Hundred years of Marxism

(Continued from page 5)
before the Russian Revolution.
Marx was the leading spirit of
the First Interfational, the au-
thor of the inaugural address
that was the organization’s first
declaration of principles.

. Largely through Marx's ef-
forts,-the international was the
vehicle through which Commun-

: ist thought and Communist pro-

gram gained adherents in a doz-
en ‘countries.

‘The International was the cul-
mination of a series of interna-
tional solidarity actions by Brit-
ish workers, a series set in mo-
tion by the demonstrations of
support by British labor to the
Union side in America’s Civil
War. Those efforts of British
labor are widely credited with
preventing Britain’s ruling class-
es from entering the war on the
side of the Southern slaveowners.

During its waning years (1872-
1876), the International had its
headquarters. in the United
States. In 1872, it boasted of 30
sections, with 5000 members, in
the U.S. The convention formally
dissolving the International was
held in Philadephia in July 1876
(exactly 100 years after the De-
elaration of Independence was
written in Philadephia.) The de-
claration of dissolution conclud-
ed with this appeal:

“The comrades in America pro-
mise you that they will faith-
fully guard and cherish the ac-
quisitions of the International in
this country until more favorable
conditions will again bring to-
gether the workingmen of all
countries to common struggles,
and the cry will resound again
louder than ever.

“‘proletarians of all countries,
unite!.

Imagine! The ringing call—
Proletarians of all countries,
unite!—was issued from America
to the workers of the world.

And that was in 1876, fully 41
years before the Russian Rev-
olution, It might lead one to be-
lieve that the Russian Revolu-
tion’ was the product of world
communism and not that world

communism is the offspring of

the Soviet power.
eo. @
“more favorable condi-
tions” for which’ the Phila-
deiphia convention hoped were
not long in coming. If the First
International was disbanded in
Philadelphia, during the centen-
nial observance, the Second In-
ternational was born in Paris on
July 14, 1889, on the hundreth
anniversary of the storming the
Bastille.

The Second International flour-
ished during an. era of relatively
peaceful expansion. The eighties
marked the zenith of the golden
Victorian Age of the British Em-
pire. On the European continent,
there was an air of peace and
economia progress, nourished by
the acquisition and looting of
colonies. In the United States
and Canada, the opening of the
West was nearing completion. ,

Even after the turn of the cen-
tury, when the first symptoms of
the war to come began to appear,
the atmosphere of illusory op-
timism prevailed. It permeated
the Socialist movement, ana
there arose vistas of steady,
peaceful progress from electoral
triumph .to the ultimate victory.

FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 1948

LS aN

Something of this spirit was
very aptly expressed by Jack

Gene Debs re-
to a_ half-million
votes as the Socialist candidiate
for president in 1904.

London, after

ceived close

London pointed to the “steady
growth of the Socialist vote” in
the U.S. and termed the 1904

election ‘results “a working class
revolt against the economic mas-
ters of the United States.”

“How will the masters quell
this revolt?” he demanded. “That
remains to be seen, but the mas-
ters must take one thing into
consideration — there was never
the like of this revolt in the
world before. It is without pre-
cedent. It is a democratic revolt
and must be fought out with
ballots.

‘It is not a strife of lockout
and blacklist, strike and boycott,
employers’ associations and la-
bor unions, strikebreakers and
broken heads, armed Pinkertons
and injunctions, policemen’s club
and machine guns. It is a peace-
able and orderly revolt at the

ballot box, under democratic
conditions, where the majority
rules.

“My masters, you are in the
minority. How will you manage
to keep a majority of the votes?"

“What will you, my masters;
what will you?” '

Not long after, London was to
answer his own mocking ques-
tion in his prophetic novel, The
Iron Heel, which envisioned the
destruction of democracy and
the rise of fascism.

rJYHE masters had another an-

swer too. Militarism and war.
Ten years after London wrote,
the First World War broke out.
Tilusions, as well as men, were
slain. The reality of the dread-
ful carnage submerged the
dreams of peaceful and gradual
progress into socialism.

Lenin estimated the achieve-
ments of the Second Internation-
al in his comment that it “per-
formed historically necessary and
useful work when the problem
of training the masses within
the framework of bourgeois de-
mocracy was on the order of the

day ... it marked the epoch in.

which the soil was prepared for
a broad mass widespread move-
ment in a hundred of countries.”

Within the amorphous and in-
creaseingly soft mass of the Se-
cond International, there was
formed a hard core of workers
devoted to Marxist principles. In
the crisis of the war, these work-
ers broke with , the corrupt
leaders who made common cause
with the capitalists of their re-
spective countries to wage a war
for colonies and markets.

The Russian Revolution ac-
celerated the process of fissure,
hastened the emergence of new
political parties, based on. a
Marxist program as developed by
Lenin in accordance with: con-
ditions before, during and after
the First World War.

The Russian Revolution was a
fact, and so is the Soviet state.
The same world crisis of capital-
ism, brutally expressed in the
First World War, as gave birth
to the Russian Revolution, also
gave birth to the contemporary
« Communist movement in other
lands.

If the alien class had trem~

bled with apprenhension before,

now it trembled with a raving
hysteria, What had been a theo-

.

retical postulate before, now be-
came reality. The armies of 14
states invaded Soviet Russia to
crush the revolution, Millions
were expendéd to finance the
remnants of Czarist bands. The
economic boycott of hunger was
directed against the Russian peo-

ple. Political and diplomatic war

was waged relentlessly.

Yet, the Russian people, led
by their Communist party, de-
voted to Marxist principles, beat

off all these attacks. Impoverish-_

ed and exhausted by the war,
ravaged by famine and disease,
they stood their ground and won.
The interventionists of our own
day, demanding direct action in
Greece and China, might also
ponder this.

In their: hysterical trembling,
the ruling classes of country

after country unloosed the most ©

savage terror, tried to crush
evéry spark of resistance and in-

dependence among the workers,

sought to root out every last ves-
tige of Marxist thought. ;

In Italy, in- Yugoslavia, in Hun-

gary, in Bulgaria in other. coun-.

ese aaa Terror raged.

KARL MARX

The wise men of Italian. fascism _

invented the castor oil treat-
ment; the Yugoslavia police won

laurels for their ingenuity in. de-.

vising new and more. scientific
means of torture.

The tide was dammed, mom-
entarily, but. now it surges once
more, and in those lands millions
of people, liberated after decades
of oppression, are asserting them-
selves and choosing the path of
Marxism.

century of Marxism is no

idyllic success story. Marx,
whose scientific foresight grows
the more amazing with the pas-
sage of time, not only envisioned
the growth: and sweep of. the

Communist movement, but also ~
foresaw the halting, tortuous-na-

ture of this process.

“Proletarian. rewotutions.” he
wrote, “ .,. critizice themselves
eonstantly, interrupt themselves..

continually in their own course,
come back to the apparently ac-

complished in order to recom

mence it afresh, deride with un-

merciful thoroughness the inad-_

rt

equacies, weaknesses and paltri-
ness of their first ‘attempts, seem
to throw down’ ‘their adversary
only" ‘in order that ‘he may, draw
new strength, from the earth and
rise. again .more gigantic. before
them, recoil ever and anon from
the ‘indefinite © /prodigiousness of
their own’ aims, until the situa
tion “has. been created which
makes. al] turning back impoasi-
bien <® :

That’ prophetic “passage, writ-
ten in 1852, is in broad outline
a summary of the history of the -
Communist movement: The cent-
ury of Marxism - confirms the
estimate of the Communist Mani-—
festo that “what the bourgeoisie
therefore produces, above all, are «
its, own grayediggers.”.

And ‘amid the ruins _ of ions,
the misery of Asia, they are dig-- ;
ging furiously today.

‘@ Al. Richmond is executive ed:

itor of the People’s World, San 4
Francisco, from which paper
this article was condensed.

+

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 9°