Good News from America. (1929)

Party News from the December 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

A New Socialist Paper.

Onr American Comrades of the Socialist Educational Society published in November the first number of their monthly journal, “The Socialist.”

We welcome this valuable addition to the forces of socialist propaganda and urge readers who wish to be informed on developments in the U.S.A. to become regular subscribers. “The Socialist” can be obtained from the publishers at 35, West 20th Street, New York City, or from this office. Subscription rates, 1 dollar, or 4s. 0d. per annum post free. Single copies 10 cents, or 3d. Bundle rates given on application.

"The Socialist." (1930)

Party News from the August 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

It will not be news to our readers that “prosperity" in the U.S.A. has taken a wrong turning. We regret to have to announce that something has happened much more serious than the ruin of large numbers of gamblers on the New York Stock Exchange. The issue of "The Socialist” has had to be suspended temporarily. The following extract from a letter written by our New York comrades tells its own story :—

  Conditions here are much worse than you read in the papers. More than half our members are unemployed; others had to leave for other parts, crippling us almost mortally. At open-air meetings, where formerly we sold from 12 to 14 dollars’ worth of literature in an evening, we now do well to sell one and a-half dollars’ worth. The workers simply cannot afford to buy.

This is bad news, but not quite so bad as it might have been. “The Socialist" will not disappear. It will be printed, but at intervals which will be irregular for a time until conditions improve.

Readers in Great Britain who have paid their subscriptions through the S.P.G.B. will be supplied with the number of issues for which they have paid, unless we hear from them to the effect that they wish the unexpired part of the subscription returned.

The Acid Test of History (1930)

From the January 1930 issue of The Socialist

The old adage, “The course of true love ne’er runs smooth," may be well applied to the course of the “History of the Communist Movement in America." We are prompted to this conclusion after attending a lecture on the above subject, given by the National Secretary of the Proletarian Party on. Nov. 30, 1929. We heard a lengthy discourse dealing with the formation of the Communist Party of America, and the various intrigues on the part of different groups in their efforts to gain control of that organination. Of small interest to us is the claim made by the Proletarian Party to being the "real communist movement" in America. Seeing that they receive no recognition from the Third International, we cannot see how they substantiate this. Of more importance to us is their claim to being a Marxian organization equipped with an almost complete monopoly of Marxism. It is on this point that we base our criticism.

We have endeavored to obtain a definite program or declaration of principles by them but have failed to find anything of the sort in their official organ, “The Proletarian.” We are therefore compelled to look mainly to the verbal utterances of their speakers. The nearest we can arrive at anything resembling a program is a series of statements made by their National Secretary at the afore' mentioned lecture. He pointed out that the Proletarian Party stands for “Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the setting up by armed insurrection of some sort of “Workers’ Government;" also that they “realize the limitations of Parliamentary action." Being anxious to know, we questioned their speaker as to what these limitations consisted of. In reply, he premised an imaginary condition that a substantial majority of the working class having become conscious of the need for taking over the means of wealth production, and establishing Socialism, express their desires by the vote, and are met with resistance by the capitalist class in the form of military force. Therefore the workers will be compelled to organize a counter military force to enforce their desires. For proof of this their speaker asserted that the Army and Navy are officered by bourgeois and therefore would be used by the capitalist class against the working class.

Had our ultra-Marxists of the Proletarian Party an understanding of the basic principle of Socialism, the Materialistic Conception of History, as they claim to have, they would realize that, the economic conditions of capitalism having evolved to a point at which a substantial majority of the working class have reached an understanding of Socialism, the Army and Navy forces would also be imbued with the same ideology as the civil population, since the immense majority of those forces including the officers are members of the working class. They would be poor material for the capitalists to rely upon to prevent the intelligent working class from asserting its will. However, the working class has not as yet voted for Socialism; until it does we cannot formulate any utopian detailed plans for dealing with an imaginary condition in the future.

We were further told that the Communist Party in Russia is carrying toward completion, and in the same spirit, the movement begun by the Paris Commune in 1871. Both the Communist Party of America and the Proletarian Party in making this claim are either ignorant of the conditions obtaining in Paris during the few short months of the Commune, or they are deliberately distorting the facts concerning conditions existing in Soviet Russia which is a resort to the old time method of all political forces of reaction.

