Joan of Mark

Helen Keller with Rabindranath Thakur at a meeting of the New History Society, c. 1930, U.S.

2013-05-20T09:21:00.001-04:00

Helen Keller was a life-long socialist, activist for disability rights, prolific author and orator, and all-around bad-ass.

Rabindranath Thakur (anglicised to Tagore) was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. He became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He was a fierce anti-imperialist and an early advocate of Indian independence from British colonialism.

Description: Newspaper clipping. Helen Keller meets Indian poet and educationalist, Sir Rabindranath Tagore. Caption below photograph reads, "A sage from the Orient meets a famous woman of the Occident. Sir Rabindranath Tagore, eminent Indian poet and educationalist, conversing with Helen Keller, noted blind woman of America, on the problem of India. At the meeting of the New History Society in New York, at which Tagore gave his farewell message to American people, Miss Keller spoke in the interests of India."
Date: circa 1930
Format: newspaper clipping
Digital Identifier: AG62-3-002
Rights: Samuel P. Hayes Research Library, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, MA

Note: The New History Society was formed in New York City in 1929 as way of spreading the teachings of the Bahá'í Faith. It was primarily an educational movement, the chief activity of which was international correspondence. The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. It was founded by `Abdu'l-Bahá, a Persian man who spent much of his life living in Palestine. In the Bahá'í Faith, religious history is seen to have unfolded through a series of divine messengers, each of whom established a religion that was suited to the needs of the time and the capacity of the people. These messengers have included Abrahamic figures as well as Dharmic ones - Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and others. Between 1911-13, `Abdu'l-Bahá traveled to Europe and North America to spread his faith. During his talks he proclaimed Bahá'í principles such as the unity of God, unity of the religions, oneness of humanity, equality of women and men, world peace and economic justice. He also insisted that all his meetings be open to all races.

Katkov, Germany money and Lenin, in Rabinowitch

2012-11-18T12:51:00.000-05:00

Despite Rabinowitch's claim that "Lenin seems to have known of the German money [surreptitiously expended by the German government during WWI to foment internal instability within Russia by funding dissident groups, such as the Bolsheviks, among others]," there is absolutely zero evidence to substantiate this claim. Rabinowitch cites the work of Katkov on this score. Katkov presents zero evidence that Lenin was ever aware of money from the German government being funneled to the Bolsheviks, nor that he willingly accepted money from the German government. See comment from Alexander Dallin on Katkov piece, as well as links below. At most, the Bolsheviks openly accepted monetary donations from the German SPD, which was a part of the German government, but never from the Kaiser, the German secret police, or any other such nonsense. Also, while it is possible that the Bolsheviks may have received money from opaque sources that were in fact, unbeknownst to them, agents of the German government, there is no evidence documenting either (a) how much money this amounted to and whether it was a significant sum or not, or (b) that the Bolsheviks were aware of this source.

http://books.google.com/books?id=HzRiDJnTTG4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2Zdv5hwi_o6b0h6UFUtekhUdFk
http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/pearson/katkov.html
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/11.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1976/lenin2/ch15.htm#s4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisson_Documents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Parvus
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch27.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/27b.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/05b.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/06a.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/07c.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/08a.htm#fwV25E076
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/19a.htm#bkV25E071
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/aug/01.htm

The rise & fall of the 1917 Russian revolution - a few great articles

2012-09-21T09:13:00.000-04:00

80 Years Since the Russian Revolution

February's Forgotten Vanguard

The Fall of Stalinism: Ten Years On

In Defense of Leninism

Russia - How the Revolution Was Lost

The Material Heritage of Pre-October Society

Russia's Transformation From a Workers' State to a Capitalist State

Notes on Lenin, the Russian civil war, red terror, "The Black Book," and prostitution (literal & figurative)

2012-09-20T12:40:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism
- [Makes mention that part of War Communism was that "strikers could be shot," which itself is a quite ambiguous statement. The citation for this is: Nicolas Werth, "Histoire de l'Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline," 1995. Co-author of Black Book of Communism (see below). It's not exactly clear what this is in reference to or what exactly this is based on ... ]
- After reading Werth's "Histoire," I could find absolutely no mention of strikers being shot. It certainly covers a lot of other people being shot by the Cheka during the civil war (i.e., Whites, SRs, kulaks, etc, i.e., the enemy forces). But the only thing I could find that even comes close to this in the book was the following sentence, which appears in a section dealing with the repression of War Communism: "The unions, many of which were not obedient to the Bolsheviks (railway, postal workers, typographers, employees, etc.), were either dissolved or reduced to the role of a 'transmission belt.'" (Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, p. 20)
- Leaving aside the question of the veracity of this statement there is certainly a world of difference between the supposed dissolution of unions hostile to the Bolsheviks and/or Soviet government, on the one hand, and a policy of shooting workers who go on strike, on the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_the_Bolsheviks#Repression
The Black Book of Communism: ""It is quite clear that preparations are being made for a White Guard uprising in Nizhni Novgorod," wrote Lenin in a telegram on 9 August 1918 to the president of the Executive Committee of the Nizhni Novgorod soviet, in response to a report about peasant protests against requisitioning. "Your first response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc. There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals. Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements." [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/09gff.htm]

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/asreview.htm
"The Black Book of Communism sets out to address: the inability and -- for a great many -- the outright refusal to recognize the unmitigated evil that communism was and is ... [it proffers an] editorial outlook which asserts that Communism, in all its historical forms, is morally equivalent to Nazism ... The clearest picture to emerge from these pages is that the history of Communism is, at its simplest, little more than the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques. These groups have, invariably, been led by excruciatingly cruel dictators who were revoltingly drunk on their own foolish ideology and power."
- [Published by Harvard University Press, written by career anti-communist hacks and apologists for capitalism; largely influenced by work of FA Hayek - conservative economist, connected with Milton and 'Chicago School,' virulent anti-communist, yet admirer of Pinochet, even taking honorary position in Pinochet government.]

Lenin on "prostitutes": What is he talking about in quote above? Is he referring to literal sex-workers, or is he using this word in the political sense which he often did to refer insultingly to political opponents (i.e., Cadets, Mensheviks, bourgeois-liberals, kulaks, etc.)? Why would he want sex-workers to be shot, when he simultanesouly advocated organizing sex workers on the basis of their position as exploited and oppressed members of the working masses? If Lenin is talking about literal prostitutes here, we have to say that this is an odious sentiment. We can only assume that he was here either exaggerating for dramatic effect (i.e., not giving an actual order to shoot prostitutes); or was here engaging in an excess born of his anxiety during the darkest moment of the Civil War when this letter was written [i.e., this is the only instance in all of his writings in which such a ridiculous measure is advocated against prostitutes/non-combatants, i.e., it was not a practice, habit, or policy to engage in such behavior and it does not even come up beyond this one piece of correspondence]. Moreover, we, unfortunately, do not know what actually came of this particular situation in Nizhni Novgorod in the immediate days following this letter, i.e., as to whether 'hundreds' of prostitutes were actually shot, so it is difficult to verify the precise meaning and impact of Lenin's words here, taken out of context as they were.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jul/26.htm
"Duchesses, countesses, bishops, priests, rabbis, police officials and all sorts of bourgeois philanthropists were well to the fore! How many festive luncheons and magnificent official receptions were given! And how many solemn speeches on the harm and infamy of prostitution! What means of struggle were proposed by the elegant bourgeois delegates to the congress? Mainly two methods—religion and police. When the Austrian delegate G\"artner tried to raise the question of the social causes of prostitution, of the need and poverty experienced by working-class families, of the exploitation of child labour, of unbearable housing conditions, etc., he was forced to silence by hostile shouts! We may judge from this the disgusting bourgeois hypocrisy that reigns at these aristocratic-bourgeois congresses. Acrobats in the field of philanthropy and police defenders of this system which makes mockery of poverty and need gather “to struggle against prostitution”, which is supported precisely by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie...."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/27.htm
"Millions upon millions of women in such families live (or, rather, exist) as “domestic slaves”, striving to feed and clothe their family on pennies, at the cost of desperate daily effort and “saving” on everything—except their own labour. It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist.... Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/00.htm
"When reading things like this, one can scarcely believe the evidence of one’s eyes. What a degree of senile decay and prostitution has been reached by present-day professorial science!"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm
"... the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders have prostituted the Soviets, have reduced their role to that of a talking shop, of an accomplice in the compromising policy of the leaders.... The sad history of the prostitution of the Soviets by the Tseretelis and Chernovs, the history of the "coalition", is also the history of the liberation of the Soviets from petty-bourgeois illusions, of their passage through the "purgatory" of the practical experience of the utter abomination and filth of all and sundry bourgeois coalitions.... in order to frustrate the Soviets, to reduce them to nought, to prostitute them (with the aid of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries), to transform them into talking-shops, to wear down the peasants and workers by months and months of empty talk and playing at revolution.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm
"I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes and that she wants to organise them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/22.htm
" ... And the crudeness of the Americans’ rapacious imperialism may be seen from the fact that American agents are buying white slaves, women and girls, and shipping them to America for the development of prostitution. Just think, free, cultured America supplying white slaves for brothels!"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/05.htm
"On the other hand, Mr. Milyukov and his gang revealed themselves in all their old glory as shameless and unprincipled careerists. In the adopted resolution they gloss over the issue in order to fool the public at large, in the way that the liberal heroes of parliamentary prostitution have always fooled the people."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/20.htm
"Thieves, male prostitutes, venal writers, venal newspapers. Such is our “big press”. Such is the flower of our “high” society."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/sep/07cc.htm
"I have written about the Duma in Nos. 12, 14 and 15 of Proletary. I am also writing in No. 16, which will come out on September 12 (new style)[1] . In Posledniye Izvestia (September 1, new style, No. 247) the Bund talked itself popeyed. We’ll give them a whipping they won’t forget till   they’re able to sit up again. These Bundists are such dolts and trumpeters, such nitwits and idiots, they are the limit! Iskra has got tangled up in lies, especially Martov in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung (August 24, new style—translation in Proletary No. 15). For heaven’s sake, don’t rush in with an official resolution and do not give way an inch to this Bundist-new-Iskrist conference. Is it true that there will be no minutes? How can one possibly confer with these prostitutes without minutes?"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/sep/05e.htm
"Wherever possible we shall strive to set up our committees, committees of the Social-   Democratic Labour Party. They will consist of peasants, paupers, intellectuals, prostitutes (a worker recently asked us in a letter why not carry on agitation among the prostitutes), soldiers, teachers, workers—in short, all Social-Democrats, and none but Social-Democrats. These committees will conduct the whole of Social-Democratic work, in its full scope, striving, however, to organise the rural proletariat especially and particularly, since the Social-Democratic Party is the class party of the proletariat. To consider it “unorthodox” to organise a proletariat which has not entirely freed itself from various relics of the past is a tremendous delusion, and we would like to think that the relevant passages of the letter are due to a mere misunderstanding. The urban and industrial proletariat will inevitably be the nucleus of our Social-Democratic Labour Party, but we must attract to it, enlighten, and organise all who labour and are exploited, as stated in our programme—all without exception: handicraftsmen, paupers, beggars, servants, tramps, prostitutes—of course, subject to the necessary and obligatory condition that they join the Social-Democratic movement and not that the Social-Democratic movement join them, that they adopt the standpoint of the proletariat, and not that the proletariat adopt theirs."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/sep/00c.htm
Lenin mimicking reformist socialists who try to temper the 1905 workers' uprising: "Workers! We are too weak for an uprising. Therefore, do not talk and do not let the Osvobozhdeniye prostitutes, the Constitutional-Democrats, and Duma supporters talk of a revolution; do not allow those bourgeois scoundrels to sully a great popular concept with their claptrap."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ep-s2.htm#bkV09P126F01
"We are witnessing a highly instructive and highly comical spectacle. The bourgeois liberal prostitutes are trying to drape themselves in the toga of revolution. The Osvobozhdentsi—risum teneatis, amici![2]—the Osvobozhdentsi are beginning to speak in the name of the revolution! The Osvobozhdentsi are beginning to assure us that they “do not fear revolution” (Mr. Struve in the Osvobozhdeniye, No. 72)!!! The Osvobozhdentsi are voicing their claims “to be at the head of the revolution”!!!"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x01.htm
"The problem is how to approach the peasants in the course of practical work, how to organise the poor and middle peasants so as to be able at every step to combat their gravita- tion towards the past, their attempts to go back to free trading activities, their constant striving to be “free” producers. The word “freedom” is a good word. We meet it at every step: freedom to trade, freedom to sell, freedom to sell one self, and so forth. And there are Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, rascals, who garble and distort this beautiful word “freedom” in every newspaper and in every speech. But these are all crooks, capitalism’s prostitutes, who are trying to drag the people back to the past."

The civil war in the Autumn of 1918 - the Bolshevik's darkest hour (i.e., around the time of when the above letter was written): The authors of Black Book reveal: "'The Bolsheviks are saying openly that their days are numbered,' Karl Helfferich, the German ambassador to Moscow, told his government on 3 August 1918. "A veritable panic has overtaken Moscow ...'
   "The Bolsheviks certainly never felt as much under threat as they did in 1918. The territory they controlled amounted to little more than the traditional province of Moscow, which now faced anti-Bolshevik opposition on 3 solidaly established fronts: the first in the region of the Don, occupied by teh Cossak troops of Ataman Krasnov and by General Denikin's White Army; the second in Ukraine, which was in the hands of the Germans and of the Rada, the national Ukraine government; and a third front all along the Trans-Siberian Railway, where most of the big cities had fallen to the Czech Legion, whose offensive had been supported by the SR govt in Samara.
   "In the regions that were more or less under Bolshevik control, nearly140 major revolts and insurrections broke out in the summer of 1918; most involved peasant communities resisting the enforced commandeering of food supplies; protests against the limitations on trade and exchange; or protests against the new compulsory conscription for the Red Army. Typically the angry peasants would flock en masse to the nearest town, besiege the soviet, and sometimes even attempt to set fire to it." (Black Book, p.71)
- On top of this - 1918 = assassination attempts, bombings/attacks on Bolshevik offices and Soviet delegates/workers/soldiers/offices.
- Civil war = violence, murder, mass repression/disarming of enemy ... Abraham Lincoln and American Civil War ("mass murderer"; forced conscription) = 1 million casualties (3% of total pop), including 600,000 soldier deaths and 50,000 civilians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#cite_ref-StatsWarCost_204-0).
- Authors of 'Black Book' are like apologists for Southern Confederacy documenting the "evil crimes" of the Northern Abolitionists.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jul/26cz.htm
Lenin to Clara Zetkin, 26 July 1918: "We here are now living through perhaps the most difficult weeks of the whole revolution. The class struggle and the civil war have penetrated deep among the population: everywhere there is a split in the villages—the poor are for us, the kulaks are furiously against us. The Entente has bought the Czechoslovaks, a counter-revolutionary revolt is raging, the bourgeoisie is making every effort to overthrow us. Nevertheless, we firmly believe that we shall escape this “usual” (as in 1794 and 1849) course of the revolution, and will conquer the bourgeoisie.... We are all extremely glad that you. Comrade Mehring and the other “Spartacus comrades” in Germany are with us, “head and heart”.[1] This gives us confidence that the best elements of the West-European working class—in spite of all difficulties—will nevertheless come to our assistance."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jun/26gyz.htm
"Only today we have heard at the C.C. that in Petrograd the workers wanted to reply to the murder of Volodarsky by mass terror and that you (not you personally, but the Petrograd Central Committee members, or Petrograd Committee members) restrained them. I protest most emphatically! We are discrediting ourselves: we threaten mass terror, even in resolutions of the Soviet of Deputies, yet when it comes to action we obstruct the revolutionary initiative of the masses, a quite correct one. This is im-poss-ible! This is wartime above all. We must encourage the energy and mass character of the terror against the counter-revolutionaries, and particularly in Petrograd, the example of which is decisive." [Volodarsky, V.—a leader of the Petrograd Bolsheviks, editor of the Petrograd newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta (Red Gazette) and member of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet. He was murdered on June 20, 1918 by Socialist-Revolutionaries]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/17mfb.htm
"Act in the most resolute way against the kulaks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionary scoundrels who have made common cause with them. Issue appeals to the poor peasants. Organise them. Ask for help from Yelets. Essential to suppress the kulak extortioners mercilessly. Telegraph."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/19zec.htm
"Essential to combine ruthless suppression of the kulak Left Socialism-Revolutionary rising with confiscation of all the grain from the kulaks and exemplary clearing out in full of grain surpluses, distributing part of the grain free to the poor peasants. Telegraph fulfilment."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/29pc.htm
"I allow myself to express the following wishes on the question of fulfilment of the Council of People’s Commissars’ resolution of August 29, on the submission of reports within one week:
In the reports, which must be as popular as possible, it is particularly necessary to note
(a) improvement in the position of the masses (raising of wages for the workers, school-teachers, etc.), (b) participation of the workers in administration ( personally outstanding workers, workers’ organisations likewise, etc.), (c) participation of the poor peasants and their help to Soviet power in the struggle against the kulaks, (d) expropriation of the landowners, capitalists, traders, financiers, etc.... The main task is to demonstrate concretely, with facts, exactly how Soviet power has made definite steps (the first) towards socialism."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/22gko.htm
"I have received your telegram of January 20, 1918. Hearty thanks for your energetic measures regarding food. Go on trying for God’s sake as hard as you can to secure foodstuffs, press on with collection and delivery of grain, so as to arrange supply before the spring floods. All hopes are on you, otherwise famine by the spring is inevitable."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/23vdbb.htm
"In view of your failure to fulfil my insistent request to point out to me the justification for raising my salary as from March 1, 1918, from 500 to 800 rubles a month, and in view of the obvious illegality of this increase, carried out by you arbitrarily by agreement with the secretary of the Council, Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov, and in direct infringement of the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of November 23, 1917, I give you a severe reprimand.... [Lenin refers to the decision of the Council of People’s Commissars, passed on November 18 (December 1), 1917, “On the Remuneration of People’s Commissars, Senior Government Employees and Officials”, = which he had drafted. It set the maximum monthly salary for Commissars at 500 rubles with an allowance of 100 rubles for each member of the family unable to work.]"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/oct/18sg.htm
"We have had news today that the Spartacus group, together with the Bremen Left Radicals,[2] has taken the most energetic steps to promote the setting up of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils throughout Germany. I take this opportunity to send our best wishes to the German revolutionary internationalist Social-Democrats. The work of the German Spartacus group, which has carried on systematic revolutionary propaganda in the most difficult conditions, has really saved the honour of German socialism and the German proletariat. Now the decisive hour is at hand: the rapidly maturing German revolution calls on the Spartacus group to play the most important role, and we all firmly hope that before long the German socialist proletarian republic will inflict a decisive blow on world imperialism.... With best greetings and firm hopes that in the very near future it will be possible to hail the victory of the proletarian revolution in Germany."

Redux: A debate with an anarchist on the 1917 Russian revolution

2012-09-19T18:15:00.001-04:00

‎"What a great moral influence strikes have, how they affect workers who see that their comrades have ceased to be slaves and, if only for the time being, have become people on an equal footing with the rich! Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind, thoughts of the struggle of the entire working class for emancipation from the oppression of capital. It has often happened that before a big strike the workers of a certain factory or a certain branch of industry or of a certain town knew hardly anything and scarcely ever thought about socialism; but after the strike, study circles and associations become much more widespread among them and more and wore workers become socialists." - V.I. Lenin, "On Strikes"

I posted the foregoing quote on Facebook and immediately received a comment from one of my anarchist-leaning friends that this was ironic because Lenin had "made strikes illegal in Russia starting in 1918."

The following debate enabled me to put some scattered thoughts down about the Russian revolution which I wanted to put down here as well, for posterity's sake, and because it helped me clarify my own ideas in the process. So, here's what I wrote (slightly edited):

I'm curious where you get that information from? From what I've read/heard, strikes were not completely made illegal in Russia until the late-1920s/30s. The anarchist Emma Goldman even talks about the strikes she witnessed in Moscow, Petrograd, and elsewhere when she was in Russia in 1920-1. Certainly some of these strikes were vehemently opposed by the Soviet government, for a number of reasons, but other of these strikes were settled on terms favorable to the striking workers (something which Goldman smugly extols in these writings). [See http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/index.htm]

[Also, see this document from 1920 which summarizes Russian labor laws at that time -
http://debs.indstate.edu/k17p7_1920.pdf]

I recommend reading "Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory," by Kevin Murphy which documents the strikes, work stoppages, and job actions which occurred in one of the lagrest factories in Moscow between 1917 and the 1930s. It shows the evolving relations between the workers, the Soviet government, and the Communist Party, as the revolution decayed during the 20's and 30's.

There is no doubt that the Russian workers' government was becoming more and more corrupted throughout the period of Civil War and the 1920s (NEP, etc). Workers and peasants suffered privations, to be sure, owing to Russia's economic poverty, international isolation and economic blockade, and vicious civil war against bourgeois counter-revolution.

Nonetheless, workers and unions in Russia still maintained essential control over production until the mid-1920s or so. Here is a really good piece I translated from the original French on the question of workers' control of production in revolutionary Russia - http://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2010/12/english-translation-of-lenin-and.html.

Also, if you're interested, here's a great piece written in 1922 by the American revolutionary and leading original member of the IWW, "Big" Bill Haywood. Haywood was then living in Russia and was working with the unions there (alongside Lenin) as part of the Soviet government. Here he responds to many of Emma Goldman's criticisms - http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1922/04/emma_goldman.htm.

Before Stalin, the question of the trade unions in relation to both the working-class as a whole and the representative workers' Soviets in particular was hotly debated within the Russian Communist Party. However, the clearest statement comes from the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, which is interesting in that Lenin argues that the trade unions in Russia must remain independent of the government and must continue to act as the protectors and defenders of the workers' interests both within the workplace and, as need be, against the increasingly bureucratized government itself.

For instance, see - http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/10th/16d-abstract.htm and http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm.

