or less unconsciously present in the epistemology of Kant and Jacobi, as Hegel himself points out.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n199">[199]</a></sup> But the change comes to full consciousness of itself only in Hegel’s own work. He openly revolts against the traditional tendency to regard the concept, judgment, and syllogism, as if they were sharply differentiated forms of abstract thought and not living manifestations of truth.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n200">[200]</a></sup> Naturally this change of view concerning the nature of thought brought with it a change of view concerning the result of thought. Since thought is no longer regarded as a process in abstraction, the universal of thought can no longer be thought of as the result of abstraction. If thought is the vital unity of the mind, the true universal of thought is simply the content of mind thoroughly rationalized and exhaustively explained. If thought is the Notion, the universal of thought is the universal of the Notion. And “the universal of the Notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n201">[201]</a></sup> That this doctrine of thought and universality is peculiarly Hegel’s own, there seems to be no doubt: the doctrine is the burden of his philosophy.</p>
<p>From these considerations we may pass at once to the conclusion that for Hegel the ultimately real must assume the form of concrete individuality. Neither the mere particular nor the blank universal will suffice; the real must be the particularized universal, the universalized particular. “Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity,” as Hegel himself puts it.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n202">[202]</a></sup> “Everything is a Notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n203">[203]</a></sup> The following hypothetical argument seems to sum up the matter: If it be true that thought is conterminous with experience, then certainly experience must somehow assume the form of universality; discrete particulars are excluded from it. If, in the second place, it be true that thought is simply the “indigenous becoming (<em>einheimische Werden</em>) of the concrete content,”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n204">[204]</a></sup> then its universality must be concrete, that is to say, the particulars must find their place within the sphere of the universal, which, itself, gets its meaning only by virtue of this relation to the particulars. Therefore the form of universality which experience takes (and it must take some form of universality) can be only that of the particularized universal, or, in a word, that of the individual. Now the chief purpose of this study has been to show that Hegel asserts the premises of this argument. It must be shown that this is erroneous before one may legitimately claim that Hegel equates reality either with the bare particular or with the abstract universal, or deny that he gives to the real the form of individuality.</p>
<p>That this is the correct account of Hegel’s view of reality may be shown in another way. The argument that is to be found in the <em>Logic</em>, under the head of the Notion, is in direct confirmation of the conclusion we have just reached. So we turn to this argument for further evidence on the point.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n205">[205]</a></sup> For our present purpose it will be sufficient to state the argument merely in its general outline. The triadic movement Hegel expresses under the following heads: (a) The Subjective Notion; (b) The Object; and (c) The Idea. The development here involved may be put in the following general manner. At the standpoint of the Subjective Notion we have presented to us the Notion as indeterminate and formal, the truth is given only implicitly.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n206">[206]</a></sup> In a sense, this may be said to be the point of view of formal logic, from which thought is looked upon as a sort of subjective process whose end is the formation of concepts and the manipulation of those concepts in the higher mental processes of the judgment and the syllogism. But, as Hegel goes on to show, it is impossible to rest at this point of view. It has inherent in it its own deficiency, in that it is an inadequate expression of the real nature of the Notion.</p>
<p>Thought cannot be confined to subjectivity; it is objective as well. Thus we are led on to the consideration of the Object – the second stage of the dialectical development. The Object is the ‘realization’ of the Notion, and the transition is accomplished through the syllogism of necessity, that is, the disjunctive syllogism.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n207">[207]</a></sup> But objectivity, like subjectivity, is not an adequate expression of the Notion; the Notion is neither merely subjective nor merely objective. The content, apart from the form, just as the form apart from the content, is an abstraction; the true view of the matter is reached only when we see that the two are one and inseparable. This unity of the two is the Idea, which is truth complete – the ultimately real.</p>
<p>It should be observed that this whole development is nothing more than the progressive definition of the nature of the Notion itself. As we shall see more fully below, the thesis is simply the expression of the form that the Notion, because of its very nature as form, assumes. The antithesis is the ‘realization’ of the Notion; that is to say, when the Notion has exhaustively differentiated itself in the judgment of necessity, the disjunctive judgment, it is seen to involve the object. The synthesis, finally, as Hegel himself observes, is nothing but the Notion taken in its particularity and universality. “Its ‘ideal’ content is nothing but the Notion in its detailed terms: its ‘real’ content is only the exhibition which the real gives itself in the form of external existence.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n208">[208]</a></sup> In a word, the Idea for Hegel is simply the Notion taken in its complete nature, as, on the one hand, a substantial somewhat, and, on the other hand, a meaning.</p>
<p>Since, now, the Idea is the form which ultimate reality assumes in Hegel’s system, it follows that the real is in the form of the Notion. This conclusion is in exact agreement with what we have been insisting on all along in this study, and it might be supported by numerous passages from various contexts. But this hardly seems necessary: presumably it will not be disputed that the Hegelian philosophy has to do with the unity of the Notion. If, then, we can here establish the claim that the unity of the Notion is that of the individual, our contention above will have been corroborated from another point of departure.</p>
<p>And it would seem that Hegel has left us in no doubt concerning his position on this point. In the first division of his discussion of the Notion, referred to above, he tells us quite plainly that the ultimate form of the Subjective Notion is individuality. The three members of the triad in this division are Universality, Particularity, and Individuality. Individuality is thus made the synthesis of the other two, and consequently must be considered the highest expression of the Subjective Notion. And there seems to be no particular difficulty in understanding what Hegel means by the individual. He means by it “the reflection-into-self of the specific characters of universality and particularity,”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n209">[209]</a></sup> or determinate universality (<em>bestimmte Allgemeinheit</em>).<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n210">[210]</a></sup> In contradistinction to indefinite multiplicity, it is “the particular and the universal in an identity.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n211">[211]</a></sup> In a word, individuality means for Hegel what it means for others, namely, unity within difference, harmony within diversity, a systematic whole.</p>
<p>The Subjective Notion, therefore, is a whole within which differences are found and through which those differences get their significance and reality. This seems to be a legitimate conclusion from the dialectical movement that takes place within the Notion as Notion.</p>
<p>But just here an objection awaits us. This may all be true of the Subjective Notion, but is it true of the Idea? Can we legitimately argue that, because the ultimate expression of the Subjective Notion is individuality, the ultimate expression of the real must be individuality? Have we not already seen that the Subjective Notion is the thesis of a triad of which the Idea is the synthesis, and is it not therefore false reasoning to say that the form of the Subjective Notion is adequate to the Idea? In a word, does the fact that Hegel maintains that individuality is the consummation of the process of thought justify us in the inference that for him the real is individual? We have already answered this objection in what we said above concerning the fact that the Idea is simply the Notion exhaustively analyzed.</p>
<p>It is true that the Idea is the Notion <em>completely differentiated</em>; but it is the Notion nevertheless. The dialectical development by means of which we are led to the Absolute Idea indicates this; for the Absolute Idea is the synthesis of the triadic development of the doctrine of the Notion. Indeed, the whole dialectical development of the third part of the <em>Logic </em>goes to prove that the Idea is the most perfect expression of the Notion. The Idea and individuality thus coincide. It is true, of course, that by passing in the Idea the Notion is enriched and intensified by all the intervening categories; this enrichment is really the significance of the advance. But this does not at all affect the fact that the form of the Notion does not change in the process, and that the Idea is simply the Notion seen in its truest light.</p>
<p>This is perhaps sufficient answer to the objection. But there is involved in it an assumption the error of which it will be worth while to expose. The assumption is that in the treatment of the Subjective Notion Hegel is dealing with the formal concept of the logic of the schools. One or two passages from the smaller <em>Logic </em>bearing on this point will suffice to show the falsity of the assumption. “It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the content of our mental ideas come first and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by the aforesaid operation of abstraction, and by colligating the points possessed in common by the objects, frames notions of them. Rather the Notion is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the Notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n212">[212]</a></sup> “No complaint is oftener made against the Notion than that it is <em>abstract</em>. Of course it is abstract, if abstract means that the medium in which the Notion exists is thought in general and not the sensible thing in its empirical concreteness. It is abstract also, because the Notion falls short of the Idea. To this extent the Subjective Notion is still formal. This however does not mean that it ought to have or receive another content than its own. It is itself the absolute form, and so is all specific character, but as that character is in its truth. Although it be abstract therefore, it is the concrete, concrete altogether, the subject as such.... What are called notions, and in fact specific notions, such as man, house, animal, etc., are simply denotations and abstract representations. These abstractions retain out of all the functions of the Notion only that of universality; they leave particularity and individuality out of account and have no development in these directions. By so doing they just miss the Notion.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n213">[213]</a></sup> These passages are found at the very beginning of the discussion of the Subjective Notion. At the end of this discussion we read: “To say that the Notion is subjective and subjective only, is so far quite correct: for the Notion certainly is subjectivity itself.... But we may go a step further. This subjectivity, with its functions of notion, judgment, and syllogism, is not like a set of empty compartments which has to get filled from without by separately existing objects. It would be truer to say that it is subjectivity itself which, as dialectical, breaks through its own barriers and opens out into objectivity by means of the syllogism.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n214">[214]</a></sup> The Subjective Notion, therefore, is not merely subjective; it is not a bare concept of formal logic that has only a psychological existence in some knowing consciousness. On the contrary, it is the life of the objects themselves, and is implicitly that which, when made explicit, becomes the Idea.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n215">[215]</a></sup> If, then, we are right in arguing that the real must conform itself to the Notion, and if the Notion is, when fully expressed, the individual, it seems to follow that the real must assume the form of the individual.</p>
<p>And this appears to be Hegel’s position as we find it expressed in the third part of the <em>Logic</em>. So our conclusion, which we before reached more or less indirectly, is based directly upon the dialectical development of the <em>Logic</em>.</p>
<p>Professor Pringle-Pattison has criticised Hegel for disparaging the individual, and that criticism must be examined here. It is based upon the following passage from the smaller Logic: “Sensible existence has been characterized by the attributes of individuality and mutual exclusion of the members. It is well to remember that these very attributes of sense are thoughts and general terms... . Language is the work of thought: and hence all that is expressed in language must be universal....</p>
<p>And what cannot be uttered, feeling or sensation, far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant or untrue. If I say ‘the unit,’ ‘this unit,’ ‘here,’ ‘now,’ all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a ‘this,’ or if it be sensible, is here and now.</p>
<p>Similarly, when I say ‘I,’ I mean my single self, to the exclusion of all others; but what I say, viz., ‘I,’ is just every other ‘I,’ which in like manner excludes all others from itself. .. . All other men have it in common with me to be ‘I’”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n216">[216]</a></sup> Commenting on this passage, the critic says: “This demonstration of the universal, or, to put it perhaps more plainly, the abstract nature of thought, even in the case of those terms which seem to lay most immediate hold upon reality, is both true and useful in its own place. But the legitimate conclusion from it in the present connection is not Hegel’s insinuated disparagement of the individual, but rather that which Tredelenburg draws from the very same considerations, that the individual, as such, is incommensurable or unapproachable by thought.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n217">[217]</a></sup> Or, as Mr. Bradley puts it still more roundly and trenchantly<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n218">[218]</a></sup> ‘The real is inaccessible by way of ideas.... We escape from ideas, and from mere universals, by a reference to the real which appears in perception.’” Now it seems to me unfair to charge Hegel here with disparagement of the individual. In the passage in question he has in mind discrete parts of experience, unorganized elements of sensuous perception; and it is these abstract sensations and feelings that he calls ‘unimportant and untrue.’ He does, indeed, in the same section speak of individuality as the essential feature of sense-experience; but that he means by this nothing more than that “sensible existence presents a number of mutually exclusive units,” he himself is at pains to tell us. So it would appear that the disparagement is of the isolated particular and not of the individual.</p>
<p>According to Hegel, it is not the individual which is the ‘unutterable’; for the very form of the judgment is the individual, it is essentially ‘a universal which is individualized.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n219">[219]</a></sup> The isolated, unrelated elements of abstract sense-perception and conception, these it is to which Hegel refuses to give any ultimate significance; for such discrete particulars are essentially unreal. And in this position Hegel differs little from his critic.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n220">[220]</a></sup> The real import of the section from which the above quotation is taken seems to be implied at least in a sentence of the passage which Professor Pringle-Pattison fails to quote. The sentence runs thus: “It will be shown in the Logic that thought (and the universal) is not a mere opposite of sense: it lets nothing escape it, but, outflanking its other, is at once that other and itself.” By this I understand Hegel to mean that he is to show in the Logic that thought is involved in sense-perception, that thought is a principle which, as he tells us in the very last sentence of the paragraph from which we have quoted, runs through all “sensations, conceptions, and states of consciousness.” And from this it would follow that even sense-experience is universalized, and to regard this experience as composed of discreet units is really to regard it abstractly.</p>
<p>That, it would seem, is what Hegel points out in the section under discussion.</p>
<p>It is the unrelated which is unutterable, because the universals of thought cannot get hold of it to express it. But the unrelated is not the individual, and one does not see how it could be the real. At all events, Hegel seems free from the charge of disparaging the individual here, meaning by the individual the universalized particular. It is just upon the individual that he is laying the emphasis, as against the doctrine of discrete particularity.</p>
<p>The doctrine of Hegel’s critics that the individual is unapproachable by way of ideas is a position which itself demands examination. In the first place, it seems to rest upon the doctrine that ideas, or categories, can be nothing but principles of cognition, that the assertion of the intelligibility of reality in terms of thought limits us to the mechanical categories (the categories of the sciences which have to do with factual existence) in our efforts to interpret reality. Now this doctrine is not self-evidently true, and should be tested as to its validity. Of course if it be true, we must admit at once that thought is not an adequate expression of reality; for we must all agree with Professor Royce that “individuality ... is a category indefinable in purely theoretical terms.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n221">[221]</a></sup> But is it true? According to Hegel’s doctrine of thought it is not true; Hegel’s thought includes categories of value as well as those of factual existence, and so he insists that the individual is expressible in terms of categories, though not necessarily the categories of pure cognition.</p>
<p>Whether or not Hegel’s doctrine of thought is true to the facts of experience we have tried to determine in the first Part of our study.</p>
<p>In the second place, this position involves a mistaken epistemological principle. Baldly stated, it is that the uniqueness of reality consists in its transcending knowledge. Mr. Bradley puts the position thus: “It is not by its quality, as a temporal event or phenomenon of space, that the given is unique. It is unique, not because it has a certain character, but because it is given.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n222">[222]</a></sup> The question naturally arises whether this statement actually agrees with the facts. One is inclined to dispute that it does. At any rate, the unique in this sense is certainly not synonymous with the term as it is commonly used. Let us take one or two examples.</p>
<p>What is a unique invention? Popularly, it is an invention that has properties and characteristics different from others of its class. But certainly its uniqueness is not thought of as consisting in the fact that the invention is inexplicable; if it were inexplicable, it would be simply a mystery and not anything unique at all. Suppose it were an intricate machine, which none but the man trained in mechanics could understand. Would it then be truly unique for anyone save the mechanician? It would seem that an invention is unique in terms of its peculiar properties and attributes, which must be known and appreciated as such; it is of such a known nature that it differs from all other creations of mechanical genius.</p>
<p>And the more intelligibly one succeeds in differentiating it from other such creations, the more clearly defined does its uniqueness become.</p>
<p>This same fact may be illustrated by the example of a unique personality. A person is unique only in so far as he differs from others, and he differs from others only because of certain positive characteristics that make him different. The assertion, “Ben is a unique character,” is, I dare say, a rather meaningless jumble of words; naturally, we must know more about Ben before we can appreciate his uniqueness. But “O rare Ben Jonson!” is an exclamation of genuine significance. What is the difference in the two cases? Is it not simply that in the latter our knowledge has something to attach to itself to, while in the former knowledge can get no foothold? And is it not permissible to argue that the more one knows of the characteristics of Ben Jonson, the more determinate and impressive grows the uniqueness of his individuality? Doubtless, in the minds of his associates and companions in the Mermaid the eccentricities of his genius were much more marked than they can be to us, assuming, of course, that the man was more fully known by personal contact with him. So it seems that the person, like the invention, is unique only because he possesses positive characteristics that make him unique; and apart from such positive characteristics uniqueness is lacking.</p>
<p>Now from the epistemological point of view, what does this amount to? Simply, I think, to the conclusion that uniqueness, individuality, is to be measured in terms of knowledge, not of ignorance. Before an object can be unique, it certainly must be self-identical; and the more completely self-identical it becomes, the more emphasized does its individuality appear. Now the vaguest self-identity implies reference beyond self; and apart from this reference to others self-identity is impossible.</p>
<p>But reference beyond self is relation, and relations are categories. Thus it would seem that the unique not only does not exclude categories, but, on the contrary, depends upon them for its very existence. It is only when an object is fully known to be itself, that is, when it is seen to differ determinately from others of its class, that it may legitimately be termed unique. Apart from universality individuality is a fiction. Thus the individual gets its uniqueness by being defined. That is unique which is seen to be itself, and only that which possesses attributes and qualities peculiar to itself can be differentiated from others. Of course an object may be negatively defined, that is, as not something else; but in order that such a definition have significance, it must give us positive knowledge of what we are negatively defining. For if the object of interest is not some other object, then the judgment of difference is based upon positive attributes which make its being the other object impossible; otherwise, there would be no sense in asserting the difference. In opposition to Mr. Bradley, therefore, we must argue that the ‘given’ is unique, not because it is given, but just because it possesses a certain character.</p>
<p>No brute fact is, as such, unique; it is a meaning for us, or it is nothing.</p>
<p>The uniqueness of reality is to be found only in its determinate character, not in its indeterminate factual existence.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n223">[223]</a></sup> A final objection to the position that reality is unapproachable by thought emerges from the preceding discussion. Is it not logically impossible for those who maintain that the real is inaccessible by way of ideas to assume the position that the real is individual? Are not these two contentions contradictory? The difficulty will be apparent from the following considerations. If the real is given us independently of thought and apart from its activity, then one would think that it must be represented only in the form of particularity. For, as Professor Bosanquet has reminded us, that which is supposed to come to us through abstract sense perception could come only as the unrelated particular; for the essence of sense is isolation. Feeling, uncontaminated by thought, stands on the same level with the senses in this respect.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n224">[224]</a></sup> Hegel himself has pointed out that what I feel is only mine, belongs peculiarly and exclusively to me, and, as mere feeling, must forever remain bound down to subjectivity, to bare particularity. But it must not be forgotten that the individual necessarily implies some form of universality. And the question at once arises, Whence does it get this form? If the assertion that has just been made of the senses and the feelings be true, as experience seems to teach that it is true, then universality cannot be produced by them; untouched by thought, they give and can give only the particular.</p>
<p>But if the universal character of the individual is the gift of thought, what justification can there be for the statement that the individual is unapproachable by thought? The contention seems to ignore the very process by which the result has come to be. Thus there seems to be a fundamental difficulty in the position which argues that the real is essentially beyond thought, and yet at the same time insists that the individual, and only the individual, is the real.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n225">[225]</a></sup> This difficulty may be accentuated by a somewhat detailed study of the inconsistencies that appear in Professor Baillie’s criticism of Hegel as quoted above. The digression, if it be a digression into which we shall thus be led, will perhaps throw some light on Hegel’s position by utilizing his principles in criticism of a position antagonistic to his own.</p>
<p>It is quite easy to see that Professor Baillie’s criticism is vitally bound up with the assumption that the real immediacy of experience cannot be mediated, and, consequently, lies beyond thought.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n226">[226]</a></sup> But it is not easy to see just what is meant by such an immediacy. Sometimes it is spoken of as if it were the immediacy of sense-perception: for example, we are told that “wherever we have an object present to the subject, there we have immediacy.” At other times, however, one is led to believe that the immediacy of reality is the unattainable goal of thought rather than its given point of departure. “Knowledge is not construction but reconstruction of Experience.... Experience again, on the other hand, is the compact and inexhaustible mine of fact to which knowledge ever recurs, which it seeks to fathom, ... the reproduction of which in its immediacy may be said to be its aim.” But in either case, whether the immediacy of reality be the first given from which thought can be only a process of abstraction, or the ideal towards which thought is an endless and essentially futile process of approximation, the conclusion that forces itself upon us is the same. And that conclusion is that the immediacy of experience, that immediacy which is reality, is of such a nature that thought is necessarily excluded from it; it is an immediacy with which the categories of knowledge have absolutely nothing to do. “The immediate in Experience, that immediate which is reality, is absolutely continuous with itself and admits of isolation in no sense whatever; the immediacy is indissoluble, otherwise Experience simply ceases to be.</p>
<p>This single immediacy of Experience we simply cannot have in knowledge; if so knowledge would not be knowledge but Experience.” “The complete realization of the nature of the Absolute must remain for knowledge even at its best an impossible achievement.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n227">[227]</a></sup> Now I venture to submit: (a) that such an immediate experience as Professor Baillie here identifies with reality is not possible; and (b) that, if it were possible, it could at most be but subjective and particular. Let us begin with the first of these contentions.</p>
<p>(a) All that has been said above concerning the impossibility of construing the uniqueness of the ‘given’ in terms of its merely factual aspect is applicable here. For what is this immediate experience but such an indeterminate ‘giver,’ whose individuality consists in the fact that it is so given? And what is such a unique given but a <em>contradictio in adjecto</em>? That which is merely given cannot possibly be unique, for it has no relations in terms of which its uniqueness is to be defined. The given is not in experience until it is at least recognized as a permanent somewhat which is itself and not something else; but when it is so recognized, it is no longer a merely indeterminate given. Experience certainly involves more than bare abstract fact.</p>
<p>To this may be added the following considerations. The only experience about which we know anything seems to possess at least a degree of unity. Life is at any rate livable, society does actually exist, and its many chaotic aspects cannot blind us to the orderly character of its being. Not even the simplest act of sense-perception, not to mention the more complex processes of intellectual and social activity, would be possible were there no unity within experience. But unity implies a unifying principle, and the unitary whole gets its significance only as it is construed in the light of this principle. What makes of experience a unity? Can the organic nature of experience be explained in terms of the senses, or the feelings, or the will? If in terms of the first, how refute the Sophists? If in terms of the second, how refute the mystics? If in terms of the third, how refute Schopenhauer? Is it not true that experience is a unity only by virtue of its principle of rationality; and that if any part of experience transcends or falls without this principle, it, by that very fact, ceases to be <em>aus einem St�cke</em>? The very conception of a unified experience would seem to necessitate the assumption that in its lowest and vaguest stages, as well as in its highest and sublimest reaches, its universal principle is active; and what this universal principle is seems to be a question that hardly admits of debate when once it is clearly put.</p>
<p>Now if such are the implications of experience, it is difficult to see what meaning can be given to Professor Baillie’s immediate experience from which every rational category is excluded. In point of fact, it seems to be too immediate to be experienced and so is essentially meaningless.</p>
<p>Whatever is in experience unquestionably must be experienced; but how anything can be experienced without somehow being known, that is, without at least being recognized as itself and so being subjected to a category, it is not easy to understand. That which by its very nature is incapable of being represented in consciousness cannot enter into the realm of possible experience; and to speak of an immediate experience that cannot be experienced seems to amount to an absurdity. Therefore it would seem that Professor Baillie’s conception of an immediate experience, beyond the categories of knowledge, must be given up; it is Nothing more than a mere phantom, a contradiction in terms.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n228">[228]</a></sup> (b) But, for the sake of the argument, let us grant the possibility of this experience in which thought can play no part. What is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Simply, I think, confined within the realm of abstract particularity. For in what does that experience which lies beyond thought consist, if not in an unrelated series of meaningless sense-perceptions, or of incoherent feelings, or of blind volitions? And what can such a series be but a disconnected array of discrete particulars? It is, of course, difficult to speculate concerning the nature of that which does not and cannot exist. But concerning this experience with which we are here attempting to deal, we may be sure of this, that, whatever else may or may not be true of it, it certainly cannot be objective and universal in any intelligible sense of those words. The essence of abstract sense is isolation and particularity, and feeling and volition, qua abstract feeling and volition, are entirely subjective and can be experienced by no one under the sun save the subject who psychologically possesses them. How, then, can these abstractions be called universal, and how could an experience made up exclusively of them be, in any sense whatever, objective? To put the question is to answer it. And the question, candidly faced, would seem to drive us to the conclusion that an experience that lies beyond the categories of rationality must assume the form of unrelated particularity. The prejudice, however, will not easily down. There must be a datum of experience which is just eternally there, and about which nothing more can be said. It forever eludes our grasp when we attempt to seize it by thinking it; but no sane person can deny its existence. Is not this datum given entirely independently of thought’s activity? And yet can it be denied that it comes to us, no matter how, as a part of our experience? Have we not here, then, an immediate experience which is more than an unrelated particular, and which, nevertheless, is entirely beyond the categories of thought? Everybody experiences the given, and yet its immediacy cannot appear in knowledge.</p>
<p>How does this very obvious fact square with the above assertions concerning the inherent absurdity of an immediate experience beyond thought? In the first place, attention should be directed here to a question of fact. One seems forced to point out that, as a matter of fact, there is no fixed ‘datum’ of experience. The so-called ‘given’ differs for different individuals and for the same individual at different times. In a very important sense that which is given depends upon the purposes and intellectual attainments of the one to whom it is given; and no one can doubt that such a basis is relative and is constantly changing. To the hard-pressed Richard on the battlefield the same horse would have been more of a reality by far than to the lazy beggar of Mother Goose renown; and the small boy, bent on mischief, actually sees in the stone at his feet characteristics quite different from what might appear to the eyes of the trained geologist. Other illustrations of this fact will suggest themselves. Of course this contention will not be misconstrued to mean that any phantasm that may chance to run through the mind actually does, for that reason, have a place in existential reality, that the subject creates perceptual experience. I certainly do not wish to minimize the factual aspect of experience. The point upon which emphasis is here intended to be placed is that the ‘giver,’ apart from an experiencing subject, is a blank abstraction, and that in relation to an experiencing subject it is more than a mere ‘given.’ The confusion upon which this doctrine of the ‘given’ rests is this: the object side of experience is taken from its context and then opposed to that experience as something standing over against it and independent of it Berkeley has long since pointed out the fallacy here. In this discussion it is necessary for us to rid our minds of this confusion. As Professor Bosanquet sums up the point: “The given and its extension differ not absolutely but relatively; they are continuous with each other, and the metaphor by which we speak of an extension conceals from us that the so-called ‘given’ is no less artificial than that by which it is extended.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n229">[229]</a></sup> In the second place, this insistence upon the ‘given’ lands us in insurmountable difficulties.. However the position is stated, so long as the immediate experience is too immediate for the categories of thought, it seems open to the above fatal objection that it must forever remain particular and subjective. To say that reality is found in a pure indeterminate datum, an unaccountable residuum of being, is to open the way for an influx of problems similar to those produced by Aristotle’s abstract separation of form from matter, or by Kant’s differentiation between the experienced phenomenon and its reality. It matters not that the datum is thought of as the material out of which the universals of knowledge are manufactured, or in which thought somehow finds the problems that determine its activity; the difficulties still remain. How the universals of thought are manufactured out of that which is confined to discreet particularity is not easily discovered. Nor can one see at a glance how that which lies beyond thought can really set a problem for thought.</p>
<p>If our world were such, one is inclined to think with Professor Royce that it would be “too much of a blind problem for us even to be puzzled by its meaningless presence.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n230">[230]</a></sup> Those who insist upon such an immediate experience should show by what right they appeal to the individual as the real, and by what reasoning they succeed in transcending abstract particularity within this experience. For there is certainly a difficulty here, and one that seems to be sufficiently weighty to cause the position to be, if not entirely abandoned, at least essentially modified.</p>
<p>But Professor Baillie may possibly object that, so far as he is concerned, all this is beside the mark. He may assert that he has no thought of equating reality with an unchangeable datum of experience, or with the abstract particular. His main contention, he may urge, is that reality cannot be exhausted by thought; thought is about reality, but cannot exhaust reality. The notions are not the reality of things, “for these are individual, and a notion, however concrete, is ... always a notion, i.e., a universal.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n231">[231]</a></sup> Reality, then, is not a chaotic state of immediacy, as has been represented in the discussion above; on the contrary, it is a unique whole which, on account of its very uniqueness, lies beyond the possibility of the universals of thought. It is not the starting-point from which thought abstracts, but the goal at which it aims – a goal, however, essentially beyond it. In a word, the objector may say, not abstract unrelatedness but an organic unity that is super-rational – such is the immediacy of that which may be called the real.</p>
<p>This objection, however, does not in the least change the situation. It makes no difference whether the ‘immediate’ is the indeterminate given of sense-perception with which thought works, or the unattainable ideal towards which thought strives; from the logical point of view the two positions are one and the same, and a justifiable criticism of the one holds of the other also. On this point Professor Baillie stands condemned by his own words: “If reality is in any sense beyond knowledge it is of no importance where, in the history of knowledge, the separation is made. To make knowledge bear an essentially asymptotic relation to reality is in principle precisely the same as to separate knowledge and reality absolutely from the start. The only difference is that the former puts the separation far away at infinity – ‘reality cannot be exhausted by thought’; the latter plants it down at our feet – ‘reality is outside knowledge.’ But this is a difference which is unimportant and meaningless: unimportant, since in both cases reality is beyond us, and the question of ‘when’ it becomes so does not concern knowledge: meaningless, since in both cases we can never say when knowledge actually has failed; the beyond is always a beyond in either case. The position referred to” (that is, the position expressed by Lotze, for example, when he asserts that ‘reality is richer than thought’) “is therefore rooted in dualism, in spite of the apparent concession of the worth of knowledge up to a certain point. For it must accept the alternative: either knowledge does give the nature of reality, in which case the question of amount and the time it takes to exhaust it is of no significance, since the nature of reality is explicitly known and implicitly cognizable; or there is at the outset a fundamental cleavage between the two, in which case at no point does knowledge give reality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n232">[232]</a></sup> And if this be true, we are reduced to the necessity of acknowledging that the separation between knowledge and reality, wherever the separation may appear, leads us into the difficulties of an indeterminate immediacy of experience.</p>
<p>As Hegel views the matter, the way out of these difficulties is exactly the reverse of the way in. We must define reality not as Substance but as Subject. That is to say, the real must be conceived of not as an indefinable somewhat about which nothing more can logically be said than that it just eternally is but as a thoroughly comprehensible system whose nature is expressed in its internal rational organization. Even granting that the categories which are adequate to its nature may be read in terms of sense-perception, or of blind will, or of pure cognition, or of abstract feeling, still we must say, if we are not to talk mere nonsense, that the immediacy of the real is the result of some sort of mediation and is intelligible by means of certain categories which actually do express its essential nature.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n233">[233]</a></sup> But sense-perception, blind will, pure cognition, mere feeling, have no categories to offer us for the unification of experience: the true universal runs through them all, and it is the one reason which is the life of experience.</p>
<p>Such is Hegel’s doctrine, and he insists that, if we are in earnest about transcending the standpoint of the Critical Philosophy, that is, if we are really in earnest when we deny the existence of a reality beyond the realm of possible experience, we must admit that no part of experience presents the enigmatic aspect of a mere abstract datum. For if that which is real is an indeterminate immediacy, an indefinable somewhat that lies beyond thought, wherein does it differ from the abstract particular or the thing-in-itself, or what earthly connection has it with actual concrete experience? Those who champion the position ought to take it upon themselves to remove the difficulty, and to point out in what respects their solution differs from Hegel’s own.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n234">[234]</a></sup> We may conclude this chapter with a brief summary of its main contentions.</p>
<p>Hegel equates reality with experience, and not with abstract formal knowledge as Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart seem to think.</p>
<p>When he asserts that the immediacy of reality is the immediacy of science, or that philosophy exhausts the nature of Spirit, he simply means to say that reality is not an insoluble mystery, but is essentially an ideal construction.</p>
<p>an interpretation and organization of the so-called ‘given.’ The real for him, therefore, is neither the abstract particular nor the blank universal; it is the universal filled, the particular made significant, in a word, the individual.</p>
<p>And the position that the real is individual, as he conceives the matter, necessarily involves the admission that concrete thought is no less extensive than the realm of concrete experience. For if any part of experience lies truly beyond thought, it seems to be devoid of universal characteristics and so differs in no intelligible sense from the abstract particular; and it is the validity of this contention that he would ask the upholders of the ‘pure experience’ theory to challenge. That the essential nature of which cannot be fully expressed in terms of knowledge is an incomprehensible datum which, by virtue of that fact, never appears in concrete experience.</p>
<p>And experience, organized and rationalized experience, and reality are one.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Part II.
Chapter IV. Reality as Individual.
In the preceding chapters of this study we have been concerned exclusively with Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought. We have learned that, according to his doctrine, thought is co-extensive with experience and consequently with reality itself: it has no datum opposed to and independent of it.[166] Thus an investigation of the nature of thought was necessary before we could arrive at a just appreciation of Hegel’s teaching concerning the nature of the ultimately real. Having now completed this investigation and having learned what Hegel has to say concerning the thought-process, we turn to the other aspect of our general problem and inquire about the details of Hegel’s doctrine of reality.
As we have already seen, Hegel insists that reality is the result of a process of mediation; it is not a first principle, but a last result. This is a contention upon which Hegel is constantly insisting. “If knowledge is to grasp the truth,” he tells us, “it must not remain at the standpoint of the immediately given and its determinations. On the contrary, it must penetrate this immediate being, assuming that behind it there is something other than itself, which hidden somewhat constitutes its truth.”[167] “Every immediate unity is only abstract potential truth, not real truth.”[168] “Concerning the Absolute, it is to be said that it is first as a result what it is in truth.”[169] The real is not to be found in sense-perception: it is only the result of the process of thought.[170] This emphasis of the mediated aspect of reality is one of the fundamental doctrines of the Hegelian philosophy, and the author never tires of reminding us of it.[171] The ultimately real is not shot out of a pistol at us; truth is not given, as it were, a coin from the mint. On the contrary, the real must be defined, and its definition comes only with developing experience and the growth of knowledge. It is only the labors of thought that can lead us to the land of reality.
This being true, it follows at once that the form of universality is, as Hegel views the matter, an essential aspect of the real. For, on this hypothesis, reality lies exclusively within the domain of thought; and thinking ipso facto necessitates the form of universality.[172] This implication of his system Hegel does not overlook. In the Naturphilosophie, for example, he urges that the universal aspect of objects is not to be considered as something foreign to them, a form which belongs to them only when they happen to be thought about; rather, the universal is absolutely essential to their reality, it is the noumenon, as it were, behind the transitory and fleeting phenomenon.[173] Reason, he tells us elsewhere, “is the certitude that its determinations are just as much objective, e.g., determinations of the essence of things, as they are subjective thoughts.”[174] Again, in opposition to the atomistic view of Locke and the empiricists to the effect that the universal does not in reality belong to objects, Hegel asserts: “To say ... that the universal is not the essential reality of nature ... is tantamount to saying that we do not know real existence.”[175] And an unknowable reality is, for Hegel, a contradiction in terms. Reality, then, does assume the form of universality; this is essential to its very being.
From this we may pass at once to the conclusion that the real, as Hegel conceives of it, cannot be the abstract particular. After what has just been said it is hardly necessary to argue this point further. Hegel would unhesitatingly assert that the particular, qua particular, is never found in experience at all. This is exactly what his doctrines of the inseparability of immediacy and mediation amounts to. The immediacy of reality is a mediated immediacy; and since the mediating process is that of thought which can advance only by means of universals, the immediacy of the real must transcend bare particularity. In a word, we may put the matter so: if knowledge is coextensive with experience, then the possibility that a mere particular may appear within experience is eliminated; whatever appears in knowledge must be more than a mere particular, for the universals of thought can lay hold only of that which somehow itself is universal. The abstract particular plays no part in reality. Against the idea that particularity is a form adequate to the real Hegel has some cogent objections to urge. And perhaps it would not be too much to say that those objections are rather obvious. In the first place, the particular seems to be absolutely nothing so far as experience is concerned. In order that it may be a part of experience it must, as Kant has shown us in his famous Transcendental Deduction of the categories, become universalized, must lose its abstract particularity. For the particular which is to be experienced must remain identical with itself through a period of time; and self-identity is universality. So the abstract particular has no part to play in experience, is impossible, indeed, within experience. But, in the second place, if we should grant the possibility of the abstract particular within experience, we should find ourselves in the midst of some puzzling problems. And not the least confusing is the question, What is an unrelated particular? Absolutely nothing can be said about it, because anything can be defined only in terms of its relations and a particular has no relations. Indeed, an abstract particular is simply an indefinable absolute. Hegel puts the difficulty thus: “The form of immediacy invests the particular with the character of independent or self-centered being. But such predicates contradict the very essence of the particular, – which is to be referred to something else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an absolute.”[176] And of course it is not easy to see how experience could possibly be composed of a number of unrelated absolutes. But it seems useless to stress this point further. It is plain, as Professor Pringle-Pattison has urged, that the mere particular finds a place to exist nowhere outside a logic which is not wholly clear about its own procedure.[177] But, granting that Hegel is not guilty of hypostatizing the abstract particular, what are we to say about his assertions concerning the universal? Are we so sure that he does not go to the other extreme and urge that experience consists in blank universality? Have we not seen that he maintains that to think the world is to cast it in the form of the universal, and is it not true that he reduces experience to terms of thought? Is he not always insisting that the universal, the Notion, is the very quintessence of the object? It is true, as we have all along seen, that Hegel has been generally accused of reducing the real to the form of abstract universality. This is the view of Haym, of Trendelenburg, of Lotze, indeed of all the critics of the Hegelian philosophy in general Even the sympathetic critics of the system are all practically agreed in making the same assumption. It is the very nerve of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s criticism, which we reviewed in some detail in the preceding chapter; and it is the nerve also of the criticisms of Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart, which we shall presently consider. Is Hegel really guilty of this accusation that has been brought against him by so many students of his philosophy, or is he not? If he is, then there can be no question that his system is as far from concrete experience as any system well can be. If he is not, then with the assumption fall the criticisms based upon it.
Our answer to the question is already determined, and our reasons for it already set forth. The answer must be an unequivocal and emphatic negative, its justification being found in the entire first part of this study. There it was the aim to let Hegel speak for himself; and if we are to believe what he has said, then we are forced to admit at least that it was not his intention to champion the position that reality is simply an aggregate of blank universals, a ‘ballet of bloodless categories.’ He does grant that thought is conterminous with experience, and, consequently, with reality itself; the real for him exists only in the form of the Notion.
About this there need be no dispute. Again, he as frankly admits that this position forces him to assume the further position that reality can be found only in universality; for “thinking means the bringing of something into the form of universality.”[178] Upon this all may agree. But the all-important point here, the point upon which there is difference of opinion, is the determination of Hegel’s doctrine of universality. This is really the bone of contention. What does Hegel mean by the form of universality which reality assumes? Does he mean by the universal of the Notion merely formal universality? If we dare maintain our position against the cloud of witnesses on the other side, we must hold that by his doctrine of the universality of the Notion Hegel means, not abstract generality, but concrete universality. This was the central thesis of our discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought, which we saw Hegel define, not as mere cognition, but as the very life of mind itself. In this Hegelian thought are included all the categories of the mind, from the barest, most empty sensation which only points dimly to the factual existence of an objective world, to the fullest, most concrete expression of the essential constitution of the world. As Hegel conceives the matter, experience is not reduced to the bare universals of cognition: cognition is only one aspect of the mental life, which includes within itself the categories of feeling and volition as well. To accuse him of reducing reality to blank universality, therefore, is to misapprehend what he means by the form of the Notion.[179] Both Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart give their opinion against the conclusion here advanced. These two professedly close and sympathetic students of Hegel maintain that he conceives reality to be nothing more than a process of discursive knowledge, that he reduces experience to blank universality. An examination in some detail of the grounds upon which these critics base their opinions will perhaps serve to clear up the problem before us.
The Phenomenology of Spirit forms the point of departure for Professor Baillie’s criticism. According to the critic, Hegel arrives at his fundamental position in the following manner: “All experience involves the relation of subject to object, and all Experience is fundamentally the life of mind; it finds its meaning and explanation in self-consciousness.
Now in the Phenomenology it was further shown that self-consciousness finds its most perfect expression in Absolute Science. In other words, that while all Experience is the realization of self-consciousness, Science is its truest form: it is ‘the crown of the life of mind.’ Therefore ... the immediacy of Experience is the immediacy of Science; the mediation constituting and constructing Experience is the mediation of Science.
What is immediate to life in indissoluble union with environment (in the widest sense of the term) is the same as what is ‘given’ or ‘immediate’ in Knowledge. In other words, Reality in its essence is a process of Knowledge.” In the paragraph immediately following this statement of Hegel’s supposed procedure, the critic continues: “Now it is safe to say that such an identification is absolutely groundless. To assert that the whole teeming life of the world, with its boundless activity, its inexhaustible wealth of content, is for knowledge literally ‘giver’ in its entirety, and only exists as so ‘given’ – this is surely the mere perversion of Experience in the interests of a speculative preconception.”[180] Later he gives the following as the gist of his objection: “The process of science must not for a moment be taken to be equivalent to the fullness of the life of Experience itself.”[181] The central part of this accusation, we notice, is that Hegel identifies the immediacy of experience, that immediacy which is the real, with the immediacy of science. He is made to maintain that the richness of reality, “the whole teeming life of the world, with its boundless activity its inexhaustible wealth of content,” may legitimately be forced into the abstract framework of scientific formulae. The wealth of the factual world and the glory of it, he is supposed to have transformed into the poverty of general principles and universal laws. Under his hands, it is said, the flesh and blood of living reality become so attenuated that only the skeleton is left us; and such a skeleton, we are asked to believe Hegel would have us accept for the pulsing life of concrete experience.
Now I venture to think that Hegel cannot fairly be accused of any such absurd contention. He must have known, as well as everybody else knows, that there is more to reality than mere thoughts about it. And he did. This is quite evident from the emphasis that he places from time to time upon the factual aspect of experience. Over and over again he urges that thought is true only in so far as it sinks itself in the facts, which certainly are more than the thoughts about them. With the reader’s permission I shall quote some other passages bearing on this point, in order to show that Hegel not only is not afraid of, but insists upon, the ‘logic of the fact.’[182] In the sixth section of the Introduction to the smaller Logic we read: “The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and philosophy a mere system of such phantasms. It is also opposed by the very different fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have actuality, or something too impotent to procure it for themselves.
This divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to the analytic understanding which looks upon its own abstractions, dreams though they are, as something true and real, and prides itself on the imperative ‘ought,’ which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even on the field of politics.... The object of philosophy is the Idea: and the Idea is not so impotent as merely to have a right or obligation to exist without actually existing.” In the twenty-fourth section we read: “If thought tries to form a notion of things, this notion (as well as its proximate phases the judgment and syllogism) cannot be composed of articles and relations which are alien and irrelevant to the things.” And in the second lecture note: “When we think, we renounce our selfish and particular being, sink ourselves in the thing, allow thought to follow its own course, and, if we add anything of our own, we think ill.” If these passages (and others of similar import) do not mean that thought and the science of thought have to do with factual existence, then I fail to see what they do mean.
Thought always has an objective reference, they tell us, apart from which thought is nothing more than an abstraction; if the object is neglected, if the thing is left out of account. thought is useless. Indeed, if the object is neglected, thought is nothing; for it is just the expression of the essence of the object. This would seem to be Hegel’s meaning in these passages, and it certainly is in harmony with the spirit of his system.
The above accusation of Professor Baillie, one seems forced to say, is based upon a complete misinterpretation of Hegel’s actual procedure.
In the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel does, indeed, identify the ‘element of science’ with the standpoint of absolute knowledge; and this category, as we saw in the first chapter of this study, is the truth of experience. Thus it is true, in a sense, that the ‘element of science’ is the truth of experience. But – this is the vital point – Hegel does not mean by science here what Professor Baillie seems to think he means by it, namely, a system of abstract and general laws. On the contrary, he means by it just that concrete point of view of the category of absolute knowledge, whose nature and whose necessity as a presupposition of all experience it was the province of the Phenomenology to work out and elaborate.
Therefore, when Hegel maintains that we arrive at the truth of experience only when we enter the realm of science and that in this realm we seize reality in its essence, he certainly does not argue that reality is nothing more than scientific laws and universal principles, nor does he assume that the content of abstract science is ‘equivalent to the fullness of life itself.’ Such abstract principles, he would say, have their part to play in experience; but their part, though unquestionably important and extremely significant for any theory of ultimate reality, is not to assume the role of absolute and exhaustive formulae or principles. That science which is exhaustive of reality is only ‘absolute science’; it is on the plane not of the Understanding, but of Reason, where all ‘finite’ categories are viewed in their true light and where mere generality is seen to be what it really is – a blank abstraction.
Hegel’s real position or. this point may perhaps be set forth by the following considerations. The only immediacy which he would think of equating with reality is the immediacy of what he calls ‘absolute science.’ Now what is this immediacy? The immediacy of ‘absolute science’ is completely mediated immediacy, or thoroughly rationalized experience.
There are various forms of immediacy, such as that of common sense, of science, of religion, of philosophy, each of which, according to Hegel, has a degree of reality attaching to it proportional to the exhaustiveness of the mediation which it involves; the immediacy of ‘absolute science’ is the highest of these forms of immediacy, and is absolutely concrete because it involves absolutely exhaustive mediation.
Furthermore, each more exhaustively mediated form of immediacy does not simply negate the lower; it negates and affirms it, and affirms by negating. This, as we have seen, is the unique aspect of Hegel’s doctrine of the negative function of thought. The various stages of immediacy, therefore, are not opposed to, and more or less independent of each other; on the contrary, each is involved in all and all in each. And from this it follows that the immediacy of ‘absolute science,’ which is the only completely mediated immediacy, ipso facto includes within itself all the other forms of immediacy; the truth of all finds its expression in this form of immediacy. Thus that immediacy with which Hegel identifies reality is an immediacy which includes within itself the entire realm of experience, in its most trivial as well as in its most momentous and sublime reaches. For such is the immediacy of ‘absolute science.’[183] So much for Professor Baillie’s misinterpretation of Hegel. I think we have shown that his criticism is beside the mark, and that is all we are concerned to do at present. The criticism itself implies a position the tenability of which we shall have to call in question later on in this chapter. We turn now to a consideration of Mr. McTaggart’s objection.
Mr. McTaggart’s criticism, though essentially the same as that of Professor Baillie, is presented from a different point of view and so demands separate notice. The conclusion of the Philosophy of Mind is made the basis for this attack. There, it is asserted, Hegel explicitly maintains that philosophy is the highest expression of Spirit, and thus is guilty of equating reality with philosophical knowledge. But, the critic objects, the position that in philosophy one finds the complete exposition of ultimate reality is untenable. “Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.... We are thus, it would seem, bound down to the view that Hegel considered the supreme nature of Spirit to be expressed as knowledge, and as knowledge only.”[184] “But knowledge,” we are further informed, “does not exhaust the nature of Spirit. The simplest introspection will show us that, besides knowledge, we have also volition, and the feeling of pleasure and pain. These are prima facie different from knowledge, and it does not seem possible that they should ever be reduced to it.”[185] Therefore, the critic concludes, in the final standpoint of the Encyclopaedia Hegel tried “to ignore volition, and to ignore pleasure and pain.” And, of course, “a view of Spirit which does this is fatally one-sided.”[186] The assumption involved in this criticism is quite evident. It is that Philosophy, as Hegel defines it, has to do with purely discursive knowledge, that is, with cognition as opposed to feeling and volition, and with this alone. As the critic himself puts it: ‘Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.” Now it is just this assertion that I challenge. In the first place, as I have already argued in the somewhat detailed discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of immediacy and mediation, the account which Hegel gives us of philosophical knowledge not only ‘induces’ us, but forces us, to define philosophy as a science of more than mere cognition. In point of fact, philosophy, as Hegel uses the term, is the science of experience, since it has to do with that life of mind, reason, which is nothing more nor less than experience itself. In the second place, the assumption here is the same as the assumption above, and all we have said in answer to the latter applies equally well to the former.
The realm of philosophy Hegel identifies with the realm of ‘absolute science’; and it must never be forgotten that the standpoint of ‘absolute science’ is to be found in the category of absolute knowledge. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, always means more than mere abstract cognition: it is an immediacy which includes within itself the whole life of Spirit.
Mr. McTaggart is willing to admit that the conclusion which he sees in the last division of the Philosophy of Mind is palpably inconsistent with the outcome of the Logic. In the Absolute Idea, he grants, volition as well as cognition is present. Hence the Absolute Idea “must be an idea richer and fuller than that of Cognition – richer and fuller by the content of the idea of volition.... The Absolute Idea then contains within itself the idea of knowledge as a transcended moment.” Thus “in giving the abstract framework of absolute reality in the Logic,” Hegel has at the same time given “a framework for something which, whatever it is, is more than any form of mere cognition.”[187] Now I submit that the actual result of the Philosophy of Mind is not in the least inconsistent with this result of the Logic. Hegel always and everywhere maintains that philosophical knowledge includes within itself feeling, volition, cognition, in short all the action and passion of the human mind; and that, therefore, philosophy is the science of the real, if the realm of experience be the real. This position is the presupposition of the entire Encyclopaedia, and it is just as much involved in the last part as it is in the first. The proof of this contention has already been given in our attempt to state Hegel’s doctrine of thought and to determine the position of the Logic in the system.
It is suggestive and instructive to notice that, in criticising Hegel’s contention that philosophical knowledge is conterminous with the real, Mr. McTaggart attacks the very contention which he himself immediately afterwards champions. To see that this is true, one need only compare with Hegel’s thought the critic’s ultimate synthesis of the real. In stating the characteristics of the form of unity which he thinks would be an adequate expression of reality, Mr. McTaggart says: “It must be some state of conscious spirit in which the opposition of cognition and volition is overcome – in which we neither judge our ideas by the world, nor the world by our ideas, but are aware that inner and outer are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or other it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as certain and universal as philosophy.”[188] It matters not that these lines are supposed by their author to express an idea essentially different from what Hegel means by thought; one could not want a better summary of Hegel’s doctrine. Must feeling, volition, and cognition all be blended in the expression of ultimate reality? This, Hegel says, is accomplished in that state of conscious spirit which he calls thought: “It is present in every sensation, in cognition and knowledge, in the instincts, and in volition in so far as these are attributes of the human mind.”[189] For “in the human being there is only one reason in feeling, volition, and thought or cognition.[190] Must the rift in discursive knowledge have been removed in this unity? This, Hegel tells us, is the characteristic peculiar to philosophical knowledge: the sciences “are finite because their mode of thought, as a merely formal act, derives its content from without.
Their content therefore is not known as moulded from within through the thoughts which lie at the ground of it, and form and content do not thoroughly interpenetrate each other. This partition disappears in philosophy, and thus justifies its title of infinite knowledge.”[191] Must the immediate be no longer alien for the expression of the ultimately real? Our demand, Hegel assures us, is satisfied in Spirit: “As Adam said to Eve, ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ so says the Spirit, ‘This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation has disappeared.’”[192] Should that form of expression which exhausts the real be as direct as art and as universal as philosophy? Such a combination Hegel thinks he has found in philosophy itself: “The multifarious whole is reflected in it as in a single focus, in the Notion which knows itself.”[193] In short, philosophical knowledge, as Hegel has defined it for us, meets all the requirements which Mr. McTaggart sees fit to make of the medium through which reality may receive adequate expression. And it does seem rather hard that an author should be criticized for upholding exactly the same position (barring terminology) as his critic champions.
Further detailed discussion of this point seems superfluous. Enough has already been said to show us not only that we are justified in concluding, but that we are forced to conclude, that Hegel does not equate reality with any process of formal knowledge. Such a position would be contrary to his own frequent explicit assertions, as well as to the presuppositions and actual procedure of his system. For his fundamental contention, both by word and deed, is that thought is the unifying principle of experience which includes within its diamond net the entire sphere of the activities and interests of the human soul. It subsumes within itself sensuous experience, moral and religious experience, scientific experience, all experience of which man is capable; it is the all-pervading harmonizer that illumines every phase of experience and makes it what it is. Only such thought as this, that is to say, experience, is what Hegel claims to be an adequate expression of the ultimately real. And with this we leave these misunderstandings and pass on to ask what form reality does actually assume in Hegel’s system.
There occurs a passage in Professor Bosanquet’s Logic which runs as follows: “It is important that we should dismiss the notion that the higher degrees of knowledge are necessarily and in the nature of intelligence framed out of abstractions that omit whatever has interest and peculiarity in the real world. Nothing has been more fatal to the truth and vitality of ideas than this prejudice.”[194] It is certain that no prejudice has been more fatal to an appreciation of Hegel’s philosophy, and that, too, notwithstanding the fact that the author has constantly warned against the danger. And it would seem that the time has come when such a prejudice should be laid aside and an unbiased effort made to see exactly what Hegel has taught concerning the universal aspect which he thinks every unitary experience must have. Is there any other conception of universality possible than that which sets it down to mere abstraction? If there is, may it not be such a universality as will offer us a consistent explanation of experience and a satisfactory account of the ultimately real? May it not also be just the conception of universality that Hegel has in mind when he speaks of the ‘Notion,’ with which he equates reality and which he ever and anon assures us “is not a mere sum of features common to several things"?[195] An honest look at experience forces us, it would seem, to assert that the real universal of actual thought is not that of formal logic. It is a notorious fact that we contradict the rules of the time-honored syllogism in our every-day thinking. Every developing science is an enigma to the formal principles of distributed middle and negative premises; and many of the simplest arguments of common sense cannot be forced into the syllogistic form. We are not surprised, therefore, that man, qua man, exists nowhere outside the texts on formal logic: not man has being in the real world, but only men. Professors Bradley and Bosanquet, following the lead of Hegel, have so clearly and exhaustively exposed these discrepancies in the procedure and presupposition of formal logic that it would be superfluous, if not presumptuous, for me to attempt to enlarge on them here.
It is sufficient for our present purpose simply to point out that the fundamental difficulty with the traditional logic is that it deals with an abstraction. It separates from each other two essentially inseparable aspects of experience, namely, form and content, and then concerns itself with one, namely, form, in isolation. There should be no wonder that its results are not applicable to concrete experience; the wonder perhaps is that, when so applied, they do not land us in more numerous antinomies. Of course, there is no such thing as thinking in the abstract, as if thought were indifferent to its object; and the universals that result from such an imaginary process can be nothing more than mere make-believes.
These universals of formal logic, as such, can have no part in reality.[196] What, then, we ask, is the nature of the universal of concrete thought? I know of no better or clearer definition than that given by Professor Bosanquet in the introductory chapter to his Logic.[197] He there warns us to beware of thinking of the universals as the result of the process of selective omission of differences among phenomena; this is the error which proves so fatal to the significance of formal logic. The true universal, the universal that actually has a place in concrete experience, is rather the result of a synthesis of differences, the constructive analysis of phenomena. That is to say, progression towards true universality is simply the continuous organization and systematization of the data of experience. So far from it being true that thought takes place in vacuity apart from any content, thinking is nothing but the progressive organization of its content; apart from its content thought is absolutely nothing.
Since form and content are thus inseparable, the true form can be realized only when it is viewed in its essential relation to its correlative; and when it is so viewed it is seen to include the content within itself.
The true universal, therefore, is thought-content. It does not have to wait for its filling from without, for it has within it its own filling, and lives only by virtue of the vital significance that it possesses in reference to its content. In a word, the universal of thought is concrete, a synthesis of particulars. It has no meaning whatever, not even the semblance of one, in isolation from the material aspect of experience of which it is the form.[198] This change of attitude towards the syllogistic logic of the Scholastics and this doctrine of the concrete universal are really the fundaments of Hegel’s system. After the first Part of the present study this statement hardly needs further proof. It is true that the change in view-point was more or less unconsciously present in the epistemology of Kant and Jacobi, as Hegel himself points out.[199] But the change comes to full consciousness of itself only in Hegel’s own work. He openly revolts against the traditional tendency to regard the concept, judgment, and syllogism, as if they were sharply differentiated forms of abstract thought and not living manifestations of truth.[200] Naturally this change of view concerning the nature of thought brought with it a change of view concerning the result of thought. Since thought is no longer regarded as a process in abstraction, the universal of thought can no longer be thought of as the result of abstraction. If thought is the vital unity of the mind, the true universal of thought is simply the content of mind thoroughly rationalized and exhaustively explained. If thought is the Notion, the universal of thought is the universal of the Notion. And “the universal of the Notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis.”[201] That this doctrine of thought and universality is peculiarly Hegel’s own, there seems to be no doubt: the doctrine is the burden of his philosophy.
From these considerations we may pass at once to the conclusion that for Hegel the ultimately real must assume the form of concrete individuality. Neither the mere particular nor the blank universal will suffice; the real must be the particularized universal, the universalized particular. “Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity,” as Hegel himself puts it.[202] “Everything is a Notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual.”[203] The following hypothetical argument seems to sum up the matter: If it be true that thought is conterminous with experience, then certainly experience must somehow assume the form of universality; discrete particulars are excluded from it. If, in the second place, it be true that thought is simply the “indigenous becoming (einheimische Werden) of the concrete content,”[204] then its universality must be concrete, that is to say, the particulars must find their place within the sphere of the universal, which, itself, gets its meaning only by virtue of this relation to the particulars. Therefore the form of universality which experience takes (and it must take some form of universality) can be only that of the particularized universal, or, in a word, that of the individual. Now the chief purpose of this study has been to show that Hegel asserts the premises of this argument. It must be shown that this is erroneous before one may legitimately claim that Hegel equates reality either with the bare particular or with the abstract universal, or deny that he gives to the real the form of individuality.
That this is the correct account of Hegel’s view of reality may be shown in another way. The argument that is to be found in the Logic, under the head of the Notion, is in direct confirmation of the conclusion we have just reached. So we turn to this argument for further evidence on the point.[205] For our present purpose it will be sufficient to state the argument merely in its general outline. The triadic movement Hegel expresses under the following heads: (a) The Subjective Notion; (b) The Object; and (c) The Idea. The development here involved may be put in the following general manner. At the standpoint of the Subjective Notion we have presented to us the Notion as indeterminate and formal, the truth is given only implicitly.[206] In a sense, this may be said to be the point of view of formal logic, from which thought is looked upon as a sort of subjective process whose end is the formation of concepts and the manipulation of those concepts in the higher mental processes of the judgment and the syllogism. But, as Hegel goes on to show, it is impossible to rest at this point of view. It has inherent in it its own deficiency, in that it is an inadequate expression of the real nature of the Notion.
Thought cannot be confined to subjectivity; it is objective as well. Thus we are led on to the consideration of the Object – the second stage of the dialectical development. The Object is the ‘realization’ of the Notion, and the transition is accomplished through the syllogism of necessity, that is, the disjunctive syllogism.[207] But objectivity, like subjectivity, is not an adequate expression of the Notion; the Notion is neither merely subjective nor merely objective. The content, apart from the form, just as the form apart from the content, is an abstraction; the true view of the matter is reached only when we see that the two are one and inseparable. This unity of the two is the Idea, which is truth complete – the ultimately real.
It should be observed that this whole development is nothing more than the progressive definition of the nature of the Notion itself. As we shall see more fully below, the thesis is simply the expression of the form that the Notion, because of its very nature as form, assumes. The antithesis is the ‘realization’ of the Notion; that is to say, when the Notion has exhaustively differentiated itself in the judgment of necessity, the disjunctive judgment, it is seen to involve the object. The synthesis, finally, as Hegel himself observes, is nothing but the Notion taken in its particularity and universality. “Its ‘ideal’ content is nothing but the Notion in its detailed terms: its ‘real’ content is only the exhibition which the real gives itself in the form of external existence.”[208] In a word, the Idea for Hegel is simply the Notion taken in its complete nature, as, on the one hand, a substantial somewhat, and, on the other hand, a meaning.
Since, now, the Idea is the form which ultimate reality assumes in Hegel’s system, it follows that the real is in the form of the Notion. This conclusion is in exact agreement with what we have been insisting on all along in this study, and it might be supported by numerous passages from various contexts. But this hardly seems necessary: presumably it will not be disputed that the Hegelian philosophy has to do with the unity of the Notion. If, then, we can here establish the claim that the unity of the Notion is that of the individual, our contention above will have been corroborated from another point of departure.
