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Contents [Note 1]
Ex-Marxist Blairites and "Reactionary Anti-Imperialists"
Their case for backing Blair
Support for lesser evils?
Not a penny for this system!
Progressive Imperial Democrats?
Was it the bourgeoisie that won "bourgeois democracy"?
The Russian experience
No imperialism?
Capitulators of today and yesterday
Mañana Third Campists
"The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflicts to oblige all humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas. This method is as old as bourgeois society, or more exactly, as class society in general. No one is obligated to become a Marxist; no one is obligated to swear by Lenin's name. But the whole of the politics of these two titans of revolutionary thought was directed toward this, that the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends."
Leon Trotsky, Writings Supplement 1939-40.
"No matter what the good intentions of the British parsons, or of sentimental Kautsky, may have been [the result]… is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses … distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present era, directing it towards illusory perspectives."
V I Lenin, Imperialism
Ex-Marxist Blairites and "Reactionary Anti-Imperialists"
Those who campaign for solidarity with the Iraqi labour movement have to explain complex political issues. Iraq is occupied by foreign troops, whose governments say they will eventually retire into the background, handing power to a self-governing bourgeois-democratic Iraqi regime. [note 2]
The so-called "anti-imperialist resistance" are thoroughgoing reactionaries, whose concern is to prevent democratic reform and the loss of power by the old ruling Sunni elite minority. The Iraqi labour movement, long suppressed by the Saddam regime, is at an early stage of renaissance, and probably could not survive the victory of the "anti-imperialists." For now, the occupation forces sustain the conditions in which the Iraqi labour movement is starting to rise to its feet. This list does not exhaust the complexities.
It is necessary to make socialist sense of all these facets of Iraq after Saddam.
Two political currents in the British labour movement, one on the "left", the other on the right, in their different ways, make this work more difficult.
The demagogue "reactionary anti-imperialists" — "Respect", the SWP, George Galloway, etc. — present the greatest immediate obstacle. Defining themselves not by what they are for — they no longer seem to know what socialists and Marxists are for — but negatively, by what they are against (Bush, Blair and the USA), they back the anti-working class, reactionary, Sunni-supremacist "resistance". It is not to do violence to the truth to compare that "resistance" to the underground Nazi resistance organisation, the "Werewolves", which operated in occupied Germany in 1945-6. The Trotskyists then who advocated self-determination for conquered Germany felt no need to solidarise with the Werewolf Nazi resistance.
But there are also the Blairites. Some of them are cynics. Others want what is best for the people of Iraq and for the Iraqi working class. (For example, the reform-socialist, Ann Clwyd MP). And, on the fringe of the Blairites, there are the political mirror-images of the "reactionary anti-imperialists" — born-again ex-Marxist Blairites, who, having themselves decided to enlist with the big battalions of Bush and Blair, insist that solidarity with the Iraqi trade unions implies support for Bush and Blair and is otherwise not real.
Obsessed with the spectacle of the "reactionary anti-imperialists", they seek political safety and security by inverting the politics of the SWP. As Lenin once said (of what he saw as the obsession of the Polish international Marxists with their fight against the patriotic Polish Socialist Party): to the mouse there is no animal bigger than the cat. They fling themselves at the feet of Blair and his puppeteer, Bush.
For them it is not enough to have an attitude to the IFTU ( the biggest trade-union group in Iraq, led by the Iraqi Communist Party) like we had to the Solidarnosc labour movement in Poland in the 1980s: unconditional support for its right to exist, and all-out support against the Polish state, combined with criticism where necessary of its politics, which, in recoil from the Stalinist bureaucracy, came to be entirely bourgeois.
They claim that there is no difference in practice between political criticism of the IFTU, and the attitude of the reactionary anti-imperialists who condemn the IFTU for refusing to commit hara-kiri on the altar of the "anti-imperialist" clerical fascist "resistance" — the attitude that led to the shouting down of the IFTU representative at the European Social Forum in October 2004.
Marxists do not — like someone picking a football team or a dog at the races — look for what they think is the best political organisation in a given situation and then limit themselves to its politics, or adopt and mimic its politics. If we agree with them on political issues, we arrive at agreement not by mimicry, but by the assessments we ourselves make, from our own political standpoint. It is perfectly possible to combine political criticism of the IFTU and the CPI with wholehearted and unstinting support for the Iraqi labour movement against reaction.
The young people who took part in the anti-war marches are right in their instinctive hostility to the powers that rule in Britain and America, and in their reflex siding with the "underdog". They are miseducated and politically exploited by the pseudo-socialists and reactionary "anti-imperialist" demagogues, but their animosity towards those who rule the world is, in principle, entirely right, the beginning of political wisdom.
Those who tell them that their only choice is to back either Blair and Bush or the reactionaries of the "resistance" in Iraq are doing not only (positively) the work of the Blairites, but also (inadvertently) the work of the reactionary anti-imperialists, by driving those in healthy recoil from Blair and Bush towards those reactionary anti-imperialists.
There is another choice. Our choice: work to build the "Third Camp" of independent working class politics.
Their case for backing Blair
The ex-Marxists who support Blair and Bush insist that socialists must — following after the IFTU — endorse and support the politics of the Americans and the British in Iraq.
They take the hope that — as in Germany and Japan after 1945 — out of the US-British victory against Saddam Hussein will come some sort of bourgeois-democratic system in which a labour movement can develop; and they transmute it into identification with and support for Bush and Blair. They give positive support to the USA, Britain, and their allies and stooges, and thereby take political responsibility for them and for their military and economic policies. Note 3.
What should the revolutionary socialists do in Iraq? They should explain the need for workshop organisations and trade unions there, and build them. They should work to educate the working class about the need for socialism.
They should adopt a political programme whose cutting-edge demands are for a secular democratic republic, civil rights, the separation of religion and state, an independent sovereign Iraq, self-determination for the Kurds, rights for minorities like the Assyrians.
They will naturally oppose all the clerical-fascists (those collaborating with the USA as well as those in conflict with it); the Ba'th quasi-fascists; the occupying troops; and every force antagonistic to what they want to see develop.
They will not of course ignore concrete realities and just mouth propagandist generalities and abstractions. While maintaining its intransigent class opposition to the US occupying forces, it would be right for such a Third Camp political movement not to call for immediate US-British withdrawal. It is right for the IFTU not to do so now. It would be suicidal foolishness for them if they did.
There was once a powerful working-class tradition, deformed by Stalinism it is true, among Iraqi workers. The Iraqi working class has been massively augmented in the last several decades. Tremendous things would be possible in a short time given a revolutionary Marxist Iraqi organisation in the Lenin-Trotsky tradition.
What makes the goal of a working-class socialist revolution unrealistic as a short-term prospect? The weakness, as yet, of working-class politics in Iraq. Most of the working class is not emancipated from religion. Few workers have any experience of organising as a class even on the trade union level. The working class needs to be socially and politically enlightened by experience in action and by agitation, propaganda, and Marxist education.
For that it needs democratic freedom and time. But it also needs Marxists who have not abandoned the goal of socialism and socialist working-class power and who are not too confused or too afraid to advocate — in the spirit of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks in 1917 — the perspective of working-class power.
What time-scale are we talking about? I don't know. I don't think anyone can know. In conditions of social breakdown, in the aftermath of the prolonged fascistic dictatorship, tremendous bounds forward in social and political understanding might be possible in a short time, as in 1917 in Russia.
There are political prerequisites — in the first place, a strong Iraq-wide Marxist, that is, Bolshevik, political movement. If such a movement existed, the domination which the clericalists have over the poorest people, in part because of their social welfare networks, would not have become what it is now.
The ex-Stalinist organisation which controls the IFTU is reformist. There are better, revolutionary, currents in the Iraqi working class, such as the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, but, even aside from issues of policy, they are at present weak.
What the CPI and IFTU say and do is determined not only by the situation in Iraq and the relation of forces there, but also, of course, by their politics, their governing ideas and drives. Their policy is an active, shaping factor in the Iraqi situation. It helps determine and delineate its possibilities — the situation that we, from far away, have to accept as "given". If they had a different approach, the Bolshevik approach which I outlined briefly above, there would be other possibilities in Iraq now. Were the Iraqi labour movement led by Marxists, it would stand in political opposition to the bourgeoisie and the US/British authorities, and work against them for a much fuller and more consistent democracy than the US/UK would ever grant without such a fight.
We defend them against the clerical fascists and their "anti-imperialist" British allies. We do not endorse them politically. We condemn their "Menshevik" politics, without letting that interfere with our duty to support them against the clerical fascists and their British cheerleaders.