"Trade unions are not just historically necessary; they are historically inevitable as an organisation of the industrial proletariat, and, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, embrace nearly the whole of it.... It follows from what I have said that the trade unions have an extremely important part to play at every step of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But what is their part? I find that it is a most unusual one, as soon as I delve into this question, which is one of the most fundamental theoretically. On the one hand, the trade unions, which take in all industrial workers, are an organisation of the ruling, dominant, governing class, which has now set up a dictatorship and is exercising coercion through the state. But it is not a state organisation; nor is it one designed for coercion, but for education. It is an organisation designed to draw in and to train; it is, in fact, a school: a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism. It is a very unusual type of school, because there are no teachers or pupils; this is an extremely unusual combination of what has necessarily come down to us from capitalism, and what comes from the ranks of the advanced revolutionary detachments, which you might call the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat. To talk about the role of the trade unions without taking these truths into account is to fall straight into a number of errors." - Lenin, 1920

At this point, my friend retorts:

Well I definitely can't respond with any thing as comprehensive as this. I'm no expert on the Russian Revolution, but I think I've got a pretty good grasp on it so I will try to keep up.

There were many strikes and insurrections in Russia after the revolution. Why wouldn't there be? The state took over the means of production and paid out piecemeal wages. Workers still created value for capital, the basic economic relationship was still M-C-M, so of course class struggle continued between the workers and new owner state (Lenin referred to the Soviet Union as state capitalism positively as early as 1918 and in this, at least, he was right).

Stikes were, however, made illegal in 1918 as part of Lenin's War Communism economic plan. This is simply fact, you can look it up. The policy went as far as to specify that any striker could be shot.

Surely I don't have to stress that what politicians say does not necessarily translate to what they mean or do? A huge impetus for Lenin's strategic support of unions was that they were bureaucratic and controllable, as opposed to the factory committees that, before the revolution existed in the vast majority of factories in Moscow and Petrograd (and whose model was used in smaller soviets and agrarian committees, who they federated with quite effectively). Lenin wished to see the committees integrated into the more controllable, less spontaneous and certainly less communist trade unions. He succeeded in this, returning one man management where the workers had collectivized, de-equalizing wages where they had voted to equalize them, etc. etc.

I could find hundreds of Lenin quotes that are great out quotes that I totally agree with out of context (I could probably do the same with Barack Obama 2008 campaign), nearly all of them come from the April Theses and State and Revolution, two texts written while Lenin was trying to win the favor of militant workers in the factory committees, local, smaller soviets and the agrarian committees (who collectivized 70% of farm land before Lenin symbolically passed land reform!) Lenin even went as far, in 1917, to say that factory committees should be the "organs of insurrection" and alluded to their being the social unit of a new communist order. A month later, when the Bolsheviks won control of Petrograd and Moscow soviets (basically assuring their rise to power), he completely abandoned his support for the committees, who he no longer needed. The moment he gained power he began the task of deconstructing them. A huge part of this was shifting focus to the more conservative trade unions. But once power was consolidated enough for Lenin to pass War Communism, even striking was made illegal (unions were not).

My favorite piece on the subject is this Prole.info pamphlet. I think its useful because it is truly worker centric, equally critical of anarchists and party communists.

www.prole.info/pamphlets/factorycommitteesinrussia.pdf

Then I, again:

I tried to look up the (il)legality of strikes in 1917-20 and could not find anything. maybe you're more adept at google than i am or something, but i can't find this 'fact' anywhere. also, the pamphlet you link to makes no mention of this except to have one quote from Trotsky in 1919 in which he expressed the opinion that there should be no strikes in Russia, but then goes on to say that Lenin did indeed recognize the right to strike ...

i do seem to remember at one point reading something in an anarchist publication that attributed a quote to Lenin (maybe it was in 1918) where he said something to the effect of shooting any striking worker, but there was no citation for the quote, and i was unable to find it anywhere in his collected writings ...

Then he, once more:

Sorry, the pamphlet was more in response to the nature of Lenin's lip service to unions and applying a healthy skepticism given the political conditions for that support.

Well, there are not many available documents on War Communism on the internet so we are at a bit of a stalemate here. If you search "war communism strikes made illegal" there are countless sites that reference it, but none with any English translated documents. The source on the Wikipedia article is in French, perhaps you could find it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

I hope you don't view me as a belligerent anarchist partisan in this argument. Anarchist did almost as little for the Russian revolution as socialists. The only difference is that they did not actively dismantle the progress that the workers made on their own. All the great successes of the Russian Revolution were made by mostly non-partisan workers and peasants organized in militant, federated committees and soviets, whose revolutionary activity spawned from their own class interests.

I guess I just don't understand why, if you are going to post a quote about the effectiveness and beauty of strikes, you don't choose from one of the millions of militant participants in strikes throughout history, rather than the middle class intellectual socialists who try to co-opt them.

Finally, I conclude:

Yes, I see that the wikipedia article makes mention that part of War Communism was that "strikers could be shot," which itself is a quite ambiguous statement. Anyway, the citation for this is: Nicolas Werth, "Histoire de l'Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline," 1995. I will definitely try to get my hands on a copy of this book, but I will tell you I am already skeptical about the validity of this because Werth is a notoriously pathological anti-communist and apologist for capitalism who equates communism (not Stalinism, but communism) with Nazism. he thinks capitalism is a great form of democracy and wants to paint socialism as inherently tyrannical. i really can't stand academic intellectuals like him who get paid handsomely to publish books defending capitalism and trying to depict every historical socialist movement as a form of inchoate fascism. [See
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/asreview.htm for more info on Werth].

ultimately, we just differ in our appraisal of the russian revolution, the bolsheviks, and lenin's role. i just happen to agree with lenin's whole approach to what it takes to win a succesful revolution over the ruling class (russia of 1917 was, after all, the only time in history we've so far seen the working class actually overthrow -- not just resist -- the rule of the bourgeoisie in a nation and replace it with a totally different form of workers' government based on socialized production under workers' control).

the bolsheviks spent decades fighting against Tsarist repression, organizing strikes, unions, protests, and were the only major political force in pre-1917 Russia to consistently oppose and expose the capitalist class through-and-through. this is why lenin was so popular amongst the workers of Russia (which is quite indisputable).

i think lenin has some of the most powerful statements in the revolutionary tradition exposing every filthy aspect of capitalist society; talking about the need for workers to collectively rise up and free themselves from oppression & exploitation; the need for workers to actively oppose racism, xenophobia, and oppression within the working class; criticizing the reformist socialists who want to compromise with the capitalist class rather than wage a ruthless struggle to overthrow them.

it was lenin and the bolsheviks who were quite alone in pre-revolutionary russia in arguing that socialists ought to not only focus on building the struggle around economic issues within the labor movement, but must also act as "the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.... Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected." [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm]

and these were not just words. the bolsheviks did this in practice. and they won. you forget to mention that the context of War Communism was precisely the Soviet government waging a protracted, ruthless Civil War against the the former capitalist class and its armies who wanted to crush the workers' revolution and exact vengeance upon the masses for daring to overthrow them.

you say that there are lenin quotes (or even obama quotes) which taken out of context you would support, and that may be true. but compare this speech (below) given by Lenin in December 1917 to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with any speech ever given by Obama or any other reformist-capitalist politician. indeed, if obama ever gave a speech like this, i would vote for him in a heart-beat.

"The revolution of October 25 had shown the exceptional political maturity of the proletariat and its ability to stand firm in opposition to the bourgeoisie. The complete victory of socialism, however, would require a tremendous organizational effort filled with the knowledge that the proletariat must become the ruling class.

“The proletariat was faced with the tasks of transforming the state system on socialist lines, for no matter how easy it would be to cite arguments in favor of a middle course such a course would be insignificant, the country’s economic situation having reached a state that would rule out any middle course. There was no place left for half-measures in the gigantic struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

“The workers should and did understand this; this was obvious because they had rejected half-way, compromise decisions. The more profound the revolution, the greater the number of active workers required to accomplish the replacement of capitalism by a socialist machinery. Even if there were no sabotage, the forces of the petty bourgeoisie would be inadequate. The task was one that could be accomplished only by drawing on the masses, only by the independent activity of the masses.

“The illusion that only the bourgeoisie could run the state must be fought against. The proletariat must take the rule of the state upon itself.

“The tasks of organizing production devolved entirely on the working class. They should do away, once and for all, with the illusion that state affairs or the management of banks and factories were beyond the power of the workers. All this could be solved only by tremendous day-to-day organizational work.

“Every factory committee should concern itself not only with the affairs of its own factory, but should also be an organization nucleus helping arrange the life of the state as a whole. It is easy to issue a decree on the abolition of private property, but it must and could be implemented only by the workers themselves. Let there be mistakes—they would be the mistakes of a new class creating a new way of life.

“There was not and could not be a definite plan for the organization of economic life. Nobody could provide one. But it could be done from below, by the masses, through their experience. Instructions would, of course, be given and ways would be indicated, but it was necessary to begin simultaneously from above and from below." (Lenin, Complete Works, XXII, p. 125-127)

As we know, things in Russia did not quite ultimately work out this way, despite the revolutionary heroism and energy of the working class. But the historical significance of the Russian revolution and the crucial part played by the Russian Bolsheviks remains paramount. I agree with the assessment of the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who wrote the following in 1918, shortly before her death at the hands of the German police:

"The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War.…

"Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western social democracy lacked were represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.…

"Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy…

"The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity forced upon them by these fatal circumstances…and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.…

"What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks.…

"It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have dared!’

"This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘bolshevism.’" (http://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm)

"Lucy Parsons" zine/pamphlet | Download, print, distribute!

2012-08-28T20:05:00.000-04:00

Download, print, and distribute "Lucy Parsons" zine/pamphlet!

Original online text available here

Antonio Gramsci (ISJ)

2012-06-09T20:12:00.000-04:00

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?s=contents&issue=114
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=162=109

The Class Origin and Basis of Anarchist Ideology: A Marxist Appraisal

2012-05-30T17:30:00.034-04:00

Many young people today, repulsed by the militarized, exploitative, oppressive reality of our society, are drawn towards anarchist politics. To be sure, this is a positive development. Any step that people take in the direction away from a wholehearted acceptance of the ruling ideas and assumptions of our capitalist society is something to be supported.

However, as we all know, the matter does not end there. For after one decides to try to affect social change and enters the activist foray, it becomes clear that there are a number of anti-capitalist or non-capitalist ideas out there. Sometimes these ideas seem to overlap in their goals and methods; but it is also clear that they just as often diverge. In the end, one must figure out which ideology best seems able to achieve the kind of social change one has in mind.

As a revolutionary socialist, I want to offer a broad analysis explaining the class origins and basis of anarchism -- the primary anti-capitalist alternative to that of socialism -- and the drawbacks that inevitably flow from this reality. Specifically, my contention is that anarchist thought is the ideal expression of the social position of the various middle class(es) of history. Oppressed by the ruling class, yet unable to replace the ruling class' political dominance with that of its own, the middle class finds itself in a state of eternal rebellion against seemingly alien powers representing other classes' interests.

(NOTE: This is most certainly not to say that all people who consider themselves anarchist are necessarily middle class).

A quick word to avoid confusion. Oftentimes on the left, the term "middle class" is used as a sort of flip pejorative against a competing ideology. In many of these instances, such usage of the term is less born of an actual historical analysis of an opposing set of ideas, but rather as a simple means to end an unpleasant conversation. This is not how I employ the term. In this article, the term "middle class" is exclusively meant to describe those social layers of a given society that stand between or outside of the primary classes. By primary classes I mean those socioeconomic groups of people that wield palpable weight over the entirety of that society (either "from above" or "from below", actively or potentially), owing to their integral position within the dominant relations of economic production of that society (i.e., the way society is organized so as to meet its needs and physically reproduce itself).

Moreover, my aim in attempting a critical analysis of anarchism is not to discount the important efforts of many of today's activists who identify as anarchist, nor ignore the important historical contributions of the anarchist movement to the fight against oppression and exploitation. Neither am I attempting to claim that anarchism has never been espoused by working-class people -- even large groups of working-class people.

Nonetheless, a scientific attempt at understanding the material basis of an ideology cannot rest exclusively on what class or group of people may support it at a given moment. For instance, if in a moment of political reaction a group of workers come to support the anti-union ideology of their bosses, this does not mean that we must abandon the notion that this ideology is objectively an expression and product of the capitalist class. The true indication of an ideology's social counterpart in the material world is not who happens to espouse it, but rather whose interests it embodies; whose actual conditions of existence it is an ideal expression of.

To begin with, what is anarchism? Though there are myriad different strands of anarchism -- many of which would be loath to admit kinship with each other -- there is a commonality to them all. In essence, this commonality is a basic rejection of the state (i.e., government) and an opposition (at least in theory) to 'hierarchy' in the broadest sense; that is, to the authority exerted by one person or group over another.

In the words of the popular contemporary anarchist writer, Cindy Milstein, anarchism "stands for the absence of both domination (mastery or control over another) and hierarchy (ranked power relations of dominance and subordination)," and that "[f]rom its beginnings, anarchism's core aspiration has been to root out and eradicate all coercive, hierarchical social relations and dream up and establish consensual, egalitarian ones in every instance" (http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lex_anarchism_master.pdf).

Further, anarchists argue that the state is categorically destructive of all revolutionary ends, and that the exercise of official authority can never but ultimately result in the unqualified extension of human misery, servility, and oppression. "All power corrupts." Socialists -- and in particular, Marxists -- on the other hand, hold a different view. Socialists maintain that a limited form of government or state can, nay must, be wielded by the organized working-class in its majority in order to secure its triumph over its masters, the capitalist class (or "bourgeoisie"). This is the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marx.

Much like pacifists view violence as an inherently evil phenomenon to be avoided at all costs, so too do anarchists place a taboo on the state. As the renowned anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote in Statism and Anarchy,

If the State is needed to emancipate the workers, then the workers are not yet free ... Every state, not excepting [a] People's State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. [Marxists] insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) [i.e., dictatorship of the proletariat] can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom ... (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm).

Of course, Bakunin's opposition to "all dictatorship" only included formal dictatorship or government. He had no problem with government or dictatorship as long as it was informal and concealed. As he wrote elsewhere, "[T]here is only one power and one dictatorship whose organisation is salutary and feasible: it is that collective, invisible dictatorship of those who are allied in the name of our principle," and stated that anarchists must be "like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest. . . steer[ing] it [the revolution] not by any open power but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies -- a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power" (http://struggle.ws/anarchism/writers/anarcho/anarchism/bakunindictator.html).

Moreover, Bakunin, like many anarchists since, fetishized the use of violence in pursuit of anarchist freedom. To him, there was no contradiction between supporting violence and opposing all state authority. But what, in the final analysis, is the state if not the perfect expression of organized violence? What is government but the institutions of control and domination made to serve the interest of one part of society imposing its will, or authority, on the rest of society? The laws, the police, the courts, the politicians, etc., are all instruments of state control backed up by violence or the threat of violence.

Indeed, there are many parallels between the logic of pacifism and the logic of anarchism on this score. Violence, like the state, is a social phenomenon. However, it is primarily a tool to achieve some desired end. Whether it is the ruling class of one country militarily invading another, a police battalion attacking a protest, or a group of slaves rising up to slay their masters, violence is merely the physical imposition of one will (either individually or as a group) over another in pursuit of some definite material goal.

For Marxists, this is the essence of class struggle. The interests of the various social and economic classes of a given society clashing. By definition, the interests of various classes in a society are ultimately mutually exclusive. This was true of the slaves and plantation-owners, the peasants and the feudal lords, the bourgeoisie and the landed nobility, and presently, the workers and the capitalists. As long as one part of society is differentiated from all others owing primarily to its exclusive ownership of the wealth and resources of that society, this class antagonism is manifest.

The state in any epoch has ever been either the creation or the instrument of precisely the most socially and economically dominant class of people. It is the means by which this latter class reinforces its dominance. To all other classes, this state presents itself as an alien body over which they have no control and which exists to repress them.

However, it cannot be said, as the anarchists do, that all states are universally repressive. To the ruling class wielding the state, the state seems no more divorced from their interests than does the gun in the hand of its wielder. To the modern capitalist class, the state is a refined and responsive tool which serves its needs quite effectively. Even between competing sections of the capitalist class, the state is always "their" state, regardless of which particular fraction of capital, or which capitalist party, happens to be at the helm of the state at a given moment.

Modern history, once it had taken that giant leap away from the primitive, classless societies of our hunter-gatherer and nomadic forebears, has been marked by the constant dominance of a ruling class which comprises a minority of the total human population. Be it the tributary fiefdoms or empires of ancient Europe and Asia, the slave-holding societies of the Mediterranean or Americas, or the modern capitalist societies, humanity has been ruled by a class of people constituting a minority. Therefore, all of the states that history has thus far presented to us seem to embody the interests of only a minority which perpetually stand atop these various hierarchical societies.

Nonetheless, the basis of modern socialist thought is that this state of affairs need not continue forever. The recent historical emergence of capitalism as a dominant economic system has presented humanity for the first time with the prospect of establishing a classless society based on material abundance. Never before has there existed a class such as the modern working class (Marx's "proletariat"). Not only does it possess immense social weight owing to its indispensability within the system of capitalist production, it is also the most numerous class and, most importantly, its existence is not dependent on any class below it. In other words, the working class itself is not innately an exploiting or oppressing class.

If organized and united in purpose, this working class therefore has the social capacity to replace the current ruling class with an alternative sort of rule. However, the working class can only do this by collectively imposing its will on its former capitalist masters. And it is only through some mechanism of organized violence that this can be done. This mechanism, regardless of whether one calls it a system of workers' councils, popular assemblies, or factory committees, is for all intents and purposes nothing but a type of state, in the most basic sense of the word.

It is self-evident that one cannot both be against all authority and also support the ability of the working class to impose its will (i.e., its authority) on the former ruling class through force of arms or coercion. One cannot both oppose all states and also support the ability of the organized working class to promulgate enforceable laws proscribing and curbing the liberties and freedoms of the former ruling class of capitalist exploiters.

Nonetheless, such a workers' state is inevitably very different from all preceding states. As Marx writes in the Communist Manifesto:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power [i.e., the state], properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm).

Touching on a similar theme, Engels writes elsewhere:

The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm).

Finally, here's the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin commenting on the Paris Commune of 1871 (referred to by Marx as the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action):

The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine "only" by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact, this "only" signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of "quantity being transformed into quality"... The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" of suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away (http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm).

Having the capacity to create a new society in its own image, the working class would obviously be remiss to renounce in advance the use of any weapon which could help it achieve victory. But this is precisely the nub: that the working class actually has the capacity to construct a new form of social organization to replace the old. This is not true of many other classes throughout history.

In the course of analyzing the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx offers an important insight into the social position of the peasantry in relation to society as a whole:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm).

The peasantry, in this regard, is somewhat analogous to other middle classes throughout history -- the craft artisan and journeyman of the late feudal and early capitalist epochs, or the quintessential self-employed small businessperson (or "petite-bourgeoisie") of advanced capitalism. These classes either play no or little central role in the dominant economic mode of their era, comprise too small a fraction of the total population of society, or lack sufficient social cohesion and interdependence among themselves to effectively vie for the right to rule society according to their collective interests.

What the middle class shares in common with the working class under capitalism is a hatred of the capitalist ruling class and its manifold institutions of state repression and domination. In relation to both of these former classes, the capitalist state presents itself as an alien force, standing above and outside of them, and which seems to corrupt all it touches. Therefore, as experienced by the majority of society, reality appears to confirm all of the common anarchist platitudes concerning the state as an unqualified bane.

Nonetheless, this shared experience of the middle class and the working class comes to an abrupt end during moments of heightened class struggle and especially in revolutionary moments. As the working class moves into united struggle against its common oppressor it can begin to get a sense of its own social weight and capacity to actually replace the old ruling class entirely. Not so the middle class.

Sandwiched between two primary classes of which it shares traits of each, yet is not fully either, the middle class retains its own identity but lacks its own capacity to form a national government organized around its unique interests. It neither has the strength to rule as a minority over society -- à la the capitalist class -- nor the numbers to rule as a democratic majority over society -- à la the working class.

Therefore, in relation to the middle class, it can truly be said that all states are alien forces. All states are corrupt institutions which they do not control. All states do appear as unbridled authoritarianism serving interests not their own. At best, the middle class can hope to share power in a government constructed around the dominance of some other class. At worst, its interests are cast aside by the ruling power as so much refuse. In either event, the state remains an external force, sometimes benign, sometimes malignant. This is just as much true of a workers' state -- even the most democratic workers' state -- as it is of a capitalists' state. There can never be a state that the middle class would truly be able to call its own.

None of this is to say that the middle class can play no role whatsoever in social transformation. For example, in the instance of France cited above, the peasantry played a significant role in the rise of Bonaparte. Likewise with the conquest of power by the Communist Party in China in 1949. Even the rise of Hitler in Germany owed quite a great deal to the mobilization of the middle class.

But in none of these cases above was the end result a state that represented the hegemony of the peasantry or the middle class as the self-governing force holding sway over the rest of society. The middle class can be utilized by other forces towards a given end, but the middle class itself can never rule society. Even in those historical instances where neither of the primary classes have the strength to exert their own dominance over the others (either due to mutual exhaustion as a result of inconclusive class war, or otherwise), the middle class cannot simply step into the breach and construct a petite-bourgeois paradise. As with the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia, the middle class can only take over the running of a society by shedding the essential traits of its own class. That is, by mimicking and ultimately becoming a social agent of either one or the other of the primary classes.

It is also for this reason that the middle class cannot simply be ignored by the working class. While the middle class may not be able to run society on its own, it nonetheless has the capacity -- if chronically disgruntled -- to create many problems for whichever class does happen to be running society.

In sum, the middle class is the perfect embodiment of the anarchist ideology. Indeed, it is the only class from whose vantage point anarchism holds one-hundred percent true. Further, it offers to the middle class a philosophy which transforms its limitations into a virtue. For the middle class, all states are objectively alien forces. Therefore, the pursuit of state power is inherently a fool's game. The middle class universalizes its own conditions of existence -- its own impotence and inability to wield state power in the interest of all of society -- and projects this onto the rest of society in the form of a set of morals, values, and ethics, stamped with the ideological label, anarchism.

Unable to conclusively abolish the rule of the capitalists, the middle class is an embodiment of eternal rebellion against the formers' state. The anarchist mantra, "Rebel against all authority," is both a way of life and a never-ending curse of the middle class. Its salvation, and the salvation of all of humanity, lies in the hands of other classes outside of its control.