And it would seem that Hegel has left us in no doubt concerning his position on this point. In the first division of his discussion of the Notion, referred to above, he tells us quite plainly that the ultimate form of the Subjective Notion is individuality. The three members of the triad in this division are Universality, Particularity, and Individuality. Individuality is thus made the synthesis of the other two, and consequently must be considered the highest expression of the Subjective Notion. And there seems to be no particular difficulty in understanding what Hegel means by the individual. He means by it “the reflection-into-self of the specific characters of universality and particularity,”[209] or determinate universality (bestimmte Allgemeinheit).[210] In contradistinction to indefinite multiplicity, it is “the particular and the universal in an identity.”[211] In a word, individuality means for Hegel what it means for others, namely, unity within difference, harmony within diversity, a systematic whole.
The Subjective Notion, therefore, is a whole within which differences are found and through which those differences get their significance and reality. This seems to be a legitimate conclusion from the dialectical movement that takes place within the Notion as Notion.
But just here an objection awaits us. This may all be true of the Subjective Notion, but is it true of the Idea? Can we legitimately argue that, because the ultimate expression of the Subjective Notion is individuality, the ultimate expression of the real must be individuality? Have we not already seen that the Subjective Notion is the thesis of a triad of which the Idea is the synthesis, and is it not therefore false reasoning to say that the form of the Subjective Notion is adequate to the Idea? In a word, does the fact that Hegel maintains that individuality is the consummation of the process of thought justify us in the inference that for him the real is individual? We have already answered this objection in what we said above concerning the fact that the Idea is simply the Notion exhaustively analyzed.
It is true that the Idea is the Notion completely differentiated; but it is the Notion nevertheless. The dialectical development by means of which we are led to the Absolute Idea indicates this; for the Absolute Idea is the synthesis of the triadic development of the doctrine of the Notion. Indeed, the whole dialectical development of the third part of the Logic goes to prove that the Idea is the most perfect expression of the Notion. The Idea and individuality thus coincide. It is true, of course, that by passing in the Idea the Notion is enriched and intensified by all the intervening categories; this enrichment is really the significance of the advance. But this does not at all affect the fact that the form of the Notion does not change in the process, and that the Idea is simply the Notion seen in its truest light.
This is perhaps sufficient answer to the objection. But there is involved in it an assumption the error of which it will be worth while to expose. The assumption is that in the treatment of the Subjective Notion Hegel is dealing with the formal concept of the logic of the schools. One or two passages from the smaller Logic bearing on this point will suffice to show the falsity of the assumption. “It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the content of our mental ideas come first and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by the aforesaid operation of abstraction, and by colligating the points possessed in common by the objects, frames notions of them. Rather the Notion is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the Notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them.”[212] “No complaint is oftener made against the Notion than that it is abstract. Of course it is abstract, if abstract means that the medium in which the Notion exists is thought in general and not the sensible thing in its empirical concreteness. It is abstract also, because the Notion falls short of the Idea. To this extent the Subjective Notion is still formal. This however does not mean that it ought to have or receive another content than its own. It is itself the absolute form, and so is all specific character, but as that character is in its truth. Although it be abstract therefore, it is the concrete, concrete altogether, the subject as such.... What are called notions, and in fact specific notions, such as man, house, animal, etc., are simply denotations and abstract representations. These abstractions retain out of all the functions of the Notion only that of universality; they leave particularity and individuality out of account and have no development in these directions. By so doing they just miss the Notion.” [213] These passages are found at the very beginning of the discussion of the Subjective Notion. At the end of this discussion we read: “To say that the Notion is subjective and subjective only, is so far quite correct: for the Notion certainly is subjectivity itself.... But we may go a step further. This subjectivity, with its functions of notion, judgment, and syllogism, is not like a set of empty compartments which has to get filled from without by separately existing objects. It would be truer to say that it is subjectivity itself which, as dialectical, breaks through its own barriers and opens out into objectivity by means of the syllogism.”[214] The Subjective Notion, therefore, is not merely subjective; it is not a bare concept of formal logic that has only a psychological existence in some knowing consciousness. On the contrary, it is the life of the objects themselves, and is implicitly that which, when made explicit, becomes the Idea.[215] If, then, we are right in arguing that the real must conform itself to the Notion, and if the Notion is, when fully expressed, the individual, it seems to follow that the real must assume the form of the individual.
And this appears to be Hegel’s position as we find it expressed in the third part of the Logic. So our conclusion, which we before reached more or less indirectly, is based directly upon the dialectical development of the Logic.
Professor Pringle-Pattison has criticised Hegel for disparaging the individual, and that criticism must be examined here. It is based upon the following passage from the smaller Logic: “Sensible existence has been characterized by the attributes of individuality and mutual exclusion of the members. It is well to remember that these very attributes of sense are thoughts and general terms... . Language is the work of thought: and hence all that is expressed in language must be universal....
And what cannot be uttered, feeling or sensation, far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant or untrue. If I say ‘the unit,’ ‘this unit,’ ‘here,’ ‘now,’ all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a ‘this,’ or if it be sensible, is here and now.
Similarly, when I say ‘I,’ I mean my single self, to the exclusion of all others; but what I say, viz., ‘I,’ is just every other ‘I,’ which in like manner excludes all others from itself. .. . All other men have it in common with me to be ‘I’”[216] Commenting on this passage, the critic says: “This demonstration of the universal, or, to put it perhaps more plainly, the abstract nature of thought, even in the case of those terms which seem to lay most immediate hold upon reality, is both true and useful in its own place. But the legitimate conclusion from it in the present connection is not Hegel’s insinuated disparagement of the individual, but rather that which Tredelenburg draws from the very same considerations, that the individual, as such, is incommensurable or unapproachable by thought.[217] Or, as Mr. Bradley puts it still more roundly and trenchantly[218] ‘The real is inaccessible by way of ideas.... We escape from ideas, and from mere universals, by a reference to the real which appears in perception.’” Now it seems to me unfair to charge Hegel here with disparagement of the individual. In the passage in question he has in mind discrete parts of experience, unorganized elements of sensuous perception; and it is these abstract sensations and feelings that he calls ‘unimportant and untrue.’ He does, indeed, in the same section speak of individuality as the essential feature of sense-experience; but that he means by this nothing more than that “sensible existence presents a number of mutually exclusive units,” he himself is at pains to tell us. So it would appear that the disparagement is of the isolated particular and not of the individual.
According to Hegel, it is not the individual which is the ‘unutterable’; for the very form of the judgment is the individual, it is essentially ‘a universal which is individualized.’[219] The isolated, unrelated elements of abstract sense-perception and conception, these it is to which Hegel refuses to give any ultimate significance; for such discrete particulars are essentially unreal. And in this position Hegel differs little from his critic.[220] The real import of the section from which the above quotation is taken seems to be implied at least in a sentence of the passage which Professor Pringle-Pattison fails to quote. The sentence runs thus: “It will be shown in the Logic that thought (and the universal) is not a mere opposite of sense: it lets nothing escape it, but, outflanking its other, is at once that other and itself.” By this I understand Hegel to mean that he is to show in the Logic that thought is involved in sense-perception, that thought is a principle which, as he tells us in the very last sentence of the paragraph from which we have quoted, runs through all “sensations, conceptions, and states of consciousness.” And from this it would follow that even sense-experience is universalized, and to regard this experience as composed of discreet units is really to regard it abstractly.
That, it would seem, is what Hegel points out in the section under discussion.
It is the unrelated which is unutterable, because the universals of thought cannot get hold of it to express it. But the unrelated is not the individual, and one does not see how it could be the real. At all events, Hegel seems free from the charge of disparaging the individual here, meaning by the individual the universalized particular. It is just upon the individual that he is laying the emphasis, as against the doctrine of discrete particularity.
The doctrine of Hegel’s critics that the individual is unapproachable by way of ideas is a position which itself demands examination. In the first place, it seems to rest upon the doctrine that ideas, or categories, can be nothing but principles of cognition, that the assertion of the intelligibility of reality in terms of thought limits us to the mechanical categories (the categories of the sciences which have to do with factual existence) in our efforts to interpret reality. Now this doctrine is not self-evidently true, and should be tested as to its validity. Of course if it be true, we must admit at once that thought is not an adequate expression of reality; for we must all agree with Professor Royce that “individuality ... is a category indefinable in purely theoretical terms.”[221] But is it true? According to Hegel’s doctrine of thought it is not true; Hegel’s thought includes categories of value as well as those of factual existence, and so he insists that the individual is expressible in terms of categories, though not necessarily the categories of pure cognition.
Whether or not Hegel’s doctrine of thought is true to the facts of experience we have tried to determine in the first Part of our study.
In the second place, this position involves a mistaken epistemological principle. Baldly stated, it is that the uniqueness of reality consists in its transcending knowledge. Mr. Bradley puts the position thus: “It is not by its quality, as a temporal event or phenomenon of space, that the given is unique. It is unique, not because it has a certain character, but because it is given.”[222] The question naturally arises whether this statement actually agrees with the facts. One is inclined to dispute that it does. At any rate, the unique in this sense is certainly not synonymous with the term as it is commonly used. Let us take one or two examples.
What is a unique invention? Popularly, it is an invention that has properties and characteristics different from others of its class. But certainly its uniqueness is not thought of as consisting in the fact that the invention is inexplicable; if it were inexplicable, it would be simply a mystery and not anything unique at all. Suppose it were an intricate machine, which none but the man trained in mechanics could understand. Would it then be truly unique for anyone save the mechanician? It would seem that an invention is unique in terms of its peculiar properties and attributes, which must be known and appreciated as such; it is of such a known nature that it differs from all other creations of mechanical genius.
And the more intelligibly one succeeds in differentiating it from other such creations, the more clearly defined does its uniqueness become.
This same fact may be illustrated by the example of a unique personality. A person is unique only in so far as he differs from others, and he differs from others only because of certain positive characteristics that make him different. The assertion, “Ben is a unique character,” is, I dare say, a rather meaningless jumble of words; naturally, we must know more about Ben before we can appreciate his uniqueness. But “O rare Ben Jonson!” is an exclamation of genuine significance. What is the difference in the two cases? Is it not simply that in the latter our knowledge has something to attach to itself to, while in the former knowledge can get no foothold? And is it not permissible to argue that the more one knows of the characteristics of Ben Jonson, the more determinate and impressive grows the uniqueness of his individuality? Doubtless, in the minds of his associates and companions in the Mermaid the eccentricities of his genius were much more marked than they can be to us, assuming, of course, that the man was more fully known by personal contact with him. So it seems that the person, like the invention, is unique only because he possesses positive characteristics that make him unique; and apart from such positive characteristics uniqueness is lacking.
Now from the epistemological point of view, what does this amount to? Simply, I think, to the conclusion that uniqueness, individuality, is to be measured in terms of knowledge, not of ignorance. Before an object can be unique, it certainly must be self-identical; and the more completely self-identical it becomes, the more emphasized does its individuality appear. Now the vaguest self-identity implies reference beyond self; and apart from this reference to others self-identity is impossible.
But reference beyond self is relation, and relations are categories. Thus it would seem that the unique not only does not exclude categories, but, on the contrary, depends upon them for its very existence. It is only when an object is fully known to be itself, that is, when it is seen to differ determinately from others of its class, that it may legitimately be termed unique. Apart from universality individuality is a fiction. Thus the individual gets its uniqueness by being defined. That is unique which is seen to be itself, and only that which possesses attributes and qualities peculiar to itself can be differentiated from others. Of course an object may be negatively defined, that is, as not something else; but in order that such a definition have significance, it must give us positive knowledge of what we are negatively defining. For if the object of interest is not some other object, then the judgment of difference is based upon positive attributes which make its being the other object impossible; otherwise, there would be no sense in asserting the difference. In opposition to Mr. Bradley, therefore, we must argue that the ‘given’ is unique, not because it is given, but just because it possesses a certain character.
No brute fact is, as such, unique; it is a meaning for us, or it is nothing.
The uniqueness of reality is to be found only in its determinate character, not in its indeterminate factual existence.[223] A final objection to the position that reality is unapproachable by thought emerges from the preceding discussion. Is it not logically impossible for those who maintain that the real is inaccessible by way of ideas to assume the position that the real is individual? Are not these two contentions contradictory? The difficulty will be apparent from the following considerations. If the real is given us independently of thought and apart from its activity, then one would think that it must be represented only in the form of particularity. For, as Professor Bosanquet has reminded us, that which is supposed to come to us through abstract sense perception could come only as the unrelated particular; for the essence of sense is isolation. Feeling, uncontaminated by thought, stands on the same level with the senses in this respect.[224] Hegel himself has pointed out that what I feel is only mine, belongs peculiarly and exclusively to me, and, as mere feeling, must forever remain bound down to subjectivity, to bare particularity. But it must not be forgotten that the individual necessarily implies some form of universality. And the question at once arises, Whence does it get this form? If the assertion that has just been made of the senses and the feelings be true, as experience seems to teach that it is true, then universality cannot be produced by them; untouched by thought, they give and can give only the particular.
But if the universal character of the individual is the gift of thought, what justification can there be for the statement that the individual is unapproachable by thought? The contention seems to ignore the very process by which the result has come to be. Thus there seems to be a fundamental difficulty in the position which argues that the real is essentially beyond thought, and yet at the same time insists that the individual, and only the individual, is the real.[225] This difficulty may be accentuated by a somewhat detailed study of the inconsistencies that appear in Professor Baillie’s criticism of Hegel as quoted above. The digression, if it be a digression into which we shall thus be led, will perhaps throw some light on Hegel’s position by utilizing his principles in criticism of a position antagonistic to his own.
It is quite easy to see that Professor Baillie’s criticism is vitally bound up with the assumption that the real immediacy of experience cannot be mediated, and, consequently, lies beyond thought.[226] But it is not easy to see just what is meant by such an immediacy. Sometimes it is spoken of as if it were the immediacy of sense-perception: for example, we are told that “wherever we have an object present to the subject, there we have immediacy.” At other times, however, one is led to believe that the immediacy of reality is the unattainable goal of thought rather than its given point of departure. “Knowledge is not construction but reconstruction of Experience.... Experience again, on the other hand, is the compact and inexhaustible mine of fact to which knowledge ever recurs, which it seeks to fathom, ... the reproduction of which in its immediacy may be said to be its aim.” But in either case, whether the immediacy of reality be the first given from which thought can be only a process of abstraction, or the ideal towards which thought is an endless and essentially futile process of approximation, the conclusion that forces itself upon us is the same. And that conclusion is that the immediacy of experience, that immediacy which is reality, is of such a nature that thought is necessarily excluded from it; it is an immediacy with which the categories of knowledge have absolutely nothing to do. “The immediate in Experience, that immediate which is reality, is absolutely continuous with itself and admits of isolation in no sense whatever; the immediacy is indissoluble, otherwise Experience simply ceases to be.
This single immediacy of Experience we simply cannot have in knowledge; if so knowledge would not be knowledge but Experience.” “The complete realization of the nature of the Absolute must remain for knowledge even at its best an impossible achievement.”[227] Now I venture to submit: (a) that such an immediate experience as Professor Baillie here identifies with reality is not possible; and (b) that, if it were possible, it could at most be but subjective and particular. Let us begin with the first of these contentions.
(a) All that has been said above concerning the impossibility of construing the uniqueness of the ‘given’ in terms of its merely factual aspect is applicable here. For what is this immediate experience but such an indeterminate ‘giver,’ whose individuality consists in the fact that it is so given? And what is such a unique given but a contradictio in adjecto? That which is merely given cannot possibly be unique, for it has no relations in terms of which its uniqueness is to be defined. The given is not in experience until it is at least recognized as a permanent somewhat which is itself and not something else; but when it is so recognized, it is no longer a merely indeterminate given. Experience certainly involves more than bare abstract fact.
To this may be added the following considerations. The only experience about which we know anything seems to possess at least a degree of unity. Life is at any rate livable, society does actually exist, and its many chaotic aspects cannot blind us to the orderly character of its being. Not even the simplest act of sense-perception, not to mention the more complex processes of intellectual and social activity, would be possible were there no unity within experience. But unity implies a unifying principle, and the unitary whole gets its significance only as it is construed in the light of this principle. What makes of experience a unity? Can the organic nature of experience be explained in terms of the senses, or the feelings, or the will? If in terms of the first, how refute the Sophists? If in terms of the second, how refute the mystics? If in terms of the third, how refute Schopenhauer? Is it not true that experience is a unity only by virtue of its principle of rationality; and that if any part of experience transcends or falls without this principle, it, by that very fact, ceases to be aus einem St�cke? The very conception of a unified experience would seem to necessitate the assumption that in its lowest and vaguest stages, as well as in its highest and sublimest reaches, its universal principle is active; and what this universal principle is seems to be a question that hardly admits of debate when once it is clearly put.
Now if such are the implications of experience, it is difficult to see what meaning can be given to Professor Baillie’s immediate experience from which every rational category is excluded. In point of fact, it seems to be too immediate to be experienced and so is essentially meaningless.
Whatever is in experience unquestionably must be experienced; but how anything can be experienced without somehow being known, that is, without at least being recognized as itself and so being subjected to a category, it is not easy to understand. That which by its very nature is incapable of being represented in consciousness cannot enter into the realm of possible experience; and to speak of an immediate experience that cannot be experienced seems to amount to an absurdity. Therefore it would seem that Professor Baillie’s conception of an immediate experience, beyond the categories of knowledge, must be given up; it is Nothing more than a mere phantom, a contradiction in terms.[228] (b) But, for the sake of the argument, let us grant the possibility of this experience in which thought can play no part. What is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Simply, I think, confined within the realm of abstract particularity. For in what does that experience which lies beyond thought consist, if not in an unrelated series of meaningless sense-perceptions, or of incoherent feelings, or of blind volitions? And what can such a series be but a disconnected array of discrete particulars? It is, of course, difficult to speculate concerning the nature of that which does not and cannot exist. But concerning this experience with which we are here attempting to deal, we may be sure of this, that, whatever else may or may not be true of it, it certainly cannot be objective and universal in any intelligible sense of those words. The essence of abstract sense is isolation and particularity, and feeling and volition, qua abstract feeling and volition, are entirely subjective and can be experienced by no one under the sun save the subject who psychologically possesses them. How, then, can these abstractions be called universal, and how could an experience made up exclusively of them be, in any sense whatever, objective? To put the question is to answer it. And the question, candidly faced, would seem to drive us to the conclusion that an experience that lies beyond the categories of rationality must assume the form of unrelated particularity. The prejudice, however, will not easily down. There must be a datum of experience which is just eternally there, and about which nothing more can be said. It forever eludes our grasp when we attempt to seize it by thinking it; but no sane person can deny its existence. Is not this datum given entirely independently of thought’s activity? And yet can it be denied that it comes to us, no matter how, as a part of our experience? Have we not here, then, an immediate experience which is more than an unrelated particular, and which, nevertheless, is entirely beyond the categories of thought? Everybody experiences the given, and yet its immediacy cannot appear in knowledge.
How does this very obvious fact square with the above assertions concerning the inherent absurdity of an immediate experience beyond thought? In the first place, attention should be directed here to a question of fact. One seems forced to point out that, as a matter of fact, there is no fixed ‘datum’ of experience. The so-called ‘given’ differs for different individuals and for the same individual at different times. In a very important sense that which is given depends upon the purposes and intellectual attainments of the one to whom it is given; and no one can doubt that such a basis is relative and is constantly changing. To the hard-pressed Richard on the battlefield the same horse would have been more of a reality by far than to the lazy beggar of Mother Goose renown; and the small boy, bent on mischief, actually sees in the stone at his feet characteristics quite different from what might appear to the eyes of the trained geologist. Other illustrations of this fact will suggest themselves. Of course this contention will not be misconstrued to mean that any phantasm that may chance to run through the mind actually does, for that reason, have a place in existential reality, that the subject creates perceptual experience. I certainly do not wish to minimize the factual aspect of experience. The point upon which emphasis is here intended to be placed is that the ‘giver,’ apart from an experiencing subject, is a blank abstraction, and that in relation to an experiencing subject it is more than a mere ‘given.’ The confusion upon which this doctrine of the ‘given’ rests is this: the object side of experience is taken from its context and then opposed to that experience as something standing over against it and independent of it Berkeley has long since pointed out the fallacy here. In this discussion it is necessary for us to rid our minds of this confusion. As Professor Bosanquet sums up the point: “The given and its extension differ not absolutely but relatively; they are continuous with each other, and the metaphor by which we speak of an extension conceals from us that the so-called ‘given’ is no less artificial than that by which it is extended.”[229] In the second place, this insistence upon the ‘given’ lands us in insurmountable difficulties.. However the position is stated, so long as the immediate experience is too immediate for the categories of thought, it seems open to the above fatal objection that it must forever remain particular and subjective. To say that reality is found in a pure indeterminate datum, an unaccountable residuum of being, is to open the way for an influx of problems similar to those produced by Aristotle’s abstract separation of form from matter, or by Kant’s differentiation between the experienced phenomenon and its reality. It matters not that the datum is thought of as the material out of which the universals of knowledge are manufactured, or in which thought somehow finds the problems that determine its activity; the difficulties still remain. How the universals of thought are manufactured out of that which is confined to discreet particularity is not easily discovered. Nor can one see at a glance how that which lies beyond thought can really set a problem for thought.
If our world were such, one is inclined to think with Professor Royce that it would be “too much of a blind problem for us even to be puzzled by its meaningless presence.”[230] Those who insist upon such an immediate experience should show by what right they appeal to the individual as the real, and by what reasoning they succeed in transcending abstract particularity within this experience. For there is certainly a difficulty here, and one that seems to be sufficiently weighty to cause the position to be, if not entirely abandoned, at least essentially modified.
But Professor Baillie may possibly object that, so far as he is concerned, all this is beside the mark. He may assert that he has no thought of equating reality with an unchangeable datum of experience, or with the abstract particular. His main contention, he may urge, is that reality cannot be exhausted by thought; thought is about reality, but cannot exhaust reality. The notions are not the reality of things, “for these are individual, and a notion, however concrete, is ... always a notion, i.e., a universal.”[231] Reality, then, is not a chaotic state of immediacy, as has been represented in the discussion above; on the contrary, it is a unique whole which, on account of its very uniqueness, lies beyond the possibility of the universals of thought. It is not the starting-point from which thought abstracts, but the goal at which it aims – a goal, however, essentially beyond it. In a word, the objector may say, not abstract unrelatedness but an organic unity that is super-rational – such is the immediacy of that which may be called the real.
This objection, however, does not in the least change the situation. It makes no difference whether the ‘immediate’ is the indeterminate given of sense-perception with which thought works, or the unattainable ideal towards which thought strives; from the logical point of view the two positions are one and the same, and a justifiable criticism of the one holds of the other also. On this point Professor Baillie stands condemned by his own words: “If reality is in any sense beyond knowledge it is of no importance where, in the history of knowledge, the separation is made. To make knowledge bear an essentially asymptotic relation to reality is in principle precisely the same as to separate knowledge and reality absolutely from the start. The only difference is that the former puts the separation far away at infinity – ‘reality cannot be exhausted by thought’; the latter plants it down at our feet – ‘reality is outside knowledge.’ But this is a difference which is unimportant and meaningless: unimportant, since in both cases reality is beyond us, and the question of ‘when’ it becomes so does not concern knowledge: meaningless, since in both cases we can never say when knowledge actually has failed; the beyond is always a beyond in either case. The position referred to” (that is, the position expressed by Lotze, for example, when he asserts that ‘reality is richer than thought’) “is therefore rooted in dualism, in spite of the apparent concession of the worth of knowledge up to a certain point. For it must accept the alternative: either knowledge does give the nature of reality, in which case the question of amount and the time it takes to exhaust it is of no significance, since the nature of reality is explicitly known and implicitly cognizable; or there is at the outset a fundamental cleavage between the two, in which case at no point does knowledge give reality.”[232] And if this be true, we are reduced to the necessity of acknowledging that the separation between knowledge and reality, wherever the separation may appear, leads us into the difficulties of an indeterminate immediacy of experience.
As Hegel views the matter, the way out of these difficulties is exactly the reverse of the way in. We must define reality not as Substance but as Subject. That is to say, the real must be conceived of not as an indefinable somewhat about which nothing more can logically be said than that it just eternally is but as a thoroughly comprehensible system whose nature is expressed in its internal rational organization. Even granting that the categories which are adequate to its nature may be read in terms of sense-perception, or of blind will, or of pure cognition, or of abstract feeling, still we must say, if we are not to talk mere nonsense, that the immediacy of the real is the result of some sort of mediation and is intelligible by means of certain categories which actually do express its essential nature.[233] But sense-perception, blind will, pure cognition, mere feeling, have no categories to offer us for the unification of experience: the true universal runs through them all, and it is the one reason which is the life of experience.
Such is Hegel’s doctrine, and he insists that, if we are in earnest about transcending the standpoint of the Critical Philosophy, that is, if we are really in earnest when we deny the existence of a reality beyond the realm of possible experience, we must admit that no part of experience presents the enigmatic aspect of a mere abstract datum. For if that which is real is an indeterminate immediacy, an indefinable somewhat that lies beyond thought, wherein does it differ from the abstract particular or the thing-in-itself, or what earthly connection has it with actual concrete experience? Those who champion the position ought to take it upon themselves to remove the difficulty, and to point out in what respects their solution differs from Hegel’s own.[234] We may conclude this chapter with a brief summary of its main contentions.
Hegel equates reality with experience, and not with abstract formal knowledge as Professor Baillie and Mr. McTaggart seem to think.
When he asserts that the immediacy of reality is the immediacy of science, or that philosophy exhausts the nature of Spirit, he simply means to say that reality is not an insoluble mystery, but is essentially an ideal construction.
an interpretation and organization of the so-called ‘given.’ The real for him, therefore, is neither the abstract particular nor the blank universal; it is the universal filled, the particular made significant, in a word, the individual.
And the position that the real is individual, as he conceives the matter, necessarily involves the admission that concrete thought is no less extensive than the realm of concrete experience. For if any part of experience lies truly beyond thought, it seems to be devoid of universal characteristics and so differs in no intelligible sense from the abstract particular; and it is the validity of this contention that he would ask the upholders of the ‘pure experience’ theory to challenge. That the essential nature of which cannot be fully expressed in terms of knowledge is an incomprehensible datum which, by virtue of that fact, never appears in concrete experience.
And experience, organized and rationalized experience, and reality are one.
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h3>Preface.</h3>
<p>Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that there is no system of thought more intimately bound up with one fundamental principle than is the system of Hegel. Even a cursory reading of his works is sufficient to convince one that the doctrine of the Notion, whatever it may be, is basic to the system; and a more detailed study only forces the conviction home. In the <em>Phenomenology</em>, in the <em>Encyclopaedia</em>, in the <em>History of Philosophy</em>, in the <em>Philosophy of Religion</em>, everywhere it is this doctrine of the Notion upon which emphasis is laid. Indeed, if one were to say that the entire system is just the explication of this doctrine, its elaboration by definition and application, one would be well within the bounds of justification. A correct interpretation of the system, consequently, depends upon a thorough comprehension of the doctrine of the Notion; if this doctrine is neglected, the system must remain a sealed book. The aim of the present monograph is to set forth this doctrine of the Notion, to emphasize its importance for a theory of knowledge, and, in the light of it, to give some insight into Hegel’s conception of ultimate reality.</p>
<p>The first chapter of this study was read in part before the meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Cornell University in December, 1907. Subsequently it was published in an expanded form in <em>The Philosophical Review </em>(Vol. XVII, pp. 619-642), under the title “The Significance of the Hegelian Conception of Absolute Knowledge.” My thanks are due to the editor of the <em>Review </em>for his permission to reprint it here substantially as it appeared there.</p>
<p>My very great indebtedness to various books and authors is sufficiently testified to by the footnotes. The references to the larger <em>Logic </em>are to the edition of 1841, published by Duncker and Humblot. The translations of Hegel’s works, to which I have referred for assistance and from which I have freely quoted, are: W. Wallace, <em>The Logic of Hegel </em>(second edition, 1892); W. Wallace, <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>(1894); S. W. Dyde, <em>Philosophy of Right </em>(1896); E. B. Speirs and J. B.</p>
<p>Sanderson, <em>Philosophy of Religion </em>(three volumes, 1895); E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson, <em>History of Philosophy </em>(three volumes, 1894); J. Sibree, <em>Philosophy of History </em>(reprint of 1902). I have not followed the translations verbatim in every case; but what few changes have been made are, I trust, not less faithful to the original.</p>
<p>To the members of the Sage School of Philosophy I am deeply indebted for many suggestions both consciously and unconsciously given.</p>
<p>Professor G. H. Sabine, of Leland Stanford Jr. University, has read a portion of the study in manuscript and has aided me in the not very pleasant task of proof-reading. My heaviest debt of gratitude is to Professor J. E. Creighton, of Cornell University, at whose suggestion the study was first undertaken and under whose guidance and encouragement it has been brought to completion. The study would be much more imperfect than it now appears, were there not incorporated in it Professor Creighton’s many valuable suggestions and criticisms. For the content of the monograph, however, I myself must alone be held responsible.</p>
<p class="fst">G. W. C.<br>
Middlebury College, September, 1910.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Preface.
Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that there is no system of thought more intimately bound up with one fundamental principle than is the system of Hegel. Even a cursory reading of his works is sufficient to convince one that the doctrine of the Notion, whatever it may be, is basic to the system; and a more detailed study only forces the conviction home. In the Phenomenology, in the Encyclopaedia, in the History of Philosophy, in the Philosophy of Religion, everywhere it is this doctrine of the Notion upon which emphasis is laid. Indeed, if one were to say that the entire system is just the explication of this doctrine, its elaboration by definition and application, one would be well within the bounds of justification. A correct interpretation of the system, consequently, depends upon a thorough comprehension of the doctrine of the Notion; if this doctrine is neglected, the system must remain a sealed book. The aim of the present monograph is to set forth this doctrine of the Notion, to emphasize its importance for a theory of knowledge, and, in the light of it, to give some insight into Hegel’s conception of ultimate reality.
The first chapter of this study was read in part before the meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Cornell University in December, 1907. Subsequently it was published in an expanded form in The Philosophical Review (Vol. XVII, pp. 619-642), under the title “The Significance of the Hegelian Conception of Absolute Knowledge.” My thanks are due to the editor of the Review for his permission to reprint it here substantially as it appeared there.
My very great indebtedness to various books and authors is sufficiently testified to by the footnotes. The references to the larger Logic are to the edition of 1841, published by Duncker and Humblot. The translations of Hegel’s works, to which I have referred for assistance and from which I have freely quoted, are: W. Wallace, The Logic of Hegel (second edition, 1892); W. Wallace, Philosophy of Mind (1894); S. W. Dyde, Philosophy of Right (1896); E. B. Speirs and J. B.
Sanderson, Philosophy of Religion (three volumes, 1895); E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson, History of Philosophy (three volumes, 1894); J. Sibree, Philosophy of History (reprint of 1902). I have not followed the translations verbatim in every case; but what few changes have been made are, I trust, not less faithful to the original.
To the members of the Sage School of Philosophy I am deeply indebted for many suggestions both consciously and unconsciously given.
Professor G. H. Sabine, of Leland Stanford Jr. University, has read a portion of the study in manuscript and has aided me in the not very pleasant task of proof-reading. My heaviest debt of gratitude is to Professor J. E. Creighton, of Cornell University, at whose suggestion the study was first undertaken and under whose guidance and encouragement it has been brought to completion. The study would be much more imperfect than it now appears, were there not incorporated in it Professor Creighton’s many valuable suggestions and criticisms. For the content of the monograph, however, I myself must alone be held responsible.
G. W. C.
Middlebury College, September, 1910.
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h3>Chapter II The Process of Thought: Mediation and Negation.</h3>
<p>In criticism of Hegel’s position that the science of Philosophy can adequately express the nature of the ultimately real, Mr. McTaggart says: “Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n58">[58]</a></sup> I quote this criticism because it contains an assumption which I wish to challenge, and thus sets the problem for the present chapter. The assumption is that philosophical thought, as Hegel defines it, is bare cognition to which the other aspects of the mental life bear only an external relation, that it is simply one among other elements coordinate with it, and that, consequently, it can at most be only a mediating activity among these other elements of experience which forever lie beyond and external to it. It is the justice of this assumption which the following pages will call in question. We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that such a position is foreign to Hegel’s system, and that philosophy for him is action and feeling as well as cognition. But it may be well to emphasize the fact from another point of view. So we now address ourselves to the task of establishing the thesis that Hegel’s account of philosophy does force us to give to the word a meaning essentially different from that which the above criticism attaches to it. We shall support this thesis with an exposition of the process of philosophical knowledge as it is presented in Hegel’s doctrine of mediation and negation.</p>
<p>In the preface to the <em>Phenomenology of Sprit</em>,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n59">[59]</a></sup> Hegel has been at pains to point out that, if we are to appreciate what he means by philosophy and the standpoint which it assumes, we must make an effort to understand what he means by absolute knowledge and by mediation. In the preceding chapter we investigated the nature and significance of absolute knowledge. And that investigation showed us that absolute knowledge is simply Hegel’s definition of the essential nature of thought as he uses the term, and that thought as thus defined is more than abstract cognition since it is both genuinely objective and truly universal.</p>
<p>In the present chapter it is our aim to investigate the nature of mediation, to learn if we can what Hegel has to say about the activity of thought and about its function as a mediating process. The discussion here will, presumably, elaborate further and strengthen the conclusions which we have already reached, by showing how philosophical knowledge, in the Hegelian system, is more than a mere mediating activity among phenomena external to it.</p>
<p>It may be helpful at the beginning to state in a general way the order of the discussion before us. No detailed account of the dialectical process, nor any defense of the dialectical method with reference to the development of the categories in the Logic will be attempted here. Our present purpose is a less ambitious one. We shall simply state, as best we may, what Hegel means by thought as a process of mediation, and what is his real contention when he says that negation is the vital and potent element in this process. In accordance with this purpose, therefore, we shall begin our study with a consideration of immediacy and mediation; and this will lead us on to a discussion of negation, which we shall be forced to defend against certain misconceptions that have given rise to some unjustifiable criticisms of Hegel. Our general conclusion will be that thought, as the Hegelian system defines it from this point of view, is a process of mediation which, because of the negative element involved in it, makes it possible for us to say that reality is comprehended in thought; for its universals assume the form, not of abstract indeterminate immediacy, but of concrete determinate immediacy, that is, individuality.</p>
<p>Before passing directly to a consideration of Hegel’s conception of mediation and immediacy, steps should be taken to avoid a possible error of interpretation. And this precaution will also serve us as a point of departure in our discussion. Absolutely pure immediacy, immediacy exclusive of mediation, is meaningless for Hegel. This, of course, follows at once from what was said in the preceding chapter concerning the objectivity of thought: these is no indeterminate given. A few quotations, however’ will settle the matter. “We must reject the opposition between an independent immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n60">[60]</a></sup> Again, we read: “There is nothing, nothing in heaven, in nature, in spirit, or anywhere else which does not contain both immediacy and mediation.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n61">[61]</a></sup> The whole of the second part of the <em>Logic</em>, we are told, is “a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy and mediation.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n62">[62]</a></sup> Only the abstract understanding separates the two, and then it finds itself utterly helpless to reconcile them.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n63">[63]</a></sup> It is the business of philosophy, however, to disclose the fallacy involved in such arbitrary procedure, and to bring to consciousness the fact of the essential inseparability of that which is immediate and that which is mediated.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n64">[64]</a></sup> “Even if we take up an empirical, an external attitude, it will be found that there is nothing at all that is immediate, that there is nothing to which only the quality of immediacy belongs to the exclusion of that of mediation, but that what is immediate is likewise mediated, and that immediacy itself is essentially mediated.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n65">[65]</a></sup> From these explicit statements it is unmistakably clear that, whatever Hegel may mean by immediacy and mediation, they are indissolubly associated with each other.</p>
<p>The conclusion to which we are thus led is that immediacy is the result of at least partial mediation, or, as Hegel prefers to say, that “immediacy itself is essentially mediated.” The degree of truth to which the various stages of immediacy can lay claim depends upon the amount, or rather the exhaustiveness, of the mediation involved. That is to say, imperfect mediation results in an immediacy which is only partially true; immediacy becomes entirely true only when it is exhaustively mediated.</p>
<p>This fact might be illustrated by any category of the <em>Logic</em>. Being, for example, is really viewed in its truth only when it is seen in the light of the Absolute Idea; and the same is true of all other lower forms of immediacy.</p>
<p>The Absolute Idea itself is the ultimately true immediate solely because it is the perfectly mediated. The nature of true immediacy will thus appear as we determine the essential nature of the process of mediation of which it is the result.</p>
<p>A point which will be of great importance to us when we come to inquire concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the ultimately real emerges here.</p>
<p>We have just said that the completely mediated is for Hegel the ultimately true. Now when we remember that he identifies the ultimately true and the ultimately real, we are led at once to the important conclusion that the real is the result of this process of mediation. As Hegel views the matter, the various stages of immediacy are more or less concrete according as the mediation involved in each is more nor less exhaustive; the completely mediated immediacy is nothing more nor less than the concreteness of reality itself. The Absolute Idea is an immediacy which is completely mediated; it is therefore the ultimately real category, the very expression of reality itself. Reality thus is a matter of mediation. This point will serve as the basis of our discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of reality. But for the present we are interested to work out the nature of this process of mediation itself.</p>
<p>If we turn to the preface of the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>, we find there Hegel’s formal definition of the process of mediation. Mediation, he there tells us, is “nothing other than self-uniformity (<em>Sichselbstgleichheit</em>) developing itself; or it is reflection into itself, the moment of the Ego which exists for itself (<em>des f�rsichseienden Ich</em>), pure negativity, or, degraded from its pure abstraction, simple becoming.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n66">[66]</a></sup> A page or two preceding this passage he asserts that, according to his view, the whole matter reduces to this: “Truth is to be conceived of and expressed, not as Substance, but as Subject. At the same time it is to be noted that substantiality includes in itself both that which is the immediacy of knowledge itself, namely, the universal, and that which is the immediacy for knowledge, namely, Being....”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n67">[67]</a></sup> The first of these passages gives us Hegel’s conception of the nature and characteristics of the process of mediation; the second emphasizes the nature of the result of the process. Taken together, the meaning of the two seems to be this. If we define truth as substance, our definition is so far right; both thought and being, both the particular and the universal, are included in the definition. But the inadequacy of this definition lies in the fact that It fails to explain satisfactorily the relation of these two aspects of experiences. Thought and being are left existing side by side, as it were, in a blank identity devoid of differences, which identity, like Schelling’s, “is absolutely presupposed without any attempt being made to show that this is the truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n68">[68]</a></sup> The attempt to show that this is the truth inevitably leads us, Hegel thinks, to the standpoint of subject, to the conception of identity in difference which is the central fact of consciousness. Now the process of exhibiting this necessity is the process of mediation, which, when the goal is once reached, appears in its true light as the expression of the interrelation of the parts of an organic whole which itself exists for itself. When viewed from the standpoint of the lower stages of immediacy, mediation seems merely the expression of an external relation among phenomena more or less independent of each other; but when it is looked at in its real nature, when it is viewed <em>sub specie aeternitatis</em>, it is seen to be the expression of the necessary and vital interconnection of phenomena which themselves have significance only as parts of a comprehensive unity. Summarizing, then, we may say that the process of mediation is a development towards greater determinateness and the progressive substitution of necessary and vital, for seemingly accidental and arbitrary, connections among phenomena; and such a development is from the abstract to the concrete, its final goal being the concreteness of reality itself. As Hegel himself elsewhere expresses it: “The progress of development is equivalent to further determination, and this means further immersion in and a fuller grasp of the Idea itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n69">[69]</a></sup> A glance at Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi’s doctrine of immediacy will give us an insight into his own doctrine of mediation It will accordingly be well for us to notice this criticism before passing on. But first let us remind ourselves of what in general are the nature and significance of Jacobi’s doctrine.</p>
<p>The chief significance of Jacobi’s doctrine, for our purposes at any rate, is its insistence that after all there is an ultimate reality with which we must somehow come in contact. “Reason,” he. tells us, “plainly presupposes the true, as the outer sense space and inner sense time, and exists only as the faculty of this presupposition. So that where this presupposition is wanting there is no reason The true must therefore be possessed by man just as certainly as he possesses reason.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n70">[70]</a></sup> Reason “affords us a knowledge of supersensible objects, that is, affords us assurance of their reality and truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n71">[71]</a></sup> This insistence upon the ultimate intelligibility of reality is an important point in Jacobi’s philosophy, and Hegel does not fail to call attention to it. But, notwithstanding Hegel’s recognition of this point, he yet criticizes Jacobi, as he does Kant, for denying in fact that reality can be known.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n72">[72]</a></sup> And we are compelled to admit the justice of the criticism. For Jacobi’s only medium through which reality can be known, though at times he calls it reason as above, is in point of fact different from reason; it is something which lies beyond reason, a kind of intuition, a form of immediate knowledge from which all mediation is excluded. From this form of knowing the categories of thought are, to some extent at least, banished as useless. Of course, this is no place to enter into the disputed question whether, in his conception of immediacy, Jacobi attempted to get rid entirely of the categories of thought; to solve this problem is not necessary for our present purpose. However the problem may be solved, there can be no doubt that Jacobi contemned mediation in his grasp of that immediacy which is the ultimately real, and that he arrived at his goal only by means of a <em>salto mortale</em>, baldly asserting that “sometime or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n73">[73]</a></sup> Now, from Hegel’s point of view, this Jacobian position, if true, would be the death-knell of all philosophy and would reduce us to absolute relativity. It corroborates the ‘comfortable view’ that study, painsThought taking effort and diligent application are not in the least essential to the search after truth: truth is given, is thrust upon us in immediate, intuitive perception. But this is a dangerous attitude, Hegel urges. It may be that God gives to His beloved in sleep; but, so far as we can see, that which is given in sleep is usually discovered to be simply the wares of sleep. In less figurative language, if truth is a matter of feeling, however high above reason the feeling may be supposed to stand, then it is relative and the search for it is useless: individual perception, immediate intuition, or what not, is too prone to cater to individual prejudices and prepossessions. “What has its root only in my feelings, is only for me; it is mine, but not its own; it has no independent existence in and for itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n74">[74]</a></sup> Hence, if ultimate reality is and can be only an object of feeling, whether that feeling be called intuition, faith, immediate certainty, or ultra-rational perception, then there is absolutely no reason why the real should not be denied objectivity; on the contrary, there seems to be every reason to urge that it is reduced to purely subjective terms. Hegel makes merry over this predicament of the Jacobian philosophy, and sarcastically exclaims: “Truth is in a bad way, when all metaphysics is done away with, and the only philosophy acknowledged is not a philosophy at all!”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n75">[75]</a></sup> But fortunately for truth it is not in this sad predicament. In supporting this position Jacobi overlooks the fact that short-cuts in philosophy are as useless and hurtful as they are in any other field where assiduous and patient toil is an absolute requisite. Philosophy, the discovery of truth, does not depend upon a miracle, as Jacobi asserts, but upon hard work. Jacobi was led to his false position by his misconception of the nature of thought as a mediating activity. This Hegel sees clearly and criticizes sharply and decisively. As Jacobi conceives the matter, the mediation of thought is merely a progression from finite to finite, from conditioned to conditioning which is in turn conditioned.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n76">[76]</a></sup> It is a process of mediation among phenomena quasi-mechanically related to each other; thus it can be nothing but a regresses ad infinitum. The end of this infinite regress cannot be anything more than a blank abstraction, the empty absolute, a barren identity of thought and being.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n77">[77]</a></sup> The ultimately real must lie beyond such knowledge, since to know it would be to limit it and a limited absolute is a contradiction in terms.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n78">[78]</a></sup> Thus there is an impassable gulf set between the finite and conditioned and the infinite and unconditioned, between the realm of that which seems and that which really is. And the process of mediation is arbitrarily confined to the former sphere. True immediacy, therefore, that immediacy which can be predicated of reality, must exclude all mediation.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n79">[79]</a></sup> So the real task of philosophy is to leap the gulf which cannot be bridged; and it accomplishes this miracle in order to find outside of the ken of human knowledge that which makes human knowledge possible, namely, the ultimately true. But, Hegel argues, this ridiculous contention is based upon a false view of the mediating activity of thought. True mediation is not external mediation. Instead of leading only from the conditioned to the conditioning in an infinite regress, it transforms the conditioned into the self-conditioning and so discloses the infinite and unconditioned just within the realm of the finite and conditioned. Likewise, true immediacy does not consist in transcending mediation; on the contrary, it is the subsumption of mediation, the unity in a higher synthesis of mediated factors.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n80">[80]</a></sup> We may put the whole matter in Hegel’s own words: “Immediate knowledge, like mediated knowledge, is entirely one-sided. What is true is their unity, an immediate knowledge which is likewise mediated, something mediated which is likewise simple in itself, which is immediate reference to itself... Here is union, in which the difference of those characteristics is done away with, while at the same time, being preserved ideally, they have the higher destiny of serving as the pulse of vitality, the impulse, movement, unrest of the spiritual as of the natural life.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n81">[81]</a></sup> A brief statement of the contrast between Jacobi and Hegel on this point will serve to put in relief Hegel’s view of the matter. Jacobi would fully agree with Hegel that “the only content which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated with something else, not limited by other things.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n82">[82]</a></sup> And from this both would agree in drawing the conclusion that the ultimately true must be immediate But here they would part company; of the nature of this immediate they would have exactly antithetical conceptions. By immediate Jacobi would mean that which is given independently of all mediation whatsoever; while Hegel would mean by it a completely mediated content, a content “mediated by itself, where mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n83">[83]</a></sup> Whereas Jacobi conceives of ultimate reality as the postulate of immediate intuition, Hegel defines it as the result of mediating thought: to the one, true immediacy is void of any trace of mediation; while to the other, it is nothing but perfect mediation. This difference between the two thinkers concerning immediacy, is, of course, due to the fact that their views of the mediating activity of thought are different. Jacobi conceives of the process as one of simple negation, which passes from content to content without being any the richer for its wanderings; it forever pursues a goal which eternally lies beyond its grasp. Hegel, on the contrary, views the process, not as one of mere negation, but as one of determinate negation; one which “holds fast the positive in the negative,” includes its content within itself, and passes by means of the negative into a higher synthesis in which is preserved the truth of the mediated factors.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n84">[84]</a></sup> And this brings us to a consideration of negation, that aspect of thought which gives it its possibility as a mediating activity. I think it may be justly said that an understanding of this Hegelian conception is absolutely essential to a correct appreciation of the system. As the author himself says more than once, it is the very soul and vitality of the dialectic; it is that by virtue of which the dialectic leads us to the concrete fullness of the Absolute Idea itself. Let us first try to grasp its significance, and we shall then be in a position to see how it has been misunderstood. It has been said that in order to understand Hegel properly one must read him backwards. This is nowhere more imperative than in an attempt to see what he means by the negative in thought. He tells us in the <em>Logic</em>, “To mediate is to take something as a beginning and to go onward to a second thing: so that the existence of this second thing depends on our having reached it from something else contradistinguished from it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n85">[85]</a></sup> But this is by no means all there is to the process as Hegel defines it. He maintains further that this “development of one thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is rather the absolute prius of what it appears to be mediated by.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n86">[86]</a></sup> In this statement we find set forth, it would seem, the fundamental aspect of the dialectical method: at any rate, here we find given us the right point of view for regarding the process. That which comes first finds its explanation in what follows; what seems to be product is really ground; truth is a last result and not a first principle. Mediation is thus a passage from one object to another which takes place by simply making explicit the inner connection and the essential oneness of the objects.</p>
<p>This point we have already dwelt upon above.</p>
<p>Assuming now this point of view, we are in a position to see what Hegel means by the significance and power of the negative in thought.</p>
<p>Simple relation to another is, for Hegel, negation: in so far as an object refers beyond itself it involves negation. From this it follows that everything involves negation, that is, every finite object; for by its very nature every finite object refers beyond itself. Hence the potency of negation in the dialectic. The particular points beyond itself for its explanation and completion, it finds its ‘truth’ in the other. Taken as it is given, it is isolated, indeterminate, abstract; but by the power of the negative inherent in it, that is, because of its abstract indeterminateness, it leads on to and passes into its context, and so becomes less indeterminate. Its other, however, in terms of which the object finds its explanation, is in its turn abstract and leads on to its other for its determination; and so the process goes on. Reference beyond self, negation, is thus the power that keeps in motion the machinery of the dialectic. This reference beyond itself, however, is not externally imposed upon the object; it is not the expression of a relation between itself and another essentially different from it. Rather is this reference beyond self the very expression of the deepest nature of the object; the other is not an indifferent other, but the other in which the object finds its true self. The reference beyond self, the negation inherent in the object, is just the indication of the fact that the true self of the object lies elsewhere than in its own factual existence.</p>
<p>Thus the negative leads us ever to concrete universality; for the form proves to be the “indigenous becoming of the concrete content,” and so the process is one of self-determination in which the particular finds its universal and the universal its particular.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n87">[87]</a></sup> But, in order to see that negation does actually lead us to such a result, it is essential that the exact function of the negative in thought be kept clearly in view. Hegel criticizes Jacobi very severely for neglecting the negative in his doctrine of immediate knowledge; and the chief fault he has to find with Condillac’s development of the categories is that in the development the negative aspect of thought is entirely overlooked.</p>
<p>So it will be well for us to state explicitly and discuss the two points upon which Hegel lays stress in his doctrine of negation. The first of these points is that negation is <em>negative</em>. The second is that negation is <em>positive</em>. We begin with the first of these two points.</p>
<p>It is necessary for us to remember, says Hegel, that thought really is a process of negation. This is just the point which he has in mind in the above mentioned criticism of Condillac. He grants that Condillac posits the right point of departure, namely, immediate experience: the cardinal error of Condillac’s procedure, he urges, is that the negative involved in the development of the categories is completely forgotten. Perhaps it will be well to quote the passage here: “In Condillac’s method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the several modes of mental activity could be made intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessary interconnection. But the categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the initial basis, but that the later phases that follow this starting-point present themselves as emerging in a solely <em>affirmative </em>manner, and the negative aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed as a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as if it were the true and essential foundation.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n88">[88]</a></sup> Now what does this criticism mean? Of course we are not concerned to inquire here whether it is a just criticism of Condillac’s theory.</p>
<p>Apart from this theory, and expressed in general terms, the criticism means, it would seem, simply that, in the nature of the case, to think the world is virtually to deny that its first immediate aspect is the ultimately true. Thought is not exclusively affirmative; it is negative as well, and its negative function is to transform the immediately given. Expressed in Hegel’s own words: “To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n89">[89]</a></sup> That is, all thinking experience is a process of interpretation in which there is and can be no bare immediacy; for thinking <em>ipso facto </em>involves the transcending of the particular and the transformation of it into the form of the universal. Such, then, is the negative function of thought: and all thought is negative. To think the world is to deny its reality in the form of abstract particularity; its purely immediate aspect is by thought negated.</p>
<p>But, be it noted, the particular is not merely denied; in a very important sense it is also affirmed. And this brings us to the second point, that thought is positive as well as negative. As an abstract particular, qua abstract to think it is to negate it; as a universalized particular, qua universalized, to think it is to affirm it. Reason, in short, is positive as well as negative; and, what is more important still, is positive by virtue of the very fact of its negativity. “To hold fast the positive in the negative is the most important aspect of rational knowledge.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n90">[90]</a></sup> Hegel cannot be accused of having neglected to state very definitely what he means by this positive significance of negation. In the introduction to the larger <em>Logic </em>he tells us that what is needed to secure the dialectical movement of thought “is to realize that the negative is just as much positive, or that contradiction does not dissolve into zero, into blank nothingness, but only into the negation of its particular content.” And he goes on to say: “We must realize that such negation is not total negation, but only negation of a determinate content; consequently it is determinate negation. In other words, the result contains essentially that from which it results....</p>
<p>So the result, that is, the negation, being a definite negation has a content: it is a new concept or notion, but a higher, richer notion than the preceding one which has been enriched by its own negation or opposite.</p>
<p>The new notion contains both the old one and its negation, and is thus at the same time the unity of the older with its opposite.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n91">[91]</a></sup> This we find at the beginning of the <em>Logic</em>; at the very end we find the author emphasizing exactly the same point. The negative, he there tells us, is indeed “the negative, but of a positive which it includes. It is the other, not of something to which it is indifferent, else it would be no other.... It is the other in itself, the other of another, and therefore it includes its other within itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n92">[92]</a></sup> These passages are so very explicit little need be added by way of interpretation. Their unquestionable meaning is that negation is not to be thought of as abstract contradiction, but as affirmative negation – concrete synthesis. Negation is not merely the tendency of the finite category to negate itself, to pass into its abstract opposite or other; it is not a bare denial of thesis by its antithesis. Rather is it the tendency of the finite category to complete itself, to pass into its other where lies its own true nature; it is a denial of the thesis, which is at the same time a synthesis of the thesis and its formal opposite. Thus it is that the negative has a very positive import.</p>
<p>This is a very vital point upon which Hegel is here insisting. Real negation must be significant negation: the infinite judgment, we must agree with Hegel, is a ‘nonsensical curiosity’ of formal logic.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n93">[93]</a></sup> As Mr.</p>
<p>Bradley has well put it: “A something that is only not something else, is a relation that terminates in an impalpable void, a reflection thrown upon empty space. It is a mere non-entity which can not be real.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n94">[94]</a></sup> All significant negation ipso facto has a positive import; it presupposes a system within which the negative is to fall, a unity of differences, and within the system negation affirms, more or less explicitly, some really significant conclusion about the unity. Bare negation simply denies identity of contents that have nothing in common, and is consequently a mere tautology; significant negation, on the other hand, denies identity of contents which are in some respects one, and so asserts real difference.</p>
<p>Of course, if disjunction within the unity is exhaustive, negation may to all intents and purposes be affirmation, if only two alternatives are possible, for example, the denial of the one is the affirmation of the other.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n95">[95]</a></sup> It is indeed true that negation may carry with it very little positive significance: the judgment, ‘This is not black,’ tells us practically nothing so far as the actual color of the object under consideration is concerned. But if the judgment is really a significant one, if it has any meaning at all, it partially at least introduces a determination into the universe of discourse by telling us, for example, that the subject of the judgment is a colored object, and in so far it gives us positive knowledge of the object of interest.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n96">[96]</a></sup> And this negation approximates to direct affirmation as the differences within the system in which it falls are more sharply defined – it is to be noted that this very definition may be the result of negation; negative instances are always more than <em>negative</em>.</p>
<p>Ultimately, from the denial of blackness there might arise positive knowledge concerning the actual color of the object of judgment.</p>
<p>Now in view of the above considerations we can more clearly see what Hegel means by the constant assertion that the negative is the very soul and vitality of thought. Thought is at once analytic and synthetic; it does not first negate and then synthesize, but it synthesizes in its negation.</p>
<p>It denies abstract unrelatedness, and affirms and defines complex interrelatedness among phenomena. It rejects the unrelated particular and the blank universal as alike indefinable and meaningless; it asserts the necessity of identity in difference, of unity within multiplicity. Thought as a process of mediation is thus of a two-fold nature: it is the denial of a world of unrelated elements, and the affirmation of the world as concrete totality. Such is the double function of negation: it denies the abstract and affirms the concrete. Because thought is negative, it drives us from the standpoint of immediate sense experience and forces us to seek the eternal and true elsewhere; because thought is positive in its negation, it perforce “produces the universal and seizes the particular in it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n97">[97]</a></sup> Thus, by its very nature, thought is a process of mediation which gives as a result, not mere abstract generalization, but real determination – the concrete individual.</p>
<p>I know of no better summary of Hegel’s view concerning the negative in thought than the one which he himself has given in the preface to the first edition of the larger Logic: “Reason is negative and dialectical, in that it dissolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive in that it produces the universal and preserves (<em>begreift</em>) the particular in it. As the understanding used to be taken as something separated from reason in general, so dialectical reason used to be taken as something separated from positive reason. But in its true nature reason is mind (<em>Geist</em>), which is higher than both cognitive (<em>verst�ndige</em>) reason and rational understanding. Mind is the negative, that which constitutes the quality of dialectical reason as well as of the understanding.</p>
<p>It negates simplicity and so, like the understanding, posits determinate difference; but it also destroys this difference and so is dialectical. Its result, however, is not mere emptiness, but is just as much positive; thus it returns to and establishes the first simplicity, which now is a universal concrete in itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n98">[98]</a></sup> Our conclusion, then, concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the process of thought as dialectical is that thought is a process of negative mediation.</p>
<p>As a mediating activity, thought is not limited to the finite and conditioned as those who appeal to the necessity of immediate knowledge would have us believe. On the contrary, its very mediation is the definition of reality; by relating it defines, and by negating it affirms. In other words, the process of thought is the progressive explication of the implicit, the disclosure of the essential nature of the objects of knowledge Negation is not construed in terms of formal contradiction; it is that function of the dialectic by virtue of which it leads ultimately to the essence of reality. However faultily Hegel may be thought to have worked out this conception in the Logic, its illuminating suggestiveness for any theory of knowledge cannot be denied and should not be overlooked.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n99">[99]</a></sup> Perhaps enough has been said about this Hegelian doctrine of negation.</p>
<p>But, like most of Hegel’s teachings, it has not escaped misconstruction at the hands of the critics. So it may not be amiss, at the conclusion of our exposition, to add a few words in reply to some of the most characteristic criticisms; not, indeed, for controversial purposes, but in the hope that the attempt to set Hegel right in the eyes of his critics will at least serve to call attention to the fact that another interpretation of him is possible.</p>
<p>The criticisms of Haym and James seem unquestionably to rest upon an entirely false notion of what Hegel means by negation. Haym seems to think that Hegel absurdly contended that the essence of things consists in their being contradictory; and he contrasts this supposed position of Hegel’s with the Herbartian principle that the way to truth lies through the elimination of contradiction.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n100">[100]</a></sup> Such an interpretation evidently takes it for granted that Hegel can mean by contradiction, negation, nothing more than what formal logic means by it, namely, sheer incompatibility and absolute opposition; to all appearances, the critic is innocent of the fact that negation or contradiction, as Hegel is at great pains to define it, is just the doing away with bare negation, abstract opposition, and that the term embodies Hegel’s unwearied insistence that formal contradiction has no significance when applied to reality.</p>
<p>Naturally the criticism is no more significant than the assumption upon which it leans for support. The same oversight is at the basis of Professor James’s criticism of this Hegelian conception, in a characteristic discussion “On Some Hegelisms,” in his volume of popular lectures on philosophy entitled <em>The Will to Believe</em>. At a very dramatic point in this essay Hegel is presented to us, standing amidst a jarring, jolting world of incoherent facts, frantically lifting ‘vain hands of imprecation’ at the wild and tumultuous scene before him. “But hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear? Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a chasm a filling? – a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n101">[101]</a></sup> These strictures are apparently supposed to be a real criticism of Hegel, but the absurdity against which they are directed first saw the light when they themselves were penned. It is certain that such an absurd position as the one here criticized cannot justly be attributed to Hegel; it is a caricature of Hegel’s real position. The ‘glue’ that binds the world together is, in Hegel’s view of the matter, not the eternal falling apart of objects, but simply their necessary interconnectedness; if you attempt to separate them, they will not stay put. Nor is it that negation which disintegrates the universe that Hegel uses as the ‘mortar’ to combine it; it is that negation which, because it is as much positive as negative, does actually combine it. After all, it would appear that one is forced to admit that Hegel is more than a superficial thinker trying to palm off on a long-suffering public palpable absurdities.</p>
<p>Trendelenburg’s criticism of Hegel on this point is more serious and, one is inclined to say, more significant than the preceding criticisms, but it seems no less fallacious. This critic triumphantly forces Hegel into the following dilemma: “Either the negation, through which the dialectic development to the second and third moments is mediated, is logical negation (A, not-A) – in which case nothing determinate is produced in the second moment and no synthesis is given in the third; or else the opposition is a real one – in which case it cannot be attained by logical means, and consequently the dialectic is not the dialectic of pure thought.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n102">[102]</a></sup> Here it is evident that the critic is at least aware that two kinds of opposition or negation are possible, namely, logical and real; and in this respect his criticism differs from the preceding ones But, like these others, Trendelenburg’s criticism rests upon an assumption the validity of which he does not attempt to establish. The assumption in this case is that Hegel has no right to claim that the dialectic of pure thought can involve material opposition. This assumption is based upon a further assumption that pure thought and formal thought (abstract cognition) are one. If we are willing to grant this second assumption, then the above dilemma exhausts the possibilities and so accomplishes its purpose; in the nature of the case formal opposition or negation is not material opposition. But if we maintain with Hegel that form and matter are one and inseparable, and that real thought, so far from being merely formal thought confined to the magic circle of the impotent universal, actually does express the nature of its object, then the critic’s dilemma is not exhaustive and so loses its significance; in this event, formal opposition becomes a mere abstraction, and dialectical negation, the negation of what Hegel calls pure thought, becomes <em>ipso facto </em>real opposition.</p>
<p>So it would seem that before the critic undertook to annihilate the dialectic with an ‘either-or’ proposition, he should have come to an understanding with the author concerning the nature of that thought of which the dialectic is the expression. The whole problem is whether pure thought, as Hegel uses the term, does involve real opposition; and this must be argued, not assumed at the beginning.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart’s contention that negation loses import as the dialectic advances from the more abstract to the more concrete categories implies the same general misconception of the nature of negation. In his opinion negation is very prominent in the earlier categories, while in the later categories it has almost entirely disappeared. And he seeks to establish this interpretation by investigating the movement of the dialectic in the categories of Being, and by contrasting the movement there with the movement in the categories of the Notion.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n103">[103]</a></sup> It is not our present purpose to inquire whether this is or is not a correct account of the dialectic as it is actually worked out in the Logic. The point of interest now is the fact that negation, as Mr. McTaggart implicitly conceives it, is not negation as we have seen Hegel define it above. According to the critic thesis and antithesis, in the earlier categories of the Logic, are opposed to each other in a more or less mechanical fashion and are more or less externally joined together by means of the synthesis; but, in the later categories, this abstract opposition is wanting. Now to go from this fact (granting for the sake of the argument that it is a fact) to the conclusion that negation becomes less significant as the dialectic advances is clearly to identify negation with abstract opposition The argument is this: in the categories of Being, antithesis is the logical opposite of thesis, and so here we find negation; in the categories of the Notion, antithesis and thesis are no longer sheer incompatibles, antithesis defines thesis, and therefore the negation formerly existing between them has disappeared. In this argument sheer incompatibility and negation are obviously used synonymously. But, as we have already seen, this sheer incompatibility is not Hegel’s conception of negation. From his point of view negation does not simply negate; its nature is not exhausted in bare opposition. On the contrary, it always presupposes a positive ground and so is in a very important sense positive. All genuinely significant negation carries with it a positive import; bare negation is a meaningless tautology. Hence it follows that, if the antithesis is to be a true negative, a dialectical negative, as Hegel says it is, then it must to a degree at least define the thesis; and the more perfectly it does this, the more significant a negative does it become. Thus, even accepting Mr. McTaggart’s account of the general nature and procedure of the dialectic as true, still we are forced to reject his conclusion. As Hegel conceives the negative, it progressively becomes, not a less and less, but a more and more important factor in the dialectical process; so far from finally disappearing entirely, it ever grows more explicit and more emphatic.</p>
<p>And this, one is inclined to think, is the true description of the matter: negation gains in positive import as the universe of discourse becomes more determinate.</p>
<p>Finally, Mr. Bradley’s implied criticism of Hegel on this point seems open to the same general criticism as the above. “The law of Contradiction,” he says, “has had the misfortune to be flatly denied from a certain theory of the nature of things. So far is that law (it has been contended) from being the truth, that in the nature of things contradiction exists.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n104">[104]</a></sup> Now I submit that this statement, as a criticism of the Hegelian theory, is beside the mark. Hegel does not deny the validity of the law of contradiction taken in its abstract and formal sense, that is, as the statement of the relation which exists between logical contradictories. A unitary whole whose elements are sheer logical disparates is, I think we may safely say, as genuine a non-entity for Hegel as it is for anyone else. What Hegel does deny, however, is that such abstract contradiction finds a place in reality; and he is prepared to argue that when we attribute it to reality we are guilty of attempting the impossible task of making reality square with the principles of our abstract and formal logic. What he insists upon is that we must define contradiction more concretely, if we would apply the category to the real; and this more concrete definition he gives us in his doctrine of negation. But this position does not necessarily touch the validity (formal validity) of the law of contradiction at all as Mr. Bradley himself is willing to admit. “In the object and within the whole,” he tells us, “the truth may be that we never really do have these disparates. We only have moments which would be incompatible if they really were separate, but, conjoined together, have been subdued into something within the character of the whole If we so can understand the identity of opposites – and I am not sure that we may not do so – then the law of Contradiction flourishes untouched. If, in coming into one, the contraries as such no longer exist, then where is the contradiction?” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n105">[105]</a></sup> Although it is questionable whether Mr. Bradley stands consistently by this position in his theory of knowledge, we certainly are justified in attributing it to Hegel. So, granting this, it would seem that, on the critic’s own showing, Hegel is free from the charge of having ‘flatly denied’ the significance of the law of contradiction. He had no quarrel with this principle, as a principle of formal logic; I am persuaded that he, as well as his critic, was fully conscious of the fact that “it has not a tooth with which to bite any one.” He respected its toothless estate and had no reason, and, so far as I have been able to see, no inclination, to rob it of its legitimate claims, ‘absurdly feeble’ though they surely are. What he was anxious to do was to make the formal principle conscious of its absurdly feeble condition, and to rejuvenate it by bringing it into vital touch with concrete reality. As the statement of the blank opposition of disparates the principle is indeed abstract and impotent; as the negative of the Notion it is the very pulse of the life of reality itself. This, as I comprehend it, is the position of Hegel with reference to the law of contradiction; and, if I read Mr. Bradley aright, it differs only in terminology from his own view of the matter.</p>
<p>The main points which this chapter has attempted to establish are the following. Hegel insists that immediacy and mediation are inseparable, that all immediacy implies mediation, and that the immediacy of reality involves complete mediation. But this is not to identify the immeThought diacy of reality with the abstractions of science. For the process of mediation, as Hegel defines it, is a process of determinate negation which reduces experience to an ordered and systematic whole; it affirms as well as denies, and indeed affirms by denying. In short, it is the principle within experience which makes of experience a cosmos and not a chaos.</p>
<p>A completely mediated immediacy, that is, reality, is, therefore, just completely organized experience. This negative within thought is not merely negative; it is a negative which annuls the false immediacy only because it is ever leading us onwards to the true immediacy. The many criticisms which are directed against Hegel on this point overlook this fact, and unwarrantedly assume that he means by negation abstract contradiction.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Chapter II The Process of Thought: Mediation and Negation.