The approach of the CPI and of the IFTU is likely to weaken the prospects even for democracy in Iraq, not least because it leaves disaffected Iraqi workers to the clerical fascist demagogues.
Of course the working-class organisations should use whatever opportunities for political activity are created by way of the "political process" sponsored by the US occupation. If using those opportunities is "recognising the validity of the political process" then so be it. It is of small account. We have agreement, then? No, we don't! The ex-Marxists mean something else entirely. By "recognise" they mean subordinate and limit the working class and its movements to "the UN backed process". They mean the policy of the CPI.
They mean that the Iraqi labour movement should aim no higher than to be a loyal and subordinate part of a broad "democratic" coalition and in that to have an "input" into constitution-making. They collapse politically into the camp of the bourgeoisie.
In our assessments and calculations, we have to take account of the objective realities of Iraq. But serious Iraqi socialists should not subordinate themselves, or the perspective for which they fight, to the "UN-backed process". They should use every crisis, difficulty, or delay, to agitate with, organise and educate the Iraqi working class.
The first job of socialists is to foster and expand the independent political weight and strength of the working class. Develop its consciousness and its organisations. This means building politically independent working class organisations. It means fighting for the maximum social, political, and economic advance possible in the circumstances.
Whether the working class movement is a docile supporter of the government, even has its leaders inside the bourgeois government, or is a militant, politically independent force - that can have a decisive influence on the shape of the bourgeois democratic "revolution" which may be forced through by the US. What is objectively possible can be measured only by the working class pushing at its boundaries. Only in that way can Marxists educate the Iraqi working class and prepare workers to win socialism. Lenin's writings in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions are an invaluable guide here.
The politics of the Iraqi working class organisations help to limit what is practically possible in Iraq now; and the politics of the ex-Marxist Blairites are a kiddie-town version of the politics of the right wing Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution.
Most likely in the short term things will not develop in the Bolshevik direction or on the 1917 pattern. A bourgeois-democratic system is calculably the best immediate possibility. We are limited to bourgeois democracy only because the Iraqi working class and its organisations are clearly not yet in a condition of political consciousness or organisation to struggle for their own political power.
The Iraqi labour movement will have to struggle for even a limited bourgeois democracy against the US and the UK and their Iraqi allies, as well as against the militantly anti-US clerical-fascists. That struggle should be conducted so that it educates the Iraqi working class not only on the need for democracy - bourgeois democracy if that is the best they can get now - but also in the class nature and limitations of bourgeois democracy, and on the urgent need to go beyond it to working class democracy and working class power.
Support for lesser evils?
The ex-Marxists respond by insisting that those who reject their supine politics are indifferent as to whether a bourgeois-democratic government or clerical fascists rule the new Iraq.
We don't want the Iraqi labour movement to confine itself to picking and choosing lesser evils among the anti-working-class "powers". We want it to hammer out its own politics, independent of all factions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie and of the US and British bourgeoisies. That is what the aspiration to create a "third camp", outlined in the words of Trotsky at the top of this article, comes down to in Iraqi politics now.
It follows from the ABC of Marxism. Any other attitude would be in flat contradiction to consistent working-class socialist politics. The ruling classes are our enemy — everywhere. If we find ourselves having parallel interests with bourgeois-democratic elements of a ruling class against, say, fascism, secular or clerical, then, even while fighting side by side with them, we maintain our fundamental class position and our political independence.
When the Bolsheviks fought against Kornilov's attempted coup in Russia in September 1917, Lenin wrote:
"Even now we must not support Kerensky's government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren't we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.
"We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky's troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference". (To the Central Committee of the RSDLP, 12 September 1917).
It is easy for a new-fledged realpolitiker philistine to dismiss this as just Lenin playing with words. After all, the Bolsheviks fought Kornilov, and thereby in fact "supported" the Kerensky government against those who tried to overthrow it.
Lenin was concerned that there should be no blurring of distinctions, no hint or talk of "supporting" Kerensky in any positive or political sense, no suggestion of the Bolsheviks "softening" their hostility to the government besides whose forces they were fighting to defeat a common enemy that threatened both the Kerensky government and the labour movement.
If the Bolsheviks "supported" the Kerensky government in the sense of fighting on the same side against Kornilov, they did not — and that is what concerned Lenin — subordinate to it. They did not endorse it. They remained mortally hostile to it. The Bolshevik refusal to "support" Kerensky was a pledge for the future, which they redeemed when they chased Kerensky out of St Petersburg on 7 November 1917.
Suppose we led or influenced working-class anti-fascist partisan forces in France or Italy at the end of the Second World War, and found ourselves on the same side as the invading armies of US and British imperialism. What would the ex-Marxists suggest our approach should be? If we "worked along with" the invading armies against a common enemy, that would be informed by the certainty that we would come into conflict with those armies and with their French and Italian allies, supporters, and stooges.
It speaks volumes about their politics now that the new-hatched Blairites feel obliged to denounce this idea.
Not a penny for this system!
A most instructive misunderstanding occurred when one of the New Blairites took issue with an editorial preface to some texts from Lenin and Luxemburg in Solidarity (3/52, 27 May 2004). The preface said:
"Solidarity thinks it good that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq has been smashed. Does that mean that we should have supported Bush or Blair's war? Does the political judgement that the smashing of Saddam's regime was a good thing necessarily imply support for those who smashed it? Again, we say, no. These sorts of issues and dilemmas have always existed for Marxist socialists. The Marxists in the German Reichstag [parliament] before the First World War operated under the general policy summed up by the slogan 'Not a man, not a penny, for this system'."
That, says a simple-minded ex-Marxist, was a "revolutionary defeatist position". In fact, it was not.
The standard Marxist illustration of all this is Trotsky's discussion with Max Shachtman in 1937 about the Spanish Civil War. Trotsky reprised this discussion in January 1940 (From a Scratch to a Danger of Gangrene):
"On September 18, 1937, Shachtman wrote me:
"You say, 'If we would have a member in the Cortes [parliament] he would vote against the military budget of Negrin [the Republican prime minister].' Unless this is a typographical error it seems to us to be a non-sequitur. If, as we all contend, the element of an imperialist war is not dominant at the present time in the Spanish struggle, and if instead the decisive element is still the struggle between the decaying bourgeois democracy, with all that it involves, on the one side, and fascism on the other, and further if we are obliged to give military assistance to the struggle against fascism, we don't see how it would be possible to vote in the Cortes against the military budget... If a Bolshevik-Leninist on the Huesca front were asked by a Socialist comrade why his representative in the Cortes voted against the proposal by Negrin to devote a million pesetas to the purchase of rifles for the front, what would this Bolshevik-Leninist reply? It doesn't seem to us that he would have an effective answer'.
"This letter astounded me. Shachtman was willing to express confidence in the perfidious Negrin government on the purely negative basis that the 'element of an imperialist war' was not dominant in Spain.
"On September 20, 1937, I replied to Shachtman:
'To vote the military budget of the Negrin government signifies to vote him political confidence... To do it would be a crime. How we explain our vote to the anarchist workers? Very simply: We have not the slightest confidence in the capacity of this government to conduct the war and assure victory. We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our non-confidence in it: it is the only one possibility to mobilise the masses politically against this government and to prepare its overthrow. Any other politics would be a betrayal of the revolution'.'" Note 4.
In the Spanish Civil War we were revolutionary defencists on the Republican side. 100% and 150% defencists. Trotsky's text sums up our position in all situations in which we want victory for one side, but pursue the politics of mortal class and political enmity towards those in power on that side.
A Trotskyist deputy in the Cortes would indeed have wanted the Republican militias to have guns and the best possible military equipment. (More than once I have encountered otherwise intelligent people who think that Trotsky's point was that we didn't want the Stalinists to have guns. But it wasn't). The voting in the Cortes was part of a political, not a military, process. In voting against the budget we would express not opposition to arming the anti-fascist fighters at the front, but our opposition to those in political control.
Such a thing seems hopelessly self-contradictory. It is only so if such incidents as voting are detached from the connecting chain of which they are part — and detached from socialist perspectives — and treated in isolation. If Trotskyist votes in the Cortes against the military budget would in practice lead to no money for weapons, then we would be in a situation not of voting to express no confidence in the government, but of challenging it for power.
But we will never get to that situation of challenging for power if we are not prepared to start by using our votes and voices to express intransigent hostility to the rulers.