As an aside, it is therefore no surprise that the recognized founder of modern anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, imbued his writings with the unique ideological outlook of the middle class artisan (which he himself was). He opposed both the big bourgeoisie but also the incipient proletariat, condemning strikes, work stoppages, labor unions, and class struggle itself. He explicitly states that social transformation will be brought about by enlightened members of "la classe moyenne" [the middle class]. His stated economic aims were unmistakeably that of the petite-craftsman: the socialization of the tools for the use of the producers, but the privatization of the products of labor for the ownership by the individual craftsmen.*

As Marx wrote of Proudhon: "He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm).

As a further aside, it is telling that one can actually see an explicit reflection of precisely this above trait in contemporary anarchist thought as well. Again, to quote Milstein, "Anarchism is a synthesis of the best of liberalism and the best of communism," or, put differently, the best that bourgeois thought has to offer and the best that proletarian thought has to offer. We find ourselves once more firmly within the characteristic paradigm of the middle class -- neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but rather something in between; literally, in the middle (http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lex_anarchism_master.pdf).

In the years since Proudhon, anarchism has in turn taken root amongst a myriad of like middle classes: small peasants, bohemian petite-bourgeoisie, down-and-out former aristocrats, career students and intellectuals. Where anarchism has found currency among working classes, it is always in the degree to which it veers into Marxism and away from the political precepts most distinctly associated with the middle class from whence it comes.

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* See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm, http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/socfrombel/sfb_3.htm, https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2Zdv5hwi_o6X1BQWVhwSEZQZzg, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proudhon, http://books.google.com/books?id=QDWIOL_KtGYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA237#v=onepage&q=proudhon&f=false, http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWireIndex=index&lang=EN&q=proudhon&p=1&f_creator=Proudhon%2C+Pierre+Joseph+%281809-1865%29

Marxism, feminism, and accusations of "class reductionism"

2012-05-01T10:16:00.001-04:00

I recently engaged in a friendly debate with someone who was arguing that Marxism is antithetical to the contemporary struggle for women’s rights because Marx was a “class reductionist” who ignored women’s oppression as something to be dealt with “after the revolution.”

I felt I would reproduce a snippet of my comments here:

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I just wanted to say a quick word as someone who identities as both a Marxist and a feminist.

In fact, Marx and Engels were well ahead of their time, viz., the stuggle for women’s emancipation. Even a terse reading of some of Marx’s collected works reveal him repeatedly inveighing against women’s oppression, both in society generally, and within the labor and socialist movements. Marx fought to have women included as full and equal members — including in leadership positions — in the various movements he engaged in as against many of his (bigoted) contemporaries.

He wrote that their could be no truly revolutionary movement without mass participation of women; indeed, he makes a point of saying that one can judge the level of development of any society by looking at the degree to which women have won their social emancipation in that society.

His collaborators, Frederick Engels and August Bebel, were among the first anti-capitalists to pen books specifically analyzing the history of women’s oppression. Along with Marx, they contend that a fundamental socio-economic revolution is impossible unless premised upon the complete liberation of the female half of the population (both from class exploitation and gender oppression).

Some of the first American feminists, including Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood), Helen Keller, and Lucy Parsons, were themselves members of the American Socialist Party, and they all cite the works of Marx & Engels as a central contributor to the development of their understanding of women’s oppression and liberation.

In sum, I think it’s wrong to say that Marxism is “class reductionist” or ignores the question of women’s rights as something to be dealt with “after the revolution.” Certainly there have been those who have historically claimed the label “Marxist” who have been guilty of such distortions. But then again, the terms “feminism”, “democracy”, and even “human rights” have also been historically subject to distortions by many of their supposed proponents. Just as we need to struggle against those who have tried to turn “feminism” into a dirty word, I personally think the same is true of “Marxism.”

A debate with an anarchist on the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution of 1917

2012-03-08T10:56:00.004-05:00

I am able here to only reprint part of the debate, but it is interesting nonetheless, even if taken in media res.

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Anarchist:

Lenin and Trotsky had frantically managed to position themselves as ‘leaders’ by October, yes, but that doesn’t mean that their tactics precipitated the revolution. Read Trotsky’s “history of the Russian revolution” where he admits this openly : He writes: “‘The soldiers lagged behind the shop committees. The committees lagged behind the masses … The party also lagged behind the revolutionary dynamic - an organisation which had the least right to lag, especially in a time of revolution … The most revolutionary party which human history until this time had ever known was nevertheless caught unawares by the events of history. It reconstructed itself in the fires, and straightened out its ranks under the onslaught of events. The masses at the turning point were a hundred times to the left of the extreme left party” The Bolsheviks actually OPPOSED the Petrograd strikes in February, urging workers to wait till mayday and were rightfully ignored. Trotsky admits that the Bolsheviks had no role in instigating the revolution, why can’t you?

The October coup merely replaced one bourgeois government with another. The article you link to describes the set up of what Lenin called ‘workers control’, but in practice it was anything but [the article being referenced here on "Lenin and workers' control" can be found on this blog at http://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2010/12/english-translation-of-lenin-and.html]. Yes, workers had voted for them in large numbers late in 1917 (they were the party promising most workers power after all), but as early as 1918 these promises were being exposed as opportunistic lies. No land was to be given to the peasants. Workers found that they were banned from going on strike, they were not allowed to form independent trade unions or elect whoever they chose to the Soviets.

Let me ask you this: if the Soviet system as set up by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was so democratic, what happened when they failed to elect Bolsheviks? What happened when Mensheviks and SRs won majorities, as they did in Tula, Kostroma, Briansk, and many many other industrial centres in 1918? They were ALL disbanded by FORCE. There’s your Bolshevik ‘democracy’.

As Volin wrote in ‘the voice of Labour in 1917’, “‘Once their power has been consolidated and legalised, the Bolsheviks, as state socialists, that is as men who believe in centralised and authoritarian leadership - will start running the life of the country and of the people from the top. Your soviets … will gradually become simple tools of the central government … You will soon see the inauguration of an authoritarian political and state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist… “All power to the soviets” will become “all power to the leaders of the Party”

History proved him 100% right.

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My Rebuttal:

First of all, let me say that I sympathize with your clear antipathy to authoritarianism and oppression, which I share. However, I think your reading of the Russian revolution and the behavior of the Bolshevik Party is misguided and incorrect.

You claim that the Bolsheviks did not instigate the revolution and intimate that the only role they played between February and October was to "position" themselves as leaders. I will not contest that the Bolsheviks weren't the "instigators" the revolution; that the whole thing was simply orchestrated by the Party, No genuine mass revolution in history has been this way. However, the Bolsheviks did play a very important role in the whole period leading up to February 1917, and certainly between February and October.

Maybe the fact that Trotsky did not join the Bolshevik Party until the summer of 1917 explains his ignorance on the pre-October role of the Bolsheviks. Or maybe it's just Trotsky's penchant for the dramatic and grandiose, sweeping views of events that make him miss the trees for the forest, so to speak.

In any event, here's Trotsky's full view of the revolution, in which he enumerates the necessary factors leading to its ultimate success:

"1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant weight of the proletariat.
To these organic preconditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance.
6. The revolution of 1905 was a great school, or in Lenin’s words, the ‘dress rehearsal’ of the revolution of 1917. The soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created or the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party." (Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940 (Oxford University Press, London, 1970), pp.184-185.)

Trotsky maintained that the spontaneous outpouring of the masses in the form of strikes, mutinies, and peasant rebellions, was a phenomenon that no party could merely conjur up single-handedly. But without the presence of a mass revolutionary party, this inchoate uprising would have been stifled under the forces of the bourgeoisie -- the Cadet Party, the Mensheviks, the SRs, or even the remnants of the monarchists.

This point is quite irrefutable, as even anarchist authors admit that there simply was no alternative organization -- be it anarchist or otherwise -- that was positioned in 1917 to actually forcefully overthrow the bourgeois government and organize the workers and soldiers in such a way as to ensure the supremacy of the Soviets.

Moving beyond Trotsky, the fact of the matter is that the Bolsheviks were incredibly active in agitating and encouraging the development of class-consciousness and workers' self-organization between 1905 and 1917. When many of the anarchists in Russia in 1914 supported their own government during the outbreak of WWI (for instance, Peter Kropotkin), the Bolsheviks stood nearly alone in organizing the most class-conscious workers to oppose the imperialist war and actually call for the defeat of their own government, so as to hasten the possibility of its revolutionary overthrow.

Likewise in August 1917, when General Kornilov threatened to lead a right-wing coup to bring back the monarchy, it was the Bolsheviks who led the arming of the working-class of Petrograd in preparation for a fight against Kornilov. Having thus been armed, the workers of Petrograd were then in a position to impose their will on the bourgeois Constituent Assembly come October.

Finally, beyond the "leaders" like Lenin, Trotsky, etc., there were thousands of working-class Bolsheviks and sympathizers constantly organizing amongst their co-workers in the factories and cities. Attempts to write these brave revolutionaries out of the history of the revolution is quite unforgiveable.

For instance, in August 1915, the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee called for a general strike, the creation of a people’s militia, armed attacks on police headquarters, confiscation of essential foodstuffs, organization of a soviet of workers’ deputies, and recruitment of the soldiers and officers into a general strike. Although these demands were well ahead of the masses’ political consciousness, they were almost a blueprint for what was to come eighteen months later. (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 111).

Another example: Bolsheviks organized a strike to defend Baltic Bolshevik sailors on trial. It started on October 26, 1916, and lasted for three days, with 80,000 out on the final day. At first, the Tsar responded by locking out workers. He then backed down and removed the threat of the death penalty. This victory, during wartime, showed the Bolsheviks the influence they now had. With events like this in mind, the Bolsheviks reestablished a Russian Bureau of the Central Committee when three comrades who had been in exile were sneaked back into the country. Soon, all the socialist groups began to speak of impending revolution in their propaganda. (E. N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987),53).

And, as regards the start of the revolution on February 23rd of 1917, International Women's Day: "[That morning] women workers at five textile plants walked out and headed to nearby factories to call out other workers, in the Petrograd tradition. Why these women? They were among the few textile workers who participated in strikes during the war. The day before, they had met with some Bolsheviks for a study group on the meaning of International Women’s Day." (http://isreview.org/issues/75/feat-february1917.shtml)

You state that "The October coup merely replaced one bourgeois government with another." Maybe we have very different ideas of what constitutes a "bourgeois goverment"? Are you implying that the Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies were a type of bourgeois government? On what basis?

If the Bolsheviks wanted a bourgeois government, why did they outlaw parties that precisely wanted to get rid of the Soviets (i.e., workers' power) and bring back the bourgeois government in the form of the Constituent Assembly? This explains the on-again-off-again war between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks/SRs. These latter two parties explicitly were opposed to workers' control of production and society. They wanted to establish a fully capitalist government and society ruled by Russia's bourgeoise. They were quite explicit about this, actually.

From wikipedia: "On 7 May 1918 the Eighth Party Council of the Socialist Revolutionary Party convened in Moscow and decided to start an uprising against the Bolsheviks with the goal of reconvening the Constituent Assembly. While preparations were under way, the Czechoslovak Legions [allied with the bourgeois-monarchist White Army durign the Civil War] overthrew Bolshevik rule in Siberia, Urals and the Volga region in late May-early June 1918 and the center of SR activity shifted there. "

It is actually interesting because between 1917 and 1919, the Soviet government led by the Bolsheviks would repeatedly ban the Mensheviks/SRs when they took up arms against the Soviets, only to then lift the ban and allow free and open agitation for these latter parties as soon as they would summarily renounce their violent counter-revolutionary actions.

Let me just say here as an aside that I am not a pacifist. I am not against the use of "FORCE" (as use put it in all capitals). Indeed, I have no problem with a succesful workers' revolution actually radically limiting the freedoms of the bourgeoisie and its parties. For instance, in the U.S. this would mean that FOX News, etc., would be shut down by FORCE and the capitalist Democratic and Republican Parties would be banned from participating in any workers' government, by FORCE.
It is necessary to limit the freedom of the bourgeoisie in order to expand the freedom of the working class, in the same way that it is necessary to expropriate the bourgeoisie and abolish their existence as a class in order to win the total emancipation of the working-class and the subsequent abolition of classes altogether.

You claim that by 1918, "no land was to be given to the peasants. Workers found that they were banned from going on strike, they were not allowed to form independent trade unions or elect whoever they chose to the Soviets." I don't know where you get this from. Trade unions were legal and independent of the Soviet government well into the 1920s. In fact the Tenth Party Congress of the now-renamed Communist Party in 1922, specifically debated this question at length and decided overwhelmingly that trade unions in Russia must remain independent of the state and be free to strike, organize against the government, negotiate over pay, etc. This is all a matter of public record.

I believe it wasn't until 1928 or so that independent unions and strikes were completely banned by the government (by this time, of course, Stalin had already completely risen to power by crushing the skulls of the majority of the original Bolshevik Party. including most of its "leaders" as well as its working-class base).

Finally, you quote Volin from "The Voice of Labor", in 1917, in which he predicts the eventual authoritarianism of the Bolshevik-Communist Party. This is quite interesting especially because it was under the first few years of rule of the Bolshevik-dominated Soviets that the anarchist-affiliated "Voice of Labor" was enabled to circulate more freely than it had been able to in the countries of its origin (the U.S. and Canada).

Indeed, Volin was even a supporter of the Soviet government until 1919. As libcom.org describes it, during this early stretch of "comparative freedom in Russia, when other social movements beside the Bolsheviki still enjoyed opportunity to spread their ideas through their own publications and at public meetings, Volin was constantly busy in many fields. He took part in the work of the Soviet Department for Public Education and Enlightenment of the People, first in Voronezh and later in Kharkov." (http://libcom.org/book/export/html/31261)

Of course, Volin's prediction that the mass, emancipatory Bolshevik-led revolution would ultimately turn into its authoritarian opposite was not unique to him, before or since. Virtually the entirety of the bourgeois world was screaming this refrain during the months and years leading up to and following the Russian revolution.

Aside from the capitalist press, however, most of the international anarchist movement continued to support the Soviet government in Russia at least up until 1921. In fact, Emma Goldman famously commented in 1922, after she had turned from an ardent support to an opponent of the Bolsheviks, that she felt "quite alone" and "cut off" from the rest of the anarchist and socialist left because of her position. It was really only much later, after the rise of Stalin, and after the bourgeoisie of the world had popularized the notion that Stalin's crimes originated in the very project of the Bolshevik Party itself, that the broad left began picking up this refrain as 'common sense.'

Even after Kronstadt, most of the best, working-class anarchist revolutionaries of the world understood the position the Bolsheviks were in and supported their efforts at sustaining workers' power in the most unfavorable of conditions. When Emma Goldman accepted large sums of cash as payment for a series of anti-Bolshevik articles she wrote for various capitalist newspapers in the U.S. in the wake of the Kronstadt affair, the American anarchist Lucy Parsons called her a "traitor" and characterized her articles as "a rehash of the supercilious vapourings of capitalist reporters.” (http://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2011/09/lucy-parsons-more-dangerous-than.html)

The famous anarcho-syndicalist, William "Big Bill" Haywood had this to say of Goldman's praise for the Ukranian anarchist Nestor Mahkno in his fight against the Bolsheviks:

"The “anarchist” Mahkno is mentioned by Emma Goldman as a friend and sending food to Kropotkin. In a diary of Fedora-Gianko, the wife of Mahkno, are recorded facts and dates to show that these marauders were guilty of arson, train-wrecking, murder, robbery, all committed against the Soviet Government. By them workers were killed, villages destroyed, bridges blown up, wrecks caused by wild engines turned loose against approaching trains until Mahkno was driven from the country. This kind of work against the Soviet Government meets with the approval of Miss Goldman. Her heart was never with the Bolshevik revolution. Compelled to leave the United States, she came to Russia as there was no other place to which she could go. Friends have not cut her off; she has excommunicated herself." (http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1922/04/emma_goldman.htm)

In conclusion, it's important to go back to the beginning and separate out the essential from the non-essential in what ultimately became of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik Party. No greater source than the Bolsheviks themselves likewise predicted the downfall of the revolution as far as back as 1917 (and arguably as far as back as 1904). However, for them, their prediction wasn't born of a mystical belief that any form of organization or party must necessarily lead to pure evil, but rather that without the spread of the revolution internationally, a proletarian revolution would be doomed to failure in Russia, owing to the backward and underdeveloped economic position of their society, coupled with the fact that the majority of Russian society was still composed of a rural, isolated, peasant class.

Unfortunately, the revolution did not spread, Russia was subject to an economic blockade and military intervention carried out by all of the largest imperialist nations of the world, and Russia's isolated, undeveloped economy was left in complete tatters and decay. In such a situation of societal breakdown, a new class led by a strongman, Stalin, was able to impose his rule on a society in disarray. The revolution had failed. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had, unfortunately, been proven 100% correct in their prediction.

Despite this failure, however, the Russian revolution and the work of the Bolshevik Party provide us to this day with a wealth of information that we can draw on and learn from in our efforts to once again see the rise and triumph of the working class over the horrors of capitalism.

As the German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg put it shortly before her untimely death:

"The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War.…

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western social democracy lacked were represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.…

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy…

The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity forced upon them by these fatal circumstances…and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.…

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the policies of the Bolsheviks.…

It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such. In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: ‘I have dared!’

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘bolshevism.’" (http://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm)

On strategy & tactics: Neither pacifism nor violence fetishism

2012-01-31T12:39:00.002-05:00

I don’t particularly give a damn about bourgeois or corporate property. I will shed no tear over a smashed window of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Nor will I feel bad for the owner of a police car destroyed by any group of protesters.

However, there is a difference between one’s abstract ideological sympathies, on the one hand, and the strategic application of concrete tactics in struggle, on the other. The tendency by some would-be ‘ultra-leftists’ to fetishize violence and property damage in all circumstances, is highly dogmatic, counterproductive, and ultimately undemocratic in the extreme.

In this way, the proponents of ‘propaganda of the deed’ who fetishize violence and provocative confrontation as the ’end-all, be-all’, are merely expressing the inverse of the irrational, undemocratic dogmatism of those pacifists who ceaselessly preach ‘non-violence’ in even the most revolutionary of circumstances.

I am a firm believer in the importance of mass, democratic struggle. At an early stage of the development of a struggle, this may mean nothing more than a peaceful, mass march. At another stage (for instance, see Egypt’s revolution or the 1992 L.A. Rebellion), this may mean physically attacking police, reactionary businesses, or political party offices.

The question in the end is simply one of accurately assessing the current mood and desires of the mass base of the movement and figuring out what tactic at a given juncture is best suited to both express the mood of the majority, while also seeking to push things forward as far as that majority is willing to go at that moment.

It does no good if you as an individual are ready to set up barricades in the streets and commence with a revolutionary struggle for power, if the mass of people are not. In fact, it actually tends to have a counterproductive effect, inviting mass repression by the police while also arresting or even retarding the process whereby masses of people are drawn into closer contact with and affinity for the more revolutionary-minded among their ranks.

Militancy itself is neither a talisman nor a curse to the beholder. When applied at the proper moment, it can at most be a midwife to social revolution; but when applied prematurely or in the wrong place, it can often lead to a miscarriage of the struggle.

Elisabeth Dmitrieff

2012-01-29T21:30:00.001-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Dmitrieff
http://www.aleph99.org/hor/sbher.html
http://quod.lib.umich.edu.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb04495

Marx, Engels, Schweitzer and false accusations of homophobia

2012-01-26T15:21:00.006-05:00

This is part of an ongoing research project I've been conducting on the various accusations of Marx and Engels' supposed virulent homophobia. The other two entries I've done on this topic can be viewed here and here.

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I recently stumbled upon a Wikipedia entry titled "Socialism and LGBT rights." Of particular interest to me was the section, "Marx, Engels, Ulrichs and Schweitzer."

Having already dealt elsewhere with most of the fallacious criticisms raised in the section in question (see the two links at top), I wanted to address one particular argument here, which is the following [my italics]:

Known to both Ulrichs and Marx was the case of Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, an important labor organiser who had been charged with attempting to solicit a teenage boy in a park in 1862. Social democrat leader Ferdinand Lassalle defended Schweitzer on the grounds that while he personally found homosexuality to be dirty, the labor movement needed the leadership of Schweitzer too much to abandon him, and that a person's sexual tastes had "absolutely nothing to do with a man’s political character". Marx, on the other hand, suggested that Engels use this incident to smear Schweitzer: "You must arrange for a few jokes about him to reach Siebel, for him to hawk around to the various papers." However, Schweitzer would go on to become President of the German Labor Union, and the first Social Democrat elected to a parliament in Europe.

The claim here is that Marx wanted homophobic jokes to be spread around about Schweitzer in order to further sully his name.

However, if one actually looks at the letter from which this quote by Marx is drawn, and investigates even cursorily the history and relationship of Schweitzer with Marx and Engels, it becomes painfully evident that the above claim is downright untrue. One can only assume that the author of the above Wikipedia entry is either horribly misinformed and ignorant, or simply has an axe to grind with Marx and/or Marxism and therefore willfully twists the facts in order to buttress his or her argument.

Unable to find the above quote by Marx online anywhere, I took a picture of the relevant page in the Marx-Engels Collected Works. For reference purposes, I also took a picture of the letter in which Engels responds to Marx (the next day), and an explanatory footnote from the Collected Works that I thought useful.

(Click on images below for expanded view).

While it is an indisputable part of the historical record that Marx and Schweitzer were bitter political enemies, there is nothing at all from these letters to suggest that Marx had a homophobic attitude towards him, or that Schweitzer's sexuality affected Marx's political assessment of him in any way.

The first thing that strikes one about Marx's letter is that it was written in 1865, a full three years after the incident in which Schweitzer had been charged with pedophilia. It makes absolutely no sense that Marx would just be brining this up to Engels as if it were a fresh scandal to be "hawked around to the various papers." The Schweitzer scandal had already been in all the papers for years before Marx wrote these words.