In criticism of Hegel’s position that the science of Philosophy can adequately express the nature of the ultimately real, Mr. McTaggart says: “Philosophy itself is knowledge, it is neither action nor feeling. And there seems nothing in Hegel’s account of it to induce us to change the meaning of the word in this respect.”[58] I quote this criticism because it contains an assumption which I wish to challenge, and thus sets the problem for the present chapter. The assumption is that philosophical thought, as Hegel defines it, is bare cognition to which the other aspects of the mental life bear only an external relation, that it is simply one among other elements coordinate with it, and that, consequently, it can at most be only a mediating activity among these other elements of experience which forever lie beyond and external to it. It is the justice of this assumption which the following pages will call in question. We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that such a position is foreign to Hegel’s system, and that philosophy for him is action and feeling as well as cognition. But it may be well to emphasize the fact from another point of view. So we now address ourselves to the task of establishing the thesis that Hegel’s account of philosophy does force us to give to the word a meaning essentially different from that which the above criticism attaches to it. We shall support this thesis with an exposition of the process of philosophical knowledge as it is presented in Hegel’s doctrine of mediation and negation.
In the preface to the Phenomenology of Sprit,[59] Hegel has been at pains to point out that, if we are to appreciate what he means by philosophy and the standpoint which it assumes, we must make an effort to understand what he means by absolute knowledge and by mediation. In the preceding chapter we investigated the nature and significance of absolute knowledge. And that investigation showed us that absolute knowledge is simply Hegel’s definition of the essential nature of thought as he uses the term, and that thought as thus defined is more than abstract cognition since it is both genuinely objective and truly universal.
In the present chapter it is our aim to investigate the nature of mediation, to learn if we can what Hegel has to say about the activity of thought and about its function as a mediating process. The discussion here will, presumably, elaborate further and strengthen the conclusions which we have already reached, by showing how philosophical knowledge, in the Hegelian system, is more than a mere mediating activity among phenomena external to it.
It may be helpful at the beginning to state in a general way the order of the discussion before us. No detailed account of the dialectical process, nor any defense of the dialectical method with reference to the development of the categories in the Logic will be attempted here. Our present purpose is a less ambitious one. We shall simply state, as best we may, what Hegel means by thought as a process of mediation, and what is his real contention when he says that negation is the vital and potent element in this process. In accordance with this purpose, therefore, we shall begin our study with a consideration of immediacy and mediation; and this will lead us on to a discussion of negation, which we shall be forced to defend against certain misconceptions that have given rise to some unjustifiable criticisms of Hegel. Our general conclusion will be that thought, as the Hegelian system defines it from this point of view, is a process of mediation which, because of the negative element involved in it, makes it possible for us to say that reality is comprehended in thought; for its universals assume the form, not of abstract indeterminate immediacy, but of concrete determinate immediacy, that is, individuality.
Before passing directly to a consideration of Hegel’s conception of mediation and immediacy, steps should be taken to avoid a possible error of interpretation. And this precaution will also serve us as a point of departure in our discussion. Absolutely pure immediacy, immediacy exclusive of mediation, is meaningless for Hegel. This, of course, follows at once from what was said in the preceding chapter concerning the objectivity of thought: these is no indeterminate given. A few quotations, however’ will settle the matter. “We must reject the opposition between an independent immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion.” [60] Again, we read: “There is nothing, nothing in heaven, in nature, in spirit, or anywhere else which does not contain both immediacy and mediation.”[61] The whole of the second part of the Logic, we are told, is “a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy and mediation.”[62] Only the abstract understanding separates the two, and then it finds itself utterly helpless to reconcile them.[63] It is the business of philosophy, however, to disclose the fallacy involved in such arbitrary procedure, and to bring to consciousness the fact of the essential inseparability of that which is immediate and that which is mediated.[64] “Even if we take up an empirical, an external attitude, it will be found that there is nothing at all that is immediate, that there is nothing to which only the quality of immediacy belongs to the exclusion of that of mediation, but that what is immediate is likewise mediated, and that immediacy itself is essentially mediated.”[65] From these explicit statements it is unmistakably clear that, whatever Hegel may mean by immediacy and mediation, they are indissolubly associated with each other.
The conclusion to which we are thus led is that immediacy is the result of at least partial mediation, or, as Hegel prefers to say, that “immediacy itself is essentially mediated.” The degree of truth to which the various stages of immediacy can lay claim depends upon the amount, or rather the exhaustiveness, of the mediation involved. That is to say, imperfect mediation results in an immediacy which is only partially true; immediacy becomes entirely true only when it is exhaustively mediated.
This fact might be illustrated by any category of the Logic. Being, for example, is really viewed in its truth only when it is seen in the light of the Absolute Idea; and the same is true of all other lower forms of immediacy.
The Absolute Idea itself is the ultimately true immediate solely because it is the perfectly mediated. The nature of true immediacy will thus appear as we determine the essential nature of the process of mediation of which it is the result.
A point which will be of great importance to us when we come to inquire concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the ultimately real emerges here.
We have just said that the completely mediated is for Hegel the ultimately true. Now when we remember that he identifies the ultimately true and the ultimately real, we are led at once to the important conclusion that the real is the result of this process of mediation. As Hegel views the matter, the various stages of immediacy are more or less concrete according as the mediation involved in each is more nor less exhaustive; the completely mediated immediacy is nothing more nor less than the concreteness of reality itself. The Absolute Idea is an immediacy which is completely mediated; it is therefore the ultimately real category, the very expression of reality itself. Reality thus is a matter of mediation. This point will serve as the basis of our discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of reality. But for the present we are interested to work out the nature of this process of mediation itself.
If we turn to the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we find there Hegel’s formal definition of the process of mediation. Mediation, he there tells us, is “nothing other than self-uniformity (Sichselbstgleichheit) developing itself; or it is reflection into itself, the moment of the Ego which exists for itself (des f�rsichseienden Ich), pure negativity, or, degraded from its pure abstraction, simple becoming.” [66] A page or two preceding this passage he asserts that, according to his view, the whole matter reduces to this: “Truth is to be conceived of and expressed, not as Substance, but as Subject. At the same time it is to be noted that substantiality includes in itself both that which is the immediacy of knowledge itself, namely, the universal, and that which is the immediacy for knowledge, namely, Being....”[67] The first of these passages gives us Hegel’s conception of the nature and characteristics of the process of mediation; the second emphasizes the nature of the result of the process. Taken together, the meaning of the two seems to be this. If we define truth as substance, our definition is so far right; both thought and being, both the particular and the universal, are included in the definition. But the inadequacy of this definition lies in the fact that It fails to explain satisfactorily the relation of these two aspects of experiences. Thought and being are left existing side by side, as it were, in a blank identity devoid of differences, which identity, like Schelling’s, “is absolutely presupposed without any attempt being made to show that this is the truth.”[68] The attempt to show that this is the truth inevitably leads us, Hegel thinks, to the standpoint of subject, to the conception of identity in difference which is the central fact of consciousness. Now the process of exhibiting this necessity is the process of mediation, which, when the goal is once reached, appears in its true light as the expression of the interrelation of the parts of an organic whole which itself exists for itself. When viewed from the standpoint of the lower stages of immediacy, mediation seems merely the expression of an external relation among phenomena more or less independent of each other; but when it is looked at in its real nature, when it is viewed sub specie aeternitatis, it is seen to be the expression of the necessary and vital interconnection of phenomena which themselves have significance only as parts of a comprehensive unity. Summarizing, then, we may say that the process of mediation is a development towards greater determinateness and the progressive substitution of necessary and vital, for seemingly accidental and arbitrary, connections among phenomena; and such a development is from the abstract to the concrete, its final goal being the concreteness of reality itself. As Hegel himself elsewhere expresses it: “The progress of development is equivalent to further determination, and this means further immersion in and a fuller grasp of the Idea itself.”[69] A glance at Hegel’s criticisms of Jacobi’s doctrine of immediacy will give us an insight into his own doctrine of mediation It will accordingly be well for us to notice this criticism before passing on. But first let us remind ourselves of what in general are the nature and significance of Jacobi’s doctrine.
The chief significance of Jacobi’s doctrine, for our purposes at any rate, is its insistence that after all there is an ultimate reality with which we must somehow come in contact. “Reason,” he. tells us, “plainly presupposes the true, as the outer sense space and inner sense time, and exists only as the faculty of this presupposition. So that where this presupposition is wanting there is no reason The true must therefore be possessed by man just as certainly as he possesses reason.”[70] Reason “affords us a knowledge of supersensible objects, that is, affords us assurance of their reality and truth.”[71] This insistence upon the ultimate intelligibility of reality is an important point in Jacobi’s philosophy, and Hegel does not fail to call attention to it. But, notwithstanding Hegel’s recognition of this point, he yet criticizes Jacobi, as he does Kant, for denying in fact that reality can be known.[72] And we are compelled to admit the justice of the criticism. For Jacobi’s only medium through which reality can be known, though at times he calls it reason as above, is in point of fact different from reason; it is something which lies beyond reason, a kind of intuition, a form of immediate knowledge from which all mediation is excluded. From this form of knowing the categories of thought are, to some extent at least, banished as useless. Of course, this is no place to enter into the disputed question whether, in his conception of immediacy, Jacobi attempted to get rid entirely of the categories of thought; to solve this problem is not necessary for our present purpose. However the problem may be solved, there can be no doubt that Jacobi contemned mediation in his grasp of that immediacy which is the ultimately real, and that he arrived at his goal only by means of a salto mortale, baldly asserting that “sometime or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle.”[73] Now, from Hegel’s point of view, this Jacobian position, if true, would be the death-knell of all philosophy and would reduce us to absolute relativity. It corroborates the ‘comfortable view’ that study, painsThought taking effort and diligent application are not in the least essential to the search after truth: truth is given, is thrust upon us in immediate, intuitive perception. But this is a dangerous attitude, Hegel urges. It may be that God gives to His beloved in sleep; but, so far as we can see, that which is given in sleep is usually discovered to be simply the wares of sleep. In less figurative language, if truth is a matter of feeling, however high above reason the feeling may be supposed to stand, then it is relative and the search for it is useless: individual perception, immediate intuition, or what not, is too prone to cater to individual prejudices and prepossessions. “What has its root only in my feelings, is only for me; it is mine, but not its own; it has no independent existence in and for itself.”[74] Hence, if ultimate reality is and can be only an object of feeling, whether that feeling be called intuition, faith, immediate certainty, or ultra-rational perception, then there is absolutely no reason why the real should not be denied objectivity; on the contrary, there seems to be every reason to urge that it is reduced to purely subjective terms. Hegel makes merry over this predicament of the Jacobian philosophy, and sarcastically exclaims: “Truth is in a bad way, when all metaphysics is done away with, and the only philosophy acknowledged is not a philosophy at all!”[75] But fortunately for truth it is not in this sad predicament. In supporting this position Jacobi overlooks the fact that short-cuts in philosophy are as useless and hurtful as they are in any other field where assiduous and patient toil is an absolute requisite. Philosophy, the discovery of truth, does not depend upon a miracle, as Jacobi asserts, but upon hard work. Jacobi was led to his false position by his misconception of the nature of thought as a mediating activity. This Hegel sees clearly and criticizes sharply and decisively. As Jacobi conceives the matter, the mediation of thought is merely a progression from finite to finite, from conditioned to conditioning which is in turn conditioned.[76] It is a process of mediation among phenomena quasi-mechanically related to each other; thus it can be nothing but a regresses ad infinitum. The end of this infinite regress cannot be anything more than a blank abstraction, the empty absolute, a barren identity of thought and being.[77] The ultimately real must lie beyond such knowledge, since to know it would be to limit it and a limited absolute is a contradiction in terms.[78] Thus there is an impassable gulf set between the finite and conditioned and the infinite and unconditioned, between the realm of that which seems and that which really is. And the process of mediation is arbitrarily confined to the former sphere. True immediacy, therefore, that immediacy which can be predicated of reality, must exclude all mediation.[79] So the real task of philosophy is to leap the gulf which cannot be bridged; and it accomplishes this miracle in order to find outside of the ken of human knowledge that which makes human knowledge possible, namely, the ultimately true. But, Hegel argues, this ridiculous contention is based upon a false view of the mediating activity of thought. True mediation is not external mediation. Instead of leading only from the conditioned to the conditioning in an infinite regress, it transforms the conditioned into the self-conditioning and so discloses the infinite and unconditioned just within the realm of the finite and conditioned. Likewise, true immediacy does not consist in transcending mediation; on the contrary, it is the subsumption of mediation, the unity in a higher synthesis of mediated factors.[80] We may put the whole matter in Hegel’s own words: “Immediate knowledge, like mediated knowledge, is entirely one-sided. What is true is their unity, an immediate knowledge which is likewise mediated, something mediated which is likewise simple in itself, which is immediate reference to itself... Here is union, in which the difference of those characteristics is done away with, while at the same time, being preserved ideally, they have the higher destiny of serving as the pulse of vitality, the impulse, movement, unrest of the spiritual as of the natural life.”[81] A brief statement of the contrast between Jacobi and Hegel on this point will serve to put in relief Hegel’s view of the matter. Jacobi would fully agree with Hegel that “the only content which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated with something else, not limited by other things.”[82] And from this both would agree in drawing the conclusion that the ultimately true must be immediate But here they would part company; of the nature of this immediate they would have exactly antithetical conceptions. By immediate Jacobi would mean that which is given independently of all mediation whatsoever; while Hegel would mean by it a completely mediated content, a content “mediated by itself, where mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide.”[83] Whereas Jacobi conceives of ultimate reality as the postulate of immediate intuition, Hegel defines it as the result of mediating thought: to the one, true immediacy is void of any trace of mediation; while to the other, it is nothing but perfect mediation. This difference between the two thinkers concerning immediacy, is, of course, due to the fact that their views of the mediating activity of thought are different. Jacobi conceives of the process as one of simple negation, which passes from content to content without being any the richer for its wanderings; it forever pursues a goal which eternally lies beyond its grasp. Hegel, on the contrary, views the process, not as one of mere negation, but as one of determinate negation; one which “holds fast the positive in the negative,” includes its content within itself, and passes by means of the negative into a higher synthesis in which is preserved the truth of the mediated factors.[84] And this brings us to a consideration of negation, that aspect of thought which gives it its possibility as a mediating activity. I think it may be justly said that an understanding of this Hegelian conception is absolutely essential to a correct appreciation of the system. As the author himself says more than once, it is the very soul and vitality of the dialectic; it is that by virtue of which the dialectic leads us to the concrete fullness of the Absolute Idea itself. Let us first try to grasp its significance, and we shall then be in a position to see how it has been misunderstood. It has been said that in order to understand Hegel properly one must read him backwards. This is nowhere more imperative than in an attempt to see what he means by the negative in thought. He tells us in the Logic, “To mediate is to take something as a beginning and to go onward to a second thing: so that the existence of this second thing depends on our having reached it from something else contradistinguished from it.”[85] But this is by no means all there is to the process as Hegel defines it. He maintains further that this “development of one thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is rather the absolute prius of what it appears to be mediated by.”[86] In this statement we find set forth, it would seem, the fundamental aspect of the dialectical method: at any rate, here we find given us the right point of view for regarding the process. That which comes first finds its explanation in what follows; what seems to be product is really ground; truth is a last result and not a first principle. Mediation is thus a passage from one object to another which takes place by simply making explicit the inner connection and the essential oneness of the objects.
This point we have already dwelt upon above.
Assuming now this point of view, we are in a position to see what Hegel means by the significance and power of the negative in thought.
Simple relation to another is, for Hegel, negation: in so far as an object refers beyond itself it involves negation. From this it follows that everything involves negation, that is, every finite object; for by its very nature every finite object refers beyond itself. Hence the potency of negation in the dialectic. The particular points beyond itself for its explanation and completion, it finds its ‘truth’ in the other. Taken as it is given, it is isolated, indeterminate, abstract; but by the power of the negative inherent in it, that is, because of its abstract indeterminateness, it leads on to and passes into its context, and so becomes less indeterminate. Its other, however, in terms of which the object finds its explanation, is in its turn abstract and leads on to its other for its determination; and so the process goes on. Reference beyond self, negation, is thus the power that keeps in motion the machinery of the dialectic. This reference beyond itself, however, is not externally imposed upon the object; it is not the expression of a relation between itself and another essentially different from it. Rather is this reference beyond self the very expression of the deepest nature of the object; the other is not an indifferent other, but the other in which the object finds its true self. The reference beyond self, the negation inherent in the object, is just the indication of the fact that the true self of the object lies elsewhere than in its own factual existence.
Thus the negative leads us ever to concrete universality; for the form proves to be the “indigenous becoming of the concrete content,” and so the process is one of self-determination in which the particular finds its universal and the universal its particular.[87] But, in order to see that negation does actually lead us to such a result, it is essential that the exact function of the negative in thought be kept clearly in view. Hegel criticizes Jacobi very severely for neglecting the negative in his doctrine of immediate knowledge; and the chief fault he has to find with Condillac’s development of the categories is that in the development the negative aspect of thought is entirely overlooked.
So it will be well for us to state explicitly and discuss the two points upon which Hegel lays stress in his doctrine of negation. The first of these points is that negation is negative. The second is that negation is positive. We begin with the first of these two points.
It is necessary for us to remember, says Hegel, that thought really is a process of negation. This is just the point which he has in mind in the above mentioned criticism of Condillac. He grants that Condillac posits the right point of departure, namely, immediate experience: the cardinal error of Condillac’s procedure, he urges, is that the negative involved in the development of the categories is completely forgotten. Perhaps it will be well to quote the passage here: “In Condillac’s method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the several modes of mental activity could be made intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessary interconnection. But the categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the initial basis, but that the later phases that follow this starting-point present themselves as emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed as a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as if it were the true and essential foundation.”[88] Now what does this criticism mean? Of course we are not concerned to inquire here whether it is a just criticism of Condillac’s theory.
Apart from this theory, and expressed in general terms, the criticism means, it would seem, simply that, in the nature of the case, to think the world is virtually to deny that its first immediate aspect is the ultimately true. Thought is not exclusively affirmative; it is negative as well, and its negative function is to transform the immediately given. Expressed in Hegel’s own words: “To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape.”[89] That is, all thinking experience is a process of interpretation in which there is and can be no bare immediacy; for thinking ipso facto involves the transcending of the particular and the transformation of it into the form of the universal. Such, then, is the negative function of thought: and all thought is negative. To think the world is to deny its reality in the form of abstract particularity; its purely immediate aspect is by thought negated.
But, be it noted, the particular is not merely denied; in a very important sense it is also affirmed. And this brings us to the second point, that thought is positive as well as negative. As an abstract particular, qua abstract to think it is to negate it; as a universalized particular, qua universalized, to think it is to affirm it. Reason, in short, is positive as well as negative; and, what is more important still, is positive by virtue of the very fact of its negativity. “To hold fast the positive in the negative is the most important aspect of rational knowledge.”[90] Hegel cannot be accused of having neglected to state very definitely what he means by this positive significance of negation. In the introduction to the larger Logic he tells us that what is needed to secure the dialectical movement of thought “is to realize that the negative is just as much positive, or that contradiction does not dissolve into zero, into blank nothingness, but only into the negation of its particular content.” And he goes on to say: “We must realize that such negation is not total negation, but only negation of a determinate content; consequently it is determinate negation. In other words, the result contains essentially that from which it results....
So the result, that is, the negation, being a definite negation has a content: it is a new concept or notion, but a higher, richer notion than the preceding one which has been enriched by its own negation or opposite.
The new notion contains both the old one and its negation, and is thus at the same time the unity of the older with its opposite.”[91] This we find at the beginning of the Logic; at the very end we find the author emphasizing exactly the same point. The negative, he there tells us, is indeed “the negative, but of a positive which it includes. It is the other, not of something to which it is indifferent, else it would be no other.... It is the other in itself, the other of another, and therefore it includes its other within itself.”[92] These passages are so very explicit little need be added by way of interpretation. Their unquestionable meaning is that negation is not to be thought of as abstract contradiction, but as affirmative negation – concrete synthesis. Negation is not merely the tendency of the finite category to negate itself, to pass into its abstract opposite or other; it is not a bare denial of thesis by its antithesis. Rather is it the tendency of the finite category to complete itself, to pass into its other where lies its own true nature; it is a denial of the thesis, which is at the same time a synthesis of the thesis and its formal opposite. Thus it is that the negative has a very positive import.
This is a very vital point upon which Hegel is here insisting. Real negation must be significant negation: the infinite judgment, we must agree with Hegel, is a ‘nonsensical curiosity’ of formal logic.[93] As Mr.
Bradley has well put it: “A something that is only not something else, is a relation that terminates in an impalpable void, a reflection thrown upon empty space. It is a mere non-entity which can not be real.”[94] All significant negation ipso facto has a positive import; it presupposes a system within which the negative is to fall, a unity of differences, and within the system negation affirms, more or less explicitly, some really significant conclusion about the unity. Bare negation simply denies identity of contents that have nothing in common, and is consequently a mere tautology; significant negation, on the other hand, denies identity of contents which are in some respects one, and so asserts real difference.
Of course, if disjunction within the unity is exhaustive, negation may to all intents and purposes be affirmation, if only two alternatives are possible, for example, the denial of the one is the affirmation of the other.[95] It is indeed true that negation may carry with it very little positive significance: the judgment, ‘This is not black,’ tells us practically nothing so far as the actual color of the object under consideration is concerned. But if the judgment is really a significant one, if it has any meaning at all, it partially at least introduces a determination into the universe of discourse by telling us, for example, that the subject of the judgment is a colored object, and in so far it gives us positive knowledge of the object of interest.[96] And this negation approximates to direct affirmation as the differences within the system in which it falls are more sharply defined – it is to be noted that this very definition may be the result of negation; negative instances are always more than negative.
Ultimately, from the denial of blackness there might arise positive knowledge concerning the actual color of the object of judgment.
Now in view of the above considerations we can more clearly see what Hegel means by the constant assertion that the negative is the very soul and vitality of thought. Thought is at once analytic and synthetic; it does not first negate and then synthesize, but it synthesizes in its negation.
It denies abstract unrelatedness, and affirms and defines complex interrelatedness among phenomena. It rejects the unrelated particular and the blank universal as alike indefinable and meaningless; it asserts the necessity of identity in difference, of unity within multiplicity. Thought as a process of mediation is thus of a two-fold nature: it is the denial of a world of unrelated elements, and the affirmation of the world as concrete totality. Such is the double function of negation: it denies the abstract and affirms the concrete. Because thought is negative, it drives us from the standpoint of immediate sense experience and forces us to seek the eternal and true elsewhere; because thought is positive in its negation, it perforce “produces the universal and seizes the particular in it.”[97] Thus, by its very nature, thought is a process of mediation which gives as a result, not mere abstract generalization, but real determination – the concrete individual.
I know of no better summary of Hegel’s view concerning the negative in thought than the one which he himself has given in the preface to the first edition of the larger Logic: “Reason is negative and dialectical, in that it dissolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive in that it produces the universal and preserves (begreift) the particular in it. As the understanding used to be taken as something separated from reason in general, so dialectical reason used to be taken as something separated from positive reason. But in its true nature reason is mind (Geist), which is higher than both cognitive (verst�ndige) reason and rational understanding. Mind is the negative, that which constitutes the quality of dialectical reason as well as of the understanding.
It negates simplicity and so, like the understanding, posits determinate difference; but it also destroys this difference and so is dialectical. Its result, however, is not mere emptiness, but is just as much positive; thus it returns to and establishes the first simplicity, which now is a universal concrete in itself.”[98] Our conclusion, then, concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the process of thought as dialectical is that thought is a process of negative mediation.
As a mediating activity, thought is not limited to the finite and conditioned as those who appeal to the necessity of immediate knowledge would have us believe. On the contrary, its very mediation is the definition of reality; by relating it defines, and by negating it affirms. In other words, the process of thought is the progressive explication of the implicit, the disclosure of the essential nature of the objects of knowledge Negation is not construed in terms of formal contradiction; it is that function of the dialectic by virtue of which it leads ultimately to the essence of reality. However faultily Hegel may be thought to have worked out this conception in the Logic, its illuminating suggestiveness for any theory of knowledge cannot be denied and should not be overlooked.[99] Perhaps enough has been said about this Hegelian doctrine of negation.
But, like most of Hegel’s teachings, it has not escaped misconstruction at the hands of the critics. So it may not be amiss, at the conclusion of our exposition, to add a few words in reply to some of the most characteristic criticisms; not, indeed, for controversial purposes, but in the hope that the attempt to set Hegel right in the eyes of his critics will at least serve to call attention to the fact that another interpretation of him is possible.
The criticisms of Haym and James seem unquestionably to rest upon an entirely false notion of what Hegel means by negation. Haym seems to think that Hegel absurdly contended that the essence of things consists in their being contradictory; and he contrasts this supposed position of Hegel’s with the Herbartian principle that the way to truth lies through the elimination of contradiction.[100] Such an interpretation evidently takes it for granted that Hegel can mean by contradiction, negation, nothing more than what formal logic means by it, namely, sheer incompatibility and absolute opposition; to all appearances, the critic is innocent of the fact that negation or contradiction, as Hegel is at great pains to define it, is just the doing away with bare negation, abstract opposition, and that the term embodies Hegel’s unwearied insistence that formal contradiction has no significance when applied to reality.
Naturally the criticism is no more significant than the assumption upon which it leans for support. The same oversight is at the basis of Professor James’s criticism of this Hegelian conception, in a characteristic discussion “On Some Hegelisms,” in his volume of popular lectures on philosophy entitled The Will to Believe. At a very dramatic point in this essay Hegel is presented to us, standing amidst a jarring, jolting world of incoherent facts, frantically lifting ‘vain hands of imprecation’ at the wild and tumultuous scene before him. “But hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear? Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a chasm a filling? – a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved.”[101] These strictures are apparently supposed to be a real criticism of Hegel, but the absurdity against which they are directed first saw the light when they themselves were penned. It is certain that such an absurd position as the one here criticized cannot justly be attributed to Hegel; it is a caricature of Hegel’s real position. The ‘glue’ that binds the world together is, in Hegel’s view of the matter, not the eternal falling apart of objects, but simply their necessary interconnectedness; if you attempt to separate them, they will not stay put. Nor is it that negation which disintegrates the universe that Hegel uses as the ‘mortar’ to combine it; it is that negation which, because it is as much positive as negative, does actually combine it. After all, it would appear that one is forced to admit that Hegel is more than a superficial thinker trying to palm off on a long-suffering public palpable absurdities.
Trendelenburg’s criticism of Hegel on this point is more serious and, one is inclined to say, more significant than the preceding criticisms, but it seems no less fallacious. This critic triumphantly forces Hegel into the following dilemma: “Either the negation, through which the dialectic development to the second and third moments is mediated, is logical negation (A, not-A) – in which case nothing determinate is produced in the second moment and no synthesis is given in the third; or else the opposition is a real one – in which case it cannot be attained by logical means, and consequently the dialectic is not the dialectic of pure thought.”[102] Here it is evident that the critic is at least aware that two kinds of opposition or negation are possible, namely, logical and real; and in this respect his criticism differs from the preceding ones But, like these others, Trendelenburg’s criticism rests upon an assumption the validity of which he does not attempt to establish. The assumption in this case is that Hegel has no right to claim that the dialectic of pure thought can involve material opposition. This assumption is based upon a further assumption that pure thought and formal thought (abstract cognition) are one. If we are willing to grant this second assumption, then the above dilemma exhausts the possibilities and so accomplishes its purpose; in the nature of the case formal opposition or negation is not material opposition. But if we maintain with Hegel that form and matter are one and inseparable, and that real thought, so far from being merely formal thought confined to the magic circle of the impotent universal, actually does express the nature of its object, then the critic’s dilemma is not exhaustive and so loses its significance; in this event, formal opposition becomes a mere abstraction, and dialectical negation, the negation of what Hegel calls pure thought, becomes ipso facto real opposition.
So it would seem that before the critic undertook to annihilate the dialectic with an ‘either-or’ proposition, he should have come to an understanding with the author concerning the nature of that thought of which the dialectic is the expression. The whole problem is whether pure thought, as Hegel uses the term, does involve real opposition; and this must be argued, not assumed at the beginning.
Mr. McTaggart’s contention that negation loses import as the dialectic advances from the more abstract to the more concrete categories implies the same general misconception of the nature of negation. In his opinion negation is very prominent in the earlier categories, while in the later categories it has almost entirely disappeared. And he seeks to establish this interpretation by investigating the movement of the dialectic in the categories of Being, and by contrasting the movement there with the movement in the categories of the Notion.[103] It is not our present purpose to inquire whether this is or is not a correct account of the dialectic as it is actually worked out in the Logic. The point of interest now is the fact that negation, as Mr. McTaggart implicitly conceives it, is not negation as we have seen Hegel define it above. According to the critic thesis and antithesis, in the earlier categories of the Logic, are opposed to each other in a more or less mechanical fashion and are more or less externally joined together by means of the synthesis; but, in the later categories, this abstract opposition is wanting. Now to go from this fact (granting for the sake of the argument that it is a fact) to the conclusion that negation becomes less significant as the dialectic advances is clearly to identify negation with abstract opposition The argument is this: in the categories of Being, antithesis is the logical opposite of thesis, and so here we find negation; in the categories of the Notion, antithesis and thesis are no longer sheer incompatibles, antithesis defines thesis, and therefore the negation formerly existing between them has disappeared. In this argument sheer incompatibility and negation are obviously used synonymously. But, as we have already seen, this sheer incompatibility is not Hegel’s conception of negation. From his point of view negation does not simply negate; its nature is not exhausted in bare opposition. On the contrary, it always presupposes a positive ground and so is in a very important sense positive. All genuinely significant negation carries with it a positive import; bare negation is a meaningless tautology. Hence it follows that, if the antithesis is to be a true negative, a dialectical negative, as Hegel says it is, then it must to a degree at least define the thesis; and the more perfectly it does this, the more significant a negative does it become. Thus, even accepting Mr. McTaggart’s account of the general nature and procedure of the dialectic as true, still we are forced to reject his conclusion. As Hegel conceives the negative, it progressively becomes, not a less and less, but a more and more important factor in the dialectical process; so far from finally disappearing entirely, it ever grows more explicit and more emphatic.
And this, one is inclined to think, is the true description of the matter: negation gains in positive import as the universe of discourse becomes more determinate.
Finally, Mr. Bradley’s implied criticism of Hegel on this point seems open to the same general criticism as the above. “The law of Contradiction,” he says, “has had the misfortune to be flatly denied from a certain theory of the nature of things. So far is that law (it has been contended) from being the truth, that in the nature of things contradiction exists.”[104] Now I submit that this statement, as a criticism of the Hegelian theory, is beside the mark. Hegel does not deny the validity of the law of contradiction taken in its abstract and formal sense, that is, as the statement of the relation which exists between logical contradictories. A unitary whole whose elements are sheer logical disparates is, I think we may safely say, as genuine a non-entity for Hegel as it is for anyone else. What Hegel does deny, however, is that such abstract contradiction finds a place in reality; and he is prepared to argue that when we attribute it to reality we are guilty of attempting the impossible task of making reality square with the principles of our abstract and formal logic. What he insists upon is that we must define contradiction more concretely, if we would apply the category to the real; and this more concrete definition he gives us in his doctrine of negation. But this position does not necessarily touch the validity (formal validity) of the law of contradiction at all as Mr. Bradley himself is willing to admit. “In the object and within the whole,” he tells us, “the truth may be that we never really do have these disparates. We only have moments which would be incompatible if they really were separate, but, conjoined together, have been subdued into something within the character of the whole If we so can understand the identity of opposites – and I am not sure that we may not do so – then the law of Contradiction flourishes untouched. If, in coming into one, the contraries as such no longer exist, then where is the contradiction?” [105] Although it is questionable whether Mr. Bradley stands consistently by this position in his theory of knowledge, we certainly are justified in attributing it to Hegel. So, granting this, it would seem that, on the critic’s own showing, Hegel is free from the charge of having ‘flatly denied’ the significance of the law of contradiction. He had no quarrel with this principle, as a principle of formal logic; I am persuaded that he, as well as his critic, was fully conscious of the fact that “it has not a tooth with which to bite any one.” He respected its toothless estate and had no reason, and, so far as I have been able to see, no inclination, to rob it of its legitimate claims, ‘absurdly feeble’ though they surely are. What he was anxious to do was to make the formal principle conscious of its absurdly feeble condition, and to rejuvenate it by bringing it into vital touch with concrete reality. As the statement of the blank opposition of disparates the principle is indeed abstract and impotent; as the negative of the Notion it is the very pulse of the life of reality itself. This, as I comprehend it, is the position of Hegel with reference to the law of contradiction; and, if I read Mr. Bradley aright, it differs only in terminology from his own view of the matter.
The main points which this chapter has attempted to establish are the following. Hegel insists that immediacy and mediation are inseparable, that all immediacy implies mediation, and that the immediacy of reality involves complete mediation. But this is not to identify the immeThought diacy of reality with the abstractions of science. For the process of mediation, as Hegel defines it, is a process of determinate negation which reduces experience to an ordered and systematic whole; it affirms as well as denies, and indeed affirms by denying. In short, it is the principle within experience which makes of experience a cosmos and not a chaos.
A completely mediated immediacy, that is, reality, is, therefore, just completely organized experience. This negative within thought is not merely negative; it is a negative which annuls the false immediacy only because it is ever leading us onwards to the true immediacy. The many criticisms which are directed against Hegel on this point overlook this fact, and unwarrantedly assume that he means by negation abstract contradiction.
Table of Contents
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h3>Chapter III. Ontology and Epistemology.</h3>
<p>The conclusions of the two preceding chapters have led us to a further problem which we shall here be forced to face. If it be true that thought does in point of fact express the nature of things, then it would seem to follow that the science of thought is the science of things, that ontology and epistemology coincide. In this connection two questions arise: Does Hegel identify the two? And if so, what does he mean by the identification and what justification is there for it? It is to the task of answering these questions that we now address ourselves.</p>
<p>To the first of the above questions there can, I think, be only one answer. Hegel does identify logic and metaphysics. In the first place, we have his own explicit statement on the point. Since thoughts are “Objective Thoughts,” he says, “Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts – thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n106">[106]</a></sup> Besides such an explicit statement, one might offer as evidence the whole logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy which is unquestionably towards this identification.</p>
<p>Since the categories “really are, as forms of the Notion, the vital spirit of the actual world,”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n107">[107]</a></sup> and since things or objects which do not agree with them are accidental, arbitrary, and untrue phenomena;<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n108">[108]</a></sup> since the universal aspect of the object is not something subjective attributed to it only when it is an object of thought, but rather belongs to and expresses its essential nature, it follows that the science which has to do with these universals is ipso facto the science of reality. This science, of course, is logic. Logic, therefore, is metaphysics.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n109">[109]</a></sup> For this identification of logic and metaphysics Hegel has been very severely criticized. And this brings us to our second question: What does Hegel mean by the identification, and can it in any way be defended? Perhaps we can best answer this question by attempting to answer the objections to which the identification in question has given rise. One of the most recent and perhaps the clearest and most convincing of Hegel’s critics on this point is Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison; consequently we shall devote ourselves to a consideration of his objections.</p>
<p>If we succeed in answering satisfactorily his criticism, we shall have succeeded in answering all.</p>
<p>But before passing to this criticism some preliminary work is necessary.</p>
<p>We must first attempt to define the exact position of the <em>Logic </em>with reference to the other parts of Hegel’s system. This will clear the way for the following discussion But in order not to anticipate that discussion our attention will here be confined exclusively to the problem of the position of the <em>Logic </em>in the system; the problem of the ontological significance of the <em>Logic </em>will occupy us when we come to take up Professor Pringle-Pattison’s criticism. What then, we first ask, is the position of the <em>Logic </em>in the system, and in what relation does it stand to the other parts of the <em>Encyclopedia</em>? The best point of departure in attempting to answer this question is acquaintance with the specific problem that Hegel has before him in the Logic. In order to determine the nature of this problem, however, a consideration of the question concerning the presupposition of the Logic is necessary. For it would seem that one could hardly appreciate the significance of the dialectical development of the categories by plunging at once into the ‘bacchic whirl.’ A preliminary discussion of what the Logic presupposes, if, indeed, it is not absolutely necessary to an adequate appreciation of its real problem and aim, is at least desirable.</p>
<p>But this problem of the presupposition of the <em>Logic </em>need not detain us long. There can be no doubt, it would seem that in the author’s mind the <em>Logic </em>presupposes the result of the <em>Phenomenology</em>. To justify this contention it is necessary simply to let the author speak for himself. “In the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>,” he says in the larger <em>Logic</em>, “I have exhibited consciousness in its progress from its first immediate opposition of itself and its object, on to absolute knowledge. This course traverses all the forms of the relation of consciousness to its object, and has as its result the conception of our science. This conception needs no justification here – apart from the fact that it comes out as the final result in the Logic itself – it needs no justification here, because it got its justification there. And it is capable of no other justification than just this production of it by consciousness, all whose own peculiar forms are resolved into this conception as their truth...This conception of the pure science and the deduction of it are presupposed in the present treatise, in so far as the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>is nothing else but such a deduction of it “<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n110">[110]</a></sup> Again, later in the same work, we read: “It has been remarked in the introduction that the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>is the science of consciousness, the exhibition of the fact that consciousness has the conception of our science, that is, of pure knowledge as its result. To this extent, then, the Logic has the science of the phenomenal Spirit as its presupposition; for that science contains and displays the necessity, and hence the proof of the truth of the standpoint of pure knowledge, as well as the way in which that standpoint is reached.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n111">[111]</a></sup> In addition to these explicit statements of the <em>Logic</em>, I may be permitted to quote one other passage from the preface to the <em>Phenomenology </em>itself. Having traced in a sentence or two the development of the <em>Phenomenology </em>from the standpoint of sensuous consciousness to that of absolute knowledge, where we have completely mediated being, Hegel continues: “Just here the <em>Phenomenology </em>comes to an end. In it the way has been prepared for the element of knowledge wherein the moments of Spirit have unfolded themselves in the form of simplicity which knows its object as itself. These moments no longer stand opposed to each other as being and knowing, but remain in the simplicity of knowledge; they are the true in the form of the true, and their difference is only difference of content. Their development, which in this element is organized into a whole, is <em>Logic </em>or <em>Speculative Philosophy</em>.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n112">[112]</a></sup> Comment on such plain passages as these seems superfluous: Hegel’s meaning in them is unmistakable.</p>
<p>The science of <em>Logic </em>assumes the conclusion of the <em>Phenomenology </em>as its starting point and its procedure and result are to be judged only in the light of this assumption.</p>
<p>Without further discussion of this point, then, we pass to the main problem before us. What is the aim of the <em>Logic </em>in the light of its presupposition? The passage quoted last in the preceding paragraph gives us a basis for an answer to this question. In this passage Hegel tells us what the purpose of the <em>Logic </em>is, viewed from the standpoint of absolute knowledge. The passage, translated into simpler language, amounts to this. At the conclusion of the <em>Phenomenology </em>we reached the true definition of knowledge; the categories no longer appear as merely subjective ideas, or concepts, opposed to objects to which they are quasi-mechanically related, but they show themselves to be capable of expressing the essential nature of objects, and so are genuinely universal and objective. To organize these categories into a systematic whole and to set forth in a scientific manner their interconnection is the business of the <em>Logic</em>. In other words, the <em>Phenomenology </em>exhibits the essentially objective and universal nature of that thought which is the subject-matter of the <em>Logic</em>; the problem of the <em>Logic </em>being to work out the connection among the categories in abstraction from their essential relation to sensuous experience. In the <em>Phenomenology </em>thought has been observed and its nature determined in its relation to the objects of time and place, but in the <em>Logic </em>temporal and spatial relations are entirely ignored and we move in the ether of pure thought: the concrete categories of the <em>Phenomenology </em>are, in the <em>Logic</em>, to be considered for their own sake and their inter-relations determined apart from their experiential basis. In a sense it may be said that the <em>Phenomenology </em>assumes that thought is always concrete, its procedure consisting in an exhibition of the necessity of this assumption: the <em>Logic</em>, likewise, takes this for granted but as a fact established by the <em>Phenomenology </em>and then proceeds to investigate specifically thought as it is in and for itself. “To raise to knowledge....</p>
<p>those forms of thought which act instinctively in common consciousness and obtain there only an obscure and incomplete reality, to seize them by thought, and thought alone, in their most simple, abstract, and universal existence, to trace and comprehend them in their relations and in their unity – such is the task of the Hegelian Logic.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n113">[113]</a></sup> We must guard the statement above that the purpose of the Logic is to deal with thought in abstraction from its empirical nature. Such a statement might be misconstrued to mean that the Logic deals only with abstract thought. And such an opinion would certainly not be without justification, even on the basis of Hegel’s own assertions. When we consider his statements concerning the science of logic, all that we have hitherto said about the concreteness of logical thought seems to have been said falsely. For example, Hegel tells us in one place that the realm of logic is “a kingdom of shadows, the world of simple essences, freed from all sensuous concretion.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n114">[114]</a></sup> Elsewhere he says that the content of logic is “the presentation of God as He is in His eternal essence before the creation of Nature or of a finite mind.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n115">[115]</a></sup> In yet another passage we are informed that logic “has to do not with perceptions, nor, like geometry, with abstract representations of the senses, but with pure abstractions.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n116">[116]</a></sup> But such deliverances as these are balanced by numerous counter-assertions concerning the concreteness of the science of logic.</p>
<p>For example, we meet such a passage as this: “Bare abstractions or formal thoughts are no business of philosophy, which has to deal only with concrete thoughts.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n117">[117]</a></sup> Or this: “Logic has nothing to do with an act of thought about something that lies outside of the thought as the ground or basis of it, or with forms that furnish mere signs or marks of the truth. On the contrary, the necessary forms and peculiar determinations of thought are the content and the highest truth itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n118">[118]</a></sup> Furthermore, we are explicitly informed<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n119">[119]</a></sup> that <em>das begreifende Denken </em>rather than simply <em>das Denken </em>is the subject matter of logic; and, as I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, this is to say that the thought of the science of logic is concrete.</p>
<p>The question naturally arises, Do not these two sets of passages contradict each other? Is not a ‘pure’ abstraction equivalent to a ‘bare’ abstraction, and when Hegel asserts that the science of logic has to do with pure abstractions does he not virtually deny the validity of his claims for its concreteness? A consideration of this essential point will give us a clearer idea of the <em>Logic</em>, both as to its aim and problem and as to its relation to the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>.</p>
<p>The answer to the puzzle before us will be found in an appreciation of the ambiguity which attaches to the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete.’ Abstract may mean not concrete in the sense of not sensuous. For example, it is sometimes said that the phenomena of the mind are abstract, because they cannot be touched seen, heard, etc., but are objects of thought only; objects of the world of sense-perception would, in this meaning of the terms, be concrete. This is the signification of the terms as common sense uses them. In this sense, Hegel’s logic is unquestionably abstract, as he himself explicitly states; and when he speaks of the abstractness of the logic he is thinking of this meaning of the terms. The content of the Logic may be called abstract, he says, “if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n120">[120]</a></sup> “If content means no more than what is palpable and obvious to the senses, all philosophy and logic in particular must be at once acknowledged to be void of content, that is to say, of content perceptible to the senses.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n121">[121]</a></sup> Of course, all sciences which have to do with objects not perceptible to the senses are, from this point of view, abstract But there is another meaning of the terms abstract and concrete. An object may be abstract in the sense of being unreal, or taken apart from its relations; while the concrete object is the object seen in its deepest and truest significance. The categories of mathematics, for example, may be said to be more abstract than the categories of ethical science; and the ideals that seriously influence our lives for weal or woe are more concrete than the air-castles which we build in our day-dreams. The abstract in this signification, Hegel strongly insists, is not the realm of philosophy: it is just the aim of philosophy to get rid of all abstraction and to see the world as concrete.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n122">[122]</a></sup> From these considerations Hegel’s answer to the charge of inconsistency in his statements concerning the science of logic is plain. ‘Pure’ abstraction is not equivalent to ‘bare’ abstraction; the former is characteristic of all thought, the latter only of formal thought. In that its subject matter is thought and not the immediately given of sense-perception, logic may be said to busy itself with abstractions, to move in a realm of shades; but in this way every mental science is abstract, and might be metaphorically described as a ‘kingdom of shadows.’ In that its subject matter is the Notion, however, that is to say, concrete thought, the <em>Logic </em>is not only not abstract, but is the most concrete of the sciences. <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n123">[123]</a></sup> </p>
<p>“The Notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, we must be dead to hearing and seeing. And yet . . the Notion is the only true concrete; for no other reason than because it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n124">[124]</a></sup> We shall have to return to this point later.</p>
<p>And all this shows us again the essential difference, as well as the fundamental similarity, between the <em>Logic </em>and the <em>Phenomenology</em>. They both deal with consciousness; they are both expositions of the essential nature of thought. But whereas the <em>Phenomenology </em>is interested in consciousness primarily as a subject-object relation and endeavors to work out the significance of this relation, the <em>Logic </em>is interested primarily in disclosing the organic nature of thought and so confines its attention to the thought activity in and for itself. The one is an interpretation of thought in its relation to its object: the other is an interpretation of the categories as they are in themselves, temporarily held in isolation from their empirical setting. Hegel has stated this distinction in the preface to the first edition of the larger <em>Logic</em>: “In this manner” – dialectically – “I have tried to present consciousness in the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>.</p>
<p>Consciousness is Spirit in the form of concrete knowledge, knowledge shut in in the form of externality; but the motion of the form of this object, as the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests only upon the nature of the pure essences that constitute the content of the <em>Logic</em>. As phenomenal Spirit, which in its own manner frees itself from its immediacy and external concretion, consciousness develops into pure knowledge which appropriates as its subject matter those pure essences as they are in and for themselves ... Thus is given the relation of the science that I have called the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>to the <em>Logic</em>.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n125">[125]</a></sup> To sum up briefly, our conclusion so far is this. The <em>Logic </em>has as its presupposition the whole development of the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>.</p>
<p>The <em>Phenomenology</em>, as we have already seen, asserts the inseparability of thought and reality and attempts to define for us the true nature of thought. The <em>Logic </em>presupposes this conclusion, taking for granted that thought is really as it is here defined; and in the light of this presupposition its aim is to give a more detailed account of the nature of thought, to work out the organic unity which exists among the several categories of thought.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n126">[126]</a></sup> Such, then, being the relation between the <em>Logic </em>and the <em>Phenomenology</em>, we pass on to ask concerning the relation between the <em>Logic </em>and the other parts of the <em>Encyclopaedia</em>. This is a much debated problem in connection with Hegel’s philosophy, and upon its solution depends the integrity of the system as a system. In accordance with our determination not to anticipate the following discussion, we shall here confine ourselves to the formal aspect of the problem: as little as possible will be said concerning the real ontological significance of the <em>Logic</em>. The question now before us is: As regards the systematic arrangement of the <em>Encyclopaedia</em>, what is the relation of the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>and the <em>Philosophy of Mind</em>? If at this juncture we turn to Hegel for light on the problem, we are sadly disappointed; very little light is vouchsafed us. His statements on the point are few, and those few are couched in such metaphorical terms it is almost impossible to attach a definite meaning to them. But one fact seems indisputable, the fact, namely, that Hegel believed necessary and actually tried to make some kind of transition from one part of the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>to another. Let us see what he has to say about this transition.</p>
<p>In the second edition of his <em>Hegelianism and Personality</em><sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n127">[127]</a></sup> Professor Pringle-Pattison has summarized Hegel’s account of the transition as follows: “The Absolute Idea, Hegel says in the larger ‘Logic,’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n128">[128]</a></sup> is ‘still logical, still confined to the element of pure thoughts.... But inasmuch as the pure idea of knowledge is thus, so far, shut up in a species of subjectivity, it is impelled to remove this limitation; and thus the pure truth, the last result of the Logic, becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science.’ The Idea, he recalls to us, has been defined as ‘the absolute unity of the pure notion and its reality’ – ‘the pure notion which is related only to itself’; but if this is so, the two sides of this relation are one, and they collapse, as it were, ‘into the immediacy of Being.’ ‘The Idea as the totality in this form is <em>Nature</em>. This determining of itself, however, is not a process of becoming or a transition’ such as we have from stage to stage in the <em>Logic</em>. ‘The passing over is rather to be understood thus – that the Idea freely lets itself go, being absolutely sure of itself and at rest in itself. On account of this freedom, the form of its determination is likewise absolutely free – namely, the externality of space and time existing absolutely for itself without subjectivity. A few lines lower he speaks of the ‘resolve (<em>Entschluss</em>) of the pure Idea to determine itself as external Idea.’ Turning to the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>we find at the end of the smaller <em>Logic</em>, a more concise but substantially similar statement. ‘The Idea which exists for itself, looked at from the point of view of this unity with itself, is Perception; and the Idea as it exists for perception is nature ... The absolute freedom of the Idea consists in this, that in the absolute truth of itself (i.e., according to Hegel’s usage, when it has attained the full perfection of the form which belongs to it), it resolves to let the element of its particularity – the immediate idea, as its own reflection – go forth freely from itself as Nature.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n129">[129]</a></sup> And in the lecture-note which follows we read, as in the larger <em>Logic – ‘</em>We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began. This return to the beginning is also an advance. That with which we began was Being, abstract Being, and now we have the Idea as Being; but this existent Idea is Nature.’” Such is Hegel’s account of the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. Confining our attention for the present to the aspect of the problem before us, let us ask concerning the significance and justification of this attempted transition. There seems to be no doubt that Hegel believed the transition necessary and that he did attempt to make it. The question is, Why, and with what success? One or two preliminary considerations will lead us to an answer.</p>
<p>In the first place, I think we must agree with Haldane that the transition in question is logical only, not temporal.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n130">[130]</a></sup> If what we have been arguing is true, namely, that the Notion is genuinely objective and universal, this conclusion is forced upon us: the Absolute Idea would then include in itself the fullness of Nature. And Hegel teaches us that the transition is only logical. For he insists that the Idea cannot be thought of as existing anterior to or independent of Nature; and that, when it passes into Nature, it does not come into possession of a content which before was alien to it.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n131">[131]</a></sup> On the contrary, we are informed that the Idea is nothing but completed Being, the abstract immediacy of Being made concrete.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n132">[132]</a></sup> And so such an account of the relation between the Idea and its manifestations as the following from Falckenberg may be dismissed at once as at best misleading; indeed, if it means what it says, it is ridiculously false: “The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and science to return to itself enriched and completed, i.e., to attain a higher absoluteness than that of the beginning.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n133">[133]</a></sup> As Hegel conceives the matter, the Idea does indeed enrich itself by passing through these various stages of its existence, or, rather, by exhibiting these differentiations of itself, but it does so only by showing that these differentiations are essential aspects of itself and by disclosing itself as inherent in them from the first.</p>
<p>The Idea is prior, not in point of time, but solely in the logical sense.</p>
<p>In the second place, as Vera suggests,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n134">[134]</a></sup> the true significance of the problem involved in this transition, as well as the correct solution of the problem, can be had only in the light of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole.</p>
<p>In a very important sense the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>is the presupposition of the entire <em>Encyclopedia</em>. As has already been pointed out, the aim of the <em>Phenomenology </em>is simply to show what are the implications of knowledge, and to prove, against Kant, that in knowledge as thus developed we have the expression of ultimate reality. Now, as I think we must conceive the matter, the <em>Encyclopedia </em>simply attempts a more detailed investigation and a more elaborate exposition of this position.</p>
<p>We might put it thus. In the <em>Phenomenology </em>we begin with all the reality we know anything about, namely, experience, and we proceed to develop its implications as regards its nature as a subject-object relation.</p>
<p>The <em>Logic </em>abstracts from this concrete whole and examines one aspect of it, which here we might call the subject-aspect; while the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>and the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>deal with other aspects of the same whole, that is, they might be said to define reality in its object-significance. For it must not be forgotten that, when we arrive at the category of absolute knowledge in the <em>Phenomenology</em>, we have reached, not a new kind of experience, but only a more concrete point of view in our common everyday experience; and this point of view is taken by the other parts of the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>as well as by the <em>Logic</em>.</p>
<p>Though Haym unfortunately failed to appreciate the full significance of his words, still he is essentially right whehe says that the <em>Phenomenology “</em>is really the whole system.... The later expression of the system in its articulated totality is only a more detailed exposition and completion that which is contained in the <em>Phenomenology.”</em><sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n135">[135]</a></sup> And it seems to me that this fact about the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>is not to be forgotten or overlooked, if we are truly to appreciate the relation of its several parts to each other.</p>
<p>If the preceding considerations are substantially true, then we are forced to conclude (a) that the <em>Logic</em>, <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>and <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>are only three points of view from which one organic whole is observed and interpreted. The first investigates the more strictly cognitive side of experience; the second has to do with its crass objective, its sensuous aspect; while the third undertakes to interpret its spiritual values. As Kuno Fischer points out, each in a sense has the same content: the difference among them lies rather in the form which that content assumes.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n136">[136]</a></sup> Each has a unique sphere and claim of its own, but neither is the whole of reality nor can it be ontologically separated from the others. Thought does indeed, according to Hegel, include its object, whether that object be crass matter or the other so-called functions of the mind; but it includes by subsuming, by taking up and preserving in itself. So other sciences besides that of pure thought have their <em>raison d’etre</em>.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n137">[137]</a></sup> But because thought does thus include its object, we must say (b) that in a sense the Logic comprehends the other two parts of the <em>Encyclopaedia</em>.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n138">[138]</a></sup> And so Haym’s criticism loses its force and becomes a simple statement of fact: “<em>So muss die Logik die ganze Philosophie sein, so muss mit ihr das System schliessen</em>.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n139">[139]</a></sup> This last point will come up for direct discussion later in the present chapter.</p>
<p>But it will be objected that on this score we are forced to deny the necessity of the transition from the Logic as Hegel has attempted it. And I have purposely courted the objection in order to emphasize my agreement with it. If what has been said above is true – and its validity is attested to by our entire discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought – then we must give up the idea of a dialectical transition from one to another part of the <em>Encyclopaedia</em>. Such a transition is impossible were it necessary, but it is not necessary. Its necessity has been obviated by the result of the <em>Phenomenology</em>; for this work has shown that in the dialectic of the categories the object cannot be entirely absent, even though, for methodological purposes its presence be as far as possible neglected. A dialectical transition here would in fact be inconsistent with the spirit of Hegel’s philosophy; it would seem to indicate that the Idea is a mere abstraction which demands a content to make it real, an abstract universal to be particularized. Hegel himself at times seems to feel this difficulty, although, so far as I am aware, he never explicitly expresses himself on the point. For example, his very frank recognition that the transition which he attempts from the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>is different from the transition of the subjective notion into objectivity, or of subjective purpose into life, one would think is not entirely without significance.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n140">[140]</a></sup> Again elsewhere he seems to show that he fears the transition because he takes pains to warn us against misconceiving its real import.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n141">[141]</a></sup> And in the larger Logic, at the beginning of the discussion of the Absolute Idea, there occurs a passage which is suggestive in this connection: “Since it [i.e., the Idea] contains all determination within itself, and its essence is to return to itself through its self-determination or particularity, it possesses different forms; and it is the business of philosophy to trace it in these forms” – such as nature, art, and religion.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n142">[142]</a></sup> But whether Hegel had any such feeling as I have attributed to him or whether he did not, the fact remains that he felt called upon to make the leap from the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature</em>. He explicitly asserts that “the last result of the Logic becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science,” which science is, of course, the <em>Philosophy of Nature</em>. If now, as we have argued, this transition is not only not necessary, but, what is more important, is really inconsistent with the logical bias of the system, then the question why the author deemed it necessary becomes a very pressing one. As a matter of fact he does attempt the transition: what is to be said about the fact? The answer to this question is, in my opinion, not far to seek. Hegel was very much in earnest about this transition, and he was in earnest about it for the reason that with it stands or falls his system as a system.</p>
<p>This, it seems to me, is the secret of his anxiety concerning the matter.</p>
<p>Like Kant, he was bound down to his system; he could not get beyond the machinery of his dialectic. The <em>Logic</em>, <em>Philosophy of Nature</em>, and <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>had to form a triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, else the formal coherence and symmetry of the system would have been lost. The scheme of the system demands a continuous linear development from one phase of it to another – an absolutely necessary development.</p>
