Parker and Peter join August Nimtz, the author of Lenin’s Electoral Strategy (now reprinted as The Ballot, The Streets– or Both) to discuss how Lenin and the Bolsheviks approached electoral politics and what we can learn from them to apply to today’s situation. They talk about the origins of Nimtz’s research project as an attempt to refute the point that electoralism must mean programmatic compromises, the influence on Lenin of Marx and Engels’ 1850 address to the Communist League, and how Lenin’s relation to the ballot depended on the temperature of the street and meant alternating boycotts with participation on an independent ballot line. They pivot towards analyzing the behavior and discipline of the Bolshevik faction including the consistent attempts to build an alliance with the peasantry, and the contrast between the Bolsheviks and the pre-WW1 German Social-Democratic Party, and the role of democratic centralism in disciplining parliamentary factions. They end with a reflection of what the ballot means today.
Chris Wright details the popular campaign for the Communist authored Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, a moment in US labor history that is overshadowed by Roosevelt’s more conservative New Deal programs.
Historiography on the Great Depression in the U.S. evinces a lacuna. Despite all the scholarship on political radicalism in this period, especially the activities of the Communist Party, one of the most remarkable manifestations of such radicalism has tended to be ignored: the bill that was introduced in Congress in 1934, ’35, and ’36, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill (called the Workers’ Social Insurance Bill in its 1936 version). This bill, originally authored by the Communist Party, was noteworthy in two respects: it was both very radical and very popular. In brief, it provided unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, race, or political affiliation) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week, plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages. Commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organizations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. In its 1936 form, it was particularly generous: it included insurance for widows, mothers, and the self-employed, appropriated $5 billion for the year 1936, established a Workers’ Social Insurance Commission to administer the system, and elaborated in much more detail than earlier iterations on how the system would be financed and managed.
Despite, or rather because of, its radicalism, the Workers’ Bill attracted broad support across the country. To quote its advocates, by early 1935 it had been endorsed by “more than 2,400 locals [eventually about 3,500], and the regular conventions of five International and six State bodies of the American Federation of Labor; practically every known unemployed organization; thousands of railroad and other independent local and central bodies, fraternal lodges, veterans’, farmers’, Negro, youth, women’s and church groups…[and] municipal and county governmental bodies in seventy cities, towns and counties,” in addition to millions of individual citizens who signed postcards and petitions in support of it.1 All this support was not enough to get the bill passed in Congress, although in 1935 it was reported on favorably by the House Labor Committee. In fact, its provisions were so terrifying to the business class that it never had a chance of becoming law. What is interesting, however, is the momentum that developed behind it, despite what amounted to a virtual conspiracy of silence from the press and extreme hostility from conservative congressmen, business constituencies, and the Roosevelt administration.
Given the political and social significance of the Workers’ Bill, it is unclear why historians have largely ignored it. In a book called Voices of Protest (published in 1983), Alan Brinkley does not devote a single sentence to it. Neither does Robert McElvaine in his standard history, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (1984). David Kennedy devotes half a sentence to it in volume one of his 2004 history of the Depression and World War II, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. Likewise, neither Ira Katznelson nor Jefferson Cowie mention it in their recent popular books, respectively Fear Itself (2013) and The Great Exception (2016). One reason for the neglect may be that the mainstream press tended to ignore it at the time, instead giving far more attention to the less radical—but also, arguably, less popular—Townsend Plan, an emphasis that historians have followed. In any case, in this article, I intend to rectify the historiographical oversight by telling the story of the Workers’ Bill—from the perspective of the popular enthusiasm it inspired—and arguing for its importance.
The history of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill (in its various forms) began in the summer of 1930, when the Communist Party proposed its first iteration—an incredible $25 per week to the unemployed and $5 for each dependent—and immediately proceeded to agitate on its behalf. The reception that the unemployed gave this campaign suggests, contrary to what historians have sometimes argued, that it did not take long at all for a large proportion of the Depression’s victims to reject the voluntarist ideology of the 1920s and the Hoover administration in favor of massive government intervention in society for the purpose of income redistribution. By late summer of 1930, in the very early stages of the Depression, the Daily Worker was already reporting mass petition signings and continual demonstrations for the bill in scores of cities.2
In these early months, much of the agitation for the proposed bill was being done by the Unemployed Councils. We should recall that the Councils were being organized already in January and February 1930 and that urban areas of the country were in ferment a mere three or four months after the stock market crash of October 1929. Almost every day the Daily Worker reported mass meetings and marches on city halls in cities from Buffalo to Chicago to Chattanooga and beyond, by the spring spreading even to the Deep South. In the next few years the mass protests, including hunger marches, “eviction riots,” collective thefts, bootlegging, relief demonstrations, occupation of legislative chambers, etc., would surge from coast to coast; “hardly a day passed,” the historian Albert Prago writes, “without some major demonstration taking place in some town, city, or state capital.” As historians such as Roy Rosenzweig and Randi Storch have argued, at the forefront of much of this turbulence were the Communist Unemployed Councils.3
Even in February and March 1930, before the CP had officially proposed the Workers’ Bill, enormous demonstrations in cities nationwide featured the demand for “Work or Wages,” meaning either give us work or give us relief at full wage-rates. This demand already anticipated the Workers’ Bill, and within months evolved into the even more radical provisions of that bill. As the Unemployed Councils grew in the early 1930s, so did awareness of and support for the Communist bill.
The pace of actions died down a bit in the fall of 1930 but picked up again in December and January, in preparation for February 10, 1931, when 150 delegates elected from around the country were going to present the bill and its hundreds of thousands of signatures to Congress. Requests for signature lists flooded into the New York office of the National Campaign Committee for Unemployment Insurance from not only the large industrial centers but even towns and farms in the South and West, and Alaska. Metalworkers in Chicago Heights got involved in the campaign; railroad workers and section hands in Reno, Nevada signed petitions; letters like the following were sent to the Daily Worker:
Let me know what I can do to help carry forward the fight for unemployment insurance? This is the greatest need at this hour. I am the only reader of the Daily Worker here in Ashby, Minn., and am one of four Communist votes cast here in the elections. I am a woman of 60 years, living on land; I pass out all my Daily Workers to neighbors and am getting new subscribers. Will help all I can to get signatures for the bill.4
Countless united front conferences of workers’ organizations took place in cities around the country, for instance Gary, Indiana, where the keynote of one conference was sounded by an African-American steelworker and veteran of World War I who said, in part, “It’s no use going way over to France to fight. We can demand things here just as good as we can there, fight here just as good as there, and if need be, die here just as good as there… Let’s fight for ourselves, right here, now.” They fought in Charlotte, North Carolina; Ambridge, Pennsylvania; Wheeling, West Virginia; Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, and San Antonio; Hartford, Buffalo, and San Francisco. City hunger marches were so numerous in these months that the Daily Worker could not keep track of them. The Workers’ Bill, of course, was not the only or even the most pressing issue addressed by all these actions, but it did figure prominently among their demands. On the big day, February 10, demonstrations and state hunger marches occurred in at least 63 cities as the delegation in Washington, D.C. interrupted a session in the House and was forcibly ejected by police. In St. Paul, Minnesota, a certain type of action that was already becoming rather common: demonstrators broke through police lines around the state capitol and occupied the legislative chambers, announcing that they would not leave until the legislature had acted on their demands for relief and unemployment insurance.5
In short, arguably even before churches, charities, and benefit societies had conclusively demonstrated their inability to meet the economic crisis, well over a million people nationwide were demanding that the federal government become in effect a radically social democratic welfare state. In general, the statist orientation that Lizabeth Cohen discusses in Making a New Deal, which often was an extremely collectivist orientation (as embodied, e.g., in the Workers’ Bill), did not have to wait for Roosevelt and the New Deal to act as midwives, as Cohen and other historians seem to suggest. It emerged organically on the grassroots level, stimulated both by radical groups and by suffering people’s sense that society, with all its abundant resources possessed ultimately by the federal government, had to do something to end the epidemic of unjust suffering. Roosevelt and the New Deal were products of the country’s growing collectivism more than they were causes of it. And for many millions of Americans, they never went far enough.