Second, we have no idea from the context what "jokes" Marx is talking about here, or whether or not they even relate to Schweitzer's sexuality at all (Marx makes no mention of Schweitzer's "incident" in the letter). I don't know why someone would assume that the only "jokes" Marx would have to spread around about Schweitzer would concern sex. Marx and Engels considered Schweitzer an opportunist, a sycophant, a reformist, and a fool. Certainly there wasn't a dearth of material for these two to laugh about and spread around, that would have had nothing to do with sexual matters. Further evidence of this is that in Engels' letter responding to Marx, he makes no mention of Schweitzer's sexuality, but merely comments along the lines of standing criticisms he and Marx shared of Schweitzers' political behavior and writings. This leads the honest observer to just as much assume the "jokes" are political in nature, rather than personal or sexual.

Finally, upon closer reading of Marx's letter, it is not even clear to me that the "jokes" he is asking Engels to "hawk around" even are about Schweitzer at all. Earler in the letter Marx refers to Schweitzer, but then transitions and brings up an article that Schweitzer had recently quoted, which a footnote tells us was written by someone named Karl Blind. Marx comments that Blind's article -- which had just been published 5 days previously -- was arrogant and self-aggrandizing. It is in the very next sentence that he writes: "You must arrange for a few jokes about the fellow to reach Siebel, for him to hawk around to the various papers."

Judged on the basis of syntax, content, and historical knowledge, it seems much more logical that Marx is actually refering to Karl Blind here, rather than Schweitzer. The fact that Blind's article had just been published a few days prior meant that whatever "joke" Marx thinks he deserves would be "newsworthy" from the standpoint of the "various papers," since it still would have been fresh. At least it would have been much more fresh than a three-year-old sexual scandal that had already saturated the press by then.

Whatever else one thinks of Marx, Schweitzer, or the letter in question, it is self-evident that one cannot honestly draw the conclusion that homophobia has anything to do with Marx's quip. One can assume, imagine, or believe, that Marx is addressing Schweitzer's sexuality here, albeit empirically far-fetched. But one cannot present Marx's homophobia as fact here without being utterly disingenuous.

This kind of sleight-of-hand scholarship is akin to the work of Hubert Kennedy, author of an article titled, "The Queer Marx Loved to Hate." The "queer" is Schweitzer, and it is certainly a fact that he was gay. It is also a fact that Marx did come to hate him. However, it is false to insinuate -- as the title does -- that Marx hated Schweitzer because he was queer, rather than for reasons of political disagreement.

In conclusion, my intention is not to impart the idea that Marx and Engels were infallible or beyond reproach on all questions. They weren't.

But what I am opposed to is dishonesty and misinformation. I am adamantly opposed to people who have a prejudiced political view of Marx and Engels inventing various conspiracies and blemishes in an attempt to cast aspersion on the ideas of the latter two. I am against this then being passed off as scholarly work.

Let us disagree on ideological questions. Let us debate historical and theoretical concerns. But let us remain honest in our appraisal of the facts.

"American Labor Revolutionary: Lucy Parsons"

2011-09-22T12:42:00.000-04:00

This article, first published at SocialistWorker.org, is a much-abridged, edited version of a longer article I had previously posted here.

==

Keith Rosenthal tells the story of a revolutionary who contributed enormously to the struggles of U.S. workers on both sides of the turn of the 20th century.

THE ASHES had hardly cooled from the house fire that killed labor radical Lucy Parsons in 1942 when the Chicago police raided the remains of her home, confiscating her personal library of 3,000 volumes of literature and writings on "sex, socialism and anarchy"--in the cops' words--turning it over to the FBI. This trove of revolutionary material was never again to see the light of day.

Through the six decades of her adult life, Lucy Parsons was a revolutionary, with a reputation as one of her generation's finest orators. She led workers and oppressed people in struggle, wrote widely on the questions facing anarchists and socialists, and lived a full and remarkable life.

It was no surprise that the Chicago police were anxious to bury Parsons' legacy as quickly as possible. In their own words, she was "more dangerous than a thousand rioters." For virtually the entirety of the last 40 years of her life, the police tried to bar her from making any public speeches and routinely arrested her for the "crime" of handing out revolutionary pamphlets on the street.

----------------

LITTLE IS known of Lucy Parsons' exact origins, though most historians agree that she was born around 1853 in Texas, where she probably grew up as a slave. She is thought to have been of mixed African, Mexican, and Native American ancestry.

She would stay in Texas until 1873, when she and her husband, Albert Parsons, fled the persecution they regularly faced as an interracial couple--married in a state that had been part of the slave-owning Confederacy less than a decade before--and moved north.

They eventually reached Chicago, where they took up residence in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood. The two were quickly drawn into the radical circles of the European immigrants they met there, and they breathed in the ideas the ideas of socialism, class struggle and revolution, which increasingly dominated the political and cultural life of the working classes of Europe.

The single greatest catalyst for the Parsons' radicalization was the national railroad strike of 1877, the first general strike in U.S. history. The capitalist class had responded viciously to the labor uprising. In Chicago, the police and the newly formed Illinois National Guard were mobilized to break the strike with the use of sword, gun and cannon. Scores of workers were killed, and even more wounded.

Profoundly influenced by the lessons of the strike, Lucy Parsons became increasingly active in the Chicago socialist movement. She began writing regular articles for The Socialist newspaper, and organized housewives and other women who worked but did not receive a wage into the Working Women's Union.

Lucy Parsons came to stand out as a leader among the most militant of the Chicago socialists. She had given up on the idea that there could be a peaceful transformation from capitalism to socialism, or that it could be achieved primarily through electoral channels.

The capitalist class was certainly anything but peaceful in its approach to workers' struggle, as its behavior during the 1877 strike showed. It was such class violence that prompted Parsons to pen one of her most famous articles, "To Tramps," which was published in the first edition of The Alarm , a newspaper started by her and Albert in Chicago.

Parsons addressed her call -to -arms to the "35,000 now tramping the streets of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about you at the evidence of wealth and pleasure of which you own no part." She called upon these crushed victims of inequality to take up arms against their industrial masters --and reminded them that all was fair in the class war.

The more Lucy Parsons involved herself in the revolutionary movement, the more popular she became. She began regularly addressing crowds numbering in the thousands on the streets of Chicago.

She also became virtually the sole revolutionary in the anarchist or socialist movements of the time to seriously take up the so -called "Negro question." In the pages of The Alarm , she decried the epidemic of lynchings of Southern Blacks. Though she viewed racism as an expression of "deep -seated prejudice," Parsons nonetheless maintained that the oppression of Black people under capitalism was rooted in economic conditions.

"Are there any so stupid as to believe these outrages have been, are being and will be heaped upon the Negro because he is Black?" wrote Parsons. "Not at all. It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North."

Parsons took a similar approach to the question of women's oppression, which she argued was a function of women's economic dependence on men, first as his "household drudge" and second as a lesser -paid worker.

In a speech before a group of male trade unionists, she argued:

We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it...but we have our labor. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future, it is to organize the women.

----------------

ON MAY 1, 1886, tens of thousands of workers across Chicago went on strike as part of a national walkout for the eight -hour day. Lucy and Albert Parsons played a leading role in this struggle.

Employers were furious as the movement scored victories that forced a growing number of businesses to concede the movement's demand for a shorter workday. They were waiting for an opportunity to carry out a counter -offensive against the workers. That opportunity came after a May 4 meeting at Chicago's Haymarket Square.

As the strike support rally was coming to a close, a bomb went off in a crowd of police who were attacking the gathering. Though the actual bomb thrower was never found, Albert and seven others were rounded up and charged with murder.

None of the "Haymarket Eight" were accused of having any direct connection to the bombing --the prosecutor even told the jury that the eight men were on trial simply because they were the leaders of the working-class movement. The men were found guilty, and four of them, including Albert Parsons, died on the gallows on November 11, 1887--one defendant committed suicide the day before the cheat the hangman, and the other three remained in prison until they were pardoned in 1893 by Illinois' governor.

Lucy Parsons had immediately set about organizing a defense campaign for the Haymarket Eight. She went on a national speaking tour to plead their case. By the time the execution date arrived, Lucy Parsons had traveled through 17 different states, where she made 50 speeches in front of close to 200,000 people.

Not one to be intimidated, Lucy Parsons continued her revolutionary activity after Albert's execution. She toured and spoke around the country, sold revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets in the streets of Chicago--while continually evading police--and walked picket lines with striking workers.

In 1894, she lent her efforts to what would become the first -ever mass march on Washington, D.C., organized by the populist Jacob Coxey. She addressed Coxey's "Army of the Unemployed" as they gathered on the South Side of Chicago in preparation for their long march to the capital in pursuit of federal relief for the jobless.

Later that year, she would meet with Eugene Debs, a man quickly becoming America's most popular socialist, to help him found what later became the Socialist Party of America.

But Parsons remained critical of the reformists in the socialist movement and their obsession with electoral campaigns. When some reform socialists supported the 1888 presidential campaign of Democrat Grover Cleveland, Parsons shouted at them, "Have the Democrats committed no sin? Have the Republicans been guilty of everything? The Negroes of the South are no longer in physical slavery, but the Democrats of the South intend to keep them in economic slavery!"

Within the anarchist movement, Lucy Parsons also found herself engaged in a series of debates over strategy and tactics. While Parsons was primarily focused on building revolutionary struggle among the working class, both inside and outside of trade unions, the recognized leaders of American anarchism were definitely not interested in this approach.

By the turn of the century, Emma Goldman was the most popular anarchist in the U.S. Her focus was on the freedom of the individual, primarily around the question of sexual independence and "free love."

Goldman and Parsons became fierce, lifelong adversaries over their differing perspectives on revolution. Parsons charged Goldman with ignoring the class struggle and "addressing largely middle-class audiences." Goldman attacked Parsons for failing to prioritize the fight to "smash monogamy."

For Parsons, it was ridiculous to talk about women's sexual liberation without a struggle around economic issues.

"I hold that the economic is the first issue to be settled," she writes. "That it is woman's economical dependence which makes her enslavement possible...How many women do you think would submit to marriage slavery if it were not for wage slavery?"

As the anarchist label came to be associated with those moving away from a focus on the working class, Lucy Parsons became increasingly disenchanted with anarchism.

Soon she would be writing, "Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others' organizations. But what have they done in the last 50 years?...Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming. Consequently, anarchism doesn't appeal to the public."

----------------

1905, Lucy Parsons would participate in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary-syndicalist organization.

Her speech at the IWW's founding convention contains some of her most powerful statements on socialism, revolution and workers' power. She also anticipated important developments that would later confront the international workers' movement:

The trouble with all the strikes in the past has been this: the workingmen strike and go out and starve. My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production. If anyone is to starve...let it be the capitalist class.

Later that year, Parsons would begin editing The Liberator , a newspaper connected to both the IWW and the Socialist Party. Parsons wrote a weekly column on women's issues, a series of articles on "Labor's Long Struggle with Capital" and continued to engage in the ideological debates within the movement.

On the question of the ballot box as a means of affecting social change, she wrote, "The fact is money and not votes is what rules the people. The idea that the poor man's vote amounts to anything is the veriest delusion. The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the tricks."

In 1914, war broke out between some of the world's biggest powers in Europe. As an early opponent of the war, Parsons was shocked by the behavior of the various mass socialist parties within the countries at war. Virtually all supported the war or refused to oppose it --the number of steadfast antiwar socialists was reduced to tiny numbers.

When the German Social -Democratic Party --then the largest socialist party in the world --voted to fund the national war effort, Parsons attacked its leaders for "help[ing] their imperial master lay a war levy of a billion marks or more for the prosecution of a war on workers of other countries."

The shining beacon of hope for Parsons and many others during the dark days of war was the Russian revolution of 1917. Led by the Bolshevik Party and its leader Lenin, Russian workers had risen up to overthrow the Tsar's regime and then a pro -capitalist provisional government --they aimed to a establish a system based on workers' democracy and workers' control of production.

Parsons immediately identified with the revolution. She saw in the efforts of the Russian workers the concrete embodiment of what she had spent her entire life working for.

When the Communist Party (CP) was formed in the U.S. in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Parsons quickly came to play a leading role in connection with its various activities. In 1925, she was elected to the national executive committee of the International Labor Defense (ILD), an organization formed by the CP to defend the victims of capitalist repression, both in and out of jail, and to fight for the civil rights of the victims of racism.

Through the ILD, she was involved in some of the most important fights of the day. She organized against the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist labor organizers; she defended Angelo Herndon, the young African-American Communist from Georgia who faced 20 years in prison on a charge of "insurrection"; and she fought to prevent the executions of Tom Mooney and "Big Bill" Haywood, leaders in the Socialist Party and the IWW.

She also actively participated in the now -famous campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys" --nine young African American men in Alabama who were falsely accused of rape, convicted by an all -white jury, constantly threatened with lynching by white mobs, and who ultimately became national symbols of injustices of the criminal justice system in the segregated South.

Though there is some debate as to whether Parsons was an official member of the CP or a devoted fellow traveler, there can be no doubt that she saw herself as part of the revolutionary tradition within which the CP operated.

Speaking at a 1930 May Day rally organized by the CP, Parsons said:

I have seen many movements come and go. I belonged to all of those movements. I was a delegate that organized the Industrial Workers of the World. I carried a card in the old Socialist Party. And now I am today connected with the Communists.

----------------

WHEN PARSONS died in 1942, The Daily Worker , the CP's newspaper, published a series of stirring obituaries honoring her life and legacy. One of these pieces, titled "Tribute to a Heroine of Labor," written by Parsons' longtime friend and comrade Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is arguably the most sublime portrait of Lucy Parsons in existence:

Lucy Parsons spoke in a beautiful melodious voice, with eloquence and passion. She never lost faith in the power, courage, intelligence and ultimate triumph of the people. Years ago, she accustomed trade union men to listen respectfully to a woman speaking for labor. She helped make them more keenly aware of the need of strong unions and organizing the unorganized. She helped to build up a strong tradition of labor defense so that other leaders of labor should not suffer the same fate as her husband.

She encouraged every new effort to push forward the whole labor movement. What a great satisfaction to her it must have been for her to realize the number of splendid young women, many of her color, who are enrolled in it today. She did not live in the past. She lived for the future. She will live in the future, in the hearts of the workers.

Lucy Parsons: "More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters"

2011-09-06T14:37:00.001-04:00

By Keith Rosenthal

Also available for download as a zine/pamphlet

===

The strongest argument that can be made as to why all radical activists should study the life and works of Lucy Parsons is that the FBI wants you to know nothing about her.

Lucy Parsons died in 1942, at the age of 89, in a house-fire in Chicago — the city in which she lived most of her life. The ashes had hardly cooled before the Chicago police raided the remains of her home, confiscated all 3,000 volumes of literature and writings on “sex, socialism, and anarchy,” which constituted her personal library, and turned it over to the FBI. Tragically, and despite her comrades’ repeated inquiries, this treasure trove of revolutionary material was never again to see the light of day.[1]

Indeed, the Chicago police had ample reason to want to bury Parsons’ legacy as quickly as possible. In their own words, she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” For virtually the entirety of the last 40 years of her life, the Chicago police tried to bar her from making any public speeches, and routinely arrested her for the ‘crime’ of handing out revolutionary pamphlets on the street. Famed labor historian Studs Terkel even noted how rare of a privilege it was to hear Parsons address a large audience in her later years, owing to the constant police harassment.

Overlooked by History

Partially because so much of her own writings were ‘disappeared’ by the government, and partially because she was a revolutionary woman of color speaking out against the injustices of a capitalist society run by white men, Lucy Parsons is one of the least known of the major figures in the history of revolutionary socialism in the U.S. Much like her long-time comrades and friends, Eugene Debs, William “Big Bill” Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Lucy Parsons made a tremendous contribution to the birth of America’s turn-of-the-century, revolutionary working-class movement; a movement which continues to this day to shape the character of class struggle and revolutionary politics in this country.

Historian Robin Kelley argues that Lucy Parsons was not only “the most prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth century,” but was also “one of the brightest lights in the history of revolutionary socialism.”[2] Historian John McClendon writes that she is notable for being the “first black activist to associate with the revolutionary left in America.”[3]

More often than not, however, if Lucy Parsons is mentioned as an historical figure, she is noted merely as the “wife of Albert Parsons,” a man who had gained international notoriety after he was executed in 1887 by the state of Illinois for his revolutionary activities.

Unfortunately, this slight extends beyond solely ‘mainstream’ historians, including supposedly left-wing intellectuals as well. For instance, in the 1960s, the feminist editors of Radcliffe College’s three-volume work, Notable American Women, decided to leave Parsons out of their study on the grounds that she was “largely propelled by her husband’s fate” and was a “pathetic figure, living in the past and crying injustice” after her husband’s execution.[4]

Even contemporaries of Lucy Parsons, such as the popular anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman (with whom Lucy Parsons became a life-long political opponent), accused Parsons of being an otherwise unimportant opportunist who simply rode upon the cape of her husband’s martyrdom, describing her as nothing more than one of those wives of “anarchists who marry women who are millions of miles removed from their ideas.”[5]

None of this, however, is to diminish the historical importance of Albert Parsons and the events leading up to his execution; and while it is true that Lucy Parsons spent much of her life addressing the crime that was her husband’s murder at the hands of the capitalist state, nonetheless, her political activity and impact on history extend far beyond the scope of that single tragedy. In fact, the work that she lent her energies to in the years following Albert’s execution are of equal (if not greater) importance than anything he had been able to add to the fight for workers’ emancipation in the course of a life that was sadly cut short.

“Whose Lucy Parsons?”

In one sense, Lucy Parsons defies easy political categorization. Throughout her life she referred to herself alternatively (and sometimes all at once) as an anarchist, socialist, communist, and syndicalist. She worked with socialist groups in the 1870s and anarchist groups in the 1880s. She was part of the founding of the Socialist Party in the 1890s and the revolutionary-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s. Finally, the last two decades of her life would see her working with the Communist Party.

The fact that she allowed her ideas on revolution and revolutionary organization to adapt so much over the years have led some present-day activists to feel the need to “rescue” her in order to firmly place her under the banner of their particular ideology to the exclusion of all others. For instance, the anarchist author Gale Ahrens, in the Introduction to her otherwise useful collection of Lucy Parsons’ writings and speeches, waxes near apoplectic at the thought that anyone would consider Lucy Parsons a communist. The origin of her ire is the only existing biography of Lucy Parsons, written by Carolyn Ashbuagh, in which Ashbaugh concludes that Lucy Parsons officially joined the Communist Party in 1939.

Despite the fact that this conclusion is backed up by several interviews conducted by Ashbaugh with contemporaries of Lucy Parsons (both friend and foe), and Lucy Parsons’ own words, which reveal the fact that by the 1930s she was publicly referring to herself as “connected with” the Communist Party, Ahrens feels the need to take pains to attack what, in her words, is an “unlikely image of Lucy Parsons as Communist — or worse, as The Anarchist Who Became a Communist.”[6]

Clearly for Ahrens there is nothing worse than an anarchist becoming a communist. However, the actual writings and actions of Lucy Parsons herself reveal that this aversion to communism is wholly that of Ahrens, and is not something that Parsons shared in the least.

As one anarchist writer has correctly pointed out regarding those, like Ahrens, who would attempt to declare that Lucy Parsons was one thing by simply lopping off those pieces of her life that indicate she was also something else, “Gale Ahrens’ documentary history was an attempt to rescue Parsons ‘for the anarchist movement.’ In doing so Ahrens provides anarchism with another hero but does little to demystify Parsons’ legacy. Indeed, the real question is not whose hero Lucy Parsons is, but how we can learn from her struggle and how her history can provide a better understanding of American radicalism.”[7]

Perhaps the most egregious example of this type of pick-and-choose approach to Lucy Parsons’ legacy is the Lucy Parsons Project website, which posits itself as a “tribute to Lucy Parsons, her work, and the causes she championed.”[8] This would all be well and good if the website actually lived up to its promise. While useful insofar as it provides some of Parsons’ own writings and speeches, it unfortunately does her a major disservice by creating a distorted, incomplete picture of what constituted her political life.

While one can find on this website a myriad of writings on anarchism (including those by and about Emma Goldman, who Parsons grew to utterly despise by the end of her life), as well as links to several dozen contemporary anarchist websites, one will not find any writings by or about Karl Marx, anything about the successes of the Russian revolution of 1917, nor links to any contemporary socialist websites (not to mention any specifically anti-racist media), though these were all major, if not defining, contributors to Lucy Parsons’ political worldview.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not note the other side of this trend, which can be seen in erroneous attempts to declare that at no point in Parsons’ life did she ever actually espouse anarchist ideas, which Ashbaugh appears wont to do in her biography. This, of course, is plainly not true.

In the end, while people like Emma Goldman considered Lucy Parsons an ‘opportunist’ for working with different revolutionary organizations and letting her politics evolve over the years, I would argue that this is actually her greatest attribute. Unlike Goldman, Lucy Parsons retained a firm, unwavering commitment throughout her entire life to identifying with, and struggling for, the liberation of working people as a class from the chains of capitalist exploitation, while simultaneously being open to a number of different forms in which that liberation might be brought about.

For Lucy Parsons, the aegis under which workers (and by extension, herself) were best able to fight for their social emancipation was not important. If a new type of organization or tactic in the class struggle was developed that seemed an advance over that which preceded it, Parsons did not miss a beat in throwing herself into the work of this new-found creation. Lucy Parsons had only one loyalty — to the downtrodden, oppressed, abused, and exploited. In the end, she measured an organization or an action, not by what label it could be categorized under, but how effective it was in moving this latter group of people into revolutionary action. It is for this reason, and not ‘opportunism,’ that Lucy Parsons was so quick to latch on to new organizations and ideas that emerged in the course of what she considered to be the great and ongoing war between labor and capital.

Lucy Parsons Becomes a Socialist

Little is known of Lucy Parsons’ exact origins, in no small part because she herself was quite circumspect about this matter. Today, most historians agree that Parsons was likely born circa 1853, in Texas, and quite possibly grew up as a slave on a plantation. Documentary evidence suggests that she was of mixed African, Mexican, and Native American heritage. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that she actually denied being of African ancestry, though theories abound as to why she may have claimed this.[9]

She would stay in Texas until 1873, when she and Albert Parsons, who she had married several years before, would move to Chicago. A large part of what inspired this move north was the fear of what the rise of the KKK in the post-Reconstruction South would mean for a progressive-minded, interracial couple like themselves (Albert had been shot in the leg and threatened with lynching in 1872 for his efforts to register black voters).