As far back as 1920 we find this quotation in an article, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," by N. Bucharin, published in the “Workers Dreadnought" (April 12, 1920).

   “Nevertheless we do not for a moment deny that our apparatus is rigidly centralized; that our policy towards the bourgeoisie and towards the parties of the compromising Socialists is repressive in character; that the organization of our own party, as a ruling party which exercises a dictatorship through the Soviets, is of a 'Militarist type.’ “

This is a direct negation of the claim made by the official and unofficial communists of America, that the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat" in Russia represents control by the masses. It is the position maintained by the Blanquists prior to the Paris Commune, and which they were compelled to abandon and act directly contrary to, during the tenure of the Commune. In the introduction to the “The Civil War in France,” (S. L. P. ed.) Engels points out that:

   “The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of Blanquists, who had also predominated in the central committee of the National Guard, and a minority, which consisted for the most part of members of the International Working Men‘s Association, who were adherents of the Proudhonian school of Socialism."

Engels then goes on to show how both the Blanquists and Proudhonists did the very reverse of which their schools advocated, thus:

  "The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, held together by the rigid discipline essential to it, they started from the conception that a comparatively small number of resolute, well organized men would be able not only to grasp the helm of State at a favorable moment, but also, through the display of great energy, and reckless daring, to hold it as long as required, that is, until they had succeeded in carrying the masses of the people into the revolutionary current and ranging them around the small leading band. To accomplish this, what was necessary, above all else, was the most stringent, dictatorial centralization of all powers in the hands of the new revolutionary government. And what did the Commune do, which in the majority consisted of these very Blanquists? In all its proclamations to the French people in the provinces, it called upon them for a free federation of all French communes with Paris for a national organization, which for the first time was to be the real creation of the nation. The army, the political police, the bureaucracy, all those agencies of oppression in a centralized government, which Napoleon had created in 1798, and which since then every new government had gladly used and kept up as ready weapons against its enemies, were to be abolished everywhere, as they had been abolished in Paris.”

To compare the above condition existing during the Paris Commune, to that existing in Russia, one would have to be a wish thinker like the members of the official Communist Party of America and the unofficial “real" communists of the Proletarian Party. The Red Army has not been abolished, neither has the bureaucracy nor the political police. Witness the rise of the Opposition groups and the wholesale expulsion and exile of many of those prominent early in the Russian Revolution. Is this analogous to the Paris Commune?

Again let us look at Paris during the Commune, to see the attitude of the Communards towards parliamentary action and the value of the vote. According to Engels the Commune "filled all positions of administration, justice, and instruction, through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by their constituents" (op. cit.), a system which our “communist" friends would mistake for bourgeois democracy. Engels' concept of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is also expressed in the conclusion to the same work, page 20, “ . . . look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The conditions existing in Russia bear little resemblance to those obtaining in Paris during the Commune. Neither, for that matter, do they resemble the conditions in America, England or any other developed capitalist countries. In Russia, where primitive peasant agriculture prevails, the institution of Socialism is at present an impossibility, because there is lacking the highly developed productive forces and the enlightened proletarian majority, both of which axe necessary for that purpose. Where matured capitalism exists and where the workers are therefore the majority of the population, they can achieve their emancipation as soon as they understand what Socialism is and desire it, and they will effect this by the simplest, and in fact, the only means available—the democratic conquest of the political forces of society—at present used for their subjection.

“He who tells the people revolutionary legends, he who amuses them with sensational stories, is as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.” (Lissagaray, preface to History of the Commune.) 

Alf.

Socialist Educational Society

Editorial: The Socialist Movement in Other Countries (1930)

Editorial from the February 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

PROGRESS IN AMERICA.

Our readers will have read with pleasure that in November last comrades of ours in New York launched the first number of their monthly journal, "The Socialist." The founders, the Socialist Educational Society, are trying to link up into a national organisation a number of groups and individuals who have long carried on separately the work of propagating Socialism.

"The Socialist” will make it possible for them to get their message before a wider public with the object of turning what is now an educational society, with a declaration of principles based upon our own, into a political party.

