The concept is simple enough: a logical ordering of programmatic points that indicate the practical path from the minimum to the maximum program. That’s it, really. So, for example in the U.S., a program should begin by addressing the reality of the international migrant workers, mostly Mexican, presently contained in the political form of the immigrant rights movement. Through its various semi-legal and legal gradations as “Latino”, this sector forms a crucial part of the North American proletariat.

It should also be noted that the U.S. radical right continuously insists upon impaling itself on this “Latino bogeyman”. In the recent mid-term U.S. elections the key electoral defeats of the radical right were experienced by the most “Latino bashing” campaigns, notably in Nevada and Colorado, where that POS Reid had his derriere saved by the “Latino vote”. (We should also note in aside the failure of Silicon Valley capitalists to seize the key nodes of the state apparatus in California, the Governorship and the U.S. Senate). That tells us something else: the Democratic Party arm of the electoral state apparatus anxiously seeks to integrate a privileged sector of this population under its political circus tent.

It should also tell us that the program must address the electoral system as another “immediate reality” to be transitioned beyond. Yes, U.S. elections are the most banal of subjects, but some programmatic address must be made, even if only to advocate complete abstention (which in effect the program does by its complete absence). My own approach is “negative intervention” for the purpose of 1) disruption of the state apparatus and 2) propaganda platform. Nothing should be novel here, except that it has never really been done in the U.S.

Otherwise, good start!

—Towards Goldner’s statement, ” As capital turned inward on itself, the self-cannibalization of its social reproductive base since the late 1970s was echoed with eerie concision in the self-cannibalization of its once-emancipatory culture in the ideological Ebola virus spread by the post-modern nihilists and deconstructionists, the Foucaults, the Saids and the Derridas. As Marx said long ago, “the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.”

As an admirer of Foucault, Edward Said, and Derrida, I certainly would muddy the simple minded view of their relationship with the ruling elites. How is Foucault a part of the ruling elite in anyway? The most conservative is Derrida. He may have ended up a social democrat and an atheist/jewish mystic, but is he really to be dismissed without regard to his specific ideas. The late Said also ended becoming a liberal within the PLO, but so what. Said still pushed forward some brilliant criticism of the creation of colonial and post-colonial subject.

I would also add that non and post Marxist thinkers, like Deleuze, Laclau and Mouffee, Zizek, Negri, Badiou, Ranciere, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, V. Shiva, et al. certainly give me more inspiration than what is left of the old Marxian/anarchist paradigms.

But let us be like our caricature of the old left dismissing new and creative ideas.

Connecting together my thoughts on Angelo and Goldner is also my concerns about Insurgent notes dismissal of identity politics and any form of nationalism. Is not it time for a synthesis of class with race, ethnicity, sex, gender, preference and other forms of identity? If not a synthesis, how apart a constellation where we may focus on class in one moment, but pause to think apart queer and racial politics?

Speaking of the left communist book of the ICC, I wrote, I read something “in their.” That’s the wrong spelling of “their.” It should have read, “in there.”

I enjoyed your article.

But what constantly ran through my head as I read it was, well, yes, I’m politically schizophrenic between traditional Leninist-Trotskyist communism with its principle, “The crisis of humankind can be reduced in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership,” more or less as comrade Trotsky put it in 1938 in The Transitional Programme — and, on the other hand, left communism of the sort espoused by you, this on-line publication, Insurgent Notes, other left-communist types of organizations like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, International Communist Current, and, more traditionally and older, the International Communist Party (“Bordigists”).

But what I never see in the latter groups (with, perhaps, the exception of the Bordigists, i.e., the hardline Bordigists of the International Communist Party) is some conception that to make that final assault against capital of which you speak succeed, mobilization is objectively necessary, and since mobilization is objectively necessary, there’s got to be a revolutionary party — as Trotsky put it, a revolutionary leadership — doing the mobilizing. I mean, after all, even left communists call the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution a workers’ revolution (most, at any rate; I realize Paul Mattick concluded eventually that it was a kind of non-proletarian revolution, although reading all the history of the Bolshevik Revolution I’ve read, I can’t to this day comprehend how comrade Mattick concluded that), and a fair reading of the history of that world-shaking event shows there was a Military Revolutionary Committee in the Petrograd Soviet led by a fellow named Leon Trotsky and that they on the significant night of November 7-8, 1917 (October 25-26, 1917 by the old Julian calendar still in effect when the Bolsheviks took the power that night) that Military Revolutionary Committee and particularly comrade Trotsky did, like it or not, have to issue instructions to take over the various offices like the banks, police stations, telegraph office, etc., and then finally an order for the arrest of the old provisional government was issued and a Bolshevik-led squad of revolutionary workers and soldiers did the deed.