Support for the Workers’ Bill grew during the next few years, with the help of continued demonstrations, petitions, postcard campaigns, and the efforts of radical unionists to enlist union members’ support. Hunger marchers in many states demanded that legislatures pass state versions of the bill. To take one example, Illinois saw at least four such marches to Springfield between 1931 and 1933, at the culmination of which a delegate delivered a speech before the legislature requesting enactment of the bill. The two national hunger marches Communists organized in December 1931 and 1932 gave publicity to the bill; on February 4, 1932, which the Communist Party had dubbed National Unemployment Insurance Day, hundreds of thousands of people around the country demonstrated for it. Petitions garnered thousands of signatures: in Chicago, for instance, during just three weeks in March 1932, over 30,000 people—in factories, AFL locals, public shelters, and neighborhoods—signed the bill, in preparation for May 2, when 200 workers “from all important industries from every section of America” were again going to present the petitions to Congress. Across the country, 1933 saw the organizing of numerous conferences of unemployed groups to coordinate the campaign for unemployment insurance and to prepare for the CP’s National Convention Against Unemployment in February 1934.6
Meanwhile, workers were waging their own battles in their unions, trying to get members, unions, and federations on record as supporting national unemployment insurance, preferably in the form of the Workers’ Bill. By late 1930, despite the opposition of the AFL (which was committed to the anti-government principle of voluntarism), many constituent organizations had called for legislation, including eight state federations of labor, the central labor bodies of nine cities, and the American Federation of Teachers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the ILGWU, the United Textile Workers, the United Hebrew Trades, and a number of other Internationals. Public pressure continued to mount in 1931, as 52 bills for unemployment insurance were introduced (unsuccessfully) in state legislatures. But at the 1931 AFL convention, the leadership was still able to smother the growing demand that the Federation change its voluntarist position. A rank-and-file movement, therefore, was organized in January 1932, when Carpenters Local 2717 in New York City called a conference of AFL unions. Representatives of 19 locals passed a resolution to appoint a committee—the AFL Trade Union Committee for Unemployment Insurance and Relief (AFLTU Committee)—that would gauge sentiment and build support among unions for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill. In part because of its activities—and despite its being viciously persecuted by the national office as Communist—by the spring of 1934 over 2,000 locals and many central bodies had joined in its endorsement of the Communist-authored bill that Representative Ernest Lundeen had just introduced in Congress.7
The head of the AFLTU Committee was Louis Weinstock, a Communist member of the Painters’ Union in New York City. To advocate for the Workers’ Bill, which became the Lundeen Bill in 1934, he conducted a national tour that year, in each city contacting unionists who helped him organize meetings that hundreds of workers attended. Some cities had their own local AFL Committee for Unemployment Insurance, while in others Weinstock helped create one (or several). In reports to the Communist Party, he made some telling observations about the left-wing militancy of the local unions he encountered, as contrasted with the conservatism of the Internationals to which they belonged. For example, while some locals insisted that unemployed members should be able to remain in good standing even if they could not pay dues, Internationals were more likely to want to purge their out-of-work members. In many cities, building trades unions followed the practice of the Unemployed Councils in electing small relief committees to take members to a charity office and demand more relief. They often even united with the Councils in these activities, a tendency that, from the perspective of higher union officials, was growing to “alarming proportions” all over the country. Internationals, on the other hand, usually followed the conservative AFL line in its absolute rejection of cooperation with Communists, to the point that members who participated in Unemployed Council demonstrations risked being expelled from the union. In a case in Minneapolis, for instance, a local refused to accept the decision of its International that one of its members be expelled for having taken part in a Communist demonstration. The International replied that unless the union expelled her, it would have its charter revoked.8
But already by 1932, sentiment in favor of unemployment insurance had swept the large majority of rank-and-file unionists, in addition, of course, to the long-term unemployed whether unionized or not. Members were radicalizing, growing friendlier with Communists in their disgust at the inaction of union leaders. To quote Mauritz Hallgren, a keen observer of the labor movement,
although in the early years of the crisis they had tended to drift away from the unions, [jobless members] were in 1932 taking an increasingly active part in union affairs. The fear was expressed that in some organizations the unemployed might even come into control of the bureaucratic machinery. That they exercised a tremendous influence over local unions and city and state central bodies was seen from the avalanche of radical demands that poured in upon the quarterly meeting of the Federation’s executive council at Atlantic City in July [1932]. The rank-and-file workers, whether unemployed or not, were no longer to be put off with windy promises of action…9
After the powerful United Mine Workers endorsed the principle of government action at its convention in early 1932—which followed endorsements in 1931 by the Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Molders’ Union, and many others—the AFL’s executive council saw the writing on the wall. It could prevaricate and postpone no longer; it had to accept, and propose at the next national convention, a version of compulsory unemployment insurance, thereby accepting the idea of government “interference” in the affairs of organized labor. But it certainly did not endorse the Workers’ Bill, or even the principle of federal action; instead, at the 1932 convention in November, the executive council recommended that the AFL endorse the idea of state unemployment insurance. Many of the delegates present considered this proposal too conservative, but nevertheless the convention approved it by an “overwhelming margin.” Not content with this victory, the AFLTU Committee continued its activism in the following years.10
As stated a moment ago, the growing support for the Workers’ Bill finally managed to get it introduced in Congress in early 1934, when Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party sponsored it in the House (as H.R. 7598). While it fared even worse in this session of Congress than it was to fare in 1935, its presence at the federal level increased the momentum of its popularity among the working class. In Chicago, for example, leaders of the conservative local Federation of Labor began to have less success than in previous years preventing unions from endorsing it, as locals of the Railway Conductors, Railway Clerks, Machinists, Painters, Metal Polishers, School Custodians, Women’s Upholsterers, Granite Cutters, Millinery Workers, and many other unions sent delegates to a Communist-sponsored unemployment insurance conference in the summer of 1934. In July, representatives of 43,000 workers who were organized in fraternal and benevolent societies (specifically, in the Federation of Fraternal Organizations in Struggle for Unemployment Insurance) attended a hearing before the Chicago City Council to demand that that body support the bill; committees also visited aldermen in their wards to demand the same. In September, at another conference in Chicago, delegates from the National Unemployed Leagues, the Illinois Workers Alliance, the Eastern Federation of Unemployed and Emergency Workers Union, the Wisconsin Federation of Unemployed Leagues, and the Fort Wayne Unemployed League—in the aggregate claiming a membership of 750,000—endorsed the measure. Similar conferences occurred in other regions of the country.11
In January 1934, another organization had been founded that was to play an important role in lending academic respectability to the bill: the Inter-Professional Association for Social Insurance (IPA). While not officially affiliated with the Communist Party, it had close ties to leading Party members and coordinated its campaign for passage of the Lundeen Bill with organizations of the Left. Within a year it had dozens of chapters and organizing committees around the country, made up of both individual professionals and representatives of groups—nurses, physicians, actors, teachers, engineers, architects, authors, etc. The distinguished social worker Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation led an army of her colleagues in supporting the bill and, in some cases, proselytizing for it in the press and before Congress. Economists and lawyers associated with the IPA testified to the economic soundness and constitutionality of the measure, especially in 1935, when Lundeen reintroduced it as H.R. 2827. Left-wing professionals considered it vastly superior to the Wagner-Lewis bill of 1934 and 1935—what became the Social Security Act—a professor at Smith College, for example, damning the latter as “a proposal to set up little privileged groups in the sea of misery who would be content to sit on their small islands and watch the others drown.” The Lundeen Bill (or Workers’ Bill) was certainly not without flaws, including its vagueness and, arguably, the financial burden it would impose on the country, but evidently, its Communist-style radicalism was so appreciated that even experts in their field were willing to overlook its defects.12
Significantly, it was in fact far more extensive than the Soviet Union’s measures for unemployment and social insurance. While the Lundeen Bill provided (among other things) for unemployment benefits for an unlimited period of time equal to 100 percent of wages—or much more, since an unskilled laborer with a wife and four children who might be lucky to get $16 a week would get $25 if unemployed!13—in Soviet Russia only about 35 percent of the customary wage was paid, and that for a limited time. Moreover, the various forms of insurance that H.R. 2827 would establish (unemployment, old age, maternity, disability, and industrial injury) were to be administered by councils of workers and their representatives, thus embodying a “workers’ democracy” that the Soviet system only lived up to on paper. In effect, then, the millions of Americans who advocated the measure desired a system that was, in some respects, more authentically communist/socialist than the Soviet one.14
A few days after Lundeen reintroduced his bill on January 3, 1935, the National Congress for Unemployment and Social Insurance was held in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Auditorium. Organized by the CP and its many allies, the congress comprised almost 3,000 delegates who had come by truck, jalopy, rail, box car, and on foot from every region of the country and forty states. To quote one historian, “cowboys from Colorado and Wyoming, black sharecroppers from Alabama, Texas oil hands, Florida housewives, skilled and unskilled workers, employed and unemployed” in the dead of winter made the pilgrimage to the nation’s seat of power, guided by visions of an egalitarian society, conscious that in their aggregate they directly represented millions and indirectly represented well over half the country. Unions of all types—professional, AFL-affiliated, independent; fraternal organizations and political groups; farm organizations and shop delegates; women’s groups, church groups, veterans’ groups, and unemployed groups—hundreds of such organizations, in an anticipation of the Popular Front, managed to overcome the congenital sectarianism of the Left and call as one for unprecedented social democracy. A few of the scores of lesser-known unemployed groups that were represented included the Chinese Unemployed Alliance, the Farmer Labor Union, the Italian Unemployed Groups, the Relief Workers League, the United Mine Workers Unemployment Council, the Workers Union of the World, the Right-To-Live Club, and the Dancers Emergency Association. The National Urban League, which endorsed the bill, also sent delegates.15
The legendary socialist and feminist Mother Bloor, who addressed the congress, pithily summed up its significance to a reporter from the Washington Post: “‘The congress is a success. It’s proved a big crowd of people can break down barriers of race, social position, political opinions, and convictions for a common cause. Why, there are white people and yellow people and black people out there.’ She nodded toward the mass meeting going on in the auditorium. ‘There are Communists and Socialists and Republicans. There’s even some Democrats.’” At the Congressional hearings on H.R. 2827, the chairman of the congress stated, not implausibly, that it had “formed the broadest and most representative congress of the American people ever held in the United States.”16