<p>If the dialectic is the absolute and universal method, why is there not a dialectical passage from the <em>Logic </em>to nature? There simply must be – and there was. Such procedure is due to the fact that Hegel did not always raise the spirit of his system above the letter. The Method, the unerring and absolute method of the dialectic, had to be looked out for and its claims catered to regardless of consequences; and only too frequently was the method seen in a false light and its claims misinterpreted.</p>
<p>If at all times Hegel could have identified his method with his doctrine of <em>begreifendes Denken</em>, the relation of the various parts of the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>to each other would have been differently conceived and the position of the <em>Logic </em>in the system would have been more clearly and intelligibly set forth.</p>
<p>Some commentators seem disposed to justify this leap from the <em>Logic</em>.</p>
<p>Noel, for example, goes so far as to maintain that there is a connection between the <em>Logic </em>and what follows in the system analogous to the connection among the several sections of the <em>Logic</em>.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n143">[143]</a></sup> “There must be,” he says, “a dialectical passage from the <em>Logic </em>to Nature. The logical Idea must negate itself and pass into its contrary.” But there seems to be no very good reason why the logical Idea should, just at this point, negate itself and pass into Nature. Indeed, Noel’s position seems to overlook Hegel’s own explicit statement, quoted above, to the effect that the transition here in question is different from that which obtains among the categories of the Logic. In this respect Mr. McTaggart is, perhaps, truer to Hegel. It is true that he asserts, “Granted pure thought, we are compelled by the necessity of the dialectic to grant the existence of some sensuous intuition also.” But he recognizes Hegel’s statement that the transition to the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>has its own peculiar characteristics.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n144">[144]</a></sup> </p>
<p>The fundamentals of Mr. McTaggart’s position seem to be: that the transition is both analytic and synthetic; that it really represents the phases of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and that Spirit, as the truth and goal of the movement, is present even from the beginning. In so far as this position insists that in the Idea both Nature and Spirit are involved, one is not inclined to call it in question. But does this insistence make the transition from the Absolute Idea to Nature dialectically necessary? Merely by observing the Idea as the highest of the logical categories, are we forced to posit nature as its counterpart? If so, are we thereby made aware of the implicit appearance of Spirit, even before it looms on the horizon? Even if we grant, with Noel, that logic contains in germ philosophy in its entirety, and with Mr. McTaggart that, if there were a transition at the end of the Logic, it would necessarily be both analytic and synthetic, still the essential point here has not been touched.</p>
<p>Is the transition a dialectical necessity? If so, why is it so? I confess myself unable to see any dialectical advance from the end of the <em>Logic </em>to the beginning of the <em>Philosophy of Nature</em>, or even from the Idea to a matter of sensuous intuition. Is it any less reasonable to say that the first category of the <em>Logic </em>should alienate itself in its other than that the last category should do so? Is not the category of Being as likely to go forth into its opposite as is the Absolute Idea? Certainly so, if as Mr. McTaggart seems to suggest, the fact that the Absolute Idea is ‘pure thought’ is the impetus of the movement; for Being is just as much ‘pure thought’ as is the Absolute Idea. In fact, it would seem to be more reasonable to return to the beginning of the Logic and take the sensuous ‘alienation’ of Being as the point of departure for the <em>Naturphilosophie</em>: at any rate, in this event we should have the privilege of proceeding on lines analogous to those followed in the development of the <em>Logic</em>, namely, from the less to the more determinate. But whether we put ourselves at the first category or at the ‘last result’ of the <em>Logic</em>, hoping thereby to discover a beginning for our new ‘sphere and science,’ we find ourselves baffled. In no event do we find that mysterious secret power that would drive us on to Nature. And we fail for the somewhat obvious reason that we are already at Nature and do not need to be driven to it. This so-called transition can be defended only on the basis of the Phenomenology: there it has received the only justification which it needs and of which it is capable.</p>
<p>But – and this is the important point – the conclusion of the Phenomenology destroys at once the necessity and the possibility of such a transition; and from this point of view the dialectical passage becomes nothing more than a misguided zeal for schematization. One must feel that neither Noel nor Mr. McTaggart has succeeded in making the leap plausible: if they had succeeded, one is inclined to say that the real significance of the Hegelian Logic would have been greatly diminished, if not completely destroyed.</p>
<p>It might be argued in support of this transition from the <em>Logic </em>that Hegel is simply recognizing here, explicitly, the presupposition that has been implicit in the entire development of the categories. For what is a dialectical transition? Does it not consist simply in making explicit a presupposition? And do we not at the end of the <em>Logic </em>recognize what has been a presupposition all through, namely, the spiritual union of thought and its object? Thus the circle is completed, the end is one with the beginning. And with this the necessity of a more concrete treatment is apparent – a treatment that shall take into full account the presupposition thus disclosed. And so we are brought at once into the realm of Nature and of Spirit.</p>
<p>This, it must be confessed, is all that Hegel could consistently have meant by the transition in question. It could signify nothing more than a change in point of view, if the lesson of the <em>Phenomenology </em>is to hold here. One is inclined to think that this is really the essence of the transition.</p>
<p>But the question inevitably arises why the presupposition is peculiarly forced upon us in the Absolute Idea. Is not the recognition of the presupposition as explicit in the first categories of the Logic as it is in the last? Does not Hegel make constant appeal to it throughout the whole dialectical advance? Why, then, should the presupposition be forced to the fore in the Absolute Idea as it is not in any of the other categories? It might be answered, Because at the Absolute Idea we have a definition of reality itself. Even so, how was this definition arrived at apart from the phenomena of Nature and Spirit? The fact is that it was not; for the result of the Phenomenology is recognized at every stage of the dialectical development of the categories, and this necessitates the inclusion by the Idea of these phenomena of Nature and Spirit. So far as I can see, the objective aspect of existence is no more clearly and necessarily evident in any one of the categories than it is in all; we are not forced to take account of it in the Idea in a manner different from that in which it forces itself upon us in the categories of Being and Essence. If, when Hegel reached the end of the <em>Logic</em>, he had contented himself with asserting what the above argument would have him assert, namely, that the time had come for us to turn to a detailed consideration of those phenomena that had not been explicitly taken into account by the <em>Logic</em>, if he had simply told us that at the Idea the <em>Logic </em>reached its conclusion and that he here proposed to change his point of view, we could have understood him: the necessity of the change and the partially abstract nature of the <em>Logic</em>, had already been sufficiently explained to us in the <em>Phenomenology</em>. But when he goes on to urge that the Absolute Idea must, by a dialectical necessity, alienate itself in its Other, we begin to wonder where the categories of Being came from and how we ever succeeded in getting from this abstract view of the world to the standpoint of the Idea. We had thought all along that in the Idea we were at last in touch with reality; but when this mysterious alienation begins to take place, the earth trembles under us and we wonder if we have been deceived.</p>
<p>At this juncture the <em>Phenomenology </em>comes to our relief, when we remember that its conclusion has made the transition both unnecessary and impossible. The argument before us does indeed state what Hegel must have meant, if he remained true to the principles of his doctrine; but it hardly explains what he seems actually to have attempted.</p>
<p>It would seem, then, that this would-be transition from the <em>Logic </em>must be given up. And, furthermore, we must agree with Professor Pringle-Pattison that to admit so much involves a surrender of Hegel’s system as he left it. He is systematic to a fault. Within the Logic itself the author’s mania for system often clouds, if it does not completely hide, the issue; the omnipotent Dialectic Method, rather than the organic development of thought, is only too frequently the object of interest.</p>
<p>And, unfortunately, even the data of nature and history are sometimes forced into this formal scheme whether they will or no. What under other circumstances might have been a very simple change in point of view is, as we have just seen, made incomprehensible and misleading by the same absurd reverence for the triadic movement of the ‘absolute method.’ No doubt one may easily be too severely critical of this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, both because it is so exasperating and because it is calculated to conceal the real import of the system. Our zeal to remove these barriers to a true appreciation of the system, and to gain an unprejudiced hearing for the author, might blind us to the fact that these impedimenta find their partial explanation at least in the circumstances under which Hegel wrote. Historically speaking this transition from the <em>Logic </em>may claim for itself some sort of justification. Perhaps it was important for Hegel’s influence that he set forth his system intact; and to do this seemed to necessitate this transition. For if the dialectic had with unerring precision led from the poor and abstract category of Being up to the fullness of the Absolute Idea, and that, too, apart from a direct consideration of Nature and of Spirit, then it was incumbent upon the dialectic to lead in some way to a consideration of these important aspects of experience; and how could this be more happily accomplished than by the assertion of at least a quasi-dialectical connection between the Idea and these its manifestations? This ground of justification for Hegel’s procedure here should not be overlooked, and, of course, should be given the weight that is due it. But, after all, though we may be inclined to excuse Hegel for his formality, we have no special reason for being grateful to hi him for it; his system will be appreciated fully only when we throw aside this formality and penetrate to the fundamentals of the system. And the fundamentals of the system can best be disclosed when the fruitlessness and inconsistency of this attempted transition from the Logic are revealed.</p>
<p>So with no great degree of reluctance we surrender the formal arrangement of Hegel’s system. But we can ill afford to miss its spirit and the results that follow from it. One of the most marked of these results is the position that epistemology is in a sense ontology, that logic and metaphysics cannot be separated from each other. This brings us back to our original question, the intervening discussion having been necessary to clear the way for an answer. So we ask once again concerning the real meaning and justification of this Hegelian position, that a theory of knowledge cannot be separated from a theory of reality. In accordance with our plan of discussion, we shall attempt to answer this question by examining a criticism to which the contention has been subjected.</p>
<p>The criticism which we shall here examine is to be found in the fourth lecture of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s <em>Hegelianism and Personality</em>.</p>
<p>The criticism, we seem compelled to say, is based upon a misapprehension of Hegel’s real meaning and actual procedure.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n145">[145]</a></sup> The remaining part of this chapter will first attempt to justify this assertion, and then conclude with a statement of what Hegel, in consistency with his own principles, must have meant by the identification in question.</p>
<p>The criticism is based upon the attempted transition from the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature</em>, one phase of which we have already considered.</p>
<p>Put in a few words, the criticism seems to be that in this transition Hegel deliberately attempted to deduce nature from the logical Idea, and that, by a copious use of metaphors, he deluded himself into thinking that he had successfully bridged the gulf which separates formal thought from actual existence. To quote: “The concrete existence of the categories (in Nature and Spirit) is to be deduced from their essence or thought-nature; it is to be shown that they cannot not be. When we have mounted to the Absolute Idea, it is contended, we cannot help going further. The nisus of thought itself projects thought out of the sphere of thought altogether into that of actual existence. In fact, strive against the idea as we may, it seems indubitable that there is here once more repeated in Hegel the extraordinary but apparently fascinating attempt to construct the world out of abstract thought or mere universals. The whole form and structure of the system, and the express declarations of its author at points of critical importance, combine to force this conviction upon us. The language used can only be interpreted to mean that thought out of its own abstract nature gives birth to the reality of things.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n146">[146]</a></sup> All of which amounts to saying that Hegel has taken abstract thought, ontologized it, and then has turned about and attempted to deduce concrete reality from this hypostatized abstraction It must be admitted at once that such an accusation is not prima facie without some justification. If we turn once more to the passages above quoted bearing on the transition from the Logic, our first inclination is to accept Professor Pringle-Pattison’s interpretation of them. Other passages, especially those referring to the absoluteness and finality of the system, seem to bear out the same contention. And when in the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>we run across passages which baldly assert that everything is a judgment or a syllogism, we wonder whether Plato’s conception of archetypal Ideas is more removed from concrete experience. And yet such an attempt to deduce nature from abstract thought would be a rather remarkable undertaking on Hegel’s part: it would be inconsistent with the entire spirit of his philosophy, the fundamental assumption of which is, as Haldane suggests,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n147">[147]</a></sup> that you cannot deduce the ‘that.’ Is it possible to interpret these passages so as to make Hegel consistent with the fundaments of his system? If so, it would seem that such an interpretation should certainly be adopted.</p>
<p>I think it is possible to make Hegel consistent in this regard, and this I have tried to do in the preceding pages of this chapter. I fully agree with Professor Pringle-Pattison that the attempted transition from one to another part of <em>Encyclopedia </em>must be given up; and I also agree that with this transition we surrender the system as a system. But I cannot agree with the reasons which the critic advances in support of his conclusions.</p>
<p>It was just because his system depended upon it that Hegel made the resolute leap, and not for the purpose of getting from abstract thought to concrete existence. The ‘ugly broad ditch’ between thought and reality seems to me only a shadow; and, unless indeed we are to credit Hegel with momentary forgetfulness of the foundation of his system, I cannot think that it was more to him. Now it would seem that this interpretation, namely, that the transition from the Logic was attempted for purely schematic purposes, has the advantage over such an interpretation as Professor Pringle-Pattison’s, which makes of the transition an attempt to deduce existential reality from abstract universals; and the advantage of the former interpretation lies in the fact that it does make Hegel consistent with the basic principles of his theory. We may venture to put the matter in the form of a disjunction. Either Hegel tried to deduce nature from the logical categories or he did not. If he did attempt it, then he contradicts himself; for such an attempt would presuppose that the logical categories are merely abstract thoughts existing in the heads of individuals and possessing no vital significance in relation to the essence of concrete objects. But this is the very conception of thought which we have seen Hegel object to in the systems of his predecessors and in contradistinction to which he emphasizes his own doctrine. And that doctrine is that thought has transcended the opposition between itself and its and is really the expression of the essence of the object.</p>
<p>“Pure science presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness.</p>
<p>It contains thought in so far as it is just as much the object in itself, or the object in itself in so far as it is just as much pure thought.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n148">[148]</a></sup> But, on the other hand, if Hegel did not attempt to deduce nature from thought, it would seem that his statements about a transition from the Logic must be explained away. Now the latter horn of this dilemma is comparatively easily disposed of, as has already been pointed out in the preceding part of the present chapter; the so-called transition is only a change in point of view, the author’s insistence upon the necessity of the transition being made for the sake of his system. But if we follow Professor Pringle-Pattison in accepting the former, the most significant aspect of Hegel’s philosophy will, to say the least, become questionable and he himself will stand accused of the most glaring of inconsistencies.</p>
<p>There seems to be no doubt, then, of the conclusion to be reached here.</p>
<p>But leaving aside speculation as to what may or may not have been the immediate purpose of Hegel in this transition, let us try to see what is logically involved in it. Whether or not Hegel has here made a deliberate attempt to deduce nature from thought, such an attempt is certainly not logically imposed upon him.</p>
<p>This contention is based upon what has already been said about the presupposition of the Encyclopedia. In the <em>Encyclopedia </em>we are dealing with one whole, namely, reality: the three parts of the Encyclopedia represent different points of view from which this totality is observed.</p>
<p>This conclusion follows necessarily, if our view concerning the significance of the <em>Phenomenology </em>in the system be correct. For the very outcome of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, we remember, has been the disclosure of the impossibility of dividing reality into water-tight compartments which are so separated from each other that each may be dealt with entirely independently of the others. Reality, this discussion has taught us, is rather one indissoluble whole whose parts can be separated from each other only by abstraction. The <em>Encyclopedia</em>, therefore, presupposing as it unquestionably does the result of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, must have for its object the one reality, and its several parts must be simply different points of view from which this unitary reality is observed and investigated. Now as a corollary of this, it follows that the transition from the <em>Logic </em>is as Kuno Fischer suggests,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n149">[149]</a></sup> logically nothing more than a change in point of view. If the <em>Encyclopedia </em>presents reality to us from three different standpoints each of which involves the others, – and let us not forget that this is the lesson of the <em>Phenomenology – </em>then a transition within the <em>Encyclopedia </em>cannot be anything but a change in point of view. So all that Hegel really was called upon to do in order to get from the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>was simply to announce that he intended to investigate his problems from a new viewpoint: the transition, if one will call it so, had already been made in the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit </em>as we have abundantly seen.</p>
<p>Now it would seem that the accusation that Hegel seriously tried to deduce existence from thought when he made the transition from the <em>Logic </em>to the <em>Philosophy of Nature </em>fails to give the above considerations the weight that is due them. Unless one drops them out of mind entirely, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to catch the significance of the following as a criticism of Hegel: “Most assuredly the Notion contains the category of Being; so does the Ego, that is to say, the idea of the ego, and the Idea of God, both of which are simply the Notion under another name....</p>
<p>But when we ask for real bread, why put us off with a logical stone like this? It is not the category ‘Being,’ of which we are in quest, but that reality of which all categories are only descriptions, and which itself can only be experienced, immediately known or lived. To such reality or factual existence there is no logical bridge; and thoughts or categories have meaning only if we assume, as somehow given, a real world to which they refer.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n150">[150]</a></sup> Surely such a criticism could have been written only in forgetfulness of what Hegel has said about the presupposition of the <em>Logic </em>and the mediated aspect of the category of Being.</p>
<p>Being is, indeed, a logical category; but it is more than a mere abstract category, a blank universal, that has only a psychological existence in the consciousness of the thinker who happens to possess it. It is a concrete thought that expresses one very general, but withal very essential, characteristic of that which really is. In Hegel’s usage, Being, or any other category of thought, is not a mere idea or concept; on the contrary, it is a universal which <em>ipso facto </em>includes within its very nature the particularity of existence.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n151">[151]</a></sup> And this brings us face to face with what seems to be the fundamental error in Professor Pringle-Pattison’s charge. I refer to his neglect of the meaning which Hegel attaches to the Notion. This is the bed-rock upon which Hegel bases his contention that logic and ontology are essentially one. It is only the Notion that “sinks itself in the facts”; it is only the Notion that is “accredited able to express the essential reality of things”; and only the Notion is the subject-matter of the science of logic.</p>
<p>The Notion, thus, is the tie that binds epistemology and metaphysics together. For if thought comprehends reality and is capable of expressing it, if there is no ‘residuum’ which lies outside of thought and which in its nature is inexpressible in terms of thought, then the science of thought is in a very important sense the science of things. Now just this conclusion the critic objects to; and his objection seems to rest upon a misinterpretation of the premise.</p>
<p>Let us notice some of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s statements. After quoting several passages from Hegel to the effect that Nature is the logical Idea in its otherness, is the Spirit in alienation from itself, and so forth, he continues: “Now I maintain that the whole problem of reality as such is wrapped up in these metaphorical phrases – otherness, petrifaction, materiature, concretion – and that by evading the question, Hegel virtually declines to take account of anything but logical abstractions.</p>
<p>He offers us, in a word, a logic in place of a metaphysic; and it may be unhesitatingly asserted that such a proposal, if taken literally, is not only untenable, it is absurd.” Nothing, we are further informed, is in very truth a logical category. “A living dog is better than a dead lion, and even an atom is more than a category. It at least exists as a reality, whereas a category is an abstract ghost, which may have a meaning for intelligent beings, but which, divorced from such real beings and their experience, is the very type of a non-ens.” A little later he says: “Existence is one thing, knowledge is another. But the logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy tends to make this essential distinction disappear, and to reduce things to mere types or ‘concretions’ of abstract formulae.” “The result of Hegel’s procedure would really be to sweep ‘existential reality’ off the board altogether, under the persuasion, apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relations that constitute our knowledge of the thing is equivalent to the existent thing itself. On the contrary, it may be confidently asserted that there is no more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relations than there was with one.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n152">[152]</a></sup> If I understand the import of these passages – and their meaning seems unmistakable – there is involved in them an assumption which I dare think is unwarranted. The assumption is that Hegel has actually attempted to reduce sensuous experience to the universals of formal thought, and has tried to make such universals really be the existent things. If it be true that Hegel has attempted this, then it should be admitted without argument that he has attempted that which is both impossible and absurd. It may, perhaps, be rather difficult to say just in what respect an atom is more than a category, just what other reality it possesses besides its meaning for intelligent beings; but there can not be any question that a living dog is better than a dead lion – an object is indisputably more than a mere meeting-point of abstract relations. But does Hegel deny this? Is it quite fair to him to assert that the logical bias of his philosophy is “to reduce things to mere types or ‘concretions’ of abstract formulae"? Does he really try to force the particularity of existence into the abstract universality of bare cognition? I have already maintained that such an assumption is groundless and even contrary to the real spirit of Hegel’s system; and the preceding chapters attempt to set forth the reasons upon which such a contention rests. If I have there failed to accomplish this, it would hardly be worth while for me to undertake it here. Suffice it to reiterate that, when Hegel insists that knowledge or thought and reality are conterminous, he is simply upholding the theory that experience and reality are one: he means by thought, the Notion, not abstract and formal cognition, but organized experience. If such a criticism as the one with which we are here dealing is to be established, it must first be shown that Hegel does not hold such a doctrine of the nature of thought as has here been attributed to him; and this must be shown regardless of innumerable utterances to the contrary, and in spite of the pages of the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>.</p>
<p>In the last analysis, one seems safe in saying, the real difference between Hegel and his critic turns upon the question whether thought is an adequate expression of the real. Both have the same conception of reality, namely, that it consists in the individual; and both agree as to the true definition of the individual, namely, that it is identity in difference.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n153">[153]</a></sup> But in answer to the question whether thought is capable of expressing the individual, author and critic part company. The former, as we have seen, answers in the affirmative; while the latter, though he shows a puzzling inconsistency, finally gives a negative answer.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n154">[154]</a></sup> So we face the question, Is thought adequate to express the real as thus defined? Or is it the very nature of the individual to transcend thought? In order to answer this question we must first come to some understanding concerning the real nature of thought. And two conceptions of its essential nature are possible. One doctrine of thought is that which Mr. McTaggart attributes to Hegel and which has been defined by Lotze thus: “Thought is everywhere but a mediating activity moving hither and thither, bringing into connection the original intuitions of external and internal perception, which are predetermined by fundamental ideas and laws the origin of which cannot be shown; it develops special and properly logical forms, peculiar to itself, only in the effort to apply the idea of truth (which it finds in us) to the scattered multiplicity of perceptions, and of the consequences developed from them.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n155">[155]</a></sup> According to this conception of thought, thought is a mediating activity among other mental processes which bear to it an external relation. The other possible conception of thought is that which has been attributed to Hegel in the present study, the nature of which Hegel expresses thus: “If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n156">[156]</a></sup> Or thus: “In all human perception thought is present; so too thought is the universal in all the acts of conception and recollection; in short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing, and the like. All these faculties are only further specializations of thought. When it is presented in this light, thought has a different part to play from what it has if we speak of a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, such as perception, conception, and will, with which it stands on the same level.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n157">[157]</a></sup> Now whichever of these doctrines of thought we accept as true to the facts of experience, our answer to the above question is fixed. If, on the one hand, Lotze’s account be the true description of actual concrete thought, then it is certain beyond any dispute that Being can not be “resolved into it without leaving any residuum.” Thought which is merely a process of mediation among brute facts of experience cannot possibly be more than a formal method of dealing with data given independently of it; and these data would certainly have to be accounted a part of Being. Such thought might prove a valuable instrument for dealing with reality – though I am not sure that I can see why it should, or, indeed, how it could, do so – but it could at most only compare and relate phenomena: reality would be, and would forever remain, beyond it. But, if, on the other hand, Hegel’s account of thought is the true one, then it would seem that we might as dogmatically assert that thought does comprehend and exhaust the real. Either this, or we commit ourselves to the doctrine of the thing-in-itself which Kant has taught us, by his failure to make it comprehensible, to fear. For if thought is conterminous only with experience, then it is also conterminous with the real; otherwise, of course, reality would be trans-experiential. Just how, in Hegel’s opinion, such thought is capable of expressing the individuality of reality, I have tried to indicate in the preceding chapter on the process of thought: his doctrine is that thought is adequate to express the individual, because its categories are just such self-particularizing universals – universals obtained, not by abstraction from the particulars, but by the interpretation of them.</p>
<p>It seems to me that, in the above criticism of Hegel, Professor Pringle- Pattison confuses these two doctrines of thought, or rather, that he overlooks Hegel’s own doctrine and tacitly attributes to him that of Lotze, and so criticizes him for that of which he is not guilty. For if we take Hegel’s more concrete doctrine of the nature of thought into account, the criticism misses the mark. Perhaps I have dwelt long enough on this point; but it is a very vital one in connection with Hegel’s system. I submit that it is only this confusion which gives Professor Pringle- Pattison’s criticism significance, and that the criticism falls of its own accord when the confusion is cleared away.</p>
<p>Just here emerges a consideration which we may pause to emphasize before we pass on to the concluding remarks of this chapter. And that consideration is that the point at which to attack Hegel’s identification of logic and metaphysics is his doctrine concerning the nature of that thought which is the subject-matter of the science of logic. With the validity of this doctrine stands or falls his contention that epistemology and ontology are essentially one. For if the categories express the nature of ultimate reality, then the science of the categories, namely, logic, is the science of the real. And in order to prove that Hegel has no right to claim that thought expresses fully the real, one must show that his doctrine of thought is false. And this, it would seem, would involve a careful investigation of experience, since Hegel claims to have rooted his doctrine in experience through the procedure of the <em>Phenomenology</em>. So far as I am aware, such an enterprise has been undertaken by none of Hegel’s critics.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n158">[158]</a></sup> The answer to the question as to what Hegel really did mean by his assertion that logic and metaphysics are fundamentally one is involved in what has already been said. It remains only to set it forth and to emphasize it. In the first place, it seems that we are forced to say that Hegel does not mean to reduce thought and being to an abstract identity.</p>
<p>We have already insisted upon this point, but it will be well to emphasize it again since it is so generally taken for granted that the contrary is true. Critics generally seem to think that, when Hegel asserts that thought exhausts reality, he is asserting that thought about an object actually is the object itself and that experience is no richer than the poverty of abstract cognition. Identity of thought and being means for them undifferentiated identity; upon their interpretation the particular loses itself in the universal, becomes vaporized, as it were, into a mere meeting-point of abstract relations. But such abstract identity between thought and its object Hegel simply could not teach and at the same time remain true to his system: it is in direct contradiction of his fundamental presuppositions, indeed it contradicts the very thesis he was trying to establish.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n159">[159]</a></sup></p>
<p> He began by assuming a duality within and basic to experience, namely, the subject-object relation; and certainly he did not wish to destroy the very foundation on which he was building. He never denied the existence of the concrete object, nor did he make any attempt to reduce the object to blank universality. He did indeed reduce the object to terms of the subject; he urged that ultimate reality must be construed as Subject and not as Substance. But he did not destroy the duality within experience. The object was never annihilated as an object, only explained; its alienation disappeared, but its self-identity was never lost. This idea that Hegel tried to reduce factual existence to abstract relations should be dismissed from our minds once for all, unless we prefer to believe that he forgot or set about to contradict the very doctrine which he was endeavoring to establish. Whatever one may see in the leap from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature, one must grant that Hegel could not have seriously entertained the idea that abstract cognition and existential reality are identical; the inconsistency involved is too patent.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n160">[160]</a></sup> In the second place, what Hegel really does mean by his position that logic and metaphysic coincide seems to be this, namely, the assertion of the complete intelligibility or mediated character of reality. Instead of being merely subjective ideas, the categories of the Logic are principles of ultimate reality; and ultimate reality is simply what these principles show it to be. It is only by these instruments that experience gets its organization; and organized experience and reality coincide. The science of the categories is, thus, the science of the real; but being is not deduced, it is only thoroughly rationalized and explained. Of course, we must remember that these categories are not merely conceptions of the Understanding, as Hegel calls it, or of what we call cognition: the categories of feeling and will are just as important as the categories of cognition. And we must also remember that the categories of the Reason are not merely universals bearing an external and mechanical relation to the particulars; they are universals which exist only in and through the particulars subsumed under them, and in which the particulars find their only reality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n161">[161]</a></sup> Such an identification of logic and ontology, Hegel maintains, is logically involved in the system of Kant: the reason why Kant failed to realize the fact was that he gave his categories an ‘essentially subjective significance.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n162">[162]</a></sup> That is to say, had Kant only realized that the realm of possible experience is the real and only real, then the categories, which he recognized as principles of the deepest import in experience, would have been regarded as principles of reality, would have attained to truly objective significance; and so the science of these principles would have become the science of the real, the <em>Critique of Pure Reason </em>would have been a metaphysic as well as a treatise on epistemology. Now Hegel argues that thought must be genuinely objective, else we have on our hands a dualism which cannot be transcended.</p>
<p>And thought being really objective, logic is inevitably metaphysic.</p>
<p>This leads us in conclusion to remark, in anticipation of a discussion that will follow in the next chapter, that doubtless Hegel would hardly find free from difficulties the epistemology of those who are inclined to criticize him for making logic and metaphysics coincident. He might ask concerning the logical consequences of their position; and more than likely he would intimate that the inevitable answer is the <em>Ding-an-sich </em>of the Kantian philosophy. For what reality is it that lies beyond thought, but a reality that is unknowable in terms of thought? And how can that reality which is unknowable in terms of thought be known at all? And what significance can be attached to an unknowable reality? Is it logically possible to separate knowledge and reality? Hegel would urge that knowledge, which is incapable of expressing the nature of the ultimately real, is impotent. “Only in so far as reflection has reference to the Absolute is it Reason, and its activity that of real knowledge.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n163">[163]</a></sup> He would furthermore insist that what exists apart from knowledge is an abstraction. “The object as it is without thought and the Notion is a mere idea, a name: the forms of thought and the Notion make of it what it is.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n164">[164]</a></sup> To such strictures it would seem that the critics could reply only by admitting that the real does somehow fall within the system of knowledge; for, ultimately, there can be no bits or nuclei of reality that remain opaque to thought. As Professor Bosanquet has remarked: “If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n165">[165]</a></sup> And such an empty conception of thought and such a hopeless conception of reality would combine to land us in a rather barren and forlorn subjectivism.</p>
<p>The conclusions of our discussion are as follows. Hegel does argue that logic and metaphysic coincide. But the coincidence is not an abstract identity. Against such a conclusion the lesson of the <em>Phenomenology </em>warns us. The coincidence between the two consists in the fact that the thought, which is the subject matter of logic, is the principle of organization of reality itself; logic, thus, is necessarily a science of reality.</p>
<p>The attempted transition from the Logic to the other parts of the <em>Encyclopaedia </em>must be explained as the result of Hegel’s anxiety to keep his system intact. It cannot be construed as an attempt on Hegel’s part to deduce factual existence from one aspect of conscious experience; for such an attempt would have contradicted the doctrine which Hegel most persistently presupposes, the doctrine, namely, that thought is concrete, not abstract.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Chapter III. Ontology and Epistemology.
The conclusions of the two preceding chapters have led us to a further problem which we shall here be forced to face. If it be true that thought does in point of fact express the nature of things, then it would seem to follow that the science of thought is the science of things, that ontology and epistemology coincide. In this connection two questions arise: Does Hegel identify the two? And if so, what does he mean by the identification and what justification is there for it? It is to the task of answering these questions that we now address ourselves.
To the first of the above questions there can, I think, be only one answer. Hegel does identify logic and metaphysics. In the first place, we have his own explicit statement on the point. Since thoughts are “Objective Thoughts,” he says, “Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts – thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things.”[106] Besides such an explicit statement, one might offer as evidence the whole logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy which is unquestionably towards this identification.
Since the categories “really are, as forms of the Notion, the vital spirit of the actual world,”[107] and since things or objects which do not agree with them are accidental, arbitrary, and untrue phenomena;[108] since the universal aspect of the object is not something subjective attributed to it only when it is an object of thought, but rather belongs to and expresses its essential nature, it follows that the science which has to do with these universals is ipso facto the science of reality. This science, of course, is logic. Logic, therefore, is metaphysics.[109] For this identification of logic and metaphysics Hegel has been very severely criticized. And this brings us to our second question: What does Hegel mean by the identification, and can it in any way be defended? Perhaps we can best answer this question by attempting to answer the objections to which the identification in question has given rise. One of the most recent and perhaps the clearest and most convincing of Hegel’s critics on this point is Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison; consequently we shall devote ourselves to a consideration of his objections.
If we succeed in answering satisfactorily his criticism, we shall have succeeded in answering all.
But before passing to this criticism some preliminary work is necessary.
We must first attempt to define the exact position of the Logic with reference to the other parts of Hegel’s system. This will clear the way for the following discussion But in order not to anticipate that discussion our attention will here be confined exclusively to the problem of the position of the Logic in the system; the problem of the ontological significance of the Logic will occupy us when we come to take up Professor Pringle-Pattison’s criticism. What then, we first ask, is the position of the Logic in the system, and in what relation does it stand to the other parts of the Encyclopedia? The best point of departure in attempting to answer this question is acquaintance with the specific problem that Hegel has before him in the Logic. In order to determine the nature of this problem, however, a consideration of the question concerning the presupposition of the Logic is necessary. For it would seem that one could hardly appreciate the significance of the dialectical development of the categories by plunging at once into the ‘bacchic whirl.’ A preliminary discussion of what the Logic presupposes, if, indeed, it is not absolutely necessary to an adequate appreciation of its real problem and aim, is at least desirable.
But this problem of the presupposition of the Logic need not detain us long. There can be no doubt, it would seem that in the author’s mind the Logic presupposes the result of the Phenomenology. To justify this contention it is necessary simply to let the author speak for himself. “In the Phenomenology of Spirit,” he says in the larger Logic, “I have exhibited consciousness in its progress from its first immediate opposition of itself and its object, on to absolute knowledge. This course traverses all the forms of the relation of consciousness to its object, and has as its result the conception of our science. This conception needs no justification here – apart from the fact that it comes out as the final result in the Logic itself – it needs no justification here, because it got its justification there. And it is capable of no other justification than just this production of it by consciousness, all whose own peculiar forms are resolved into this conception as their truth...This conception of the pure science and the deduction of it are presupposed in the present treatise, in so far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing else but such a deduction of it “[110] Again, later in the same work, we read: “It has been remarked in the introduction that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the science of consciousness, the exhibition of the fact that consciousness has the conception of our science, that is, of pure knowledge as its result. To this extent, then, the Logic has the science of the phenomenal Spirit as its presupposition; for that science contains and displays the necessity, and hence the proof of the truth of the standpoint of pure knowledge, as well as the way in which that standpoint is reached.”[111] In addition to these explicit statements of the Logic, I may be permitted to quote one other passage from the preface to the Phenomenology itself. Having traced in a sentence or two the development of the Phenomenology from the standpoint of sensuous consciousness to that of absolute knowledge, where we have completely mediated being, Hegel continues: “Just here the Phenomenology comes to an end. In it the way has been prepared for the element of knowledge wherein the moments of Spirit have unfolded themselves in the form of simplicity which knows its object as itself. These moments no longer stand opposed to each other as being and knowing, but remain in the simplicity of knowledge; they are the true in the form of the true, and their difference is only difference of content. Their development, which in this element is organized into a whole, is Logic or Speculative Philosophy.”[112] Comment on such plain passages as these seems superfluous: Hegel’s meaning in them is unmistakable.
The science of Logic assumes the conclusion of the Phenomenology as its starting point and its procedure and result are to be judged only in the light of this assumption.
Without further discussion of this point, then, we pass to the main problem before us. What is the aim of the Logic in the light of its presupposition? The passage quoted last in the preceding paragraph gives us a basis for an answer to this question. In this passage Hegel tells us what the purpose of the Logic is, viewed from the standpoint of absolute knowledge. The passage, translated into simpler language, amounts to this. At the conclusion of the Phenomenology we reached the true definition of knowledge; the categories no longer appear as merely subjective ideas, or concepts, opposed to objects to which they are quasi-mechanically related, but they show themselves to be capable of expressing the essential nature of objects, and so are genuinely universal and objective. To organize these categories into a systematic whole and to set forth in a scientific manner their interconnection is the business of the Logic. In other words, the Phenomenology exhibits the essentially objective and universal nature of that thought which is the subject-matter of the Logic; the problem of the Logic being to work out the connection among the categories in abstraction from their essential relation to sensuous experience. In the Phenomenology thought has been observed and its nature determined in its relation to the objects of time and place, but in the Logic temporal and spatial relations are entirely ignored and we move in the ether of pure thought: the concrete categories of the Phenomenology are, in the Logic, to be considered for their own sake and their inter-relations determined apart from their experiential basis. In a sense it may be said that the Phenomenology assumes that thought is always concrete, its procedure consisting in an exhibition of the necessity of this assumption: the Logic, likewise, takes this for granted but as a fact established by the Phenomenology and then proceeds to investigate specifically thought as it is in and for itself. “To raise to knowledge....
those forms of thought which act instinctively in common consciousness and obtain there only an obscure and incomplete reality, to seize them by thought, and thought alone, in their most simple, abstract, and universal existence, to trace and comprehend them in their relations and in their unity – such is the task of the Hegelian Logic.”[113] We must guard the statement above that the purpose of the Logic is to deal with thought in abstraction from its empirical nature. Such a statement might be misconstrued to mean that the Logic deals only with abstract thought. And such an opinion would certainly not be without justification, even on the basis of Hegel’s own assertions. When we consider his statements concerning the science of logic, all that we have hitherto said about the concreteness of logical thought seems to have been said falsely. For example, Hegel tells us in one place that the realm of logic is “a kingdom of shadows, the world of simple essences, freed from all sensuous concretion.”[114] Elsewhere he says that the content of logic is “the presentation of God as He is in His eternal essence before the creation of Nature or of a finite mind.”[115] In yet another passage we are informed that logic “has to do not with perceptions, nor, like geometry, with abstract representations of the senses, but with pure abstractions.” [116] But such deliverances as these are balanced by numerous counter-assertions concerning the concreteness of the science of logic.
For example, we meet such a passage as this: “Bare abstractions or formal thoughts are no business of philosophy, which has to deal only with concrete thoughts.”[117] Or this: “Logic has nothing to do with an act of thought about something that lies outside of the thought as the ground or basis of it, or with forms that furnish mere signs or marks of the truth. On the contrary, the necessary forms and peculiar determinations of thought are the content and the highest truth itself.”[118] Furthermore, we are explicitly informed[119] that das begreifende Denken rather than simply das Denken is the subject matter of logic; and, as I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, this is to say that the thought of the science of logic is concrete.
The question naturally arises, Do not these two sets of passages contradict each other? Is not a ‘pure’ abstraction equivalent to a ‘bare’ abstraction, and when Hegel asserts that the science of logic has to do with pure abstractions does he not virtually deny the validity of his claims for its concreteness? A consideration of this essential point will give us a clearer idea of the Logic, both as to its aim and problem and as to its relation to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The answer to the puzzle before us will be found in an appreciation of the ambiguity which attaches to the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete.’ Abstract may mean not concrete in the sense of not sensuous. For example, it is sometimes said that the phenomena of the mind are abstract, because they cannot be touched seen, heard, etc., but are objects of thought only; objects of the world of sense-perception would, in this meaning of the terms, be concrete. This is the signification of the terms as common sense uses them. In this sense, Hegel’s logic is unquestionably abstract, as he himself explicitly states; and when he speaks of the abstractness of the logic he is thinking of this meaning of the terms. The content of the Logic may be called abstract, he says, “if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception.” [120] “If content means no more than what is palpable and obvious to the senses, all philosophy and logic in particular must be at once acknowledged to be void of content, that is to say, of content perceptible to the senses.”[121] Of course, all sciences which have to do with objects not perceptible to the senses are, from this point of view, abstract But there is another meaning of the terms abstract and concrete. An object may be abstract in the sense of being unreal, or taken apart from its relations; while the concrete object is the object seen in its deepest and truest significance. The categories of mathematics, for example, may be said to be more abstract than the categories of ethical science; and the ideals that seriously influence our lives for weal or woe are more concrete than the air-castles which we build in our day-dreams. The abstract in this signification, Hegel strongly insists, is not the realm of philosophy: it is just the aim of philosophy to get rid of all abstraction and to see the world as concrete.[122] From these considerations Hegel’s answer to the charge of inconsistency in his statements concerning the science of logic is plain. ‘Pure’ abstraction is not equivalent to ‘bare’ abstraction; the former is characteristic of all thought, the latter only of formal thought. In that its subject matter is thought and not the immediately given of sense-perception, logic may be said to busy itself with abstractions, to move in a realm of shades; but in this way every mental science is abstract, and might be metaphorically described as a ‘kingdom of shadows.’ In that its subject matter is the Notion, however, that is to say, concrete thought, the Logic is not only not abstract, but is the most concrete of the sciences. [123]
“The Notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, we must be dead to hearing and seeing. And yet . . the Notion is the only true concrete; for no other reason than because it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.”[124] We shall have to return to this point later.
And all this shows us again the essential difference, as well as the fundamental similarity, between the Logic and the Phenomenology. They both deal with consciousness; they are both expositions of the essential nature of thought. But whereas the Phenomenology is interested in consciousness primarily as a subject-object relation and endeavors to work out the significance of this relation, the Logic is interested primarily in disclosing the organic nature of thought and so confines its attention to the thought activity in and for itself. The one is an interpretation of thought in its relation to its object: the other is an interpretation of the categories as they are in themselves, temporarily held in isolation from their empirical setting. Hegel has stated this distinction in the preface to the first edition of the larger Logic: “In this manner” – dialectically – “I have tried to present consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Consciousness is Spirit in the form of concrete knowledge, knowledge shut in in the form of externality; but the motion of the form of this object, as the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests only upon the nature of the pure essences that constitute the content of the Logic. As phenomenal Spirit, which in its own manner frees itself from its immediacy and external concretion, consciousness develops into pure knowledge which appropriates as its subject matter those pure essences as they are in and for themselves ... Thus is given the relation of the science that I have called the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Logic.”[125] To sum up briefly, our conclusion so far is this. The Logic has as its presupposition the whole development of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The Phenomenology, as we have already seen, asserts the inseparability of thought and reality and attempts to define for us the true nature of thought. The Logic presupposes this conclusion, taking for granted that thought is really as it is here defined; and in the light of this presupposition its aim is to give a more detailed account of the nature of thought, to work out the organic unity which exists among the several categories of thought.[126] Such, then, being the relation between the Logic and the Phenomenology, we pass on to ask concerning the relation between the Logic and the other parts of the Encyclopaedia. This is a much debated problem in connection with Hegel’s philosophy, and upon its solution depends the integrity of the system as a system. In accordance with our determination not to anticipate the following discussion, we shall here confine ourselves to the formal aspect of the problem: as little as possible will be said concerning the real ontological significance of the Logic. The question now before us is: As regards the systematic arrangement of the Encyclopaedia, what is the relation of the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind? If at this juncture we turn to Hegel for light on the problem, we are sadly disappointed; very little light is vouchsafed us. His statements on the point are few, and those few are couched in such metaphorical terms it is almost impossible to attach a definite meaning to them. But one fact seems indisputable, the fact, namely, that Hegel believed necessary and actually tried to make some kind of transition from one part of the Encyclopaedia to another. Let us see what he has to say about this transition.
In the second edition of his Hegelianism and Personality[127] Professor Pringle-Pattison has summarized Hegel’s account of the transition as follows: “The Absolute Idea, Hegel says in the larger ‘Logic,’[128] is ‘still logical, still confined to the element of pure thoughts.... But inasmuch as the pure idea of knowledge is thus, so far, shut up in a species of subjectivity, it is impelled to remove this limitation; and thus the pure truth, the last result of the Logic, becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science.’ The Idea, he recalls to us, has been defined as ‘the absolute unity of the pure notion and its reality’ – ‘the pure notion which is related only to itself’; but if this is so, the two sides of this relation are one, and they collapse, as it were, ‘into the immediacy of Being.’ ‘The Idea as the totality in this form is Nature. This determining of itself, however, is not a process of becoming or a transition’ such as we have from stage to stage in the Logic. ‘The passing over is rather to be understood thus – that the Idea freely lets itself go, being absolutely sure of itself and at rest in itself. On account of this freedom, the form of its determination is likewise absolutely free – namely, the externality of space and time existing absolutely for itself without subjectivity. A few lines lower he speaks of the ‘resolve (Entschluss) of the pure Idea to determine itself as external Idea.’ Turning to the Encyclopaedia we find at the end of the smaller Logic, a more concise but substantially similar statement. ‘The Idea which exists for itself, looked at from the point of view of this unity with itself, is Perception; and the Idea as it exists for perception is nature ... The absolute freedom of the Idea consists in this, that in the absolute truth of itself (i.e., according to Hegel’s usage, when it has attained the full perfection of the form which belongs to it), it resolves to let the element of its particularity – the immediate idea, as its own reflection – go forth freely from itself as Nature.’[129] And in the lecture-note which follows we read, as in the larger Logic – ‘We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began. This return to the beginning is also an advance. That with which we began was Being, abstract Being, and now we have the Idea as Being; but this existent Idea is Nature.’” Such is Hegel’s account of the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. Confining our attention for the present to the aspect of the problem before us, let us ask concerning the significance and justification of this attempted transition. There seems to be no doubt that Hegel believed the transition necessary and that he did attempt to make it. The question is, Why, and with what success? One or two preliminary considerations will lead us to an answer.
In the first place, I think we must agree with Haldane that the transition in question is logical only, not temporal.[130] If what we have been arguing is true, namely, that the Notion is genuinely objective and universal, this conclusion is forced upon us: the Absolute Idea would then include in itself the fullness of Nature. And Hegel teaches us that the transition is only logical. For he insists that the Idea cannot be thought of as existing anterior to or independent of Nature; and that, when it passes into Nature, it does not come into possession of a content which before was alien to it.[131] On the contrary, we are informed that the Idea is nothing but completed Being, the abstract immediacy of Being made concrete.[132] And so such an account of the relation between the Idea and its manifestations as the following from Falckenberg may be dismissed at once as at best misleading; indeed, if it means what it says, it is ridiculously false: “The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and science to return to itself enriched and completed, i.e., to attain a higher absoluteness than that of the beginning.”[133] As Hegel conceives the matter, the Idea does indeed enrich itself by passing through these various stages of its existence, or, rather, by exhibiting these differentiations of itself, but it does so only by showing that these differentiations are essential aspects of itself and by disclosing itself as inherent in them from the first.
The Idea is prior, not in point of time, but solely in the logical sense.
In the second place, as Vera suggests,[134] the true significance of the problem involved in this transition, as well as the correct solution of the problem, can be had only in the light of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole.
In a very important sense the Phenomenology of Spirit is the presupposition of the entire Encyclopedia. As has already been pointed out, the aim of the Phenomenology is simply to show what are the implications of knowledge, and to prove, against Kant, that in knowledge as thus developed we have the expression of ultimate reality. Now, as I think we must conceive the matter, the Encyclopedia simply attempts a more detailed investigation and a more elaborate exposition of this position.
We might put it thus. In the Phenomenology we begin with all the reality we know anything about, namely, experience, and we proceed to develop its implications as regards its nature as a subject-object relation.
The Logic abstracts from this concrete whole and examines one aspect of it, which here we might call the subject-aspect; while the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind deal with other aspects of the same whole, that is, they might be said to define reality in its object-significance. For it must not be forgotten that, when we arrive at the category of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology, we have reached, not a new kind of experience, but only a more concrete point of view in our common everyday experience; and this point of view is taken by the other parts of the Encyclopaedia as well as by the Logic.
Though Haym unfortunately failed to appreciate the full significance of his words, still he is essentially right whehe says that the Phenomenology “is really the whole system.... The later expression of the system in its articulated totality is only a more detailed exposition and completion that which is contained in the Phenomenology.”[135] And it seems to me that this fact about the Encyclopaedia is not to be forgotten or overlooked, if we are truly to appreciate the relation of its several parts to each other.
If the preceding considerations are substantially true, then we are forced to conclude (a) that the Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind are only three points of view from which one organic whole is observed and interpreted. The first investigates the more strictly cognitive side of experience; the second has to do with its crass objective, its sensuous aspect; while the third undertakes to interpret its spiritual values. As Kuno Fischer points out, each in a sense has the same content: the difference among them lies rather in the form which that content assumes.[136] Each has a unique sphere and claim of its own, but neither is the whole of reality nor can it be ontologically separated from the others. Thought does indeed, according to Hegel, include its object, whether that object be crass matter or the other so-called functions of the mind; but it includes by subsuming, by taking up and preserving in itself. So other sciences besides that of pure thought have their raison d’etre.[137] But because thought does thus include its object, we must say (b) that in a sense the Logic comprehends the other two parts of the Encyclopaedia.[138] And so Haym’s criticism loses its force and becomes a simple statement of fact: “So muss die Logik die ganze Philosophie sein, so muss mit ihr das System schliessen.”[139] This last point will come up for direct discussion later in the present chapter.
But it will be objected that on this score we are forced to deny the necessity of the transition from the Logic as Hegel has attempted it. And I have purposely courted the objection in order to emphasize my agreement with it. If what has been said above is true – and its validity is attested to by our entire discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of thought – then we must give up the idea of a dialectical transition from one to another part of the Encyclopaedia. Such a transition is impossible were it necessary, but it is not necessary. Its necessity has been obviated by the result of the Phenomenology; for this work has shown that in the dialectic of the categories the object cannot be entirely absent, even though, for methodological purposes its presence be as far as possible neglected. A dialectical transition here would in fact be inconsistent with the spirit of Hegel’s philosophy; it would seem to indicate that the Idea is a mere abstraction which demands a content to make it real, an abstract universal to be particularized. Hegel himself at times seems to feel this difficulty, although, so far as I am aware, he never explicitly expresses himself on the point. For example, his very frank recognition that the transition which he attempts from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature is different from the transition of the subjective notion into objectivity, or of subjective purpose into life, one would think is not entirely without significance.[140] Again elsewhere he seems to show that he fears the transition because he takes pains to warn us against misconceiving its real import.[141] And in the larger Logic, at the beginning of the discussion of the Absolute Idea, there occurs a passage which is suggestive in this connection: “Since it [i.e., the Idea] contains all determination within itself, and its essence is to return to itself through its self-determination or particularity, it possesses different forms; and it is the business of philosophy to trace it in these forms” – such as nature, art, and religion.[142] But whether Hegel had any such feeling as I have attributed to him or whether he did not, the fact remains that he felt called upon to make the leap from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. He explicitly asserts that “the last result of the Logic becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science,” which science is, of course, the Philosophy of Nature. If now, as we have argued, this transition is not only not necessary, but, what is more important, is really inconsistent with the logical bias of the system, then the question why the author deemed it necessary becomes a very pressing one. As a matter of fact he does attempt the transition: what is to be said about the fact? The answer to this question is, in my opinion, not far to seek. Hegel was very much in earnest about this transition, and he was in earnest about it for the reason that with it stands or falls his system as a system.
This, it seems to me, is the secret of his anxiety concerning the matter.
Like Kant, he was bound down to his system; he could not get beyond the machinery of his dialectic. The Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind had to form a triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, else the formal coherence and symmetry of the system would have been lost. The scheme of the system demands a continuous linear development from one phase of it to another – an absolutely necessary development.
If the dialectic is the absolute and universal method, why is there not a dialectical passage from the Logic to nature? There simply must be – and there was. Such procedure is due to the fact that Hegel did not always raise the spirit of his system above the letter. The Method, the unerring and absolute method of the dialectic, had to be looked out for and its claims catered to regardless of consequences; and only too frequently was the method seen in a false light and its claims misinterpreted.
If at all times Hegel could have identified his method with his doctrine of begreifendes Denken, the relation of the various parts of the Encyclopaedia to each other would have been differently conceived and the position of the Logic in the system would have been more clearly and intelligibly set forth.
Some commentators seem disposed to justify this leap from the Logic.
Noel, for example, goes so far as to maintain that there is a connection between the Logic and what follows in the system analogous to the connection among the several sections of the Logic.[143] “There must be,” he says, “a dialectical passage from the Logic to Nature. The logical Idea must negate itself and pass into its contrary.” But there seems to be no very good reason why the logical Idea should, just at this point, negate itself and pass into Nature. Indeed, Noel’s position seems to overlook Hegel’s own explicit statement, quoted above, to the effect that the transition here in question is different from that which obtains among the categories of the Logic. In this respect Mr. McTaggart is, perhaps, truer to Hegel. It is true that he asserts, “Granted pure thought, we are compelled by the necessity of the dialectic to grant the existence of some sensuous intuition also.” But he recognizes Hegel’s statement that the transition to the Philosophy of Nature has its own peculiar characteristics.[144]
The fundamentals of Mr. McTaggart’s position seem to be: that the transition is both analytic and synthetic; that it really represents the phases of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and that Spirit, as the truth and goal of the movement, is present even from the beginning. In so far as this position insists that in the Idea both Nature and Spirit are involved, one is not inclined to call it in question. But does this insistence make the transition from the Absolute Idea to Nature dialectically necessary? Merely by observing the Idea as the highest of the logical categories, are we forced to posit nature as its counterpart? If so, are we thereby made aware of the implicit appearance of Spirit, even before it looms on the horizon? Even if we grant, with Noel, that logic contains in germ philosophy in its entirety, and with Mr. McTaggart that, if there were a transition at the end of the Logic, it would necessarily be both analytic and synthetic, still the essential point here has not been touched.
Is the transition a dialectical necessity? If so, why is it so? I confess myself unable to see any dialectical advance from the end of the Logic to the beginning of the Philosophy of Nature, or even from the Idea to a matter of sensuous intuition. Is it any less reasonable to say that the first category of the Logic should alienate itself in its other than that the last category should do so? Is not the category of Being as likely to go forth into its opposite as is the Absolute Idea? Certainly so, if as Mr. McTaggart seems to suggest, the fact that the Absolute Idea is ‘pure thought’ is the impetus of the movement; for Being is just as much ‘pure thought’ as is the Absolute Idea. In fact, it would seem to be more reasonable to return to the beginning of the Logic and take the sensuous ‘alienation’ of Being as the point of departure for the Naturphilosophie: at any rate, in this event we should have the privilege of proceeding on lines analogous to those followed in the development of the Logic, namely, from the less to the more determinate. But whether we put ourselves at the first category or at the ‘last result’ of the Logic, hoping thereby to discover a beginning for our new ‘sphere and science,’ we find ourselves baffled. In no event do we find that mysterious secret power that would drive us on to Nature. And we fail for the somewhat obvious reason that we are already at Nature and do not need to be driven to it. This so-called transition can be defended only on the basis of the Phenomenology: there it has received the only justification which it needs and of which it is capable.
But – and this is the important point – the conclusion of the Phenomenology destroys at once the necessity and the possibility of such a transition; and from this point of view the dialectical passage becomes nothing more than a misguided zeal for schematization. One must feel that neither Noel nor Mr. McTaggart has succeeded in making the leap plausible: if they had succeeded, one is inclined to say that the real significance of the Hegelian Logic would have been greatly diminished, if not completely destroyed.
It might be argued in support of this transition from the Logic that Hegel is simply recognizing here, explicitly, the presupposition that has been implicit in the entire development of the categories. For what is a dialectical transition? Does it not consist simply in making explicit a presupposition? And do we not at the end of the Logic recognize what has been a presupposition all through, namely, the spiritual union of thought and its object? Thus the circle is completed, the end is one with the beginning. And with this the necessity of a more concrete treatment is apparent – a treatment that shall take into full account the presupposition thus disclosed. And so we are brought at once into the realm of Nature and of Spirit.
This, it must be confessed, is all that Hegel could consistently have meant by the transition in question. It could signify nothing more than a change in point of view, if the lesson of the Phenomenology is to hold here. One is inclined to think that this is really the essence of the transition.
But the question inevitably arises why the presupposition is peculiarly forced upon us in the Absolute Idea. Is not the recognition of the presupposition as explicit in the first categories of the Logic as it is in the last? Does not Hegel make constant appeal to it throughout the whole dialectical advance? Why, then, should the presupposition be forced to the fore in the Absolute Idea as it is not in any of the other categories? It might be answered, Because at the Absolute Idea we have a definition of reality itself. Even so, how was this definition arrived at apart from the phenomena of Nature and Spirit? The fact is that it was not; for the result of the Phenomenology is recognized at every stage of the dialectical development of the categories, and this necessitates the inclusion by the Idea of these phenomena of Nature and Spirit. So far as I can see, the objective aspect of existence is no more clearly and necessarily evident in any one of the categories than it is in all; we are not forced to take account of it in the Idea in a manner different from that in which it forces itself upon us in the categories of Being and Essence. If, when Hegel reached the end of the Logic, he had contented himself with asserting what the above argument would have him assert, namely, that the time had come for us to turn to a detailed consideration of those phenomena that had not been explicitly taken into account by the Logic, if he had simply told us that at the Idea the Logic reached its conclusion and that he here proposed to change his point of view, we could have understood him: the necessity of the change and the partially abstract nature of the Logic, had already been sufficiently explained to us in the Phenomenology. But when he goes on to urge that the Absolute Idea must, by a dialectical necessity, alienate itself in its Other, we begin to wonder where the categories of Being came from and how we ever succeeded in getting from this abstract view of the world to the standpoint of the Idea. We had thought all along that in the Idea we were at last in touch with reality; but when this mysterious alienation begins to take place, the earth trembles under us and we wonder if we have been deceived.