It’s certainly right to say that the lead-up to that titanic event was the preparations of about 6 or 8 months. But someone did the preparations. Who? Well, there was this entity called, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party-Bolshevik, and more specifically, before the return of the key guy who built that party, their own central leaders right after the March 1917 toppling of tsarism (February by the Julian calendar) were still following the Menshevik line of “critical support” to the bourgeois liberal government of the capitalists, and saying that in the elected soviets. Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others were saying this line.

When comrade Lenin got back from exile, he was pretty pissed off about this, and a month of national congresses and arguments and debates ensued in the Bolsheviks over the line they were taking, and comrade Lenin knew damned well when he was already going public right at the moment of his return with what has gone down in history with his April Theses so that he read them not just to a closed Bolshevik conference but to a joint open conference of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks — Lenin knew damned well he was breaking formal Bolshevik party discipline. And he did it anyway. Why? Because he was saying in effect to his party leadership who were still following the old “critical support” line to the bourgeois liberal government, “This is a sufficiently world-shaking moment to make a political split, and if you guys don’t go with the flow of proletarian anger and rage that’s out there, I will go to the proletarian ranks and mobilize them against you and for a second revolution.” That’s what in effect he was saying. And that month of struggles in the party ensuing after he returned did, indeed, show that that massive proletarian-soldier-sailor-peasant-farm laborer anger was out there and that corresponded not with the “critical-support-to-the-bourgeois-liberal” line of the right-wing and center wing of the Bolsheviks, nor of the Mensheviks, but to the left-wing “for-a-second-proletarian-revolution” line of Lenin.

And like it or not, that’s called revolutionary leadership.

So in a way, I read all this stuff, and think, okay, how to make this next assault you want succeed against capital?

And I still am compelled in some form to return to comrade Trotsky’s conception that the crisis of global humankind reduces itself in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Now, you did something kind and good for me. You gave me information about comrade Gabriel Miasnikov. And I’d not known squat about him till you told me what happened to him.

Subsequently, I read the left communist book published by the International Communist Current, The Russian Communist Left, and read more about him published in their by the ICC’s late supporter, comrade Ian Hebbes, who got ahold of some actual archives and documents of comrade Miasnikov. And you in effect said to me something that did make a dent on my sometimes thick skull. You in effect said, what was the justification for what happened to Miasnikov, and while the Lenin-Trotsky regime were still in existence at that? And that’s a good question. That sort of goes to the heart of communist morality and communist ethics, I guess.

But then, I’m compelled to think back on what some other communists, the late comrade Isaac Deutscher, the late comrade Victor Serge, wrote in some of their books about what happens to intransigently honest revolutionary regimes, and more historically specifically, what happened to the intransigently honest people in the Bolshevik leadership during the course of the era of the revolutionary proletarian communist phase of the regime in Russia, which I date typically as 1917-1923 (that’s probably more a Trotskyist or crypto-Trotskyist dating than it is a left-communist dating; I suspect left communists would probably date the proletarian communist phase of the regime as being more like 1917-1920 or 1917-1921, or in some really extreme cases, 1917-1918). I don’t think Serge and Deutscher were dishonest. I think they were trying to explain what happened in the case of the original Bolshevik regime to honest revolutionary men and women when they were put into intolerable conditions. I mean, their country, a new revolutionary Soviet republic, was invaded by 14 capitalist armed forces. Were they supposed to take that lying down, or were they supposed to fight back? They decided, we’ll fight back, and they appointed comrade Trotsky to organize the Red Army to do that.

Now the argument can be made, here was in embryo some sense of the later Stalinization of the regime, because the Soviet Red Army organized by Trotsky certainly had internal discipline, and some of the traditional elements of a traditional armed force, a stratified armed force.

But do you and other left-communists honestly think Cromwell’s New Model Army in England, for instance, that smashed the last remnants of feudal obligations in England, or that the French Revolutionary armed forces of 1792-1794, the embryo of the later armed force of Napoleon, which, however, in the heady French Revolutionary days of 1792-1794, the most plebeian democratic days of the French Revolution, did not have some kinds of internal discipline and organization? They did.