The Congressional hearings themselves were noteworthy. While the executive secretary of the IPA may have exaggerated when he wrote, “The record of the hearings on H.R. 2827 is one of the most challenging ever placed before the Congress of the United States and probably the most unique document ever to appear in the Congressional Record,” that judgment is understandable. Eighty witnesses testified: industrial workers, farmers, veterans, professional workers, African-Americans, women, the foreign-born, and youth. “Probably never in American history,” an editor of the Nation wrote, “have the underprivileged had a better opportunity to present their case before Congress.” The aggregate of the testimonies amounted to a systematic indictment of American capitalism and the New Deal, and an impassioned defense of the radical alternative under consideration. Witness after witness described the harrowing suffering that they and the thousands they represented (in each case) were enduring, and condemned the Wagner-Lewis bill as a sham. From the representative of the American Youth Congress, which encompassed over two million people, to the representative of the United Council of Working-Class Women, which had 10,000 members, each testimony fleshed out the eminently “class-conscious” point of view of the people back home who had “gather[ed] up nickels and pennies which they [could] poorly spare” in order to send someone to plead their case before Congress. Most of the Congressmen on the Labor subcommittee they were addressing were strikingly sympathetic.17
For example, when Herbert Benjamin, one of the leaders of the CP, had this to say on press coverage (or the lack thereof) of the Lundeen Bill—
So much has been said in the last few weeks about the Townsend plan [for old-age pensions]. I have discussed this question with a number of Members [of Congress], and they tell me that, outside of California, they received not a single postcard on the Townsend plan, but they received thousands of cards from all over the United States on the Lundeen Bill, asking for the enactment of this bill. Yet the newspapers, by reason of the fact that they really fear this measure and do not fear the Townsend plan, knowing that the Townsend plan can be a very good red herring to draw attention away from social insurance, have given publicity to the Townsend plan, and have yet avoided very studiously any attention to the workers’ unemployment and social-insurance measure—
the chairman of the subcommittee, Matthew Dunn, interrupted to say,
I want to substantiate the statement you just made about the Townsend bill and about this bill. Now, I represent the Thirty-fourth District in Pennsylvania, which is a very large district. May I say that I do not believe I have received over a half dozen letters to support the Townsend bill; however, I have received quite a number of letters and cards from the State of California. In addition to that, I have received many letters and cards from all over the country asking me to give my utmost support in behalf of the Lundeen bill, H.R. 2827.18
Incidentally, Benjamin’s complaint about press coverage was justified. Overwhelming press attention was devoted to the much less radical—and less economically sound—Townsend Plan, while virtually no coverage was granted the Lundeen Bill except during and after the subcommittee’s hearings, and even then it was mostly local papers that covered it. According to the executive secretary of the IPA, “forty-three news releases to all the news agencies and newspapers of the major cities during the course of two weeks [i.e., during the hearings] were, with few exceptions, suppressed, although in those outlying districts where organization has made the demands of the workers more articulate, some papers carried workers’ testimony as front page news.”19 As mentioned earlier, historians have followed newspapers’ lead by tending to ignore the Lundeen Bill and focus on the Townsend Plan, in some cases condescendingly interpreting the popularity of the latter’s provisions as evidence of the credulousness and simple-mindedness of the American public.20 This emphasis is unfortunate in that (1) it was the press that was significantly responsible for propagating the Townsend Plan (presumably to divert attention from the Lundeen Bill), and (2) the supposedly simple-minded public had the organizational sophistication and political savvy to build momentum behind a more reasonable bill premised on both the reality and the valorization of class conflict, not only without help from the press but despite active hostility from nearly all sectors of power—the press, the AFL, the Roosevelt administration, reactionary Southern landowners and politicians, and big business in general. Under such conditions, for example, organizers’ ability to get over five million signatures on their petitions was no mean achievement.21
Admittedly, compared to the number of signatures they likely could have collected had they possessed more resources, five million is not terribly impressive. In the spring of 1935, the New York Post conducted a poll of its readers after printing the contents of the Lundeen, the Townsend, and the Wagner-Lewis bills. Out of 1,391 votes cast, 1,209 readers supported the first, 157 the second, 14 the third, and 7 none of them. Of the 1,073 respondents who were employed, 957 supported the Lundeen Bill, 100 the Townsend Bill, 7 the Wagner-Lewis Bill, and 5 none. It would not be outlandish to infer from these findings that, had they known of the contents of the bills, a majority of working-class (and perhaps even many middle-class) Americans would have preferred Lundeen’s Communist-written one. This is also suggested by the enormous number of letters congressmen received on the measure, such as this one sent to Lundeen:
The reason I am writing you is that we Farmers [and] Industrial workers feel that you are the only Congressman and Representative that is working for our interest. We have analyzed the Wagner-Lewis Bill [and] also [the] Townsend Bill. But the Lundeen H.R. (2827) is the only bill that means anything for our class… The people all over the country are [waking] up to the facts that the two old Political Parties are owned soul, mind [and] body by the Capitalist Class.22
Feeling the pressure of this mass support, both the subcommittee and the House Labor Committee voted in favor of H.R. 2827 that spring, making it the first unemployment insurance plan in U.S. history to be recommended by a committee. It had no chance in the House, though. The Rules Committee refused to send it to the floor, although it allowed Lundeen to propose it as an amendment to the Social Security Bill (as a substitute for the unemployment insurance provisions in that bill). It was defeated in April by a vote of 204 to 52.23
As far as its advocates were concerned, the fight was not over. Throughout the spring and summer of 1935, the flood of endorsements did not stop. The first national convention of rank-and-file social workers endorsed it in February; the Progressive Miners of America followed, along with scores of local unions and such ethnic societies as the Italian-American Democratic Organization of New York (with 235,000 members) and the Slovak-American Political Federation of Youngstown, Ohio. Virtually identical state versions of H.R. 2827 were, or already had been, introduced in the legislatures of California, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other states. Conferences of unions and fraternal organizations were called in a number of states, including the Deep South, to plan further campaigns for the Workers’ Bill. That year’s May Day was one of the largest in American history, “monster demonstrations” (to quote the New York Times)of tens of thousands taking place in New York City, for example; and in many cities, included among the marchers were united fronts of church groups, workers clubs, fraternal lodges, and Communist and Socialist groups parading under banners demanding the passage of H.R. 2827. While the majority of AFL unions never endorsed the bill, perhaps because William Green and the executive council were exerting intense pressure on them not to do so, it is probable that most of the rank and file supported it.24
In January 1936, Ernest Lundeen and Republican Senator of North Dakota Lynn Frazier introduced in their respective houses of Congress a more sophisticated version of the bill, which the Inter-Professional Association had written. Again it was endorsed by unions, labor councils, and other institutions, including the 1936 convention of the EPIC movement in California. The National Joint Action Committee for Genuine Social Insurance, which had grown out of the 1935 Congress for Unemployment and Social Insurance, coordinated a nationwide campaign. In New York, “flying squads” from the Fraternal Federation for Social Insurance visited lodges and fraternal organizations throughout the city (e.g., Knights of Pythias, Woodmen of the World, Workmen’s Circle, etc.) to secure their support. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and several other cities, united-front conferences and committees were organized to campaign for the bill. The hearings before the Senate Labor Committee in April resembled the hearings on H.R. 2827, with academics, social workers, unionists, and farmers testifying as to the inadequacy of the recently passed Social Security Act and the necessity of the Frazier-Lundeen Bill. A representative of the National Committee on Rural Social Planning spoke for millions of agricultural workers, sharecroppers, tenants, and small owners when he opined that this bill was “the only one which is likely to check the fascist terror now riding the fields” in the South (directed against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union).25
The fascist terror continued unchecked, however, for the bill did not even make it out of committee. After its dismal fate in 1936, it was never introduced again.
From a certain perspective, one might say that the Workers’ Bill, in its radicalism and collectivism, departed from traditions of “Americanism,” whatever that word is taken to mean. From another perspective, however, we might see the bill as something like the apotheosis of radical collectivist strains that for many decades had been embedded in American popular culture. The class solidarity it embodied in its frontal attack on fundamental institutions of capitalism—private appropriation of wealth, determination of wages by the market, maintenance of an insecure army of the unemployed—has perhaps just as much claim to the title of “Americanism” as anything else, for U.S history abounds with the solidarity of the wealthy and the solidarity of the poor. It so happens that with regard to the Workers’ Bill, as on so many other occasions, the solidarity of the wealthy triumphed—because, as always, of the greater resources at the disposal of the wealthy.
In any event, it should be clear from the foregoing discussion that the Workers’ Bill deserves more attention from historians than it has received, not only as an intrinsically interesting phenomenon but also because its popularity suggests that “ordinary Americans” in the Depression years were a good deal more radical than historiography has tended to assume. If a significant proportion of Americans favored the Workers’ Bill, to that extent they must have been quite dissatisfied by the comparative conservatism of the Roosevelt administration.
On one hand, there is much truth to Jefferson Cowie’s argument, for example, in The Great Exception, that the comparative radicalism of the New Deal moment in American political history was a result of very specific and contingent circumstances, such as the damming of the flood of immigration to the U.S. in the early 1920s. Whether people would have expressed so much support for the explicitly class-conscious Workers’ Bill in the absence of these circumstances is an open question. It is quite possible that the “labor aristocracy” of white men in particular would have shunned such a bill in the 1920s or earlier, given its premise of cross-racial and cross-ethnic class solidarity. Nor is it very likely that by the late 1940s, in a political environment of increasing conservatism, an ever-more-economically-secure working class would have expressed the same enthusiasm for the Lundeen Bill that it did during the 1930s, when radical horizons opened up and a new world briefly seemed possible.
On the other hand, I can detect no significant differences in support for the bill between races, genders, or regions of the country: women and men, white and Black, industrial worker and sharecropper, Northerner and Southerner signed petitions, attended rallies, and organized meetings to advocate for a legislative measure they saw as a final guarantee of economic security. Its promise to radically disrupt the American political economy was no bar to their advocacy; indeed, it is more apt to say that such disruption is precisely what attracted them to the measure.