The Labour Party conference is not a bourgeois parliament, like the Cortes, but essentially the same issue is involved there. Trotsky wrote that he was "astounded" that "Shachtman was willing to express confidence in the perfidious Negrin government on the purely negative basis that the 'element of an imperialist war' was not dominant in Spain". I find the idea astounding that at the Labour Party conference — the "parliament" of the political labour movement, or what is left of it — people calling themselves socialists should line up, as the Labour Friends of Iraq did, to help win a vote for Blair and his neo-Tory New Labour government, on the purely negative basis of opposition to the kitsch left.
We do not want the clerical fascists to win in Iraq, and right now if the US and (very much secondarily) the British troops are withdrawn, they probably will win, or in any case Iraq will be torn apart in a civil war in which the labour movement will most likely be destroyed, It does not follow at all that we must do our bit to help Blair defeat his critics in the labour movement, or become political sheepdogs for Blair at the Labour Party conference.
Supervising history?
The issue here between revolutionary socialists and the ex-Marxist Blairites is not disposed of by badmouthing the "reactionary anti-imperialists" who back even the clerical fascists against Britain and America. We are politically independent militants. The whole of politics is not defined for us by Iraq, or, negatively, by the SWP.
Trotsky expressed our approach here in an article of 1939:
"The policy that attempts to place upon the proletariat the insoluble task of warding off all dangers engendered by the bourgeoisie and its policy of war is vain, false, mortally dangerous. 'But fascism might be victorious!' 'But the USSR is menaced!' 'But Hitler's invasion would signify the slaughter of workers!' And so on, without end.
"Of course, the dangers are many, very many. It is impossible not only to ward them all off, but even to foresee all of them. Should the proletariat attempt at the expense of the clarity and irreconcilability of its fundamental policy to chase after each episodic danger separately, it will unfailingly prove itself bankrupt... The workers will be able to profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy themselves not by acting as supervisors of the historical process but by engaging in the class struggle..." (A Step Towards Social Patriotism, 7 March 1939).
In real politics, it is sometimes necessary to hold two, or maybe three or four, conflicting aspects of something in your mind at the same time in order to get an accurate picture of reality. A clear opinion in politics - a decision as to what is most important in a given time and situation - often involves side-lining or subordinating certain aspects of the reality, making a decision that they are secondary. If doing that leads, as it does with the "left" born-again Blairites, to outright denial of reality, then you can take that as evidence that the job has not been done well, or with sufficient lucidity and rationality.
Take an example from the history of the suppression of black slavery. Even though the activities of the British navy to stop the slave trade (after 1808) were an aspect of Britain's drive for dominion on the world's seas (this was in the middle of the wars against Napoleonic France), it was none the less right, good, progressive, and to be endorsed and supported, that the slave trade should be stopped. Someone who was hostile to British domination of the seas — rightly so, from our point of view — and therefore, concerned purely with that aspect of reality, denounced British ships stopping the slave ships of other, sovereign, nations on the high seas and freeing the slaves, would have been a malign fool.
But someone supporting the British drive to suppress the slave trade would have been a different sort of a fool to ignore the facts that slavery continued in the British colonies, until 1834. That the British ruling class exploited large parts of the world — India, Ireland the West Indies, etc. That suppression of the slave trade meant the growth of "slave-breeding farms" in the USA: that is, farms that bred human beings with no rights, for exploitation, from childhood, as other farms breed sheep and cattle. That the great British cotton industry, which exploited children in Britain, depended for its raw material on the labour of American black slaves who were being worked to death, on average, in seven or eight years.
Or to feel that it would be a betrayal to fight against the slave trade even to mention such things…
Progressive Imperial Democrats?
"Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, therefore the workers must support the bourgeoisie, say the worthless politicians... Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, say we Marxists, therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deceptive practices of the bourgeois politicians, must teach the people not to believe in words, but to depend wholly on their own strength, on organisation, on their own unity, and on arms" - Vladimir Lenin
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the USA, the sole hyper-power, no longer constricted by the exigencies of competing with Stalinist Russia, is now engaged in spreading its own pluto-democratic version of bourgeois democracy across the world. That Blair, Bush, and their allies stand for bourgeois-democratic political revolution, imposed from outside and from above. That Iraq is the first of a series of US-originated bourgeois-democratic revolutions imposed from outside. What should be the attitude of socialists?
That the bourgeoisie and capitalism are a great revolutionary force in history, the ground-breaker for the working class movement and the harbinger of the working class socialist revolution, is of course, not foreign to Marxists, but basic to our entire world outlook back as far as the Communist Manifesto.
In many ways there was something "unnatural", against the grain of the USA's own bourgeois-democratic nature, in America buttressing internal reaction in so many countries during the Cold War with the USSR. Recognising this, American Independent Socialists in the 1950s and 60s advocated that, in its struggle against Stalinist totalitarianism for international influence, the USA should promote democratic regimes, and the independence of oppressed peoples, everywhere.
There is a sort of precedent. In its wars against the French bourgeois revolution, and then against the Empire which Napoleon Bonaparte erected on the social conquests of the revolution, bourgeois Britain allied with the deepest and dirtiest reactionaries in Europe, with kings and tsars, bishops and medieval-minded aristocrats. Britain itself was the most advanced bourgeois society in existence. The bourgeoisie ruled there. But when the French war ended in 1815, the political settlement of post-revolutionary Europe was shaped by the so named Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, Prussia, dominated by kings, emperors, aristocrats, and Christian witchdoctors. They entrenched reaction in power, everywhere, placing a giant tombstone over progressive Europe. It took decades, and many revolutions, for that reactionary work to be undone.
Britain had been the most important power in the wars against revolutionary France. Though it acquiesced in the post-war Holy Alliance system it did not join the Holy Alliance. The pressures and exigencies of war gone, Britain for a while in the 1820s pursued a far more progressive foreign policy. It supported the independence of Greece, submerged for centuries in the Turkish Empire, whose patriots, by way of revolutionary war, created the first Greek state in modern history, in 1829. It supported the liberation of the peoples of South America from Spanish rule.
In a sense, the bourgeois social nature of Britain manifested itself in, as Marx put it, "England's mission to promote constitutionalism" (as against despotism) internationally. Its great power nature soon reasserted itself and led to decades of supporting the repressive Turkish Empire, in order to prevent Russia aggrandising itself at the expense of the Turkish "sick man of Europe'.
That the pluto-democratic USA, free of the long struggle against Russia, might now adopt a "mission to promote constitutionalism", is by no means impossible. The USA announced similar plans both after World War One, under Wilson, and after World War Two, under Roosevelt and Truman. Both quickly ran aground, but they were serious plans.
How likely it is that any such plan now will be generalised and sustained is another question. But, for now, grant the "New Blairites" their strongest case. Assume that the hyper-power is acting as a world imperialist revolutionary-bourgeois force, from outside and from above.
What then would follow for socialists? What would our duty be? As people who want a working-class socialist revolution, but would see the establishment of bourgeois-democratic rights in Iraq, and elsewhere, as a great step forward for the working class — what attitude should we take?
Loyally support Bush and Blair and their allies in Iraq now? Support the American neo-conservatives and the "honorary" neo-conservative Blair? Follow the bourgeoisie and urge the working class to do the same, until the "proper" revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in history has been entirely exhausted?
Would socialists do what the newly evangelised ex-Marxist Blairites do — support "imperialist-revolutionary" wars, as the corollary of supporting the US and Britain in Iraq now? If not, why not?
Politically, such an attitude of lining up behind the bourgeoisie was never the right policy, not even in the great bourgeois revolution in France 200 years ago! It is not the right policy now.
In our hypothetical international bourgeois-democratic revolution the character and "limitations" of the world protagonist — the ruling class pluto-democrats of the hyperpower — are blatantly clear and very well-known, written across the history of the 20th century in world politics and in the US's own political system of "democracy for the rich" at home. Any openings the USA's hypothetical "imperial-democratic revolution" could bring for the working class could only be maximised and utilised by working-class movements which maintained a sharp hostility to the US plutocrats.
A century and a half ago, the US ruling class was very different then from its descendant now. It carried through a progressive bourgeois-democratic revolution by way of civil war and conquest of the Southern slave-holding states of the USA itself. Even then, the plundering of even the most radical of the bourgeois-democrats of the north in the defeated ex-slave states and the political system they set up there, are well known. It took a hundred years and the Civil Rights movement for the descendants of the ex-slaves to even begin to come into their own in the territories in which the Northern bourgeoisie had made a bourgeois-democratic revolution, of sorts.
Was it the bourgeoisie that won "bourgeois democracy"?
The great "bourgeois" French revolution was not made by the bourgeoisie but by the lower petty bourgeoisie and the so-called sans culottes, the lowest class of all, bar the lumpen proletariat, in the towns and the nearest equivalent of the modern proletariat.