Now, of course, they were, indeed, not only revolutionary and formally democratic, but also bourgeois in the sense that the objective historical tasks imposed on them were bourgeois tasks. I could have added a third instance, the Union army of Lincoln. That was a socially revolutionary armed force, especially from 1862 on, but again, it was organized from the top down. Should Lincoln have said to the slaveholders’ rebellion, “Oh, we agree with your philosophy of decentralization sufficiently to set up our own armed force in a decentralized fashion, because we’re nice people”? I trust if he’d done that, slavery would not have been overthrown.

Now, of course, in the aftermath of all 3 of these bourgeois revolutions, counter-revolutions set in. Cromwell became one of the earliest oppressors of the Irish people. The overthrow of the Jacobins in 1794 was followed by events which eventually culminated in Napoleon becoming in 1804 emperor of France. And after Lincoln was murdered in 1865, a full-scale counter-revolution against black people in the American South set right in, orchestrated at least in part by Lincoln’s own former vice-president, turned president, Andrew Johnson, at first, then there was the Radical Republican phase of attempted re-imposition on the South of a racially integrated plebeian dictatorship to smash the racist counter-revolutionaries, but then, the Northern bourgeois cut the fatal deal with the Southern white former plantation owners now aspiring to be Southern capitalist employers, and the federal occupying troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in 1877 to be sent to crush a labor strike that same year. That symbolized the fact American bourgeois capitalist rule had in some substantive sense ended its historical phase of being “progressive” in the sense that in capitalist crises in the so-called “progressive” phases, the wiping out of capital values at least leads to a basis for new qualitative leaps ahead, but in the period from 1877 on, wiping out of capital values in economic crises in the U.S. no longer meant that. (We could, I suppose, haggle over this last issue, and some might suggest it would be better to date this a bit later, say in 1901 or thereabouts, and I’m open-minded on that score; the robber barons, at least, still built something, unlike today’s capitalists who build nothing.).

But again, all these “betrayed revolutions” (using the phrase from Trotsky’s great 1936-1937 book, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?) were bourgeois revolutions. So betrayal was more or less in the cards and organic, as I see it.

But the Bolsheviks took a gamble in 1917, and Lenin and his colleagues knew it was a gamble. What were they gambling on?

They were gambling on the success of the world socialist revolution; that’s what they were gambling on.

And that gamble didn’t really pay off, eventually. It started to. But for different reasons, the only non-private-capitalist-based state left standing after the 1917-1923 revolutionary wave (and I notice you used the years 1917-1921, and again, I’m not sure if that’s calculated in your case or just that you had some differences over viewing, say, the attempted German proletarian insurgency in 1923 as part of that revolutionary wave) remained, the Soviet state.

And what Serge and Deutscher in their writings were saying was not, in my view, whitewashing the earlier forms of authoritarianism of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik regime in the era of Lenin and Trotsky. Rather, Serge and Deutscher were trying to grapple with the actual factual and actual historical moment in which Lenin and Trotsky acted, and Serge and Deutscher were trying to make the rest of us see things how Lenin and Trotsky saw things.

I don’t think Serge and Deutscher, let alone Lenin and Trotsky, were amoral people immune to the concerns of communist internationalist egalitarian morality and communist internationalist egalitarian ethics. But I think they were in pretty damned intolerable conditions. And given that, there really wasn’t much else they could do, as they saw it.

Deutscher in his amazing 3-volume bio. of Trotsky (and I read that 3-volume bio. twice) said in, I believe it was volume 2, “The Prophet Unarmed,” that the Bolshevik leadership themselves first got entangled in the intricacies and threads of the growing authoritarian corruption of the new Soviet bureaucratizing state, but then, one by one, different Bolsheviks tried each in his or her own way, to disentangle himself or herself, and begin to struggle against the counter-revolution setting in in the new society. I am saying this from memory, not because I have “The Prophet Unarmed” in front of me, Loren. But I remember reading that and thinking seriously over it a lot, so it’s pretty much kind of what Deutscher said. And I think that’s a fair way of putting it.

I think that in the context of the conditions the Soviet state operated in in 1917-1923, it’s at least comprehensible why bad things happened to good people, including bad things to good people like Gabriel Miasnikov. I think it’s comprehensible why Trotsky was inculpated in that. I don’t think Trotsky’s inculpation in that is “good” from some abstract standard of morality. But communists are materialists and view morality as following from material conditions. Historical specificity is key in how communists look at how to arrive at what we must do. So in 1922 or 1923, I think some of the actions taken by Trotsky, and earlier, Lenin (before he was severely incapacitated by strokes) were at least comprehensible, even if we can view them with historical hindsight as being unfortunate.

The key thing in 1917 was, the Bolsheviks gambled on the world revolution taking their new state out of international isolation. I think that was the main gamble they made. When Trotsky finally awakened after first waffling when Lenin tried to get Trotsky to forge a bloc with Lenin in 1922 against Stalin, Trotsky fought the rest of his life for the world socialist revolution as the key programmatic element in his program which, were it to materialize, could take the Soviet state out of its isolation and, in so doing, undermine the bureaucratization and authoritarianism of the new society by creating the material foundations for material aid to the new Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were Marxist materialists, and they looked at their revolution in terms of its eventually getting aid from some richer and more well-heeled revolutionary proletarian government or revolutionary proletarian state, and they particularly focused on Germany for a number of diverse reasons I won’t enter into here. For different reasons, their hopes were dashed. The German Revolution in 1919 was smashed by the counter-revolution; the same thing happened in 1923 in Germany. There were efforts at forming a soviet in Seattle, Washington, but the American working class has historically been afflicted in our consciousness by this severe contradiction between on the one hand a willingness to enter into violent class conflict and violent class action in opposition to the capitalist bosses simultaneously with a kind of crypto-anarchic crypto-individualistic aversion to going beyond the bounds of pure-and-simple trade unionist militancy. I think a big part of that has a lot to do with the skin color question in America being a cutting issue that’s divided labor and kept labor from forging its own united class party independent of and apart from the capitalists. But in 1917-1923, even that Seattle soviet was only pretty brief, about a week or so my memory tells me (and I acknowledge that at my age, my memory is not always topnotch, so I’m willing to listen to factual corrections of some of my statements). The Bolsheviks needed the organic international unity of world socialist proletarian revolution to pull their chestnuts out of the fire of being internationally isolated, however, and that is my main point here. And one can only really condemn Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolsheviks who first got, as Deutscher said it, “entangled” in the bad elements of the new state, its authoritarianism, if one doesn’t really want a proletarian revolution in the first place, or if one condemns as the Bolsheviks’ “original sin” their leadership in 1917 of the second proletarian revolution.

If we’re going to make a successful assault on global capital, I think at bottom, that question Trotsky posed in 1938 of the crisis of humankind being the crisis of proletarian leadership still remains the main question for communists.

That, in a longwinded and roundabout way, is what I was getting at.

Anyway, again, I enjoyed your article.

Warm, comradely, communist,
internationalist greetings,

Al (Allan) Greene
Email: tompaine1917@yahoo.com

Congratulations on the new publication, which is most welcome at this time. Excellent article, look forward to more and will send some material in for your consideration.

Steven

1. implementation of a program of technology export to equalize upward the Third World.
2. creation of a minimum threshold of world income.
3. dismantling of the oil-auto-steel complex, shifting to mass transport and trains.
4. abolish the bloated sector of the military; police; state bureaucracy; corporate bureaucracy; prisons; FIRE; (finance- insurance- real estate); security guards; intelligence services; cashiers and toll takers.

etc., etc.

—

I know that you don’t have much regard for V.I. Lenin but his writings are focused laser-like on the immediate challenges of the class struggle in Czarist Russia, such as how to relate to the Zemstvo. My suggestion is to hold off on grandiose programs for worldwide communism and to use your considerable intelligence and facility with the keyboard to solve the problems facing us right now and right here in the USA, such as immigrant rights, BP oil spill, gay marriage, etc. It is only by achieving victories here and now in such struggles that we can advance toward the final goal of transforming society. Furthermore, for all your emphasis on proletarian power, there is a certain disjunction with the obvious reality of life in the USA, namely one in which workers *are not* on the move. Maybe they are in South Korea or Oaxaca, but you are not there. Unless you see yourself as a latter-day Trotsky issuing pronouncements from afar, my advice is to get a bit more grounded in the country that you live in.