The near-universality of working-class support is suggested by an unusual incident in March 1936, which may serve as a coda to the story of the Workers’ Bill. In order to advertise its liberal position on freedom of speech, CBS invited Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party, to speak for fifteen minutes (at 10:45 p.m.) on a national radio broadcast, with the understanding that he would be answered the following night by zealous anti-Communist Congressman Hamilton Fish. Browder seized the opportunity for a national spotlight and appealed to “the majority of the toiling people” to establish a national Farmer-Labor Party that would be affiliated with the Communist Party, though it “would not yet take up the full program of socialism, for which many are not yet prepared.” He even declared that Communists’ ultimate aim was to remake the U.S. “along the lines of the highly successful Soviet Union”: once they had the support of a majority of Americans, he said, “we will put that program into effect with the same firmness, the same determination, with which Washington and the founding fathers carried through the revolution that established our country, with the same thoroughness with which Lincoln abolished chattel slavery.”26
Reactions to Browder’s talk were revealing: according to both CBS and the Daily Worker, they were almost uniformly positive. CBS immediately received several hundred responses praising Browder’s talk, and the Daily Worker, whose New York address Browder had mentioned on the air, received thousands of letters. The following are representative:
Chattanooga, Tennessee: “If you could have listened to the people I know who listened to you, you would have learned that your speech did much to make them realize the importance of forming a Farmer-Labor Party. I am sure that the 15 minutes into which you put so much that is vitally important to the American people was time used to great advantage. Many people are thanking you, I know.”
Evanston, Illinois: “Just listened to your speech tonight and I think it was the truest talk I ever heard on the radio. Mr. Browder, would it not be a good thing if you would have an opportunity to talk to the people of the U.S.A. at least once a week, for 30 to 60 minutes? Let’s hear from you some more, Mr. Browder.”
Springfield, Pennsylvania: “I listened to your most interesting speech recently on the radio. I would be much pleased to receive your articles on Communism. Although I am an American Legion member I believe you are at least sincere in your teachings.”
Bricelyn, Minnesota: “Your speech came in fine and it was music to the ears of another unemployed for four years. Please send me full and complete data on your movement and send a few extra copies if you will, as I have some very interested friends—plenty of them eager to join up, as is yours truly.”
Harrold, South Dakota: “Thank you for the fine talk over the air tonight. It was good common sense and we were glad you had a chance to talk over the air and glad to hear someone who had nerve enough to speak against capitalism.”
Sparkes, Nebraska: “Would you send me 50 copies of your speech over the radio last night? I would like to give them to some of my neighbors who are all farmers.”
Arena, New York: “Although I am a young Republican (but good American citizen) I enjoyed listening to your radio speech last evening. I believe you told the truth in a convincing manner and I failed to see where you said anything dangerous to the welfare of the American people.”
Julesburg, Colorado: “Heard your talk… It was great. Would like a copy of same, also other dope on your party. It is due time we take a hand in things or there will be no United States left in a few more years. Will be looking forward for this dope and also your address.”27
In general, the main themes of the letters were questions like, “Where can I learn more about the Communist Party?”, “How can I join your Party?”, and “Where is your nearest headquarters?” Some people sent money in the hope that it would facilitate more broadcasts. The editors of the Daily Worker plaintively asked their readers, “Isn’t it time we overhauled our old horse-and-buggy methods of recruiting? While we are recruiting by ones and twos, aren’t we overlooking hundreds?” One can only imagine how many millions of people in far-flung regions would have flocked to the Communist banner had Browder and William Z. Foster been permitted the national radio audience that Huey Long and the wildly popular “radio priest” Father Coughlin were.
But such is the history of workers and the unemployed in the U.S.: elite efforts to suppress the political agenda and the voices of the downtrodden have all too often succeeded, thereby wiping out the memory of popular struggles. Indeed, to the extent that anti-statism and “individualism” have reigned in American political culture (as Cowie, among many others, emphasizes), it is largely because opposing tendencies and traditions have been actively suppressed, even violently crushed. But if we can resurrect such stories as that of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, they may prove of use in our own time of troubles, as new struggles against political oppression are born.
For the first installment of our in-depth study of Soviet Science, Djamil, Donald and Rudy sit down to discuss the scientific institutions and the practice of Science in the early Soviet Union up to the conclusion of the Stalin Revolution. They start off with a survey of the Tsarist Academy, and what kind of structures and specialists the Bolsheviks inherited. The conversation continues with the changing ways the Bolsheviks related to specialists during the Civil War and the NEP, and how they were trying to assimilate the culture of specialists when they realized it was impossible to seize cultural power, and how this relates to the present-day debate around the Professional Managerial Class. They then discuss the role of the two anti-specialist trials that kick off the Stalin revolution: the Shakhty affair and the Industrial Party Trial, and how that served to strengthen Stalin’s hand in taking over the politbureau and resulted in a culture of blaming specialists for the failure of five-year plans. They finish by analyzing the resulting academy and intelligentsia of the 1930s, fully loyal to Stalin, and how that sets the stage for the rise of someone like Lysenko.
Further reading:
Loren R. Graham – Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (1993)
Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front (1992)
Kendall E. Bailes – Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (1978)
Simon Ings – Stalin and the Scientists (2019)
James T. Andrews – Science for the Masses (2003)
Stay tuned for episodes on Lysenko, the relation of dialectical materialism to the sciences, physics, chemistry, computing, and space travel.
The 1970s were a time of turmoil and transition. Connor Harney gives a Marxist account of this pivotal decade.
Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)
Nostalgia for the Past
As we enter a new decade that will inevitably wear the birthmarks of the last, it seems of utmost importance to reflect on the current trajectory of the left in the United States. There are many reasons to both lament the state of the left in the U.S. and to remain hopeful of its potential. While it is uncertain if the current popularity of socialism, the upswing in labor militancy across 2018 and 2019, and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run will provide a foundation for a lasting movement that will outlast the current electoral cycle, the seeds do seem to be there. At the same time, it is not enough to expect them to sprout on their own. The seeds of the emergent socialist movement must be tended to, and must be provided an environment where they can flourish. For us, this means that we must not limit our study to the fertile grounds of revolutionary history. It is not enough to just survey 1789, 1871, 1917, 1959, or 1968, and imagine that it is only those moments that can help plot the path forward.
First of all, this approach often leads to a politically determined position that ignores the economic conditions of those moments, and second, it assumes that revolution is just around the corner—an understandably optimistic assumption that in the long term douses the flames of youthful militancy and burns out even the most committed. Even so, it is still wrong to outright dismiss the revolutionary potential of the moment the way that many on the social-democratic left often do. Socialists, communists, and others on the radical left should be at the same time prepared for both immediate insurrection and the slow process of movement building: be it by preparing the ground for a new working-class party or by rebuilding and forging new trade unions and other organizations of proletarian solidarity. In doing so, we can ensure that Santiago and Paris are not just burned to the ground over a repressed discontent with the status quo.
Our frustration should be channeled towards rebuilding these cities in our own image out of the ashes. Many within the embryonic socialist left, especially within the “democratic socialists”, but also among the purportedly more radical trends like Marxist-Leninists or Trotskyists look to the period of the 1930s and 1940s to draw inspiration from. In particular, they look at the New Deal and welfare states constructed contemporaneously in Europe, and arguably the Soviet bloc as well, and focus on the social leveling and the higher standard of living for working people as an aspiration in a time of absurd levels of wealth inequality. The sentiment seems to be “if it worked then, it can work now.” But good Marxists should always be uneasy applying the traditions of the past whole cloth to the present. As Marx famously quipped in the Eighteenth Brumaire, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”1
The specific conditions that allowed radicals to push for reforms to the capitalist order are entirely different from those present at the current moment. When the pieces of legislation that made up the New Deal were passed, the left was at the peak of its strength and was acting in the context of a worldwide depression that grounded capitalist economies to a halt—alongside the memory of the October Revolution which still haunted the minds of the ruling class like a waking nightmare. Casting aside the question of whether a Green New Deal or Medicare for All is possible under current conditions, we should ask instead whether or not such reforms are enough? The answer to such a question is to be found not in the period of the New Deal or Great Society programs, but in the crises of the 1970s that created and forged the current moment. It was at this moment that the limits of those reforms were made clear. Not only was the dilemma of stagflation unthinkable from the standpoint of Keynesian orthodoxy, the doctrine’s salve no longer healed the wounds of the U.S. economy.
In order to grapple with that period, we need to complicate the well-tread intellectual history of Hayek and Friedman that is so often trotted out in order to explain the rise of neoliberalism. As the story usually goes, by the 1980s, the conservative movement had succeeded in its long war to erode the social peace that made up the postwar consensus, and in the subsequent turmoil managed to implement its agenda of privatization and tax cuts proposed by Friedmanites. While part of this may be true, it is not the whole story. To this idealist conception of historical development, E.J. Hobsbawm once wrote that historians should remember that ideas “cannot for more than a moment be separated from the ways in which men get their living and their material environment [… because …] their relations with one another are expressed and formulated in language which implies concepts as soon as they open their mouths.”2
Rather than assume that neoclassical economics created the current moment, the more important line of inquiry should be as follows: how did the crisis of the postwar pact between capital and labor and the Keynesian consensus produce the conditions that allowed previously marginal ideas to become hegemonic not only at the commanding heights of the economy, but even among the working class themselves? Written in May of this year for the Correspondent, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s article “The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?” perfectly encapsulates such a view of the past. He correctly diagnoses the cracks in the facade of neoliberalism but does so starting from a faulty premise. Bregman takes the architects of neoliberal economic thinking at their own word, without accounting for the process by which their thinking went from marginal to common sense. He cites Milton Friedman’s view that in times of crisis, “ideas that are lying around” are picked up if the “proper groundwork” has “been laid.”3 But what groundwork? And why is it that certain ideas are picked up over others? Bregman claims that over the course of the crises of the 1970s “spread from think tanks to journalists and from journalists to politicians, infecting people like a virus.”4 He does not try to explain the crises, nor address why the old Keynesian medicine could not cure its patient any longer, but in his description of how neoliberal ideas became hegemonic we find our answer. For him, in society there is a battle of ideas over who can best explain the world, and to the victors goes the spoils of the material world, that is until their ideas no longer make sense. But hidden in his word is the class explanation for the ideas that get picked up. Think tanks, journalists, and politicians do not by and large represent the working class, particularly in the United States where there has never even been a labor party. Instead, the contest of ideas described here is largely between elements of the ruling class in an attempt to consolidate its own position in a time of crisis.