At this juncture the Phenomenology comes to our relief, when we remember that its conclusion has made the transition both unnecessary and impossible. The argument before us does indeed state what Hegel must have meant, if he remained true to the principles of his doctrine; but it hardly explains what he seems actually to have attempted.
It would seem, then, that this would-be transition from the Logic must be given up. And, furthermore, we must agree with Professor Pringle-Pattison that to admit so much involves a surrender of Hegel’s system as he left it. He is systematic to a fault. Within the Logic itself the author’s mania for system often clouds, if it does not completely hide, the issue; the omnipotent Dialectic Method, rather than the organic development of thought, is only too frequently the object of interest.
And, unfortunately, even the data of nature and history are sometimes forced into this formal scheme whether they will or no. What under other circumstances might have been a very simple change in point of view is, as we have just seen, made incomprehensible and misleading by the same absurd reverence for the triadic movement of the ‘absolute method.’ No doubt one may easily be too severely critical of this aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, both because it is so exasperating and because it is calculated to conceal the real import of the system. Our zeal to remove these barriers to a true appreciation of the system, and to gain an unprejudiced hearing for the author, might blind us to the fact that these impedimenta find their partial explanation at least in the circumstances under which Hegel wrote. Historically speaking this transition from the Logic may claim for itself some sort of justification. Perhaps it was important for Hegel’s influence that he set forth his system intact; and to do this seemed to necessitate this transition. For if the dialectic had with unerring precision led from the poor and abstract category of Being up to the fullness of the Absolute Idea, and that, too, apart from a direct consideration of Nature and of Spirit, then it was incumbent upon the dialectic to lead in some way to a consideration of these important aspects of experience; and how could this be more happily accomplished than by the assertion of at least a quasi-dialectical connection between the Idea and these its manifestations? This ground of justification for Hegel’s procedure here should not be overlooked, and, of course, should be given the weight that is due it. But, after all, though we may be inclined to excuse Hegel for his formality, we have no special reason for being grateful to hi him for it; his system will be appreciated fully only when we throw aside this formality and penetrate to the fundamentals of the system. And the fundamentals of the system can best be disclosed when the fruitlessness and inconsistency of this attempted transition from the Logic are revealed.
So with no great degree of reluctance we surrender the formal arrangement of Hegel’s system. But we can ill afford to miss its spirit and the results that follow from it. One of the most marked of these results is the position that epistemology is in a sense ontology, that logic and metaphysics cannot be separated from each other. This brings us back to our original question, the intervening discussion having been necessary to clear the way for an answer. So we ask once again concerning the real meaning and justification of this Hegelian position, that a theory of knowledge cannot be separated from a theory of reality. In accordance with our plan of discussion, we shall attempt to answer this question by examining a criticism to which the contention has been subjected.
The criticism which we shall here examine is to be found in the fourth lecture of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality.
The criticism, we seem compelled to say, is based upon a misapprehension of Hegel’s real meaning and actual procedure.[145] The remaining part of this chapter will first attempt to justify this assertion, and then conclude with a statement of what Hegel, in consistency with his own principles, must have meant by the identification in question.
The criticism is based upon the attempted transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature, one phase of which we have already considered.
Put in a few words, the criticism seems to be that in this transition Hegel deliberately attempted to deduce nature from the logical Idea, and that, by a copious use of metaphors, he deluded himself into thinking that he had successfully bridged the gulf which separates formal thought from actual existence. To quote: “The concrete existence of the categories (in Nature and Spirit) is to be deduced from their essence or thought-nature; it is to be shown that they cannot not be. When we have mounted to the Absolute Idea, it is contended, we cannot help going further. The nisus of thought itself projects thought out of the sphere of thought altogether into that of actual existence. In fact, strive against the idea as we may, it seems indubitable that there is here once more repeated in Hegel the extraordinary but apparently fascinating attempt to construct the world out of abstract thought or mere universals. The whole form and structure of the system, and the express declarations of its author at points of critical importance, combine to force this conviction upon us. The language used can only be interpreted to mean that thought out of its own abstract nature gives birth to the reality of things.”[146] All of which amounts to saying that Hegel has taken abstract thought, ontologized it, and then has turned about and attempted to deduce concrete reality from this hypostatized abstraction It must be admitted at once that such an accusation is not prima facie without some justification. If we turn once more to the passages above quoted bearing on the transition from the Logic, our first inclination is to accept Professor Pringle-Pattison’s interpretation of them. Other passages, especially those referring to the absoluteness and finality of the system, seem to bear out the same contention. And when in the Encyclopaedia we run across passages which baldly assert that everything is a judgment or a syllogism, we wonder whether Plato’s conception of archetypal Ideas is more removed from concrete experience. And yet such an attempt to deduce nature from abstract thought would be a rather remarkable undertaking on Hegel’s part: it would be inconsistent with the entire spirit of his philosophy, the fundamental assumption of which is, as Haldane suggests,[147] that you cannot deduce the ‘that.’ Is it possible to interpret these passages so as to make Hegel consistent with the fundaments of his system? If so, it would seem that such an interpretation should certainly be adopted.
I think it is possible to make Hegel consistent in this regard, and this I have tried to do in the preceding pages of this chapter. I fully agree with Professor Pringle-Pattison that the attempted transition from one to another part of Encyclopedia must be given up; and I also agree that with this transition we surrender the system as a system. But I cannot agree with the reasons which the critic advances in support of his conclusions.
It was just because his system depended upon it that Hegel made the resolute leap, and not for the purpose of getting from abstract thought to concrete existence. The ‘ugly broad ditch’ between thought and reality seems to me only a shadow; and, unless indeed we are to credit Hegel with momentary forgetfulness of the foundation of his system, I cannot think that it was more to him. Now it would seem that this interpretation, namely, that the transition from the Logic was attempted for purely schematic purposes, has the advantage over such an interpretation as Professor Pringle-Pattison’s, which makes of the transition an attempt to deduce existential reality from abstract universals; and the advantage of the former interpretation lies in the fact that it does make Hegel consistent with the basic principles of his theory. We may venture to put the matter in the form of a disjunction. Either Hegel tried to deduce nature from the logical categories or he did not. If he did attempt it, then he contradicts himself; for such an attempt would presuppose that the logical categories are merely abstract thoughts existing in the heads of individuals and possessing no vital significance in relation to the essence of concrete objects. But this is the very conception of thought which we have seen Hegel object to in the systems of his predecessors and in contradistinction to which he emphasizes his own doctrine. And that doctrine is that thought has transcended the opposition between itself and its and is really the expression of the essence of the object.
“Pure science presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness.
It contains thought in so far as it is just as much the object in itself, or the object in itself in so far as it is just as much pure thought.”[148] But, on the other hand, if Hegel did not attempt to deduce nature from thought, it would seem that his statements about a transition from the Logic must be explained away. Now the latter horn of this dilemma is comparatively easily disposed of, as has already been pointed out in the preceding part of the present chapter; the so-called transition is only a change in point of view, the author’s insistence upon the necessity of the transition being made for the sake of his system. But if we follow Professor Pringle-Pattison in accepting the former, the most significant aspect of Hegel’s philosophy will, to say the least, become questionable and he himself will stand accused of the most glaring of inconsistencies.
There seems to be no doubt, then, of the conclusion to be reached here.
But leaving aside speculation as to what may or may not have been the immediate purpose of Hegel in this transition, let us try to see what is logically involved in it. Whether or not Hegel has here made a deliberate attempt to deduce nature from thought, such an attempt is certainly not logically imposed upon him.
This contention is based upon what has already been said about the presupposition of the Encyclopedia. In the Encyclopedia we are dealing with one whole, namely, reality: the three parts of the Encyclopedia represent different points of view from which this totality is observed.
This conclusion follows necessarily, if our view concerning the significance of the Phenomenology in the system be correct. For the very outcome of the Phenomenology, we remember, has been the disclosure of the impossibility of dividing reality into water-tight compartments which are so separated from each other that each may be dealt with entirely independently of the others. Reality, this discussion has taught us, is rather one indissoluble whole whose parts can be separated from each other only by abstraction. The Encyclopedia, therefore, presupposing as it unquestionably does the result of the Phenomenology, must have for its object the one reality, and its several parts must be simply different points of view from which this unitary reality is observed and investigated. Now as a corollary of this, it follows that the transition from the Logic is as Kuno Fischer suggests,[149] logically nothing more than a change in point of view. If the Encyclopedia presents reality to us from three different standpoints each of which involves the others, – and let us not forget that this is the lesson of the Phenomenology – then a transition within the Encyclopedia cannot be anything but a change in point of view. So all that Hegel really was called upon to do in order to get from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature was simply to announce that he intended to investigate his problems from a new viewpoint: the transition, if one will call it so, had already been made in the Phenomenology of Spirit as we have abundantly seen.
Now it would seem that the accusation that Hegel seriously tried to deduce existence from thought when he made the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature fails to give the above considerations the weight that is due them. Unless one drops them out of mind entirely, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to catch the significance of the following as a criticism of Hegel: “Most assuredly the Notion contains the category of Being; so does the Ego, that is to say, the idea of the ego, and the Idea of God, both of which are simply the Notion under another name....
But when we ask for real bread, why put us off with a logical stone like this? It is not the category ‘Being,’ of which we are in quest, but that reality of which all categories are only descriptions, and which itself can only be experienced, immediately known or lived. To such reality or factual existence there is no logical bridge; and thoughts or categories have meaning only if we assume, as somehow given, a real world to which they refer.”[150] Surely such a criticism could have been written only in forgetfulness of what Hegel has said about the presupposition of the Logic and the mediated aspect of the category of Being.
Being is, indeed, a logical category; but it is more than a mere abstract category, a blank universal, that has only a psychological existence in the consciousness of the thinker who happens to possess it. It is a concrete thought that expresses one very general, but withal very essential, characteristic of that which really is. In Hegel’s usage, Being, or any other category of thought, is not a mere idea or concept; on the contrary, it is a universal which ipso facto includes within its very nature the particularity of existence.[151] And this brings us face to face with what seems to be the fundamental error in Professor Pringle-Pattison’s charge. I refer to his neglect of the meaning which Hegel attaches to the Notion. This is the bed-rock upon which Hegel bases his contention that logic and ontology are essentially one. It is only the Notion that “sinks itself in the facts”; it is only the Notion that is “accredited able to express the essential reality of things”; and only the Notion is the subject-matter of the science of logic.
The Notion, thus, is the tie that binds epistemology and metaphysics together. For if thought comprehends reality and is capable of expressing it, if there is no ‘residuum’ which lies outside of thought and which in its nature is inexpressible in terms of thought, then the science of thought is in a very important sense the science of things. Now just this conclusion the critic objects to; and his objection seems to rest upon a misinterpretation of the premise.
Let us notice some of Professor Pringle-Pattison’s statements. After quoting several passages from Hegel to the effect that Nature is the logical Idea in its otherness, is the Spirit in alienation from itself, and so forth, he continues: “Now I maintain that the whole problem of reality as such is wrapped up in these metaphorical phrases – otherness, petrifaction, materiature, concretion – and that by evading the question, Hegel virtually declines to take account of anything but logical abstractions.
He offers us, in a word, a logic in place of a metaphysic; and it may be unhesitatingly asserted that such a proposal, if taken literally, is not only untenable, it is absurd.” Nothing, we are further informed, is in very truth a logical category. “A living dog is better than a dead lion, and even an atom is more than a category. It at least exists as a reality, whereas a category is an abstract ghost, which may have a meaning for intelligent beings, but which, divorced from such real beings and their experience, is the very type of a non-ens.” A little later he says: “Existence is one thing, knowledge is another. But the logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy tends to make this essential distinction disappear, and to reduce things to mere types or ‘concretions’ of abstract formulae.” “The result of Hegel’s procedure would really be to sweep ‘existential reality’ off the board altogether, under the persuasion, apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relations that constitute our knowledge of the thing is equivalent to the existent thing itself. On the contrary, it may be confidently asserted that there is no more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relations than there was with one.”[152] If I understand the import of these passages – and their meaning seems unmistakable – there is involved in them an assumption which I dare think is unwarranted. The assumption is that Hegel has actually attempted to reduce sensuous experience to the universals of formal thought, and has tried to make such universals really be the existent things. If it be true that Hegel has attempted this, then it should be admitted without argument that he has attempted that which is both impossible and absurd. It may, perhaps, be rather difficult to say just in what respect an atom is more than a category, just what other reality it possesses besides its meaning for intelligent beings; but there can not be any question that a living dog is better than a dead lion – an object is indisputably more than a mere meeting-point of abstract relations. But does Hegel deny this? Is it quite fair to him to assert that the logical bias of his philosophy is “to reduce things to mere types or ‘concretions’ of abstract formulae"? Does he really try to force the particularity of existence into the abstract universality of bare cognition? I have already maintained that such an assumption is groundless and even contrary to the real spirit of Hegel’s system; and the preceding chapters attempt to set forth the reasons upon which such a contention rests. If I have there failed to accomplish this, it would hardly be worth while for me to undertake it here. Suffice it to reiterate that, when Hegel insists that knowledge or thought and reality are conterminous, he is simply upholding the theory that experience and reality are one: he means by thought, the Notion, not abstract and formal cognition, but organized experience. If such a criticism as the one with which we are here dealing is to be established, it must first be shown that Hegel does not hold such a doctrine of the nature of thought as has here been attributed to him; and this must be shown regardless of innumerable utterances to the contrary, and in spite of the pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
In the last analysis, one seems safe in saying, the real difference between Hegel and his critic turns upon the question whether thought is an adequate expression of the real. Both have the same conception of reality, namely, that it consists in the individual; and both agree as to the true definition of the individual, namely, that it is identity in difference.[153] But in answer to the question whether thought is capable of expressing the individual, author and critic part company. The former, as we have seen, answers in the affirmative; while the latter, though he shows a puzzling inconsistency, finally gives a negative answer.[154] So we face the question, Is thought adequate to express the real as thus defined? Or is it the very nature of the individual to transcend thought? In order to answer this question we must first come to some understanding concerning the real nature of thought. And two conceptions of its essential nature are possible. One doctrine of thought is that which Mr. McTaggart attributes to Hegel and which has been defined by Lotze thus: “Thought is everywhere but a mediating activity moving hither and thither, bringing into connection the original intuitions of external and internal perception, which are predetermined by fundamental ideas and laws the origin of which cannot be shown; it develops special and properly logical forms, peculiar to itself, only in the effort to apply the idea of truth (which it finds in us) to the scattered multiplicity of perceptions, and of the consequences developed from them.”[155] According to this conception of thought, thought is a mediating activity among other mental processes which bear to it an external relation. The other possible conception of thought is that which has been attributed to Hegel in the present study, the nature of which Hegel expresses thus: “If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.”[156] Or thus: “In all human perception thought is present; so too thought is the universal in all the acts of conception and recollection; in short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing, and the like. All these faculties are only further specializations of thought. When it is presented in this light, thought has a different part to play from what it has if we speak of a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties, such as perception, conception, and will, with which it stands on the same level.”[157] Now whichever of these doctrines of thought we accept as true to the facts of experience, our answer to the above question is fixed. If, on the one hand, Lotze’s account be the true description of actual concrete thought, then it is certain beyond any dispute that Being can not be “resolved into it without leaving any residuum.” Thought which is merely a process of mediation among brute facts of experience cannot possibly be more than a formal method of dealing with data given independently of it; and these data would certainly have to be accounted a part of Being. Such thought might prove a valuable instrument for dealing with reality – though I am not sure that I can see why it should, or, indeed, how it could, do so – but it could at most only compare and relate phenomena: reality would be, and would forever remain, beyond it. But, if, on the other hand, Hegel’s account of thought is the true one, then it would seem that we might as dogmatically assert that thought does comprehend and exhaust the real. Either this, or we commit ourselves to the doctrine of the thing-in-itself which Kant has taught us, by his failure to make it comprehensible, to fear. For if thought is conterminous only with experience, then it is also conterminous with the real; otherwise, of course, reality would be trans-experiential. Just how, in Hegel’s opinion, such thought is capable of expressing the individuality of reality, I have tried to indicate in the preceding chapter on the process of thought: his doctrine is that thought is adequate to express the individual, because its categories are just such self-particularizing universals – universals obtained, not by abstraction from the particulars, but by the interpretation of them.
It seems to me that, in the above criticism of Hegel, Professor Pringle- Pattison confuses these two doctrines of thought, or rather, that he overlooks Hegel’s own doctrine and tacitly attributes to him that of Lotze, and so criticizes him for that of which he is not guilty. For if we take Hegel’s more concrete doctrine of the nature of thought into account, the criticism misses the mark. Perhaps I have dwelt long enough on this point; but it is a very vital one in connection with Hegel’s system. I submit that it is only this confusion which gives Professor Pringle- Pattison’s criticism significance, and that the criticism falls of its own accord when the confusion is cleared away.
Just here emerges a consideration which we may pause to emphasize before we pass on to the concluding remarks of this chapter. And that consideration is that the point at which to attack Hegel’s identification of logic and metaphysics is his doctrine concerning the nature of that thought which is the subject-matter of the science of logic. With the validity of this doctrine stands or falls his contention that epistemology and ontology are essentially one. For if the categories express the nature of ultimate reality, then the science of the categories, namely, logic, is the science of the real. And in order to prove that Hegel has no right to claim that thought expresses fully the real, one must show that his doctrine of thought is false. And this, it would seem, would involve a careful investigation of experience, since Hegel claims to have rooted his doctrine in experience through the procedure of the Phenomenology. So far as I am aware, such an enterprise has been undertaken by none of Hegel’s critics.[158] The answer to the question as to what Hegel really did mean by his assertion that logic and metaphysics are fundamentally one is involved in what has already been said. It remains only to set it forth and to emphasize it. In the first place, it seems that we are forced to say that Hegel does not mean to reduce thought and being to an abstract identity.
We have already insisted upon this point, but it will be well to emphasize it again since it is so generally taken for granted that the contrary is true. Critics generally seem to think that, when Hegel asserts that thought exhausts reality, he is asserting that thought about an object actually is the object itself and that experience is no richer than the poverty of abstract cognition. Identity of thought and being means for them undifferentiated identity; upon their interpretation the particular loses itself in the universal, becomes vaporized, as it were, into a mere meeting-point of abstract relations. But such abstract identity between thought and its object Hegel simply could not teach and at the same time remain true to his system: it is in direct contradiction of his fundamental presuppositions, indeed it contradicts the very thesis he was trying to establish.[159]
He began by assuming a duality within and basic to experience, namely, the subject-object relation; and certainly he did not wish to destroy the very foundation on which he was building. He never denied the existence of the concrete object, nor did he make any attempt to reduce the object to blank universality. He did indeed reduce the object to terms of the subject; he urged that ultimate reality must be construed as Subject and not as Substance. But he did not destroy the duality within experience. The object was never annihilated as an object, only explained; its alienation disappeared, but its self-identity was never lost. This idea that Hegel tried to reduce factual existence to abstract relations should be dismissed from our minds once for all, unless we prefer to believe that he forgot or set about to contradict the very doctrine which he was endeavoring to establish. Whatever one may see in the leap from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature, one must grant that Hegel could not have seriously entertained the idea that abstract cognition and existential reality are identical; the inconsistency involved is too patent.[160] In the second place, what Hegel really does mean by his position that logic and metaphysic coincide seems to be this, namely, the assertion of the complete intelligibility or mediated character of reality. Instead of being merely subjective ideas, the categories of the Logic are principles of ultimate reality; and ultimate reality is simply what these principles show it to be. It is only by these instruments that experience gets its organization; and organized experience and reality coincide. The science of the categories is, thus, the science of the real; but being is not deduced, it is only thoroughly rationalized and explained. Of course, we must remember that these categories are not merely conceptions of the Understanding, as Hegel calls it, or of what we call cognition: the categories of feeling and will are just as important as the categories of cognition. And we must also remember that the categories of the Reason are not merely universals bearing an external and mechanical relation to the particulars; they are universals which exist only in and through the particulars subsumed under them, and in which the particulars find their only reality.[161] Such an identification of logic and ontology, Hegel maintains, is logically involved in the system of Kant: the reason why Kant failed to realize the fact was that he gave his categories an ‘essentially subjective significance.’[162] That is to say, had Kant only realized that the realm of possible experience is the real and only real, then the categories, which he recognized as principles of the deepest import in experience, would have been regarded as principles of reality, would have attained to truly objective significance; and so the science of these principles would have become the science of the real, the Critique of Pure Reason would have been a metaphysic as well as a treatise on epistemology. Now Hegel argues that thought must be genuinely objective, else we have on our hands a dualism which cannot be transcended.
And thought being really objective, logic is inevitably metaphysic.
This leads us in conclusion to remark, in anticipation of a discussion that will follow in the next chapter, that doubtless Hegel would hardly find free from difficulties the epistemology of those who are inclined to criticize him for making logic and metaphysics coincident. He might ask concerning the logical consequences of their position; and more than likely he would intimate that the inevitable answer is the Ding-an-sich of the Kantian philosophy. For what reality is it that lies beyond thought, but a reality that is unknowable in terms of thought? And how can that reality which is unknowable in terms of thought be known at all? And what significance can be attached to an unknowable reality? Is it logically possible to separate knowledge and reality? Hegel would urge that knowledge, which is incapable of expressing the nature of the ultimately real, is impotent. “Only in so far as reflection has reference to the Absolute is it Reason, and its activity that of real knowledge.” [163] He would furthermore insist that what exists apart from knowledge is an abstraction. “The object as it is without thought and the Notion is a mere idea, a name: the forms of thought and the Notion make of it what it is.”[164] To such strictures it would seem that the critics could reply only by admitting that the real does somehow fall within the system of knowledge; for, ultimately, there can be no bits or nuclei of reality that remain opaque to thought. As Professor Bosanquet has remarked: “If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality.”[165] And such an empty conception of thought and such a hopeless conception of reality would combine to land us in a rather barren and forlorn subjectivism.
The conclusions of our discussion are as follows. Hegel does argue that logic and metaphysic coincide. But the coincidence is not an abstract identity. Against such a conclusion the lesson of the Phenomenology warns us. The coincidence between the two consists in the fact that the thought, which is the subject matter of logic, is the principle of organization of reality itself; logic, thus, is necessarily a science of reality.
The attempted transition from the Logic to the other parts of the Encyclopaedia must be explained as the result of Hegel’s anxiety to keep his system intact. It cannot be construed as an attempt on Hegel’s part to deduce factual existence from one aspect of conscious experience; for such an attempt would have contradicted the doctrine which Hegel most persistently presupposes, the doctrine, namely, that thought is concrete, not abstract.
Table of Contents
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h4>Part I</h4>
<h3>Chapter I. Thought as Objective and Universal.</h3>
<p>Perhaps no part of Hegel’s system has been more persistently overlooked or misunderstood than has his doctrine of the nature of thought.</p>
<p>Certainly no part of his system deserves to be more carefully studied.</p>
<p>For this is the doctrine that is absolutely fundamental to his system; and it must be understood before any fair appreciation of his system can be arrived at or any just criticism of his contentions be advanced. To give an exposition of the Hegelian doctrine of thought, and to do this as much as is practicable in the author’s own words, is the aim of this chapter.</p>
<p>Almost universally it is taken for granted that the <em>Logic </em>contains all that Hegel thought it worth while to say about the nature of thought. His epistemology is criticized and defended against criticism exclusively on the basis of the dialectical development of the categories, the assumption of both critic and champion being that here we find Hegel’s last word concerning the nature of knowledge. That such an assumption is erroneous and leads to positive error in interpreting the Hegelian epistemology will, I trust, appear in what is to follow. The <em>Logic </em>does, indeed, purport to give an account of the essentially organic nature of thought, by showing how one category necessarily loses itself in its negative, which proves to be, not an abstract negative, but a negative that dialectically leads on to a more concrete synthesis of the two opposed categories.</p>
<p>The <em>Logic </em>leads progressively from the abstract categories of Being, through the more concrete categories of Essence, to the still more concrete categories of the Notion; and finally to the most concrete category of all, that category in which all the lower categories find their ‘truth,’ namely, the Absolute Idea. This the <em>Logic </em>does; but this is all that it does. It tells us nothing direct about the empirical significance of the categories themselves. Except by frequent hints – which indeed are quite emphatic and significant – the Logic gives us no insight into that fundamental problem of epistemology, namely, the significance of the subject-object relation. On the contrary, as Hegel himself declares, the very purpose of the <em>Logic </em>is to deal with the categories in the pure ether of thought and in abstraction from their empirical setting.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n1">[1]</a></sup> So in the Logic we search in vain for an exposition of this most important aspect of our knowing experience; the implications of the objective reference of thought are not explicitly touched upon there. For such an exposition we must look elsewhere.</p>
<p>The exposition for which we seek is to be found in the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. Perhaps this will appear beyond dispute from a consideration of some of Hegel’s own statements on the point. In the preface to the <em>Phenomenology </em>he says: “The task which I have set myself is to elaborate the fact that philosophy approaches the form of science – approaches the point where it lays aside the name of <em>love for </em>knowledge, and becomes real knowledge.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n2">[2]</a></sup> Again, later in the same preface we read: “The process of science in general, or of <em>knowledge</em>, is set forth in the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. Knowledge as it is at first, or the immediate spirit, is spiritless or sensuous consciousness. In order to become real knowledge, to reach the element of science which is its pure notion itself, this <em>sensuous consciousness </em>has to work itself through a long way.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n3">[3]</a></sup> This way is, of course, that traced by the <em>Phenomenology</em>.</p>
<p>A little later in the same work we are told that the problem of the <em>Phenomenology </em>is simply “an investigation and proof of the reality of knowledge.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n4">[4]</a></sup> This same point Hegel is emphasizing when he urges that the <em>Phenomenology </em>is the science of experience; for experience, he tells us, is only the “dialectical process (<em>Bewegung</em>) which perfects consciousness in itself, both in its knowledge and in its object.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n5">[5]</a></sup> In other words, since experience is essentially a subject-object relation, its truth is to be found in the determination of the real import and significance of that relation. Thus it seems that the problem of <em>Phenomenology </em>is pretty clearly defined: it is simply the progressive definition and exposition of the significance of this duality within experience. It is not merely to trace an organic development from one to another stage of consciousness, as Professor Baillie would seem to suggest.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n6">[6]</a></sup> Rather is it to disclose the important change that takes place between subject and object as the knowing experience is traced through the various attitudes of consciousness. As Lasson aptly remarks in the introduction to his recent edition of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, the point of interest in the work is the transition “from one relation of consciousness to the entire world of being, to another such relation.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n7">[7]</a></sup> Hegel’s purpose in this novel Introduction to Philosophy is not like Kant’s in the first of the Critiques, namely, to investigate the possibility and limitations of knowledge. He accepts knowledge and the knowing experience very much as it is accepted by common-sense, and then proceeds to develop its implications.</p>
<p>Passing dialectically from sensuous consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion, he finally arrives at what seems to him to be the true attitude of consciousness, the truth of the knowing experience. This final result of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, which Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge (<em>das absolute Wissen</em>), is thus his definition of the real nature of knowledge; it is his final statement of the significance of the subject-object relation within concrete experience.</p>
<p>It is very important to notice at the outset, and to keep constantly in mind, the fact that Hegel bases this conception of absolute knowledge directly and unequivocally upon our common knowing experience. This point is so fundamental, and is so generally neglected by the critics, that it needs emphasis even at the risk of digression. If there is wanted more evidence than has already been adduced, it is not far to seek. In the Preface to the <em>Phenomenology </em>itself, we find an explicit statement to the effect that there is no break between consciousness as it appears in sensuous perception and in absolute knowing; and this very fact, Hegel argues, makes possible the transition from the lower to the higher stage.</p>
<p>“The beginning of philosophy,” he says, “makes the presupposition or demand that consciousness be in this element” (i.e., as the context indicates, in the ‘element’ of ‘absolute science,’ which is simply the point of view of absolute knowledge). “But this element receives its completion and clearness only through the process of its development.... On its side, science demands of self-consciousness that it raise itself into this ether....</p>
<p>On the other hand, the individual has a right to ask that science at least let down to him the ladder to this standpoint, that is, show him the standpoint within himself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n8">[8]</a></sup> Furthermore, in the Introduction to the larger <em>Logic </em>we read: “Absolute knowledge is the truth of all modes or attitudes of consciousness.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n9">[9]</a></sup> Finally, there is a passage in the smaller <em>Logic </em>which runs thus: “In my <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>... the method adopted was to begin with the first and simplest phase of mind, immediate consciousness, and to show how that stage gradually of necessity worked onward to the philosophical point of view, the necessity of that view being proved by the process.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n10">[10]</a></sup> Now it would seem that the import of such passages as these is unmistakable. The <em>Phenomenology </em>begins with the most naive attitude of consciousness, where the matter of intuition is looked upon as a mere datum; its progress, as Professor McGilvary suggests,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n11">[11]</a></sup> consists just in showing that this sensuous consciousness is an essential element in absolute knowing. In other words, the standpoint of absolute knowing is involved in every, even the simplest, phase of consciousness; it is implied in every act of knowledge, in every subject-object relation, – which is tantamount to saying that it is conterminous with experience itself.</p>
<p>Near the end of his discussion of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, Haym, looking back over the course of its development, remarks: “This whole phenomenological genesis of absolute knowledge was nothing other than the <em>presence of the Absolute</em>, which unfolded itself before our very eyes in the methodical manner peculiar to its spiritual nature. It was the selfdevelopment of the Absolute as it has mirrored itself in consciousness and in history.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n12">[12]</a></sup> One is led to believe that the critic means by this, as he says later, that the ego “is at the beginning of the <em>Phenomenology </em>exactly where it ought to be at the end, – not in itself, but in the Absolute.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n13">[13]</a></sup> The suggestion of such a point of view as this, however, seems to me to be at best misleading. Whatever may be said concerning the relation of the result of the <em>Phenomenology </em>to the standpoint of an Absolute Intelligence,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n14">[14]</a></sup> there is certainly no reason for maintaining that Hegel would ask us to assume such a standpoint at the beginning of the <em>Phenomenology</em>. He asks us merely to place ourselves at the point of view of sensuous consciousness, and to try to discover its logical implications.</p>
<p>It is, indeed, true that in the attitude of sensuous consciousness Hegel sees the standpoint of absolute knowing, which thus finds its basis in the actual knowing experiences of finite individuals; and it is also true that these experiences are never left out of consideration by him.</p>
<p>But this means nothing more than that absolute knowledge is logically involved in every knowing experience, and that investigation can prove that it is so involved. Hegel himself has very clearly put the matter in another context: “It may be said that the Absolute is involved in every beginning, just as every advance is simply an exposition of it.... But because it is at first only implicit, it is really not the Absolute.... The advance, therefore, is not a sort of overflow, as it would be were the beginning truly the Absolute; rather the development consists in the fact that the universal determines itself.... Only in its completion is it the Absolute.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n15">[15]</a></sup> Even granting, then, for the sake of the argument, that Hegel finally identifies absolute knowledge with the point of view of an omniscient Intelligence (which assumption is by no means self-evident, – indeed, it is difficult to prove that Hegel’s Absolute is such an Intelligence), we are certainly not justified in saying that he emerges from the <em>Phenomenology </em>with nothing more than the assumption with which he began his investigation. The standpoint of absolute knowledge is not assumed at the beginning; it is arrived at only at the end. And to accuse Hegel of having begun with the point of view of the Absolute is an indication that his actual procedure has been misconstrued. Absolute knowledge does not, as Haym asserts, find its justification in the fact that “the <em>Weltgeist </em>has completed itself in history,” but, as we shall see later, in the fact that it is the necessary presupposition of all concrete individual experience.</p>
<p>Lotze, too, has brought practically the same accusation against Hegel.</p>
<p>“It was not after Hegel’s mind,” he tells us, “to begin by determining the subjective forms of thought, under which alone we can apprehend the concrete nature of this ground of the Universe, – a nature perhaps to us inaccessible. From the outset he looked on the motion of our thought in its effort to gain a clear idea of this still obscure goal of our aspiration as the proper inward development of the Absolute itself, which only needed to be pursued consistently in order gradually to bring into consciousness all that the universe contains.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n16">[16]</a></sup> Now I submit that such an accusation entirely overlooks the procedure of the <em>Phenomenology </em>in establishing the category of absolute knowledge. The very purpose of this effort was ‘to determine the subjective forms of thought’ as they appear in the knowing experience of the individual. It is true that Hegel did not enter into psychological discussion of individual minds; his aim was epistemological and not psychological.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n17">[17]</a></sup> It is also true that he ended his investigation by exhibiting the essential objectivity of these so-called ‘subjective forms’ of thought. But the fact still remains that he took his stand on actual human experience and began his inquiry with common everyday consciousness. In the case of the <em>Logic </em>(provided one forgets the fact that the result of the <em>Phenomenology </em>is its presupposition) it may be argued with some show of plausibility that from the outset the author regards thought as the “proper inward development of the Absolute itself.” But there can be no doubt whatever concerning the baselessness of the charge when made with reference to the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. The category of absolute knowledge is not a first principle shot out of a pistol at us, as it were, but a conclusion laboriously reached; and it is attained only by a careful and painstaking examination of all stages of consciousness from the sensuous to the scientific and religious. Wherever there is a subject-object relation, there the characteristics of absolute knowledge are disclosed.</p>
<p>Absolute knowledge being, then, Hegel’s interpretation of the essential characteristics of thought as it appears in every actual knowing experience, the question arises concerning the details of the conception.</p>
<p>What are the fundamental characteristics of thought as defined in this Hegelian category? It is to an attempt to answer this question, partially at least, that we now address ourselves.</p>
<p>In the first place, Hegel claims that his conception of absolute knowledge gives thought release from the subjectivity in which it was bound by both the Kantian and Fichtean systems. Kant, he admits, does indeed give to thought a quasi-objectivity, namely, universal validity. “Kant gave the title objective to the intellectual factor, to the universal and necessary; and he was quite justified in so doing.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n18">[18]</a></sup> That is to say, for Kant objectivity means the universally valid in contradistinction to the particularity and relativity of sense-perception; and this is a step in the right direction towards true objectivity. “But after all,” Hegel continues, “objectivity of thought, in Kant’s sense, is again to a certain extent subjective.</p>
<p>Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts – separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n19">[19]</a></sup> In other words, Kant’s categories cannot, by their very nature, express the real: they are mere ideas, which can indeed tell us about the temporal and spatial relations of objects, but which just for this reason can give us no insight into the nature of ultimate reality. Hegel elsewhere speaks of them as prisms through which the light of truth is so refracted and broken that it can never be had in its purity. Such idealism, Hegel justly concludes, is purely subjective.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n20">[20]</a></sup> Heroic as were Fichte’s efforts to break through to reality, they were, Hegel asserts, unavailing. “Fichte,” he says, “never advanced beyond Kant’s conclusion, that the finite only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the range of thought. What Kant calls the thing-by-itself, Fichte calls the impulse from without, – that abstraction of something else than ‘I,’ not otherwise describable or definable than as the negative or non-Ego in general.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n21">[21]</a></sup> To express it otherwise, Fichte, in his search for objectivity, finds nothing more satisfactory than an unattainable ideal, an eternal <em>Sollen</em>. But this vanishing ideal does not meet the difficulty; thought, which merely ought to be objective, is still subjective, even though an infinite time be allowed for transition to objectivity. Consequently, Fichte’s position, like Kant’s, is in the last analysis nothing more than subjective idealism. Now the standpoint of absolute knowledge, Hegel maintains, transcends the dualism in which the systems of Kant and Fichte seem hopelessly involved. It gives to thought, not a quasi-objectivity or an objectivity that ought to be, but an objectivity that is at once genuine and actual.</p>
<p>Hegel has left us in no doubt as to what he thinks such an objectivity implies. In the context of the above criticism of Kant, he says: “The true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things, and of whatever is an object to us.” Later in the same context he tells us that objectivity means “the thought-apprehended essence of the existing thing, in contradistinction from what is merely our thought, and what consequently is still separated from the thing itself, as it exists in independent essence.” From these very explicit statements it is evident that objectivity of thought means for Hegel at least two things: (a) that thought which is truly objective is not particular and individual, but in a sense transcends the individual; and (b) that truly objective thought does actually express the essence of things. A consideration of these two points will now occupy our attention for a time.</p>
<p>The first of these points, that thought is really more than an individual affair, Hegel states very explicitly in the smaller Logic. In the twenty-third section he asserts that thought is “no private or particular state or act of the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with all individuals.” Furthermore, he constantly insists that the dialectic of thought is really <em>der Gang der Sache selbst</em>.</p>
<p>“It is not the outward action of subjective thought, but the personal soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n22">[22]</a></sup> The question, however, at once arises, Are not such statements meaningless? Is the “abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable,” anything more than an hypostatized entity? Do we know anything about the ‘universal action’ of thought apart from an individual experience? Is the finite knower merely a passive observer of the ‘march of the object,’ or of the organically unfolding ‘soul of the content’? To meet the objection implied in these questions, a preliminary consideration is necessary.</p>
<p>Every act of thought may be looked at from two points of view. It may be regarded as a process in time, that is, as a mere psychological event, or as a meaning. As a process in time, it is a state of consciousness among other such states to which it is related and by reference to which it may be explained. As a meaning, it is the expression of the relation of subject to object, the expression of which relation gives it its significance as an act of knowledge. Neither of these aspects of thought can, of course, be neglected; a timeless act of thought is as much a nonentity as a meaningless act of thought. But, on the other hand, the two aspects must not be confused; thought as a process in time is something quite different from thought as a meaning. Both points of view are legitimate and, indeed, necessary in dealing with concrete mental experience.</p>
<p>If, now, these ways of viewing thought be the standpoints of psychology and epistemology, respectively, we are perfectly right in saying that, from the psychological point of view, thought is subjective and particular, while from the standpoint of epistemology it is transsubjective.</p>
<p>As a psychological process, thought is subjective and particular for the simple reason that, when so viewed, it is nothing more than an element in a complex presentation which at a particular moment makes up the mental life of the individual subject. Even belief in a trans-subjective world, the psychologist treats, as Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison says, “simply as a subjective fact; he analyzes its constituents and tells us the complex elements of which it is built up; he tells us with great precision what we do believe, but so far as he is a pure psychologist he does not attempt to tell us whether our belief is true, whether we have real warrant for it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n23">[23]</a></sup> Epistemology, on the contrary, necessarily transcends this subjective standpoint of psychology. It deals, not with the knowing experience of any particular mind, not with knowledge as it is possessed by any particular subject, but with knowledge as it is in itself. Epistemology finds its special field just in determining the validity or falsity of the claims of our trans-subjective belief. Its business is to give us a criterion of truth, to investigate the subject-object relation within experience and to develop its implications. In doing this it must neglect the particular experiences, or, to use Professor Bosanquet’s phrase, it must abstract from the abstractions of psychology, and fix its attention upon the essential nature of knowledge qua knowledge. It does not, of course, deny the significance of the psychological aspect of thought, nor does it try to escape from the implications of experience when read from that angle of vision. It simply deals with thought from its own specific standpoint, its aim being to handle its data unencumbered as much as possible by psychological considerations.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n24">[24]</a></sup> Now, as I understand Hegel, we can accuse him neither of confusing these two points of view, nor of overlooking one in his zeal for the other. As has been pointed out, his interest in the discussion of knowledge is primarily epistemological in the sense above defined; and he keeps consistently to this point of departure. He sees clearly that, from this point of view, knowledge must be investigated as it is in and for itself and freed from the prejudices and preconceptions which attach to it in individual minds; if an adequate standard of truth is to be attained, relativity in knowledge must be overcome. But it should be very carefully noted that Hegel does not, at any rate need not, forget that thought is always a process in a knowing mind. The objectivity which he claims for thought in the category of absolute knowledge is claimed for the thought of every individual who knows; the truth of absolute experience, truth as it is in itself and for itself, is simply the truth of the experiences that are here and now. This point I tried to emphasize at the beginning of the discussion. Thus the ‘abstract self,’ freed from the limitations of its ordinary states and busy in its universal mode of action, turns out to be the finite self making an unusually strenuous effort to be consistent. Genuinely objective thought is not the private possession of A or B; it is rather the thought activity in which, so far as they are rational creatures, A and B participate. Even if we are fully convinced that Hegel has gone too far in the identification of the finite knower with the Absolute, still we must admit the legitimacy and necessity of this demand of the category of absolute knowledge. For if the subjectivity in which experience is involved by the Kantian and Fichtean philosophies is really to be transcended, experience must be given some form of genuine objectivity; and if that form of objectivity is to be found in thought, then thought must be looked upon as it is in its essential nature and not as it appears in this or that individual mind. And this, it would seem, is all that Hegel means when he says that truly objective thought transcends the individual experience.</p>
<p>The second factor involved in the conception of true objectivity, namely, the capacity of thought to express the essential nature of its object, Hegel shows to be the necessary presupposition of all knowing experience. Thought must disclose the constitution of reality, he maintains, otherwise experience is doomed to a hopeless dualism. “The truth as such,” he tells us, “is essentially in knowledge.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n25">[25]</a></sup> “Only in so far as reflection has relation to the Absolute is it reason and its activity that of true knowledge (<em>Wissen</em>).”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n26">[26]</a></sup> Every individual who knows does, by virtue of that very fact, transcend the dualism which seems to exist between subject and object; on any other assumption it is not easy to see how experience can be brought into actual contact with ultimate reality.</p>
<p>To elaborate this argument is exactly what Hegel undertakes in the <em>Phenomenology</em>.</p>
<p>He shows there by dialectical procedure how the lowest and most naive attitude of consciousness to its object subsumes the opposition which <em>prima facie </em>seems such a barrier to the comprehension of reality; such subsumption must be assumed, or we shall never be able to say that experience and reality are one. One might summarily say, without doing violence to Hegel’s own words, that the purpose of the <em>Phenomenology </em>is to show, in opposition to the Kantian philosophy, why the <em>Ding-an-sich </em>must be known and how it can be known. It must be known, because this is the presupposition of experience from its earliest and simplest stages; it can be known, because thought is no merely subjective and private process going on in our heads, but in its very essence is a significant relation to objects. Thus Hegel solves the problem of the opposition between subject and object by pointing out that the problem is really made by our own abstract procedure in dealing with experience. In point of fact, he tells us, there is no such opposition; on the contrary, the very fact that we can have significant knowledge forces us to the conclusion that thought is truly objective, and that the object is in reality as it is in knowledge.</p>
<p>Hegel’s position on this point can, perhaps, be more clearly understood when contrasted with Lotze’s view. In his <em>Logic </em>Lotze summarizes his position thus: “We have convinced ourselves that this changing world of our ideas is the sole material given us to work upon; that truth and the knowledge of truth consist only in the laws of interconnection which are found to obtain universally within a given set of ideas.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n27">[27]</a></sup> Now when we recall that these ideas are for Lotze more or less subjective, mere ‘tools’ by means of which we somehow come in contact with reality, but through which the essence of objects can never be known, the contrast between his position and Hegel’s is plain. According to the one, we are shut off from reality by means of the very tools we vainly endeavor to work with; reality is a realm ‘whose margin fades forever and forever’ as we move. According to the other, we are never out of touch with reality, since to know is <em>ipso facto </em>to know the essential nature of the objects of knowledge. To the former, truth is nothing more than consistency within a given set of ideas; to the latter, truth is nothing less than reality itself. In a word, on the theory of Lotze thought is after all still subjective, still confined to the abstract realm of bare universals, impotent to overtake the phantom reality it pursues: Hegel teaches, on the contrary, that thought is essentially objective, that form and content interpenetrate, that the process of knowledge is the process of things.</p>
<p>And this conception of the objectivity of thought, Hegel would urge, is a necessary presupposition of experience, unless indeed we are willing to abide by the consequences of an epistemological dualism.</p>
<p>But if thought expresses the essence of its object, then thought <em>ipso facto </em>comprehends its object and so exhausts reality. This implication of his doctrine of the objectivity of thought Hegel not only recognizes but insists upon. “Conception is the penetration of the object, which is then no longer opposed to me. From it I have taken its own peculiar nature, which it had as an independent object in opposition to me. As Adam said to Eve, ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ so says the Spirit, ‘This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation has disappeared.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n28">[28]</a></sup> This same idea Hegel has in mind when he speaks of thought as <em>begreifendes Denken</em>. “<em>Begreifendes Denken</em>,” says Professor McGilvary, “is grasping, clutching thought, thought that grips its object as its own inalienable possession. Perhaps we might translate <em>das begreifende Denken </em>by the phrase ‘object-appropriating thought’; for the logical relation of such thought to its object is analogous to the legal relation of the master to the slave; the slave had no independent status; he stood only in his master, who engulfed him.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n29">[29]</a></sup> Again, the one distinguishing feature between what Hegel terms ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ thought is that the latter destroys the opposition between form and content, which opposition the former never transcends; as Hegel puts it, ‘finite’ thought is “subjective, arbitrary, and accidental,” while ‘infinite’ thought is what alone “can get really in touch with the supreme and true.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n30">[30]</a></sup> And, of course, it is ‘infinite’ thought with which Hegel has to do in his category of absolute knowledge. Furthermore, in the Introduction to the larger <em>Logic </em>Hegel argues that to separate the form and content of knowledge is to presuppose an external objective world which is independent of thought; and this, he objects, is unjustifiable.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n31">[31]</a></sup> And later in the same Introduction, we read: “In logic we have nothing to do with thought <em>about </em>something which lies independently outside of thought as the basis of it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n32">[32]</a></sup> Finally, in the smaller <em>Logic</em>, he asserts: “In the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n33">[33]</a></sup> Other passages bearing on this point might be quoted, did it seem necessary; but the above passages state very clearly Hegel’s position. In fact, the position is inevitably involved in his whole conception of the objectivity of knowledge.</p>
<p>Truly objective knowledge cannot have opposed to it an unaccountable residuum of fact, which it is unable to comprehend or interpret; on the contrary, it must be conterminous with reality.</p>
<p>The following quotation from Mr. McTaggart presents an admirable antithesis to Hegel’s position here. “Thought is a process of mediation and relation, and implies something immediate to be related, which cannot be found in thought. Even if a stage of thought could be conceived as existing, in which it was self-subsistent, and in which it had no reference to any data... at any rate this is not the ordinary thought of common life. And as the dialectic process professes to start from a basis common to every one,... it is certain that it will be necessary for thought, in the dialectic process, to have some relation to data given immediately, and independent of that thought itself.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n34">[34]</a></sup> It makes no difference that this statement is given by the critic as an interpretation of Hegel; it is in truth exactly contrary to Hegel’s view of the matter.</p>
<p>Thought, as Hegel conceives of it, certainly has no data opposed to, and independent of it; nor is it merely a process of mediation and relation among phenomena external to it. It bears no relation whatever to immediately given data, ‘nuclei’ of being, which lie outside of and beyond it, for there are no such. On the contrary, it transcends this dualism, and always finds itself ‘at home’ in its object from which every trace of alienation has disappeared.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n35">[35]</a></sup> Perhaps I can best bring out the contrast between Hegel’s real position and that attributed to him by his critic by letting him once more speak for himself: “If under the process of knowledge we figure to ourselves an external operation in which it is brought into a merely mechanical relation to an object, that is to say, remains outside it, and is only externally applied to it, knowledge is presented in such a relation as a particular thing for itself, so that it may well be that its forms have nothing in common with the qualities of the object; and thus, when it concerns itself with an object, it remains only in its own forms, and does not reach the essential qualities of the object, that is to say, does not become real knowledge of it. In such a relation knowledge is determined as finite, and as of the finite; in its object there remains something essentially inner, whose notion is thus unattainable by and foreign to knowledge, which finds here its limit and its end, and is on that account limited and finite.” So far we have a statement of the critic’s view with its attendant difficulties. By way of criticism and exposition of his own position, Hegel continues: “But to take such a relation as the only one, or as final or absolute, is a purely made-up and unjustifiable assumption of the Understanding. Real knowledge, inasmuch as it does not remain outside the object, but in point of fact occupies itself with it, must be immanent in the object, the proper movement of its nature, only expressed in the form of thought and taken up into consciousness.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n36">[36]</a></sup> This passage is self-explanatory, and comment on it seems superfluous.</p>
<p>In it Hegel has simply pointed out the inevitable dualism involved in the position which Mr. McTaggart has attributed to him; and in opposition to such a position he has stated his own more objective standpoint An objection which arises just here seems <em>prima facie </em>unanswerable.</p>
<p>If it be true that thought actually does exhaust reality, then it must be that thought, or knowing experience, and reality coincide. But can such a view possibly be seriously entertained? Is it not nonsense to say that thought is co-extensive with the real, when so much of our everyday experience, our hopes, our fears, our loves, our hates, fall outside the thinking process? Can one be so mad as to attempt to reduce existential reality to terms of ideas? Lotze has put the objection very forcibly thus: “Nothing is simpler than to convince ourselves that every apprehending intelligence can only see things as they look to it when it perceives them, not as they look when no one perceives them; he who demands a knowledge which should be more than a perfectly connected and consistent system of ideas about the thing, a knowledge which should actually exhaust the thing itself, is no longer asking for knowledge at all, but for something entirely unintelligible.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n37">[37]</a></sup> Mr. Bradley, in a classic passage, has voiced the same feeling: “Unless thought stands for something that falls beyond mere intelligence, if ‘thinking’ is not used with some strange implication that never was part of the meaning of the word, a lingering scruple still forbids us to believe that reality can ever be purely rational.... The notion that existence could be the same as understanding strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. That the glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n38">[38]</a></sup> Now Hegel’s answer to this objection is, I think, found in the second characteristic of thought as he has defined it for us in absolute knowledge; and this we shall proceed at once to examine.</p>
<p>Thought, Hegel argues, is not mere abstract cognition, but, on the contrary, is truly universal. In answer to Mr. Bradley he would say that thought does stand for something which falls beyond <em>mere </em>intelligence.</p>
<p>That is to say, actual concrete thought, in Professor Bosanquet’s phraseology, is a process, not of selective omission, but of constructive analysis; its universals are syntheses of differences.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n39">[39]</a></sup> In Hegel’s own words: “The Notion is generally associated in our minds with abstract generality, and on that account it is often described as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the notions of color, plant, animal, etc. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colors, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all. This is the aspect of the Notion which is familiar to the understanding; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatizes such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and shadows. But the universal of the Notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. For the sake both of cognition and of our practical conduct, it is of the utmost importance that the real universal should not be confused with what is merely held in common. All those charges which the devotees of feeling make against thought, and especially against philosophic thought, and the reiterated statement that it is dangerous to carry thought to what they call too great lengths, originate in the confusion of these two things.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n40">[40]</a></sup> In other words, universality may mean two very different things. On the one hand, it may indicate nothing but abstract generality which is arrived at by neglecting the marks peculiar to particular objects. On the other hand, it may mean the synthetic analysis of the particulars, and so include within itself the essential characteristics of them. If one only remembers this distinction, and remembers that the true universal of thought is the subsumption, not the annihilation, of the particular, then, Hegel would say, there should be no objection raised against the assertion that ultimately the real is comprehended by thought.</p>
<p>For, in this meaning of thought, experience and thinking experience are synonymous terms.</p>
<p>There are various passages in which Hegel emphasizes this aspect of thought by insisting that thought is not one mental faculty among others coordinate with it, but that it is the principle of universality in mind and includes within itself the other so-called mental faculties as essential elements. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy occurs a criticism of Kant which is very suggestive in this connection: “With Kant the thinking understanding and sensuousness are both something particular, and they are merely united in an external, superficial way, just as a piece of wood and a leg might be bound together with a cord.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n41">[41]</a></sup> Against any such atomistic conception of the mind Hegel would insist: “Even our sense of the mind’s living unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n42">[42]</a></sup> But he would go further than this. Not only does he maintain that thought is not one element in an aggregate of disparate parts; he also urges that thought is rather the very life of the one organic whole which we call mind, “its very unadulterated self.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n43">[43]</a></sup> For example, in the smaller <em>Logic </em>he asserts that thought is present in every perception and in every mental activity.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n44">[44]</a></sup> “We simply cannot escape from thought,” he elsewhere says, “it is present in sensation, in cognition, and knowledge, in the instincts, and in volition, in so far as these are attributes of a human mind.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n45">[45]</a></sup> In the <em>Philosophy of Right </em>we read: “Spirit in general is thought, and by thought man is distinguished from the animal. But we must not imagine that man is on one side thinking and on another side willing, as though he had will in one pocket and thought in another. Such an idea is vain. The distinction between thought and will is only that between a theoretical and a practical relation. They are not two separate faculties.</p>
<p>The will is a special way of thinking; it is thought translating itself into reality; it is the impulse of thought to give itself reality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n46">[46]</a></sup> The conclusion of the whole matter is, that “in the human being there in only <em>one </em>reason, in feeling, volition, and thought.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n47">[47]</a></sup> Overlooking this conception of universality in Hegel’s doctrine of thought, Mr. McTaggart criticizes him for holding “that the highest activity of Spirit, in which all others are transcended and swallowed up, is that of pure thought.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n48">[48]</a></sup> Such a contention, we are informed, ignores a fact which Lotze has emphasized in many parts of his system. And that fact is “that Spirit has two other aspects besides thought – namely, volition and feeling – which are as important as thought, and which cannot be deduced from it, nor explained by it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n49">[49]</a></sup> Now this criticism assumes that Hegel actually tried to reduce the contents of mind to terms of abstract cognition. But, as we have just seen, such an assumption is entirely groundless. Hegel never thought of reducing will and feeling to knowledge, meaning by knowledge what his critic means by it, namely, one of several coordinate elements within the life of mind. What Hegel means by thought, when he asserts that it is conterminous with experience, is simply that principle by virtue of which experience is an organic and unitary whole. It is that life of mind itself, which includes within itself feeling, will, and cognition, and which finds its very being in the expression of this living unity of the mind’s activity.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n50">[50]</a></sup> For Hegel, there is “only one reason, in feeling, volition, and thought.” After all, the difference between Hegel and his critics on this point is not so great as might at first appear. Mr. McTaggart is perfectly willing to admit that it is not impossible that these elements of mind “might be found to be aspects of a unity which embraces and transcends them all”; but he is unwilling to call this unity thought.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n51">[51]</a></sup> Mr. Bradley, likewise, demands an ultimate synthesis; but it must fall beyond the category of rationality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n52">[52]</a></sup> Though Lotze states it as his conviction “that the nature of things does not consist in thoughts, and that thinking is not able to grasp it,” yet he goes so far as to say that “perhaps the whole mind experiences in other forms of its action and passion the essential meaning of all being and action.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n53">[53]</a></sup> Thus it would seem that the real quarrel between Hegel and the critics is concerning the real nature of the synthesis. What the critics vaguely term an ultimate unity, Hegel prefers to call thought, reason, or Spirit. The former try to find a synthesis of elements which they have defined as practically exclusive and independent, though, of course, not ontologically separable from each other; and they seek this synthetic principle in feeling or intuition, – something ultra-rational. Hegel, on the other hand, insists that mind is an organic unity, and that it is such only by virtue of its own most characteristic activity; it is a one reason. Every concrete act of knowledge, he argues, is an activity of the whole mind; and this unitary, synthetic activity can be made intelligible and given true objectivity, not, as the critics seem to maintain, in terms of intuition or feeling, but only in terms of rationality. And reflection on the point will, I think, convince us that Hegel is in the right.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n54">[54]</a></sup> We are now in a position to expose another aspect of the current misconception of Hegel’s doctrine of universality. The misconception concerns Hegel’s supposed identification of thought and being, and is, perhaps, one of the most prolific sources of adverse criticism of the Hegelian philosophy. I refer to the prevalent view, implied in the above quotations from Mr. Bradley and Lotze, which Professor Seth Pringle- Pattison expresses thus: “The result of Hegel’s procedure would really be to sweep ‘existential reality’ off the board altogether, under the persuasion, apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relations that constitute our knowledge of the thing is equivalent to the existent thing itself. On the contrary, it may be confidently asserted that there is no more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relations than there was with one.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n55">[55]</a></sup> Now this idea that Hegel tried to reduce things to pure thought about things, or that he for a moment maintained that thought could possibly be the existent thing, seems to me a monstrous misinterpretation of his real meaning. It is inconsistent with the presupposition of his whole philosophy, namely, that reality is essentially a subject-object relation.</p>
<p>It is also inconsistent with the explicit statements quoted above concerning the universality of the Notion, which always involves particularity.</p>
<p>And, as we shall see in the next chapter, he emphatically repudiates such a view in his account of mediation and the function of the negative in thought. But, apart from these facts, it seems that we might credit Hegel with sufficient acumen to see the inherent absurdity of such a position. Surely he saw the contradiction involved in an attempt to attain by thought an ideal which would result in the annihilation of thought itself. Indeed, was it not Hegel who first impressed upon us the fact that knowledge always requires an object, and that, if that object be taken away, knowledge itself ceases to be? As Professor Jones has said: “It is inconsistent with the possibility of knowledge that it should be the reality it represents: knowledge is incompatible alike with sinking the real in the ideal, and the ideal in the real.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n56">[56]</a></sup> And I think we are safe in saying that Hegel was well aware of this truth; his essential disagreement with Spinoza is that in the Spinozistic philosophy object is reduced to and identified with subject.</p>
<p>Hegel seems to have taken special pains that he should not be misunderstood on this point. The passages already quoted might be paralleled with others just as positive. I shall content myself, however, with adding only two which show, as plainly as words can show, that the author was not an advocate of the theory of abstract identity. The first of these is to be found in the eighty-second section of the smaller <em>Logic</em>: “If we say that the absolute is the unity of subjective and objective, we are undoubtedly in the right, but so far one-sided, as we enunciate the unity only and lay the accent upon it, forgetting that in reality the subjective and objective are not merely identical but also distinct.” In the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>is found the other passage, which so well forestalls the above criticism and so forcefully emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing between merely formal identity and concrete unity that I may be pardoned for quoting it at length: “The close of philosophy is not the place, even in a general exoteric discussion, to waste a word on what a ‘Notion’ means. But as the view taken of this relation is closely connected with the view taken of philosophy generally and with all imputations against it, we may still add the remark that though philosophy certainly has to do with unity in general, it is not however with abstract unity, mere identity, and the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the Notion), and that in its whole course it has to do with nothing else; that each step in its advance is a peculiar term or phase of this concrete unity, and that the deepest and last expression of unity is the unity of absolute mind itself. Would-be judges and critics of philosophy might be recommended to familiarize themselves with these phases of unity and to take the trouble to get acquainted with them.... But they show so little acquaintance with them... that, when they of unity – and relation ipso facto implies unity – they rather stick fast at quite abstract indeterminate unity, and lose sight of the chief point of interest – the special mode in which the unity is qualified. Hence all they can say about philosophy is that dry identity is its principle and result, and that it is the system of Identity. Sticking fast to the undigested thought of identity, they have laid hands on, not the concrete unity, the notion and content of philosophy, but rather its reverse.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n57">[57]</a></sup> If in these passages Hegel does not deny any attempt to arrive at the blank identification of thought and being, of subject and object, and if in them he does not criticize such a goal as an essentially mistaken ideal of philosophical inquiry, then so far as I am concerned the import of the passages is lost. Surely by concrete unity he means something quite different from abstract identity, – and concrete unity is that with which philosophy, as he conceives it, has to do.</p>
<p>It seems only fair to insist that such considerations as the preceding be taken into account before Hegel is accused of attempting that which is at once impossible and absurd. He never had any idea of reducing the ‘choir of heaven’ and the multifarious passions of the human soul to a ‘ballet of bloodless categories.’ Such an attempt would have seemed to Hegel as nonsensical as it seems to his critics. When he speaks of the unity of thought and being, he always means identity in difference, and never the undifferentiated identity of Schelling’s system. And when he asserts that subject comprehends object, he does not mean to reduce experience to abstract subject, as did Spinoza. He does indeed insist upon unity, but it is always upon concrete unity, the unity of the ‘Notion’; and this unity does not annihilate or even harm its differences. In a word, Hegel transcends dualism, and yet, at the same time, does justice to the duality within and essential to experience. He neither denies nor attempts to explain away the factual side of experience; he simply denies that an inexplicable datum has any part or lot within experience.</p>
<p>Not immediacy, but abstract immediacy, immediacy apart from interpretation, is unreal.</p>
<p>This chapter may be brought to an end by an attempt to state in one paragraph its essential points. Hegel’s doctrine of thought, philosophic thought, is given in the category of absolute knowledge, which is arrived at through the procedure of the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. The conception is thus based directly upon our actual knowing experience, and claims to give us an account of thought as it essentially is. Thought, as here defined, is genuinely objective, transcending the relativity of individual experiences and being the determination of things as they are in themselves. But this is not to say that reality is identical with abstract cognition. For thought finds its capacity to express the real in the fact that its universals are always the syntheses of differences, and not the blank universals of purely formal logic. Actual living thought includes within itself the data of so-called intuitive perception, of feeling, of volition, of cognition, and it is adequately conceived of only as this unifying principle of experience; it is the living unity of mind, the one reason which appears in every mental activity. Therefore, when Hegel teaches that thought is conterminous with the real, he is simply stating the doctrine that experience and reality are one.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Part I
Chapter I. Thought as Objective and Universal.