The Chicago to which the Parsons’ fled, was a city undergoing dramatic, if not chaotic changes. The city was fast industrializing and thousands of immigrants were streaming in from around the world, adding to the city’s developing proletariat. These workers were savagely exploited and lived in abysmal conditions.

An 1873 investigation conducted on the housing situation in Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods revealed that homes designed for 6 or 7 people often housed 30 or 40. Children played in streets covered in animal litter from the nearby meatpacking plants. Fifty percent of these children never reached the age of five.[10]

It was in one such immigrant neighborhood that the Parsons’ first took up residence. Immediately, they were drawn into the radical circles of these European immigrants, learning about the ideas of socialism, class struggle, and revolution, which were rapidly growing amongst the working classes of Europe. Through these circles, the two came to be familiarized with various socialist theorists, including Karl Marx, whose works engrossed them.

Before long, the Parsons’ had become leading members in the Chicago branch of the Workingmen’s Party (WP), an organization affiliated with, and modeled on, the German Social-Democratic Party (SDP). WP organizing meetings were held at the Parsons’ house, and Albert even ran for local office in a WP-sponsored electoral campaign.

More than anything else, the single greatest catalyst of the Parsons’ radicalization was the national railroad strike of 1877, the first general strike in U.S. history. Originating in West Virginia as a strike against wage cuts, the strike quickly spread along the rails to Chicago, where every single railroad worker joined in, turning trains over onto the tracks to render them impassable.

As Lucy Parsons would later write of this event, “It was during the great railroad strike of 1877 that I first became interested in what is known as the ‘Labor Question’.”[11]

The WP threw itself into the strike, with Albert at one point addressing a rally of 25,000 striking workers.

The capitalist class responded viciously to the labor uprising. In Chicago, the police and the newly-formed Illinois National Guard were mobilized to break the strike with the use of sword, gun, and cannon. Scores of workers were killed and even more wounded. The capitalist press was remorseless in its appraisal of the bloody repression. The Chicago Tribune commenting on the working people who joined the strike, opined, “The world owes these classes [of people] rather extermination than a livelihood.”[12]

Despite the brutal defeat suffered by the working class in the course of the strike, the aftermath saw the WP — now renamed the ‘Socialist Labor Party’ (SLP) — grow dramatically.

It was during this period that Lucy Parsons also first became tremendously active in the socialist movement. By 1879, she was pregnant with her first child and working full-time as a dress-maker to support her and Albert, who had been fired and blacklisted from working in the printing trades due to his involvement in the strike.

Despite this, she began writing regular articles for the newspaper of the SLP, The Socialist, was a leading figure in organizing housewives and other wageless women into the SLP’s Working Women’s Union, and was one of the first women to join the Knights of Labor once it finally accepted female members in 1879.

Through the pages of The Socialist, Lucy addressed the plight of women servants of the rich; wrote tributes to the late Abolitionists who had mortally wounded the Southern “aristocracy” by “striking the shackles from the black slave”; and excoriated the profiteering rich Northerners who grew wealthy during the Civil War, only to spit on the ragged soldiers who later came to them in search of relief from their hunger.

In one article, titled, “On the ‘harmony’ between capital and labor,” Lucy argued that there was no such thing as an identity of interest “twixt the oppressor and the oppressed, twixt the robber and the robbed.”

Let the masses understand that these robbers hold this property (which is so much unpaid labor) under the plea of the laws which they themselves have made … and further, that these so-called laws would not be worth the paper they are written on, twenty-four hours after the producers of all wealth had willed it otherwise.[13]

Reform or Revolution

By the early 1880s, the SLP was undergoing a major internal fight roughly along the lines of a reformist versus revolutionary wing. The SLP, much like the corresponding German SDP, was primarily a reform-oriented organization, which saw socialism as coming about via electoral channels. It viewed the transformation from capitalism to socialism as a peaceful process to be carried out ‘from above,’ by holders of political office, with the class struggle playing an ancillary role, if at all.

In the wake of the violent repression of the 1877 strike, many socialists began to view the notion of a peaceful resolution to the conflict between workers and capitalists as fantasy. For them, the ‘class war’ was no mere phrase, and some actually saw the arming of the working class as an imminent objective. Moreover, these socialists had come to see the electoral road to socialism as a dead-end. The SLP had been making little progress in this vein, and those candidates that did make gains were oftentimes quickly co-opted by local Democratic politicians, jettisoning their socialist platform in the process.

Lucy Parsons had come to stand out as a spokesperson for the more militant faction inside the SLP, fully participating in party debates and conventions. Even the local bourgeois press took note of her, commenting that “she preached the social revolution with even more vehemence than her husband.”[14]

By the end of 1881, the SLP had officially undergone a nationwide split. In Chicago, the revolutionary wing of the SLP, in whose ranks could be counted Albert and Lucy, branded itself the ‘Socialist Revolutionary Club.’ In 1883, the Socialist Revolutionary Club participated in the Congress of North American Socialists, from which Congress issued forth a new national formation, the International Working People’s Association (IWPA).

The IWPA was established on a firmly militant basis, arguing in its Manifesto that, “No ruling class has ever laid down its privileges without a struggle. It becomes, therefore, self-evident that the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie will be of a violent revolutionary character.”[15]

And while the IWPA adopted a resolution, motivated by the Chicago Revolutionary Socialists, which said that the trade unions “form the advance guard of the coming revolution,” the bulk of the IWPA rather held to the concept of “propaganda of the deed.”

This theory, as propounded at the Congress by the German émigré, Johann Most, centered on the efficacy of property damage, sabotage, and political assassination, as the main catalyst of social revolution.

Anarchism and State-Socialism

Though the Manifesto of the IWPA did not explicitly mention the word ‘anarchism,’ it nonetheless became the main label associated with the IWPA by both its critics and proponents.

It is also at this time that Lucy Parsons begins referring to herself as an anarchist. She explained that she used to believe the “government could be made an instrument in the hands of the oppressed to alleviate their sufferings. But a closer study of the origin, history and tendency of governments convinced me that this was a mistake. … that it made no difference what fair promises a political party, out of power, might make to the people in order to secure their confidence, when once securely established in control of the affairs of society.”[16]

She went on to argue that “the struggle for liberty is too great and the few steps we have gained have been at too great a sacrifice, for the great mass of the people … to consent to turn over to any political party the management of our social and industrial affairs.” Finally, as she concludes, “For these and other reasons, [I] turned from a sincere, earnest, political Socialist to the non-political phase of Socialism — Anarchism.”[17]

For Parsons, the ‘political (i.e., electoral) Socialists’ or ‘state-socialists’ were guilty of harboring delusions in the possibility of creating fundamental change simply by capturing state power. And even if possible, this would be undesirable, for nobody but the masses themselves could be trusted to bring about their own emancipation.

Interestingly enough, however, the struggle against the ‘state-socialists’ was not historically unique to anarchism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels fought bitterly against the state-socialists who dominated the German SDP. The leader of this school of thought in Germany, Ferdinand Lassalle, was also the man whose ideas held sway over the very same Socialist Labor Party in the U.S. that Lucy Parsons had come to criticize.

As Paul D’Amato has accurately summarized,

[I]t was Marx and Engels who organized the fight in the socialist movement against those who believed that socialism was about taking over the state, or that socialism could be equated with state ownership or control of production. … Marx rejected the politics of the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, who viewed the working class as a sort of stage-army that would help him into office where he and his cohorts would implement socialism through the state. Marx attacked Lasalleans for their ‘servile belief in the state.’[18]

Elsewhere, Marx argued against Lassalle’s top-down approach to working-class organization, saying that, especially “where the worker is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk for himself” [emphasis in original].[19]

In fact, it seems quite likely that Lucy Parsons knew of Karl Marx’s fight against the ‘political socialists’ in Germany, for she repeatedly insisted on referring to Marx in her writings as an ‘anarchist’ like herself![20]

Clearly, the differences between the theories of socialism and anarchism, which to many people today may seem quite clear, were incredibly intermingled in the minds of Lucy Parsons and those around her. As one of her comrades in the IWPA later explained, “A number of persons claim that an anarchist cannot be a socialist, and a socialist not an anarchist. This is wrong. … The anarchists are divided into two factions; the communistic anarchists and the Proudhon or middle-class anarchists. The ‘International Working People’s Association’ is the representative organization of the communistic anarchists.” In sum, he concludes, “a socialist who is not a state-socialist must necessarily be an anarchist.”[21]

Of course, under such a definition, we would have no choice but to consider Marx an anarchist, too!

Indeed, at one point Albert Parsons responded to a claim that the IWPA was not only anti-Marx, but actually inspired by his political opponent, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, by flatly stating, “The IWPA was not founded by Bakounine … The IWPA is not in opposition to Marx. So far from it that one ‘group’ in this city as elsewhere, is called by his name. The first publication ever issued by the IWPA was written by Marx and Engels in English-German” [emphasis in original].[22]

Elsewhere, Albert said of the IWPA, “We are called Communists, Socialists, or Anarchists. We accept all three of the terms.”[23]

Class War

Nonetheless, Lucy Parsons was also very much influenced by distinctly anarchist politics during this period. Especially attractive to her was the idea of “propaganda of the deed” and its emphasis on the positive role of political violence.

She considered wage-slavery to be little different than chattel-slavery and so concluded that a similar type of armed conflict would be required to abolish it. In this vein, she supported the efforts to set up armed detachments of the various unions that affiliated with the IWPA. This tactic actually had a degree of appeal amongst some unions, as the 1880s were a time of bloody clashes between workers and armed thugs, called Pinkertons, hired by capitalists to suppress any labor disturbances.

In truth, Lucy Parsons’ tendency to view the class struggle in martial terms is quite understandable if one looks at the rhetoric of the capitalist class of the time, not to mention their behavior during the 1877 strike.

The Chicago Times, for instance, editorialized on a group of sailors fighting for an increase in pay:

Hand grenades should be thrown among these union sailors, who are striving to obtain higher wages and less hours. By such treatment they would be taught a valuable lesson, and other strikers could take warning from their fate.[24]

On the topic of the growth in homeless people begging for food in the streets, The Chicago Tribune opined:

When a tramp asks you for bread, put strychnine or arsenic on it and he will not trouble you any more, and others will keep out of the neighborhood.[25]

It was in response to such depravity that Lucy Parsons penned one of her most famous articles, entitled, “To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited, and Miserable,” which was published in the first edition of the newspaper started by her and Albert in Chicago, The Alarm, in 1884, and later reprinted as a pamphlet by the IWPA.

Parsons addressed her call-to-arms to the “35,000 now tramping the streets of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about you at the evidence of wealth and pleasure of which you own no part, not sufficient even to purchase yourself a bit of food with which to appease the pangs of hunger now gnawing at your vitals."

Have you not worked hard all your life, since you were old enough for your labor to be of use in the production of wealth? Have you not toiled long, hard and laboriously in producing wealth? And in all those years of drudgery do you not know you have produced thousands upon thousands of dollar’s worth of wealth, which you did not then, do not now, and unless you ACT, never will, own any part in?

… And that at last when the caprice of your employer saw fit to create an artificial famine by limiting production, that the fires in the furnace were extinguished, the iron horse to which you had been harnessed was stilled; the factory door locked up, you turned upon the highway a tramp, with hunger in your stomach and rags upon your back?

… Awaken them [the industrial bosses] from their wanton sport at your expense! Send forth your petition and let them read it by the red glare of destruction. Thus when you cast “one long lingering look behind” you can be assured that you have spoken to these robbers in the only language which they have ever been able to understand, for they have never yet deigned to notice any petition from their slaves that they were not compelled to read by the red glare bursting from the cannon’s mouths, or that was not handed to them upon the point of the sword.[26]

The titles of some of her other articles written for The Alarm in 1885, such as, “Dynamite! The Only Voice the Oppressors of the People Can Understand!” and, “Our Civilization: Is It Worth Saving?” convey the unmitigated contempt in which she held the ruling class.

In May of 1885, soldiers killed two striking workers at a Chicago quarry. The IWPA held a meeting in response to the slayings in which another of Parsons’ most famous statements was recorded by The Chicago Tribune:

Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot their owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live as [General] Sheridan devastated the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah.[27]

Lucy Parsons on Oppression

The more Lucy Parsons involved herself in the revolutionary movement, the more popular she became. She began regularly addressing crowds numbering in the thousands on the streets of Chicago. The press compared her to John Brown and Louise Michel, the “red virgin” of the Paris Commune, who had died fighting to defend the first ever worker-run society in 1871. Lucy Parsons relished the comparison and was prepared to die a martyr, just as the Communards had done.

Her reputation quickly spread beyond Chicago. One reporter from Canton, Ohio, wrote of her, “She is a wonderfully strong writer and it is said she can excel her husband in making a fiery speech.”[28]

She also became virtually the sole revolutionary in the IWPA (or the SLP, for that matter) to seriously take up the “Negro Question” as it was called then. In the spring of 1886, 13 black people were massacred by a white mob in Mississippi as retribution for one of the black men filing assault charges against a local police officer.

In response to this atrocity Parsons wrote:

Who … could help but stand aghast and heave a sigh and perchance drop a tear as they read the graphic account flashed to us of the awful massacre of the poor and defenseless wage-slaves … in the state of Mississippi? Defenseless, poverty-stricken, hemmed about by their deadly enemies; victims not only of their misfortunes, but to deep-seated, blind, relentless prejudice, these our fellow-beings are murdered without quarter.

She continues:

Are there any so stupid as to believe these outrages have been, are being and will be heaped upon the Negro because he is black? Not at all. It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.

And as to what recourse Southern blacks had to fight this tyranny:

[T]o the Negro himself we would say your deliverance lies mainly in your own hands. You sow but another reaps. You till the soil but for another to enjoy. The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell!

… But your course in the future, if you value real freedom, is to leave politics to the politician, and prayer to those who can show wherein it has done them more good than it has ever done for you, and join hands with those who are striving for economic freedom.

… As to those local, periodical, damnable massacres to which you are at all times liable, these you must revenge in your own way. You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.[29]

Some critics have taken this article as an example of what they call Parsons’ “class reductionism” in approaching the question of racism.[30] Ashbuagh writes that Parsons was “erroneous” in her belief that “all social ills stemmed from economic oppression”; that “the abolition of capitalism would automatically produce racial and sexual equality”; and that “Lucy Parsons did not see that racism and sexism have histories and existences independent of the economic structure of society.”[31]

While Lucy Parsons indisputably saw social oppression as a function of the broader economic system in which it operated, it would nonetheless be incorrect to assert that she believed there was no need to wage particular fights against particular forms of oppression, outside of the purely industrial sphere of relations, simply because the abolition of capitalism would “automatically” obviate the need for such fights.

As Ashbaugh well knows, and as we shall see later in Lucy Parson’s political career, she repeatedly, and throughout her life, addressed the specific oppressions faced by women, black people, immigrants, and others, in her articles, speeches, and organizing. She campaigned against lynchings and the racist criminal justice system. She fought for women’s suffrage, equal pay, birth control access, abortion rights, the right to easily divorce and remarry, and to be free from rape.

In 1892, Parsons wrote about a meeting she attended in Chicago organized by local black activists to “protest against the outrages being perpetrated in the South upon peaceful citizens simply because they are Negroes.”

Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such brutality as has been ever since the war and is now being perpetrated upon the Negro in the South.

Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled?

The whites of the South are not only sowing the wind which they will reap in the whirlwind, but the flame which they will reap in the conflagration.[32]

Further, to truly understand the significance of Lucy Parsons’ forthright condemnation of the scourge of racism, one has to look at the context in which she was operating.

Lucy Parsons was in an extreme minority amongst even most black leaders in the 1890s, who far from advocating armed self-defense, were rather supporting the efforts of Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist approach to white racism was at the height of its popularity.

And within the ranks of the labor and revolutionary movements, the prevailing notions on racism ranged from the indifferent to the downright odious. For instance, Dyer Lum, the personal secretary to Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was an extreme racist whose bigotry was nonchalantly accepted by all those around him. Lum, whose path Parsons routinely crossed in the course of various labor organizing efforts, once commented on the news of a Southern black man who had been burned at the stake, “I would have carried wood myself if I had been there. [T]o shoot him would only have made a county sensation. Burning him made the flesh of every nigger brute in the South to creep.”[33]

A similar accusation of “class reductionism” is often leveled against Parsons for her position on women’s oppression, which she argued was a function of woman’s economic dependence on man, first as his “household drudge” and second as a lesser-paid worker.

Parsons’ theoretical approach to the oppression of women was greatly influenced by the writings of August Bebel, the German socialist and close friend of Frederick Engels.[34] Bebel’s book, Women and Socialism, written in 1879, was one of the first instances of a socialist or anarchist attempting a serious, class analysis of the origins and basis of women’s oppression.

In a 1905 article, which drew heavily on Bebel’s ideas, Parsons expounded upon her view on this question:

[A]s man ascended in the social scale of development, he began to acquire property, which he wished to transmit along with his name to his offspring — then woman became his household drudge.

She was regarded as a sort of necessary evil; as something to be used and abused; to be bought and sold — as a thing fit only to cater to his pleasures and his passions — this was woman’s lowly position. For countless centuries, the drudge went her lonesome, weary way, bore the children — and man’s abuse.

However, she goes on to explain that the development of industry and the entrance of women into the ranks of the proletariat “was to bring relief at last. This enabled woman to leave the narrow confines of the kitchen where she had been kept for so long. She entered the arena of life’s activities, to make her way in this hustling, pushing, busy world as an independent human being for the first time in the world’s history.”

She ends by cautioning: “But woman is allowing herself to be used to reduce the standard of life by working for lower wages than those demanded by men; this she will have to rectify, else her labor will become a detriment instead of a blessing or help either to herself or her fellow workers.”[35]

Elsewhere she sounded a similar theme, saying,

We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it … but we have our labor. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future it is to organize the women.[36]

Finally, on the immense capacity of women to play a key role in the process of social change, she wrote, “When the women take hold of a great and crying evil, you may expect revolution — not necessarily a revolution of blood and destruction, yet not necessarily one of peace.”[37]

The Haymarket Affair

The trial and execution of Albert Parsons in 1887 would have a tremendous impact on Lucy Parsons’ life and politics. For years prior to that fatal day, the capitalist class of Chicago wanted nothing more than a convenient excuse to be rid of Albert and his cohorts, and in 1886, an event occurred that provided just such an excuse.

May 1st, 1886, had been set as a date by the labor movement for a crescendo of activity to what had developed into a vibrant movement for the 8-hour workday. The average worker at the time spent 10-12 hours a day laboring in factories, mines, and mills. The IWPA, which had come to play a leading role in the 8-hour movement, raised the slogan, “For an eight-hour day with no reduction in pay!”

The 8-hour movement in Chicago had come to take on a truly “mass” character, with hundreds of unions and thousands of workers participating in the reform struggle. Albert worked furiously, agitating among working people to participate in the May 1st call for a general strike. Lucy, for her part, focused on organizing for the strike-call amongst sewing women and Knights of Labor locals.

When the day arrived, it was estimated that 250,000 workers had gone on strike nationwide, while Albert, Lucy, and the IWPA led a march of 80,000 through the streets of Chicago. The day ended peacefully and successfully, as the city conceded to the 8-hour day for all city employees, with other private employers following suit.

However, two days later, at the local McCormick machinery plant, police fired on striking workers, killing six. The following evening, May 4th, the IWPA called for a meeting at Haymarket Square to discuss the murders. Albert spoke at the meeting, but had left the Square well before the police had decided to march on the meeting and order everyone present to disperse. A short exchange occurred between the Police Captain and Samuel Fielden of the IWPA.

Suddenly, a bomb exploded at the edge of the police line, killing one police officer and several workers. The capitalist class and the police spent the next 48-hours carrying out a veritable reign of terror against anyone in the city who had ever expressed sympathy with Chicago’s revolutionary movement.

Virtually every known socialist and anarchist was arrested and roughed up. The police smashed the presses of all radical publications. Throughout the day of May 5th, Lucy Parsons was arrested and interrogated by police on three separate occasions. They were looking for information on the whereabouts of Albert who had temporarily fled the state, fearing the worst.

The state finally settled on 8 leaders of the IWPA, including Albert Parsons, who they charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Allegedly, Lucy Parsons was spared by the prosecutor for the sole reason that it was deemed less likely that a jury would return a sentence of death if a woman were among the defendants.

The “Haymarket 8” were never charged with actually creating, throwing, or even plotting to throw, the bomb. As the prosecutor said in court, “Anarchy is on trial! These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.”[38]

The “Haymarket 8” were summarily convicted, with four of the eight ultimately facing execution. Albert was one of those four. The execution date was eventually set for November 11th, 1887.

As soon as the charges were brought against her eight comrades, Lucy Parsons immediately set about organizing a defense campaign. She sent circulars to every section of the IWPA alerting them to the crisis and asking for donations. She also began what would turn into a non-stop, national speaking tour, which would bring her through 17 different states, where she made approximately 50 speeches in front of close to 200,000 people.

She saw the tour as more than simply a campaign to free her husband and comrades. She intended to use the tour as a means to bring the idea of workers’ revolution to as wide an audience as possible, making the most of the fact that the case of the “Haymarket 8” had become national headline news. She spoke at college campuses, union halls, women’s clubs, and relished the opportunity to expound upon radical philosophies on a national stage.

In fact, Lucy and Albert were to a certain extent ambivalent about the actual execution itself. Still under the influence of the “propaganda of the deed” concept, the two became convinced that the plain injustice at the root of Albert’s pending martyrdom would usher in a mass uprising leading to the social revolution.

She told a Yale audience at one of her stops, “My husband may die ‘at the stake’, but his death will only help the cause … as it is a necessary thing in the early stages of any great reform that there be some martyrs …”[39]

To Albert she confided, “I now go forth to take your place. I will herald abroad to the American people the foul murder ordered here today at the behest of monopoly. I, too, expect to mount the scaffold. I am ready.”[40]

Others in the defense campaign pleaded with her to tone down her rhetoric, saying that her violent speeches were not helping the cause. She was unmoved.

One reporter who interviewed her found her a “self-possessed and fluent” speaker, whose “socialist harangues are the most violent and vindictive of all the orators of that persuasion.” She told the reporter that her “religion” was to run the machine that will guillotine capitalists.[41]

At a speech in Kansas City she pulled absolutely no punches, declaring that the death of the policeman as a result of the explosion was the fault of the police alone, for they had no right to march on the Haymarket meeting and order its dispersal in the first place.