Later in the piece, Bregman begins to wonder who will be the progenitors of the new economic ideology, suggesting the names of Thomas Piketty, Emanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, or Marian Mazzucato. What these thinkers have in common is a desire to return to higher tax rates and more government regulation, believing that those policies could reverse high levels of income inequality and restore economic growth by putting more in the pockets of everyday people. Piketty is an interesting choice, as his first book Capital in the 21st Century was a lightning rod of admiration and controversy when it was released. In it he documents the trend toward higher inequality since the 1970s, offering politics as the solution to the problems of the economy. His latest book, Capital and Ideology is an attempt to bridge the gap between his prescriptions and how they might be practically realized.
In a review of Capital and Ideology, liberal commentator and economist Paul Krugman claims the book can be described as “turning Marx on his head.”5 According to Krugman:
In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: ‘Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.’6
For Piketty, the dominant ideology of a given time is created by ‘ruptures’ that can be used as “switch points” by a “few people” to “cause a lasting change in society’s trajectory.”7 A few people? Piketty himself perhaps? What Krugman misses in his explanation of Marxian orthodoxy, is that the relationship of the forces of production to society is not a one to one reflection. In fact, technology itself is shaped by the relations of production, which include within them the ideology necessary to reproduce society as is, and in the case of capitalism, its continued expansion. By turning Marx on his head in this way, we do not even get Hegel, who in his own way had a materialist conception of history. Instead, we get a view of a society unmoored from its material basis, one in which politics is merely a discursive exercise in figuring out the best way to do things, the cream of the intellectual crop will float to the top.
To go back to Bregman, his theory of change very much aligns with that of Piketty: someone thinks of an idea and it gets put into practice. He claims “that the way we conceive of activism tends to forget the fact that we all need different roles.”8 Instead, he believes some tend to focus on the work of grassroots mobilization, others on that of high-profile leaders, while still others struggle over whether to protest or begin “the long march through the institutions.” Bregman argues that we must remember that this is not “how change works.” “All of these people,” from Occupy protesters to “lobbyists who set out for Davos,” have their roles.9 The message seems to be that only if people remember their place, then our society could see progress. Leave it to the Pikettys and the Krugmans of the world to figure out the problems of the world, to bring the stone tablet solutions down from the mount, but it is for those in the street to spread the good word. From this conception, the question remains: After the long line of world-historic crises faced in only the first two decades of the 21st century, why do people reject the sermons of our new economic high priests? Partly, I think this can be attributed to people’s rightful perception that these thinkers themselves offer no real plan to deal with the present. Their role is to project the programs of the past to our current circumstances without dealing with the failings of the New Deal project in the first place: a shortcut for young people desperate to attend to the alienation of their own lives and the imminent climate crisis facing the planet.
Source: CCC–Third Corps Area (PA, MD, VA, DC), Poultry Raising Project, Co. 2380, Jonesville, Virginia, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum.
From this inability or unwillingness to deal with the flaws in their own conceptions of the New Deal horizon we arrive at two faulty assumptions. Firstly, that if left unhindered by the machinations of the Right, those working today, the children and grandchildren of the greatest generation, would find themselves working the “three-hour shifts” or the “fifteen-hour work week” that Keynes famously predicted.10 Flowing from the first comes the second assumption: namely that the economic crises of the 1970s were entirely political in nature, be it the consequence of oil shocks or the lack of political will necessary to take the steps required toward full employment. The secret to the peaceful transition from capitalism had already been cracked—it was only a matter of putting in the right people to implement it. Setting aside the logical problem of a political strategy that requires no opposition to realize, both of these presuppositions fail to deal with the real political-economic problems of the Fordist era. From the widespread discontentment and alienation of a consumer society still predicated on the production of value and the increasing inability of the capitalist basis of society to cash the check of promised affluence for all those who toil.
Nostalgia of the Past
It was not only those living at the time that were unable to resolve these contradictions inherent to the postwar consensus. Even now, there are those who continue to either outright ignore the problems inherent to that political-economic arrangement. They do so, by either refusing to see that economic order as a problem at all, or at best, they are ignorant of its history. By doing so, they help to maintain the marginal position of the left by sustaining an unfounded nostalgia over a progressive program.
This longing for a bygone era of increased possibility for a segment of the working class is not new to the twentieth-first century. It began as soon as the cracks in the old order were beginning to have ramifications in the daily lives of working people. It is no wonder then, that in the last few years Christopher Lasch has seen a resurgence in currency among some circles within the radical left. Lasch was a witness to the unraveling of social solidarity and the rise of a “culture of narcissism,” and understandably lamented the “logic of individualism” carried to “to the extreme of all against all,” in which “the pursuit of happiness” became “the dead-end of narcissistic preoccupation with the self.”11 As a historian and preeminent critic of society, he identified atomization as the ill that ailed Americans as the turbulent 1970s drew to close. This diagnosis brought Lasch to discover the solipsistic self-awareness that informed the condition of postmodernity. He writes in the Culture of Narcissism:
Distancing soon becomes a routine in its own right. Awareness commenting on awareness creates an escalating cycle of self-consciousness that inhibits spontaneity. It intensifies the feeling of inauthenticity that rises in the first place out of resentment against the meaningless roles prescribed by modern industry. Self-created roles become as constraining as the social roles from which they are meant to provide ironic detachment.12
Yet, his critique of this form of disassociation offers no way out of the endless spiral of the self he describes. Instead, what little solace Lasch does offer was a romanization of the past that ultimately led him to the dead end of fetishizing the patriarchal family.13
Source: David Levine, 1991, Christopher Lasch, New York Review of Books.
Still, Lasch’s description of a society in decay is not without value for the left. Indeed, even his intuition that the history could offer a sense of hope for the future can be salvaged sans the rose-colored and romantic relationship to the past, for “a denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future.”14 Andreas Killen, a historian obviously influenced by a Lasch’s unique brand of history infused with both a sociological and psychological analysis, has more recently characterized 1973 as a collective “nervous breakdown” from which the United States never recovered. Echoing the concern of forgetting the past, Killen writes that the inability to grapple with the malaise that infected the American psyche after the failure of 1968 exists even to the present.
In a certain sense, he is correct. The revolution that the New Left envisioned never came to fruition, and without the power to transform the material basis of society in the United States, the concern became the realm of culture.15 Yet, what this analysis misses, is that the revolutionary moment was not simply reacting to the remaining vestiges of de jure racism and sexism. As the 1960s progressed it became clear that it was necessary to not only dismantle the juridical apparatus of oppression but also to remove the levers of exploitation that the capitalist left firmly engaged. What many did not foresee, however, was the drying up of the material conditions that had made mass politics possible in the first place.
This inability to understand the contours of a changing political-economic constitution of late capitalism underpinned not just their moment, but also the current one. Killen contends, “the crises of the 1970s are not so easily buried; indeed they have emerged with new intensity in our time.”16 The historiography of the 1970s has grown immensely since Killen penned 1973 Nervous Breakdown in the first decade of the new millennium, and within the wider historiography of the United States the decade has gone from marginal to what Judith Stein called a “pivotal decade.” This essay seeks to flesh out a historical materialist analysis of the 1970s in order to add to the ongoing debate over the political-economic trajectory of the second half of the twentieth century, not to provide a roadmap to a socialism, but rather to point out the assumptions that led to the political cul-de-sacs informing left debates for more than half of a century—be it through imagining a return to the politics of the New Deal, or for the more radical left, a return to the Popular Front of the 1930s.
Past the Post-Industrial Society
The historian Jefferson Cowie, has argued for years that the New Deal was “the Great Exception” to the American national project. While there are components of his arguments that may be overstated, there is a truth to the overall content of his message. These thirty golden years of American capitalism may have stoked a small, but long-standing spirit of egalitarianism in the United States. At the same time, it is ultimately a footnote in the larger national project, and yet, so much of the popular image of the country emerged from this moment. Even the political and cultural norms we observe now were shaped by this aberrational moment. Indeed, part of the inability with those living through the breakdown of New Deal order was the assumption that the good times were here to stay, that the pact between labor and capital would last forever, and that the perceived mutually-beneficial relationship would continue to produce mutual gains for all.
Source: Feng Li, Workers assemble children’s bicycle wheels at a factory in Jiangsu, China, 2012, Getty Images.
In his introduction to Labor in the Twentieth Century, former labor secretary for the Ford administration and labor economist John T. Dunlop called the twentieth century “the worker’s century.” His misplaced but understandable optimism was part of the ideological fog that shrouded the postwar compact’s breakdown. Written in 1978, as the seams were really beginning to unravel around Keynesian orthodoxy, he could still say that any “reader of this volume must conclude that the twentieth century is likely to be known as the century of the worker or of the employee in advanced democratic societies,” and further that, “the first three-quarters of the century provide a desirable frame of reference to consider the course of development out to the year 2000.”17
While Dunlop and Galenson’s volume is billed as a comparative work, looking at the trajectories of a handful of advanced industrial economies, more often than not it falls prey to an analysis of Keynesianism in one country. That is, it bases itself on the assumption that redistributive welfare state and regulatory apparatus can rely on the industry of its own country to provide the material basis for those policies to operate. Only four years later, another set of labor economists wrote in their predictions for the future of the field that:
it is likely that the current awareness of the effects of world-wide competition, the interdependence of national economies, and the popularized comparisons of differences in national systems of industrials and management process will further spur in comparative and international industrial relations research.18
Clearly, the encroachment of the global on the national became something that could not be ignored even by those invested in maintaining the conventions of the old order. Or, to put in Marxist terms, if national economies are like giant cartels, they must compete with one another due to the coercive laws of competition, which in the long term to push them to increase the productivity of labor through either investment in more advanced techniques of production or the increased level of exploitation of labor through suppressing wages or increasing the working day. Such an impulse could not be contained as the United States’ global dominance eroded: a result of a shrinking advantage in productive capacity, which also underpinned its ability to maintain a stable international credit system.
Part of this is what historian Judith Stein argues in her seminal work Pivotal Decade. Where she diverges from a certain Marxist reading of events is clear from her book’s subtitle: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. For Stein, the political class’ inability to protect manufacturing in the United States was the downfall of America’s detour into social democracy. In her view, these jobs were not just any jobs, but productive labor that allowed a large portion of the working population to live “the good life.” The book’s final chapter deals with the current “age of inequality” born out of this failure to maintain the economic hegemony of the United States. In it she prescribes a revival of manufacturing. According to Stein, “as long Americans use computers, wear clothes, drive autos, build with steel, play video games—in short, do everything,” there will be a need for someone to do the work, and for that reason, the explosion of debt-fueled consumption in the years following the crisis of the 1970s reflect a society in which “Americans consumed these items but did not make enough of them.”19
What Stein overlooks, is that manufacturing was not simply outsourced, it was also automated. Fewer workers are required to oversee the production of the coats, chairs, cars, and computers that are a part of daily life in the modern world. At the same time, her view also reduces hundreds of millions of people in the world to merely unproductive vagabonds leeching off the work of those doing those “making things.”
Setting aside the first point of automation, the question of productive labor within the world economy is an important one. In the often ignored second volume of Capital, Marx discusses the importance of the work that goes into both maintaining and transporting commodities, which, if nothing else, is the work of the grocery clerk, the long-haul trucker, the fast-food worker, and the Amazon warehouse worker. He writes:
Within every production process, the change of location of the object of labor and the means of labor and labor-power needed for this plays a major role; for instance, cotton that is moved from the carding shop into the spinning shed, coal lifted from the pit to the surface. The transfer of the finished product as a finished commodity from one separate place of production to another a certain distance away shows the same phenomenon, only on a larger scale. The transport of products from one place of production to another is followed by that of the finished products from the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption. The product is ready for consumption only when it has completed this movement.20
In other words, for the modern consumer to enjoy their Big Mac, watch Netflix, or read the newest novel by their favorite, labor is required to not only produce goods but to transport and maintain them. Crucial to this circulation of commodities across the country, and more broadly the globe, is physical infrastructure like roads, cellphone towers, and electrical lines—all of which are run or maintained by any army of workers who ensure their continuous movement. In concrete terms, as important as the papermill, the slaughterhouse, and the factory, are the warehouse, the freight companies, and the restaurant. While there may be a kernel of truth to Stein’s argument about a decline in productive work, what Stein’s work shows more than anything else is the limits to a strictly national labor movement and the attempt to reform capitalism within the borders of one country. The highly-centralized business unions within AFL-CIO proved outmoded against increasingly decentralized and international corporations. In a word, interdependence carried the day, and the old ways of organizing proved incapable of withstanding its onslaught.21
On the other side, there are many that have cheered on the decline in manufacturing in the United States, extolling the virtues of the so-called post-industrial society—a term popularized by sociologist Daniel Bell in his work The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society published in 1974. In the same year, Harry Braverman, metalworker and long-time editor of Monthly Review Press challenged this vision of the future, claiming in his agitational magnum-opus Labor and Monopoly Capital that such a view represented another in long line of “economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time,” but in the last analysis, he suggests, each form of labor peacefully coexists “as recorded in balance sheets” of multinational corporations.22 Most importantly, rather than a decline in the application of Taylorism to the world of work, the rise of the service economy represented its universalization. As a truck team member at a major grocery chain, his description of “a revolution…now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had every imagined possible,” is no longer one possible path of the historical development of the forces and relations of production, but rather a foregone conclusion, at least in that segment of the service economy.23
Braverman’s unique conception of deskilling flows from this notion of scientific management’s universal application. With the proliferation of white-collars jobs over blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, there is often the assumption that increased requirements of education and the more technology is applied to accomplish workers’ daily tasks on the job the more skilled the overall workforce, but what Braverman contends is:
The more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehensions of the machine the worker has. In other words, the more the worker needs to know in order to remain a human being at work, the less does he or she know.24
For example, ask someone whose job it is to stock the shelves at the local grocery store how what they are stocking gets to the store and how the store knows to order it, chances are the response will be a blank stare—not due to any lack of intelligence on the part of the worker—but rather, because of the complexity of daily life under the modern division of labor mediated by network technology.
Such a state of affairs cannot help but help alienate the working class from one another. Not only do they become a cog in the giant machine of global capital, but they also can no longer imagine how their own movement has an effect on the other gears. While Braverman rightfully dismissed the sociologists and other academics whose sole focus was studying this alienation over the objective conditions of work experienced by workers over the course of their careers, their scholarship can help highlight how those conditions are then experienced on a psychological level.
After years of successive strike waves, culminating in 1971 as the most active year for the labor movement since the militant heyday of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Nixon administration commissioned a Special Task Force to create a report on “work in America” for then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot Richardson.25 From the report, the administration would catch a glimpse into the lives of working people in order to get them back to work, or so they thought. Unfortunately for them, the results pointed to no easy answer, or at least to none within the framework of the postwar compact. The only solutions gestured either out of capitalism or towards the past, before the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act, which laid the ground for both a new kind of labor struggle and eventually paved the way for a labor truce. The report analyzes the problems of the “blue-collar blues,” “white-collar woes,” and the conflicts brought on by the increasing diversification of the workforce. According to the report, the blue-collar blues was not simply tied to traditional bread and butter issues like wages and benefits, but also to “[workers’] self-respect, a chance to perform well in his work, a chance for personal achievement and growth in competence, and a chance to contribute something personal and unique to his work.”26 This sort of alienation was not limited to blue-collar workers, but also was there for white-collar workers:
The office today, where work is segmented and authoritarian, is often a factory. For a growing number of jobs, there is little to distinguish them but the color of the worker’s collar: computer keypunch operations and typing pools share much in common with the automobile assembly-line.27
Clearly, the unraveling of the New Deal was not simply a question of “diminishing expectations” in the face of economic decline, but its terms became increasingly untenable from the physical and psychological toll wrought by the spread of scientific management to each sector of the American economy.
Bruce Springsteen captures this disillusionment with the old promise of the American dream in his song “Factory” from his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. In it, he describes the Faustian bargain faced by American workers as he sees his “daddy walking through the factory gates in the rain,” that “factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life.” To emphasize the truly one-sided nature of the deal, Springsteen sings that at the “end of the day, factory whistle cries/men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.”28 Like many working-class baby boomers, Springsteen had seen the way that the wear and tear of a lifetime of monotonous toil could wrack working people with an overwhelming sense of emptiness alongside the physical debilitation that often comes with manual labor. As the 1970s progressed into the 1980s, material decline faced by workers created a new reason for anxiety. In spite of this harrowing reality, it is important to highlight the problem of romanticizing the affluent society that came before our own neoliberal moment. Despite less precarity, there was still powerlessness felt in the face of the growing power of faceless multinationals to structure the daily lives of millions of people both in the workplace and the marketplace.
The Planning System and Monopoly Capitalism
This process by which the world became one colossal factory and market was experienced as deindustrialization in many advanced industrial economies. As the massive skyscrapers, factories, hospitals, schools, bridges, and feats of engineering, built by the hands of workers, decayed and fell into disrepair, there was little they could do. They may have made them, but they did not own them. To offer the words of Marx in the Grundrisse: “the condition that the monstrous objective power which social labor itself erected opposite itself as one of its moments belongs not to the worker, but…to capital.”29
Despite the monstrosity of a world increasingly alien to those who make their way in it, it should not be assumed that the great mass of people cannot overturn the existing order of things—that the monster cannot be slain. As the giants of the postwar era, like Ford, IBM, and General Electric began to dominate more and more aspects of everyday life, there came a tendency to view these monopoly monsters as invulnerable to the traditional foes of the individual firm within the capitalist system. Indicative of this perspective and informing much of the thinking on monopoly capital in the postwar was the work of economists like J.K. Galbraith, particularly in his work the New Industrial State first published in 1967. Here he attempts to illuminate the transformations of the capitalist system in the twentieth century, arguing that the conditions of free competition and exchange ceased to underpin the existing social relations within capitalism. Of course, from the standpoint of a critique of political economy, such relations never truly existed in the first place, except maybe in the utopian dreams of liberal partisans during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie:
drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.30
They made a world in which “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” replaced an exploitation “veiled by religious and political illusions,” but at the same time, this very exploitation “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”31 Utopian dream indeed, but only for those lucky enough to find themselves outside the ranks of the proletarians whose muscle and blood built this wondrous new world. Eventually, free competition and exchange became a watchword, part of a new veil forged to cover the nightmares created for the mass of society in realizing their bourgeois dreams. A new mystification for a new age.
Most important to understanding Galbraith’s contribution to political economy is an analysis of what he calls the “Planning System.” For him, the “Planning System” was a patchwork of the largest corporations in the U.S. economy, all working in concert to coordinate costs of production through a relationship to the state. In a certain way, Galbraith’s analysis aligns with conception of monopoly capital put forward by Marxists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their work Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, released only a year before the New Industrial State. If the tendency of global capitalism before World War II had been toward regular crises, then the postwar period can only be described as infinitely more stable. Both works attempted to explain this relative stability against the behavior of the capitalist system over the previous century and the beginning of the twentieth—behavior that helped bring about not only nearly thirty years of near-constant warfare—but also two world-historic revolutions which attempted to break with the very system that brought such destruction and misery into the world.
Source: Keith Ploeck, 2014, Mental Floss.
According to Galbraith, the “Planning System” arose out of the need to mitigate the uncertainty by ensuring continued profits alongside the rapid expansion of production. This growth was predicated on the application of increasingly complex technology. In turn, this meant a growing portion of a company’s capital had to be tied up in maintaining old and researching new technology. Part of this cost, as Baran and Sweezy also noted, was offset by state spending on both public research and government contracts, but ultimately, to ensure a return on these investments in technology, companies created massive advertising apparatuses that shaped the desires and wants of the consumer. Of course, such an operation could not be sustained without recourse to planning, and Galbraith believed that this forecasting replaced market mechanisms in determining what the cost of production and final price of commodities would be. While this “Planning System” may have stabilized capitalism to a degree, he worried that “we are becoming servants in thought and in action of the machine we have created to serve us.”32
On the one hand, Galbraith’s preoccupation with planning helped him see through the ideological mist of American society, where “the ban on the use of the word planning excluded reflection on the reality of planning.” However, his tendency to see planning as purely the necessary outgrowth of the size and level of technology of a particular firm tended to obscure the role of competition in determining the need for planning.33 While Galbraith acknowledged that technology was employed in order for firms to compete with one another—planning could, in the final analysis, eliminate a particular market altogether. This line of thinking brought him to two conclusions, the first that “size is the general servant of technology, not the special servant of profits,” and second, that “the enemy of the market is not ideology but the engineer.”34
The idea that the growth and complexity of capitalist society created an antimony between engineers and other technical experts and market interests was not new. More than a quarter-century before, heterodox economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen came to a similar conclusion. But rather than decry the power of the engineer over production in industrial society, he welcomed it as a great mediator.35 This “general staff of industry” as he called them would settle the dispute between capital and labor for good. This was necessary for two reasons: first, the complexity of the industrial system (very similar to Galbraith’s planning system) meant that it could no longer be run by non-experts, and second, too large a community outside of capital and labor were dependent on that system to allow one side to work toward their vested interests alone. Veblen believed that engineers could continue running the industrial system in the interests of the community as a whole, rather than from their own narrow interests. In The Engineers and the Price System, he wrote that he believed that they would soon realize their ability to oversee society for the greater good. As the role of engineers and professional experts grew exponentially in society, they were “beginning to understand that commercial expediency has nothing better to contribute to the engineer’s work than so much lag, leak, and friction.”36 Further, “they are accordingly coming to understand that the whole fabric of credit and corporation finance is a tissue of make-believe.”37
But of course, fantasy has long driven civilizations to action, even the immaterial can have objective consequences. This is what Marx meant when there was a “phantom-like objectivity” to the value of a commodity.38 While the marks of the socially necessary labor time imbued in a commodity may not be readily apparent, that it has been worked by human hands is understood. Along with that understanding, is that of a whole host of corresponding social practices that allow such an abstract principle to order human affairs. At the same time, Veblen was correct to point out that technology applied to production was constrained by the relations of production, of the need to maintain private ownership, and the corresponding profit motive, but that tension exists does not mean that it will be worked out. Particularly, if there is no revolutionary rupture with the old order of things, which he believed not only unnecessary but an unwanted obstruction to the industrial system. For him, the success of the Bolsheviks was what had simultaneously made their situation so difficult. The fact that Russia was technologically backward meant that the: “Russian community is able, at a pinch, to draw its own livelihood from its own soil by its own work, without that instant and unremitting dependence on materials and wrought goods drawn from foreign ports and distant regions.”39
In the case of an advanced industrial society like the United States, such a revolution was undesirable for the inverse reason: dependence on the industrial system meant that disrupting its function would lead to widespread deprivation and misery. Instead, Veblen believed there would eventually be a bloodless coup by engineers, after capitalists “eliminate themselves, by letting go quite involuntarily” as “the industrial situation gets beyond their control.”40 In doing so, he underestimated the lengths that capital would go in holding on to their interests and just how complex industrial society would become. The increasingly complicated division of both mental and manual meant that even a vanguard of engineers and experts could not manage the whole system alone. Eventually, this process would erode their relative independence from either the capitalist class or the working class by pulling them toward one pole or another.41
Much like Veblen, in an ironic twist of fate, Galbraith the economist came to the position that economics no longer mattered. Rather, the conquest of political power by monopolies had, and would, determine the future of American society. By separating the political from the economic, rather than view them as two sides of the same co-determined coin, he assumed that one could continuously dominate the other, rather than engage with each other in a dialectical back and forth. This view that monopolies could disembed themselves from the dictates of the market has not gone anywhere. In fact, it was central to the argument of Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s popular book the People’s Republic of Walmart that made the rounds across a number of different left groups and tendencies. Phillips and Rozworski present a full-throated socialist defense of planning in the People’s Republic of Walmart, highlighting the prominence of firms like Walmart and Amazon, whose very success, they argue, is predicated on their tendency to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible through complex planning systems.
The authors acknowledge that “the real world is often one of messy disequilibrium, of prices created by fiat rather than from the competitive ether,” but still “remains one where markets determine much of our economic, and thereby social life.” Unfortunately, their conception of firms as “islands of tyranny” reinforces the notion that these massive companies can remove themselves from the sea of market competition.42 To put in Marxist terms, these firms are somehow able to ignore the law of value through their application of central planning. Much like Braverman’s critique of postindustrial society as overemphasizing the growth sector of the economy, a similar criticism can be leveled at Phillips and Rozworksi for focusing too much on the ascendant firms of the twenty-first century. Amazon and Walmart may be economic juggernauts now, but no one can know what the march of history has in store for them in the long term. When Galbraith wrote the New Industrial State in 1967, he seemed very certain of the futures of Ford and GM. The same cannot be said of either from 2020. This is not to suggest that socialists should not be concerned with central planning, but rather, that planning is not a magic bullet that makes the transition away from capitalism inevitable.
Over a century ago, Lenin praised the scientific management of Taylor as a progressive force in capitalist society because of its tendency to bring order to the chaos of capitalist production. He believed that it would eventually lay the foundation for socialism through its rationalization of production and distribution within capitalism. According to Lenin, Taylorism had inadvertently helped prepare for “the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers’ committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalizing all social labor,” and that the increasing centralization of industry on a large scale would “provide thousands of opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organized workers and make them four times better off than they are today.”43 If one looks at the universalization of Taylorism in the capitalist world and the experience of the Soviet Union, there is, at the very least, a question mark over the efficacy of taking on the methods of scientific management without a mind to the way they help structure relations of production.
The same can be said about the claims of planning. While it may have had the effect of stabilizing individual capitals, or even large segments of capital, planning has not led to the stabilization of capital in general. In other words, to assume that the means to liberate ourselves from capital exist as tools to be grasped fully-formed from the capitalist system, be it either scientific management or central planning, is to an assume the inevitability of socialism, a false proposition that Rosa Luxemburg grasped more than a hundred years ago when she appealed to the imperative toward either socialism or barbarism.
Writing during the nightmarish upheaval of total war in Europe, Luxemburg reminded the proletariat movement of their latent potential, their role as agents in history to overturn the existing order. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, in a world wracked by imperialist proxy wars, climate catastrophe, and political-economic uncertainty, her words echo today as true they did then when she first wrote them in 1915. In the face of this reality, “the only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.”44
What Luxemburg so masterfully illustrates with her passionate reminder of human will in shaping the course of history, is what E.H. Carr gestures toward in his methodological book What is History? His book outlines a general methodology for the history discipline. In doing so, he takes aim at critics’ contentions that historical materialism posits an inevitable outcome to history. At the same time, he challenges a view of history as random happenstance. For Carr, “nothing in history is inevitable, except in the formal sense that, for it to have happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to have been different,” but at the same time, history is not completely “a chapter of accidents, a series of events determined by chance coincidences, attributable only to the most causal of causes.”45
Late Capitalism and the Law of Value
The discussion above may seem a digression from the larger analysis of the long 1970s. However, the faith that the economic question within capitalism had been solved by social democracy and that the road to peaceful transition had been charted, is what blinded many to the cracks in the postwar consensus—a belief not altogether different from that of the inevitable triumph of socialism. Today, a similar belief exists. For many, the idea that we could go back to the politics of the postwar consensus is not only feasible, but also desirable. This stems from a mistaken notion that the only thing that led to its breakdown was politics: if we can just get back to the right kind of politics, then we can make social democracy great again.
Even as he criticized the power of the corporation and the state in the modern economy, Galbraith made such an argument about politics during the breakup of the postwar order. He wrote in the Introduction to the 3rd edition of the New Industrial State released in 1978, that by all accounts the “sharp recessions” of that decade were “by wide agreement…the result of a deliberate act of policy to arrest inflation,” with “those holding most vehemently that inflation was still a natural phenomenon being those responsible for the policy.”46 While Marxist Economist and Historian Ernest Mandel would likely agree that nothing in political economy is inherently natural, this does not mean that human beings do not create systems that stand over them and cannot be controlled at will. Human beings certainly forged those bonds through the muck of ages, but that does not mean that their essence remains apparent as they become imbued with new meaning across time. This is of course what Marx meant when he employed the concept of commodity fetishism, that is to say social relations between people appear as relations between things.
