FIRST: Class notes and a Happy New Year to all. Class notes are to let you know that Benjamin Lind, a very sharp high school student in the Bay Area, has the series on a website, in case you've lost earlier sections or came in late. Go to: http://hometown.aol.com/BentheSavage/Socialism.html. In addition, Joe DeNeen has them on his website (which I will hope to list next time) along with other issues I'd written on and you can get that by writing Joe at: jdeneed@student.flint.umich.edu. John Metz also has the materials on his web site plus a fascinating encyclopedia of the left. I also hope to list his website next time, but his email is: revsocialist@hotmail.com
And again, I have hoped from the beginning to reach younger people who are new to the movement or interested in it. If you have the names of anyone who might be interested, please let them know about it, send any of these posts on to them, or let me know and I'll write them. All of this material is public - there are no limits to its reproduction in whole or part.
This is really a bit broader than simply "class war," and involves the problem of social change and what is involved. I've tried to keep some of my opinions out of this - in discussing how Marxism (not socialism in the broader sense, but Marxism) was an atheist position, I didn't explain why I thought it was actually possible to believe in God and be a Marxist. In my case I do not believe in God, but I consider myself a religious atheist. Now, in taking up social change, I will, aside from this paragraph, say almost nothing about nonviolence. But while Marx saw no alternative to violence, I think revolutionists can look for alternatives. I am actually more modest than it may appear about my own writings, to which I don't attach great importance, but I think my slim little pamphlet "Philosophy of Nonviolence" available for $1 from the Muste Institute should be considered as we look at the issue of social change. (Website: http://www.ajmuste.org).
Marx recognized with genuine and rare clarity that history is bloody for a reason. History is not simply a list of "great men and their battles," but rather of social forces and the conflicts that occur as those forces change. Before the issue of "class war" emerged with the rise of Marx's "proletariat" or what we call the working class, there were other bitter conflicts throughout human history which reflected shifts in power. In Western history alone you had the violent efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to defeat the rise of city states and the new nation states, as well as the exceptionally bloody efforts to suppress the heresy of Martin Luther, efforts that failed and left Christianity divided between Roman Catholics and Protestants. (How ironic that followers of Jesus thought their differences should or could be settled by torture or on the field of battle). The Lutherans, by the way, were no better than the Catholics, for they in turn violently suppressed their own dissidents in the crushing of the peasant uprisings.
Let's take our own Civil War as an example of how the ideology of "abolition" was attached to what at heart was a struggle over economics. The Civil War was bloody beyond our current imagining - more lives were lost (taking the casualties of the Federal government and the Confederacy together) in that war than in ALL the wars this country fought from 1776 through the Korean War. Only by the end of the Vietnam War did the actual total of "dead in battle" from all other wars top the total from the Civil War. Keeping in mind that the US population was very much smaller in 1860 than it is now, this gives some idea of how draining the war was.
No doubt the abolitionist movement played a role in the war, helped to push the South to secede, and certainly gave to the Northern forces a cloak of a great and just cause. I wonder, however, how many American students know that Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation until well into the Civil War, that it applied only to the South States still in insurrection?
One of the deeper issues in our Civil War, the issue that drove the southern states to secede, involved the high tariffs the North imposed on imported goods. Those high tariffs were a great help in developing the young industrial machinery of the North, but they were very painful to the Southern states. The North profited from its trade with the South, which had to pay unusually high rates for finished industrial goods. But the South, which wanted to sell its cotton to Britain, was bitterly opposed to the high tariffs, which meant they could not buy British goods in exchange. It was no surprise that Britain, eager to break the tariff barriers, supported the Confederacy. (It is also one of the great stories of history that it was the British working class, deeply opposed to slavery, which placed a sharp limit on British aid to the Confederacy and made it impossible for Britain to give diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy).
We are all glad that slavery was ended, and I do not mean to diminish the degree to which abolition motivated the North. (If you go to the graveyards in small towns in Vermont you may be stunned, as I was, to find that young men from the far north had volunteered and died in such great numbers - the names listed as fallen in the Civil War are greater by far than those from World War I, or II.) But historians often do not want to look at the economic motives of history.
And even if the Civil War was entirely based on the issue of abolition, what a terrible cost was involved! A cost, by the way, which lasted long after the war was over. The South was plunged into poverty from which it did not recover until World War II. In the 1880's and 1890's it faced widespread starvation, affecting both blacks and whites. In many ways the real issues of slavery were not faced until that day in December 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery.