Perhaps no part of Hegel’s system has been more persistently overlooked or misunderstood than has his doctrine of the nature of thought.
Certainly no part of his system deserves to be more carefully studied.
For this is the doctrine that is absolutely fundamental to his system; and it must be understood before any fair appreciation of his system can be arrived at or any just criticism of his contentions be advanced. To give an exposition of the Hegelian doctrine of thought, and to do this as much as is practicable in the author’s own words, is the aim of this chapter.
Almost universally it is taken for granted that the Logic contains all that Hegel thought it worth while to say about the nature of thought. His epistemology is criticized and defended against criticism exclusively on the basis of the dialectical development of the categories, the assumption of both critic and champion being that here we find Hegel’s last word concerning the nature of knowledge. That such an assumption is erroneous and leads to positive error in interpreting the Hegelian epistemology will, I trust, appear in what is to follow. The Logic does, indeed, purport to give an account of the essentially organic nature of thought, by showing how one category necessarily loses itself in its negative, which proves to be, not an abstract negative, but a negative that dialectically leads on to a more concrete synthesis of the two opposed categories.
The Logic leads progressively from the abstract categories of Being, through the more concrete categories of Essence, to the still more concrete categories of the Notion; and finally to the most concrete category of all, that category in which all the lower categories find their ‘truth,’ namely, the Absolute Idea. This the Logic does; but this is all that it does. It tells us nothing direct about the empirical significance of the categories themselves. Except by frequent hints – which indeed are quite emphatic and significant – the Logic gives us no insight into that fundamental problem of epistemology, namely, the significance of the subject-object relation. On the contrary, as Hegel himself declares, the very purpose of the Logic is to deal with the categories in the pure ether of thought and in abstraction from their empirical setting.[1] So in the Logic we search in vain for an exposition of this most important aspect of our knowing experience; the implications of the objective reference of thought are not explicitly touched upon there. For such an exposition we must look elsewhere.
The exposition for which we seek is to be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Perhaps this will appear beyond dispute from a consideration of some of Hegel’s own statements on the point. In the preface to the Phenomenology he says: “The task which I have set myself is to elaborate the fact that philosophy approaches the form of science – approaches the point where it lays aside the name of love for knowledge, and becomes real knowledge.”[2] Again, later in the same preface we read: “The process of science in general, or of knowledge, is set forth in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Knowledge as it is at first, or the immediate spirit, is spiritless or sensuous consciousness. In order to become real knowledge, to reach the element of science which is its pure notion itself, this sensuous consciousness has to work itself through a long way.”[3] This way is, of course, that traced by the Phenomenology.
A little later in the same work we are told that the problem of the Phenomenology is simply “an investigation and proof of the reality of knowledge.” [4] This same point Hegel is emphasizing when he urges that the Phenomenology is the science of experience; for experience, he tells us, is only the “dialectical process (Bewegung) which perfects consciousness in itself, both in its knowledge and in its object.”[5] In other words, since experience is essentially a subject-object relation, its truth is to be found in the determination of the real import and significance of that relation. Thus it seems that the problem of Phenomenology is pretty clearly defined: it is simply the progressive definition and exposition of the significance of this duality within experience. It is not merely to trace an organic development from one to another stage of consciousness, as Professor Baillie would seem to suggest.[6] Rather is it to disclose the important change that takes place between subject and object as the knowing experience is traced through the various attitudes of consciousness. As Lasson aptly remarks in the introduction to his recent edition of the Phenomenology, the point of interest in the work is the transition “from one relation of consciousness to the entire world of being, to another such relation.”[7] Hegel’s purpose in this novel Introduction to Philosophy is not like Kant’s in the first of the Critiques, namely, to investigate the possibility and limitations of knowledge. He accepts knowledge and the knowing experience very much as it is accepted by common-sense, and then proceeds to develop its implications.
Passing dialectically from sensuous consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion, he finally arrives at what seems to him to be the true attitude of consciousness, the truth of the knowing experience. This final result of the Phenomenology, which Hegel calls Absolute Knowledge (das absolute Wissen), is thus his definition of the real nature of knowledge; it is his final statement of the significance of the subject-object relation within concrete experience.
It is very important to notice at the outset, and to keep constantly in mind, the fact that Hegel bases this conception of absolute knowledge directly and unequivocally upon our common knowing experience. This point is so fundamental, and is so generally neglected by the critics, that it needs emphasis even at the risk of digression. If there is wanted more evidence than has already been adduced, it is not far to seek. In the Preface to the Phenomenology itself, we find an explicit statement to the effect that there is no break between consciousness as it appears in sensuous perception and in absolute knowing; and this very fact, Hegel argues, makes possible the transition from the lower to the higher stage.
“The beginning of philosophy,” he says, “makes the presupposition or demand that consciousness be in this element” (i.e., as the context indicates, in the ‘element’ of ‘absolute science,’ which is simply the point of view of absolute knowledge). “But this element receives its completion and clearness only through the process of its development.... On its side, science demands of self-consciousness that it raise itself into this ether....
On the other hand, the individual has a right to ask that science at least let down to him the ladder to this standpoint, that is, show him the standpoint within himself.”[8] Furthermore, in the Introduction to the larger Logic we read: “Absolute knowledge is the truth of all modes or attitudes of consciousness.”[9] Finally, there is a passage in the smaller Logic which runs thus: “In my Phenomenology of Spirit... the method adopted was to begin with the first and simplest phase of mind, immediate consciousness, and to show how that stage gradually of necessity worked onward to the philosophical point of view, the necessity of that view being proved by the process.”[10] Now it would seem that the import of such passages as these is unmistakable. The Phenomenology begins with the most naive attitude of consciousness, where the matter of intuition is looked upon as a mere datum; its progress, as Professor McGilvary suggests,[11] consists just in showing that this sensuous consciousness is an essential element in absolute knowing. In other words, the standpoint of absolute knowing is involved in every, even the simplest, phase of consciousness; it is implied in every act of knowledge, in every subject-object relation, – which is tantamount to saying that it is conterminous with experience itself.
Near the end of his discussion of the Phenomenology, Haym, looking back over the course of its development, remarks: “This whole phenomenological genesis of absolute knowledge was nothing other than the presence of the Absolute, which unfolded itself before our very eyes in the methodical manner peculiar to its spiritual nature. It was the selfdevelopment of the Absolute as it has mirrored itself in consciousness and in history.”[12] One is led to believe that the critic means by this, as he says later, that the ego “is at the beginning of the Phenomenology exactly where it ought to be at the end, – not in itself, but in the Absolute.” [13] The suggestion of such a point of view as this, however, seems to me to be at best misleading. Whatever may be said concerning the relation of the result of the Phenomenology to the standpoint of an Absolute Intelligence,[14] there is certainly no reason for maintaining that Hegel would ask us to assume such a standpoint at the beginning of the Phenomenology. He asks us merely to place ourselves at the point of view of sensuous consciousness, and to try to discover its logical implications.
It is, indeed, true that in the attitude of sensuous consciousness Hegel sees the standpoint of absolute knowing, which thus finds its basis in the actual knowing experiences of finite individuals; and it is also true that these experiences are never left out of consideration by him.
But this means nothing more than that absolute knowledge is logically involved in every knowing experience, and that investigation can prove that it is so involved. Hegel himself has very clearly put the matter in another context: “It may be said that the Absolute is involved in every beginning, just as every advance is simply an exposition of it.... But because it is at first only implicit, it is really not the Absolute.... The advance, therefore, is not a sort of overflow, as it would be were the beginning truly the Absolute; rather the development consists in the fact that the universal determines itself.... Only in its completion is it the Absolute.”[15] Even granting, then, for the sake of the argument, that Hegel finally identifies absolute knowledge with the point of view of an omniscient Intelligence (which assumption is by no means self-evident, – indeed, it is difficult to prove that Hegel’s Absolute is such an Intelligence), we are certainly not justified in saying that he emerges from the Phenomenology with nothing more than the assumption with which he began his investigation. The standpoint of absolute knowledge is not assumed at the beginning; it is arrived at only at the end. And to accuse Hegel of having begun with the point of view of the Absolute is an indication that his actual procedure has been misconstrued. Absolute knowledge does not, as Haym asserts, find its justification in the fact that “the Weltgeist has completed itself in history,” but, as we shall see later, in the fact that it is the necessary presupposition of all concrete individual experience.
Lotze, too, has brought practically the same accusation against Hegel.
“It was not after Hegel’s mind,” he tells us, “to begin by determining the subjective forms of thought, under which alone we can apprehend the concrete nature of this ground of the Universe, – a nature perhaps to us inaccessible. From the outset he looked on the motion of our thought in its effort to gain a clear idea of this still obscure goal of our aspiration as the proper inward development of the Absolute itself, which only needed to be pursued consistently in order gradually to bring into consciousness all that the universe contains.”[16] Now I submit that such an accusation entirely overlooks the procedure of the Phenomenology in establishing the category of absolute knowledge. The very purpose of this effort was ‘to determine the subjective forms of thought’ as they appear in the knowing experience of the individual. It is true that Hegel did not enter into psychological discussion of individual minds; his aim was epistemological and not psychological.[17] It is also true that he ended his investigation by exhibiting the essential objectivity of these so-called ‘subjective forms’ of thought. But the fact still remains that he took his stand on actual human experience and began his inquiry with common everyday consciousness. In the case of the Logic (provided one forgets the fact that the result of the Phenomenology is its presupposition) it may be argued with some show of plausibility that from the outset the author regards thought as the “proper inward development of the Absolute itself.” But there can be no doubt whatever concerning the baselessness of the charge when made with reference to the Phenomenology of Spirit. The category of absolute knowledge is not a first principle shot out of a pistol at us, as it were, but a conclusion laboriously reached; and it is attained only by a careful and painstaking examination of all stages of consciousness from the sensuous to the scientific and religious. Wherever there is a subject-object relation, there the characteristics of absolute knowledge are disclosed.
Absolute knowledge being, then, Hegel’s interpretation of the essential characteristics of thought as it appears in every actual knowing experience, the question arises concerning the details of the conception.
What are the fundamental characteristics of thought as defined in this Hegelian category? It is to an attempt to answer this question, partially at least, that we now address ourselves.
In the first place, Hegel claims that his conception of absolute knowledge gives thought release from the subjectivity in which it was bound by both the Kantian and Fichtean systems. Kant, he admits, does indeed give to thought a quasi-objectivity, namely, universal validity. “Kant gave the title objective to the intellectual factor, to the universal and necessary; and he was quite justified in so doing.”[18] That is to say, for Kant objectivity means the universally valid in contradistinction to the particularity and relativity of sense-perception; and this is a step in the right direction towards true objectivity. “But after all,” Hegel continues, “objectivity of thought, in Kant’s sense, is again to a certain extent subjective.
Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts – separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge.”[19] In other words, Kant’s categories cannot, by their very nature, express the real: they are mere ideas, which can indeed tell us about the temporal and spatial relations of objects, but which just for this reason can give us no insight into the nature of ultimate reality. Hegel elsewhere speaks of them as prisms through which the light of truth is so refracted and broken that it can never be had in its purity. Such idealism, Hegel justly concludes, is purely subjective.[20] Heroic as were Fichte’s efforts to break through to reality, they were, Hegel asserts, unavailing. “Fichte,” he says, “never advanced beyond Kant’s conclusion, that the finite only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the range of thought. What Kant calls the thing-by-itself, Fichte calls the impulse from without, – that abstraction of something else than ‘I,’ not otherwise describable or definable than as the negative or non-Ego in general.”[21] To express it otherwise, Fichte, in his search for objectivity, finds nothing more satisfactory than an unattainable ideal, an eternal Sollen. But this vanishing ideal does not meet the difficulty; thought, which merely ought to be objective, is still subjective, even though an infinite time be allowed for transition to objectivity. Consequently, Fichte’s position, like Kant’s, is in the last analysis nothing more than subjective idealism. Now the standpoint of absolute knowledge, Hegel maintains, transcends the dualism in which the systems of Kant and Fichte seem hopelessly involved. It gives to thought, not a quasi-objectivity or an objectivity that ought to be, but an objectivity that is at once genuine and actual.
Hegel has left us in no doubt as to what he thinks such an objectivity implies. In the context of the above criticism of Kant, he says: “The true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things, and of whatever is an object to us.” Later in the same context he tells us that objectivity means “the thought-apprehended essence of the existing thing, in contradistinction from what is merely our thought, and what consequently is still separated from the thing itself, as it exists in independent essence.” From these very explicit statements it is evident that objectivity of thought means for Hegel at least two things: (a) that thought which is truly objective is not particular and individual, but in a sense transcends the individual; and (b) that truly objective thought does actually express the essence of things. A consideration of these two points will now occupy our attention for a time.
The first of these points, that thought is really more than an individual affair, Hegel states very explicitly in the smaller Logic. In the twenty-third section he asserts that thought is “no private or particular state or act of the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with all individuals.” Furthermore, he constantly insists that the dialectic of thought is really der Gang der Sache selbst.
“It is not the outward action of subjective thought, but the personal soul of the content, which unfolds its branches and fruit organically.”[22] The question, however, at once arises, Are not such statements meaningless? Is the “abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable,” anything more than an hypostatized entity? Do we know anything about the ‘universal action’ of thought apart from an individual experience? Is the finite knower merely a passive observer of the ‘march of the object,’ or of the organically unfolding ‘soul of the content’? To meet the objection implied in these questions, a preliminary consideration is necessary.
Every act of thought may be looked at from two points of view. It may be regarded as a process in time, that is, as a mere psychological event, or as a meaning. As a process in time, it is a state of consciousness among other such states to which it is related and by reference to which it may be explained. As a meaning, it is the expression of the relation of subject to object, the expression of which relation gives it its significance as an act of knowledge. Neither of these aspects of thought can, of course, be neglected; a timeless act of thought is as much a nonentity as a meaningless act of thought. But, on the other hand, the two aspects must not be confused; thought as a process in time is something quite different from thought as a meaning. Both points of view are legitimate and, indeed, necessary in dealing with concrete mental experience.
If, now, these ways of viewing thought be the standpoints of psychology and epistemology, respectively, we are perfectly right in saying that, from the psychological point of view, thought is subjective and particular, while from the standpoint of epistemology it is transsubjective.
As a psychological process, thought is subjective and particular for the simple reason that, when so viewed, it is nothing more than an element in a complex presentation which at a particular moment makes up the mental life of the individual subject. Even belief in a trans-subjective world, the psychologist treats, as Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison says, “simply as a subjective fact; he analyzes its constituents and tells us the complex elements of which it is built up; he tells us with great precision what we do believe, but so far as he is a pure psychologist he does not attempt to tell us whether our belief is true, whether we have real warrant for it.”[23] Epistemology, on the contrary, necessarily transcends this subjective standpoint of psychology. It deals, not with the knowing experience of any particular mind, not with knowledge as it is possessed by any particular subject, but with knowledge as it is in itself. Epistemology finds its special field just in determining the validity or falsity of the claims of our trans-subjective belief. Its business is to give us a criterion of truth, to investigate the subject-object relation within experience and to develop its implications. In doing this it must neglect the particular experiences, or, to use Professor Bosanquet’s phrase, it must abstract from the abstractions of psychology, and fix its attention upon the essential nature of knowledge qua knowledge. It does not, of course, deny the significance of the psychological aspect of thought, nor does it try to escape from the implications of experience when read from that angle of vision. It simply deals with thought from its own specific standpoint, its aim being to handle its data unencumbered as much as possible by psychological considerations.[24] Now, as I understand Hegel, we can accuse him neither of confusing these two points of view, nor of overlooking one in his zeal for the other. As has been pointed out, his interest in the discussion of knowledge is primarily epistemological in the sense above defined; and he keeps consistently to this point of departure. He sees clearly that, from this point of view, knowledge must be investigated as it is in and for itself and freed from the prejudices and preconceptions which attach to it in individual minds; if an adequate standard of truth is to be attained, relativity in knowledge must be overcome. But it should be very carefully noted that Hegel does not, at any rate need not, forget that thought is always a process in a knowing mind. The objectivity which he claims for thought in the category of absolute knowledge is claimed for the thought of every individual who knows; the truth of absolute experience, truth as it is in itself and for itself, is simply the truth of the experiences that are here and now. This point I tried to emphasize at the beginning of the discussion. Thus the ‘abstract self,’ freed from the limitations of its ordinary states and busy in its universal mode of action, turns out to be the finite self making an unusually strenuous effort to be consistent. Genuinely objective thought is not the private possession of A or B; it is rather the thought activity in which, so far as they are rational creatures, A and B participate. Even if we are fully convinced that Hegel has gone too far in the identification of the finite knower with the Absolute, still we must admit the legitimacy and necessity of this demand of the category of absolute knowledge. For if the subjectivity in which experience is involved by the Kantian and Fichtean philosophies is really to be transcended, experience must be given some form of genuine objectivity; and if that form of objectivity is to be found in thought, then thought must be looked upon as it is in its essential nature and not as it appears in this or that individual mind. And this, it would seem, is all that Hegel means when he says that truly objective thought transcends the individual experience.
The second factor involved in the conception of true objectivity, namely, the capacity of thought to express the essential nature of its object, Hegel shows to be the necessary presupposition of all knowing experience. Thought must disclose the constitution of reality, he maintains, otherwise experience is doomed to a hopeless dualism. “The truth as such,” he tells us, “is essentially in knowledge.”[25] “Only in so far as reflection has relation to the Absolute is it reason and its activity that of true knowledge (Wissen).”[26] Every individual who knows does, by virtue of that very fact, transcend the dualism which seems to exist between subject and object; on any other assumption it is not easy to see how experience can be brought into actual contact with ultimate reality.
To elaborate this argument is exactly what Hegel undertakes in the Phenomenology.
He shows there by dialectical procedure how the lowest and most naive attitude of consciousness to its object subsumes the opposition which prima facie seems such a barrier to the comprehension of reality; such subsumption must be assumed, or we shall never be able to say that experience and reality are one. One might summarily say, without doing violence to Hegel’s own words, that the purpose of the Phenomenology is to show, in opposition to the Kantian philosophy, why the Ding-an-sich must be known and how it can be known. It must be known, because this is the presupposition of experience from its earliest and simplest stages; it can be known, because thought is no merely subjective and private process going on in our heads, but in its very essence is a significant relation to objects. Thus Hegel solves the problem of the opposition between subject and object by pointing out that the problem is really made by our own abstract procedure in dealing with experience. In point of fact, he tells us, there is no such opposition; on the contrary, the very fact that we can have significant knowledge forces us to the conclusion that thought is truly objective, and that the object is in reality as it is in knowledge.
Hegel’s position on this point can, perhaps, be more clearly understood when contrasted with Lotze’s view. In his Logic Lotze summarizes his position thus: “We have convinced ourselves that this changing world of our ideas is the sole material given us to work upon; that truth and the knowledge of truth consist only in the laws of interconnection which are found to obtain universally within a given set of ideas.”[27] Now when we recall that these ideas are for Lotze more or less subjective, mere ‘tools’ by means of which we somehow come in contact with reality, but through which the essence of objects can never be known, the contrast between his position and Hegel’s is plain. According to the one, we are shut off from reality by means of the very tools we vainly endeavor to work with; reality is a realm ‘whose margin fades forever and forever’ as we move. According to the other, we are never out of touch with reality, since to know is ipso facto to know the essential nature of the objects of knowledge. To the former, truth is nothing more than consistency within a given set of ideas; to the latter, truth is nothing less than reality itself. In a word, on the theory of Lotze thought is after all still subjective, still confined to the abstract realm of bare universals, impotent to overtake the phantom reality it pursues: Hegel teaches, on the contrary, that thought is essentially objective, that form and content interpenetrate, that the process of knowledge is the process of things.
And this conception of the objectivity of thought, Hegel would urge, is a necessary presupposition of experience, unless indeed we are willing to abide by the consequences of an epistemological dualism.
But if thought expresses the essence of its object, then thought ipso facto comprehends its object and so exhausts reality. This implication of his doctrine of the objectivity of thought Hegel not only recognizes but insists upon. “Conception is the penetration of the object, which is then no longer opposed to me. From it I have taken its own peculiar nature, which it had as an independent object in opposition to me. As Adam said to Eve, ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ so says the Spirit, ‘This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation has disappeared.’[28] This same idea Hegel has in mind when he speaks of thought as begreifendes Denken. “Begreifendes Denken,” says Professor McGilvary, “is grasping, clutching thought, thought that grips its object as its own inalienable possession. Perhaps we might translate das begreifende Denken by the phrase ‘object-appropriating thought’; for the logical relation of such thought to its object is analogous to the legal relation of the master to the slave; the slave had no independent status; he stood only in his master, who engulfed him.”[29] Again, the one distinguishing feature between what Hegel terms ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ thought is that the latter destroys the opposition between form and content, which opposition the former never transcends; as Hegel puts it, ‘finite’ thought is “subjective, arbitrary, and accidental,” while ‘infinite’ thought is what alone “can get really in touch with the supreme and true.”[30] And, of course, it is ‘infinite’ thought with which Hegel has to do in his category of absolute knowledge. Furthermore, in the Introduction to the larger Logic Hegel argues that to separate the form and content of knowledge is to presuppose an external objective world which is independent of thought; and this, he objects, is unjustifiable.[31] And later in the same Introduction, we read: “In logic we have nothing to do with thought about something which lies independently outside of thought as the basis of it.”[32] Finally, in the smaller Logic, he asserts: “In the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity.”[33] Other passages bearing on this point might be quoted, did it seem necessary; but the above passages state very clearly Hegel’s position. In fact, the position is inevitably involved in his whole conception of the objectivity of knowledge.
Truly objective knowledge cannot have opposed to it an unaccountable residuum of fact, which it is unable to comprehend or interpret; on the contrary, it must be conterminous with reality.
The following quotation from Mr. McTaggart presents an admirable antithesis to Hegel’s position here. “Thought is a process of mediation and relation, and implies something immediate to be related, which cannot be found in thought. Even if a stage of thought could be conceived as existing, in which it was self-subsistent, and in which it had no reference to any data... at any rate this is not the ordinary thought of common life. And as the dialectic process professes to start from a basis common to every one,... it is certain that it will be necessary for thought, in the dialectic process, to have some relation to data given immediately, and independent of that thought itself.”[34] It makes no difference that this statement is given by the critic as an interpretation of Hegel; it is in truth exactly contrary to Hegel’s view of the matter.
Thought, as Hegel conceives of it, certainly has no data opposed to, and independent of it; nor is it merely a process of mediation and relation among phenomena external to it. It bears no relation whatever to immediately given data, ‘nuclei’ of being, which lie outside of and beyond it, for there are no such. On the contrary, it transcends this dualism, and always finds itself ‘at home’ in its object from which every trace of alienation has disappeared.[35] Perhaps I can best bring out the contrast between Hegel’s real position and that attributed to him by his critic by letting him once more speak for himself: “If under the process of knowledge we figure to ourselves an external operation in which it is brought into a merely mechanical relation to an object, that is to say, remains outside it, and is only externally applied to it, knowledge is presented in such a relation as a particular thing for itself, so that it may well be that its forms have nothing in common with the qualities of the object; and thus, when it concerns itself with an object, it remains only in its own forms, and does not reach the essential qualities of the object, that is to say, does not become real knowledge of it. In such a relation knowledge is determined as finite, and as of the finite; in its object there remains something essentially inner, whose notion is thus unattainable by and foreign to knowledge, which finds here its limit and its end, and is on that account limited and finite.” So far we have a statement of the critic’s view with its attendant difficulties. By way of criticism and exposition of his own position, Hegel continues: “But to take such a relation as the only one, or as final or absolute, is a purely made-up and unjustifiable assumption of the Understanding. Real knowledge, inasmuch as it does not remain outside the object, but in point of fact occupies itself with it, must be immanent in the object, the proper movement of its nature, only expressed in the form of thought and taken up into consciousness.”[36] This passage is self-explanatory, and comment on it seems superfluous.
In it Hegel has simply pointed out the inevitable dualism involved in the position which Mr. McTaggart has attributed to him; and in opposition to such a position he has stated his own more objective standpoint An objection which arises just here seems prima facie unanswerable.
If it be true that thought actually does exhaust reality, then it must be that thought, or knowing experience, and reality coincide. But can such a view possibly be seriously entertained? Is it not nonsense to say that thought is co-extensive with the real, when so much of our everyday experience, our hopes, our fears, our loves, our hates, fall outside the thinking process? Can one be so mad as to attempt to reduce existential reality to terms of ideas? Lotze has put the objection very forcibly thus: “Nothing is simpler than to convince ourselves that every apprehending intelligence can only see things as they look to it when it perceives them, not as they look when no one perceives them; he who demands a knowledge which should be more than a perfectly connected and consistent system of ideas about the thing, a knowledge which should actually exhaust the thing itself, is no longer asking for knowledge at all, but for something entirely unintelligible.”[37] Mr. Bradley, in a classic passage, has voiced the same feeling: “Unless thought stands for something that falls beyond mere intelligence, if ‘thinking’ is not used with some strange implication that never was part of the meaning of the word, a lingering scruple still forbids us to believe that reality can ever be purely rational.... The notion that existence could be the same as understanding strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. That the glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.”[38] Now Hegel’s answer to this objection is, I think, found in the second characteristic of thought as he has defined it for us in absolute knowledge; and this we shall proceed at once to examine.
Thought, Hegel argues, is not mere abstract cognition, but, on the contrary, is truly universal. In answer to Mr. Bradley he would say that thought does stand for something which falls beyond mere intelligence.
That is to say, actual concrete thought, in Professor Bosanquet’s phraseology, is a process, not of selective omission, but of constructive analysis; its universals are syntheses of differences.[39] In Hegel’s own words: “The Notion is generally associated in our minds with abstract generality, and on that account it is often described as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the notions of color, plant, animal, etc. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colors, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all. This is the aspect of the Notion which is familiar to the understanding; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatizes such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and shadows. But the universal of the Notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. For the sake both of cognition and of our practical conduct, it is of the utmost importance that the real universal should not be confused with what is merely held in common. All those charges which the devotees of feeling make against thought, and especially against philosophic thought, and the reiterated statement that it is dangerous to carry thought to what they call too great lengths, originate in the confusion of these two things.”[40] In other words, universality may mean two very different things. On the one hand, it may indicate nothing but abstract generality which is arrived at by neglecting the marks peculiar to particular objects. On the other hand, it may mean the synthetic analysis of the particulars, and so include within itself the essential characteristics of them. If one only remembers this distinction, and remembers that the true universal of thought is the subsumption, not the annihilation, of the particular, then, Hegel would say, there should be no objection raised against the assertion that ultimately the real is comprehended by thought.
For, in this meaning of thought, experience and thinking experience are synonymous terms.
There are various passages in which Hegel emphasizes this aspect of thought by insisting that thought is not one mental faculty among others coordinate with it, but that it is the principle of universality in mind and includes within itself the other so-called mental faculties as essential elements. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy occurs a criticism of Kant which is very suggestive in this connection: “With Kant the thinking understanding and sensuousness are both something particular, and they are merely united in an external, superficial way, just as a piece of wood and a leg might be bound together with a cord.”[41] Against any such atomistic conception of the mind Hegel would insist: “Even our sense of the mind’s living unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other.”[42] But he would go further than this. Not only does he maintain that thought is not one element in an aggregate of disparate parts; he also urges that thought is rather the very life of the one organic whole which we call mind, “its very unadulterated self.”[43] For example, in the smaller Logic he asserts that thought is present in every perception and in every mental activity.[44] “We simply cannot escape from thought,” he elsewhere says, “it is present in sensation, in cognition, and knowledge, in the instincts, and in volition, in so far as these are attributes of a human mind.”[45] In the Philosophy of Right we read: “Spirit in general is thought, and by thought man is distinguished from the animal. But we must not imagine that man is on one side thinking and on another side willing, as though he had will in one pocket and thought in another. Such an idea is vain. The distinction between thought and will is only that between a theoretical and a practical relation. They are not two separate faculties.
The will is a special way of thinking; it is thought translating itself into reality; it is the impulse of thought to give itself reality.”[46] The conclusion of the whole matter is, that “in the human being there in only one reason, in feeling, volition, and thought.”[47] Overlooking this conception of universality in Hegel’s doctrine of thought, Mr. McTaggart criticizes him for holding “that the highest activity of Spirit, in which all others are transcended and swallowed up, is that of pure thought.”[48] Such a contention, we are informed, ignores a fact which Lotze has emphasized in many parts of his system. And that fact is “that Spirit has two other aspects besides thought – namely, volition and feeling – which are as important as thought, and which cannot be deduced from it, nor explained by it.”[49] Now this criticism assumes that Hegel actually tried to reduce the contents of mind to terms of abstract cognition. But, as we have just seen, such an assumption is entirely groundless. Hegel never thought of reducing will and feeling to knowledge, meaning by knowledge what his critic means by it, namely, one of several coordinate elements within the life of mind. What Hegel means by thought, when he asserts that it is conterminous with experience, is simply that principle by virtue of which experience is an organic and unitary whole. It is that life of mind itself, which includes within itself feeling, will, and cognition, and which finds its very being in the expression of this living unity of the mind’s activity.[50] For Hegel, there is “only one reason, in feeling, volition, and thought.” After all, the difference between Hegel and his critics on this point is not so great as might at first appear. Mr. McTaggart is perfectly willing to admit that it is not impossible that these elements of mind “might be found to be aspects of a unity which embraces and transcends them all”; but he is unwilling to call this unity thought.[51] Mr. Bradley, likewise, demands an ultimate synthesis; but it must fall beyond the category of rationality.[52] Though Lotze states it as his conviction “that the nature of things does not consist in thoughts, and that thinking is not able to grasp it,” yet he goes so far as to say that “perhaps the whole mind experiences in other forms of its action and passion the essential meaning of all being and action.”[53] Thus it would seem that the real quarrel between Hegel and the critics is concerning the real nature of the synthesis. What the critics vaguely term an ultimate unity, Hegel prefers to call thought, reason, or Spirit. The former try to find a synthesis of elements which they have defined as practically exclusive and independent, though, of course, not ontologically separable from each other; and they seek this synthetic principle in feeling or intuition, – something ultra-rational. Hegel, on the other hand, insists that mind is an organic unity, and that it is such only by virtue of its own most characteristic activity; it is a one reason. Every concrete act of knowledge, he argues, is an activity of the whole mind; and this unitary, synthetic activity can be made intelligible and given true objectivity, not, as the critics seem to maintain, in terms of intuition or feeling, but only in terms of rationality. And reflection on the point will, I think, convince us that Hegel is in the right.[54] We are now in a position to expose another aspect of the current misconception of Hegel’s doctrine of universality. The misconception concerns Hegel’s supposed identification of thought and being, and is, perhaps, one of the most prolific sources of adverse criticism of the Hegelian philosophy. I refer to the prevalent view, implied in the above quotations from Mr. Bradley and Lotze, which Professor Seth Pringle- Pattison expresses thus: “The result of Hegel’s procedure would really be to sweep ‘existential reality’ off the board altogether, under the persuasion, apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relations that constitute our knowledge of the thing is equivalent to the existent thing itself. On the contrary, it may be confidently asserted that there is no more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relations than there was with one.”[55] Now this idea that Hegel tried to reduce things to pure thought about things, or that he for a moment maintained that thought could possibly be the existent thing, seems to me a monstrous misinterpretation of his real meaning. It is inconsistent with the presupposition of his whole philosophy, namely, that reality is essentially a subject-object relation.
It is also inconsistent with the explicit statements quoted above concerning the universality of the Notion, which always involves particularity.
And, as we shall see in the next chapter, he emphatically repudiates such a view in his account of mediation and the function of the negative in thought. But, apart from these facts, it seems that we might credit Hegel with sufficient acumen to see the inherent absurdity of such a position. Surely he saw the contradiction involved in an attempt to attain by thought an ideal which would result in the annihilation of thought itself. Indeed, was it not Hegel who first impressed upon us the fact that knowledge always requires an object, and that, if that object be taken away, knowledge itself ceases to be? As Professor Jones has said: “It is inconsistent with the possibility of knowledge that it should be the reality it represents: knowledge is incompatible alike with sinking the real in the ideal, and the ideal in the real.”[56] And I think we are safe in saying that Hegel was well aware of this truth; his essential disagreement with Spinoza is that in the Spinozistic philosophy object is reduced to and identified with subject.
Hegel seems to have taken special pains that he should not be misunderstood on this point. The passages already quoted might be paralleled with others just as positive. I shall content myself, however, with adding only two which show, as plainly as words can show, that the author was not an advocate of the theory of abstract identity. The first of these is to be found in the eighty-second section of the smaller Logic: “If we say that the absolute is the unity of subjective and objective, we are undoubtedly in the right, but so far one-sided, as we enunciate the unity only and lay the accent upon it, forgetting that in reality the subjective and objective are not merely identical but also distinct.” In the Philosophy of Mind is found the other passage, which so well forestalls the above criticism and so forcefully emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing between merely formal identity and concrete unity that I may be pardoned for quoting it at length: “The close of philosophy is not the place, even in a general exoteric discussion, to waste a word on what a ‘Notion’ means. But as the view taken of this relation is closely connected with the view taken of philosophy generally and with all imputations against it, we may still add the remark that though philosophy certainly has to do with unity in general, it is not however with abstract unity, mere identity, and the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the Notion), and that in its whole course it has to do with nothing else; that each step in its advance is a peculiar term or phase of this concrete unity, and that the deepest and last expression of unity is the unity of absolute mind itself. Would-be judges and critics of philosophy might be recommended to familiarize themselves with these phases of unity and to take the trouble to get acquainted with them.... But they show so little acquaintance with them... that, when they of unity – and relation ipso facto implies unity – they rather stick fast at quite abstract indeterminate unity, and lose sight of the chief point of interest – the special mode in which the unity is qualified. Hence all they can say about philosophy is that dry identity is its principle and result, and that it is the system of Identity. Sticking fast to the undigested thought of identity, they have laid hands on, not the concrete unity, the notion and content of philosophy, but rather its reverse.”[57] If in these passages Hegel does not deny any attempt to arrive at the blank identification of thought and being, of subject and object, and if in them he does not criticize such a goal as an essentially mistaken ideal of philosophical inquiry, then so far as I am concerned the import of the passages is lost. Surely by concrete unity he means something quite different from abstract identity, – and concrete unity is that with which philosophy, as he conceives it, has to do.
It seems only fair to insist that such considerations as the preceding be taken into account before Hegel is accused of attempting that which is at once impossible and absurd. He never had any idea of reducing the ‘choir of heaven’ and the multifarious passions of the human soul to a ‘ballet of bloodless categories.’ Such an attempt would have seemed to Hegel as nonsensical as it seems to his critics. When he speaks of the unity of thought and being, he always means identity in difference, and never the undifferentiated identity of Schelling’s system. And when he asserts that subject comprehends object, he does not mean to reduce experience to abstract subject, as did Spinoza. He does indeed insist upon unity, but it is always upon concrete unity, the unity of the ‘Notion’; and this unity does not annihilate or even harm its differences. In a word, Hegel transcends dualism, and yet, at the same time, does justice to the duality within and essential to experience. He neither denies nor attempts to explain away the factual side of experience; he simply denies that an inexplicable datum has any part or lot within experience.
Not immediacy, but abstract immediacy, immediacy apart from interpretation, is unreal.
This chapter may be brought to an end by an attempt to state in one paragraph its essential points. Hegel’s doctrine of thought, philosophic thought, is given in the category of absolute knowledge, which is arrived at through the procedure of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The conception is thus based directly upon our actual knowing experience, and claims to give us an account of thought as it essentially is. Thought, as here defined, is genuinely objective, transcending the relativity of individual experiences and being the determination of things as they are in themselves. But this is not to say that reality is identical with abstract cognition. For thought finds its capacity to express the real in the fact that its universals are always the syntheses of differences, and not the blank universals of purely formal logic. Actual living thought includes within itself the data of so-called intuitive perception, of feeling, of volition, of cognition, and it is adequately conceived of only as this unifying principle of experience; it is the living unity of mind, the one reason which appears in every mental activity. Therefore, when Hegel teaches that thought is conterminous with the real, he is simply stating the doctrine that experience and reality are one.
Table of Contents
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<p class="title">Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910</p>
<h3>Chapter V. The of the Absolute.</h3>
<p>Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of the Absolute is a problem that is not easy of solution. The fact that the Hegelians of the Left and of the Right, while appealing to the authority of the master in justification of their respective positions, reached antithetical conclusions with reference to this problem is an indication of its difficulty. But the result that we have already attained in the preceding chapter offers us a vantage-point in our discussion of the problem. We have shown that the unity of reality, according to Hegel, is a unity that includes differences, and that the differences are essential to the unity. This point will, however, be of more direct interest to us when we come to ask concerning the relation of the Absolute and its differentiations. The problem immediately before us is to determine how this unity must be conceived, what more specifically the nature of the unity is. The thesis which we shall defend is that the Hegelian doctrine concerning this unity is that it is spiritual, and that it exists as a self-conscious Personality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n235">[235]</a></sup> The point of departure for our discussion we shall find in the Absolute Idea. If we can determine the essential nature of the Idea, then we may claim to have set forth Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of the Absolute, since the two terms are practically synonymous in his system.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n236">[236]</a></sup> If Hegel has given any direct proof at all that the Absolute is to be thought of as personal, it must be sought in an investigation of the Idea; and, on the other hand, if it can be shown that the Idea is a self-conscious Individuality, it must be admitted that Hegel teaches the doctrine of a personal Absolute. We ask first, then, Is the category of the Absolute Idea, as defined for us in the <em>Logic</em>, equivalent to a Personality or self-conscious Individuality? We have already pointed out that Hegel teaches that the Idea is individual for it assumes the form of the Notion, and the form of the Notion is individuality. Even a glance at the Logic will indicate this truth: the Idea is the last category in the dialectical definition of the Notion. But this, in itself, proves nothing more than that the Idea is a unity of differences, and that unity and differences are equally essential.</p>
<p>This is a very important result, to be sure; it settles some vexed questions concerning the Absolute and the finite, as we shall see in the discussion of the relation of God to the world. But it still leaves unanswered the problem of the nature of the unity among the differences.</p>
<p>Does Hegel think of this unity as personal and self-conscious? The answer to this question is to be found in the triadic development which Hegel has given in that part of the Doctrine of the Notion called the Idea. The triad which we find here consists of the categories of Life, Cognition (perhaps Consciousness would more nearly adequately convey Hegel’s meaning), and the Absolute Idea. The movement, though considerably hindered by puzzling and bothersome details, is tolerably clear in its main features; and, fortunately, it is only the main features with which we are here concerned. Let us follow this development.</p>
<p>We ask first concerning the standpoint of the thesis. Here, under the category of Life, Hegel tells us that we have the Idea in its immediacy but in an immediacy which is not true. By this is meant, it would seem, that in the category of Life we get the first approximately explicit manifestation of the real nature of the Idea, but in a manner inadequate to that nature. The category is approximately adequate to the Idea, because we have in it the first explicit appearance of a spiritual activity.</p>
<p>Its inadequacy consists in the fact that it presupposes an opposition between subjective and objective which it never succeeds in overcoming.</p>
<p>It is, indeed, true that the dialectical process within this category consists just in transcending this opposition: in the Kind (<em>Gattung</em>) the particular living thing loses part of its immediacy and becomes, to a degree, objective and universal. Nevertheless, its particularity and universality do not completely coincide. “Implicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it exists as only.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n237">[237]</a></sup> And just because of this contradiction, which is essential to it, the category of Life cannot furnish us with the ultimate synthesis of reality. In such a synthesis we could have nothing more than blank identity between the particular and the universal; the particular on this plane is not able to withstand the universal. “The animal never gets so far in its Kind as to have a teeing of its own; it succumbs to the power of Kind.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n238">[238]</a></sup> Thus we are forced to look for the unity of the Idea in a category other than that of Life. And this brings us to the category which Hegel calls Cognition in general.</p>
<p>Before passing on to the standpoint of this category, it will be well to pause here, and quote Hegel’s own words bearing on the defect and the dialectical development of the category of Life as we have just attempted to trace it. “The notion [of Life] and [its] reality do not thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of Life is the soul, and this notion has the body for its reality. The soul is, as it were, infused into its corporeity; and in that way it is at first sentient only, and not yet freely self-conscious. The process of Life consists in getting the better of the immediacy with which it is still beset: and this process, which is itself threefold, results in the idea under the form of judgment, i.e., the idea as Cognition.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n239">[239]</a></sup> In his discussion of the category of Cognition Hegel indulges in numerous digressions, which serve only to obscure the outlines of the dialectical advance. But, if we neglect the confusing details, the goal at which the author is aiming seems pretty clearly to be the category of self-consciousness. And he reaches it in some such way as the following.</p>
<p>Leaving behind us the category of Life, as confessedly inadequate to the unity of the Idea, we turn first to the level of abstract cognition proper, and examine its claims.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n240">[240]</a></sup> This category is at once seen to be insufficient, and that for two reasons. In the first place, it presupposes a somewhat as given, upon which it impresses itself in a more or less mechanical fashion; this is the standpoint of the sciences, which busy themselves with the discovery of laws without being able to pass judgment upon their ontological significance.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n241">[241]</a></sup> “The assimilation of the matter, therefore, as a datum, presents itself in the light of a reception of it into categories which at the same time remain external to it, and which meet each other in the same style of diversity. Reason is here active, but it is reason in the shape of the understanding. The truth which such Cognition can reach will therefore be only finite.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n242">[242]</a></sup> The second defect of abstract Cognition, which is an inevitable result of its abstractness, is that it fails to do justice to the nature of the knowing mind; mind is regarded from this point of view too much as an empty vessel to be filled from without. “The finitude of Cognition lies in the presupposition of a world already in existence, and in the consequent view of the knowing subject as a <em>tabula rasa</em>.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n243">[243]</a></sup> For these reasons, therefore, we fail to find in Cognition proper release from the dualism in which the category of Life left us bound; we do not get here the unity for which we are seeking. So we turn next to volition. Can Will supply us with a satisfactory synthesis? At first it seems that it might, since from this point of view the objective falls together with the subjective; objectivity is measured in terms of subjective ideals and aims. But this is just the difficulty with the standpoint. Objectivity is too completely reduced to subjective terms, and therefore really opposes itself to subjectivity; the objective never, in point of fact, becomes subjective and the subjective never really loses itself in objectivity. Thus we are reduced to the eternal <em>Sollen </em>of Fichte. “While Intelligence merely proposes to take the world as it is, Will takes steps to make the world what it ought to be. Will looks upon the immediate and given present not as solid being, but as mere semblance without reality. It is here that we meet those contradictions which are so bewildering from the standpoint of abstract morality.</p>
<p>This position in its ‘practical’ bearings is the one taken by the philosophy of Kant, and even by that of Fichte. The Good, say these writers, has to be realized: we have to work in order to produce it: and Will is only the Good actualizing itself. If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of Will would be at an end. The Will itself therefore requires that its end should not be realized. In these words, a correct expression is given to the finitude of Will.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n244">[244]</a></sup> So once again, we are disappointed in our search for unity. “This Volition has, on the one hand, the certitude of the nothingness of the presupposed object; but, on the other, as finite, it at the same time presupposes the purposed End of the Good to be a mere subjective idea, and the object to be independent.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n245">[245]</a></sup> Volition presupposes a discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, a discrepancy which, from the point of view of abstract volition, cannot be eliminated; and so our unity is not yet attained.</p>
<p>But a way to that unity has been suggested. If we could secure a conjunction of what is and what ought to be, if, that is to say, we could combine the standpoints of Cognition proper and Volition in a higher synthesis, then it would seem that we should have reached our goal. For in such a synthesis the subjective would be genuinely objective, and the objective would not stand over against the subjective as something foreign to it but would partake of its very nature. “The reconciliation is achieved, when Will in its result returns to the pre-supposition made by Cognition. In other words, it consists in the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. Will knows the end to be its own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the Notion actual.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n246">[246]</a></sup> This synthesis, according to Hegel, is found in the Absolute Idea. It is here that we get our ultimate unity of the real. It will be well to let Hegel speak for himself on this very vital point. “The truth of the Good is laid down as the unity of the theoretical and practical idea in the doctrine that the Good is radically and really achieved, that the objective world is in itself and for itself the Idea, just as it at the same time eternally lays itself down as End, and by action brings about its actuality.</p>
<p>This Life which has returned to itself from the bias and finitude of Cognition, and which by the activity of the Notion has become identical with it, is the Speculative or Absolute Idea.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n247">[247]</a></sup> The following passage is perhaps more explicit: “The Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the theoretical and the practical idea, and thus at the same time the unity of the idea of Life with the idea of Cognition. In Cognition we had the Idea in a biased, one-sided shape. The process of Cognition has issued in the overthrow of this bias and the restoration of that unity, which as unity, and in its immediacy, is in the first instance the Idea of Life. The defect of Life lies in its being the Idea only implicit or natural: whereas Cognition is in an equally one-sided way the merely conscious Idea, or the Idea for itself. The unity and truth of these two is the Absolute Idea which is both in itself and for itself. Hitherto we have had the Idea in development through its various grades as our object, but now the Idea comes to be its <em>own object</em>.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n248">[248]</a></sup> The development that we have just traced seems pretty clearly outlined and the goal to which it has led us appears to be very well defined.</p>
<p>The category of Life fails as a synthesis of reality, because it is not selfconscious; the categories of Cognition proper and Volition fail, because they are only one-sided representations of self-conscious life; the Absolute Idea succeeds, because it transcends the defects of these lower standpoints.</p>
<p>And from this it seems only logical to conclude that the Idea succeeds because it is the unity of Self-consciousness in its completion.</p>
<p>“This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself – and here at least as a thinking or Logical Idea.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n249">[249]</a></sup> One can see no valid reason why we may not believe that Hegel is in earnest when he says, as above, that “the Idea comes to be its own object,” and that “its developed and genuine actuality is to be as a subject and in that way as mind.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n250">[250]</a></sup> On the contrary, the dialectical development- here seems to force us to the conclusion that the category of the Absolute Idea is really a Self-consciousness, a knowing and willing Individual, who ‘comes home’ to Himself from His differentiations in which He sees Himself mirrored as it were in His eternal essence, a Personality who exists in and for Himself and realizes His ends in the phenomenal world. For within the unity of the Idea, Life, Cognition, and Volition are blended harmoniously together, and the life of knowledge and the life of activity are one. And Consciousness is the only category that gives us such a unity.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart objects to the conclusion which we have here reached; he denies that it is the logical outcome of Hegel’s system. He readily grants that, according to the system, the unity of the Idea must be construed in terms of spirit; and he is ready not only to admit but to maintain that the author believed it possible for spirit to exist only in the form of personality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n251">[251]</a></sup> But he contends that we have no right to infer from these premises to the conclusion that this unity of the Idea is a personal unity. “It might be said of a College,” he urges, “with as much truth as it has been said of the Absolute, that it is a unity, that it is a unity of spirit, and that none of that spirit exists except as personal.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n252">[252]</a></sup> This objection, however, seems to rest upon a false notion of the nature of the unity that is defined in the Idea. Hegel himself has told us, “The unity of God is always unity, but everything depends upon the <em>particular nature </em>of this unity; this point being disregarded, that upon which everything depends is overlooked.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n253">[253]</a></sup> Now it seems that Mr. McTaggart has misconceived the unity of the Idea; and consequently his criticism of our conclusion which is based upon this misconception is of no significance. Let us see what can be said in justification of this statement.</p>
<p>In the first place, it is important to notice that Mr. McTaggart thinks of the Idea as absolutely identical with its differences: the unity, as he conceives of it, is nothing more than its differentiations, and they are nothing more than it. For instance, he says: “The individual has his entire nature in the manifestation of this whole, as the whole, in turn, is nothing else but its manifestation in individuals.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n254">[254]</a></sup> Again he takes for granted that Hegel “reaches in the category of Life a result from which he never departs in the subsequent categories – that the unity and plurality are in an absolutely reciprocal relation, so that, while the plurality is nothing but the differentiation of the unity, the unity is nothing but the union of the plurality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n255">[255]</a></sup> And with this supposedly Hegelian position is contrasted at considerable length Lotze’s view, that “the Absolute is to be taken as something more and deeper than the unity of its differentiations.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n256">[256]</a></sup> Thus Mr. McTaggart’s conception of the unity of the Idea is hardly mistakable; according to him, this unity consists in the relation of abstract identity between the Idea and its differentiations.</p>
<p>A criticism of the tenability of this doctrine of identity will be undertaken later on in this chapter. Our present purpose is to show that it is not, as Mr. McTaggart assumes it is, Hegel’s account of the unity of the Idea. But it will not be amiss, perhaps, to pause here for a moment to point out one or two difficulties involved in this interpretation of the critic. In the first place, if the unity and the differences of the Idea are in exact equilibrium, it is not quite evident that any room is left anywhere for that ‘simple and indivisible element’ which Mr. McTaggart makes the very quintessence of the personality of finite individuals and upon which he bases his argument for their immortality.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n257">[257]</a></sup> On this hypothesis it would appear that the finite individual finds himself as sorely pressed as does the Absolute; for the personality of the former is in just as precarious a predicament as is that of the latter.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n258">[258]</a></sup> In the second place, it is difficult to see where such a unity as Mr. McTaggart insists upon becomes actual; there certainly is room to question whether it is ever actualized.</p>
<p>If its actualization is possible, it would have to be in a state of society which yet lies in the far distant future; certainly society has not yet attained unto it. So it would appear to be a unity that ought to be but is not – a conception so vigorously criticized by Hegel. In the third place and finally, the problem of the contingent, which on any idealistic theory short of pessimism is a puzzling one, becomes doubly so on Mr.</p>
<p>McTaggart’s hypothesis. He seems logically bound to assert either that the finite is perfect, or that the imperfections of the finite, qua imperfections, belong to the essential nature of the Absolute; for the Absolute, it is to be remembered, is its differentiations.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n259">[259]</a></sup> To sum up the whole matter, Mr. McTaggart seems to be between the Scylla of a fictitious unity and the Charybdis of differences that defy conjunction. His universal is one which, after it has succeeded in unifying the universe, itself finds nowhere to lay its head; and his particulars tend either to vanish entirely into the universal, or – this is the more imminent danger – to fly asunder and become discrete entities. And one is inclined to think that this is exactly the difficulty into which, as Hegel points out, Leibnitz fell – the difficulty, namely, of resolving the contradiction between an absolutely self-centered individual and a completely unifying universal that swamps its differences.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n260">[260]</a></sup> But to return from this digression, let us ask concerning the justification of Mr. McTaggart’s interpretation of Hegel’s meaning. The exact balance which the critic supposes between the unity of the Idea and its manifestations is foreign to the author’s conception of the matter. In the first place, the dialectical movement, which we have above outlined, bears out this contention. Contrary to Mr. McTaggart’s assertion that in the category of Life Hegel reaches a result from which he never departs, namely, an ‘absolutely reciprocal relation’ between the unity and its plurality, it may be argued that the development from the category of Life to that of the Absolute Idea consists just in transcending this relation of identity, and in asserting a unity which exists for itself within its differences. It would be hard to say in what respect the Idea is an advance beyond the category of Life, if not in the fact that it unites within itself the theoretical and practical elements of the spiritual life. And such a synthesis, as we have seen, is that of consciousness. If this is the result to which Hegel leads us, then the unity of the Idea is more than its differences, more than ‘the union of the plurality’; for it is inconsistent with the nature of consciousness to be nothing more than its content.</p>
<p>The Idea thus seems to be something deeper than the mere conjunction of its differentiations.</p>
<p>Again, Mr. McTaggart’s position on this point is contrary to the result of our previous chapter, that the real for Hegel is the individual. If that result be true, then the Absolute Idea must be an actual synthesis of concrete differences, the differences existing for the synthesis and the synthesis existing in its differences and for itself – such a synthesis as cannot be found in any society (however closely unified) of self-conscious finite spirits. It belongs to the very nature of the individual that its differences be more than the union of themselves, and that its unity be more than the conjunction of its differentiations; in other words, abstract identity of the particulars and the universal is foreign to the essence of the concrete individual. If therefore we are right in our position that Hegel’s ultimate synthesis, the Absolute Idea, must be individual in its nature, we are also right in insisting that the synthesis is not identical with its differences. And that we are in the right here the whole first Part of our study bears witness.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart’s difficulty here is traceable to his failure to appreciate the significance of negation in Hegel’s doctrine of thought. For the unity of the Idea is a negative unity, and as such is different from the unity that either destroys multiplicity or itself fails to exist. I shall let Hegel state the matter: “As the Idea is (a) a process, it follows that such an expression for the Absolute as unity of thought and being, of finite and infinite, etc., is false; for unity expresses an abstract and merely quiescent identity. As the Idea is (b) subjectivity, it follows that the expression is equally false on another account. That unity of which it speaks expresses a merely virtual or underlying presence of the genuine unity. The infinite would thus seem to be merely neutralized by the finite, the subjective by the objective, thought by being. But in the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity. The unity of the Idea is thought, infinity, and subjectivity, and is in consequence to be essentially distinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this overlapping subjectivity, thought, or infinity is to be distinguished from the one-sided subjectivity, one-sided thought, one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defiling.’<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n261">[261]</a></sup> A study of this passage discloses the fact that the unity of the Idea, which is a negative unity, is not the unity of exact equilibrium.</p>
<p>Mr. McTaggart has another objection to raise against the thesis we are here maintaining. He not only asserts that the position which we have attributed to Hegel is not logically involved in his system, – he does admit that the dialectic itself furnishes no positive disproof of it – but he also contends that the position is one which Hegel himself did not hold. He thinks that Hegel explicitly repudiates the doctrine of a personal Absolute, and he bases his contention on the conclusion of the <em>Philosophy of Religion</em>.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n262">[262]</a></sup> “It seems clear from the <em>Philosophy of Religion</em>,” he tells us, “that the truth of God’s nature, according to Hegel, is to be found in the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost.... And the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost appears to be not a person but a community.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n263">[263]</a></sup> Before passing on to examine the basis of this argument, I cannot refrain from quoting a few other passages from various contexts, which seem to be in direct refutation of the contention which the critic is trying to establish. I shall cite only those passages which have explicit reference to the point. In the larger Logic at the beginning of the discussion of the Absolute Idea we read: “The Notion is not only soul but free subjective Notion, which is for itself and, therefore, has personality – the practical objective Notion which is determined in and for itself, and which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n264">[264]</a></sup> A page or two below, after having spoken of the method as an immanent form of development, the author says: “The Method thus shows itself to be the Notion which knows itself, and which, as the Absolute, both subjective and objective, has itself for its own object.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n265">[265]</a></sup> Again, in the smaller Logic: “It is true that God is necessity, or, as we may also put it, that He is the absolute Thing: He is however no less the absolute Person. That He is the absolute Person, however, is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached; and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n266">[266]</a></sup> In the <em>Philosophy of Religion </em>we are told that “God is himself consciousness, He distinguishes Himself from Himself within Himself, and as consciousness He gives Himself as object for what we call the side of consciousness.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n267">[267]</a></sup> And later in the same work occurs a passage which seems to have been written designedly to meet a position like that which Mr. McTaggart attributes to Hegel: “The Divine is not to be conceived of merely as a universal thought, or as something inward and having potential existence only; the objectifying of the Divine is not to be conceived of simply as the objective form it takes in all men, for in that case it would be conceived of simply as representing the manifold forms of the spiritual in general, and the development which the Absolute Spirit has in itself and which has to advance till it reaches the form of what is the form of immediacy, would not be contained in it.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n268">[268]</a></sup> The fourteenth lecture on the ‘Proofs of the Existence of God’ has something to say on the point: “That man knows God implies, in accordance with the essential idea of communion or fellowship, that there is a community of knowledge; that is to say, man knows God only in so far as God Himself knows Himself in man. This knowledge is God’s self-consciousness, but it is at the same time a knowledge of God on the part of man, and this knowledge of God by man is a knowledge of man by God.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n269">[269]</a></sup> Finally, in the Introduction to the <em>Philosophy of History </em>we read: “It is One Individuality which, presented in its essence as God, is honored and enjoyed in Religion; which is exhibited as an object of sensuous contemplation in Art; and is apprehended as an intellectual conception in Philosophy.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n270">[270]</a></sup> To these seemingly quite explicit passages others might be added.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n271">[271]</a></sup> But enough have been quoted to establish at least a presumption that, according to Hegel’s own statements on the point, God is not a community of finite spirits but a Personality.</p>
<p>We turn now to an examination of the basis upon which Mr. McTaggart rests his contention. Does the dialectical movement in the <em>Philosophy of Religion</em>, from the Kingdom of the Father, through the Kingdom of the Son, to the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, justify the conclusion that Hegel conceives of God as nothing more than a community of finite individuals? To this question I think a negative answer must be given. Let us follow this movement in some detail.</p>
<p>There is no reason why we should not agree with Mr. McTaggart that the three stages of the Kingdoms of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit form a dialectical triad. And from this, we also agree, it necessarily follows that, “if God is really personal, He must be personal in the Kingdom of Spirit.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n272">[272]</a></sup> But one fails to see how these premises lead to the conclusion that the Spirit which manifests itself in the synthesis here cannot be a Personality, an Individual. To be sure we must admit that God, on this showing, is adequately represented only in a community of spirits, since the Kingdom of the Spirit is conceived of as such a community. And, of course, it would be absurd to contend that a community is, or can possibly be, a person. But it is difficult to see, so much being granted, how we are necessarily committed to the conclusion that in the Kingdom of the Spirit God must be impersonal, or that, when adequately represented, He becomes absolutely identical with the spiritual community in which He finds fullest expression. Such a conclusion is forced upon us only when we assume, with the critic, that God is just His manifestations and nothing more. And on this assumption we could not logically confine the Absolute to any community of self-conscious spirits, – unless, indeed, we are willing to endow all forms of nature with spiritual qualities; for Hegel unquestionably maintains that Nature is God’s manifestation of Himself. But the assumption is arbitrary and groundless, if our position concerning the unity and individuality of the Idea is true.</p>
<p>Furthermore, this triad, as interpreted by Mr. McTaggart, differs essentially from other triads in the Logic and elsewhere. For his argument necessitates the assumption that the movement here consists in an attempt to get away from an entirely erroneous view of God’s nature to a true and fundamentally different view. For example, after insisting that the triad is a genuine dialectical process and that, consequently, we must look for an adequate expression of God’s nature only in the synthesis, he continues: “If [God] were personal as manifested in the first and second Kingdoms, but not in the third, it would mean that He was personal when viewed inadequately, but not when viewed adequately – i.e., that He was not really personal.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n273">[273]</a></sup> This is the critic’s interpretation of the actual movement and result of the triad. This interpretation, however, makes of the triad an exception. For usually in the dialectical triad there is a thread of connection running from thesis to synthesis; the two are never separated by a chasm. But on Mr. McTaggart’s interpretation of the triad before us, thesis and synthesis would seem to be torn completely asunder; in the thesis, God is viewed as a Personality, while, in the synthesis, He is defined only as the abstract unity of the Church, and is personal in no sense whatsoever. Thus there is no connection between thesis and synthesis: the synthesis is a mere negation of the thesis. If the synthesis is right, therefore, the thesis must be completely wrong, absolutely false – a fact which we have been in the habit of thinking is not characteristic of a dialectical triad. Mr. McTaggart’s argument seems thus to make of the present triad an extraordinary exception.</p>