Had I been there, had I seen those murderous police approach, had I heard that insolent command to disperse, had I heard Fielden say, ‘Captain, this is a peaceable meeting,’ had I seen the liberties of my countrymen trodden under foot, I would have flung the bomb myself. I would have violated no law, but would have upheld the constitution.

I do not stand here to gloat over the murder of those policemen. I despise murder. But when a ball from the revolver of a policeman kills it is as much murder as when death results from a bomb.

She related how the prosecution had lined the walls of the courtroom with red and black flags as a way to whip up an anti-anarchist and anti-socialist hysteria within the jury. To this she retorted:

But the red flag, the horrible red flag, what does that mean? Not that the streets should run with gore, but that the same red blood courses through the veins of the whole human race. It meant the brotherhood of man. When the red flag floats over the world the idle shall be called to work. There will be an end of prostitution for women, of slavery for man, of hunger for children.[42]

Lucy Parsons’ tour was making quite the stir. “My trip is having its effect,” she wrote to Albert in a letter from Connecticut. “The powers that be don’t know what to do with me. One New York paper suggests that ‘Parsons be let out as a compromise to get Mrs. Parsons to stop talking.’”[43]

One thing is for certain, “the powers that be” were definitely taking notice. During her tour, she routinely arrived at speaking halls to find the doors barred shut. Where she was allowed to speak, police lined the walls and detectives tracked her every move.

While Lucy Parsons may have expected the aftermath of the Haymarket event to see a surge in popular rebellion, quite the opposite proved to be the case. The capitalist class used the post-Haymarket political climate of fear to rescind the 8-hour day where it had been granted. Repression abounded. The labor movement quieted. Membership in the Knights of Labor in Chicago declined from 24,000 to 4,000 between 1886 and 1887. Far from being motivated into action by the bombing and its aftermath, the working class became frightened into inactivity, wholly unprepared to deal with the intensity of the capitalists’ swift offensive.

On August 20, 1886, Lucy was able to visit Albert in his prison cell. He handed her a letter, which would be the last words he would ever be able to communicate directly to her.

Our verdict … cheers the hearts of tyrants throughout the world, and the result will be celebrated by King Capital in its drunken feast of flowing wine from Chicago to St. Petersburg.

There was no evidence that any one of the eight doomed men knew of, or advised, or abetted the Haymarket tragedy. But what does that matter? The privileged class demands a victim, and we are offered a sacrifice to appease the hungry yells of an infuriated mob of millionaires …

You I bequeath to the people, a woman of the people. I have one request to make of you: Commit no rash act to yourself when I am gone, but take up the great cause of Socialism where I am compelled to lay it down [emphasis in original].[44]

In the days before the execution, Lucy was a fixed presence out in the Chicago streets, selling pamphlets and making speeches, as crowds of thousands of people gathered around her.

On the morning of that fateful day, November 11th, 1887, Lucy Parsons took her two young children to the prison to say goodbye to their father for the last time. But the police, who had created a cordon around the entire facility, refused to grant her entry. Adding insult to injury, they proceeded to arrest her and the two children, throwing them all in a jail cell after stripping them naked. She was kept there until the evening, released only after Albert had long since drawn his final breath.

Continuing the Fight

After a few short weeks of intense grieving, Lucy Parsons renewed her revolutionary activities with a vengeance. She refused to be cowed by the capitalists’ reign of terror, as she was sure they desired. As she would write in retrospect to this whole episode:

Our comrades were not murdered by the state because they had any connection with the bombthrowing, but because they were active in organizing the wage-slaves. The capitalist class didn’t want to find the bombthrower; this class foolishly believed that by putting to death the active spirits of the labor movement of the time, it could frighten the working class back to slavery.[45]

Her first major undertaking was to publish a book that Albert had been working on while in jail, titled, Anarchism: Its philosophy and scientific basis. Released in December of 1887, the police seized all but the first 300 copies from the printer.

This book is noteworthy, inter alia, for epitomizing the extent to which the concepts of anarchism and socialism were inextricably mingled in the minds of Albert and those around him. Replete with “copious extracts from Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’,” Albert indicates his intent to “delineate the Philosophy and Scientific Basis of the modern Labor movement, known as Anarchism.”

In this work he argues:

There are two distinct phases of socialism in the labor movement throughout the world today. One is known as anarchism, without political government or authority; the other is known as state socialism or paternalism, or governmental control of everything.

He continues:

Socialism is a term which covers the whole range of human progress and advancement. Socialism … I think I have a right to speak of this matter, because I am tried here as a socialist. I am condemned as a socialist, and it has been of socialism that [the Chief Prosecutor, Julius] Grinnell and these men had so much to say, and I think it right to speak before the country, and be heard in my own behalf, at least. If you are going to put me to death, then let the people know what it is for.”[46]

This particular approach to the question of socialism and anarchism can be found repeated in Lucy Parsons’ next major work, The life of Albert Parsons: with a brief history of the labor movement in America, published in 1889.

Included in this work is the text of Albert’s final speech before the court, in which he says:

“I am an anarchist. Now strike! But hear me before you strike! What is socialism, or anarchism? Briefly stated, it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production, and the right of the producers to their product. That is socialism.”[47]

Much like Lucy Parsons during this period, it is clear from the above works that Albert neither considered himself exclusively an ‘anarchist’ nor ‘socialist’ but rather both, simultaneously.

With the fresh publication of her collection of Albert’s writings, and in light of the recent success of her national speaking tour, Lucy decided to go back on the road in 1888. She embarked on a tour of the Eastern U.S., selling pamphlets and literature, and giving speeches.

Later that year, she traveled to London as a guest of the Socialist League of England. There, she spoke on panels alongside William Morris — a friend of Frederick Engels and one of the founders of modern British socialism — and Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist theoretician.

Back in Chicago, Lucy Parsons continued to face constant harassment by the police, who arrested her whenever they caught her selling pamphlets on the streets, or shut down meeting halls where she was scheduled to speak.

In 1896, at a meeting to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs, Lucy Parsons rose to address the audience, but was only able to get through two sentences before she was arrested by the police. Even as far away as Newark, New Jersey, the police had it in for Parsons. When she went to address a meeting there in 1890, the police arrested her before she was able to even enter the hall.

Aside from the political harassment Parsons endured as a result of her activism, she also regularly experienced the routine racist and sexist abuses of the criminal justice system. In 1891, she was forced to seek a judicial restraining order against a prominent anarchist she had been living with, after he had become violent with her, destroying her apartment and leaving her with a black eye. The local press was universally merciless in their attacks on Parsons, calling her a ‘whore’ and a liar. Likewise, the Judge reveled in the opportunity to make Parsons squirm, and turned the case into an indictment of her sexuality, accusing her of ‘living in sin’ with a man out of wedlock. The case was quickly dismissed and she was laughed out of court.

Characteristically, Emma Goldman — the supposed sworn-enemy of patriarchy — would later chastise Lucy Parsons for this incident, complaining that Parsons “dragged a man she had been living with into court over a couple pieces of furniture.”[48]

Police repression and public ridicule notwithstanding, Lucy Parsons was incredibly active during the decade following the Haymarket executions. She had become a regular presence on the streets of Chicago, trudging miles through the city in evasion of the police, selling revolutionary pamphlets, books, and newspapers. She walked picket lines with striking workers day in and day out.

Ashbaugh writes, “She was becoming as much a part of Chicago as the Board of Trade or the stockyards. Travelers to Chicago made it a point to see Lucy Parsons, either for inspiration or out of curiosity.”[49]

When the new Governor of Illinois, John Altgeld, organized a series of “Economic Forums” in the early 1890s, in order to discuss possible ‘progressive’ reforms the state could enact, Parsons made sure to intervene. At one such forum on the topic of ‘penal reform,’ which proposed such things as the construction of more spacious prison cells, while leaving the prisons themselves — and the laws that filled them — intact, Parsons blasted the Governor:

Will you deny that your jails are filled with the children of the poor, not the children of the rich? Will you deny that men steal because their bellies are empty? Will you dare to state that any of those lost sisters you speak of enjoy going to bed with ten and twenty miserable men in one night and having their insides burn like they were branded?

She continued over the boos and hisses of the forum’s upper-class attendees:

I will not rise to your reform bait. This is your society Judge Atgeld; you helped to create it, and it is this society that makes the criminal … And if the workers unite to fight for food, you jail them too … No, so long as you preserve this system and its ethics, your jails will be full of men and women who choose life to death, and who take life as you force them to take it, through crime.”[50]

Statements such as these, however, should not be taken to indicate that Parsons was against all reforms, as some have incorrectly averred.[51] Far from the caricature of Lucy Parsons as a fanatical revolutionary stubbornly opposed to all measures that did not lead to the immediate abolition of the existing order of things, Parsons understood the importance of the fight for reforms as part of the process of building up the consciousness and confidence of the working class towards the goal of revolution.

Looking back on the struggle for the eight-hour day, i.e., to reform the length of the workday, Parsons noted that “the radical element in Chicago were divided as to what position they should take regarding the proposed strike, some taking the position that it was only a palliative at best, that it was not worth such a gigantic struggle as must be engaged in, if it was to succeed.”[52]

To such ‘ultra-left’ concerns she had retorted:

A reduction of the hours of labor to the point where all can have employment is worth a general strike, because upon this point all efforts can be focused, and if carried, its beneficial effects would be felt immediately by the whole working class, men, women, and children.

It would be an object lesson at once demonstrating what united effort can accomplish. Having carried this point of attack, further moves could be instituted for attacks upon the profit-taking class, and gained until the wage system is abolished and a system of cooperation is instituted, the working class preparing themselves in the meantime for a larger liberty.”[53]

For Parsons, there was a world of difference between reforms granted from on-high, by a ruling class trying to co-opt and control its subjects, and reforms wrested from the ruling class by a fighting movement from below.

Reforms from above were mere charity, “hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers.” But the struggle for reforms was crucial if the working-class was going to develop the ability to fight for itself; and without the ability to fight for itself, the working class had nothing.

As Parsons eloquently put it, “He who would be free must himself strike the blow.”[54]

In 1891, Lucy Parsons began editing her own newspaper, Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly. Through the pages of Freedom, Parsons spoke out against lynchings and the peonage of black sharecroppers in the South; she covered the major labor struggles of the day, such as the fights at the Carnegie steel mills of Pennsylvania and the silver mines of Idaho; she called attention to the epidemic of rape within marriage, and pointed out that women’s function in the home was often nothing more than that of a servant, “for which she does not get a servant’s wage.”[55]

Nearly a decade removed from the Haymarket executions, Lucy Parsons publicly expressed her hatred for the capitalist class with as much ferocity as ever. At a rare public speaking event in Chicago in 1893, Parsons addressed a crowd of thousands of unemployed people, casualties of the financial crisis of that year.

You are the sole producers; why should you not consume? … The present social system is rotten from top to bottom. You must see this and realize that the time has come to destroy it.

Let our streets run with gore but let us have justice … Capitalist lives swept away are so much gain to us … That is why I am a revolutionist!

You must no longer die and rot in tenement houses … Shoulder to shoulder with one accord you should rise and take what is yours.[56]

In 1894, she lent her efforts to what would become the first ever mass march on Washington, D.C., organized by the populist, Jacob Coxey. She addressed Coxey’s “Army of the Unemployed” as they gathered on the South Side of Chicago in preparation for their long march to the Capitol in pursuit of federal relief for the jobless.

The year 1894 is also noteworthy as the year that Eugene Debs emerged as a national labor leader in the course of the Pullman railroad strike he helped organize. Debs would end up spending six months in jail for his role in the strike, and would emerge from prison as a self-identified socialist.

Parsons immediately became enamored with Debs, who she called a “new revolutionary leader.” When Debs met with her in Chicago in 1897, she quickly signed on to his plan to found a new socialist organization, the Social Democracy of America, with a platform calling for a shorter workday, jobs for the unemployed, and public ownership of all utilities. Parsons fully endorsed Debs’ vision for this organization and subsequently lent her name to the organization’s ‘re-founding’ in 1901 as the Socialist Party of America.

Though Parsons was engrossed in issues of domestic reform during this period, it is to her credit that she also took notice of the rise of America as an imperial power on the international stage. In 1898, the U.S. went to war with Spain over control of Cuba and the Philippines. Parsons took to the streets, denouncing the war and discouraging young people from enlisting in the military’s adventure.

I appeal to you young men to refuse to enlist and go to those far-off islands for the purpose of riveting the chains of a new slavery on the limbs of the Filipinos … What will it avail you? Don’t you have to fight enough battles against the trusts here, without traveling across the Pacific?[57]

Debates in the Movement

By the turn of the century, socialism was becoming a powerful force within the labor movement. In 1893, the AFL national convention passed a floor resolution calling for “the collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution.” In 1902, a member of the Socialist Party lost a bid to unseat the AFL President Samuel Gompers by a vote of 4897 to 4171.

With the socialist movement gaining in significance, the fight between its reformist and revolutionary wings took on a renewed vigor. Once again, Lucy Parsons found herself in the midst of a battle over the character and direction of American socialism.

The reformists were still determined to turn the movement into a purely electoral, peaceful presence within the labor movement and broader society. Parsons, of course, would have no truck with this. In Chicago, she became the reformists’ most fierce opponent.

As early as 1888, at a meeting of Chicago’s Central Labor Union, Parsons stood up to denounce those socialists at the meeting who were voicing support for the Democratic Party as against the Republicans. “Have the Democrats committed no sin?” she shouted. “Have the Republicans been guilty of everything?” She pointed out that the Democratic President, Grover Cleveland, had carried the South using “the most shocking outrages and crimes.”

I have seen the Ku Klux in the South myself. I know something about them, and they were every one of them Democrats. The negroes of the South are no longer in physical slavery, but the Democrats of the South intend to keep them in economic slavery![58]

In 1889, Lucy Parsons was speaking at a meeting organized jointly by members of the IWPA and the SLP. She was inveighing against racism, and attacking the Church and the State as Siamese twins.

The Christian civilization of Chicago … permits the heart’s blood of your children to be quaffed in the wine cups of the labor robbers … Socialism is the only 100-cents-on-the-dollar religion. (Cheers) … We have heard enough about a paradise behind the moon. We want something now.”

At this point, one of the leaders of the reformist current within the SLP jumped up and started yelling, “I won’t allow Socialism to be imposed upon. Socialism means one thing and anarchy another. … Mrs. Parsons spoke in this hall last Wednesday night, and she used the word socialist every time she should have used the word anarchist. Mrs. Parsons has no right to call herself a socialist.”[59]

During a subsequent meeting of the SLP, Lucy Parsons was physically thrown out of the hall by the reformists.

At the precise moment that Lucy Parsons’ state-socialist opponents were intent on wholly ejecting her from the socialist into the anarchist movement, Parsons was coming into conflict with the recognized leaders of American anarchism.

Lucy Parsons’ anarchism was always syndicalist in nature — that is, based on a conception of the labor movement as the main lever of social revolution. She argued that “the trade unions, the Knights of Labor assemblies, etc., are the embryonic groups of the ideal anarchist society.”[60]

Elsewhere, she makes clear that her conception of a future anarchist society would be constructed along the lines of industrial labor. In a strikingly similar vision to that established with the advent of workers’ councils, or ‘Soviets,’ as they arose in Russia, first in 1905, and then later in 1917, Parsons speculates:

Each branch of industry will no doubt have its own organization, regulations, leaders, etc.; it will institute methods of direct communication with every member of that industrial branch in the world, and establish equitable relations with all other branches. There would probably be conventions of industry which delegates would attend, and where they would transact such business as was necessary”[61]

In the meantime, the duty of all revolutionaries was to agitate within the existing trade unions in order to fight for their direction and to win over the workers therein to the necessity of revolution.

Such a conception of revolution was a million miles away from the prevailing anarchist ideas of the time. Emma Goldman, the “Queen of the Anarchists” as her friends called her, was the most popular anarchist figure in America by the turn of the century.[62] Her newspaper, Mother Earth, was quickly becoming the ‘mainstream’ of intellectual anarchism.

Goldman was not concerned with the trade union movement, nor even with the class struggle, primarily. As Ashbaugh summarizes:

Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman came from very different social and political backgrounds. Parsons developed in the context of the militant Chicago working class movement of the 1870’s and 80’s. Goldman developed in the immigrant radical intellectual circles of New York.

Goldman became interested in the freedom of the individual; Parsons remained committed to the freedom of the working class from capitalism.[63]

While Emma Goldman was becoming the spokesperson for the bohemian, ‘free love’ movement, Lucy Parsons was doing speaking tours of AFL locals across the country.

Indeed, one of Parsons’ major critiques of Goldman was that she regularly addressed “largely middle-class audiences” and overly-focused on the pursuit of individual, sexual freedom, to the exclusion of pursuing the freedom of the entire working class — both men and women — from the multifarious forms of oppression intrinsic to capitalism.[64]

Parsons became extremely alienated from most anarchist leaders over her row with Goldman. She was attacked as a traitor for criticizing the ‘free love’ movement. These anarchists had pushed the question of ‘free love’ to the center of their politics, declaring that individual liberation, and specifically women’s liberation, could be attained outside of the realm of class struggle, merely by the assertion of one’s right to live as an independent sexual being.

One of Goldman’s associates even went so far as to argue that only free love could end the private ownership of one person by another.[65]

Within the mainstream anarchist movement, variety in sexual relations, or ‘free love,’ had become the height of revolutionary activity, and Lucy Parsons endured withering criticisms in the anarchist press for her skepticism.

For Parsons, in contrast to Goldman, women’s oppression was inextricably linked to the economic system of capitalist exploitation. Capitalism stripped most women of their economic, and therefore social, independence. Thus, the fight for women’s liberation must be both economic and social in its content. In other words, women’s slavery could only truly be abolished in the degree to which wage-slavery was also abolished, and vice-versa.

In an article entitled, “Cause of Sex Slavery,” Lucy Parsons responded to those anarchists who attacked her for failing to prioritize the fight to ‘smash monogamy’:

I hold … that the economic is the first issue to be settled, that it is woman’s economical dependence which makes her enslavement possible … How many women do you think would submit to marriage slavery if it were not for wage slavery?[66]

Parsons believed that far too many women were “obliged to live with a man whom she does not love, in order to get bread, clothes, and shelter.”[67] Therefore, substantive liberation for women required her economic ascendancy, but as a class, rather than as individuals.

As the attacks on her by Goldman and others continued, Parsons began to question her very identification as an anarchist: “Variety in sex relations and economic freedom have nothing in common. Nor has it anything in common with Anarchism, as I understand Anarchism; if it has then I am not an Anarchist.”[68]

Elsewhere, regarding a comment on ‘free love’ she had come under fire for making at a meeting in 1897, she writes: “If it is necessary to advocate variety to be an Anarchist, then I am not an Anarchist … I stated further that it made no difference to me what people did in their private lives … but when they set up their ideas as a reconstructive theory of society, it became public property and I had a right to disagree with them and criticize them.”[69]

While some present-day critics have argued that Parsons’ position in this dispute shows that her thinking on marriage and the family was actually quite traditional and conservative, this argument is not entirely convincing. Parsons had no problem publicly advocating for reproductive rights, for the organization of sex workers inside the labor movement, for sex education for children, and for the right of women to more easily dissolve a marriage. Furthermore, in the course of her own life, she was in several different romantic relationships of public knowledge, before and after Albert, which were ‘out of wedlock.’

In the end, however, it is actually irrelevant what Lucy Parsons’ sexual life looked like (or anyone else’s, for that matter), and that is really the main point. The obsession of her anarchist detractors with making an individual’s sexual lifestyle the central-most important question in the social revolution, merely showed the extent to which they were indeed obsessed with the individual pursuit of freedom (and on a “middle-class” basis), to the exclusion of fighting for the freedom of the entire working class from the social, economic, and political systems of oppression endemic to capitalism.

Aside from the question of ‘free love’, Parsons began to grow distanced from the anarchist movement on a whole slew of issues. Soon she would be writing:

The Anarchist cause (there has been no movement in recent years) has lacked a plan of procedure or organization … The result is that the realization of the anarchistic ideal, grand as it is, is not in the least encouraging …

I, personally, have always held to the idea of organization, together with an assumption of responsibility by the members, such as paying monthly dues and collecting funds for propaganda purposes. For holding these views, I have been called an ‘old-school’ Anarchist, etc.

Anarchism, as taught in recent years, is too far away from the mental level of the masses.[70]

By the early 1900s, Parsons was also beginning to firmly reject the ‘propaganda of the deed’ tactic, replacing it with a re-focused attention on the power of the united, mobilized working class.

In 1892, Alexander Berkman, the long-time friend and associate of Emma Goldman, carried out a plot to assassinate the notoriously anti-union steel magnate, Henry Frick. Far from producing the expected workers’ uprising, Berkman was detained and beaten senseless by a group of workers before he could flee.

As Ashbaugh writes of Parsons, “She was surprised and disappointed that Berkman’s action did not spark the workers to revolutionary action. The incident marked a turning point away from the [propaganda of the deed] in the radical movement.”[71]

Several years later, in 1901, a similar plot to assassinate President William McKinley was undertaken by an anarchist claiming to be inspired by Emma Goldman. However, by this time, Parsons responded by saying, “Nothing could be worse for the cause of anarchism. What is the use to strike individuals? That is not true anarchy. Another ruler rises to take his place and no good is accomplished.”[72]

The Industrial Workers of the World

By the early 1900s, industrial capitalism was in full-swing. The process to get to that point, however, had been tumultuous. The period leading up to and following the Civil War had seen America just beginning to undergo the transition from an economy based on small, craft-based production, to one based on large-scale industry. This transition entailed the mass pauperization of those pushed out of their craft by the introduction of modern, machine-based manufacturing, with its requirement of a large pool of proletarians bereft of any tools and resources of their own.

For many, including Lucy Parsons, this earlier reality seemed to offer the newly-pauperized laborer, or ‘tramp,’ no other recourse but to fight against their destitution at the hands of Capital by simply impeding or destroying its progress. Hence, the preoccupation with dynamite.

