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| ISBN-13: | 9781785350504 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 992 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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It's Not Over
Learning from the Socialist Experiment
By Pete Dolack
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Pete DolackAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-050-4
CHAPTER 1
Foundation for Isolation: The Revolutionary Period of 1917–21
As 1917 began, the Bolshevik Party of Russia was a small, hounded group with much of its leadership in foreign exile and others banished to remote Siberian villages, cut off from all legal political activity; a party little known outside of Socialist circles and the tsar's ubiquitous secret police. The Social Democratic Party of Germany was the most powerful political group of working people in the world, boasting an organization with its own social institutions, dozens of newspapers, thousands of paid officials and the largest following of any German party despite property restrictions on voting.
Yet it was the Bolsheviks who, before the year was out, carried out a revolution while the German Social Democrats not only failed to bring about the revolution that was central to its program, but its leadership actually suppressed its rank-andfile who believed in their party's program. Revolutions failed or didn't happen across Europe, leaving Russia isolated. Fourteen countries invaded Russia, seeking to crush the October Revolution, and provided material support for the White armies led by the tsar's military officers in a civil war fought without mercy. With the country's industry and infrastructure already in ruins under the impact of World War I, the Civil War further aggravated an already desperate situation.
The October Revolution shouldn't have survived.
Arc of a movement: Fervent militancy to quiet accommodation
In so many ways, it is difficult for us today to imagine the world of the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, the men and women who lived when socialist, syndicalist and anarchist movements began to attract millions of followers would find present-day technological advances and the radically changed zeitgeist dizzily disorienting. Yet the economic organization of today would be familiar to them. Friedrich Engels wrote these words about the United States in 1891:
[E]ach of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states ... [N]evertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends.
The world those millions lived in would seem cruel to today's eyes, but that is not solely the product of evolving social standards — it also due to the fact that the violence used to maintain the privileges of the powerful was then more undisguised than it is today. Seeking to create a better world, some among those millions organized the first experiment in socialist government, the Paris Commune, and, true to their times, there was no ambiguity in the violence that put an end to it.
Russian Bolsheviks and German Social Democrats were both profoundly influenced by the Paris Commune. Although occurring a generation before the October Revolution, in 1871, the cynical and manipulative use of nationalism on the part of German and French social elites, the naked and swift dumping of nationalism when the class interests of social elites in both countries required they unite against the rest of the French nation, and the drowning of the Commune in blood as an exemplary punishment for challenging the elites left a vivid impression on the international social democratic movement. ("Social democratic" was the label, before World War I, for those who believed that working people would one day collectively overthrow capitalism and establish a class-free society. The term "Marxist" did not begin to come into usage until after Marx's death, and until the outbreak of World War I most Marxist parties included "social democratic" or "socialist" in their names.) Popular anger against the Russian elites' inability to govern effectively, as well as their cruelty, created the conditions for Russia's 1917 revolutions, and a similar dynamic had prevailed in Paris a generation earlier.
The chain of events that caused tens of thousands to die in the Franco-Prussian War and culminated in the Paris Commune began with the writing of a brief letter. A letter that was selectively edited before its publication with the express purpose of provoking war. The extraordinarily powerful, and reactionary, Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was the editor of the letter written in July 1870 by the king of Prussia, Wilhelm I.
Prussia had steadily expanded by absorbing smaller German states, and neighboring countries' disquiet over Prussia's growing strength was inflamed when the Spanish parliament invited a Prussian prince to become Spain's king. France, fearful of a close alliance between countries on its opposing borders, was particularly displeased. Believing that yielding to French protests would be a prudent move diplomatically, Wilhelm ordered the prince (his nephew) to decline the Spanish offer, but the French ambassador to Prussia followed up by requesting that Wilhelm promise that no member of his dynasty would ever be allowed to sit on the Spanish throne.
Wilhelm refused to make such a promise, and authorized Bismarck, who as chancellor oversaw Wilhelm's government, to make public his written account of the discussion. Bismarck saw the public release of the king's letter as an opportunity to provoke a war between Prussia and France — a war, Bismarck believed, that would spark the unification of the remaining independent German states under Prussian hegemony through the example of a pan-German lightning military victory that would stimulate popular feelings of German nationalism.
Bismarck selectively edited the letter to make it appear that the king had rudely insulted the French and that the French ambassador had made an arrogant demand. For added effect, Bismarck released his edited version the day before Bastille Day, the French national holiday. The chancellor told two of his generals that the letter would provide a "red rag to taunt the Gallic Bull": He needed France to initiate hostilities so that Prussia's alliances with the other German states would be triggered. France did indeed declare war — not for the first or last time had nationalism been used to goad a population into willingly waging war.