<p>In point of fact, the movement here is not away from personality to impersonality. The dialectic does force us to say that the Spiritual Community is necessary to an adequate representation of the nature of God; but this is very far from saying that God is the Community or that the Community is God. The critic does not refer to any passages in which Hegel speaks of this very significant, and withal very peculiar, turn in the dialectic advance; and I have been able to find none. I have, however, found one in which the identification in question seems to be denied, and it runs so: “This third sphere” (that is, the sphere of the Kingdom of the Spirit, the Spiritual Community) “represents the Idea in its specific character as individuality; but, to begin with, it exhibits only the one individuality, the divine universal individuality as it is in-and-for-itself .... Individuality as exclusive is for others immediacy, and is the return from the other into self. The individuality of the Divine Idea, the Divine Idea as a person (<em>ein Mensch</em>), first attains to completeness in actuality (<em>Wirklichkeit</em>), since at first it has the many individuals confronting it, and brings these back into the unity of Spirit, into the Church or Spiritual Community (<em>Gemeinde</em>), and exists here as real universal self-consciousness.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n274">[274]</a></sup> If I understand what this means, it indicates that, as Hegel himself views the matter, the third Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Spirit, is the standpoint where God is first viewed in His true Personality; for here it is that He is seen to be in vital and actual touch with men and things. Thus it appears that the triad is not a movement from the conception of a personal to the conception of an impersonal God; but rather from an inadequate to an adequate representation of God as personal. He is not pure thought, existing behind the world as it were in infinite space; this is the conception of the thesis. On the contrary, He is that spiritual unity, that ‘real universal self-consciousness,’ realizing His aims and purposes in the lives of finite self-conscious agents whose aspirations are perfected and consummated in Him. In some such way it seems that the movement here must be understood.</p>
<p>Another fact that militates against Mr. McTaggart’s position on this point – at any rate from the point of view of the present essay – is that the culmination of Hegel’s discussion of the Spiritual Community is the standpoint of the Notion. The three phases within this discussion Hegel designates as follows: (a) The conception of the Spiritual Community; (b) The realization of the Spiritual Community; and (c) The realization of the spiritual in universal reality (<em>Wirklichkeit</em>). So far as our present purpose is concerned, the first two of these divisions may be dismissed without comment. The third, however, is of interest especially when we learn that it “directly involves the transformation and remodelling of the Spiritual Community.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n275">[275]</a></sup> It is divided into a threefold movement, which consists in three different attitudes taken towards objectivity. Hegel states this movement in outline thus: “Objectivity as an external immediate world, is the heart with its interests; another form of objectivity is that of reflection, of abstract thought, of Understanding; and the third and true form of objectivity is the Notion. We have now to consider how Spirit realizes itself in these three elements.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n276">[276]</a></sup> The development here outlined is not easily followed in detail. But it seems to consist in tracing the essential features of the faith of the Spiritual Community concerning the nature of the objective order, and the attitudes assumed towards such an objective order. In the first stage, the Spiritual Community has opposed to it a worldly element, which seems to exist on its own account; there is here an opposition between the religious and the secular.</p>
<p>In the second stage we swing to the other extreme, in which the objective is practically disregarded and the idea of God, being emptied of content, is reduced to an abstraction; this is that “inner self-enclosed life which may indeed co-exist with calm, lofty, and pious aspirations, but may as readily appear as hypocrisy or as vanity in its most extreme form.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n277">[277]</a></sup> The first of these two stages Hegel calls the “servitude of Spirit in the absolute region of freedom”; the second is “abstract subjectivity, subjective freedom without content.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n278">[278]</a></sup> The final stage is, as we would expect, the reconciliation of these two extremes. It discovers that freedom, real intelligible freedom, is to be found only in the objective, that objective and subjective, when they are adequately comprehended, fall together. This is the standpoint of philosophy. “What we have finally to consider is that subjectivity develops the content out of itself, but it does this in accordance with necessity – it knows and recognizes that the content is necessary, and that it is objective and exists in-and-for-itself. This is the standpoint of philosophy, according to which the content takes refuge in the Notion, and by means of thought gets its restoration and justification.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n279">[279]</a></sup> The objective within the Community, therefore, must be known to be in-and-for-itself before the community has attained complete and perfect actualization; and this knowledge is reached only when philosophic comprehension is substituted for intuitive faith. Thus we are once again brought to our former problem concerning the real nature of the Notion and its significance in Hegel’s system. If the form of the Notion is individuality, then it would seem that, on the above showing, the Spiritual Community is perfected only when its unity is actualized.</p>
<p>It is to be noted, furthermore, that in philosophy and not in the Spiritual Community, as such, is to be found the true realization of the object of Absolute Religion. The Spiritual Community, “in attaining realization in its spiritual reality,” falls into “a condition of inner disruption”; and so “its realization appears to be at the same time its disappearance.” <sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n280">[280]</a></sup> “For us,” however, “philosophical knowledge has harmonized this discord,” and we have “rediscovered in revealed religion the truth and the Idea.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n281">[281]</a></sup> And from this it seems evident that the nature of ultimate reality is to be sought, not in the Spiritual Community, but in the Idea. We are thus sent back to the study of the dialectic for an answer to our question concerning the Absolute; and we have already seen what answer the dialectic gives.</p>
<p>The foregoing considerations force us to question the validity of Mr. McTaggart’s contention that, for Hegel, the Absolute is nothing more than a community of self-conscious spirits. But this interpretation of Hegel may be traversed from another point of departure. I think that it can be shown that a community of self-conscious persons – however close the unity that binds them together – is not, in Hegel’s opinion, and cannot be an adequate representation of the unity of the Idea. And it can be shown in some such way as the following.</p>
<p>In one place Hegel tells us that the state is “the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n282">[282]</a></sup> In another passage he speaks of the state as an ‘actual God,’ and defines it as “the march of God in the world.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n283">[283]</a></sup> In yet another context he says: “It is in the organization of the state that the Divine has passed into the sphere of actuality.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n284">[284]</a></sup> Looked at from the other side, the state is conceived of by Hegel as the highest form of human society. According to the plan which is sketched in the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>and elaborated at length in the <em>Philosophy of Right</em>, the state is viewed as the choicest product of the moral life, it is “the self-conscious ethical substance.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n285">[285]</a></sup> The very highest point that the Objective Mind can attain unto in its strivings towards divinity is the unity of the state; this is the most truly real form of social union. If now it can be shown that Hegel does not admit that Mr. McTaggart’s doctrine of a community of self-conscious beings is an adequate expression of the essential nature of the state, then we may safely conclude that he would not admit that the total nature of reality is exhausted in such a community.</p>
<p>Concerning the unity of the state, this highest unity of society, Hegel’s position is expressed unequivocally in both the <em>Philosophy of Mind </em>and the <em>Philosophy of Right</em>, and in the latter at some length. Put in a word, his position amounts to an insistence that the function of the prince or monarch is absolutely essential to the ideal state, that no state is complete apart from this personal expression of its unity, and that this conclusion is necessitated by a consideration of the idea or notion of the state apart from accidental circumstances of time or place. The unity of the commonwealth, he urges, must be actualized in a personality before it becomes a real unity, or before the state is perfectly organized: the rational articulation of the state demands this incarnation of its unity.</p>
<p>“We usually speak of the three functions of the state,” says Hegel, “the legislative, executive, and judicial. The legislative corresponds to universality, and the executive to particularity; but the judicial is not the third element of the conception.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n286">[286]</a></sup> This third element, we are immediately told, is to be found in the function of the prince; this is the synthesis of the other two functions of the state, and in this they are brought together in a personal unity. Apart from this expression of the will of the state in the will of the monarch the state is not organized according to the nature of the Notion.</p>
<p>This is not merely an interesting point which Hegel happens to mention incidentally in his theory of the state. It is one upon which he lays special emphasis. I shall quote some of these emphatic passages. “It is easy for one to grasp the notion that the state is the self-determining and completely sovereign will, whose judgment is final. It is more difficult to apprehend this ‘I will’ as a person.... This ‘I will’ constitutes the greatest distinction between the ancient and the modern world, and so must have its peculiar niche in the great building of the state. It is to be deplored that this characteristic should be viewed as something merely external, to be set aside or used at pleasure.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n287">[287]</a></sup> Again: “The conception of monarch offers great difficulty to abstract reasonings and to the reflective methods of the understanding. The understanding never gets beyond isolated determinations, and ascribes merit to mere reasons, or finite points of view and what can be derived from them. Thus the dignity of the monarch is represented as something derivative not only in its form but also in its essential character. But the conception of the monarch is not derivative, but purely self-originated.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n288">[288]</a></sup> Once more: “Personality or subjectivity generally, as infinite and self-referring, has truth only as a person or independent subject. This independent existence must be one, and the truth which it has is of the most direct or immediate kind. The personality of the state is actualized only as person, the monarch. ... A so-called moral person, a society, community (<em>Gemeinde</em>), or family, be it as concrete as it may, possesses personality only as an element and abstractly. It has not reached the truth of its existence. But the state is this very totality in which the moments of the conception gain reality in accordance with their peculiar truth.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n289">[289]</a></sup> Again: “When a people is not a patriarchal tribe, having passed from the primitive condition which made the forms of aristocracy and democracy possible, and is represented not as in a wilful and unorganized condition, but as a self-developed truly organic totality, in such a people sovereignty is the personality of the whole, and exists, too, in a reality which is proportionate to the conception, the person of the monarch.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n290">[290]</a></sup> Finally: “In the government – regarded as organic totality – the sovereign power (<em>principate</em>) is subjectivity as the infinite self-unity of the Notion in its development; – the all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the state, its highest peak and all-pervasive unity. In the perfect form of the state, in which each and every element of the Notion has reached free existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called ‘moral person,’ or a decree issuing from a majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing will has not an actual existence), but an actual individual – the will of a decreeing individual monarchy. The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development and realization of reason.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n291">[291]</a></sup> Now what do all these passages mean?<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n292">[292]</a></sup> At least one strain runs through them all; and that is, that the unity of the state, before it can become real and rational, must be embodied in an actual form, must find expression in an actually existent person. The state which has not the power of uttering this ‘I will’ – it matters not how intrinsically insignificant the ‘I will’ may be; it may mean nothing more than the simple signing of the name – is not a completely articulated organization: it lacks an essential function. No merely organic whole is a rational expression of the nature of the state; the unity must be embodied in a personal form which has actual, concrete existence.</p>
<p>This being true, we have good reason to deny that Mr. McTaggart’s conception of the unity of the ultimately real – a unity which, as we have pointed out, never really becomes actual – can legitimately be attributed to Hegel. Of course argument from analogy is always dangerous; and no claim is made here that we should be justified in drawing positive conclusions concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the unity of the Idea solely on the basis of his doctrine of the unity of the state – though it is indubitably true that the analogy is much more significant than one is apt to think, apart from a very careful reading of the author’s statements on the point. But it does seem justifiable to conclude that, if an actualized unity is essential to the very idea of the state, the unity of ultimate reality could not be an unrealized, and, one is inclined to say, an unrealizable ideal. If no community of individuals, however organically related they may be, adequately expresses the rational organization of the state – and this thesis Hegel unquestionably maintains – we can be practically certain that the synthesis of ultimate reality cannot be found in any community of self-conscious spirits, however organic or super-organic that community may be and however deep its harmony. The argument is a simple <em>a fortiori </em>one. Hegel emphatically asserts that a group of individuals is not an adequate representation of this ‘actual God’ on earth: surely, he would be the first to deny that it is a perfect representation of the essential nature of the Absolute Idea. At any rate, the burden of proof seems-to be on those who deny the validity of this conclusion. So we seem to have shown the inadequacy of Mr.</p>
<p>McTaggart’s interpretation of Hegel from another point of departure.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n293">[293]</a></sup> I am forced to believe, however. that such an objection would be very much mistaken. A careful reading of the relevant portions of the Philosophy of Right will impress one with the fact that Hegel was really in earnest when he contends, as quoted above, that “the monarchical constitution is the constitution of developed reason,” and that “all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development and realization of reason.” He apparently is firmly convinced that in his theory of the state he is presenting the form that Spirit assumes in its most nearly perfect institutional manifestation (see especially <em>Werke</em>, Bd. VIII, ��258, 272, and 279). His own explicit statements bear witness to his sincerity in the matter. To those quoted above we might add such as these: “When thinking of the idea of the state, we must not have in our mind any particular state, or particular institution, but must rather contemplate the idea, this actual God, by itself.” (Ibid., �258.) “In the organization of the state, that is to say, in constitutional monarchy, we must have before us nothing except the inner necessity of the idea. Every other point of view must disappear. The state must be regarded as a great architectonic building, or the hieroglyph of reason, presenting itself in actuality. Everything referring merely to utility, externality, etc., must be excluded from a philosophical treatment.” (Ibid., �279.) We thus have sufficient evidence, it would seem, to justify us in asserting that Hegel gives us the doctrine of the state which he honestly believes is most nearly the expression of the logical implications of his system.</p>
<p>Even if we grant that he was prejudiced in working out this theory, as he undoubtedly was in details, still we must admit that he bases his theory more or less directly on the doctrine of the Idea; and admitting so much, the above argument from analogy holds.</p>
<p>Let us bring together the results of our discussion. Our conclusion is that Hegel’s Absolute is an infinite Consciousness, a Personality, who synthesizes in His own experience the experiences of all. “An infinite intelligence, an infinite spiritual principle, which is manifested in finite minds though not identical with them” – such, we agree with Professor Adamson,<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n294">[294]</a></sup> is Hegel’s doctrine of ultimate reality. And this conclusion we have based upon the dialectic movement in the triad of Life, Cognition, and the Absolute Idea, as well as upon direct statements that Hegel has made regarding the problem. The Hegelian Absolute, we have seen, cannot be identified with a community of self-conscious spirits, as Mr.</p>
<p>McTaggart contends. There seems to be no justification for such an interpretation of Hegel either in the final triad of the <em>Logic </em>or in the final triad under Absolute Religion. In the former we pass beyond the exact balance between the unity and its differences to the category of self-consciousness, where the unity exists for itself in its differentiations; in the latter we are ultimately brought back to the Idea and told to look there for the answer to our question about the nature of God. Furthermore, such a community of spirits as Mr. McTaggart imagines we found would not be adequate to express even the nature of the state as Hegel defines it. Thus from another point of departure we were led to question whether such a community could adequately represent Hegel’s synthesis of ultimate reality. For it seemed that, if a personal unity is essential to the nature of the state, we might justly conclude that the synthesis of the real, of which the state is only an imperfect copy, could hardly be less than a personal unity.</p>
<p>This conclusion that the Absolute is a self-conscious Individuality, leads us to a further problem that we must here face. And that problem is concerning the relation between such an Absolute and the world of finite existence. Granting that the Absolute is a self-conscious Personality, in what relation must we say that He stands to our own finite world? The remaining portion of this chapter will be taken up with an attempt to answer this question.</p>
<p>A first glance at the problem might lead one to conclude that only two solutions of it are possible, and that either solution is fatal to the doctrine of the personality of the Absolute. For it would seem that we must admit either that there is or that there is not an Other to the Absolute.</p>
<p>And with this admission we find ourselves in a dilemma. For, on the one hand, if there be in the universe something besides the Absolute, an Other that has the least degree of reality in its own right, then it apparently follows that the Absolute is limited by this Other, is, in other words, not the Absolute. “The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees, – as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n295">[295]</a></sup> On the other hand, if there be no Other to the Absolute, if there be nothing in the universe that can claim reality on its own account apart from its relation to the Absolute, then pantheism is our only conclusion. Evidently, if our theory merges everything into the Absolute, it is nothing short of pantheism. So it would seem that the doctrine of a personal Absolute leaves us either in contradiction with ourselves or in a pantheistic metaphysics; and from this dilemma there seems to be no way of escape.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is hardly necessary to say that Hegel wastes no words in arguing for a limited Absolute; he does not fall into self-contradiction on this point. For him the Absolute is the only true reality; all else has its reality, not in itself, but in the Absolute. Concerning Hegel’s position here there can, presumably, be no question. On the other hand, there need be no hesitancy whatsoever in asserting that, in Hegel’s own mind at any rate, his system is not pantheistic. Pantheism he often denounces as a mistaken theory of reality; he constantly urges that to conceive of the Absolute as the One Reality in which all particularity loses its significance is completely erroneous. Whatever may be the relation that he teaches exists between the Absolute and the finite world, it certainly is not the relation of identity, which, in his opinion, exists between the Spinozistic Substance and its Accidents: indeed, it is just in contradistinction to this doctrine of Spinoza that Hegel is at pains to define his own. As Hegel views the matter, then, neither pantheism nor a finite God is the conclusion to be drawn in answer to our problem.</p>
<p>But how does he find a way of escape from the dilemma? In both the <em>Philosophy of Religion </em>and the <em>Philosophy of Mind</em>, Hegel tells us that he is not unaware that his theory may be misconstrued as pantheistic; and he is careful to point out the oversight on which the misconstruction rests. The point he makes is this: the interpretation overlooks the distinction between the Absolute as Substance and the Absolute as Subject.</p>
<p>“Those who say that speculative philosophy is pantheism generally know nothing of this distinction; they overlook the main point, as they always do, and they disparage philosophy by representing it as different from what it really is.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n296">[296]</a></sup> This distinction being forgotten, unity is construed to mean only abstract identity. “In accordance with that superficiality with which the polemic against philosophy is carried on, it is added, moreover, that philosophy is a system of Identity.... But those who speak of the philosophy of Identity mean abstract unity, unity in general, and pay no attention to that upon which alone all depends; namely, the essential nature of this unity, and whether it is defined as Substance or Spirit.... What is of importance is the difference in the character of the unity. The unity of God is always unity, but everything depends upon the particular nature of the unity; this point being disregarded, that upon which everything depends is overlooked.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n297">[297]</a></sup> It is, then, in the nature of the unity that Hegel expects to find a way out of the difficulty.</p>
<p>Of course the unity which Hegel is here emphasizing is the unity of the Notion. This unity of the Notion it is which he thinks satisfactorily explains the relation of the Absolute to the world of particularity. This is evident from a glance at the Logic. For it is this unity of the Notion that is the culmination of the dialectical development of the categories and receives complete expression in the category of categories, the Absolute Idea. This unity it is, therefore, that is the ultimate expression of reality, the final statement of the relation between God and the world.</p>
<p>What, now, is this unity of the Notion? If the interpretation of Hegel given in the present study is not fundamentally false and all of our arguments up to this point totally vicious, it seems that we are forced to say that the unity of the Notion is the category of self-consciousness.</p>
<p>This is the conclusion that is forced upon us by the <em>Phenomenology of Spirit</em>; the Notion is the life of mind. Likewise, the Logic teaches us the same lesson: since the Absolute Idea is the ultimate expression of the unity of the Notion, it follows, if the Absolute Idea is a self-conscious Individual, that the unity of the Notion, that unity which explains the nature of reality, must be self-consciousness. Indeed, this seems to be just the point that Hegel has in mind, in numerous passages in the <em>History of Philosophy</em>, the <em>Philosophy of Religion</em>, the <em>Philosophy of Mind</em>, and elsewhere, in which he draws a distinction, as he does in the passages cited above, between the definition of the Absolute as Substance and his own conception of the Absolute as Spirit, or Subject, and urges that the latter definition offers the only way of escape from pantheism in our metaphysics. It is in the category of self-consciousness, therefore, that we are to look for an exemplification of the unity of the Notion.</p>
<p>Let us try to see how this category aids us in our present problem.</p>
<p>In attempting to do this, we shall first briefly analyze self-consciousness to discover its fundamental characteristics; and then we shall, on the basis of this analysis, see what must be our conclusions concerning an Absolute Consciousness. For it seems certain that, if we are to argue at all concerning a personal Absolute, we must rest the discussion on an analysis of finite consciousness; there is no other basis of discussion. At any rate, this is what Hegel does, as the <em>Phenomenology </em>shows; and we are interested primarily in setting forth his doctrines and their justification.</p>
<p>Whatever other characteristics finite self-consciousness may have, there are three which can hardly be called in question. The first of these is that consciousness always has a content. By that I mean that there is always something other than the consciousness itself, which exists as the object of it. Apart from this objective reference consciousness is the veriest abstraction.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n298">[298]</a></sup> The second characteristic of consciousness is that it always includes its content as something essentially its own. The content is not received by consciousness as if it were a stranger to be momentarily entertained and then lost forever: on the contrary, the content is the very life of the consciousness that possesses it. As Hegel would say, spirit finds the object to be bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, and so all alienation between the two has disappeared. This characteristic of the conscious life needs some emphasis; we have so formed the habit of thinking that the content is an element foreign to consciousness, that we are prone to forget the abstraction that is responsible for the habit. It requires only a little reflection, however, to bring to light the vital unity that exists between consciousness and its content – a unity that is absolutely fundamental to the integrity of each. The last characteristic of consciousness that I would call attention to is this: consciousness is never identical with, but is always something more than, its content. Notwithstanding the fact that the content is always received by consciousness as its very own, as its other self in fact, still there is a distinction between the two that never disappears; consciousness and its content never fall together in an undifferentiated identity.</p>
<p>The fundamental importance of these three characteristics of consciousness, as well as their vital interconnectedness, may be emphasized by a brief analysis of self-consciousness. It is evident that as a self-conscious being I am of a two-fold nature. In the first place, I am a bundle of sensations, feelings, impulses, desires, volitions, and ideas.</p>
<p>This is the object-self. And from this point of view I am eternally changing.</p>
<p>At any moment of my existence I am never what I have been, or shall be, at any other moment. At one instant I am a center of impulses and passions; at another, a centre of ideas and ideals. To-day I am a self of pleasures; tomorrow, a self of pains. An everlasting panorama of change, a veritable Heracleitean flux – this is what the object-self really is. But there is another fact about this self-consciousness that must be taken into account; so far we have considered only one side of it. It is true that I am eternally changing, that I am not what I have been heretofore, and that I shall never be again just what I am now. And yet, paradoxical as it may sound, what I have been I am, and what I am I shall be.</p>
<p>Underlying the panorama of change, deeper than the self that is in a never-ceasing process of transformation, is another self that gives unity and coherence to the process. This is the subject-self. And this it is that makes education, spiritual development in general, possible; without it our experience would be at best but a chaos of meaningless sensations and incoherent desires. These two aspects or phases seem to be present in all self-consciousness. Take a cross-section of consciousness at any moment, and you will discover that it is of this two-fold nature. Even in our moments of most intense introspection, when we enter as intimately as possible into ourselves, we find that this duality is present; indeed, one is inclined to say, it is then that its presence is most strongly impressed upon us.</p>
<p>It is to be noticed, moreover, that the duality is absolutely essential to self-consciousness. Not only do we find it actually present in self-consciousness; the implication of experience is that it must exist so long as consciousness itself exists. For self-consciousness is just this duality: the subject-self and the object-self exist only as they co-exist. This fact may be illustrated by the consciousness that we possess just as we are falling asleep. In proportion as this duality is overcome does the waking consciousness sink away; and it rapidly returns when the attention becomes fixed upon some object and the duality, unknown and unexperienced in the land of dreams, is restored. And normal waking consciousness illustrates the same truth. He is most truly self-conscious who sinks himself, as we say, in the object that occupies the focus of consciousness; this is the ethical import of the doctrine of self-abnegation.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n299">[299]</a></sup> But this sinking of the self in the object attended to does not destroy the difference between the self and the object; rather does it intensify the duality. For the object absorbs attention only in proportion as it harmonizes with a set of purposes and interests that are themselves clearly defined. To take a concrete case, let us suppose that I am intensely interested in a botanical specimen. Here there is evidently a unity of subject and object; indeed, it would be difficult to differentiate the two, and the difficulty would increase with the increase of my interest in the specimen.</p>
<p>And yet, clearly, there is a difference. The specimen grasps my interest only as it makes its appeal to a self whose centre of being is more or less clearly defined; and the more significant the hold of the specimen on my attention, the deeper and more significant must have been my training in the science of botany. If I am a mere tyro in botanical investigations, the specimen would not make the same appeal as it would were I thoroughly versed in the subject; and the difference is that in the former case the appeal would be made to a less thoroughly developed self. The unity, and consequently the duality, is not as clearly defined in the former case as in the latter. The very unity of consciousness thus seems to be organically bound up with this dual relation of subject and object.</p>
<p>And from this follows immediately a further result. Since this duality is essential to consciousness, these two phases of subject and object cannot fall into identity with each other. Take any case of consciousness that you please, whether it be consciousness of objects in the mental or in the physical world. Do you find there a coincidence between subject and object? Certainly not. The object is never its own consciousness; there is, and can be, no identity between them. It is inconsistent with the very nature of consciousness that these two phases collapse into identity.</p>
<p>As Professor Royce says, “When we are aware only of unity, it appears that we then become aware of nothing at all.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n300">[300]</a></sup> The presupposition of consciousness is that there shall be something, an object in the physical world, an object in the mental world, something other than the consciousness itself, of which the consciousness shall be. The two cannot be identical with each other.</p>
<p>But this essential duality within consciousness must not be misconstrued as a dualism. In his famous deduction of the categories, Kant unfortunately speaks too much as if the subject-self were superimposed on the object-self as something essentially foreign to it. But the real lesson he has to teach us in that deduction is a deeper one. And that lesson is that the unity and the differences within conscious experience are really one, that there is no chasm between them. It is true that the data which constitute the object-self seem to be facts drawn from a world external to that self, or, at any rate, external to the synthetic unity that binds these data into a unitary and organic whole. But both of these positions fall before criticism, for the data are vitally concerned in their own organization. We must admit that Kant has once for all shown us, at least by implication if not explicitly, that the object-self is not foreign to the subject-self: the data of the Sensibility and the categories of the Understanding are common expressions of one fundamental principle.</p>
<p>And this implication of the Kantian philosophy becomes explicit in Hegel.</p>
<p>The burden of the <em>Phenomenology</em>, as we saw in our first chapter, is that these two selves are organically bound up with each other, and that, if we are to speak accurately, we must call them, not two selves, but only two points of view from which we look at the one self – subject-object.</p>
<p>And it seems that we are forced to say that this is the verdict of experience. Consequently, to view these two phases of consciousness in isolation is to view them abstractly. Of course, this abstraction is perfectly justifiable, indeed, necessary from the standpoint of the particular sciences; but it is dangerous for metaphysics. Whether the emphasis is placed upon the subject or the object is a matter of indifference so far as the metaphysical difficulty involved in their separation is concerned; metaphysically, they are not separable. The data of the object-self get their reality only when organized by the categories of the subject-self; and, on the other hand, the categories are essentially those data, otherwise it is incomprehensible how the organization could possibly take place. Thus the separation between the two is overreached and the two fall together. They are different, and yet they are one such seems to be the paradoxical relation existing between the two sides of consciousness.</p>
<p>The results of our analysis of finite self-consciousness are these.</p>
<p>The characteristics of consciousness are that it has a content, that it differs from this content, and yet at the same time is one with it. Moreover, each of these is a condition that must be met, if consciousness is to exist at all. If the content is removed, then of course consciousness is destroyed, because there is nothing of which the consciousness could be. Likewise, if consciousness and its content are identified, consciousness ceases, for the identification simply amounts to the removal of the content; and here again the essential duality is done away with. Finally, if a chasm is made between consciousness and its content, consciousness again is made impossible; when an impassable barrier is erected between the two, the duality upon which consciousness depends is once more removed.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n301">[301]</a></sup> This three-fold condition is the presupposition of all finite consciousness.</p>
<p>Now it would seem that, on the basis of this analysis of finite consciousness, we should be justified in making the following assertions concerning an Absolute Consciousness. In the first place, such a Consciousness would necessarily have a content; that is, there would have to be an Other of which the Absolute is conscious. In the second place, this Other would not be regarded by the Absolute as something foreign or external, in the sense that it lay genuinely outside of the Absolute; rather would it be possessed as an essential element within the Absolute.</p>
<p>And, lastly, the Absolute would necessarily differentiate this Other from itself in such a way as to preserve the duality that we have found to be essential to the conscious life. And our justification for making these assertions concerning an Absolute Consciousness is simply that these characteristics which we have attributed to the Absolute are those that experience shows us to be fundamental to all consciousness as we know it; and unless we are to reduce our discussions to meaningless logomachy, we must test them by concrete experience. Certainly it seems that we must assume that the conditions prerequisite to finite consciousness must be fulfilled in an Absolute Consciousness.</p>
<p>What now must be our answer to the dilemma with which we began our discussion? In the first place, it would seem that we have found a way of escape from pantheism in our doctrine of the Absolute. For so long as we maintain the self-consciousness of the Absolute, we are forced to maintain also that the Absolute and the world are differentiated from each other. Really, pantheism is logically possible only to the metaphysician who denies the self-consciousness of the Absolute. For pantheism, if it means anything, means identity between the Absolute and the world of finite existence; whatever form the theory may take, it ultimately reduces everything in the universe to an undifferentiated unity with the all-inclusive One. But, if the Absolute be regarded as a self-conscious Individual, this abstract identity becomes impossible; because, as our analysis of the category has disclosed, consciousness always demands a content from which it is differentiated. Destruction of this duality is the destruction of the possibility of consciousness. Therefore no theory that maintains that the Absolute is Self-Consciousness can legitimately be accused of pantheism so long as it is consistent.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n302">[302]</a></sup> But have we escaped the other horn of our dilemma? Our own argument has forced us to admit that an Other to the Absolute is essential; indeed, it is this fact that relieves us from any fears concerning pantheism as the outcome of our doctrine. And have we not virtually limited the Absolute by positing this Other, which our analysis of consciousness has compelled us to assume is necessary? The answer to this objection is involved in what we have just been saying about the fact that the two extremes of the equation of consciousness are not foreign to each other; and it might perhaps be sufficient simply to point to this fact in meeting the objection. But, since this criticism against the doctrine of the personality of the Absolute is so general, and that, too, amongst Idealists of a certain type, it seems well in concluding this discussion to devote some attention to it.</p>
<p>I have chosen Mr. McTaggart as the representative of this type of criticism, because his objections are advanced immediately in connection with a study of Hegel’s system.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n303">[303]</a></sup> His views can best be expressed in his own words: “The Absolute is a unity of system, and not a unity of centre, and the element of unity in it cannot be a simple and indivisible point, like that of the finite self. For if the unity is of this sort, then, by virtue of its simplicity and indivisibility, it excludes its differentiation from itself in one sense, while including them in another. But the Absolute cannot exclude its differentiations from itself in any sense.... There is nothing outside of the Absolute. And it would therefore be impossible for it to exclude its differentiations from itself in any sense. For in as far as they are not in it, they are absolutely wrong.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n304">[304]</a></sup> In order to evaluate this objection, we must again look at consciousness and ask concerning its real nature. As we have already pointed out, consciousness always demands a content with which it is never identical; without such a content consciousness is nothing but an empty abstraction.</p>
<p>Consciousness presupposes differentiations, and in some sense it is true that these differentiations are excluded from it. But this is not the whole story; there is another aspect of the conscious life that we cannot afford to overlook. Consciousness not only excludes its differentiations, it also includes them. The exclusion is never absolute; the content is a vital part of the consciousness; in a very important sense it is the consciousness. Consciousness overreaches the distinction between itself and its content and takes the content up into itself, so that the content, though different from, yet is one with the consciousness. As Edward Caird aptly puts it, “The self can be conscious of itself as so distinguished and related, only in so far as it overreaches the distinction between itself and its object.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n305">[305]</a></sup> Thus it is that the self or consciousness may be said both to include and exclude its object; and the fact of inclusion is complementary to the fact of exclusion. Inclusion does not mean the abstract identity of subject-self and object-self; nor, on the other hand, does exclusion mean their abstract opposition. Consciousness includes its various differentiations, because they are its differentiations; it excludes them, because they are its differentiations. Inclusion and exclusion are only different names for the same fact, just as are the concave and convex sides of a curved line.</p>
<p>If, now, we are to argue on the basis of finite consciousness concerning the nature of Absolute Consciousness – and, I repeat, I know of no other basis on which to argue – it would seem that we are forced to conclude that such a Consciousness, granting its existence, would necessarily at once include and exclude its differentiations. Every object in the world would be included in such a Consciousness, because every object in the world would be an object for such a Consciousness. But the inclusion would not, could not, be that of identity. For every object in the world would have to be excluded from such a Consciousness, since no object in the world would actually <em>be </em>that Consciousness.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n306">[306]</a></sup> And the exclusion could not be abstract opposition; the differentiations would still be differentiations of the consciousness for which they exist.</p>
<p>The Absolute Consciousness, like all other consciousness, would be confined to the circle of its own differentiations: this we seem forced to admit. But the differentiations of the Absolute, like the differentiations of finite consciousness, would be differentiations still: this also we seemed forced to admit. And with this we have admitted the inclusion and the exclusion of the differentiations of an absolute Consciousness. As Hegel remarks, “God is Himself consciousness, He distinguishes Himself from Himself within Himself, and as consciousness He gives Himself as object for what we call the side of consciousness.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n307">[307]</a></sup> This is exactly what every finite consciousness does in its own limited way: it gives itself as object, distinguishes itself from itself within itself, and is at once knower and known, possessor and possessed, subject and object. Such seems to be the paradox of consciousness as such; there is nothing inherently contradictory or absurd about it – unless, indeed, consciousness itself is an absurdity.</p>
<p>Thus we are forced to say that Mr. McTaggart’s objection to the doctrine of a personal Absolute rests upon a misconstruction of the true import of the category of self-consciousness. The objection stands or falls with the contention that, if the Absolute were to exclude its differentiations from itself, those differentiations would either cease to be real or stand as a limitation to the Absolute. Now this contention holds only on the condition that the Absolute is forced to oppose to itself its differentiations as something entirely beyond and foreign to it. But it is the very nature of consciousness not to do this, if our analysis has been correct. For as we have repeatedly seen, perhaps to the point of weariness, consciousness is a duality within unity; and if you destroy either the unity or the duality, you utterly annihilate the conscious life. And it seems evident that, if you construct a chasm between consciousness and its differentiations, you do irreparable violence to the unity between the two. At your touch both consciousness and its differentiations vanish into nothingness. There is no meaning in talking about the exclusion of something by consciousness, unless that something is included in consciousness; for consciousness excludes its differentiations just by virtue of the fact that it includes them. To argue, therefore, that an Absolute Consciousness is impossible because it cannot abstractly oppose itself to its differentiations is exactly as convincing as it would be to argue that finite consciousness is impossible because it cannot do the same.</p>
<p>You could argue either way indifferently and with equal success in both cases; for your demand sins against the presupposition of all consciousness.</p>
<p>Of course an Absolute Consciousness is impossible, provided it is so by definition; but why define it so? It seems to be no more inherently absurd than finite consciousness, and there can be no question that finite consciousness is an actuality.</p>
<p>It is interesting to notice that this objection of Mr. McTaggart is inconsistent with his own analysis of finite consciousness. Speaking in another context of the finite self, which he grants is ‘sufficiently paradoxical,’ he says: “What does it included Everything of which it is conscious.</p>
<p>What does it exclude? Equally – everything of which it is conscious.</p>
<p>What can it say is not inside it? Nothing. What can it say is not outside it? A single abstraction. And any attempt to remove the paradox destroys the self. For the two sides are inevitably connected. If we try to make it a distinct individual by separating it from all other things, it loses all content of which it can be conscious, and so loses the very individuality which we started by trying to preserve. If, on the other hand, we try to save its content by emphasizing the inclusion at the expense of the exclusion, then the consciousness vanishes, and, since the self has no contents but the objects of which it is conscious, the content vanishes also.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n308">[308]</a></sup> Now I submit that, if Mr. McTaggart stands consistently by the position here stated he cannot argue that consciousness, whether finite or absolute, can exclude its differentiations in any sense in which it does not at the same time and ipso facto include them.</p>
<p>And this is the ground upon which his objection against the doctrine of a personal Absolute, as I comprehend it, rests. To say that the finite self excludes its differentiations in a manner that would be impossible to the Absolute assumes the very point at issue, and so begs the whole question.</p>
<p>Does the finite self exclude its differentiations in a manner impossible for the Absolute? Certainly not, if we are willing to accept Mr.</p>
<p>McTaggart’s analysis of finite consciousness. The finite self, he tells us, includes everything of which it is conscious, and it excludes everything that it includes. But, be it noted, it does not cease to include because it excludes: inclusion and exclusion, we are told, are ‘inevitably connected.’ If, now, finite consciousness at once includes and excludes its differentiations, is there anything absurd in the position that Absolute Consciousness may do the same? If the finite consciousness is a differentiation of the Absolute just because of its paradoxical nature – and this, we must remember, is the basis upon which Mr. McTaggart rests his argument for the immortality of the individual – may it not be that the Absolute itself embodies this paradox par excellence? If inclusion and exclusion by consciousness are correlative terms, why is it impossible for a perfect Consciousness to include everything in the universe and yet at the same time and just for that reason exclude it? Why, in short, would it be necessary for the infinite and perfect self to fail just in that respect which constitutes the very essence of the finite and imperfect self? Arguing in this vein appears to be an approach to absurdity; and yet this seems to be the position into which Mr. McTaggart is forced by his own analysis of consciousness.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n309">[309]</a></sup> The whole difficulty with Mr. McTaggart’s position may be put in very brief compass. His objection rests upon the disjunction with which we began: either pantheism or a finite God, either abstract identity between the absolute and its differentiations or a limited Absolute. But this disjunction depends upon an abstract view of the nature of consciousness.</p>
<p>For it implies that consciousness must be either identical with or abstractly opposed to its differentiations, that the Absolute either is the world or must regard the world as something essentially foreign to itself. This disjunction, however, plainly flies in the face of experience.</p>
<p>As we have tried to show, and as Mr. McTaggart himself has pointed out, consciousness and its differentiations are neither identical nor yet opposed to each other: they are ‘inevitably connected,’ and each lives in the life of the other. And when we make a violent separation between them, or assume a position that implies this separation, we should not forget the fact that the possibility of finite consciousness, as well as the possibility of an Absolute Consciousness is thereby denied – simply because we then have done away with the presupposition of all consciousness. And this suggests to us that it would be well to investigate experience further, before we commit ourselves to a position that leads to such singularly disastrous results. This essential unity of the Absolute and its Other Hegel emphasizes in his exposition of the philosophical import of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation.<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n310">[310]</a></sup> In this dogma we have expressed in religious terms the philosophical truth that “the divine and human natures are not implicitly different.” In Jesus Christ is manifested the Universal, God; the contingent and accidental circumstances of temporal life are disregarded by Him. “Who is my mother and my brother?” “Let the dead bury their dead.” But Christ is not only God; he is also the Son of Man, the Man of Sorrows. In his death we have evidence of the fact that He shares the common fate of all human beings; indeed, “in Him humanity was carried to its furthest point,” since he died the aggravated death of the evil-doer. This Personality, which reaches to the glories of the Infinite, touches also, by virtue of its divinity, the lowest abyss of the finite. The true lesson of the Incarnation, Hegel would seem to say, is that God is not high and lifted up beyond the world of time and place; but that He is also here, and that it is only here that He finds full and complete expression. God’s Other is His own very Self, and not an existence beyond Him.</p>
<p>In conclusion, then, we may say that, as Hegel views the matter, the puzzle of God’s relation to the world is to a considerable extent one of our own making. By a process of abstraction we separate God from the world, and then proceed to ask how we are ever to get them together again; we destroy their essential interconnectedness, and then raise the cry that their relation to each other is to us incomprehensible. Consequently, we must either take refuge in an impotent faith or be content to remain sceptics and agnostics. “The ‘reflective’ understanding begins by rejecting all systems and modes of conception, which, whether they spring from heart, imagination, or speculation, express the interconnection of God and the world: and in order to have God pure in faith or consciousness, he is as essence parted from appearance, as infinite from the finite. But, after this partition, the conviction arises also that the appearance has a relation to the essence, the finite to the infinite, and so on: and thus arises the question of reflection as to the nature of this relation. It is in the reflective form that the whole difficulty of the affair lies, and that causes this relation to be called incomprehensible by the agnostic.”<sup class="enote"><a href="notes.htm#n311">[311]</a></sup> Hegel’s own solution of the problem, which he proceeds to outline for us in the paragraph from which this passage is taken, is to be found on a plane which transcends the point of view of the ‘reflective understanding’; and his solution consists really in pointing out that the separation that gives rise to the problem is the result of abstract thinking.</p>
<p>This more concrete standpoint he calls the Notion of the speculative Reason, which is, in the last analysis, the category of self-consciousness.</p>
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Thought and Reality In Hegel’s System. Gustavus Watts Cunningham 1910
Chapter V. The of the Absolute.
Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of the Absolute is a problem that is not easy of solution. The fact that the Hegelians of the Left and of the Right, while appealing to the authority of the master in justification of their respective positions, reached antithetical conclusions with reference to this problem is an indication of its difficulty. But the result that we have already attained in the preceding chapter offers us a vantage-point in our discussion of the problem. We have shown that the unity of reality, according to Hegel, is a unity that includes differences, and that the differences are essential to the unity. This point will, however, be of more direct interest to us when we come to ask concerning the relation of the Absolute and its differentiations. The problem immediately before us is to determine how this unity must be conceived, what more specifically the nature of the unity is. The thesis which we shall defend is that the Hegelian doctrine concerning this unity is that it is spiritual, and that it exists as a self-conscious Personality.[235] The point of departure for our discussion we shall find in the Absolute Idea. If we can determine the essential nature of the Idea, then we may claim to have set forth Hegel’s doctrine of the nature of the Absolute, since the two terms are practically synonymous in his system.[236] If Hegel has given any direct proof at all that the Absolute is to be thought of as personal, it must be sought in an investigation of the Idea; and, on the other hand, if it can be shown that the Idea is a self-conscious Individuality, it must be admitted that Hegel teaches the doctrine of a personal Absolute. We ask first, then, Is the category of the Absolute Idea, as defined for us in the Logic, equivalent to a Personality or self-conscious Individuality? We have already pointed out that Hegel teaches that the Idea is individual for it assumes the form of the Notion, and the form of the Notion is individuality. Even a glance at the Logic will indicate this truth: the Idea is the last category in the dialectical definition of the Notion. But this, in itself, proves nothing more than that the Idea is a unity of differences, and that unity and differences are equally essential.
This is a very important result, to be sure; it settles some vexed questions concerning the Absolute and the finite, as we shall see in the discussion of the relation of God to the world. But it still leaves unanswered the problem of the nature of the unity among the differences.
Does Hegel think of this unity as personal and self-conscious? The answer to this question is to be found in the triadic development which Hegel has given in that part of the Doctrine of the Notion called the Idea. The triad which we find here consists of the categories of Life, Cognition (perhaps Consciousness would more nearly adequately convey Hegel’s meaning), and the Absolute Idea. The movement, though considerably hindered by puzzling and bothersome details, is tolerably clear in its main features; and, fortunately, it is only the main features with which we are here concerned. Let us follow this development.
We ask first concerning the standpoint of the thesis. Here, under the category of Life, Hegel tells us that we have the Idea in its immediacy but in an immediacy which is not true. By this is meant, it would seem, that in the category of Life we get the first approximately explicit manifestation of the real nature of the Idea, but in a manner inadequate to that nature. The category is approximately adequate to the Idea, because we have in it the first explicit appearance of a spiritual activity.
Its inadequacy consists in the fact that it presupposes an opposition between subjective and objective which it never succeeds in overcoming.
It is, indeed, true that the dialectical process within this category consists just in transcending this opposition: in the Kind (Gattung) the particular living thing loses part of its immediacy and becomes, to a degree, objective and universal. Nevertheless, its particularity and universality do not completely coincide. “Implicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it exists as only.”[237] And just because of this contradiction, which is essential to it, the category of Life cannot furnish us with the ultimate synthesis of reality. In such a synthesis we could have nothing more than blank identity between the particular and the universal; the particular on this plane is not able to withstand the universal. “The animal never gets so far in its Kind as to have a teeing of its own; it succumbs to the power of Kind.”[238] Thus we are forced to look for the unity of the Idea in a category other than that of Life. And this brings us to the category which Hegel calls Cognition in general.
Before passing on to the standpoint of this category, it will be well to pause here, and quote Hegel’s own words bearing on the defect and the dialectical development of the category of Life as we have just attempted to trace it. “The notion [of Life] and [its] reality do not thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of Life is the soul, and this notion has the body for its reality. The soul is, as it were, infused into its corporeity; and in that way it is at first sentient only, and not yet freely self-conscious. The process of Life consists in getting the better of the immediacy with which it is still beset: and this process, which is itself threefold, results in the idea under the form of judgment, i.e., the idea as Cognition.”[239] In his discussion of the category of Cognition Hegel indulges in numerous digressions, which serve only to obscure the outlines of the dialectical advance. But, if we neglect the confusing details, the goal at which the author is aiming seems pretty clearly to be the category of self-consciousness. And he reaches it in some such way as the following.
Leaving behind us the category of Life, as confessedly inadequate to the unity of the Idea, we turn first to the level of abstract cognition proper, and examine its claims.[240] This category is at once seen to be insufficient, and that for two reasons. In the first place, it presupposes a somewhat as given, upon which it impresses itself in a more or less mechanical fashion; this is the standpoint of the sciences, which busy themselves with the discovery of laws without being able to pass judgment upon their ontological significance.[241] “The assimilation of the matter, therefore, as a datum, presents itself in the light of a reception of it into categories which at the same time remain external to it, and which meet each other in the same style of diversity. Reason is here active, but it is reason in the shape of the understanding. The truth which such Cognition can reach will therefore be only finite.”[242] The second defect of abstract Cognition, which is an inevitable result of its abstractness, is that it fails to do justice to the nature of the knowing mind; mind is regarded from this point of view too much as an empty vessel to be filled from without. “The finitude of Cognition lies in the presupposition of a world already in existence, and in the consequent view of the knowing subject as a tabula rasa.”[243] For these reasons, therefore, we fail to find in Cognition proper release from the dualism in which the category of Life left us bound; we do not get here the unity for which we are seeking. So we turn next to volition. Can Will supply us with a satisfactory synthesis? At first it seems that it might, since from this point of view the objective falls together with the subjective; objectivity is measured in terms of subjective ideals and aims. But this is just the difficulty with the standpoint. Objectivity is too completely reduced to subjective terms, and therefore really opposes itself to subjectivity; the objective never, in point of fact, becomes subjective and the subjective never really loses itself in objectivity. Thus we are reduced to the eternal Sollen of Fichte. “While Intelligence merely proposes to take the world as it is, Will takes steps to make the world what it ought to be. Will looks upon the immediate and given present not as solid being, but as mere semblance without reality. It is here that we meet those contradictions which are so bewildering from the standpoint of abstract morality.
This position in its ‘practical’ bearings is the one taken by the philosophy of Kant, and even by that of Fichte. The Good, say these writers, has to be realized: we have to work in order to produce it: and Will is only the Good actualizing itself. If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of Will would be at an end. The Will itself therefore requires that its end should not be realized. In these words, a correct expression is given to the finitude of Will.”[244] So once again, we are disappointed in our search for unity. “This Volition has, on the one hand, the certitude of the nothingness of the presupposed object; but, on the other, as finite, it at the same time presupposes the purposed End of the Good to be a mere subjective idea, and the object to be independent.”[245] Volition presupposes a discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, a discrepancy which, from the point of view of abstract volition, cannot be eliminated; and so our unity is not yet attained.
But a way to that unity has been suggested. If we could secure a conjunction of what is and what ought to be, if, that is to say, we could combine the standpoints of Cognition proper and Volition in a higher synthesis, then it would seem that we should have reached our goal. For in such a synthesis the subjective would be genuinely objective, and the objective would not stand over against the subjective as something foreign to it but would partake of its very nature. “The reconciliation is achieved, when Will in its result returns to the pre-supposition made by Cognition. In other words, it consists in the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. Will knows the end to be its own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the Notion actual.”[246] This synthesis, according to Hegel, is found in the Absolute Idea. It is here that we get our ultimate unity of the real. It will be well to let Hegel speak for himself on this very vital point. “The truth of the Good is laid down as the unity of the theoretical and practical idea in the doctrine that the Good is radically and really achieved, that the objective world is in itself and for itself the Idea, just as it at the same time eternally lays itself down as End, and by action brings about its actuality.
This Life which has returned to itself from the bias and finitude of Cognition, and which by the activity of the Notion has become identical with it, is the Speculative or Absolute Idea.”[247] The following passage is perhaps more explicit: “The Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the theoretical and the practical idea, and thus at the same time the unity of the idea of Life with the idea of Cognition. In Cognition we had the Idea in a biased, one-sided shape. The process of Cognition has issued in the overthrow of this bias and the restoration of that unity, which as unity, and in its immediacy, is in the first instance the Idea of Life. The defect of Life lies in its being the Idea only implicit or natural: whereas Cognition is in an equally one-sided way the merely conscious Idea, or the Idea for itself. The unity and truth of these two is the Absolute Idea which is both in itself and for itself. Hitherto we have had the Idea in development through its various grades as our object, but now the Idea comes to be its own object.”[248] The development that we have just traced seems pretty clearly outlined and the goal to which it has led us appears to be very well defined.
The category of Life fails as a synthesis of reality, because it is not selfconscious; the categories of Cognition proper and Volition fail, because they are only one-sided representations of self-conscious life; the Absolute Idea succeeds, because it transcends the defects of these lower standpoints.
And from this it seems only logical to conclude that the Idea succeeds because it is the unity of Self-consciousness in its completion.
“This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself – and here at least as a thinking or Logical Idea.”[249] One can see no valid reason why we may not believe that Hegel is in earnest when he says, as above, that “the Idea comes to be its own object,” and that “its developed and genuine actuality is to be as a subject and in that way as mind.”[250] On the contrary, the dialectical development- here seems to force us to the conclusion that the category of the Absolute Idea is really a Self-consciousness, a knowing and willing Individual, who ‘comes home’ to Himself from His differentiations in which He sees Himself mirrored as it were in His eternal essence, a Personality who exists in and for Himself and realizes His ends in the phenomenal world. For within the unity of the Idea, Life, Cognition, and Volition are blended harmoniously together, and the life of knowledge and the life of activity are one. And Consciousness is the only category that gives us such a unity.
Mr. McTaggart objects to the conclusion which we have here reached; he denies that it is the logical outcome of Hegel’s system. He readily grants that, according to the system, the unity of the Idea must be construed in terms of spirit; and he is ready not only to admit but to maintain that the author believed it possible for spirit to exist only in the form of personality.[251] But he contends that we have no right to infer from these premises to the conclusion that this unity of the Idea is a personal unity. “It might be said of a College,” he urges, “with as much truth as it has been said of the Absolute, that it is a unity, that it is a unity of spirit, and that none of that spirit exists except as personal.”[252] This objection, however, seems to rest upon a false notion of the nature of the unity that is defined in the Idea. Hegel himself has told us, “The unity of God is always unity, but everything depends upon the particular nature of this unity; this point being disregarded, that upon which everything depends is overlooked.”[253] Now it seems that Mr. McTaggart has misconceived the unity of the Idea; and consequently his criticism of our conclusion which is based upon this misconception is of no significance. Let us see what can be said in justification of this statement.
In the first place, it is important to notice that Mr. McTaggart thinks of the Idea as absolutely identical with its differences: the unity, as he conceives of it, is nothing more than its differentiations, and they are nothing more than it. For instance, he says: “The individual has his entire nature in the manifestation of this whole, as the whole, in turn, is nothing else but its manifestation in individuals.”[254] Again he takes for granted that Hegel “reaches in the category of Life a result from which he never departs in the subsequent categories – that the unity and plurality are in an absolutely reciprocal relation, so that, while the plurality is nothing but the differentiation of the unity, the unity is nothing but the union of the plurality.”[255] And with this supposedly Hegelian position is contrasted at considerable length Lotze’s view, that “the Absolute is to be taken as something more and deeper than the unity of its differentiations.” [256] Thus Mr. McTaggart’s conception of the unity of the Idea is hardly mistakable; according to him, this unity consists in the relation of abstract identity between the Idea and its differentiations.
A criticism of the tenability of this doctrine of identity will be undertaken later on in this chapter. Our present purpose is to show that it is not, as Mr. McTaggart assumes it is, Hegel’s account of the unity of the Idea. But it will not be amiss, perhaps, to pause here for a moment to point out one or two difficulties involved in this interpretation of the critic. In the first place, if the unity and the differences of the Idea are in exact equilibrium, it is not quite evident that any room is left anywhere for that ‘simple and indivisible element’ which Mr. McTaggart makes the very quintessence of the personality of finite individuals and upon which he bases his argument for their immortality.[257] On this hypothesis it would appear that the finite individual finds himself as sorely pressed as does the Absolute; for the personality of the former is in just as precarious a predicament as is that of the latter.[258] In the second place, it is difficult to see where such a unity as Mr. McTaggart insists upon becomes actual; there certainly is room to question whether it is ever actualized.
If its actualization is possible, it would have to be in a state of society which yet lies in the far distant future; certainly society has not yet attained unto it. So it would appear to be a unity that ought to be but is not – a conception so vigorously criticized by Hegel. In the third place and finally, the problem of the contingent, which on any idealistic theory short of pessimism is a puzzling one, becomes doubly so on Mr.
McTaggart’s hypothesis. He seems logically bound to assert either that the finite is perfect, or that the imperfections of the finite, qua imperfections, belong to the essential nature of the Absolute; for the Absolute, it is to be remembered, is its differentiations.[259] To sum up the whole matter, Mr. McTaggart seems to be between the Scylla of a fictitious unity and the Charybdis of differences that defy conjunction. His universal is one which, after it has succeeded in unifying the universe, itself finds nowhere to lay its head; and his particulars tend either to vanish entirely into the universal, or – this is the more imminent danger – to fly asunder and become discrete entities. And one is inclined to think that this is exactly the difficulty into which, as Hegel points out, Leibnitz fell – the difficulty, namely, of resolving the contradiction between an absolutely self-centered individual and a completely unifying universal that swamps its differences.[260] But to return from this digression, let us ask concerning the justification of Mr. McTaggart’s interpretation of Hegel’s meaning. The exact balance which the critic supposes between the unity of the Idea and its manifestations is foreign to the author’s conception of the matter. In the first place, the dialectical movement, which we have above outlined, bears out this contention. Contrary to Mr. McTaggart’s assertion that in the category of Life Hegel reaches a result from which he never departs, namely, an ‘absolutely reciprocal relation’ between the unity and its plurality, it may be argued that the development from the category of Life to that of the Absolute Idea consists just in transcending this relation of identity, and in asserting a unity which exists for itself within its differences. It would be hard to say in what respect the Idea is an advance beyond the category of Life, if not in the fact that it unites within itself the theoretical and practical elements of the spiritual life. And such a synthesis, as we have seen, is that of consciousness. If this is the result to which Hegel leads us, then the unity of the Idea is more than its differences, more than ‘the union of the plurality’; for it is inconsistent with the nature of consciousness to be nothing more than its content.
The Idea thus seems to be something deeper than the mere conjunction of its differentiations.
Again, Mr. McTaggart’s position on this point is contrary to the result of our previous chapter, that the real for Hegel is the individual. If that result be true, then the Absolute Idea must be an actual synthesis of concrete differences, the differences existing for the synthesis and the synthesis existing in its differences and for itself – such a synthesis as cannot be found in any society (however closely unified) of self-conscious finite spirits. It belongs to the very nature of the individual that its differences be more than the union of themselves, and that its unity be more than the conjunction of its differentiations; in other words, abstract identity of the particulars and the universal is foreign to the essence of the concrete individual. If therefore we are right in our position that Hegel’s ultimate synthesis, the Absolute Idea, must be individual in its nature, we are also right in insisting that the synthesis is not identical with its differences. And that we are in the right here the whole first Part of our study bears witness.
Mr. McTaggart’s difficulty here is traceable to his failure to appreciate the significance of negation in Hegel’s doctrine of thought. For the unity of the Idea is a negative unity, and as such is different from the unity that either destroys multiplicity or itself fails to exist. I shall let Hegel state the matter: “As the Idea is (a) a process, it follows that such an expression for the Absolute as unity of thought and being, of finite and infinite, etc., is false; for unity expresses an abstract and merely quiescent identity. As the Idea is (b) subjectivity, it follows that the expression is equally false on another account. That unity of which it speaks expresses a merely virtual or underlying presence of the genuine unity. The infinite would thus seem to be merely neutralized by the finite, the subjective by the objective, thought by being. But in the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity. The unity of the Idea is thought, infinity, and subjectivity, and is in consequence to be essentially distinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this overlapping subjectivity, thought, or infinity is to be distinguished from the one-sided subjectivity, one-sided thought, one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defiling.’[261] A study of this passage discloses the fact that the unity of the Idea, which is a negative unity, is not the unity of exact equilibrium.
Mr. McTaggart has another objection to raise against the thesis we are here maintaining. He not only asserts that the position which we have attributed to Hegel is not logically involved in his system, – he does admit that the dialectic itself furnishes no positive disproof of it – but he also contends that the position is one which Hegel himself did not hold. He thinks that Hegel explicitly repudiates the doctrine of a personal Absolute, and he bases his contention on the conclusion of the Philosophy of Religion.[262] “It seems clear from the Philosophy of Religion,” he tells us, “that the truth of God’s nature, according to Hegel, is to be found in the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost.... And the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost appears to be not a person but a community.”[263] Before passing on to examine the basis of this argument, I cannot refrain from quoting a few other passages from various contexts, which seem to be in direct refutation of the contention which the critic is trying to establish. I shall cite only those passages which have explicit reference to the point. In the larger Logic at the beginning of the discussion of the Absolute Idea we read: “The Notion is not only soul but free subjective Notion, which is for itself and, therefore, has personality – the practical objective Notion which is determined in and for itself, and which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity.”[264] A page or two below, after having spoken of the method as an immanent form of development, the author says: “The Method thus shows itself to be the Notion which knows itself, and which, as the Absolute, both subjective and objective, has itself for its own object.”[265] Again, in the smaller Logic: “It is true that God is necessity, or, as we may also put it, that He is the absolute Thing: He is however no less the absolute Person. That He is the absolute Person, however, is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached; and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity.”[266] In the Philosophy of Religion we are told that “God is himself consciousness, He distinguishes Himself from Himself within Himself, and as consciousness He gives Himself as object for what we call the side of consciousness.”[267] And later in the same work occurs a passage which seems to have been written designedly to meet a position like that which Mr. McTaggart attributes to Hegel: “The Divine is not to be conceived of merely as a universal thought, or as something inward and having potential existence only; the objectifying of the Divine is not to be conceived of simply as the objective form it takes in all men, for in that case it would be conceived of simply as representing the manifold forms of the spiritual in general, and the development which the Absolute Spirit has in itself and which has to advance till it reaches the form of what is the form of immediacy, would not be contained in it.”[268] The fourteenth lecture on the ‘Proofs of the Existence of God’ has something to say on the point: “That man knows God implies, in accordance with the essential idea of communion or fellowship, that there is a community of knowledge; that is to say, man knows God only in so far as God Himself knows Himself in man. This knowledge is God’s self-consciousness, but it is at the same time a knowledge of God on the part of man, and this knowledge of God by man is a knowledge of man by God.”[269] Finally, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History we read: “It is One Individuality which, presented in its essence as God, is honored and enjoyed in Religion; which is exhibited as an object of sensuous contemplation in Art; and is apprehended as an intellectual conception in Philosophy.”[270] To these seemingly quite explicit passages others might be added.[271] But enough have been quoted to establish at least a presumption that, according to Hegel’s own statements on the point, God is not a community of finite spirits but a Personality.