However, as industrial production became the dominant economic form, and as the concomitant industrial proletariat became increasingly aware of its resultant power, radicals like Parsons began to turn away from desperate attempts to destroy industry, and instead looked to the organization of the working class as the key to taking over industry. Industry in the hands of the workers could play a very different role in society than industry in the hands of the capitalist elites.

By 1905, Lucy Parsons was no longer encouraging tramps to see individual violence as their only ally in the fight against capitalism. Rather, she was encouraging them to organize and see their strength in numbers, as united toilers.

In this vein, she participated in the founding of what would become one of the boldest organizations in the history of the revolutionary working-class movement in the U.S.

Linking up with Eugene Debs and fellow veterans of the radical labor movement, Mother Jones and William “Big Bill” Haywood, Parsons helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905.

Despairing of the AFL’s narrowly craft-based approach to union organizing, which often pitted workers in the same factory against each other, the proponents of the IWW sought to leverage the power of workers by organizing along industrial lines. The ultimate goal, as stated, was to organize the entire working class into “one big union,” which would then take over the running of industry in the interest of the people, rather than for profit.

While she recognized and felt “compelled to give credit to the [AFL] for the great benefit it has been to the working class of America,” Lucy Parsons nevertheless felt that the AFL’s days were numbered, “first, because of its own inherent rottenness, and second, because it, in common with all other craft organizations, have outgrown their usefulness and must give way to the next step in Evolution, which is the Industrial union, which proposes to organize along industrial lines, the same as capital is organized.”[73]

At the IWW’s founding convention, Lucy Parsons was the only woman to address the delegates, which she did from both the floor and the speaker’s rostrum.[74] She actually made a point of drawing attention to this incongruity, encouraging the convention to quickly remedy it.

... I have taken the floor because no other woman has responded, and I feel that it would not be out of place for me to say in my poor way a few words about this movement.

I entered here as a delegate to represent that great mass of outraged humanity, my sisters whom I can see in the night when I go out in Chicago … who are compelled to sell the holy name of womanhood for a night’s lodging. I am here to raise my voice with them, and ask you to put forth from this organization a declaration of principles and a constitution that shall give them hope, in the future, that they should be enrolled under the banner of this organization.

Taken together, her speeches at the convention comprise some of her most powerful statements on socialism, revolution, and workers’ power. They reveal a tremendous maturation in her perspective on the “Labor Question” over the preceding decades, and actually anticipate important developments that would later arise in the working class movement.

She begins by laying out an internationalist vision for the organization: “We are here as one brotherhood and one sisterhood, as one humanity, with a responsibility to the downtrodden and the oppressed of all humanity, it matters not under what flag or in what country they happened to be born. Let us have that idea of Thomas Paine, that ‘The world is my country, and mankind my countrymen.

She exhorts the delegates to eschew all amateurishness in designing the structure of the organization, thus ensuring that it will have the fortitude deserving of a weapon to be wielded by the workers in the course of the class war.

When you go out of this hall, when you have laid aside your enthusiasm, then comes the solid work. Are you going out of here with your minds made up that the class which we call ourselves, revolutionary Socialists so-called -- that class, is organized to meet organized capital with the millions at its command? It has many weapons to fight us. First it has money. Then, it has legislative tools. Then, it has armories; and last, it has the gallows.... I simply throw these hints out that you young people may become reflective and know what you have to face at the first, and then it will give you strength.

That is the solid foundation that I hope this organization will be built on; that it may be built not like a house upon the sand, that when the waves of adversity come it may go over into the ocean of oblivion; but that it shall be built upon a strong, granite, hard foundation.

She continues:

... [W]hat do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialists? We mean the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers. Now, let us analyze that for just a moment. Is there a single land owner in this country ... who will allow you to vote it away from him?

... [The product] belongs to the capitalist class as their legal property. Do you think that they will allow you to vote them away from them by passing a law and saying, 'Be it enacted that on and after a certain day Mr Capitalist shall be dispossessed?’ Hence, when you roll under your tongue the expression that you are revolutionists, remember what that word means. It means a revolution that shall turn all these things over where they belong -- to the wealth producers.

Now, how shall the wealth producers come into possession of them? I believe that if every man and woman who works ... should decide in their minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them ... then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army.

She concludes by making an allusion to the worker’s uprising then taking place in Russia, “where the red flag has been raised.” No doubt drawing inspiration from the Russian workers, she argues:

My conception of the future method of taking possession of this Earth is that of the general strike. The trouble with all the strikes in the past has been this: the workingmen ... strike and go out and starve. My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production. If anyone is to starve ... let it be the capitalist class.[75]

Later that year, Lucy Parsons would begin editing a new periodical in Chicago, which she saw as connected to both the IWW and the Socialist Party. She named it The Liberator, in tribute to the anti-slavery campaigner, William Lloyd Garrison, whose newspaper of the same name had played a key role in organizing the Abolitionist movement.

For Parsons, The Liberator was more than just a whimsical endeavor. Much like she had once viewed the importance of “propaganda of the deed,” she now saw the indispensable role played by “propaganda of the word” (so to speak) in organizing the class struggle.

While there is no direct evidence as to whether Parsons was aware of the now infamous work written by the Russian revolutionary, V.I. Lenin, in 1902, What Is To Be Done?, anyone familiar with that work will be struck by the similarity of purpose between the two revolutionaries on the question of a revolutionary newspaper.

Parsons writes:

There is no way of building up a movement, strengthening it and keeping it intact, except by a press, at least weeklies if dailies are impossible. The press is the medium through which we exchange ideas, keep abreast of the times, take the gauge of the battle and see how far the class conflict has progressed. It is by the press we educate the public mind and link the people of most distant parts together in bonds of fraternity and comradeship. We can keep track of the work and accomplishments of our comrades in no other way, except by the medium of the paper.

There was never a time in the history of America when there was such urgent need for radical education as at the present moment. The rich are becoming more oppressive, domineering and arrogant each day; the people more depressed, despoiled and helpless. Every radical should try to reach them and educate them to a correct understanding of their condition in society; tell them why they are exploited, and the remedy. The Liberator is trying to perform this task.[76]

“Educate the public mind” is precisely what Lucy Parsons did through the pages of this newspaper. She wrote a weekly column on women’s issues; wrote a series of articles entitled, “Labor’s Long Struggle with Capital,” covering the history of working-class radicalism; and she addressed the fight against racism, xenophobia, and police brutality.

Mostly, she sought to simply lay bare the hypocrisy and barbarism of bourgeois society. In one characteristic article she writes:

The utter irreconcilability of the interest of labor and capital based upon the present system of buying and selling … should be transparent to any one who gives the matter serious thought.

The one is employed by the other; the laborer wishes to sell his labor at the highest figure possible; the capitalist wishes to buy at the lowest, so the conflict begins. The whole labor problem is brought up when the dispute arises over the share of the product which each of these parties, the workers and the capitalists, are to receive. The competitive system fixes the wages received by the wage class upon the basis of mere subsistence; all over and above this sum, the surplus, goes to the profit-taker.[77]

She also continued to wage the fight against the reformists and ‘ballot-socialists’:

Of all the modern delusions, the ballot has certainly been the greatest. Let us see, for example, how our law factories are operated. A corruptionist works a majority as follows: He hires a tool called an attorney or lobbyist to hang around the capitol and buttonhole the members of the legislature … In this way, together with some graft, he usually gets the votes of the majority of the members.

With thousands of laws being enacted and hundreds of corruptionists playing their tricks, what becomes of the voter’s victory at the polls? What becomes of his reforming all things by the use of the ballot?

The fact is money and not votes is what rules the people. And the capitalists no longer care to buy the voters, they simply buy the “servants” after they have been elected to “serve.” The idea that the poor man’s vote amounts to anything is the veriest delusion. The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the tricks.”[78]

Or as she put it succinctly in another article, “The trusts will not allow you to vote them out of power because they are the power.”[79]

Building Mass Movements

Lucy Parsons was nearing sixty years of age and suffering from failing eyesight when she helped found the IWW. Nevertheless, she maintained an arduous touring schedule well into the nineteen teens, speaking and organizing across the country, and spending far more time on the road than at home in Chicago (in part because the local police continued to prevent her from securing speaking permits in the city).

In 1910 she went on a national lecture tour of AFL Locals with the explicit goal of trying to radicalize the unionized workers, selling revolutionary books and pamphlets. The next year she joined “Big Bill” Haywood on a circuit of New York City, speaking on the topic of the IWW and the class struggle, and raising funds to support the Mexican revolution then taking place. It was during this time that she began to actually self-identity more as a ‘syndicalist’ than an ‘anarchist’, changing the name of her famous tour speech, “Anarchism: Its Aim & Objects,” to “Syndicalism: Its Aims & Objects.”[80]

In 1913 she traveled to Seattle where, in between organizing to defend a group of 99 socialists who had been arrested for ‘speaking in the street,’ she gave a series of lectures on revolution in which she continued to develop her critiques of the anarchist movement, arguing that the prevailing anarchist theories were “negative, vague, and non-constructive.”[81]

In 1914, Parsons momentarily settled in San Francisco, where she led a campaign to bring relief to those suffering from the economic crash of that year. She helped form an ‘unemployment committee’, and held street rallies and speak-outs, all of which culminated in a massive march of 10,000 people through downtown San Francisco, demanding jobs and relief.

She would expand upon such efforts in a similar campaign she initiated in Chicago in 1917. She organized a series of “Hunger Demonstrations” throughout the city, and specifically focused her agitation amongst the burgeoning numbers coming around Chicago’s Hull House for the unemployed.

At one mass meeting in the Hull House, Lucy Parsons got into a veritable shouting match with the House’s founder, Jane Adams, who had been preaching ‘patience’ to the unemployed in attendance. Parsons stood in the doorway, pointing to the street, yelling, “Come on! March! March! If you want jobs, then make the warehouses of the rich so insecure that through fear they will give you work.”[82]

Such efforts ultimately proved fruitful. Jane Adams, fearing that Lucy Parsons’ more attractive militancy would win the unemployed masses away from the Hull House, was forced to concede, at least in part, to Parsons’ approach. A “Hunger Demonstration” was called for February 12th, 1917, to be organized jointly by the Hull House, the Socialist Party, and the AFL, with Lucy Parsons acting as the lead coordinator of the effort. Within two weeks of the mass demonstration, the federal government began implementing a plan to decentralize aid distribution for the hungry and unemployed.

Though Parsons worked with the IWW in one capacity or another for the duration of her life, she nonetheless had serious disagreements with its approach to organizing. As early as 1906, she expressed intense frustration with its overall lack of structure, accountability, and program.

[T]he IWW cannot hope to gain and hold the confidence of the wage class long if it has no definite aim in view looking to a lasting betterment of economic conditions. The Industrial Workers of the World have been organized nearly a year. What have they done worth mentioning? Carried a few isolated, insignificant strikes? What does this amount to? The whole organization seems to be floundering around like a ship lost at sea without a rudder.[83]

Perhaps her most important disagreement was over the IWW’s ‘dual unionism.’ The IWW was implacably opposed to the AFL, even to the point of cutting itself off from the vast numbers of workers who were organized in AFL unions. Lucy Parsons argued for a strategy in the IWW, called ‘boring from within,’ in which the IWW would work with and through existing AFL unions in an attempt to win AFL-organized workers over to a more radical perspective. The IWW rebuffed this strategy.

As Ahrens writes, “Critical though she was of the AFL bureaucrats’ conservative policies, she did not want to ignore its million-plus rank and file,” and she wished to “introduce radical ideas to audiences that might well have been put off by a blatantly anti-AFL speaker.”[84]

To this end, she took the step in 1912 of helping to organize a short-lived break-away group from the IWW, called the Syndicalist League of North America, committed to the ‘boring from within’ approach. She was allied in this venture with long-time comrades Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, and Earl Browder. The Syndicalist League established its headquarters in Lucy Parsons’ house in Chicago, and was able to play an active role in a number of strikes before it petered out in 1914.

War and Repression

In July of 1914, war broke out between the world’s largest imperial powers. Lucy Parsons, who considered the war a dirty conflict between national capitalists, initially grew very despondent at the rapidity with which the working class seemed to have been caught up in a wave of conservative patriotism at the war’s onset. However, her disappointment would reach new heights at the treacherous behavior of the various mass socialist parties within the imperial nations. Every one of these parties, barring the Socialist Parties of the U.S. and Italy, and the Bolshevik Party of Russia, either supported the war or refused to oppose it.

Commenting on the decision of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany — then the largest socialist party in the world — to actively support the war effort, Parsons fumed:

Scientific socialism (so-called) has been taught in Germany for more than fifty years. [Yet] the political representatives of “science” (backed by more than four million voters) helped their imperial master lay a war levy of a billion marks or more for the prosecution of a war on workers of other countries.

And each of the scientists was honored by a clasp of the imperial hand to the tune of “Deutschland Uber Alles!” German scientific Socialism has stifled the revolutionary tendency, once so promising.[85]

Fortunately, the patriotic fervor of the working class was not to last. By February of 1917, Parsons was able to write,

The anti-military spirit which is developing among the masses of Europe will tell the governments of the Earth that the workers have no trouble that needs to be settled by cruel war; and if the rulers have trouble, they can settle them by fighting it out among themselves … But we are told that kind of talk is unpatriotic, that every man ought to be willing to fight for his country. What country belongs to the wage class?[86]

In April 1917, the U.S. officially entered the war. As is often the case with imperial conflicts, the war abroad was coupled with a war at home. The U.S. Congress quickly passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to clamp down on all domestic dissent, and unleashed a wave of repression against all revolutionary working-class organizations.

The entire executive committee of the Socialist Party was indicted under the Espionage Act. Eugene Debs would be sent to prison for two years after making an anti-war speech. The IWW may have fared the worst. Despite the fact that the IWW refused to actively oppose the war, the ruling class took advantage of the moment to crush the organization. “Big Bill” Haywood and one hundred other leaders of the IWW were arrested for committing 10,000 crimes. Mass trials of all known IWW members took place in Kansas and California. Every single state headquarters of the IWW was raided by the FBI. By 1920, with all of its leaders either in jail or exile, the IWW declined precipitously, never to truly recover.

The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party

The shining beacon of hope for Parsons and many others during this period of war and repression was the Russian revolution of 1917. Led by the Bolshevik Party and V.I. Lenin, the Russian workers had risen up to overthrow the capitalist class. The victorious workers set about reshaping society along the lines of workers’ control of production, redistributing the land and tools to the toilers. They established a truly-democratic workers’ state, which was based on the network of Soviets that had emerged as the bodies through which the struggling masses had organized the revolution.

Lucy Parsons immediately identified with the revolution. She saw in the efforts of the Russian working class a concretization of what she had spent her entire life working towards. For her, Soviet Russia had become “the land of promise.”[87]

In 1921, the left-wing of the Socialist Party and the remnants of the IWW merged to found the American Communist Party (CP), which was roughly modeled on the Bolshevik Party, and sought to lead a workers’ revolution in the U.S., just as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. Most of Lucy Parsons’ closest comrades immediately came to play leading roles in the CP, including Gurley Flynn, Haywood, Foster, and Browder.

Though not officially a member at this point, Parsons, too, would come to play a leading role in connection with the CP. In 1925, the CP started an organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD), which set for itself the goal of defending the victims of capitalist repression, both in and out of jail, and fighting for the civil rights of the victims of racism.

In 1927, Lucy Parsons was elected to the Executive Committee of the ILD, where she worked side-by-side with Gurley Flynn. In this capacity, she was involved in some of the most important fights of the day. She organized against the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchist labor organizers who were framed for murder; she defended Angelo Herndon, the young African-American Communist, who faced 20 years in prison on a charge of “insurrection” for trying to organize black industrial workers in Georgia; she fought to prevent the execution of Tom Mooney, her long-time friend and a leader in both the Socialist Party and the IWW, who had also been framed for murder.

Finally, she actively participated in the famous campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys” — nine young African American men in Alabama who were falsely accused of rape, convicted by an all-white jury, constantly threatened with lynching by white mobs, and who ultimately became national symbols of criminal injustice in the segregated South. The victorious campaign to win their freedom would become one of the most recognized successes of the ILD and the CP. Notably, it was through this work with the ILD that Lucy Parsons would make her first return to the South in over fifty years.

In a revealing letter written to a friend, Parsons looks back on what it was that attracted her to the ILD in light of her frustrations with anarchism:

Anarchism has not produced any organized ability in the present generation, only a few little loose, struggling groups, scattered over this vast country, that come together in ‘conferences’ occasionally, talk to each other, then go home.

Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others’ organizations. But what have they done in the last fifty years … Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming. Consequently, Anarchism doesn’t appeal to the public … [It] is a dead issue in American life today.

I went to work for the International Labor Defense (ILD) because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking, talking.”[88]

With events in Russian providing a concrete example of the possibility of workers’ revolution, Lucy Parsons had no patience for those anarchists leveling abstract criticisms against the realities of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as embodied in the early years of the Soviet government. It was precisely this issue that would spark the final flare-up in Parsons’ long-standing political feud with Emma Goldman.

Though an initial supporter of the Russian revolution while living there in exile in 1920, Goldman had become an outspoken opponent within a few years. The turning point for her was the suppression by the Soviet government of the sailors’ mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921. A group of peasant sailors, calling themselves anarchists, had risen against the workers’ government, demanding, among other things, the ouster of the Bolshevik Party, a return to private control of the land and tools, and the right of individuals to privately sell commodities on the free-market.[89]

An in-depth discussion of the Kronstadt affair is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that Goldman’s turnabout on the Russian revolution because of this incident, drew the ire of Lucy Parsons, especially after Goldman accepted payment by various bourgeois newspapers in the U.S. to denounce the Soviet government in their pages.[90]

“Big Bill” Haywood, who considered the Kronstadt sailors to be no better than scabs, describes in a fascinating article in 1922 how Lucy Parsons “severely criticizes Emma Goldman because she sold herself to the capitalist press of the United States. She characterizes the Goldman articles in effect as a rehash of the supercilious vapourings of capitalist reporters.”[91]

Parsons writes of Goldman:

I think Russia treated her and Berkman very tolerantly and cleverly; anyone could see that they were doing everything in their power to provoke arrest.

As to the Kronstadt affair, that was war; nothing new about it, and the side that got licked are sour about that, too, nothing new about it either. I wonder what the Anarchists would have done, had they won out? Surrounded as they were by those hostile armies [of the Allied Powers] and enemies on every side?”[92]

In an interview she gave around that time, she goes so far as to say of Goldman, “We had been friends for more than thirty years, but when she began publishing articles in the Chicago press attacking the Soviet Union I wrote her that I never wanted to see her again.”[93]

For Goldman, this was all just another instance of Lucy Parsons being the opportunist who “goes around with every group proclaiming itself revolutionary, the IWW, now the communists.”[94]

Despite aforementioned contentions to the contrary, it is clear that the final years of Lucy Parsons’ life were spent working closely with the CP (either as an 'official', card-carrying member or, at the very least, as a devoted 'fellow traveler'). Though Ahrens argues the unlikelihood of Parsons joining a party as bureaucratically stifling as the Communist Party of 1939, warped as it was by Stalinism (to be sure, an entirely accurate characterization), this overlooks the extent to which the CP was not only leading the fight against racism and repression during this period, but was also spearheading the unionization of the working class along industrial lines through its work in the newly-formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

As Ashbaugh argues, “Lucy Parsons had lived to see hundreds of thousands of workers organized into the C.I.O. in auto, steel, meat packing, and other industries. She felt that the Communist Party had led a movement for industrial unionism which compared with the size of the mass movement for the eight hour day which the ‘anarchists’ had led in 1886.”[95]

In a 1930 letter to a friend, Parsons writes of being impressed with the CP’s organizing efforts in the context of the Great Depression, commenting, “While I don’t belong to the Communist Party, I have been working with them to some extent, as they are the only bunch who are making a vigorous protest against the present horrible conditions!” [emphasis in original].[96]

In another letter she writes, “The Communists are very good propagandists; they stir things up. Of course, like all humanity, they, too, have their faults and shortcomings. Society cannot be static, it must either go forward to some kind of state of socialism or backward to slavery.”[97]

Finally, in an article written for the CP’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, on the eve of International Worker’s Day, May 1st, 1930, Parsons writes, “On this day the workers of every land and every clime will abandon the factories, mines and other hell holes of capitalism and march by the thousands under the banner of the Communist International and will declare their intention to abolish the curse of capitalism, poverty, misery.”

She continues with a review of the labor movement: “There came to the front the A.F. of L. which has retarded and deadened the labor movement. In a population of 38 million of workers it has gathered some 2 millions of the mechanics and ignored the other 36 millions — virtually told them to go to hell! Now the Communists have risen as a challenge to this bunch of lazy racketeer A.F.L. officials, with their morally bankrupt organization. The Communists are here to stay.”[98]

“She Lived for the Future”

In a poetic twist of history, Lucy Parsons’ last public appearance was in 1941, where she gave a speech to striking workers at the International Harvester machinery plant — the successor to the very same McCormick machinery plant where the deaths of six workers at the hands of the police in 1886 would prompt that fateful meeting in Haymarket Square.

Upon her death, The Daily Worker published a series of stirring obituaries honoring the life and legacy of Lucy Parsons.[99] One of these pieces, “Tribute To a Heroine of Labor,” by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, is arguably the most sublime portrait of Lucy Parsons in existence:

Lucy Parsons spoke in a beautiful melodious voice, with eloquence and passion. She had her roots in the people, which gave her strength. Both of her children died. She kept on alone, without wavering. She never lost faith in the power, courage, intelligence and ultimate triumph of the people. Years ago she accustomed trade union men to listen respectfully to a woman speaking for labor. She helped make them more keenly aware of the need of strong unions and organizing the unorganized. She helped to build up a strong tradition of labor defense so that other leaders of labor should not suffer the same fate as her husband.

When Eugene V. Debs spoke at the 1905 IWW convention, Mother Jones sat on one side of him and Lucy Parsons on the other. Bill Haywood presided. She encouraged every new effort to push forward the whole labor movement. What a great satisfaction to her it must have been for her to realize the number of splendid young women, many of her color, who are enrolled in it today. What a joy to see trades unions millions strong! She did not live in the past. She lived for the future. She will live in the future, in the hearts of the workers.[100]

[1] Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 1976), 266. Frank Beck, Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & other agitators & outsiders in 1920s/30s Chicago (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 2000), 79.