The starting of the new journal is by no means an isolated event. It is the outcome of years of hard and often seemingly fruitless efforts. But the handful who .persisted in that work were men who had learned by experience—some of them as members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain—that the road to Socialism cannot be an easy one. They know, as the founders of the S.P.G.B. knew, that there is no limit to the plausible but futile schemes for reforming Capitalism put forward by professional politicians and well-meaning but badly-informed would-be saviours of the working class, and that nothing but Socialist knowledge will make the workers secure against these political frauds and cranks. The publication of "The Socialist” marks a definite step forward for the Socialist movement in the U.S.A., and it also inevitably means a heavy additional burden for the comrades who are responsible, a new drain on their time, their energies and their pockets. We urge our readers here and in America to give what aid they can in extending the sale of the new journal in order to lighten as much as possible the work of the Socialist Educational Society. We hope next to be able to report that the extension of their activities, the holding of more study classes and propaganda meetings, will have made it possible to. form in the U.S.A. the looked for Socialist Party.

AND AUSTRALIA.

Reference has also been made from time to time in our columns to the Socialist Party of Australia, another young organisation formed by a few readers of the Socialist Standard. They, too, have as their basis our Declaration of Principles.

At their meetings and lectures they have been in the habit of selling our pamphlets and the Socialist Standard, but during the past year or two the Australian Government has done us the honour of banning our literature from that country. That action—still being continued under the present Labour Government which came into office last October—has caused us and our Australian comrades inconvenience and financial loss, but it is likely to have one very happy result. It has caused the Socialist Party of Australia to concentrate on publishing a journal of their own, and this they intend to do as soon as they can get together the necessary minimum of money. We commend this incident to the authorities who thought they could stop Australian workers from studying Socialism by excluding literature from abroad.

Readers in Australia who would like to assist in the work of the S.P. of Australia should get into touch with the Secretary, at P.O. Box 1440, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION.

In the early days of the S.P.G.B. we sent delegates to the Congress of the International, but finding that parties were admitted to it which were prepared to repudiate by word and deed the fundamental principles of Socialism—parties here and abroad of the type of the Labour Party and the I.L.P.—we withdrew. We were not, and are not, prepared to associate internationally with organisations which are opposed to Socialism at home. In due course the war justified all our criticisms of the Second International. Not being based on Socialist principles and knowledge, it dissolved at the first shock into national groups anxious only to outdo each other in their ferocious jingoism and their demonstrations of loyalty to their respective sections of the Capitalist class.

The eventual formation of the Third (Communist) International has not solved the problem; rather has it confused it still more. It, like its rival, is prepared to admit organisations which are not in any sense of the word Socialist. It admits and supports bodies which are avowedly nationalist, interested primarily in helping one Capitalist country against another. It allows (or rather orders) its national parties to support Capitalist candidates at elections and advocates the suicidal policy of street-fighting. Its policy is dictated, not in the interests of the working class of the world, but in the interests of the developing Capitalist system in Russia striving for a place in the world scramble for markets.

The progress of Socialist organisation cannot be more advanced on the international than on the national plane. We look forward to the time when our work and the work of the bodies we have mentioned and other individuals and groups in English-speaking countries and in Austria and elsewhere, will bear fruit in a real International based not on illusions but on the solid foundation of Socialist knowledge and organisation.

__________________________

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NOTICE.

READ "THE SOCIALIST"

"The Socialist," organ of the Socialist Educational Society (U.S.A.), is obtainable from the publishers at 132 East 23rd Street, New York, or from this office. Price 3½d. a copy, post free; or 3/6 a year post free (one dollar a year post free in the U.S.A.). Bundles rates on application.

Workers Socialist Party vs. Independent Communist Labour League

From the January 1938 issue of The Socialist

On Sunday, October 3rd, a debate was held with the Independent Communist Labor League, (formerly, the Communist Party Opposition or Lovestone Group). The debate took place at the headquarters of our Local Boston, 12 Hayward Place, Boston. The I.C.L.L. was represented by a Mr. Mautner, while the W.S.P. spokesman was Comrade I. Rab. The subject debated was "Whose Principles Are Correct: Workers Socialist Party or Independent Communist Labor League?"