Not all were quick to leap, however. As war fever heated, French members of the International Workingmen's Association — a federation of working-class organizations and individuals to which followers of Karl Marx, other socialists and the leaders of various anarchist movements belonged — issued the following statement: "German Brothers! In the name of peace refuse to listen to the hired or servile voices of those who are trying to deceive you concerning the true mind of France. Be deaf to mad provocations, for war between us would be fratricidal ... A quarrel between us can only lead, on both sides of the Rhine [River], to the complete triumph of despotism."
The German members of the International responded in similar fashion: "Inspired with fraternal sentiments, we join hands with you ... [W]e assure you that there is no trace of national hatred in our hearts, but that we are under the thralldom of force, and that only through compulsion shall we form part of the fighting forces which are about to spread wretchedness and disaster over the peaceful fields of our countries."
These voices were too few in number to have any effect. Although it was the French king, Napoleon III, who declared war, it was Prussia that was far better prepared; its superiority in weaponry, tactics and mobilization quickly led to a rout of France. Napoleon III had wanted a war against Prussia to maintain the image of France as a great power. Leading his army on the battlefield, he ended his adventure by surrendering — ultimately, 375,000 French soldiers were taken prisoner — and abdicating his crown.
The republican opposition to Napoleon III assumed power, forming a "Government of National Defense." Prussia, having crushed the French army, now began a siege of Paris, sealing the city from outside supplies and bombarding it. The people of Paris had already endured mass poverty under Napoleon III and now bore the brunt of the Prussian siege, reduced to eating cats, dogs and rats to survive. Parisians also swelled the ranks of the National Guard, boosting the militia's size to 350,000 and changing its social composition through election of its officers.
The new Government of National Defense proved inept and twice narrowly survived attempts to overthrow it by the people of Paris, actions sparked by rumors that it was about to surrender Paris to the Prussians. Those rumors became reality — after the second overthrow attempt, the Government of National Defense did begin secretly negotiating a surrender. The government's vice president snuck out of Paris, crossing enemy lines to talk with the Prussians because he believed "civil war only a few yards away, famine a few hours."
The Prussian terms of surrender were draconian, but readily agreed to. One of these terms required the Government of National Defense to call a national election to ratify the surrender within eight days. An election was held despite the impossibility of such a vote being organized fairly; the election for a National Assembly returned a substantial majority of reactionary monarchists from the countryside because communications from inside Paris were blocked by the Prussian occupation and throughout the country there was insufficient time for anyone but the aristocracy and priests to organize for the election. The regular French army was to be disarmed, but received permission from the Prussian occupiers to enter Paris to disarm the National Guard, the popular militia that had held off the Prussians for five months and was in no mood to surrender.
On 18 March 1871, the regular French army was sent to confiscate the National Guard's cannons, but when the first cannon was to be taken, Parisian women surrounded it. "This is shameful; what are you doing here?" they demanded, holding firm. Inspired, the National Guard refused to surrender its cannons. The regular army soldiers refused to obey their officers' commands, defecting to the defenders of Paris. Faced with the soldiers' fraternizations with Parisians, army officers fled or were arrested. The Government of National Defense, headed by Adolphe Thiers (who had given the order to disarm the National Guard), fled Paris.
An arch-opportunist, Thiers had helped crush popular rebellions against the monarchy in the 1830s and 1840s, and in 1870 he had agitated for war against Prussia before switching to opposing the war once it became apparent that France would lose. Such maneuvering enabled Thiers to be elected president by the newly elected National Assembly. Ultimately, much of Thiers' maneuvering throughout his long career was on behalf of France's capitalists despite the sometimes populist-sounding statements he made during his periods out of office. Thiers was summed up succinctly by Charles Beslay, an engineer who once was the proprietor of a machine foundry and a former parliamentary colleague of Thiers who was elected to the Paris Commune: "The enslavement of labor by capital has always been the cornerstone of your policy, and from the very day you saw the Republic of Labor installed at [Paris City Hall], you have never ceased to cry out to France: 'These are criminals!'"
Following Thiers' flight from Paris, the city was briefly governed by the elected central committee of the National Guard, until, on 26 March, the citizens of Paris elected a municipal council — the Commune — as the new government. This was the first election in French history with universal male suffrage; despite the initiative of the revolutionary women who were the first to resist confiscation of the National Guard cannons, the vote was not given to them. The Paris Commune enacted several progressive laws — banning exploitative night work for bakers, suspending the collection of debts incurred during the siege, separating church from state, providing free education for all children, handing over abandoned workshops to cooperatives of workers who would restart production, and abolishing conscription into the army. Commune officials were subject to instant recall by voters and were paid the average wage of a worker (an example that would one day be emulated by the organizers of Russia's soviets).