And let's look at that struggle, the Civil Rights struggle. This is 2002. 1955 seems an awfully long way behind us. How terribly hard - tears jump to my eyes as I write this - to even begin to imagine the human cost, the brutality, the lynchings, the humiliations, which had faced blacks both before 1955 and in the intense period of struggle that began in December of that year. We must never take for granted the shift in racial patterns. It was bought in blood, in jail terms, in beatings.
This is what Marx tried to make clear. New societies do not leap joyfully into existence - like any birth, they are bloody and painful. It is only later, after the birth pains are forgotten, that the mother can laugh and smile at her child.
The conservatives would have us believe that history can be changed by education alone, by legal arguments alone, or by appeals to the better nature of one's oppressors. All of those surely help, but even in the most incredibly nonviolent of struggles - our own Civil Rights movement - many people died, most of them black, some of them white. Many more will bear to the day of their death the marks on their bodies from the beatings.
And if society does not change, if we "leave well enough alone," the violence is still there. When I was in jail in 1961 for 25 days (for refusing to take shelter during the civil defense drills) I was made aware of the violence within the black community. Most of those in jail were black, and almost all of the black prisoners bore the scars of life in the ghetto. Not the scars of police brutality (though I don't question that was common enough), but the long scars from razors and knives, the scars from a fury of violence which young black men did not dare to use against their oppressors, and instead used on each other.
It was not only Marx, of course, but much of the credit must go to him, who pointed out how truly violent our "peaceful" society is. If one reads Dickens' accounts of life in London in the middle of the 19th century one glimpses this. In Ibsen's play, "The Doll's House", set in Norway in the 19th century, when the wife turns, at the end of the play, leaves her husband and walks out the door onto the street, modern audiences may miss (as I did when I first saw the movie based on it) what was involved - there was no work for a single woman at that time, certainly not for a middle class woman with no training. To walk "out the door of her house" meant choosing prostitution as almost the only way to earn a living. Audiences of that day didn't miss the point - there were storms of protest over Ibsen daring to send the wife "out the door." Independence, yes, but at what cost?
Again, I ask we not take for granted the gains we enjoy in women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, etc. These were won by great struggle. If you want to see how "public homosexuals" were treated in London in our own time, rent the film about my friend, the late Quentin Crisp, "Naked Civil Servant."
So when Marx was told that the changes he sought would prove bloody, he said "what else is new?" I am as horrified as anyone at the loss of lives in the Russian Revolution of 1917. But I will not join in denouncing it. First, the actual loss of life in October of that year was very small. (In many ways, October was a "coup" that occured in the broader framework of the Revolution which had begin in April of that year.) The real loss of life did not come from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it came from the "White Russians," the counterrevolutionaries, and the British who backed them. So who does one blame, the Bolsheviks for daring to try to set up a revolutionary society, or their opponents who waged such bloody war against them? When I visited Baku in 1987 on a trip to the then Soviet Union there were major streets named after the Commissars who had been murdered by British forces which had landed in Baku as part of an effort to put down the revolution.
Why, Lenin might ask (and I ask it as well), was it alright for so many millions to die in the trenches of the Western front in World War I, a war fought over economic issues, a war driven by the arms dealers and the ruling classes, but wrong to be willing to risk bloodshed for a revolution? And pacifists should not think we are exempt from the cost of social change. When India gained its independence, though it had gained it through the quite extraordinary methods of Mohandas Gandhi, the long record of Britain's "divide and rule" caused hundreds of thousands to die even as Indian independence was being granted. For Britain, which had played the Muslims against the Hindus in order to rule them both, left a heritage which made it possible for the Muslims to demand their own state (Pakistan), and as India was being born as a free nation, whose independence was won by nonviolence, hundreds of thousands of Indians were dying in communal rioting, as what had been "one nation" was divided at birth into Muslim and Hindu.
Thus, when we are attacked for advocating "class war" my response, as a Marxist, is that we didn't choose the war. It was thrust upon us. In trying to change society we choose resistance, we choose social change, and in making that choice, we know that there will be lives lost and a price to be paid. We know, too, that if we do not act, if we are complicit in maintaining the "calm" of the existing social order, it is one which in our own time has caused such loss of life in Indochina, in Central America, in Chile, in the Middle East, in Africa.
In choosing resistance, we affirm the value of human life.
Next time: Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat