#Hillquit

[racefortheironthrone]

In a hypothetical situation where Moris Hilquit wins the 1917 mayoral election by a plurality, how do you think the ideal socialist for successful dentists would have performed as mayor of new york?

That is a tricky scenario to pull off, as alternate histories go.

In "original timeline" New York City, Morris Hillquit (SPA-NYC) got 145,000 votes for mayor, which is impressive....for third place, with the Democratic nominee (John Francis Hylan, a man who had impressively worked his way up from railroad laborer to engineer and then to lawyer, and who managed to win the support of both Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst) winning 314,000 votes, and incumbent reform mayor John P. Mitchel (having largely alienated his Fusion alliance) winning 155,000.

So the first thing that would have had to happen was Mitchel not running and splitting the anti-Tammany vote. However, Hillquit and Mitchel together would still be 14,000 votes short - and you know what happens when there's a close mayoral election and Tammany Hall is on the ballot.

So the second, and arguably more important thing that would have to happen is for Hearst to run against Tammany, like he did in 1905 (as a "Municipal Ownership League" candidate, no less!) and 1909, splitting the Democratic vote. (Words cannot describe what a weird guy William Randolph Hearst was politically. Depending on what part of his life you're talking about, he was an imperialist or an isolationist, a supporter of the New Deal or an outright Nazi.)

As for how Morris Hillquit would have done as mayor of New York City, I think he would have faced a pretty unrelentingly uphill battle on a lot of fronts. Hillquit was running as an anti-war candidate at a time when the country as a whole was starting to shift in a pro-war and anti-socialist direction - which would ultimately see five Socialists ejected from the New York state legislature in 1920. (Note that it would take until 2020 for New York socialist electoral politics to reach its former high-water mark.) Mayor Hillquit might well have joined them as a casualty of the First Red Scare.

While I think that Hillquit's support for municipal ownership of the subway and other utilities, women's suffrage, and the Socialist Party's proposal for government food-purchasing to help deal with the crippling cost-of-living crisis would have been quite popular, I think he would have had a very hard time getting socialization of the subway through the Board of Alderman.

Whatever its temporary woes in mayoral or gubernatorial races, Tammany was always strongest in the legislative branch (in no small part because that's where the money was) - and Tammany's empire of corruption rested upon a foundation of bribes and kickbacks paid by private companies looking to get "franchises" (i.e, private monopolies) for water, gas, electricity, commuter rail, and subways. They would have fought tooth and nail to stop Hillquit from taking these utilities under public ownership and stopping their gravy train, so Hillquit would have had to win a majority on the Board of Aldermen as well.

So I think that Tammany would have tried to do to Hillquit the same thing they did with reform mayors like Seth Low and John P. Mitchel: wait him out. (Incidentally, this is what made Fiorello LaGuardia a terrifying enemy to Tammany Hall: he was the first reform mayor to ever get re-elected, which gave him the time he needed to push through a new charter that abolished the Board of Aldermen, essentially permanently crippling Tammany.)

[reidio-silence]

Much as many New Yorkers had predicted in the spring of 1919, the housing shortage went from bad to worse. By October 1, which the New York American called “one of the most trying ‘moving days’ in history,” the situation was dire. The landlords were attempting “a wholesale ousting of tenants,” wrote the Telegram, bringing summary proceedings in record numbers, as many as thirty thousand, according to one estimate. Virtually no apartments were vacant. And very few movers were available. Three questions were on the minds of New York's tenants, wrote the Sun. “Where shall we go? How will we get there? How much will we pay? There are no answers to the first two questions, but the answer to the third is another question: How much have you?” With hundreds if not thousands of cases on their calendars, the municipal court judges did what little they could to resolve the problem, adjourning some cases, postponing others, and—provided that the tenants paid the old rent to the court—granting a stay of up to twenty days in still others, which they had been empowered to do under the laws enacted at the special session. So many stays were granted that by early October roughly $650,000 had been deposited with the courts. Despite the best efforts of the judges, tens of thousands of tenants were ousted from their homes, often after a fight with the marshals, schleppers, and police. From his courthouse in the Bronx, where 1,400 cases were on the calendar in one week in early October, Robitzek warned that New York City was “on the verge of a revolution,” a matter of great concern to the state legislators. Also of great concern to the legislators was the upcoming election, in which the Socialist Party was fielding a large slate of candidates. Convinced that no issue was of greater interest to working-class New Yorkers, the Socialists made rent profiteering the centerpiece of their campaign. The Socialists argued that the Democrats and Republicans were so beholden to the landlords that they would not do anything to ease the plight of the tenants. Only the Socialist Party could be counted on to push for legislation to regulate rents and prevent evictions. As it turned out, the Socialist Party did not do as well in 1919 as it had in 1917, when Morris Hillquit ran for mayor. And several prominent Socialists lost their seats on the Board of Aldermen, among them their leader, Algernon Lee. But the Socialist Party was still a force to be reckoned with. It held on to its two seats in the Assembly and picked up three more, giving it five, two from the Bronx and one each from Brownsville, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side. Also, under pressure from the Socialists, several Democrats and Republicans felt compelled to speak out against rent profiteering and pledge to stop it.

— Robert M. Fogelson, The Great Rent Wars (2013)

[kheelcenter]

United Hebrew Trades Council

On this Day in 1888, the United Hebrew Trades was organized in New York, with Bernard Weinstein, Morris Hillquit, and Abe Cahan among its leaders. In 1933 they issued their Souvenir Journal commemorating 45 years of service in which founding member Morris Hillquit saluted the organization and its members, just weeks before his death.

[weil-weil-lautre]

[spainhistoryteacher]

La formación del Partido Socialista en los Estados Unidos (I)

Buenos días desde Academia Cruellas. Hoy vamos a centrar nuestro comentario sobre la formación del Partido Socialista en los Estados Unidos. Antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial el socialismo norteamericano estaba muy disperso y era muy difuso, tanto en su implantación como en su orientación. Hasta 1916 la fuerza electoral estaba al oeste del Mississippi, en donde predominaban mineros, colonos y madereros. Y en 1917 Nueva York se convirtió en el centro neurálgico del socialismo norteamericano.

En sus comienzos la base estaba formada por pequeños granjeros que vivían al oeste del Mississippi, y en la ciudades el partido reclutaba a sus militantes entre los obreros cualificados, los grupos de inmigrantes y los intelectuales. El socialismo ejerció un gran poder de atracción entre los escritores (Jack London,…) intelectuales y periodistas. Este fue el momento en que se desarrollaba el movimiento de los muckrakers, quienes en la prensa denunciaban la corrupción de la vida política y la unión entre los medios financieros y políticos. Fueron muchos los periodistas que llegaron al socialismo por la vía del contacto directo con la realidad y el análisis periodístico de los hechos (Charles Russell, A.M. Simons,…).

Lo que caracterizó al Partido Socialista norteamericano fue su diversidad interna, sus estructuras laxas, democráticas y abiertas. Existían diferentes facciones, pero la coexistencia de múltiples tendencias parecía como algo necesario para el desarrollo de un partido de masas. Había discrepancias en cuanto a la táctica: algunos creían en la eficacia de una coalición de obreros, granjeros y otros grupos radicales de clase media, mientras otros rechazaban estas alianzas. Después de la guerra, seguían las discrepancias en problemas como el racismo y la cuestión femenina.

Sólo la aceptación de algunos principios básicos (reconocimiento de la división de la sociedad norteamericana en clases antagónicas y de la existencia de lucha de clases, así como del monopolio de la clase dominante sobre el Estado y sus diferentes aparatos, y la necesidad de la formación de una conciencia de clase obrera para llevar a cabo cambios profundos) y la perspectiva de derrocar el orden capitalista daban cohesión a este partido ten heterogéneo.

A la derecha del partido estaba Victor Berger, maestro, impresor, periodista y político profesional de origen alemán. Fue sin duda el socialista norteamericano que mejor acertó en construir una organización política estable basada en los sindicatos.

El lider de la tendencia centrista fue Morris Hillquit, representante de la tradición marxista ortodoxa. Era un inmigrante ruso nacido en Riga y criado en el barrio judio de Nueva York.

Eugene Debs representaba la izquierda del movimiento en las cuestiones más específicamente norteamericanas del mismo. Organizador del American Raiway Union. Debs no dejó de luchar toda su vida contra el sistema capitalista porque según sus propias palabras, “es nocivo; por su propia naturaleza es fundamentalmente injusto, inhumano, sin futuro y no puede durar”. Debs encarnaba la unión de las fuerzas radicales (populistas, socialistas utópicos y marxistas, cristianos progresistas y militantes sindicales) que se fusionaron para formar el Socialist Party of America.

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2AbbPtD

[berniesrevolution]

In May 2016, at a conference for Germany’s left-wing Die Linke party, Torten für Menschenfeinde (“Pies for Misanthropes”) struck again. Sneaking up the side of the conference hall, a member of the anti-fascist organization threw a piece of cake at Sahra Wagenknecht, a prominent Die Linke member in the Bundestag. It was a direct hit: Wagenknecht’s face was covered in chocolate frosting, a streak of whipped cream extending from ear to ear.

Torten für Menschenfeinde targeted Wagenknecht for her vocal position against an open-border policy for Germany. Earlier that year, she challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to accept more than 1 million refugees, arguing that Germany should impose limits on entry and deport those who abused German “hospitality.” The cake attack—which followed a cream-pie offensive against a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany—isolated Wagenknecht in her party, which had otherwise pledged support for Merkel’s policy.

Nearly three years later, however, Wagenknecht and her views on migration have gone mainstream, in Germany and across Europe. In September 2018, Wagenknecht and her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, founded Aufstehen (“Rise Up”), a political movement combining left-wing economic policy with exclusionary social protections. The movement has garnered over 170,000 members since its official launch; according to a recent poll, more than a third of German voters “could see themselves” supporting Wagenknecht’s initiative.

“I am tired of surrendering the streets to the [anti-Islam movement] Pegida and the Alternative for Germany,” Wagenknecht said at the launch event. Onstage, she was joined by allies in Germany’s Green Party and the Social Democratic Party. “As many followers of the political left as possible should join,” several Social Democratic politicians wrote in a joint statement.

By founding Aufstehen, Wagenknecht became a member of the new vanguard of left politics in Europe. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads La France Insoumise, a left-populist movement that has been critical of mass migration. “I’ve never been in favor of freedom of arrival,” Mélenchon has said, claiming that migrants “are stealing the bread” of French workers. He is now the most popular politician on the French left, widely considered the face of the opposition to President Emmanuel Macron and a championof the Yellow Vest movement.

In the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn leads the Labour Party and offers a radical vision of socialist transformation. And yet, although he was a vocal advocate for migrant rights during his tenure at Westminster, Corbyn has expressed deep skepticism about open borders as the party’s leader. “Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle,” Corbyn said, committing Labour to a policy of “reasonable management” based on “our economic needs.”

The rise of these left-nationalist leaders marks a momentous turn against free movement in Europe, where it has long been accepted as a basic right of citizenship.

Forget The Communist Manifesto’s refrain that “the working men have no country”; the new face of the European left takes a radically different view. Free movement is, to quote Wagenknecht, “the opposite of what is left-wing”: It encourages exploitation, erodes community, and denies popular sovereignty. To advocate open borders, in this view, is to oppose the interests of the working class.

By popularizing this argument, these new movements are not just challenging migration policy in Europe; they are redefining the boundaries of left politics in a dangerous, and inopportune, direction. Over the next few decades, global migration is set to explode: By 2100, up to 1 million migrants will be applying to enter the European Union each year.

Right-wing populists have already begun their assault on migrants: In Italy, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has called for “mass cleaning,” while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proposed that recent arrivals should be sent “back to Africa.” As left-nationalist movements charge ahead in the polls, it is not immediately clear who will challenge their pessimistic view of migration and fight for the right to free movement.

In April 1870, Karl Marx wrote a letter to two German migrants in New York City, imploring them to “pay particular attention” to what he called “the Irish question.”

“I have come to the conclusion,” Marx wrote, “that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” For Marx, Ireland would play a decisive role because of its mass emigration—the Mexico of its time. “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class,” Marx continued. “It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

In the century and a half since, Marx’s letter has become a key reference point for the left critique of free movement. The passage is cited as evidence of a fundamental tension between the traditional goals of the left—equality, solidarity, working-class power—and a policy of open borders. “Karl Marx identified that fact a long time ago,” announced Len McCluskey, general secretary of Britain’s Unite the Union and a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, in 2016.

But critics of free movement often neglect to mention Marx’s conclusions: “Given this state of affairs,” he wrote, “if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organizations must become international.”

Marx’s analysis of mass migration did not lead him to advocate harder borders. Instead, it made him support international mobilization to protect workers’ rights in a world of free movement.

After all, Marx himself was a triple émigré: He fled Prussia to Paris, faced exile from Paris to Brussels, and—after a brief incarceration by the Belgian authorities—found his way to London. And he was hardly a model immigrant: Poor, sick, and a notorious procrastinator, Marx was much more of a scrounger than a striver, leeching off the largesse of Friedrich Engels.

As such, Marx had little sympathy for the “ordinary English worker,” who “hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standards of life.” The solution to the Irish question was not to bow to these prejudices, he argued, but to dissolve the antagonism between the various camps of the working class. “A coalition of German workers with the Irish workers—and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it—is the greatest achievement you could bring about now,” he advised.

Following Marx, the concept of left internationalism came to be associated with support for free movement on both ethical and strategic grounds. Ethically, open borders gave equal opportunity to workers of all nationalities. More important, the movement of people across borders created new opportunities for a coordinated challenge to capitalism. Internationalists like Marx supported free movement for the same reasons they supported free trade: It hastened the pace of history and heightened capitalism’s contradictions.

“There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner,” wrote Vladimir Lenin in 1913. “But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations…. Capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world…breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries.”

Back in Lenin’s day, a very similar debate over the merits of migration was roiling through the European left. But while the pessimistic view of Wagenknecht and other left nationalists has now taken hold in many parts of the continent, Lenin’s, at the time, prevailed.

At the 1907 Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart, Germany, leaders of the Socialist Party of America introduced a resolution to end “the willful importation of cheap foreign labor.” Morris Hillquit, a founder of the party, argued that migrants from Asia—the “yellow races,” unlike those from Europe—amounted to a “pool of unconscious strikebreakers.” The convention rejected the resolution: “The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature.”

Lenin would never forget the incident. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League of America, he called out the American socialists for their efforts to restrict Chinese and Japanese migration. “We think that one can not be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions,” he wrote. “Such socialists are in reality jingoes.”

By the time of Lenin’s letter, of course, Europe’s great powers had been whipped into a frenzy of nationalist violence. In the First World War, British soldiers sang “Rule, Britannia,” the Germans sang “Deutschlandlied,” and they all marched to their deaths. Even the Social Democratic Party of Germany—a key player in the Second International—voted in favor of the war. Citing the need for national self-defense, large swaths of the European left abandoned the cause of open borders.

But by the end of the next world war—which left another 80 million people dead and 60 million more displaced—support for free movement had moved from the margins of the left into the heart of the postwar political establishment. When the United Nations convened in Paris to draft its Declaration of Human Rights in November 1948, the committee consideredmobility a matter of “vital importance.” “Freedom of movement was the sacred right of every human being,” commented the representative from Chile. “The world belongs to all mankind,” added the representative from Haiti.

(Continue Reading)

[today-in-wwi]

Roosevelt Campaigns for New York Mayor Mitchel’s Re-election

A New York Times cartoon from November 4, with caption: Crown Prince: “Any more victories, Papa?” Kaiser: “I can’t tell till Tuesday.”  Note the alarmist implication that a victory for Hillquit or even Hylan would be a victory for Germany on the same scale as Caporetto.

November 1 1917, New York--The first wartime Election Day in the US was fast approaching, but, it being an odd-numbered year, there were relatively few prominent contests.  The most-watched one was for Mayor of New York. The incumbent Mayor, John Mitchel, ardently pro-war and pro-preparedness, lost the Republican primary, but was running as an independent.  In addition to the Republican candidate, he was running against the Tammany Hall-backed Democrat John Hylan, as well as the Socialist Morris Hillquit.

Hillquit had been ardently against the war before the United States entered, and argued for a peace without indemnities and annexations as quickly as possible.  He made sure while campaigning to stay well within the bounds of the Espionage Act, but Wilson refused to let him address the troops at Camp Upton.  Hillquit ran into trouble, however, in late October, when he admitted he had not subscribed to either of the Liberty Loans, as he was “not going to do anything to advance the war.”  

This led to vicious attacks on his patriotism, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt, who addressed a pro-Mitchel rally on November 1.  He warned of the danger from the “Hun within” (as opposed to the “Hun without”), the “hyphenated” Americans who, in his view, presented a mortal danger to the war effort.  This may have been a subtle attack on Hillquit’s background (he was born in Latvia and immigrated to New York in his late teens), but he denounced him more explicitly as someone who “cringes before the Hun within.  The American pacifist has been a great ally of the German militarist.”  Roosevelt also attempted to tie Hylan to pacifism and Germany, though with less success.

On election day on the 6th, Hylan won a resounding victory with 47% of the vote; Mitchel barely edged out Hillquit for second place, 23% to 22%.  Mitchel volunteered to serve as a pilot, but on July 6 was killed when he fell out of his plane during a training flight in Louisiana.

Today in 1916: Ninth Battle of the Isonzo Begins Today in 1915: Metaxas, Falkenhausen Discuss Greek Entry Into War Today in 1914: Germans Destroy British Squadron at Coronel

Sources include: Michael Kazin, War Against War.

[commissarraege]

The Twenty-one Conditions, officially the Conditions of Admission to the Communist International, refer to the conditions given by Vladimir Lenin to the adhesion of the socialists to the Third International (Comintern) created in 1919 after the 1917 October Revolution. The conditions were formally adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. The conditions were: 1 . All propaganda and agitation must bear a really communist character and correspond to the programme and decisions of the Communist International. All the party’s press organs must be run by reliable communists who have proved their devotion to the cause of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat must not be treated simply as a current formula learnt off by heart. Propaganda for it must be carried out in such a way that its necessity is comprehensible to every simple worker, every woman worker, every soldier and peasant from the facts of their daily lives, which must be observed systematically by our press and used day by day. The periodical and other press and all the party’s publishing institutions must be subordinated to the party leadership, regardless of whether, at any given moment, the party as a whole is legal or illegal. The publishing houses must not be allowed to abuse their independence and pursue policies that do not entirely correspond to the policies of the party. In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly. 2 . Every organisation that wishes to affiliate to the Communist International must regularly and methodically remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post in the labour movement (party organisations, editorial boards, trades unions, parliamentary factions, co-operatives, local government) and replace them with tested communists, without worrying unduly about the fact that, particularly at first, ordinary workers from the masses will be replacing ‘experienced’ opportunists. 3 . In almost every country in Europe and America the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. Under such conditions the communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They have the obligation of setting up a parallel organisational apparatus which, at the decisive moment, can assist the party to do its duty to the revolution. In every country where a state of siege or emergency laws deprive the communists of the opportunity of carrying on all their work legally, it is absolutely necessary to combine legal and illegal activity. 4 . The duty of propagating communist ideas includes the special obligation of forceful and systematic propaganda in the army. Where this agitation is interrupted by emergency laws it must be continued illegally. Refusal to carry out such work would be tantamount to a betrayal of revolutionary duty and would be incompatible with membership of the Communist International. 5 . Systematic and methodical agitation is necessary in the countryside. The working class will not be able to win if it does not have the backing of the rural proletariat and at least a part of the poorest peasants, and if it does not secure the neutrality of at least a part of the rest of the rural population through its policies. Communist work in the countryside is taking on enormous importance at the moment. It must be carried out principally with the help of revolutionary communist workers of the town and country who have connections with the countryside. To refuse to carry this work out, or to entrust it to unreliable, semi-reformist hands, is tantamount to renouncing the proletarian revolution. 6 . Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation to unmask not only open social-patriotism but also the insincerity and hypocrisy of social-pacificism, to show the workers systematically that, without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, no international court of arbitration, no agreement on the limitation of armaments, no ‘democratic’ reorganisation of the League of Nations will be able to prevent new imperialist wars. 7 . The parties that wish to belong to the Communist International have the obligation of recognising the necessity of a complete break with reformism and ‘centrist’ politics and of spreading this break among the widest possible circles of their party members. Consistent communist politics are impossible without this. The Communist International unconditionally and categorically demands the carrying out of this break in the shortest possible time. The Communist International cannot tolerate a situation where notorious opportunists, as represented by Turati, Modigliani, Kautsky, Hilferding, Hillquit, Longuet, MacDonald, etc., have the right to pass as members of the Communist International. This could only lead to the Communist International becoming something very similar to the wreck of the Second International. 8 . A particularly marked and clear attitude on the question of the colonies and oppressed nations is necessary on the part of the communist parties of those countries whose bourgeoisies are in possession of colonies and oppress other nations. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation of exposing the dodges of its ‘own’ imperialists in the colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be thrown out of the colonies, of cultivating in the hearts of the workers in their own country a truly fraternal relationship to the working population in the colonies and to the oppressed nations, and of carrying out systematic propaganda among their own country’s troops against any oppression of colonial peoples. 9 . Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International must systematically and persistently develop communist activities within the trades unions, workers’ and works councils, the consumer co-operatives and other mass workers’ organisations. Within these organisations it is necessary to organise communist cells which are to win the trades unions etc. for the cause of communism by incessant and persistent work. In their daily work the cells have the obligation to expose everywhere the treachery of the social patriots and the vacillations of the ‘centrists’. The communist cells must be completely subordinated to the party as a whole. 10 . Every party belonging to the Communist International has the obligation to wage a stubborn struggle against the Amsterdam ‘International’ of yellow trade union organisations. It must expound as forcefully as possible among trades unionists the idea of the necessity of the break with the yellow Amsterdam International. It must support the International Association of Red Trades Unions affiliated to the Communist International, at present in the process of formation, with every means at its disposal. 11. Parties that wish to belong to the Communist International have the obligation to subject the personal composition of their parliamentary factions to review, to remove all unreliable elements from them and to subordinate these factions to the party leadership, not only in words but also in deeds, by calling on every individual communist member of parliament to subordinate the whole of his activity to the interests of really revolutionary propaganda and agitation. 12 . The parties belonging to the Communist International must be built on the basis of the principle of democratic centralism. In the present epoch of acute civil war the communist party will only be able to fulfil its duty if it is organised in as centralist a manner as possible, if iron discipline reigns within it and if the party centre, sustained by the confidence of the party membership, is endowed with the fullest rights and authority and the most far-reaching powers. 13. The communist parties of those countries in which the communists can carry out their work legally must from time to time undertake purges (re-registration) of the membership of their party organisations in order to cleanse the party systematically of the petty-bourgeois elements within it. 14 . Every party that. wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation to give unconditional support to every soviet republic in its struggle against the forces of counter-revolution. The communist parties must carry out clear propaganda to prevent the transport of war material to the enemies of the soviet republics. They must also carry out legal or illegal propaganda, etc., with every means at their disposal among troops sent to stifle workers’ republics. 15 . Parties that have still retained their old social democratic programmes have the obligation of changing those programmes as quickly as possible and working out a new communist programme corresponding to the particular conditions in the country and in accordance with the decisions of the Communist International. As a rule the programme of every party belonging to the Communist International must be ratified by a regular Congress of the Communist International or by the Executive Committee. Should the Executive Committee of the Communist International reject a party’s programme, the party in question has the right of appeal to the Congress of the Communist International. 16 . All decisions of the Congresses of the Communist International and decisions of its Executive Committee are binding on all parties belonging to the Communist International. The Communist International, acting under conditions of the most acute civil war, must be built in a far more centralist manner than was the case with the Second International. In the process the Communist International and its Executive Committee must, of course, in the whole of its activity, take into account the differing conditions under which the individual parties have to fight and work, and only take generally binding decisions in cases where such decisions are possible. 17 . In this connection all those parties that wish to belong to the Communist International must change their names. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International must bear the name Communist Party of this or that country (Section of the Communist International). The question of the name is not formal, but a highly political question of great importance. The Communist International has declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all yellow social-democratic parties. The difference between the communist parties and the old official ‘social-democratic’ or ‘socialist’ parties that have betrayed the banner of the working class must be clear to every simple toiler. 18 . All the leading press organs of the parties in every country have the duty of printing all the important official documents of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. 19 . All parties that belong to the Communist International or have submitted an application for membership have the duty of calling a special congress as soon as possible, and in no case later than four months after the Second Congress of the Communist International, in order to check all these conditions. In this connection all party centres must see that the decisions of the Second Congress are known to all their local organisations. 20 . Those parties that now wish to enter the Communist International but have not yet radically altered their previous tactics must, before they join the Communist International, see to it that no less than two thirds of the central committee and of all their most important central institutions consist of comrades who even before the Second Congress of the Communist International spoke out unambiguously in public in favour of the entry of the party into the Communist International. Exceptions may be permitted with the agreement of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. The Executive Committee of the Communist International also has the right to make exceptions in relation to the representatives of the centrist tendency mentioned in paragraph 7. 21. Those party members who fundamentally reject the conditions and Theses laid down by the Communist International are to be expelled from the party.

V.I Lenin - 1920 Second Comintern Congress. These are the tenants of the Communist Party.

[topmixtrends]

THE UNITED STATES TODAY may seem oblivious to the relentless global military activity carried out in its name, but, as Ken Burns’s recent documentary on the Vietnam War reminds us, that wasn’t always the case. Half a century ago, you would have had a hard time finding Americans unaware of our foreign wars and a very easy time finding people who objected to them — vociferously. Fifty years further back, President Woodrow Wilson’s call for the first large-scale dispatch of American troops abroad also provoked serious opposition — and preoccupied the lives of four of the five principals of Jeremy McCarter’s new book, Young Radicals. At the time, as McCarter points out, the United States had only the 17th largest army in the world, whereas now, a century of foreign interventions later, the American military budget is larger than that of the next eight or 10 runner-up nations combined.

McCarter starts his story on January 1, 1912, Walter Lippmann’s first day as executive secretary to George Lunn, the newly elected Socialist Party mayor of Schenectady, New York. The 22-year-old Lippmann has arrived with great expectations: he came recommended by Socialist Party founder and leader Morris Hillquit; the philosopher William James had once dropped by his dorm room to praise an article he wrote for a campus publication positing a brighter socialist-oriented future; in short, he was, according to McCarter, “the boy wonder of socialism.” Lippmann promptly produced a glowing account of the new Lunn administration for The Masses, the New York City socialist monthly started the previous year. But by the beginning of May (page seven of the book), he was out, now characterizing the Schenectady venture as “timid benevolence” and concluding that, while “[r]eform under the fire of radicalism is an educative thing[,] reform pretending to be radicalism is deadening.” By the next year, Lippmann, now “souring on socialism in all its forms,” had joined the staff of another new magazine, the New Republic, which its publisher called “radical without being socialistic.” It would rapidly become a leading voice for war preparedness, and Lippmann himself would soon take a job with the War Department (as the Defense Department was more appropriately called at the time), mobilizing for the war effort, his days as a radical effectively at an end — almost.

Lippmann knew John Reed at Harvard College when he was an officer in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and Reed was a cheerleader and student actor. Their political trajectories subsequently crossed, with Reed first drawing public notice for his sympathetic, on-the-spot coverage of Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolutionary forces in 1913. Lippmann, who published his first book that same year, would have the more prominent career, being viewed as one of the nation’s most influential journalists for much of the next six decades. But it is Reed whose considerably shorter story seems to have retained the greater cachet as an embodiment of the zeitgeist: Warren Beatty played him in the 1981 Oscar-winning movie Reds.

Earlier in 1913, Reed had worked in support of 25,000 mostly immigrant silk industry laborers, who organized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in a strike for better wages and working conditions in Paterson, New Jersey. When the New York press refused to report on the strike, hampering the union’s ability to take their story to a larger regional working class audience, someone came up with the idea of ferrying 1,000 laborers across the Hudson River to Madison Square Garden to tell the story themselves. Crossing the river in the other direction to check out the scene, Reed was arrested at the picket line and thrown in jail for four days; he subsequently assisted with the Madison Square Garden event. (Lippmann also helped, while grousing, McCarter tells us, about Reed’s “inordinate desire to be arrested.”) In addition to the speeches, the event featured an Italian folk song backed by a German chorus, IWW chants adapted to college football tunes, and the entire crowd of 15,000 rising to their feet for a finale of the “Internationale.” All in all, it was perhaps the greatest show the American labor movement ever produced.

Three years later, Reed joined a group of bohemian friends hoping to develop a new type of American theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Among their number was Eugene O’Neill, who would go on to become the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize, but who at that point had never had a play actually performed. In 1917, Reed and wife Louise Bryant, a writer, activist, and feminist of some note, went off to cover the Russian Revolution, an experience Reed described in Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), one of the best and most influential firsthand accounts of a social revolution ever written. Reed and Bryant both, it should be added, were far from being “objective” observers or “disinterested” journalists. McCarter tells us that Reed had been obsessed with Russia ever since his mentor, renowned muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens, “told him the new world was being born there.” In January 1918, Reed addressed the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and not long after, Leon Trotsky appointed him the Soviet consul in New York. Even though the appointment didn’t work out, he came to be regarded as the “foremost American communist in the world,” sitting on the Executive Committee of the Communist International before resigning in frustration at the Russians’ heavy-handed role in the organization.

In late 1920, after Reed had died in Moscow of typhus five days short of his 33rd birthday, the American journalist and author Max Eastman delivered the eulogy at his funeral. The service was held in New York, but Reed’s body stayed in Moscow, one of three Americans whose remains are interred at the Kremlin wall. The editor-in-chief of The Masses, Eastman once referred to Reed as the publication’s “jail editor.” McCarter describes the New Republic as a “prematurely middle-aged magazine,” but no one ever said anything like that about The Masses. Based in Greenwich Village, the publication was, according to a manifesto co-authored by Eastman and Reed, “a revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable.” But while The Masses may have been “conspicuously merry,” its politics were never frivolous. When The Masses accused the Associated Press of suppressing news about West Virginia mines and miners, Eastman was indicted for libel, along with cartoonist Art Young. Those charges were eventually dropped, but more would soon follow.

In many ways, this was a more genteel era than our own (Eastman once actually discussed the war with President Wilson), yet it is also true that, in some respects, the government’s repression of war opponents surpassed anything the 1960s antiwar movement encountered. The Masses would soon find itself running afoul of the newly passed Espionage Act, which allowed the Postmaster General to bar from the mail publications deemed to hamper the war effort. A ban was soon issued on all of the major socialist publications, starting with The Masses. Eastman, McCarter writes, “marvel[ed] that the American government has suppressed the socialist press more quickly and completely than the Germans did.” And that wasn’t the half of it: Socialist Party offices were raided by the authorities and vandalized by vigilantes, IWW members were arrested, peace marches were broken up. Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who had won six percent of the 1912 vote, had to conduct his 1920 campaign from the Atlanta Penitentiary, where his opposition to the war had landed him with a 10-year sentence under the Espionage Act.

With the Bernie Sanders campaign having brought the ideals of socialism some of their most positive public exposure in decades, Young Radicals suggests that a reconsideration may be in order as to the root cause of the “public relations” problems socialism has experienced during the past century. As McCarter shows, even before the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth and degeneration of Russian Communism (events generally considered decisive in souring many Americans on socialism), the jingoistic pro-war right was already pushing the idea that there was something “un-American” about the movement. After all, the American Socialist Party had actually stuck to the Socialist International’s antiwar principles and opposed the nation’s war effort, unlike the socialist parties in most of the other belligerent nations (the Russians being a notable exception).

Eastman himself subsequently moved hard left during the 1920s, embracing the Twenty-one Conditions for membership in the new Communist International that were rejected by many of the United States’s most prominent socialists, including Debs and Hillquit. Later he would tack to the right, regarding his prior positions as “half-fanatical glassy-mindedness” and dismissing socialism as “a dangerous fairy tale.” By 1955, he was serving on the editorial board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative publication, National Review. His life was often held up as a caution to the 1960s New Leftists, purportedly illustrating the foolishness of their youthful radicalism.

Eastman, who lived to be 86, was in 1918 the only one of this book’s five central characters not to be affected by the worldwide influenza outbreak that killed more people than the war had itself. One of the epidemic’s casualties was Randolph Bourne, the first of the book’s characters to die, at age 32. Bourne’s personal life was dominated by his physical condition: a childhood illness had stunted his growth and twisted his spine, leaving him hunch-backed and short. A college classmate who heard him play the piano marveled at “how beautifully this strange misshapen gnome could make a piano sing and talk.” McCarter reports that, after publishing Bourne’s first essay and inviting him to a club lunch, the editor of The Atlantic cancelled “shortly after Bourne arrived, as he couldn’t bear to be seen with one so deformed.” (The reader’s inevitable curiosity as to his appearance is frustrated by the book’s lack of illustrations.)

The last years of Bourne’s political life were dominated by the war. After the New Republic declared that it was the intellectuals who had brought the nation into the conflict, and that this was to their credit, Bourne wrote that “[o]nly in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world liberalism.” Like a lot of Bourne’s writing, this essay would stand up equally well 50 years later as an indictment of the Kennedy Era’s “best and brightest” who did so much to bring us the disaster in Vietnam. American critic Lewis Mumford considered Bourne “perhaps the only writer who gauged” the “virulence of the animus” set loose by the world war “at its full worth.” As McCarter writes, “Bourne had predicted that leaders stupid enough to start a world war would be too stupid to end it.” It is not hard for contemporary readers to see that judgment as a critique of the state of affairs once called the global War on Terror but now known as everyday reality.

Alice Paul, the one female among McCarter’s five youthful radicals, was also the only one for whom the war always remained a secondary concern. Nothing would divert her attention from the suffrage issue until women actually had won the right to vote. Raised amid progressive ideas in a Quaker family and educated in them at Swarthmore, Paul found her life’s calling at age 22 when she saw crusading suffragette Christabel Pankhurst in action in Great Britain. Quickly enrolled in the movement led by Christabel’s mother Emmeline, Paul was arrested numerous times for disruption of public events. Suffragette strategy was to seek political prisoner status and then engage in hunger strikes; during her last prison stay, Paul was force-fed 55 times.

After this experience, which harmed her health permanently, Paul returned to the United States to recuperate and apply herself further to the cause. She made her mark nationally by helping to mount a march of 8,000 suffragists along Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration. After a congressional resolution was deemed necessary to secure the route, a half million people came to witness the colorful parade, whose way had to be cleared by the Pennsylvania and Massachusetts national guards, the local police having failed to do so. Paul herself soon met with Wilson, taking the new president aback by asking if he did “not understand that the Administration has no right to legislate for currency, tariff, and any other reform without first getting the consent of women to these reforms.”

Four years later, when Russian diplomats from the short-lived Kerensky government arrived at the White House for a meeting on the war effort, two suffragettes unfurled a banner declaring that “America is not a democracy” because “[t]wenty million American women are denied the right to vote.” After suffragists had stood outside the White House for over a year, Wilson endorsed legislation to expand the franchise, which passed the House in early 1918 and the Senate the following year, becoming the 19th Amendment to the Constitution when the requisite number of state legislatures endorsed it in 1920. Of all of McCarter’s subjects, Paul was unquestionably the most successful in achieving her goals, yet he believes that her “absolute single-mindedness” also led her to “evil” compromises with Southern white supremacists who feared that “enfranchising women will create more pressure to enfranchise black people.” In one editorial, Paul even claimed that the “enfranchising of all women will increase the relative power of the white race in a most remarkable way.”

Paul — and the National Woman’s Party she headed — continued the struggle by introducing the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, which finally passed both houses of Congress in 1972 (though it stalled in the state legislatures). When Paul died in 1977 at the age of 92, she was the last of the book’s survivors. Eastman, whose rightward turn had led him to an editorial post at Reader’s Digest (according to McCarter, “the squarest and least radical magazine in America”) had died in 1969. Lippmann, 85 when he departed the planet in 1974, turned out to have one last spark of radicalism left in him. When most establishment liberals lined up behind the “domino theory” that brought us the Vietnam War, Lippmann refused to join in. Lyndon Johnson never forgave him, but Life magazine called him “the embodiment of meaningful opposition.”

With the rise of Donald Trump causing many Americans to scrutinize our politics and history more rigorously than they might otherwise have done, in an earnest search for alternatives to the status quo, McCarter has given us a well-written and compelling introduction to the lives of five young radicals who embarked upon a similar journey of resistance one century ago.

¤

Tom Gallagher is a writer and activist living in San Francisco. He is the author of Sub: My Years Underground in America’s School (2015) and The Primary Route: How the 99 Percent Takes on the Military Industrial Complex (2016).

The post Reform Under the Fire of Radicalism appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ysS3IW

[nhlabornews]

Today in labor history for the week of October 9, 2017

October 09 United Hebrew Trades is organized in New York by shirt maker Morris Hillquit and others. Hillquit would later become leader of the Socialist Party - 1888 Retail stock brokerage Smith Barney reaches a tentative sexual harassment settlement with a group of female employees. The suit charged, among other things, that branch managers asked female workers to remove their tops in exchange for money and one office featured a "boom boom room" where women workers were encouraged to "entertain clients." The settlement was never finalized: a U.S. District Court judge refused to approve the deal because it failed to adequately redress the plaintiff's grievances - 1997 October 10 Six days into a cotton field strike by 18,000 Mexican and Mexican-American workers in Pixley, Calif., four strikers are killed and six wounded; eight growers were indicted and charged with murder - 1933 October 11 The Miners’ National Association is formed in Youngstown, Ohio, with the goal of uniting all miners, regardless of skill or ethnic background - 1873 Nearly 1,500 plantation workers strike Olaa Sugar, on Hawaii’s Big Island - 1948 October 12 Company guards kill at least eight miners who are attempting to stop scabs, Virden, Ill. Six guards are also killed, and 30 persons wounded - 1898 Fourteen miners killed, 22 wounded at Pana, Ill. - 1902 Some 2,000 workers demanding union recognition close down dress manufacturing, Los Angeles - 1933 More than one million Canadian workers demonstrate against wage controls - 1976 October 13 American Federation of Labor votes to boycott all German-made products as a protest against Nazi antagonism to organized labor within Germany - 1934 More than 1,100 office workers strike Columbia University in New York City. The mostly female and minority workers win union recognition and pay increases - 1985 National Basketball Association cancels regular season games for the first time in its 51-year history, during a player lockout.  Player salaries and pay caps are the primary issue.  The lockout lasts 204 days - 1998 Hundreds of San Jose Mercury News newspaper carriers end 4-day walkout with victory - 2000 October 14 Int’l Working People's Association founded in Pittsburgh, Pa. - 1883 The Seafarers Int’l Union (SIU) is founded as an AFL alternative to what was then the CIO’s National Maritime Union.  SIU is an umbrella organization of 12 autonomous unions of mariners, fishermen and boatmen working on U.S.-flagged vessels - 1938 Formal construction began today on what is expected to be a five-year, $3.9 billion replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River.  It's estimated the project would be employing 8,000 building trades workers over the span of the job - 2013 October 15 President Woodrow Wilson signs the Clayton Antitrust Act—often referred to as "Labor’s Magna Carta"—establishing that unions are not "conspiracies" under the law. It for the first time freed unions to strike, picket and boycott employers. In the years that followed, however, numerous state measures and negative court interpretations weakened the law - 1914 —Compiled and edited by David Prosten  

Today in labor history for the week of October 9, 2017 was originally published on NH LABOR NEWS

[politiciandirect]

President Trump's Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

President Trump’s Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

Why are we aimlessly blowing stuff up? Most Popular Getty Mohammed Huwais Mar 30, 2017 You know, if I hadn’t been convinced by very smart people that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the warmonger in last year’s presidential campaign, and by other very smart people that Donald Trump was a non-interventionist America-First-Morris-Hillquit-For-The-New-Millennium kind of guy, I’d swear this administration…

[kheelcenter]

Labor Spotlight ~ Emil Schlesinger

Emil Schlesinger was born on December 27, 1900. Schlesinger graduated from City College in June 1921 and began Columbia Law School in September 1921, graduating in 1924. He worked for Morris Hillquit, the prominent labor lawyer, from 1922-1925 while he was a law student and after graduation until he was able to open his own law office and practice on January 3, 1926, though he continued to do trial work and argue cases in court for Hillquit.

In 1929 he became the general counsel for the Cloakmakers union and in 1933 represented the Joint Board of the Dressmakers union. Schlesinger provided legal counsel to the ILGWU and represented various locals of the union including Local 10 and Local 102. He died January 5, 1992.

For more on Emil Schlesinger, see Collection #6036/018, the Emil Schelsinger Collection.

[kheelcenter]

Labor Spotlight ~ Frederick Umhey

#LaborSpotlight Frederick Umhey

Umhey was born in New York City in 1895. Unlike most officials in the ILGWU, Umhey was never employed as a garment maker. He began working in the office of Morris Hillquit, the labor lawyer, while still a teenager, and remained there until Hillquit's death in 1933. The following year, ILGWU President David Dubinsky appointed Umhey to the newly-created post of Executive Secretary. In that role, he served as administrator for such ILGWU programs as the Union Health Center, Unity House, and the death benefit fund. He also served as secretary to all of the standing committees of the union's General Executive Board. Frederick Umhey died in office in 1955.

For more information, see Collection #5780/005, Frederick F. Umhey, Executive Secretary's Correspondence, 1934-1955.

[spainhistoryteacher]

La formación del Partido Socialista en los Estados Unidos (I)

La formación del Partido Socialista en los Estados Unidos (I)

Buenos días desde Academia Cruellas. Hoy vamos a centrar nuestro comentario sobre la formación del Partido Socialista en los Estados Unidos. Antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial el socialismo norteamericano estaba muy disperso y era muy difuso, tanto en su implantación como en su orientación. Hasta 1916 la fuerza electoral estaba al oeste del Mississippi, en donde predominaban mineros, colonos y…

[politiciandirect]

President Trump's Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

President Trump’s Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

Why are we aimlessly blowing stuff up? Most Popular Getty Mohammed Huwais Mar 30, 2017 You know, if I hadn’t been convinced by very smart people that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the warmonger in last year’s presidential campaign, and by other very smart people that Donald Trump was a non-interventionist America-First-Morris-Hillquit-For-The-New-Millennium kind of guy, I’d swear this administration…

[politiciandirect]

President Trump's Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

President Trump’s Middle East Policy Consists of Bombing People

Why are we aimlessly blowing stuff up? Most Popular Getty Mohammed Huwais Mar 30, 2017 You know, if I hadn’t been convinced by very smart people that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the warmonger in last year’s presidential campaign, and by other very smart people that Donald Trump was a non-interventionist America-First-Morris-Hillquit-For-The-New-Millennium kind of guy, I’d swear this administration…