The elected communards represented a mix of occupations and ages: Workmen were a minority while professionals, journalists and others from the middle class were larger in number. The significant turnout for the Commune elections and the fact that a crowd of 200,000 people turned out to watch the peaceful handover of power did not prevent Thiers from menacingly responding in this fashion: "No, France will not let wretches triumph who would drown her in blood."
Blood was on the mind of Thiers and his government. France's capitalists, now amply represented by the monarchists who dominated the National Assembly, had whipped up nationalism to compel the working people of France to fight against Prussia. They now turned to the very same Prussia for help in crushing those same working people.
By early April, Thiers had secured the release of French prisoners of war held by Prussia to rebuild his army and began his own siege of Paris, complete with bombardments — the very acts for which the French leaders had, weeks earlier, condemned the Prussian army. Prussian commanders also allowed the reconstituted French army to pass through their areas of control, despite that being forbidden under the terms of surrender. After weeks of attacks, French soldiers entered the city on 21 May, taking eight days to gain control and crush the Commune, drowning in blood the popular experiment in self-government. Simultaneous attempts to create communes in cities across France were also defeated.
What mistakes had the Commune made that contributed to its demise? These mistakes were both tactical and a result of simple human kindness, and flowed out of a lack of political organization. The buildup of authority in the National Guard and the subsequent Commune was spontaneous, and what political ideas the Communards had generally flowed from two anarchist tendencies. A majority, influenced by Louie-Auguste Blanqui, who believed that a small group of conspirators could stage an insurrection to change society, sought to make a radical leap without having any concrete political or economic program; others were influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who believed that society could be changed through organizing workplace cooperatives while "ignoring" the state.
The concrete result of those ideologies was a failure to disperse the French army and government as they left Paris in late March, allowing them to regroup freely at Versailles; failing to seize the gold still held in the central bank vaults in Paris, which would have cut off all funds to Thiers and his Versailles government; failing to prepare a military defense or to attack Versailles before Thiers' forces could regroup; and failing to organize a proper defense of the city, under the assumption that the Prussians would not allow the French army to pass. A National Guard commander freed captured French army officers in a spirit of "comradeship," to the point where a top army commander was let go in exchange for a promise that the commander would henceforth be neutral — a promise that was swiftly broken.
The Communards' magnanimity was repaid with a horrific bloodbath. An estimated 30,000 Parisians were massacred by the marauding French army in one week, executed on sight in the streets or after 30-second "trials." Another 40,000 were held in prisons, and many of these were exiled to a remote South Pacific island where they became forced laborers on starvation diets, eventually barred from fishing in the sea or foraging for food, and routinely subjected to torture. The restored government exerted itself to deny any political or moral content to the Communards' actions, instead treating them as the worst common criminals as part of what developed into a de facto "social cleansing" of Paris; the French official overseeing the deportations, in his public statements, directly linked socialist politics with chronic petty crime.
A leading newspaper of French capital, Le Figaro, echoed the restorationist desires of France's capitalists and aristocracy who were eager to reassert the upper hand, when it declared: "Never has such an opportunity presented itself for curing Paris of the moral gangrene that has been consuming it for the past 25 years." The general who oversaw the massacre of Parisians had meekly surrendered to Prussia alongside Napoleon III. There was no mercy now, as gruesomely described in a contemporary account of one of the places of execution: "There were so many victims that the soldiers, tired out, were obliged to rest their guns actually against the sufferers. The wall of the terrace was covered with brains; the executioners waded through pools of blood." This was not the first such lesson administered: The revolutions of 1848, popular uprisings that had swept Europe, had also ended in bloodbaths in France and elsewhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from It's Not Over by Pete Dolack. Copyright © 2015 Pete Dolack. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
Notes on Style,
Chapter 1: Foundation for Isolation: The Revolutionary Period of 1917–21,
Chapter 2: The Socio-economic Bases for the Rise of the Stalin Dictatorship,
Chapter 3: The Destroyed Experiment of a Developed, Industrial State: Prague Spring,
Chapter 4: The Destroyed Experiment of an Undeveloped, Agricultural State: The Sandinista Revolution,
Chapter 5: The Dissolution of the Soviet Union,
Chapter 6: Imagining a Better World Is the First Step,