We turn now to an examination of the basis upon which Mr. McTaggart rests his contention. Does the dialectical movement in the Philosophy of Religion, from the Kingdom of the Father, through the Kingdom of the Son, to the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, justify the conclusion that Hegel conceives of God as nothing more than a community of finite individuals? To this question I think a negative answer must be given. Let us follow this movement in some detail.
There is no reason why we should not agree with Mr. McTaggart that the three stages of the Kingdoms of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit form a dialectical triad. And from this, we also agree, it necessarily follows that, “if God is really personal, He must be personal in the Kingdom of Spirit.”[272] But one fails to see how these premises lead to the conclusion that the Spirit which manifests itself in the synthesis here cannot be a Personality, an Individual. To be sure we must admit that God, on this showing, is adequately represented only in a community of spirits, since the Kingdom of the Spirit is conceived of as such a community. And, of course, it would be absurd to contend that a community is, or can possibly be, a person. But it is difficult to see, so much being granted, how we are necessarily committed to the conclusion that in the Kingdom of the Spirit God must be impersonal, or that, when adequately represented, He becomes absolutely identical with the spiritual community in which He finds fullest expression. Such a conclusion is forced upon us only when we assume, with the critic, that God is just His manifestations and nothing more. And on this assumption we could not logically confine the Absolute to any community of self-conscious spirits, – unless, indeed, we are willing to endow all forms of nature with spiritual qualities; for Hegel unquestionably maintains that Nature is God’s manifestation of Himself. But the assumption is arbitrary and groundless, if our position concerning the unity and individuality of the Idea is true.
Furthermore, this triad, as interpreted by Mr. McTaggart, differs essentially from other triads in the Logic and elsewhere. For his argument necessitates the assumption that the movement here consists in an attempt to get away from an entirely erroneous view of God’s nature to a true and fundamentally different view. For example, after insisting that the triad is a genuine dialectical process and that, consequently, we must look for an adequate expression of God’s nature only in the synthesis, he continues: “If [God] were personal as manifested in the first and second Kingdoms, but not in the third, it would mean that He was personal when viewed inadequately, but not when viewed adequately – i.e., that He was not really personal.”[273] This is the critic’s interpretation of the actual movement and result of the triad. This interpretation, however, makes of the triad an exception. For usually in the dialectical triad there is a thread of connection running from thesis to synthesis; the two are never separated by a chasm. But on Mr. McTaggart’s interpretation of the triad before us, thesis and synthesis would seem to be torn completely asunder; in the thesis, God is viewed as a Personality, while, in the synthesis, He is defined only as the abstract unity of the Church, and is personal in no sense whatsoever. Thus there is no connection between thesis and synthesis: the synthesis is a mere negation of the thesis. If the synthesis is right, therefore, the thesis must be completely wrong, absolutely false – a fact which we have been in the habit of thinking is not characteristic of a dialectical triad. Mr. McTaggart’s argument seems thus to make of the present triad an extraordinary exception.
In point of fact, the movement here is not away from personality to impersonality. The dialectic does force us to say that the Spiritual Community is necessary to an adequate representation of the nature of God; but this is very far from saying that God is the Community or that the Community is God. The critic does not refer to any passages in which Hegel speaks of this very significant, and withal very peculiar, turn in the dialectic advance; and I have been able to find none. I have, however, found one in which the identification in question seems to be denied, and it runs so: “This third sphere” (that is, the sphere of the Kingdom of the Spirit, the Spiritual Community) “represents the Idea in its specific character as individuality; but, to begin with, it exhibits only the one individuality, the divine universal individuality as it is in-and-for-itself .... Individuality as exclusive is for others immediacy, and is the return from the other into self. The individuality of the Divine Idea, the Divine Idea as a person (ein Mensch), first attains to completeness in actuality (Wirklichkeit), since at first it has the many individuals confronting it, and brings these back into the unity of Spirit, into the Church or Spiritual Community (Gemeinde), and exists here as real universal self-consciousness.”[274] If I understand what this means, it indicates that, as Hegel himself views the matter, the third Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Spirit, is the standpoint where God is first viewed in His true Personality; for here it is that He is seen to be in vital and actual touch with men and things. Thus it appears that the triad is not a movement from the conception of a personal to the conception of an impersonal God; but rather from an inadequate to an adequate representation of God as personal. He is not pure thought, existing behind the world as it were in infinite space; this is the conception of the thesis. On the contrary, He is that spiritual unity, that ‘real universal self-consciousness,’ realizing His aims and purposes in the lives of finite self-conscious agents whose aspirations are perfected and consummated in Him. In some such way it seems that the movement here must be understood.
Another fact that militates against Mr. McTaggart’s position on this point – at any rate from the point of view of the present essay – is that the culmination of Hegel’s discussion of the Spiritual Community is the standpoint of the Notion. The three phases within this discussion Hegel designates as follows: (a) The conception of the Spiritual Community; (b) The realization of the Spiritual Community; and (c) The realization of the spiritual in universal reality (Wirklichkeit). So far as our present purpose is concerned, the first two of these divisions may be dismissed without comment. The third, however, is of interest especially when we learn that it “directly involves the transformation and remodelling of the Spiritual Community.”[275] It is divided into a threefold movement, which consists in three different attitudes taken towards objectivity. Hegel states this movement in outline thus: “Objectivity as an external immediate world, is the heart with its interests; another form of objectivity is that of reflection, of abstract thought, of Understanding; and the third and true form of objectivity is the Notion. We have now to consider how Spirit realizes itself in these three elements.”[276] The development here outlined is not easily followed in detail. But it seems to consist in tracing the essential features of the faith of the Spiritual Community concerning the nature of the objective order, and the attitudes assumed towards such an objective order. In the first stage, the Spiritual Community has opposed to it a worldly element, which seems to exist on its own account; there is here an opposition between the religious and the secular.
In the second stage we swing to the other extreme, in which the objective is practically disregarded and the idea of God, being emptied of content, is reduced to an abstraction; this is that “inner self-enclosed life which may indeed co-exist with calm, lofty, and pious aspirations, but may as readily appear as hypocrisy or as vanity in its most extreme form.”[277] The first of these two stages Hegel calls the “servitude of Spirit in the absolute region of freedom”; the second is “abstract subjectivity, subjective freedom without content.”[278] The final stage is, as we would expect, the reconciliation of these two extremes. It discovers that freedom, real intelligible freedom, is to be found only in the objective, that objective and subjective, when they are adequately comprehended, fall together. This is the standpoint of philosophy. “What we have finally to consider is that subjectivity develops the content out of itself, but it does this in accordance with necessity – it knows and recognizes that the content is necessary, and that it is objective and exists in-and-for-itself. This is the standpoint of philosophy, according to which the content takes refuge in the Notion, and by means of thought gets its restoration and justification.”[279] The objective within the Community, therefore, must be known to be in-and-for-itself before the community has attained complete and perfect actualization; and this knowledge is reached only when philosophic comprehension is substituted for intuitive faith. Thus we are once again brought to our former problem concerning the real nature of the Notion and its significance in Hegel’s system. If the form of the Notion is individuality, then it would seem that, on the above showing, the Spiritual Community is perfected only when its unity is actualized.
It is to be noted, furthermore, that in philosophy and not in the Spiritual Community, as such, is to be found the true realization of the object of Absolute Religion. The Spiritual Community, “in attaining realization in its spiritual reality,” falls into “a condition of inner disruption”; and so “its realization appears to be at the same time its disappearance.” [280] “For us,” however, “philosophical knowledge has harmonized this discord,” and we have “rediscovered in revealed religion the truth and the Idea.”[281] And from this it seems evident that the nature of ultimate reality is to be sought, not in the Spiritual Community, but in the Idea. We are thus sent back to the study of the dialectic for an answer to our question concerning the Absolute; and we have already seen what answer the dialectic gives.
The foregoing considerations force us to question the validity of Mr. McTaggart’s contention that, for Hegel, the Absolute is nothing more than a community of self-conscious spirits. But this interpretation of Hegel may be traversed from another point of departure. I think that it can be shown that a community of self-conscious persons – however close the unity that binds them together – is not, in Hegel’s opinion, and cannot be an adequate representation of the unity of the Idea. And it can be shown in some such way as the following.
In one place Hegel tells us that the state is “the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”[282] In another passage he speaks of the state as an ‘actual God,’ and defines it as “the march of God in the world.”[283] In yet another context he says: “It is in the organization of the state that the Divine has passed into the sphere of actuality.”[284] Looked at from the other side, the state is conceived of by Hegel as the highest form of human society. According to the plan which is sketched in the Philosophy of Mind and elaborated at length in the Philosophy of Right, the state is viewed as the choicest product of the moral life, it is “the self-conscious ethical substance.”[285] The very highest point that the Objective Mind can attain unto in its strivings towards divinity is the unity of the state; this is the most truly real form of social union. If now it can be shown that Hegel does not admit that Mr. McTaggart’s doctrine of a community of self-conscious beings is an adequate expression of the essential nature of the state, then we may safely conclude that he would not admit that the total nature of reality is exhausted in such a community.
Concerning the unity of the state, this highest unity of society, Hegel’s position is expressed unequivocally in both the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Right, and in the latter at some length. Put in a word, his position amounts to an insistence that the function of the prince or monarch is absolutely essential to the ideal state, that no state is complete apart from this personal expression of its unity, and that this conclusion is necessitated by a consideration of the idea or notion of the state apart from accidental circumstances of time or place. The unity of the commonwealth, he urges, must be actualized in a personality before it becomes a real unity, or before the state is perfectly organized: the rational articulation of the state demands this incarnation of its unity.
“We usually speak of the three functions of the state,” says Hegel, “the legislative, executive, and judicial. The legislative corresponds to universality, and the executive to particularity; but the judicial is not the third element of the conception.”[286] This third element, we are immediately told, is to be found in the function of the prince; this is the synthesis of the other two functions of the state, and in this they are brought together in a personal unity. Apart from this expression of the will of the state in the will of the monarch the state is not organized according to the nature of the Notion.
This is not merely an interesting point which Hegel happens to mention incidentally in his theory of the state. It is one upon which he lays special emphasis. I shall quote some of these emphatic passages. “It is easy for one to grasp the notion that the state is the self-determining and completely sovereign will, whose judgment is final. It is more difficult to apprehend this ‘I will’ as a person.... This ‘I will’ constitutes the greatest distinction between the ancient and the modern world, and so must have its peculiar niche in the great building of the state. It is to be deplored that this characteristic should be viewed as something merely external, to be set aside or used at pleasure.”[287] Again: “The conception of monarch offers great difficulty to abstract reasonings and to the reflective methods of the understanding. The understanding never gets beyond isolated determinations, and ascribes merit to mere reasons, or finite points of view and what can be derived from them. Thus the dignity of the monarch is represented as something derivative not only in its form but also in its essential character. But the conception of the monarch is not derivative, but purely self-originated.”[288] Once more: “Personality or subjectivity generally, as infinite and self-referring, has truth only as a person or independent subject. This independent existence must be one, and the truth which it has is of the most direct or immediate kind. The personality of the state is actualized only as person, the monarch. ... A so-called moral person, a society, community (Gemeinde), or family, be it as concrete as it may, possesses personality only as an element and abstractly. It has not reached the truth of its existence. But the state is this very totality in which the moments of the conception gain reality in accordance with their peculiar truth.”[289] Again: “When a people is not a patriarchal tribe, having passed from the primitive condition which made the forms of aristocracy and democracy possible, and is represented not as in a wilful and unorganized condition, but as a self-developed truly organic totality, in such a people sovereignty is the personality of the whole, and exists, too, in a reality which is proportionate to the conception, the person of the monarch.”[290] Finally: “In the government – regarded as organic totality – the sovereign power (principate) is subjectivity as the infinite self-unity of the Notion in its development; – the all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the state, its highest peak and all-pervasive unity. In the perfect form of the state, in which each and every element of the Notion has reached free existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called ‘moral person,’ or a decree issuing from a majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing will has not an actual existence), but an actual individual – the will of a decreeing individual monarchy. The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development and realization of reason.”[291] Now what do all these passages mean?[292] At least one strain runs through them all; and that is, that the unity of the state, before it can become real and rational, must be embodied in an actual form, must find expression in an actually existent person. The state which has not the power of uttering this ‘I will’ – it matters not how intrinsically insignificant the ‘I will’ may be; it may mean nothing more than the simple signing of the name – is not a completely articulated organization: it lacks an essential function. No merely organic whole is a rational expression of the nature of the state; the unity must be embodied in a personal form which has actual, concrete existence.
This being true, we have good reason to deny that Mr. McTaggart’s conception of the unity of the ultimately real – a unity which, as we have pointed out, never really becomes actual – can legitimately be attributed to Hegel. Of course argument from analogy is always dangerous; and no claim is made here that we should be justified in drawing positive conclusions concerning Hegel’s doctrine of the unity of the Idea solely on the basis of his doctrine of the unity of the state – though it is indubitably true that the analogy is much more significant than one is apt to think, apart from a very careful reading of the author’s statements on the point. But it does seem justifiable to conclude that, if an actualized unity is essential to the very idea of the state, the unity of ultimate reality could not be an unrealized, and, one is inclined to say, an unrealizable ideal. If no community of individuals, however organically related they may be, adequately expresses the rational organization of the state – and this thesis Hegel unquestionably maintains – we can be practically certain that the synthesis of ultimate reality cannot be found in any community of self-conscious spirits, however organic or super-organic that community may be and however deep its harmony. The argument is a simple a fortiori one. Hegel emphatically asserts that a group of individuals is not an adequate representation of this ‘actual God’ on earth: surely, he would be the first to deny that it is a perfect representation of the essential nature of the Absolute Idea. At any rate, the burden of proof seems-to be on those who deny the validity of this conclusion. So we seem to have shown the inadequacy of Mr.
McTaggart’s interpretation of Hegel from another point of departure.[293] I am forced to believe, however. that such an objection would be very much mistaken. A careful reading of the relevant portions of the Philosophy of Right will impress one with the fact that Hegel was really in earnest when he contends, as quoted above, that “the monarchical constitution is the constitution of developed reason,” and that “all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development and realization of reason.” He apparently is firmly convinced that in his theory of the state he is presenting the form that Spirit assumes in its most nearly perfect institutional manifestation (see especially Werke, Bd. VIII, ��258, 272, and 279). His own explicit statements bear witness to his sincerity in the matter. To those quoted above we might add such as these: “When thinking of the idea of the state, we must not have in our mind any particular state, or particular institution, but must rather contemplate the idea, this actual God, by itself.” (Ibid., �258.) “In the organization of the state, that is to say, in constitutional monarchy, we must have before us nothing except the inner necessity of the idea. Every other point of view must disappear. The state must be regarded as a great architectonic building, or the hieroglyph of reason, presenting itself in actuality. Everything referring merely to utility, externality, etc., must be excluded from a philosophical treatment.” (Ibid., �279.) We thus have sufficient evidence, it would seem, to justify us in asserting that Hegel gives us the doctrine of the state which he honestly believes is most nearly the expression of the logical implications of his system.
Even if we grant that he was prejudiced in working out this theory, as he undoubtedly was in details, still we must admit that he bases his theory more or less directly on the doctrine of the Idea; and admitting so much, the above argument from analogy holds.
Let us bring together the results of our discussion. Our conclusion is that Hegel’s Absolute is an infinite Consciousness, a Personality, who synthesizes in His own experience the experiences of all. “An infinite intelligence, an infinite spiritual principle, which is manifested in finite minds though not identical with them” – such, we agree with Professor Adamson,[294] is Hegel’s doctrine of ultimate reality. And this conclusion we have based upon the dialectic movement in the triad of Life, Cognition, and the Absolute Idea, as well as upon direct statements that Hegel has made regarding the problem. The Hegelian Absolute, we have seen, cannot be identified with a community of self-conscious spirits, as Mr.
McTaggart contends. There seems to be no justification for such an interpretation of Hegel either in the final triad of the Logic or in the final triad under Absolute Religion. In the former we pass beyond the exact balance between the unity and its differences to the category of self-consciousness, where the unity exists for itself in its differentiations; in the latter we are ultimately brought back to the Idea and told to look there for the answer to our question about the nature of God. Furthermore, such a community of spirits as Mr. McTaggart imagines we found would not be adequate to express even the nature of the state as Hegel defines it. Thus from another point of departure we were led to question whether such a community could adequately represent Hegel’s synthesis of ultimate reality. For it seemed that, if a personal unity is essential to the nature of the state, we might justly conclude that the synthesis of the real, of which the state is only an imperfect copy, could hardly be less than a personal unity.
This conclusion that the Absolute is a self-conscious Individuality, leads us to a further problem that we must here face. And that problem is concerning the relation between such an Absolute and the world of finite existence. Granting that the Absolute is a self-conscious Personality, in what relation must we say that He stands to our own finite world? The remaining portion of this chapter will be taken up with an attempt to answer this question.
A first glance at the problem might lead one to conclude that only two solutions of it are possible, and that either solution is fatal to the doctrine of the personality of the Absolute. For it would seem that we must admit either that there is or that there is not an Other to the Absolute.
And with this admission we find ourselves in a dilemma. For, on the one hand, if there be in the universe something besides the Absolute, an Other that has the least degree of reality in its own right, then it apparently follows that the Absolute is limited by this Other, is, in other words, not the Absolute. “The slightest suspicion of pluralism, the minutest wiggle of independence of any one of its parts from the control of the totality would ruin it. Absolute unity brooks no degrees, – as well might you claim absolute purity for a glass of water because it contains but a single little cholera-germ. The independence, however infinitesimal, of a part, however small, would be to the Absolute as fatal as a cholera-germ.”[295] On the other hand, if there be no Other to the Absolute, if there be nothing in the universe that can claim reality on its own account apart from its relation to the Absolute, then pantheism is our only conclusion. Evidently, if our theory merges everything into the Absolute, it is nothing short of pantheism. So it would seem that the doctrine of a personal Absolute leaves us either in contradiction with ourselves or in a pantheistic metaphysics; and from this dilemma there seems to be no way of escape.
Perhaps it is hardly necessary to say that Hegel wastes no words in arguing for a limited Absolute; he does not fall into self-contradiction on this point. For him the Absolute is the only true reality; all else has its reality, not in itself, but in the Absolute. Concerning Hegel’s position here there can, presumably, be no question. On the other hand, there need be no hesitancy whatsoever in asserting that, in Hegel’s own mind at any rate, his system is not pantheistic. Pantheism he often denounces as a mistaken theory of reality; he constantly urges that to conceive of the Absolute as the One Reality in which all particularity loses its significance is completely erroneous. Whatever may be the relation that he teaches exists between the Absolute and the finite world, it certainly is not the relation of identity, which, in his opinion, exists between the Spinozistic Substance and its Accidents: indeed, it is just in contradistinction to this doctrine of Spinoza that Hegel is at pains to define his own. As Hegel views the matter, then, neither pantheism nor a finite God is the conclusion to be drawn in answer to our problem.
But how does he find a way of escape from the dilemma? In both the Philosophy of Religion and the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel tells us that he is not unaware that his theory may be misconstrued as pantheistic; and he is careful to point out the oversight on which the misconstruction rests. The point he makes is this: the interpretation overlooks the distinction between the Absolute as Substance and the Absolute as Subject.
“Those who say that speculative philosophy is pantheism generally know nothing of this distinction; they overlook the main point, as they always do, and they disparage philosophy by representing it as different from what it really is.”[296] This distinction being forgotten, unity is construed to mean only abstract identity. “In accordance with that superficiality with which the polemic against philosophy is carried on, it is added, moreover, that philosophy is a system of Identity.... But those who speak of the philosophy of Identity mean abstract unity, unity in general, and pay no attention to that upon which alone all depends; namely, the essential nature of this unity, and whether it is defined as Substance or Spirit.... What is of importance is the difference in the character of the unity. The unity of God is always unity, but everything depends upon the particular nature of the unity; this point being disregarded, that upon which everything depends is overlooked.”[297] It is, then, in the nature of the unity that Hegel expects to find a way out of the difficulty.
Of course the unity which Hegel is here emphasizing is the unity of the Notion. This unity of the Notion it is which he thinks satisfactorily explains the relation of the Absolute to the world of particularity. This is evident from a glance at the Logic. For it is this unity of the Notion that is the culmination of the dialectical development of the categories and receives complete expression in the category of categories, the Absolute Idea. This unity it is, therefore, that is the ultimate expression of reality, the final statement of the relation between God and the world.
What, now, is this unity of the Notion? If the interpretation of Hegel given in the present study is not fundamentally false and all of our arguments up to this point totally vicious, it seems that we are forced to say that the unity of the Notion is the category of self-consciousness.
This is the conclusion that is forced upon us by the Phenomenology of Spirit; the Notion is the life of mind. Likewise, the Logic teaches us the same lesson: since the Absolute Idea is the ultimate expression of the unity of the Notion, it follows, if the Absolute Idea is a self-conscious Individual, that the unity of the Notion, that unity which explains the nature of reality, must be self-consciousness. Indeed, this seems to be just the point that Hegel has in mind, in numerous passages in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Religion, the Philosophy of Mind, and elsewhere, in which he draws a distinction, as he does in the passages cited above, between the definition of the Absolute as Substance and his own conception of the Absolute as Spirit, or Subject, and urges that the latter definition offers the only way of escape from pantheism in our metaphysics. It is in the category of self-consciousness, therefore, that we are to look for an exemplification of the unity of the Notion.
Let us try to see how this category aids us in our present problem.
In attempting to do this, we shall first briefly analyze self-consciousness to discover its fundamental characteristics; and then we shall, on the basis of this analysis, see what must be our conclusions concerning an Absolute Consciousness. For it seems certain that, if we are to argue at all concerning a personal Absolute, we must rest the discussion on an analysis of finite consciousness; there is no other basis of discussion. At any rate, this is what Hegel does, as the Phenomenology shows; and we are interested primarily in setting forth his doctrines and their justification.
Whatever other characteristics finite self-consciousness may have, there are three which can hardly be called in question. The first of these is that consciousness always has a content. By that I mean that there is always something other than the consciousness itself, which exists as the object of it. Apart from this objective reference consciousness is the veriest abstraction.[298] The second characteristic of consciousness is that it always includes its content as something essentially its own. The content is not received by consciousness as if it were a stranger to be momentarily entertained and then lost forever: on the contrary, the content is the very life of the consciousness that possesses it. As Hegel would say, spirit finds the object to be bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, and so all alienation between the two has disappeared. This characteristic of the conscious life needs some emphasis; we have so formed the habit of thinking that the content is an element foreign to consciousness, that we are prone to forget the abstraction that is responsible for the habit. It requires only a little reflection, however, to bring to light the vital unity that exists between consciousness and its content – a unity that is absolutely fundamental to the integrity of each. The last characteristic of consciousness that I would call attention to is this: consciousness is never identical with, but is always something more than, its content. Notwithstanding the fact that the content is always received by consciousness as its very own, as its other self in fact, still there is a distinction between the two that never disappears; consciousness and its content never fall together in an undifferentiated identity.
The fundamental importance of these three characteristics of consciousness, as well as their vital interconnectedness, may be emphasized by a brief analysis of self-consciousness. It is evident that as a self-conscious being I am of a two-fold nature. In the first place, I am a bundle of sensations, feelings, impulses, desires, volitions, and ideas.
This is the object-self. And from this point of view I am eternally changing.
At any moment of my existence I am never what I have been, or shall be, at any other moment. At one instant I am a center of impulses and passions; at another, a centre of ideas and ideals. To-day I am a self of pleasures; tomorrow, a self of pains. An everlasting panorama of change, a veritable Heracleitean flux – this is what the object-self really is. But there is another fact about this self-consciousness that must be taken into account; so far we have considered only one side of it. It is true that I am eternally changing, that I am not what I have been heretofore, and that I shall never be again just what I am now. And yet, paradoxical as it may sound, what I have been I am, and what I am I shall be.
Underlying the panorama of change, deeper than the self that is in a never-ceasing process of transformation, is another self that gives unity and coherence to the process. This is the subject-self. And this it is that makes education, spiritual development in general, possible; without it our experience would be at best but a chaos of meaningless sensations and incoherent desires. These two aspects or phases seem to be present in all self-consciousness. Take a cross-section of consciousness at any moment, and you will discover that it is of this two-fold nature. Even in our moments of most intense introspection, when we enter as intimately as possible into ourselves, we find that this duality is present; indeed, one is inclined to say, it is then that its presence is most strongly impressed upon us.
It is to be noticed, moreover, that the duality is absolutely essential to self-consciousness. Not only do we find it actually present in self-consciousness; the implication of experience is that it must exist so long as consciousness itself exists. For self-consciousness is just this duality: the subject-self and the object-self exist only as they co-exist. This fact may be illustrated by the consciousness that we possess just as we are falling asleep. In proportion as this duality is overcome does the waking consciousness sink away; and it rapidly returns when the attention becomes fixed upon some object and the duality, unknown and unexperienced in the land of dreams, is restored. And normal waking consciousness illustrates the same truth. He is most truly self-conscious who sinks himself, as we say, in the object that occupies the focus of consciousness; this is the ethical import of the doctrine of self-abnegation.[299] But this sinking of the self in the object attended to does not destroy the difference between the self and the object; rather does it intensify the duality. For the object absorbs attention only in proportion as it harmonizes with a set of purposes and interests that are themselves clearly defined. To take a concrete case, let us suppose that I am intensely interested in a botanical specimen. Here there is evidently a unity of subject and object; indeed, it would be difficult to differentiate the two, and the difficulty would increase with the increase of my interest in the specimen.
And yet, clearly, there is a difference. The specimen grasps my interest only as it makes its appeal to a self whose centre of being is more or less clearly defined; and the more significant the hold of the specimen on my attention, the deeper and more significant must have been my training in the science of botany. If I am a mere tyro in botanical investigations, the specimen would not make the same appeal as it would were I thoroughly versed in the subject; and the difference is that in the former case the appeal would be made to a less thoroughly developed self. The unity, and consequently the duality, is not as clearly defined in the former case as in the latter. The very unity of consciousness thus seems to be organically bound up with this dual relation of subject and object.
And from this follows immediately a further result. Since this duality is essential to consciousness, these two phases of subject and object cannot fall into identity with each other. Take any case of consciousness that you please, whether it be consciousness of objects in the mental or in the physical world. Do you find there a coincidence between subject and object? Certainly not. The object is never its own consciousness; there is, and can be, no identity between them. It is inconsistent with the very nature of consciousness that these two phases collapse into identity.
As Professor Royce says, “When we are aware only of unity, it appears that we then become aware of nothing at all.”[300] The presupposition of consciousness is that there shall be something, an object in the physical world, an object in the mental world, something other than the consciousness itself, of which the consciousness shall be. The two cannot be identical with each other.
But this essential duality within consciousness must not be misconstrued as a dualism. In his famous deduction of the categories, Kant unfortunately speaks too much as if the subject-self were superimposed on the object-self as something essentially foreign to it. But the real lesson he has to teach us in that deduction is a deeper one. And that lesson is that the unity and the differences within conscious experience are really one, that there is no chasm between them. It is true that the data which constitute the object-self seem to be facts drawn from a world external to that self, or, at any rate, external to the synthetic unity that binds these data into a unitary and organic whole. But both of these positions fall before criticism, for the data are vitally concerned in their own organization. We must admit that Kant has once for all shown us, at least by implication if not explicitly, that the object-self is not foreign to the subject-self: the data of the Sensibility and the categories of the Understanding are common expressions of one fundamental principle.
And this implication of the Kantian philosophy becomes explicit in Hegel.
The burden of the Phenomenology, as we saw in our first chapter, is that these two selves are organically bound up with each other, and that, if we are to speak accurately, we must call them, not two selves, but only two points of view from which we look at the one self – subject-object.
And it seems that we are forced to say that this is the verdict of experience. Consequently, to view these two phases of consciousness in isolation is to view them abstractly. Of course, this abstraction is perfectly justifiable, indeed, necessary from the standpoint of the particular sciences; but it is dangerous for metaphysics. Whether the emphasis is placed upon the subject or the object is a matter of indifference so far as the metaphysical difficulty involved in their separation is concerned; metaphysically, they are not separable. The data of the object-self get their reality only when organized by the categories of the subject-self; and, on the other hand, the categories are essentially those data, otherwise it is incomprehensible how the organization could possibly take place. Thus the separation between the two is overreached and the two fall together. They are different, and yet they are one such seems to be the paradoxical relation existing between the two sides of consciousness.
The results of our analysis of finite self-consciousness are these.
The characteristics of consciousness are that it has a content, that it differs from this content, and yet at the same time is one with it. Moreover, each of these is a condition that must be met, if consciousness is to exist at all. If the content is removed, then of course consciousness is destroyed, because there is nothing of which the consciousness could be. Likewise, if consciousness and its content are identified, consciousness ceases, for the identification simply amounts to the removal of the content; and here again the essential duality is done away with. Finally, if a chasm is made between consciousness and its content, consciousness again is made impossible; when an impassable barrier is erected between the two, the duality upon which consciousness depends is once more removed.[301] This three-fold condition is the presupposition of all finite consciousness.
Now it would seem that, on the basis of this analysis of finite consciousness, we should be justified in making the following assertions concerning an Absolute Consciousness. In the first place, such a Consciousness would necessarily have a content; that is, there would have to be an Other of which the Absolute is conscious. In the second place, this Other would not be regarded by the Absolute as something foreign or external, in the sense that it lay genuinely outside of the Absolute; rather would it be possessed as an essential element within the Absolute.
And, lastly, the Absolute would necessarily differentiate this Other from itself in such a way as to preserve the duality that we have found to be essential to the conscious life. And our justification for making these assertions concerning an Absolute Consciousness is simply that these characteristics which we have attributed to the Absolute are those that experience shows us to be fundamental to all consciousness as we know it; and unless we are to reduce our discussions to meaningless logomachy, we must test them by concrete experience. Certainly it seems that we must assume that the conditions prerequisite to finite consciousness must be fulfilled in an Absolute Consciousness.
What now must be our answer to the dilemma with which we began our discussion? In the first place, it would seem that we have found a way of escape from pantheism in our doctrine of the Absolute. For so long as we maintain the self-consciousness of the Absolute, we are forced to maintain also that the Absolute and the world are differentiated from each other. Really, pantheism is logically possible only to the metaphysician who denies the self-consciousness of the Absolute. For pantheism, if it means anything, means identity between the Absolute and the world of finite existence; whatever form the theory may take, it ultimately reduces everything in the universe to an undifferentiated unity with the all-inclusive One. But, if the Absolute be regarded as a self-conscious Individual, this abstract identity becomes impossible; because, as our analysis of the category has disclosed, consciousness always demands a content from which it is differentiated. Destruction of this duality is the destruction of the possibility of consciousness. Therefore no theory that maintains that the Absolute is Self-Consciousness can legitimately be accused of pantheism so long as it is consistent.[302] But have we escaped the other horn of our dilemma? Our own argument has forced us to admit that an Other to the Absolute is essential; indeed, it is this fact that relieves us from any fears concerning pantheism as the outcome of our doctrine. And have we not virtually limited the Absolute by positing this Other, which our analysis of consciousness has compelled us to assume is necessary? The answer to this objection is involved in what we have just been saying about the fact that the two extremes of the equation of consciousness are not foreign to each other; and it might perhaps be sufficient simply to point to this fact in meeting the objection. But, since this criticism against the doctrine of the personality of the Absolute is so general, and that, too, amongst Idealists of a certain type, it seems well in concluding this discussion to devote some attention to it.
I have chosen Mr. McTaggart as the representative of this type of criticism, because his objections are advanced immediately in connection with a study of Hegel’s system.[303] His views can best be expressed in his own words: “The Absolute is a unity of system, and not a unity of centre, and the element of unity in it cannot be a simple and indivisible point, like that of the finite self. For if the unity is of this sort, then, by virtue of its simplicity and indivisibility, it excludes its differentiation from itself in one sense, while including them in another. But the Absolute cannot exclude its differentiations from itself in any sense.... There is nothing outside of the Absolute. And it would therefore be impossible for it to exclude its differentiations from itself in any sense. For in as far as they are not in it, they are absolutely wrong.[304] In order to evaluate this objection, we must again look at consciousness and ask concerning its real nature. As we have already pointed out, consciousness always demands a content with which it is never identical; without such a content consciousness is nothing but an empty abstraction.
Consciousness presupposes differentiations, and in some sense it is true that these differentiations are excluded from it. But this is not the whole story; there is another aspect of the conscious life that we cannot afford to overlook. Consciousness not only excludes its differentiations, it also includes them. The exclusion is never absolute; the content is a vital part of the consciousness; in a very important sense it is the consciousness. Consciousness overreaches the distinction between itself and its content and takes the content up into itself, so that the content, though different from, yet is one with the consciousness. As Edward Caird aptly puts it, “The self can be conscious of itself as so distinguished and related, only in so far as it overreaches the distinction between itself and its object.”[305] Thus it is that the self or consciousness may be said both to include and exclude its object; and the fact of inclusion is complementary to the fact of exclusion. Inclusion does not mean the abstract identity of subject-self and object-self; nor, on the other hand, does exclusion mean their abstract opposition. Consciousness includes its various differentiations, because they are its differentiations; it excludes them, because they are its differentiations. Inclusion and exclusion are only different names for the same fact, just as are the concave and convex sides of a curved line.
If, now, we are to argue on the basis of finite consciousness concerning the nature of Absolute Consciousness – and, I repeat, I know of no other basis on which to argue – it would seem that we are forced to conclude that such a Consciousness, granting its existence, would necessarily at once include and exclude its differentiations. Every object in the world would be included in such a Consciousness, because every object in the world would be an object for such a Consciousness. But the inclusion would not, could not, be that of identity. For every object in the world would have to be excluded from such a Consciousness, since no object in the world would actually be that Consciousness.[306] And the exclusion could not be abstract opposition; the differentiations would still be differentiations of the consciousness for which they exist.
The Absolute Consciousness, like all other consciousness, would be confined to the circle of its own differentiations: this we seem forced to admit. But the differentiations of the Absolute, like the differentiations of finite consciousness, would be differentiations still: this also we seemed forced to admit. And with this we have admitted the inclusion and the exclusion of the differentiations of an absolute Consciousness. As Hegel remarks, “God is Himself consciousness, He distinguishes Himself from Himself within Himself, and as consciousness He gives Himself as object for what we call the side of consciousness.”[307] This is exactly what every finite consciousness does in its own limited way: it gives itself as object, distinguishes itself from itself within itself, and is at once knower and known, possessor and possessed, subject and object. Such seems to be the paradox of consciousness as such; there is nothing inherently contradictory or absurd about it – unless, indeed, consciousness itself is an absurdity.
Thus we are forced to say that Mr. McTaggart’s objection to the doctrine of a personal Absolute rests upon a misconstruction of the true import of the category of self-consciousness. The objection stands or falls with the contention that, if the Absolute were to exclude its differentiations from itself, those differentiations would either cease to be real or stand as a limitation to the Absolute. Now this contention holds only on the condition that the Absolute is forced to oppose to itself its differentiations as something entirely beyond and foreign to it. But it is the very nature of consciousness not to do this, if our analysis has been correct. For as we have repeatedly seen, perhaps to the point of weariness, consciousness is a duality within unity; and if you destroy either the unity or the duality, you utterly annihilate the conscious life. And it seems evident that, if you construct a chasm between consciousness and its differentiations, you do irreparable violence to the unity between the two. At your touch both consciousness and its differentiations vanish into nothingness. There is no meaning in talking about the exclusion of something by consciousness, unless that something is included in consciousness; for consciousness excludes its differentiations just by virtue of the fact that it includes them. To argue, therefore, that an Absolute Consciousness is impossible because it cannot abstractly oppose itself to its differentiations is exactly as convincing as it would be to argue that finite consciousness is impossible because it cannot do the same.
You could argue either way indifferently and with equal success in both cases; for your demand sins against the presupposition of all consciousness.
Of course an Absolute Consciousness is impossible, provided it is so by definition; but why define it so? It seems to be no more inherently absurd than finite consciousness, and there can be no question that finite consciousness is an actuality.
It is interesting to notice that this objection of Mr. McTaggart is inconsistent with his own analysis of finite consciousness. Speaking in another context of the finite self, which he grants is ‘sufficiently paradoxical,’ he says: “What does it included Everything of which it is conscious.
What does it exclude? Equally – everything of which it is conscious.
What can it say is not inside it? Nothing. What can it say is not outside it? A single abstraction. And any attempt to remove the paradox destroys the self. For the two sides are inevitably connected. If we try to make it a distinct individual by separating it from all other things, it loses all content of which it can be conscious, and so loses the very individuality which we started by trying to preserve. If, on the other hand, we try to save its content by emphasizing the inclusion at the expense of the exclusion, then the consciousness vanishes, and, since the self has no contents but the objects of which it is conscious, the content vanishes also.”[308] Now I submit that, if Mr. McTaggart stands consistently by the position here stated he cannot argue that consciousness, whether finite or absolute, can exclude its differentiations in any sense in which it does not at the same time and ipso facto include them.
And this is the ground upon which his objection against the doctrine of a personal Absolute, as I comprehend it, rests. To say that the finite self excludes its differentiations in a manner that would be impossible to the Absolute assumes the very point at issue, and so begs the whole question.
Does the finite self exclude its differentiations in a manner impossible for the Absolute? Certainly not, if we are willing to accept Mr.
McTaggart’s analysis of finite consciousness. The finite self, he tells us, includes everything of which it is conscious, and it excludes everything that it includes. But, be it noted, it does not cease to include because it excludes: inclusion and exclusion, we are told, are ‘inevitably connected.’ If, now, finite consciousness at once includes and excludes its differentiations, is there anything absurd in the position that Absolute Consciousness may do the same? If the finite consciousness is a differentiation of the Absolute just because of its paradoxical nature – and this, we must remember, is the basis upon which Mr. McTaggart rests his argument for the immortality of the individual – may it not be that the Absolute itself embodies this paradox par excellence? If inclusion and exclusion by consciousness are correlative terms, why is it impossible for a perfect Consciousness to include everything in the universe and yet at the same time and just for that reason exclude it? Why, in short, would it be necessary for the infinite and perfect self to fail just in that respect which constitutes the very essence of the finite and imperfect self? Arguing in this vein appears to be an approach to absurdity; and yet this seems to be the position into which Mr. McTaggart is forced by his own analysis of consciousness.[309] The whole difficulty with Mr. McTaggart’s position may be put in very brief compass. His objection rests upon the disjunction with which we began: either pantheism or a finite God, either abstract identity between the absolute and its differentiations or a limited Absolute. But this disjunction depends upon an abstract view of the nature of consciousness.
For it implies that consciousness must be either identical with or abstractly opposed to its differentiations, that the Absolute either is the world or must regard the world as something essentially foreign to itself. This disjunction, however, plainly flies in the face of experience.
As we have tried to show, and as Mr. McTaggart himself has pointed out, consciousness and its differentiations are neither identical nor yet opposed to each other: they are ‘inevitably connected,’ and each lives in the life of the other. And when we make a violent separation between them, or assume a position that implies this separation, we should not forget the fact that the possibility of finite consciousness, as well as the possibility of an Absolute Consciousness is thereby denied – simply because we then have done away with the presupposition of all consciousness. And this suggests to us that it would be well to investigate experience further, before we commit ourselves to a position that leads to such singularly disastrous results. This essential unity of the Absolute and its Other Hegel emphasizes in his exposition of the philosophical import of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation.[310] In this dogma we have expressed in religious terms the philosophical truth that “the divine and human natures are not implicitly different.” In Jesus Christ is manifested the Universal, God; the contingent and accidental circumstances of temporal life are disregarded by Him. “Who is my mother and my brother?” “Let the dead bury their dead.” But Christ is not only God; he is also the Son of Man, the Man of Sorrows. In his death we have evidence of the fact that He shares the common fate of all human beings; indeed, “in Him humanity was carried to its furthest point,” since he died the aggravated death of the evil-doer. This Personality, which reaches to the glories of the Infinite, touches also, by virtue of its divinity, the lowest abyss of the finite. The true lesson of the Incarnation, Hegel would seem to say, is that God is not high and lifted up beyond the world of time and place; but that He is also here, and that it is only here that He finds full and complete expression. God’s Other is His own very Self, and not an existence beyond Him.
In conclusion, then, we may say that, as Hegel views the matter, the puzzle of God’s relation to the world is to a considerable extent one of our own making. By a process of abstraction we separate God from the world, and then proceed to ask how we are ever to get them together again; we destroy their essential interconnectedness, and then raise the cry that their relation to each other is to us incomprehensible. Consequently, we must either take refuge in an impotent faith or be content to remain sceptics and agnostics. “The ‘reflective’ understanding begins by rejecting all systems and modes of conception, which, whether they spring from heart, imagination, or speculation, express the interconnection of God and the world: and in order to have God pure in faith or consciousness, he is as essence parted from appearance, as infinite from the finite. But, after this partition, the conviction arises also that the appearance has a relation to the essence, the finite to the infinite, and so on: and thus arises the question of reflection as to the nature of this relation. It is in the reflective form that the whole difficulty of the affair lies, and that causes this relation to be called incomprehensible by the agnostic.”[311] Hegel’s own solution of the problem, which he proceeds to outline for us in the paragraph from which this passage is taken, is to be found on a plane which transcends the point of view of the ‘reflective understanding’; and his solution consists really in pointing out that the separation that gives rise to the problem is the result of abstract thinking.
This more concrete standpoint he calls the Notion of the speculative Reason, which is, in the last analysis, the category of self-consciousness.
Table of Contents
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<p class="title">Lu�s Carlos Prestes 1925</p>
<h3>Manifesto of the Prestes Column<br>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">October 19th, 1925</span></h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source</span>: <a href="../../../portugues/prestes/1925/10/19.htm"><em>Manifesto da Coluna Prestes</em></a>;<br>
<span class="info">Translated</span>: by Lucas Fernandes for marxists.org 2015.</p><hr class="end">
<p>Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny.</p>
<p>Despite this long peregrination full of sacrifice, we are still animated by the same unshakable faith of the early days of our journey based on the certainty that the majority of Brazilians share with us the ideals of the Revolution and yearn for Brazil to reinstate liberal principles which are inherent to our Constitution. Now, however, the majority of Brazilians are being trampled by a political syndicate without scruples which has seized the fate of the country in order to squander its fortune, bloody its territory and vilify the best of its traditions.</p>
<p>The people can rest assured that the revolutionary soldiers will not surrender until they have seen the death of despotism and intolerance which asphyxiates in delirious oppression the better wishes of the national consciousness!</p>
<p>Brazilian People!</p>
<p>We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war. </p>
<p>It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland.</p>
<p>To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people.</p>
<p>No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions.</p>
<p>On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months.</p>
<p>Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs.</p>
<p>We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed.</p>
<p class="indentb">Porto Nacional, 19th of October, 1925.<br>
General Miguel Costa<br>
Colonel Lu�s Carlos Prestes<br>
Colonel Juarez T�vora.</p>
<p class="skip"> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../index.htm"> Lu�s Carlos Prestes Archive</a>
</p>
</body> |
Lu�s Carlos Prestes 1925
Manifesto of the Prestes Column
October 19th, 1925
Source: Manifesto da Coluna Prestes;
Translated: by Lucas Fernandes for marxists.org 2015.
Fellow citizens: Today, after fifteen months of bitter fighting – marked daily by all of the anguish which darkens the sad situation of a civil war – having arrived at the heart of Brazil and the banks of the portentous Tocantins, we have the happy opportunity to once again remind our homeland that the patriotic crusade initiated on the fifth of July in the glorious city of Sao Paulo and whose ranks were later added to by the brave sons of the South, has not yet died and will not die, or be overwhelmed by the bayonets of tyranny.
Despite this long peregrination full of sacrifice, we are still animated by the same unshakable faith of the early days of our journey based on the certainty that the majority of Brazilians share with us the ideals of the Revolution and yearn for Brazil to reinstate liberal principles which are inherent to our Constitution. Now, however, the majority of Brazilians are being trampled by a political syndicate without scruples which has seized the fate of the country in order to squander its fortune, bloody its territory and vilify the best of its traditions.
The people can rest assured that the revolutionary soldiers will not surrender until they have seen the death of despotism and intolerance which asphyxiates in delirious oppression the better wishes of the national consciousness!
Brazilian People!
We know well that the country suffers. So too do the people, with the inevitable procession of violence which accompanies war.
It is necessary however, no matter the cost, for Brazil to once again sustain control of its own fate – whether or not new martyrs must add their blood to the blood already sacrificed by those who have given their lives for the liberation of their homeland.
To retreat at this moment would forsake an ideal, for so many dear companions have made this great sacrifice. Indeed, after such an abjuration would there most certainly be a loss of life and liberty to absolute despotism. Despotism which has not once brought honor to Christianity or the tradition of generosity in our people.
No one wishes to see, however, a desire to wage war on intransigent whims or ambitions.
On the contrary: we want peace, and only for peace would we fight for more than fifteen months.
Furthermore, we want peace without opprobrium, rooted in justice – that is, in short, able to restore to the country a peace of mind which it so desperately needs.
We will surely repel the dark and tragic peace which masks the vilification of the slave’s quarters. Ultimately, if the finality of destiny must represent itself like the last swig of bitter gall to consume, we would prefer, without any hesitancy, the great anguish of being crushed.
Porto Nacional, 19th of October, 1925.
General Miguel Costa
Colonel Lu�s Carlos Prestes
Colonel Juarez T�vora.
Lu�s Carlos Prestes Archive
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./articles/Schreiner-Olive/https:..www.marxists.org.subject.women.authors.schrein.farm.index | <body>
<h2>Olive Schreiner's</h2>
<h4>(Ralph Iron)</h4>
<h1>The Story of an African Farm</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<b>First Published:</b> 1883.<br>
<b>Transcribed:</b> Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg. <br>
<b>HTML Markup:</b> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a> for marxists.org in 2000.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h4>Contents</h4>
<p class="toc">
<a href="preface.htm">Preface.</a></p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="gloss.htm">Glossary.</a> </p>
<br>
<p class="toc">
Part I.
</p><p class="index">
<a href="ch01a.htm">Chapter 1. I. Shadows From Child Life.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01b.htm">
Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01c.htm">
Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01d.htm">
Chapter 1.IV. Blessed is He That Believeth.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01e.htm">
Chapter 1.V. Sunday Services.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01f.htm">
Chapter 1.VI. Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01g.htm">
Chapter 1.VII. He Sets His Trap.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01h.htm">
Chapter 1.VIII. He Catches the Old Bird.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01i.htm">
Chapter 1.IX. He Sees A Ghost.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01j.htm">
Chapter 1.X. He Shows His Teeth.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01k.htm">
Chapter 1.XI. He Snaps.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01l.htm">
Chapter 1.XII. He Bites.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch01m.htm">
Chapter 1.XIII. He Makes Love.</a></p>
<p class="toc">
Part II.</p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch02a.htm">
Chapter 2.I. Times and Seasons.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02b.htm">
Chapter 2.II. Waldo's Stranger.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02c.htm">
Chapter 2.III. Gregory Rose Finds His Affinity.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02d.htm">
Chapter 2.IV. Lyndall.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02e.htm">
Chapter 2.V. Tant Sannie Holds An Upsitting, and Gregory Writes A Letter.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02f.htm">
Chapter 2.VI. A Boer-wedding.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02g.htm">
Chapter 2.VII. Waldo Goes Out to Taste Life, and Em Stays At Home and
Tastes It.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02h.htm">
Chapter 2.VIII. The Kopje.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02i.htm">
Chapter 2.IX. Lyndall's Stranger.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02j.htm">
Chapter 2.X. Gregory Rose Has An Idea.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02k.htm">
Chapter 2.XI. An Unfinished Letter.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02l.htm">
Chapter 2.XII. Gregory's Womanhood.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02m.htm">
Chapter 2.XIII. Dreams.</a>
<br>
<a href="ch02n.htm">
Chapter 2.XIV. Waldo Goes Out to Sit in the Sunshine.</a></p>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="preface.htm">Read Preface</a> |
<a href="../index.htm">Women and Marxism - Olive Schreiner</a><br>
<a href="../../../index.htm">Women and Marxism main page</a> |
<a href="../../../../../index.htm">Marxists Internet Archive</a></p>
</body> |
Olive Schreiner's
(Ralph Iron)
The Story of an African Farm
First Published: 1883.
Transcribed: Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan for marxists.org in 2000.
Contents
Preface.
Glossary.
Part I.
Chapter 1. I. Shadows From Child Life.
Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.
Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.
Chapter 1.IV. Blessed is He That Believeth.
Chapter 1.V. Sunday Services.
Chapter 1.VI. Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest.
Chapter 1.VII. He Sets His Trap.
Chapter 1.VIII. He Catches the Old Bird.
Chapter 1.IX. He Sees A Ghost.
Chapter 1.X. He Shows His Teeth.
Chapter 1.XI. He Snaps.
Chapter 1.XII. He Bites.
Chapter 1.XIII. He Makes Love.
Part II.
Chapter 2.I. Times and Seasons.
Chapter 2.II. Waldo's Stranger.
Chapter 2.III. Gregory Rose Finds His Affinity.
Chapter 2.IV. Lyndall.
Chapter 2.V. Tant Sannie Holds An Upsitting, and Gregory Writes A Letter.
Chapter 2.VI. A Boer-wedding.
Chapter 2.VII. Waldo Goes Out to Taste Life, and Em Stays At Home and
Tastes It.
Chapter 2.VIII. The Kopje.
Chapter 2.IX. Lyndall's Stranger.
Chapter 2.X. Gregory Rose Has An Idea.
Chapter 2.XI. An Unfinished Letter.
Chapter 2.XII. Gregory's Womanhood.
Chapter 2.XIII. Dreams.
Chapter 2.XIV. Waldo Goes Out to Sit in the Sunshine.
Read Preface |
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<blockquote>
<div class="border">
<br>
<p class="header">Olive Schreiner 1911</p>
<h1>Woman and Labour</h1>
<img src="../../../../../glossary/people/s/pics/schreiner-olive.jpg" border="1" align="right" hspace="20" vspace="2" alt="Olive Schreiner">
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">First Published</span>: London: Unwin, 1911; <br>
<span class="info">Transcribed</span>: Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg;<br>
<span class="info">HTML Markup</span>: <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a> for marxists.org in 2000.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">
Dedicated to Constance Lytton</p>
<p class="indentb">
"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,<br>
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea –<br>
Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong –<br>
Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she:<br>
Give her the glory of going on and still to be."<br>
Tennyson.</p>
<p class="fst">
Olive Schreiner.<br>
De Aar, Cape of Good Hope,<br>
South Africa. 1911.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h4>Contents</h4>
<p class="index">
<a href="intro.htm">Introduction</a></p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch01.htm">Chapter I. Parasitism</a> </p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch02.htm">Chapter II. Parasitism (continued)</a> </p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch03.htm">Chapter III. Parasitism (continued)</a> </p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch04.htm">Chapter IV. Woman and War</a> </p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch05.htm">Chapter V. Sex Differences</a> </p>
<p class="index">
<a href="ch06.htm">Chapter VI. Certain Objections</a> </p>
<p> </p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../index.htm" target="_top">Olive Schreiner Archive</a> |
<a href="../../../index.htm" target="_top">Women and Marxism</a></p>
<p class="pagenote">
To volunteer for the MIA, Email our <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/steering.htm">Admin Committee</a></p>
</div>
</blockquote>
</body> |
Olive Schreiner 1911
Woman and Labour
First Published: London: Unwin, 1911;
Transcribed: Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg;
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan for marxists.org in 2000.
Dedicated to Constance Lytton
"Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea –
Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong –
Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she:
Give her the glory of going on and still to be."
Tennyson.
Olive Schreiner.
De Aar, Cape of Good Hope,
South Africa. 1911.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I. Parasitism
Chapter II. Parasitism (continued)
Chapter III. Parasitism (continued)
Chapter IV. Woman and War
Chapter V. Sex Differences
Chapter VI. Certain Objections
Olive Schreiner Archive |
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<h2>Olive Schreiner's</h2>
<h1>Dream Life and Real Life</h1>
<h3>A Little African Story</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<b>First Published:</b> 1892.<br>
<b>Transcribed:</b> Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg. <br>
<b>HTML Markup:</b> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a> for marxists.org in 2000.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h5>Dedication.</h5>
<p>
To My Brother Fred,
</p><p>
For whose little school magazine the first of these tiny stories--one of<br>
the first I ever made--was written out many long years ago.
</p>
<p>
O.S.
<br>
New College, Eastbourne,<br>
Sept. 29, 1893.
<br>
</p><h4>Contents</h4>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch01.htm">I. Dream Life and Real Life; a Little African Story</a></p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch02.htm">II. The Woman's Rose.</a> </p>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch03.htm">III. "The Policy in Favour of Protection–".</a>
</p><p>
Kopjes - In the karoo, are hillocks of stones, that rise up singly or in<br>
clusters, here and there; presenting sometimes the fantastic appearance of<br>
old ruined castles or giant graves, the work of human hands.<br>
Kraal - A sheepfold.<br>
Krantz - A precipice.<br>
Sluit - A deep fissure, generally dry, in which the superfluous torrents of<br>
water are carried from the karoo plains after thunderstorms.<br>
Stoep - A porch.
</p>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="ch01.htm">Read Part I</a> |
<a href="../index.htm">Women and Marxism - Olive Schreiner</a><br>
<a href="../../../index.htm">Women and Marxism</a> |
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</body> |
Olive Schreiner's
Dream Life and Real Life
A Little African Story
First Published: 1892.
Transcribed: Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan for marxists.org in 2000.
Dedication.
To My Brother Fred,
For whose little school magazine the first of these tiny stories--one of
the first I ever made--was written out many long years ago.
O.S.
New College, Eastbourne,
Sept. 29, 1893.
Contents
I. Dream Life and Real Life; a Little African Story
II. The Woman's Rose.
III. "The Policy in Favour of Protection–".
Kopjes - In the karoo, are hillocks of stones, that rise up singly or in
clusters, here and there; presenting sometimes the fantastic appearance of
old ruined castles or giant graves, the work of human hands.
Kraal - A sheepfold.
Krantz - A precipice.
Sluit - A deep fissure, generally dry, in which the superfluous torrents of
water are carried from the karoo plains after thunderstorms.
Stoep - A porch.
Read Part I |
Women and Marxism - Olive Schreiner
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<h2>Olive Schreiner's</h2>
<h1>Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<b>First Published:</b> 1897.<br>
<b>Transcribed:</b> Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg. <br>
<b>HTML Markup:</b> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a> for marxists.org in 2000.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p>
To a Great Good Man, Sir George Grey,
</p><p>
Once Governor of the Cape Colony, who, during his rule in South Africa,
bound to himself the Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives he governed, by an
uncorruptible justice and a broad humanity; and who is remembered among us
today as representing the noblest attributes of an Imperial Rule.
</p><p>
"Our low life was the level's and the night's;<br>
He's for the morning."
</p><p>
Olive Schreiner.
</p><p>
19, Russell Road,<br>
Kensington, W.,<br>
February, 1897.</p>
<br>
<h4>Contents</h4>
<p class="toc">
<a href="ch01.htm"> Chapter I. </a>
<br>
<a href="ch02.htm">Chapter II.</a>
</p><p>
Aardvark - The great anteater.<br>
Cape Smoke - A very inferior brandy made in Cape Colony.<br>
Kopje - Little hillock.<br>
Kraal - A Kaffir encampment.<br>
Mealies - Maize (corn).<br>
Riem - A thong of undressed leather universally used in South Africa.<br>
Vatje of Old Dop - A little cask of Cape brandy.<br>
Veld - Open Country.
</p>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="ch01.htm">Read Part I</a> |
<a href="../index.htm">Women and Marxism - Olive Schreiner</a> |
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</p></body> |
Olive Schreiner's
Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland
First Published: 1897.
Transcribed: Sue Asscher for Project Gutenberg.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan for marxists.org in 2000.
To a Great Good Man, Sir George Grey,
Once Governor of the Cape Colony, who, during his rule in South Africa,
bound to himself the Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives he governed, by an
uncorruptible justice and a broad humanity; and who is remembered among us
today as representing the noblest attributes of an Imperial Rule.
"Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning."
Olive Schreiner.
19, Russell Road,
Kensington, W.,
February, 1897.
Contents
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Aardvark - The great anteater.
Cape Smoke - A very inferior brandy made in Cape Colony.
Kopje - Little hillock.
Kraal - A Kaffir encampment.
Mealies - Maize (corn).
Riem - A thong of undressed leather universally used in South Africa.
Vatje of Old Dop - A little cask of Cape brandy.
Veld - Open Country.
Read Part I |
Women and Marxism - Olive Schreiner |
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<h4>Olive Shreiner</h4>
<h3>Selected Letters</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<strong>Source:</strong> <em>The Letters Of Olive Schreiner, 1876-1920</em>;<br>
<b>Published:</b> Unwin, 1924.<br>
<strong>Edited:</strong> S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner.<br>
<strong>Transcribed:</strong> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm">Sally Ryan</a> for marxists.org in 2000.</p>
<p class="index">
1884, July 16: To <a href="84_07_16.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1884, July 18: To <a href="84_07_18.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1884, July 24: To <a href="84_07_24.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1884, July 29: To <a href="84_07_29.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1884, Aug 2: To <a href="84_08_02.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1887, May 24: To <a href="87_05_24.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1890, Nov 6: To <a href="90_11_06.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1892, Sept 25: To <a href="92_09_25.htm">T. Fisher Unwin</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1892, Sept 26: To <a href="92_09_26.htm">T. Fisher Unwin</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1895, Jan 10: To <a href="95_01_10.htm">W. T. Stead</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1900, October 9: letter read on the <a href="00_10_09.htm">Boer War</a> at the Paarl Women's Meeting<br>
</p><p class="index">
1895, March 25: To <a href="95_03_25.htm">W. T. Stead</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1904, May 13: To <a href="04_05_14.htm">Mrs. Francis Smith</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1905, ?: letter read at a <a href="05_shop.htm">Johannesburg Shop Assistants' Demonstration</a> <br>
</p><p class="index">
1908, May 29: Letter read on <a href="08_05_29.htm">Women's Suffrage</a> at a public meeting in Cape Town<br>
</p><p class="index">
1912, Sept: To <a href="12_09.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1913, ?: To <a href="12_sun.htm">Havelock Ellis</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1913, April 29: To <a href="13_04_29.htm">Edward Carpenter</a><br>
</p><p class="index">
1915, March: To <a href="15_03.htm">Miss E. Hobhouse</a><br>
</p>
<br>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
<a href="../index.htm">Schreiner main page</a> |
<a href="../../../index.htm">Women and Marxism main page</a> |
<a href="../../../../../index.htm">Marxists Internet Archive</a>
</p></body> |
Olive Shreiner
Selected Letters
Source: The Letters Of Olive Schreiner, 1876-1920;
Published: Unwin, 1924.
Edited: S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner.
Transcribed: Sally Ryan for marxists.org in 2000.
1884, July 16: To Havelock Ellis
1884, July 18: To Havelock Ellis
1884, July 24: To Havelock Ellis
1884, July 29: To Havelock Ellis
1884, Aug 2: To Havelock Ellis
1887, May 24: To Havelock Ellis
1890, Nov 6: To Havelock Ellis
1892, Sept 25: To T. Fisher Unwin
1892, Sept 26: To T. Fisher Unwin
1895, Jan 10: To W. T. Stead
1900, October 9: letter read on the Boer War at the Paarl Women's Meeting
1895, March 25: To W. T. Stead
1904, May 13: To Mrs. Francis Smith
1905, ?: letter read at a Johannesburg Shop Assistants' Demonstration
1908, May 29: Letter read on Women's Suffrage at a public meeting in Cape Town
1912, Sept: To Havelock Ellis
1913, ?: To Havelock Ellis
1913, April 29: To Edward Carpenter
1915, March: To Miss E. Hobhouse
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