In the 1848 revolution in central Europe — in the first place, in Germany — the bourgeoisie proved unable to carry through "its own" revolution, in part for fear of the proletariat. Afterwards, over decades, parts of the bourgeoisie's social programme were introduced under Bismarck by those who in the revolution had defeated the bourgeoisie.
Bismarck's reforms were necessarily alloyed with regressive and reactionary Junker (landlord) elements, whose interests Bismarck also served. They amounted to something recognisably like the bourgeois-democratic revolution aspired to by the revolutionary democrats in the defeated revolution of 1848 — but also, and especially from the point of view of the working class, something radically different.
Within the bourgeois democratic framework, what we think of as "democratic", or as "mature" bourgeois democracy had to be won, defended, and yet again won back and defended again against the bourgeoisie by the working class and its allies. The USA of Woodrow Wilson was also the USA of the repressive Palmer Raids, when the early Communist Party of the USA was forced underground.
At any turning point in the long history, anyone who stuck to what the bourgeoisie wanted would have been a vehement enemy of most of the things we prize in "bourgeois democracy".
Way, way back, those who sided with "the people" had to fight the idea that "real" historical and social progress, even in the era of bourgeois revolutions, was the possession and mission of the bourgeoisie and therefore that intelligent well-wishers of their kind should side with and aid the bourgeoisie. Those who meekly backed the bourgeoisie were thereby rendered incapable of being even serious "bourgeois" democrats!
The Russian experience
In Russia, when all Marxists, as distinct from the populist agrarian-socialists, believed that the only possible revolution was a bourgeois-democratic revolution that at best would lead to a bourgeois-democratic republic, they debated the question of how they should relate to the bourgeois democrats, the liberal bourgeoisie, the right-populists, etc. The different answers to that question defined and shaped the political formations in Russian Marxism in the 20 years before 1917.
To simplify it a great deal, the Mensheviks said that since it was to be a bourgeois revolution, the bourgeoisie would have to lead it, and therefore the working class should avoid doing anything that would frighten the bourgeoisie. They accommodated to the bourgeois political formations, whose political goal came to be a constitutional monarchy. They educated the workers they influenced in such a spirit.
The Bolsheviks took a radically different approach, even though until 1917 they too believed possible only a revolution that would end in bourgeois power.
The most important liberals in pre-1917 Russia took the Bismarckian model of "reform from above" as their own desired "bourgeois revolution" for fear of both the workers and the peasantry.
The Bolsheviks taught the workers they educated to aim for a radical "Jacobin" revolution in the style of the French revolution of 1789-93, led by workers and peasants, that would level all the institutions of the old regime and clear away all the debris of the past. In making such a revolution, in alliance with the peasants, the working class would educate itself in the best way possible and to the highest possible degree to fight for its own working-class interests against the bourgeoisie in power.
They thought it certain that the end result of the anti-Tsarist revolution, for a considerable time ahead, would be a bourgeois-democratic regime, under the bourgeoisie. But they advocated independent and revolutionary tactics so that the working class would best be educated, and the historical epoch of bourgeois rule possibly foreshortened, especially in the event that the radical bourgeois revolution in Russia helped trigger working-class revolutions in European countries which were "ripe" for socialism.
It did not work out like that. The Tsar defeated the revolution of 1905, and when the Tsar was overthrown in 1917 the Bolsheviks steered towards a working-class seizure of power, believing that the First World War would trigger working-class revolutions in the west, to which worker-ruled Russia would then become an economically underdeveloped appendage.
The Bolsheviks adopted the politics expressed in the old slogan coined in mid 19th century Europe to define the tactics of working-class organisations fighting side-by-side with bourgeois revolutionaries against royal and feudal reaction: "march separately, strike together".
The Communist International incorporated those ideas in its basic political platform at the Second Congress in 1920. The Comintern asserted that with such an approach, no period of stable bourgeois rule was now rigidly predetermined for backward countries.
In its early political manifestations, Stalinism broke with that approach. Among the consequences of that was the very bloody defeat of the Chinese working class in 1927 (which has a great deal to say both to the '"reactionary anti-imperialists" — and to the democratic pro-imperialists!)
No imperialism?
The "reactionary anti-imperialist" left pretends that because of the vast disparity of power between Iraq and the US/UK, and because Iraq was controlled by Britain directly until 1932 and indirectly until 1958, Iraq cannot be defined as "imperialist" or "regional-imperialist". (The same approach to the Second World War would lead them to deny that Japan, which was weak and backward compared to the USA, was an imperialist power!) Out of Sunni-supremacist "resistance" to losing power to the Shia and the Kurdish majority, they conjure up an imaginary "anti-imperialist resistance".
As it turned out, good came from the post-Second World War US occupation of Germany and Japan — after they had buried the dead, reconstructed the economies, and begun to rebuild the cities levelled in such atrocities as the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Dresden and the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Japan the USA carried through a thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution, allowed a labour movement to develop (and later in the 1940s helped the Japanese bourgeoisie crush the militant wing of that labour movement).
And therefore? We have to conclude that the Second World War did not come from imperialist rivalries, and that the victors were not (bourgeois-democratic) imperialists?
That the result, bourgeois democracy in Japan and Germany and Western Europe, wipes out the fact of imperialist rivalries, and imperialist methods like the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo? Or that because we hope for a qualifiedly good outcome in Iraq, we must deny that it is an imperialist occupation? That we must refrain from being "nasty", avoid saying true but unpleasant, debunking things? That we should not name and define for what they are the characteristic brutality of the US military, and the USA's crude, bungling, rapacious imperialist methods in Iraq?
The political and military arrogance, the brutality, the reckless use of power and fire-power, and the naked rapacity of the USA — their plan to sell of Iraqi state assets, and their insistence that reconstruction contracts go to foreign, mostly US, corporations — cut against the possibility of a democratic system developing.
Capitulators of today and yesterday
An example from the history of the USSR will also shed some Marxist light on the question of the attitude we take when alien, anti-working class forces, are, or seem to be, doing work we want done, and would like to be strong enough to do ourselves, in our way.
In the mid 1920s, Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and then the United Opposition (with Zinoviev), advocated a programme of industrialisation for the USSR. Their opponents, the Stalinists and the Bukharinites, scoffed at such an idea.
Then in 1928-9, faced with an upsurge of resistance by rich peasants (the "kulaks"), the Stalinists, who controlled the state, broke with the "right wing" Bukharinites, wiped out the kulaks, and forcibly drove the peasants into collective farms, wreaking vast destruction in rural Russia. Simultaneously, they launched a powerful drive to industrialise the USSR.
Their state waged a savage one-sided civil war on most of the people over whom they ruled. They turned Russian society upside down. In the Ukraine they created an artificial famine and used it to break the resistance of the peasants, three million or more of whom died.
The Trotskyists had been finally defeated in December 1927, and many hundreds of them, including most of those who had led the Bolshevik revolution, exiled to Siberia and similar wilderness places. From there they saw the Stalinists beginning to industrialise the USSR, at a furious pace and with murderous recklessness.
Some of the exiles began to ask themselves, and each other: isn't this our programme which Stalin is carrying through? A cruel, crude, wasteful caricature of it, indeed. The Stalinists are what they are, but, even so, it is a version of our programme that they are implementing. Don't we want to see done what they are trying to do? Putting our "factional" feelings aside in the interests of the revolution, don't we want them to succeed?
And if they are defeated in their struggle with the peasants, will that not lead to bourgeois counter-revolution, to the final destruction of the October Revolution? Aren't we, as serious people, obliged to do whatever we can to help them? So many of the defeated Oppositionists began to think.
Some of them were demoralised and wanted only an excuse to give up the fight. Many of them were sincere. They began to resent Trotsky, Rakovsky, and the other irreconcilables. In that mood, hundreds of them capitulated to Stalin in 1928 and 1929.
Abandoning their own politics, they served the Stalinists. Some, Pyatakov for example, took leading positions in the construction of the new industries. In the purges of the mid-30s, almost all of them would be shot or imprisoned.
Against these self-depoliticised ex-Bolshevik "social engineers" and would-be "administrators of the historical process", what did Trotsky and his comrades say? Trotsky insisted that, quite apart from specific criticisms of what the Stalinists were doing — and he was highly critical — the fundamental thing for revolutionary socialists was not only what was being done, but who was doing it, how, and why.
Lenin, expressing the same idea in general, says somewhere that the most fundamental issue in the politics of class society is who? whom? Trotsky now posed the same basic question to the capitulators: who? whom?
Trotsky too believed that, fundamentally, what the Stalinists were doing was historically progressive, despite all that had to be said against their methods. He believed that the pressure of the Opposition and its programme had played a big part in determining that the Stalinists, when their old pro-kulak policy broke down, turned on the rich farmers and on the Bukharinite right wing of their own party.
But Trotsky refused to blind himself to the difference between the programme of the working-class Left Opposition and what the bureaucracy was actually doing "on the ground".
Both the Trotskyists and the rightists around Bukharin had wanted to retain the market framework which had been introduced in 1921, with the "New Economic Policy". The Stalinists shattered it entirely and created a regime in which the totalitarian state used mass terror as the instrument for enforcing its own arbitrary and subjective economic and social decisions, recognising neither economic nor human nor any other restriction or restraint.
Where the Left Opposition had coupled proposals for industrialisation with proposals for raising working-class wages and improving working-class conditions, the Stalinists in their drive to industrialise cut wages, severely worsened working-class conditions, destroyed the trade unions as workers' defence organisations, and created pseudo-unions to regiment the workers on behalf of the state and its objectives. They turned the working class of the USSR into something closer to a class of slaves than to a free proletariat. (Trotsky registered as much in 1939-40).
The result was needless chaos, waste, starvation, deprivation, famine, and the death of millions.
They did however industrialise the USSR. To this day you will find academics to argue that Stalin carried out the industrialisation programme of the Left Opposition — that the Left Opposition had first advocated the policies that Stalin eventually carried out. In fact Stalin's was a different industrialisation, serving different objectives, and, for the working class and society as a whole, producing radically different results. Who? whom? proved to be the all-defining questions. Means shaped ends, the "who" determined the "what" and the "how".
Looking back with hindsight, we can see what Trotsky did not so clearly see, that the difference between the programme of the Left Opposition and the seeming variant of it being carried out by the Stalinists was a class difference. Both the Left Opposition and Stalin were for "industrialisation", but they represented different class programmes of industrialisation.
What Trotsky did see clearly in 1928-9 was that socialists who had undertaken to organise and lead the working-class struggle for emancipation had to distinguish between the industrialisation of the bureaucracy and the sort of industrialisation, administered by and serving the working class, that the Opposition had advocated. He saw that the Opposition had to maintain their own political programme. They had to criticise the bureaucracy and its methods from the point of view of its working-class victims, and continue to counterpose their working-class programme to that of the bureaucracy.
They had to defend the working class, and help the working class to defend itself from the bureaucracy. Whatever it meant for the tempo of the bureaucracy's version of industrialisation, the immediate material interests and well-being of the working class had to be championed and secured — just as, under capitalism, whether its work was considered progressive or not, the Marxists put the organisation, education, and self-assertion of the working class before everything else.
The Trotskyists did not identify with bureaucratic industrialisation. They did not politically support Stalin. In short, they refused to join their ex-comrades who chose to betray the interests and the cause of the working class and go over to the "progressive" bureaucracy.
The argument would be beside the point that Bush and Blair, representing free-market pluto-democracy, are not to be compared to the totalitarian Stalin. The analogy is between the Left Oppositionists who saw Stalin carrying through what looked like a variant of their industrialisation programme, and socialists now who see Bush's and Blair's attempt in Iraq to realise, in their own way and for their own reasons, a bourgeois-democratic regime that for us is both desirable and, when the working class is not yet ready to make a socialist revolution, necessary.
The analogy is between the politically demoralised and politically deracinated ex-Trotskyists who thought that the best contribution they could make to securing the interests of socialism was to go over to Stalin and commit political and moral suicide — and our former comrades who think that the best contribution they can make to progress in Iraq is to cease to be other than notional socialists, and, instead, to become cheerleaders for Blair and Bush and their Communist Party allies in Iraq.
The differences between our contemporaries who go over to Blair and the oppositionists who went over to Stalin are instructive too. Stalin was embattled when the capitulators rallied to him; Blair controls Britain, and Bush, the world-bestriding hyper-power.
The 1928-9 capitulators thought Stalin was defending and extending working class power; and that they really could make a difference in the fight, as they mistakenly saw it, between historical progress and historical reaction. Their view that they themselves could make a difference was not absurd.
The ex-Marxist Blairites think that, by backing Bush and Blair, by adopting the politics of their allies in Iraq, by helping Blair against his critics at Labour Party Conference, they can control or influence the outcome in Iraq. The idea is preposterous! To believe that is to believe in sympathetic magic. if the superstitious ex-Marxists don't chant their uncritical support for Bush and Blair. If the shaman doesn't dress up in green, then Spring will never come again. If the tribe doesn't make the right mimic noises and dance the right mimetic dance wearing the right costumes, at the right time, then the herds won't pass this way again.…
Mañana Third Campists
A central political difficulty in arguing with the born-again Blairites is that, though they have gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, they still try to deny it (perhaps even to themselves).
Though they reject all the relevant concerns, norms and "precedents" of the revolutionary socialist movement on war, peace and on how communists behave during a "bourgeois" revolution — everything on which our approach is erected — they pretend or half pretend, to argue still from within the Marxist tradition which some of them once had in common with AWL.
They introduce a small "correction" into what were our common politics. Third Camp politics are fine, but they will become "operational" only in the future. Not today, not in "real time"; some other time. Some of them sometimes say they are still Third Campists. But they are mañana Third Campists!
For today they console themselves and others with the illusory perspective that everything is all right for democracy, the Iraqi labour movement and the fight against clerical fascism and other forms of reaction in Iraq — Blair and Bush are on the job! All socialists — especially Iraqi socialists — can do is back them, help to "hold up their hands", until they succeed.
"Tomorrow", promise the Blairites-For-The-Duration, they will again be Third Camp independent socialists. Tomorrow belongs to the "Third Camp", working class political independence and socialism. But today — that belongs to Blair, Bush, and their allies in Iraq!
As Vladimir Lenin wrote about Karl Kautsky:
"We have any number of promises to be a Marxist sometime in another epoch, not under present conditions, not at this moment. For tomorrow we have Marxism on credit, Marxism as a promise, Marxism deferred. For today we have a petty bourgeois opportunist theory — and not only a theory — of softening contradictions... In practice he who denies the sharp tasks of today in the name of dreams about soft tasks in the future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of dreams..."
Or, in this case, to give up — "for now", of course — the "dream" of building the "Third Camp" of an independent working class left and attach oneself to the powers that govern the affairs of the world.
Though labour movements exist in many countries, what does not exist is a strong international "Third Camp" in Trotsky's sense: a politically independent labour movement, in which the working class acts as a "class for itself" in politics, counterposing itself to all the other camps and in the first place to the bourgeoisie of its own state.
From where we are to that, we have a long political way to go. Though great transformations may happen in a relatively short time — "twenty years in a day" — a strong organised "Third Camp" does not yet exist.
In this situation, our basic approach is the one Max Shachtman expounded when explaining his opposition to the Korean war.
"We have no intention or desire, no right and no need, to abandon the fight for socialism in this way or in any other. The Third Camp does exist. It is nothing but the camp of the workers and oppressed peoples everywhere who are sick to death of insecurity, exploitation, subjection and increasingly abominable wars, who aspire to freedom, peace and equality.
"We never promised that we would be able to organise them into an independent movement, packed, wrapped, sealed and delivered by a specified date. We did say that unless they are organised into a movement independent of capitalism and Stalinism, the decay and disintegration of the world would continue, as it has. We did say that the forces of the Third Camp of socialism and liberty, are here, and it is our sworn duty to help organise them into an independent movement.
"The only way we know how to do this is: tell the truth about capitalism and Stalinism; help make those we can reach conscious of the problem of society today and how to solve it, and increase the clarity of those who are already partly conscious of it...
"Our opposition to the war does not mean support of Stalinism, in Russia or elsewhere.
"Only ignorant or mendacious people say that. The best that can be said for such people is that they are so completely sceptical about the ability of the masses to attain socialist independence freedom and peace, that in their obtuseness they conclude that the only way American imperialism can be opposed is by helping Stalinist imperialism. We will try to teach the ignorant better; and we will answer the mendacious as they deserve to be answered.
"Our opposition to Stalinist imperialism is not one whit less uncompromising than our opposition to American imperialism. We do not need any instruction on how to fight the latter so that the former is not the gainer thereby. We do not oppose American imperialism so that it may be defeated by Stalinism...
"The Social-Democrats [reform "socialists"], to whom the Third Camp is a joke because they long ago ceased to regard socialism as a real fighting goal, have naturally proclaimed their adherence to the cause of American imperialism in Korea. The Fourth Internationalists to whom the Third Camp is an incomprehensible and uncomprehended blasphemy because they regard Stalinist totalitarianism as part of the working-class camp, have just as naturally proclaimed their adherence to the side of the Stalinists in Korea.