Mr. Mautner, in his main talk laid down the major  tenets of his organization. In doing so, he said that the I.C.L.L. was concerned with the tactics and strategy for setting the masses in motion. He quoted Frederick Engels to show that "a great national movement, no matter what its form, is the real starting point of working class development," pointing to the 400,000 members of the Auto Workers Union as an example of such a movement, adding, "Some were formerly Ku Kluxers and members of the Black Legion, now they are good workers for the cause of labor." This union activity, he continued, led to a formation of a Labor Party, "something totally new." He further went on to say, "We expect to be in opposition to the Labor Party in the future, but now the problem is to break the workers from their old ideology."

Mr. Mautner spoke of reforms, recognizing that such measures help bolster up the capitalist system, but claiming, however, that fighting for reforms has value in that it teaches the working class the need for political action.

In dealing with Russia, Mr. Mautner described the situation there as a "Proletarian State" where the Russians are engaged in "Socialist construction." However, current history forces him to note "bureaucratic distortions existing there." Despite this, he claimed the Soviet state is organized exclusively for the workers, pointing out, however, that the new socialist economy in Russia had not yet developed a new terminology, therefore, "wages" really means "certificates." "The workers receive according to their deeds."

Mr. Mautner concluded by maintaining that a Labor Party program in America would lead to a Marxist program.

Comrade Rab, in his main talk analyzed the differences in principles between the two organizations. He listed the four main differences as follows: (1) The value of parliamentary activity; (2) The question of reforms; (3) The question of trade unionism; (4) The analysis of Soviet Russia.

In dealing with the first, Comrade Rab stated briefly the Party's position on parliamentary action, concluding this point by showing that the I.C.L.L. maintained that the revolutionary act comes about with the smashing of the existing state; that it must be an armed uprising led by a matured vanguard, a position contrary and opposed to that of the W.S.P. which defined the revolutionary act as the seizure of political power by a class conscious majority of the proletariat.

Discussing reforms, Comrade Rab maintained that the only way the workers can improve their lot is by the establishment of Socialism. He showed that the I.C.L.L., on the other hand, supports a "struggle for daily aims based on the existing stage of understanding."

On the trade union question, he brought out that although economic organization of the workers is very necessary in order that they sell their labour-power to the best advantage, unions have many limitations and weaknesses. Unions must depend upon numbers rather than on understanding. They cannot, in the long run, alter the downward trend of working class conditions. They are concerned primarily with wages and  hours problems rather than with overthrowing capitalism.

In dealing with the Russian question, Comrade Rab denied the existence of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Soviet Russia as accepted by the I.C.L.L. He pointed out, among other things, that the U.S.S.R. is going through a period of capitalist development and showed that the social relations of a capitalist economy exist there.

Mr. Mautner opened his rebuttal by asking Comrade Rab where there was surplus-value in Russia. Next, he denounced the use of the ballot saying, "When a Socialist Party advocates the ballot it breaks away from the principles of Socialism." "Marx stood for the smashing of the state." He insisted "what the workers need is a revolution based on soviets."

Comrade Rab in his rebuttal answered the questions raised by Mr. Mautner. Dealing with the question of "surplus-value in Russia," he defined surplus-value as the wealth that is extracted from the workers through the wages system. In Russia they have all the relationships of capital and wage labor and therefore, surplus-value. The existence of inheritance and income taxes, a banking system, laws pertaining to investments and interest, together with workers living on the barest of subsistence alongside of another group living in luxury—all go to describe surplus-value production or capitalism in Russia.

On the question of political action, Comrade Rab showed that the Socialist working class does not smash the state, pointing out also that marx in no place advocated the smashing of the state, pointing out also that Marx in no place advocated the smashing of the state, but on the contrary advocated its capture so that the workers could, "lop off its repressive features and transform it into an agent of emancipation."

Dealing with the Labor Party he showed its many weaknesses, how it was used for class collaboration, reforming and administering capitalism, and therefore against Socialist principles.

In conclusion, he called for a united front for Socialism.

According to the arrangements for the debate, the question period took place between the main talks and the rebuttals. Most of the questions dealt with the experiences of the British Labor Party.