[2] Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 41-42.

[3] John McClendon III, “Lucy Parsons (1853-1942) Anarchist, socialist, communist, journalist, poet” in Jessie Carnie Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book II (New York: Gale Research, 1996), 514-516.

[4] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 6.

[5] Candace Falk, Anarchy, Love, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 66. Emma Goldman, “Letter to Alexander Berkman,” 1932, quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 256.

[6] (Also see endnote 99 in this article). Lucy Parsons was one of the featured speakers at a May Day rally, organized by the Communist Party in 1930, where she said, "I have seen many movements come and go. I belonged to all of those movements. I was a delegate that organized the Industrial Workers of the World. I carried a card in the old Socialist Party. And now I am today connected with the Communists." Lucy Parsons, “May Day Speech,” Chicago, 1 May 1930, in Gale Ahrens, ed., Freedom, Equality & Solidarity: Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2003), 156. Gale Ahrens, “Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters,” in Ibid., 20.

[7] Casey Williams, “Whose Lucy Parsons? The mythologizing and re-appropriation of a radical hero,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Number 47, Summer 2007.

[8] http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/

[9] Michelle Diane Wright, Confounding Identity: Exploring the Life and Discourse of Lucy E. Parsons. Available at http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=michelledianewright.

[10] Jon F. Rice, “Lucy Parsons, Chicago Revolutionary,” People’s Tribune, Volume 22, Number 7, 13 February 1995.

[11] Lucy Parsons, “The Principles of Anarchism,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 29.

[12] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 25.

[13] Lucy Parsons, “On the Harmony Between Capital and Labor,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 39-40.

[14] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 41.

[15] Ibid., 44.

[16] Lucy Parsons, “The Principles of Anarchism,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 29.

[17] Ibid., 30.

[18] Paul D’Amato, “Anarchism: How Not to Make a Revolution,” International Socialist Review, Issue 3, Winter 1997.

[19] Karl Marx, “Letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer in Berlin,” London, 13 October 1868, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43, 132.

[20] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 58.

[21] Speech by Adolph Fischer, in Albert Parsons, Anarchism: its philosophy and scientific basis as defined by some of its apostles (Chicago: Mrs. A. R. Parsons, 1887), 78-79.

[22] Albert Parsons, Knights of Labor, 11 December 1886, cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 58.

[23] Alan Calmer, Labor Agitator: The Story of Albert R. Parsons (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 70.

[24] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 57.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Lucy Parsons, “To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited, and Miserable,” The Alarm, 4 October 1884. Available at http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/writings/to_tramps.html.

[27] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 60. The last sentence is in reference to the Union Army General Philip Sheridan whose ‘scorched earth’ approach to the South during the Civil War is credited with playing a key role in tipping the balance in favor of the North.

[28] Ibid., 63.

[29] Lucy Parsons, “The Negro,” The Alarm, 3 April 1886, in Ahrens, Freedom, 54-56.

[30] Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 42.

[31] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 66.

[32] Lucy Parsons, “Southern Lynchings,” Freedom, April 1892, in Ahrens, Freedom, 70.

[33] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 187.

[34] See Lucy Parsons, “Speech at the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World,” 29 June 1905, in Ahrens, Freedom, 79.

[35] Lucy Parsons, “Woman: Her Evolutionary Development,” The Liberator, 10 September 1905, in Ahrens, Freedom, 93.

[36] Lucy Parsons, “Speech at the Founding Convention,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 79.

[37] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 105.

[38] Quoted in Ibid., 96.

[39] Quoted in Ibid., 107.

[40] Quoted in Ibid., 104.

[41] Ibid., 86.

[42] Lucy Parsons, “Kansas City Speech,” The Kansas City Journal, 21 December 1886. Available at http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1886-lucy-parsons-i-am-anarchist.

[43] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 107.

[44] Albert Parsons, “Letter to Lucy Parsons,” Cook County Bastille, Cell Number 29, 20 August 1886, reprinted in Albert and Lucy Parsons, Life of Albert R. Parsons, with brief history of the labor movement in America (Chicago: L.E. Parsons, 1889), 211-212.

[45] Lucy Parsons, The Agitator, 1 November 1912. Available at http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/writings/voices_of_people.html.

[46] Albert Parsons, Anarchism, 9, 93.

[47] Albert and Lucy Parsons, Life of Albert R. Parsons, 161.

[48] Emma Goldman, “Letter to Alexander Berkman,” 1928, quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 179.

[49] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 176.

[50] Quoted in Ibid., 175.

[51] See Jacob McKean, “A Fury for Justice: Lucy Parsons and the Revolutionary Anarchist Movement in Chicago,” The Anarchist Library, 17 October 2006, and Wright, “Confounding Identity,” and Williams, “Whose Lucy Parsons?”

[52] Lucy Parson, “The Eight-Hour Strike of 1886,” Industrial Worker, 1 May 1912, in Ahrens, Freedom, 138.

[53] Lucy Parsons, “The IWW and the Shorter Workday,” The Liberator, 8 April 1906, in Ahrens, Freedom, 121.

[54] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 170.

[55] Ibid., 202.

[56] Ibid., 190.

[57] Ibid., 207.

[58] John C. Ambler Scrapbooks (the scrapbooks may have been prepared for the Citizens’ Association), v. 90, clipping, Chicago Historical Society, cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 159.

[59] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 170-171.

[60] Lucy Parsons, “On Anarchy,” in Albert Parsons, Anarchism, 110.

[61] Lucy Parsons, “The Principles of Anarchism,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 33.

[62] Beck, Hobohemia, 51. For more on the life and politics of Emma Goldman, see Lance Selfa, “Emma Goldman: A life of controversy,” International Socialist Review, Issue 34, March-April 2004.

[63] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parson, 182, 200.

[64] Falk, Anarchy, 66.

[65] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 203.

[66] Lucy Parsons, “Cause of Sex Slavery,” Firebrand, 1895, in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 202.

[67] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 222.

[68] Ibid., 204.

[69] Ibid., 206.

[70] Lucy Parsons, “On Anarchist Organization,” The Demonstrator, 6 November 1907, in Ahrens, Freedom, 131.

[71] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 185.

[72] Ibid., 211.

[73] Quoted in Ibid., 221.

[74] Lucy Parsons, “I am An Anarchist.” Available at
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1886-lucy-parsons-i-am-anarchist.
[75] Lucy Parsons, “Speech at the Founding Convention,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 77-83.

[76] Lucy Parsons, “The Importance of a Press,” The Liberator, 19 April 1906, in Ahrens, Freedom, 127.

[77] Lucy Parsons, “The IWW and the Shorter Workday,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 120-121.

[78] Lucy Parsons, “The Ballot Humbug,” The Liberator, 10 September 1905, in Ahrens, Freedom, 95-98.

[79] Lucy Parsons, “Wage-Slaves vs. Corporations,” The Liberator, 24 September 1905, in Ahrens, Freedom, 100.

[80] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 230.

[81] Ibid., 234.

[82] Ibid., 242.

[83] Lucy Parsons, “The IWW and the Shorter Workday,” in Ahrens, Freedom, 121-122.

[84] Ahrens, Freedom, 15.

[85] Lucy Parsons, “Just a Few Stray Observations,” Instead of a Magazine, September 1915, in Ahrens, Freedom, 150.

[86] Lucy Parsons, “Workers and War,” The Agitator, 12 February 1917, in Ahrens, Freedom, 151.

[87] Lucy Parsons, “Foreword,” 24 September 1937, in Calmer, Labor Agitator, 5.

[88] Lucy Parsons, “U.S. Anarchism in the 1930s,” Letter to Carl Nold, 27 February 1934, in Ahrens, Freedom, 161.

[89] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion#cite_ref-3.

[90] For more on Kronstadt, see Chris Harman, “Kronstadt and the Defeat of the Russian Revolution,” International Socialist Review, Issue 3, Winter 1997, available at http://www.isreview.org/issues/03/kronstadt.pdf, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, “An Anarchist on Russia: A Reply to Emma Goldman,” The Communist Review, Vol. 3, No. 4., August 1922, available at http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/communist_review/1922/04/emma_goldman.htm.

[91] Haywood, “An Anarchist on Russia,” op. cit.

[92] Lucy Parsons, “Letter to Carl Nold,” 30 May 1932, cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 255.

[93] Quoted in Sender Garlin, “Lucy Parsons Carried Out Bequest of Her Husband, A Hero of American Labor,” The Daily Worker, 11 March 1942.

[94] Nowhere at Home, 170, Emma Goldman to Alexander Berkman, January 1932, cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 256.

[95] Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 261.

[96] Lucy Parsons to Carl Nold, 25 September 1930, Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 254.

[97] Lucy Parsons to Comrade Lawson, 12 June 1934, reprinted in Michael Boda, “An unpublished 1934 letter from Lucy Parsons,” Pittsburgh Grassroots Examiner, 13 October 2009. Available at http://www.examiner.com/grassroots-in-pittsburgh/an-unpublished-1934-letter-from-lucy-parsons.

[98] Quoted in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 253.

[99] One of the key pieces of evidence that Ahrens cites as reason to doubt Lucy Parsons’ membership in the CP is that the Daily Worker did not mention this fact in its obituary for her. Ahrens argues that the Daily Worker would have emblazoned Parsons’ membership on its masthead if it had been true. However, there are several mitigating factors that potentially explain this seeming omission. First, it is significant in and of itself that the Daily Worker published four separate glowing obituaries over a series of days, all of which posited Lucy Parsons as firmly within its tradition; something which is unlikely to have been done for an activist who had been indifferent, let alone hostile, to the CP. Second, by 1942, the CP was well into its ‘Popular Front’ period, in which it was downplaying the presence of the Party in virtually everything it did. Indeed, by this time, the Daily Worker was even distancing itself from appearing to be a direct organ of the CP. And of course, in 1944, the CP even went so far as to dissolve itself entirely as a political party, in an attempt to further ingratiate itself with the Roosevelt administration. The fact of the matter is that the period in which Parsons died also happens to be the period in which the Party wasn’t emblazoning its existence on anything, let alone an obituary for Lucy Parsons.

[100] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Tribute To a Heroine of Labor,” The Daily Worker, 11 March 1942. Available at https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B2Zdv5hwi_o6ODA3MDdiMzYtYzhkNy00Yzc0LTk0NDItZWQxMzUzZmQ5ZjQ2&hl=en.

Know Your Rights | Is it legal to video record the police? (The short answer is, yes)

2011-06-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

A troubling trend has been cropping up across the nation recently: the arrest of bystanders for the "crime" of video recording on-duty police officers.

Often using a cell phone or camera, people in several cities (Boston, Albany, Chicago) have attempted to record police engaging in legally-dubious behavior, only to have their recording devices smashed or confiscated, and themselves handcuffed and charged with felonies carrying 5-year prison sentences.

The court cases and outcry from civil liberties groups that have resulted from these incidents have raised the question of whether recording the police should be considered a protected right under the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Most of the arrests that the police have made in this vein have been under "illegal wiretapping" and "secret eavesdropping" laws, contending that a citizen who records them conducting police business is violating their rights to privacy.

By and large, however, the courts have decided against the police in these instances and have upheld the legality of recording police activity that occurs in public venues.

In general, the question revolves around whether or not the recording was being done "secretly," or openly, so that the person being recorded was aware of it. In many states it is not illegal to record someone without their consent or knowledge, while other states explicitly prohibit this.

To find out the relevant laws governing the recording of another person (including police) in your state, see the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press's "State-by-State Guide", which provides summaries of the relevant "wiretapping" laws for each of the fifty states.

As a general rule of thumb, however, it is best to follow these simple steps to ensure that when you record the police, you will be engaging in legally and constitutionally protected activity.

1) Record the police in a public location. The laws governing the recording of another person on private property are much more complex and difficult from the standpoint of the person doing the recording.

2) Do not conceal the fact that you are recording the police. In fact, make it obvious! In every state in the country, it is legal to record another person in a public location as long as they are aware that you are doing so (i.e., it is not being done "secretly"). This is very important, as is evidenced by the following case, referenced by the Citizen Media Law Project:

In a recent case, a political activist was convicted of violating the wiretapping statute by secretly recording video of a Boston University police sergeant during a political protest in 2006. The activist was shooting footage of the protest when police ordered him to stop and then arrested him for continuing to operate the camera while hiding it in his coat. As part of the sentencing, the court ordered the defendant to remove the footage from the Internet. From this case, it is clear that you can violate the statute by secretly recording, even when you are in a public place.

In contrast to the above case, there is a more recent case of a Boston law student who was arrested in 2007 for recording the police harassing and assaulting a man on the Boston Common. However, in this situation, all charges were dismissed against the law student, making this court decision an important precedent in securing the right for Massachusetts citizens to record police in public locations, as long as the recording is being done "openly" and in a way that would be deemed "obvious to a reasonable person."

The actual wording of the court ruling in this latter case can be accessed here. Additionally, if interested, one can click here to access the court filing on behalf of the law student who is now suing the police for violating his civil rights.

To view the exact Massachusetts law on "illegal wiretapping," which covers the act of recording another person, you can see it here. It is also worth checking out the Citizen Media Law Project's section on Massachusetts Recording Law.

---

Finally, it is worth stepping back and wondering what is behind these police attacks on concerned bystanders who take it upon themselves to observe the police. With the increasing prevalence of camera-phones and the technological advances for rapid, mass dissemination of video via services such as YouTube, the last several years has seen a veritable explosion of videos circulating on the internet, capturing cops engaging in police brutality, illegal activity, and so on.

It is therefore no surprise that police engaged in suspect activities would begin keeping an eye out for anyone who may be recording them. The ability for the police to abuse their power and act with that oh-so-common arrogant air of omnipotent impunity (not to mention the downright racist, sexist, homophobic, and bigoted actions the police regularly engage in), turns upon the extent to which they exist outside of the public eye.

If more citizens get in the habit of recording police as they engage in such activities, it has the potential to lead to the police actually being held accountable for those things they had grown accustomed to regularly getting away with.

This is what is behind the growth of police attacking bystanders who attempt to document their misconduct; it is nothing more than pure-and-simple scare tactics and bullying.

But this is also why it is so important to fight against police attempts to crack down on free speech. If we can't record their abuses, it makes it all the easier for the police to get away with committing those abuses.

It is in this spirit that I offer this article as a resource for people to use in asserting their First Amendment rights to "observe and report" police misconduct, wherever it may occur.

UPDATE: How to invite all your friends to a Facebook Event

2011-06-05T19:53:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmBgGDoX7G0&feature=youtu.be

How to invite all your friends to a Facebook Event
For Firefox:
1. Install an Add-on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

2. Install a Script
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/89653

3. Refresh Facebook page

4. On your Event click on invite people and you will have a Select all button

Enjoy!!!!

For Google Chrome just install the Script :))))

Zulu words to opening verse of "Circle of Life," Lion King song

2011-05-16T17:01:00.000-04:00

Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba	[Here comes a lion, Father]
Sithi uhm ingonyama	[Oh yes, it's a lion]
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba
Sithi uhhmm ingonyama
Ingonyama
Siyo Nqoba	[We're going to conquer]
Ingonyama
Ingonyama nengw' enamabala	[A lion and a leopard come to this open place]

---

The opening lyrics of “The Circle of Life” are lines translated into and sung in A REAL LANGUAGE; one that is spoken by over 10 million people, including 95% of South Africa. The opening of “The Circle of Life” is in Zulu, the language of the Zulu people.

The verse above contains the actual words, along with the English translation.

Frida Kahlo on being "flawed"

2011-05-11T15:52:00.002-04:00

"Celebrations of Death," Osama bin Laden, and the American Media

2011-05-09T17:03:00.005-04:00

By Keith Rosenthal

In those rare moments over the past week when the mainstream media have even acknowledged the revulsion that many Americans may feel towards all of the "Bin Laden is Dead" debauchery, the question is ever addressed from a purely psychological -- as opposed to a political -- standpoint.

Articles have been popping up in the "Health" sections of all the major newspapers exploring the question of whether it is okay -- morally, socially, mentally -- to celebrate Death (for example, see this gem which appeared in the New York Times: "Celebrating bin Laden's Death: Ugly, Maybe, but Only Human").

The aim of these articles is always to assuage the unease of a presumably-liberal audience, whose instincts are to recoil away from the overtly-crude, frat party-atmosphere of the bin Laden street parties. Celebrations of death are "okay," we are assured, as long as the dead person was really, really evil. Indeed, such celebrations can be an important part of the "healing process."

In particular, TIME magazine recently ran an article titled, "The Post-Bin Laden Party — and Why You Should Enjoy It," which extols the national "paroxysm of celebration in which the image and memory of the person who dreamed of being a world-transforming figure is simply ground into the street along with the wet confetti," and in keeping with a mood more appropriate for a Wayne's World movie than the response you would expect to follow from a political assassination, the article's author concludes by saying, "So party on, America — for a while longer, at least."

(As an aside, this article also attempts to offer consolation to those who feel demoralized by the lack of due process in the summary execution of bin Laden, by arguing that, yes, it would have been nice to have taken Osama alive and tried him in court, "but then you've got the years-long mess of a trial and the question of what you do with him once he's been inevitably found guilty. Best to whack him quickly and pitilessly and let the national touchdown dance begin.")

Now, while the above-mentioned discussion of Death and the Human Psyche is certainly interesting and would make for a great college seminar, the problem is that not a single one of these articles has even broached the question of whether some Americans may be repulsed by the celebrations, not because of some abstract, psychological discomfort with the general practice of taking glee in someone's death (I danced a jig-and-a-half when Reagan died), but rather are disgusted by the political context surrounding this particular assassination by the U.S.

In other words, it is not merely a squeamishness about death, or feelings of Christian guilt, that would possibly lead one to wax nauseous about all of the celebratory flag-waving, but rather the fact that the killing of bin Laden is merely one death in what has been a ten-year killing spree by the American military, claiming the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Arab people across the Middle East.

What's more, the surge of patriotism in the wake of bin Laden's assassination is inevitably going to be (and already is being) exploited in order to buttress public support for the prolongation of U.S. wars abroad in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Iraq (yes, the U.S. army is still in Iraq). This will mean the unnecessary killing of thousands of more innocent people at the hands of the U.S.

After ten long years of disastrous U.S. war on the Arab world, what this country needs right now more than anything else is not mass celebrations of American military power and imperial reach, but rather mass protests calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East; not a resurgence of public support for the torture techniques that supposedly led to bin Laden's netting, but rather popular demands for the closing of Guantanamo and the release of real heroes, like Bradley Manning, from military prison.

The war on al-Qaeda and reactionary political forces in the Middle East is being won, not by the U.S. Army, but actually by the masses of Arab people themselves, who are rendering the foregoing groups impotent by virtue of the politics of hope, solidarity, and democracy that have been thrust to the fore by the broader revolutionary wave sweeping the region.

Ironically (or maybe not so ironically), these Arab uprisings, which are ultimately responsible for the weakening of al-Qaeda's influence, have as their direct aim the overthrow of those despotic regimes that owe their very existence to the exertion of U.S. power.

In other words, the fate of al-Qaeda's strength in the region, and the question of whether or not it gets marginalized out of existence, turns upon the ability of the Arab people to end the U.S.'s regional power and influence, and with it end the democracy-crushing, inequality-breeding, and social strife-inducing, state of affairs created by the imperial meddling of the United States.

If Americans (oh yeah, and the remaining 95% of the human population) are to celebrate the death of anything, let it be the death of the U.S. Empire -- an edifice of global power, which frustrates the desires of people abroad for self-determination, and sacrifices the dreams of working-class people at home to the Gods of Corporate Profits and National Security.

Nature & Art: 371 Great Pictures

2011-04-23T14:10:00.002-04:00

Click to view album (371 pictures)

The day the music died

2011-04-20T13:09:00.001-04:00

I was just informed by the powers-that-be at the health center where I've worked for 4 years that I was no longer allowed to sing or hum while at work, because it is "unprofessional."

Maybe I could understand it if I had a god-awful voice and if the patients were complaining that they were coming in for back pains, but leaving with ear pains.

But that's not the case. Nobody lodged a complaint against me. On the contrary! Not to brag, but my coworkers regularly say they like my singing, that it brightens the place up, and that I have a good voice. Besides, I have a good-enough rapport with my coworkers that if one of them politely asked me to stop, I would immediately (half the time I'll just start absent-mindedly humming a tune and won't even realize it til I'm well into the second verse).

Why do I sing (and sometimes whistle) while I work? The reasons are manifold.

I sing in order to retain my own sense of humanity during those eight hours of the waking day that I don't really control -- indeed, when someone else really controls me. When some unaccountable, unelected bureaucrat can tell me what, when, and how to do something, whether right or wrong, and I have to do it.

I sing to mitigate the indignity of being paid just above the poverty level by one of the world's wealthiest institutions.

I sing to block out the incessant chatter of my bigoted coworker, indefatigably spewing forth disdain for people on welfare, people with eating disorders, the elderly, immigrants, unions, Muslims, antiwar activists, etc., etc.

Most of all, I sing as a way of saying, "My body and mind might be trapped inside these sterile walls, beneath these inescapable lights, bent towards accomplishing a monotony of tasks, surrounded by a group of people as utterly alienated as I am from one another and from themselves (each expressing it in their own unique way); all these things may be so, but at least my spirit, my soul, my yearning for beauty, humanity, universal freedom -- these things will still be mine. You cannot have them, too!"

Well, apparently they can.

As someone once said of that jealous God, the Capitalist, "he demands of the worker not just his labor-power, but also his very soul."

Best Lefty Political Cartoon Websites

2011-04-14T20:57:00.003-04:00

http://www.solidarity.com/hkcartoons/
http://www.leftycartoons.com/
http://slowpokecomics.com/blog/
http://blog.troubletown.com/
http://mattbors.com/blog/
http://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon
http://twitpic.com/photos/CarlosLatuff
http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/
http://thismodernworld.com/
http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Comics
http://www.markfiore.com/
http://blog.bigfatwhale.com/
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug
http://www.politico.com/wuerker/
http://www.rall.com/rallblog/
http://m1khaela.blogspot.com/
http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/

Snubnose Monkey!

2011-04-12T08:23:00.000-04:00

'No' to US imperialism

2011-04-08T23:38:00.000-04:00