"The voice of socialist independence and internationalism is stilled in those movements or reduced to a whisper.
"In our movement, it will remain clear and firm. It will be heard, and it will be echoed".
The working class and with it the "Third Camp" left is politically weak? The Bushes, Blairs and their like dominate the world? Indeed.
Therefore? Marxists who take their politics seriously believe that the precondition for changing such a situation to one more favourable to socialism is that the Marxists steadfastly advocate their politics, and work to build independent socialist organisations. That no other attitude is consistent with a real commitment to socialism has been the irreducible attitude of the Marxist movement all the way back to Marx and Engels.
If the Marxists lose heart, efface their own politics, latch on to a role in the alien bourgeois "political process" instead of playing their own proper role, that of obdurate propagandists and critics, then the consequence will be to perpetuate the working-class unripeness. The working class will never become "ripe", never "Bolshevik" — that is, educated, organised, and committed to all-out class war until we win.
The politics of the New Blairites consists of the cheap and foolish urge to write themselves into the current big-bourgeois and imperialist political scenario. They play there the only role they conceivably can play, that of political lick-spittles and organisers of a claque to cheer on their "team", sing its praises, wear its "colours", jeer at its enemies, and shout encouragement in the sad and futile style of the fantasy footballer yelling frantic advice and encouragement from the terraces. But most vicarious footballers don't suffer from the delusion that they can by their activities control or influence what the players do or the shape of the match.
The only practical consequence of such politics is that the socialists remove themselves as socialists from the longer-term political "process".
The idea that Iraq is "the hinge of our times", as someone expressed it, may be true or false, but, either way, the political conclusion for serious socialists is not that we amalgamate ourselves politically with Bush and Blair. Trotsky correctly wrote in the early thirties that Germany was the hinge of European and world politics. Most of subsequent 20th century history, maybe even the final consolidation of Stalinism in Russia, was shaped by Hitler's triumph.
But what followed from Trotsky's tragically correct perception? That Marxists should throw their weight behind the bourgeois-democrats, the liberals and the Social Democrats — the biggest working-class based party in Germany? That we owed them loyal, and even uncritical, support? That in the presidential election of 1932, when it was a choice between Hitler and the old mainstream right-winger Hindenburg, we should have followed the Social Democrats in backing Hindenburg?
Not for Trotsky! By driving the disaffected into the camps of the Nazis and Stalinists, the liberals and Social Democrats helped Hitler. And finally, when Hindenburg, just recently the "democratic" candidate against Hitler for president, called Hitler to be Chancellor, they "democratically" acquiesced in the "democratic" Reichstag.
The pixilated kibitzers and fantasy footballers on the right are the mirror image of the "reactionary anti-imperialists" on the kitsch left. We differ from that because, whatever policy the American and British or other bourgeois forces pursue, and even if they are doing - in their own way - something that we want to see done, we advocate working-class political and organisational independence from them and what they do. We tell the labour movement that it should place neither trust nor reliance in any bourgeois force.
The US is not trying to reduce Iraq to an old-style colony (as, for example, Russia was in Afghanistan and, say, Italy in feudal Ethiopia in the mid-1930s). But there is certainly a large dimension of imperialism in the US policy in Iraq.
If the USA were to pursue a comprehensive world wide "democratic foreign" policy, it would at one and the same time be pursuing, in that way, the goal of a world imperium for the US hyper power. It is a serious possibility that the upshot of the US-Iraq war will be a long-term — and a possibly expanding — US "colonial" presence in the Middle East. We don't know, yet. Possibly the US government doesn't know.
A situation may develop in which the policy of the Lenin-Trotsky Communist International, in the era of colonial imperialism, would guide us. We would back a genuine national liberation movement, even one led by reactionaries (of course, without politically endorsing the reactionaries).
None of this implies the policy of the "reactionary anti-imperialists". It does not imply that when the US/Britain are attempting to set up an Iraqi bourgeois democratic system and pledge to withdraw eventually (though that may mean after quite a few years) we back Islamic clerical fascists, Ba'thists and Sunni supremacists, shouting "Troops Out Now".
It does imply that, even while we hope for an outcome in Iraq in which the labour movement can develop, we look with cold eyes on the US (and Britain) in Iraq.
Our primary obligation is to tell the truth — first to ourselves — about what is happening and what may happen. The whole truth, including the truth about the "democratic imperialists". Nothing but the truth: we should not indulge in soft-headed, "pixilated" fantasies that the US bourgeoisie is a pure — or relatively pure — force for "democracy". Only in that way can we fight for working class political independence..
We reject the idea that working class policy can be worked out as a mere negative imprint of bourgeois policy. We scorn the cheap delusion that if we shout "good on you!", "we're with you!", we can affect, shape or control what, in their own interest and for their own goals, they do. We recognise that the cost of that cheap delusion-of-influence is a loss of political clarity, definition and identity for the erstwhile revolutionary socialists. As Trotsky put it, we are "the party of irreconcilable opposition". We relate to the bourgeoisie in all circumstances with mortal working class hostility.
"We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition... Our tasks... we realise not through the medium of bourgeois governments, but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a 'defence' cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us." - Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism
Note 1
This is an edited and reworked version of articles which first appeared in Solidarity 3/63 to 3/65, 2 December 2004 to 20 January 2005 - part 1, part 2, part 3, as a reply to an article in Solidarity 3/62, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", by Alan Johnson and Jane Ashworth.
The USA signed an agreement to withdraw in 2008, and completed withdrawal in 2011, though it has sent some forces back to help the Iraqi government fight against Daesh.
Discussion in Solidarity of the possibility that the US invasion of Iraq might leave behind a more-or-less functioning bourgeois democracy, as the 1940s US occupations did in West Germany and Japan, may have helped generate the neo-con nonsense of poor Alan Johnson and the Labour Friends of Iraq. But what made them what they were, and divided them from us, was their abandonment of an independent working-class, Third-Camp, stance in relation to Blair and Bush — their moral, political, and intellectual collapse before Blairism and capitalism. None of that necessarily followed from even the most optimistic surmises about the US-British occupation of Iraq.
Shachtman responded that he had been "entirely wrong" on the issue; but his letter to Trotsky had been in the name of Cannon and others as well as himself: The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism, p.452.


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The spec race has reached a point where most devices now use the same hardware. All we've seen recently are Snapdragon 801 processors, 1080p displays that measure around 5 inches, Sony camera sensors and so on. Samsung is trying to differentiate itself with features and HTC is doing the same with build quality, but Motorola has taken a different path. The company released its Moto X with a unique Motorola X8 chip that included a dual-core processor as well as two special cores for voice recognition and contextual computing. It was a very different approach to building a smartphone.
The Moto X ended up placing pretty high on most everyone's list of favorite devices. Sure, it had its flaws, but the features that it brought to the table were legitimately revolutionary. This is why we're so excited for the successor to the Moto X. The good news is that, according to a recent tweet from Motorola, this successor is coming in the late summer!
Q from twitter: When is next version of Moto X? A: Keep posted – hint – late summer. #MotoMWC
– Motorola Mobility (@Motorola) February 25, 2014
On my wishlist for the next Moto X is much-improved camera, a slightly larger display with thin bezels, more customization options, a Galaxy Note-sized model and a hydro-dynamic spatula. Tell us what you'd like to see Motorola include with the next Moto X in the comments!

subset: commoncrawl


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Skip to comments.Brett Baier's All Star Panel Comments on NRA ad
Posted on 01/16/2013 5:07:22 PM PST by FR_addict
click here to read article
Every one of them put their elitist's knee pads on and gave 0bama a big sloppy 'job.'
In the world in which Americans live in. It may eventually come to bunkers. Either bunkers, concentration camps, or winning a war.
"but comparing the risk to a Presidents kids to ours is ridiculous."
Most of the anti-gun elites have armed guards, not just Dear Leader. Pointing out the hypocrisy of Obama makes Alinsky sense because it freezes and personalizes the issue, and this can be transferred to the other oppressors.
Dianne Feinstein has one of the rare carry permits in California, David Gregory's kids go to a school protected by guns, Obama signed a law assuring that he'll be protected by guns forever.
Is this well known on the right?
If Fox News had fully reported the ugly truth about Obamas cult-like hateful religious belief and really hammered it home, Obama would never have been elected president. Fox News gives the impression of being pro-American, but they are actually kept on a short-leash, by their foreign-born, globalist and Islamist owners.
I don't remember where I read or heard it, but somebody referred to CK as "when the evil Charley shows up".
Guess that happened again.
I admire the guy for a lot...but he did work for Carter, right?
The point is that the basic premise exists in both cases. Children are exposed to potential attacks in school. His kids face danger at school and they have armed protection. All kids in public schools face danger (thanks to Federal law mostly) but 0bowdown doesn't think they deserve protection.
" Hardly. We're sitting ducks on-post due to gun laws and regulations."
And which Democrat president disarmed the military? Clinton. Some say he did it to lock up all the Army's guns to prevent an armed coup. It fer shur was not about "safety".
A retired LEO sitting in the front office with the secretary, eating a maple donut would have taken that POS out before he shot the Principal. Just a wild guess.
No, his kids are not more important.
"Are soft targets created on purpose?"
Did thugs in political power in Chicago disarm the populace to make them easier targets? Same in any big city. Why are there gangs and street crime? Because some are profiting from it and it keeps your people oppressed and not being troublemakers.
"We must accept this, must we not?" That is Official Reality.
Not a surprise. Krauthammer doesn't believe in the 2nd amendment and is on record saying that all guns should be banned/confiscated. he supports Obama 100% on this.
Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically.
It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today.
Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic - purely symbolic - move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation
Yes, Sarah Brady is doing God's work. Yes, in the end America must follow the way of other democracies and disarm.
I wonder what most conservatives would think about Krauthammer once they knew he wrote that.
Of course they were all insulted about the ad. Don't forget this hits them where they live also. They are all DC elitists too.
I generally like Krauthammer, but I always have to keep in mind he has an inside the beltway mind. Most of the pundits do. If they didn't, they wouldn't get invited to the very expensive parties.
"Bad company corrupts good character." Most TV pundits have an arrogance about them most average Americans don't, so they lose touch with real America over time. Every now and then something catches their human parts attention and they come back to earth. Then, they work their way back into elitistville until another rock hits them in the head to wake them up again.
The ad was right on the money. All the elitist have armed guards for themselves and their kids, as if somehow the love they have for their kids is greater than the love we have for ours.
Why, don't we understand how much more important to the world THEY are than we are? That's the arrogance I'm referring to. All the self appointed elitists have it at some point. Today, the table showed us theirs as clear as day.
No, to me, the presidents kids are NOT more important than mine. If I had to save his kid or mine from a speeding car, I'd save mine.
" Maybe we need military patrols in every town?"
Back before GCA 68 and a raft of state laws, there were lots of citizens who were armed. No need for military patrols when you can do it yourself. Crime was lower and there were very few mass shootings. Concealed carry was much more common.
As we disarmed mass shootings and rampant gang crime increased.
America was set up initially to be its own militia.
yep, DBrow. They who rule us keep telling us we must accept and comply. Those who rule us keep hurting our nation and placing more of the law-abiding in jeopardy, and should the law-abiding sound an alarm, those who sounded the alarm are made into criminals. It is done so others may profit. Can be no other reason. The system places those making them a profit back on the street in many or nearly all cases. There is purpose in the madness of the system, so it appears. The system makes it difficult to keep those who seek to harm the innocent away from the innocent. Profit comes from harming of innocents. All is done for the purpose of profit? It does seem to be so, or is it? When in doubt one reads history to see if profit ever caused the harm of innocents. So is all profit evil? No, for there is profit in the private sector to protect one from its government. Governments never show a profit, only destruction and debt. History is a great teacher. Wonder when sane people will learn history's secrets? I (myself) still grapple with the meanings of our planet's past, present and future, but I do understand government (every government) throughout history has become tyrannical.
Fox has even hired uberleftist whacko Dennis Kuchinich. As of this day, I now view Fox as another leftist news source. That means that there exists a chance to serve a segment of the population -- those on the right -- with a new news channel.
Again, loud and clear to every elitist pundit out there....
No, to me, the presidents kids are NOT more important than mine. If I had to save his kid or mine from a speeding car, I'd save mine.
Agree. Nice to find a like mind.
Some is profit, like crime, but some is basic ideology like fascism.
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Welcome to A Better Shot Photography Client Portal.
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SpiceJet soars in June quarter
From here on, the outlook really depends on whether the airline can put up such a stellar show on a consistent basis
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Nobody expected SpiceJet Ltd's June quarter results to surprise positively. On the contrary, expectations were running low after InterGlobe Aviation Ltd (IndiGo) and Jet Airways (India) Ltd reported weaker-than-expected June quarter financials owing to pricing pressure.
SpiceJet's shares had declined about 14% till Tuesday since IndiGo announced its results on 1 August. But SpiceJet's June quarter performance changed the trend. Its share price closed 16% higher on Wednesday.
To be sure, it's not as if SpiceJet's fares haven't declined. They did, by 3% year-on-year. But this decline was smaller than expected. In comparison, IndiGo's average fare had declined 11%. Further, a combination of 37% increase in capacity, an impressive 92.5% load factor and 64% growth in ancillary revenue helped SpiceJet's revenue grow 37% to Rs.1,521 crore, according to Kiran Koteshwar, chief financial officer of SpiceJet. Ancillary revenue includes ticket cancellation charges, excess baggage fees, sales of on-board meals, etc.
Of course, the lower fuel cost environment helped. Fuel costs as a percentage of revenues declined to 26% from 32% last year though the measure was higher sequentially. But SpiceJet's cost per available seat kilometre, or CASK, excluding fuel costs increased 3%. That was on account of the rupee's depreciation and a general inflationary pressure, said Koteshwar.
Overall operating costs grew at a relatively slower pace than revenues. As a result, operating profit and Ebitdar increased 53% and 57%, respectively, to Rs.192 crore and Rs.451.8 crore. Ebitdar stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and lease rentals. SpiceJet's Ebitdar margin came in at 30%, representing an increase over the June 2015 quarter. In comparison, IndiGo's Ebitdar margin had declined year-on-year to 33% last quarter.
Flat depreciation costs and a decline in finance costs helped SpiceJet's net profit more than double to Rs.149 crore. From here on, the outlook really depends on whether the airline can put up such a stellar show on a consistent basis. Domestic passenger growth remains strong. But the current quarter is typically a lean one for the sector and the numbers of aviation companies should reflect that. Despite the recent underperformance, SpiceJet shares have meaningfully outperformed the Sensex in the last one year.
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Korea's Amazing Skincare Products
There's nothing more stylish than healthy, clear skin. Skin is our body's biggest organ, so it's imperative we take care of it. Radiant skin, just like a fabulous outfit, makes you feel confident and polished. These days, Korean skin care products are some of the hottest on the market. Simple, effective and all the rage,Read entire article »


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I absolutely love this couple! They recorded a new version of "Talk Dirty To Me" instead with "Talk Disney To Me," as the original lyrics says!
As a parent, I prefer this version than the original one. It is such an amazing thing to see families getting together to produce something genuine.
Please show this couple some love and SHARE their video so it can go viral!


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Noted Regional Scholar to Speak at UTC Monday Night
Dr. Donald E. Davis, a resident of northwest Georgia and Professor at Dalton State College, will speak at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Monday night. Davis will give an overview of his latest book: "Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians".
It is a little known fact that the Southern Appalachian Region is one of the world's most biologically diverse regions outside of the tropics. In addition to having a rich natural heritage, the Southern Appalachians have a unique cultural heritage as well.
Davis will speak at 7:00 pm on Monday, November 13th in the Signal Mountain Room of the University Center on Vine St. This event is free and the public is encouraged to attend. This event is sponsored by the UTC Department of Biology and Environmental Science and the Sequatchie Valley Institute.
A native of north Georgia, Donald Edward Davis, Ph.D., holds master's degrees in both Social Ecology and Psychology. He is the author of "Ecophilosophy: A Field Guide to the Literature" (R&E Miles 1989) and has published numerous articles in journals such as Environmental Ethics, The Ecologist, The Trumpeter, and the Utne Reader.
Davis has, in addition, been a research assistant and consultant to the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC, collaborating there with Jeremy Rifkin on the book "Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for the 21st Century." He has also served as the Coordinating Director of the Jacques Ellul Society and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. His most recent books are "Where there Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians" (UGA Press 2000) and the forthcoming "The Land of Ridge and Valley: A Photographic History of the Northwest Georgia Mountains" (Arcadia 2001).


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Exactly one month has passed since I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya. As a complete newbie in Africa, I had no idea what to expect when I first landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Before my arrival, I had done some research about the country that was going to be my home for the coming months. A quick google search on Nairobi informed me that Kenya's capital is the 12th largest one in Africa, the name Nairobi is a Maasai phrase that translates to "cold water" and it's located 1,800 meters above sea level. My internet search also informed me that...Continue Reading >>


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The signal handling facilities in ECL are constrained by two needs. First of all, we can not ignore the synchronous signals mentioned in Section 7.2.1. Second, all other signals should cause the least harm to the running threads. Third, when a signal is handled synchronously using a signal handler, the handler should do almost nothing unless we are completely sure that we are in an interruptible region, that is outside system calls, in code that ECL knows and controls.
The way in which this is solved is based on the existence of both synchronous and asynchronous signal handling code, as explained in the following two sections.
In systems in which this is possible, ECL creates a signal handling thread to detect and process asynchronous signals (See Section 7.2.2). This thread is a trivial one and does not process the signals itself: it communicates with, or launches new signal handling threads to act accordingly to the denoted events.
The use of a separate thread has some nice consequences. The first one is that those signals will not interrupt any sensitive code. The second one is that the signal handling thread will be able to execute arbitrary lisp or C code, since it is not being executed in a sensitive context. Most important, this style of signal handling is the recommended one by the POSIX standards, and it is the one that Windows uses.
The installation of the signal handling thread is dictated by a boot
time option,
ECL_OPT_SIGNAL_HANDLING_THREAD, and it will
only be possible in systems that support either POSIX or Windows
Systems which embed ECL as an extension language may wish to deactivate the signal handling thread using the previously mentioned option. If this is the case, then they should take appropriate measures to avoid interrupting the code in ECL when such signals are delivered.
Systems which embed ECL and do not mind having a separate signal
handling thread can control the set of asynchronous signals which is handled
by this thread. This is done again using the appropriate boot options such
ECL_OPT_TRAP_SIGTERM, etc. Note that in order to detect
and handle those signals, ECL must block them from delivery to any other
thread. This means changing the
sigprocmask() in POSIX
systems or setting up a custom
in Windows.
We have already mentioned that certain synchronous signals and exceptions can not be ignored and yet the corresponding signal handlers are not able to execute arbitrary code. To solve this seemingly impossible contradiction, ECL uses a simple solution, which is to mark the sections of code which are interruptible, and in which it is safe for the handler to run arbitrary code. All other regions would be considered "unsafe" and would be protected from signals and exceptions.
In principle this "marking" of safe areas can be done using POSIX
functions such as
pthread_sigmask() or
sigprocmask(). However in practice this is slow, as it
involves at least a function call, resolving thread-local variables, etc,
etc, and it will not work in Windows.
Furthermore, sometimes we want signals to be detected but not to be
immediately processed. For instance, when reading from the terminal we want
to be able to interrupt the process, but we can not execute the code from
the handler, since the C function which is used to read from the terminal,
read(), may have left the input stream in an
inconsistent, or even locked state.
The approach in ECL is more lightweight: we install our own signal
handler and use a thread-local variable as a flag that determines whether
the thread is executing interrupt safe code or not. More precisely, if the
ecl_process_env()->disable_interrupts is set, signals
and exceptions will be postponed and then the information about the signal
is queued. Otherwise the appropriate code is executed: for instance invoking
the debugger, jumping to a condition handler, quitting, etc.
Systems that embed ECL may wish to deactivate completely these
signal handlers. This is done using the boot options,
Systems that embed ECL and want to allow handling of synchronous
signals should take care to also trap the associated lisp conditions that
may arise. This is automatically taken care of by functions such as
si_safe_eval(), and in all other cases it can be solved
by enclosing the unsafe code in a
frame (See


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AMP honors ad sales prowess at 2005 Nexus Awards
The Association of Medical Publishers named Sharon Spector and Tom Hennessy as the recipients of its 2005 Nexus Awards for journal advertising sales prowess. The awards were presented April 6 at the Grand Hyatt New York. Spector (nee Gellman), national advertising manager for Dowden Health Media's Current Psychiatry and Current Psychiatry in Patient Care, won honors for sales on a specialty publication. Judges were impressed with her expertise and responsiveness, with one client remarking that she is "always organized and does not waste my time," and another saying she is "reliable and a great follow-up."
Tom Hennessy, group publisher of Haymarket Medical's Cortlandt Forum and The Clinical Advisor, won the award for multi-specialty or primary care journal sales. Clients said he "sells without pushing" and "always includes something unique to remember the presentation by."


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LOS ANGELES --A six-mile stretch of the 710 Freeway will close for Caltrans maintenance for the next 10 weekends.
Lanes on the 710 Freeway will be shut down at night from Bell to Downey.
Southbound lanes will remain closed during the day, with drivers in both directions routed onto the northbound side of the freeway.
Get up to the minute traffic conditions at www.abc7.com/traffic.


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The Division of AIDS (DAIDS) Table for Grading the Severity of Adult and Pediatric Adverse Events consists of parameters, or Adverse Events (AEs), with severity grading guidance that are to be used in DAIDS clinical trials for safety data reporting to maintain accuracy and consistency in the evaluation of AEs.
Below are the Grading Tables (Versions 1.0, 2.0 and Corrected v 2.1), suggested citations, applicable clarification documents, and additional resources. The protocol will specify which DAIDS Adverse Event Grading Table is applicable.
Previous versions are available upon request at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Home | Website User Feedback | Accessibility | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer
Copyright © DAIDS RSC. All rights reserved.
This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the Division of AIDS (DAIDS), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under contract No. HHSN272201700014C, entitled NIAID DAIDS Regulatory Support Center (RSC).


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Fact Sheet: Building a Neighbor's Capacity
fs-11-44.pdf — PDF document, 539 kB (552,669 bytes)
Year: 2011Abstract:
MEASURE Evaluation provides technical leadership through collaboration at local, national, and global levels to advance the field of health monitoring and evaluation. We build sustainable capacity of individuals and organizations to identify data needs, collect and analyze technically sound data, and use that data for health decision-making.
This document is not available in print from MEASURE Evaluation.


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Last week, I submitted an article to the McGill Daily. (Just broadening my horizons, not switching turfs.) When the editor told me that I had used too many of another's words and as a result, the article could not be published, I was shocked. Had I really crossed the line to plagiarism?
A 2009 study at the University of British Columbia found that students who plagiarize or cheat have "dark" personality traits, most commonly psychopathy. The study's author, psychology Professor Delroy Paulhus, recommended that universities should treat plagiarism as a mental disorder.
Me? A psychopath? It doesn't match my personality traits or my strong ethical values. I still can't come to terms with the fact that laziness and sloppy work resulted in a close call with plagiarism. I am reluctant to even talk about this incident because, like many other students, I'm hesitant to admit that I came so close to cheating. It's a mistake I won't make again.
Apparently, I'm not the first. Researchers at Guelph University and Rutgers University revealed in a 2006 study that over 53 per cent of Canadians admitted to plagiarism and 18 per cent to cheating on tests at post-secondary schools. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of plagiarizing his 2010 throne speech from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Harper was also accused of plagiarizing a speech he gave as opposition leader, urging Canada to send troops into Iraq. His speechwriter eventually was forced to resign.
The fact that plagiarism is so widespread—among politicians, students, and even professors—makes me wonder why it's so appealing. Is it laziness, or is it a deeper societal problem?
One issue is that students often don't realize they are cheating. Letting your parents edit your work (or write it for you) is plagiarism. Working in groups to solve a project, when the professor has forbidden it, is cheating. A survey of 20,000 students compiled by the Canadian Council on Learning found that students of our generation are more likely than those of others to cheat, and less likely to call it cheating.
Another problem is the accessibility of cheating. Internet-based cheating increased by 81 per cent between 2003 and 2006 according to a survey conducted by the CCL. Copying and pasting from an article has never been so easy.
But the biggest problem is our failure to value our own words and work. People cheat not because they are unethical or too busy to come up with their own ideas, but because they don't value their own opinions. The thoughts of supposedly reputable others seem more important; one's own original thoughts seem not to measure up in comparison. While discussing ideas for a class paper, my Shakespeare professor didn't just tell us not to plagiarize. He told us not to disrespect our own intelligence. "Borrowing" an idea from someone else only means that we don't believe sufficiently in ourselves.
An organizer of the Rutgers/Guelph study said the best way to deal with plagiarism is to implement an honour code in schools. But students know cheating is wrong. It's more important to encourage them to develop their own ideas and take them seriously when they vocalize those ideas.
The excuses are endless but at the root of cheating lies an under-appreciation of your own self-worth. Rather than just inserting the section "McGill values academic integrity" onto every syllabus, it would be more effective if professors and students discussed what academic integrity really is: an understanding that my ideas can only be authentic if I work hard to ensure that they're my own.