Mandel’s Late Capitalism is very much a response to this overly politically-determined view of history. He provides empirical evidence to support the notion contrary to thinkers like Galbraith, Baran, and Sweezy that Marx’s critique of political economy still stood as definitive in the era of monopoly capitalism. Even the title of his work was meant as a response to those who believed capitalist society had superseded the laws of motion of capital as described by Marx in the same way that an Einsteinian universe had eclipsed the Newtonian one early in the middle of the twentieth century. For Mandel, the question of whether late capitalism represented a new stage of capitalist development could be answered by asking whether “government regulation of the economy, or the ‘power of the monopolies,’ or both, ultimately or durably cancel the workings of the law value.”47 Indeed, if that question was answered in the affirmative, then any unstable holdovers from the old order such as “crises and recessions” could “no longer… due to the forces inherent in the system but merely to the subjective mistakes or inadequate knowledge of those who ‘guide the economy.’”48
Source: Ernest Mandel Internet Archive.
By holding Marx’s critique of political economy as valid even in the age of monopoly capital, Mandel was able to see the postwar era for what it was: the calm before the storm of capitalist crisis. An interregnum, which could lead either towards continued domination or towards the liberation of the working class. Rather than take monopoly power as something eternal, Mandel looked at its long-term historical trajectory. First, by sticking to a Marxist conception of the economy that is consistent with the labor theory of value, his starting point of analysis is that the equalization of the rate of profit as it relates to the theory of the rate of profit to fall does not imply an equal division of profits among capitalists. Rather, because this rate is determined by the “total mass of capital set in by each autonomous firm,” those firms that employ the greatest amount technology or constant capital in the production process, are able to siphon surplus from those with a below-average level of productivity, despite a smaller footprint in terms of variable capital or labor power used in the course of production.49 However, while this does not imply an equal mass of profits, there is still the tendency to push and pull the rate of profit towards a social average on the level of individual firms. Effectively, this means that the role of the monopoly in late capitalism is to prevent as long as possible the equalization process from taking place by blocking the movement of capital from one branch to another. But as with any wall, there is always a ladder that can be climbed to reach the other side.
For instance, Mandel argues that the short-term need of monopolies to bring non-monopolized sectors under their purview to control effective demand leads in the long term to an erosion of their monopoly power through an acceleration of the equalization of the rate of profit. In other words:
The more this process advances, and the nearer the package of goods produced by monopolies comes to compromise the whole range of social production, the smaller monopoly surplus-profits will tend to become and the closer the monopoly rate of profit will have to adjust to the average rate of profit. The monopolies will thus increasingly be dragged into the maelstrom of the tendency for this average rate of profit to fall.50
At the same time, even if non-monopoly sectors of the economy remain independent of the monopoly ones, in times of downturn those sectors find themselves at a diminished capacity. Therefore, the monopoly sector is not furnished with the surplus-profits that protect them from the fall in the rate of profit. Not only do monopolies in the last analysis sow the seeds for their own demise vis-à-vis their need for continual growth, but also attempts to subvert this tendency in the long term, including those of the state, have the effect of intensifying these contradictions.
Mandel identified at least three specific limitations to state intervention into the capitalist economy. First, the stimulation of demand through the printing of new money has the effect of lowering the rate of surplus-value i.e. the rate of profit, and in no way does it ensure productive investment–that is investment in the production of value leading to the accumulation of capital. Second, if the state invests any redistributed surplus-value towards productive investment of its own, it must ensure that those investments do not directly compete with already existing sectors of the economy. Finally, if state investments made from tax revenues are to be generative of new value, rather than a redistribution of existing surplus-value, they must not be from capital itself, but from the petty bourgeoisie and the working class’ general wage fund.51 Data from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s recent book the Triumph of Injustice bears out this assumption. While their definition of what constitutes wealth and the question of how to address income inequality may be flawed, their collection of average effective tax rate data is a helpful illustration of the shifting tax burden that Mandel first theorized in 1972:
Source: Emanuel Zaez and Gabriel Zucman, the Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019). Data and Appendix of Figures: https://taxjusticenow.org/#/appendix
This change in the composition of the tax base helps to create antagonistic relationships between the capitalists on the dole of the state and the petty bourgeoisie, as well as those segments of capital whose profit is not ensured through state subsidy. This explains the rise of the politics of the taxpayers revolt, which was and has been so central to building a base of support for the neoliberal turn.52 Mandel identifies this tension as a real limit to the support that the state can have for monopolies: the state cannot support monopolies if they endanger the capitalist system as a whole.53
Long Waves of Capitalist Development
The main point of Late Capitalism may have been to illustrate the continued validity of the Marxist research project in the face of its dismissal by critics on both the left and the right, but Mandel did not simply seek to explain the crisis of his moment. Instead, he sought to provide a long-term view of capitalist development, one that explained the tectonic shifts in the mode of production from one generation to the next, and most importantly, one that might clarify where the transition of his own time might lead.
This longue durée approach to the historical development of capitalism is precisely why Mandel’s work seems so prescient in the light of the present. This perspective allowed Mandel to historicize his own moment as part of the larger development of capitalism as a global economic system counterposed to contemporaneous bourgeois economists, who held that golden age as a permanent stasis. Mandel accomplished this by adapting Soviet Economist Nikolai Kondratieff’s work on long waves of capitalist development, which posited that along with short-term business cycles there were longer-term ones that lasted for fifty years more or less. These long waves inevitably brought about a restructuring of the capitalist economy through a revolution in technology, or, to use another phrase, the development of the forces of production. In Mandel’s version, these long waves consisted of a period of twenty-five to thirty years, either expansionary or depressive in character. Despite the dichotomy of expansion and depression in Mandel’s long waves, the standard five to seven-year business cycle still operated. For example, during depressive waves recoveries are not as robust as those that occur during expansive ones.
Mandel explains the breakdown of each kind of wave and its effect on the rate of profit as follows: “expansive waves are periods in which the forces counteracting the tendency of the average rate of profit to decline operate in a strong and synchronized way,” and “depressive long waves are periods in which the forces counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to decline are fewer, weaker, and decisively less synchronized.54This connection to rate of profit, and thus to the levels of investment, helps explain another part of Mandel’s unique interpretation of the long waves in capitalist development. He posited that, unlike business cycles, expansionary waves were by no means automatically triggered by long depressive one. In this way, he was able to integrate Leon Trotsky’s criticism of Kondratieff into the way that he applied the concept. Trotsky critiqued Kondratieff’s long cycles for removing human agency from the development of new technology and ways of working, as well as, the role played by what might be termed exogenous or outside the economic base of society such as wars and revolutions to creating conditions for a new expansionary wave.
Defending this interpretation and application of long waves to the history of capitalism against charges of eclecticism, Mandel argued that, often, the “creative destruction” needed to reinvigorate the level productive investments and trigger a new expansionary wave could actually require the physical destruction of fixed capital and of older technology, rather than just its market devaluation. Indeed, his retort, that:
it is inevitable that new long wave of stagnating trend must succeed a long wave of expansionist trend, unless of course, one is ready to assume that capital has discovered the trick of eliminating for a quarter of a century (if not for longer) the tendency of the average rate of profit to decline.55
speaks to the room that exists for “heterodoxy” within the orthodox Marxist tradition.
If nothing else, Marx continuously used the newest methods bestowed to him by the practitioners of classical political economy in critiquing them. To assume that he would not have continued to do the same had he had the opportunity to continue his project is to contradict the very nature of his work. Like Marx, Mandel’s use of long waves in no way betrays his commitment to critique of political economy, in that their abstraction is in no way opposed to the concrete. If anything it was Mandel’s critics who were idealistic in their criticism of his notion of exogenous triggers.
Source: Leon Neal, 2017, Getty Images.
The 1970s as the End of an Era and the Foundation for the Neoliberal Turn
Another useful method inherited from Mandel’s adoption of the modified Kondratieff’s cycles, is the notion that these long waves could be conceptualized as unique historical moments. The postwar boom represents just one of many long expansionary waves, and the interwar years and the Great Depression represent an example of a long period of stagnation. Considering that the lectures that made up his book Long Waves were given in 1978, most of his theorization on the period of the collapse of the postwar order and the neoliberal turn remained mainly predictions based on existing evidence from the start of that wave and other speculations. Still, they do offer an insight not only into how this turn was experienced for Mandel as an individual, but also on some general assumptions and observations that can be subject to an empirical review of subsequent data.
One point, in particular, seems terribly cogent, especially in the light of contemporary explanations of the neoliberal turn on the left. Mandel postulates that the shift from a certain Keynesian orthodoxy to a monetarist one at the level of national governments did not create neoliberalism, but rather, it was the political-economic crisis brought upon by the stagflation of the 1970s that made one set of ideas marginal and brought the other in vogue. Given the logic of capital and its need to restore the rate of profit, the welfare state could no longer offer the safety net it once had, and indeed it represented a barrier to further accumulation. This materialist explanation of the hegemony of the likes of Friedman and Hayek makes far more sense than the notion that somehow the strength of their ideas created a brand-new consensus by the 1980s. As Mandel writes, this “new economic wisdom” was by no means ‘scientific,’ despite claims to the contrary, but rather “corresponds to the immediate and long-term needs of the capitalist class.”56 Recent scholarship on the New York City financial crisis of 1975 that among other things, produced the now infamous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” points to such a pragmatic and ad hoc adoption of new economic ideas in response to uncertain realities of the day.57
Source: New York Daily News, (1975), New York Daily News.
Fear City by Kim Phillips-Fein, tells the story of the response to the deep crisis of the city from above and below, but ultimately though, it was those who acted from above won the day. However, the idea that those crafting fiscal policy and managing the city’s budget were either contemporary Republican deficit hawks and their Third Way Democratic party handmaidens of austerity should be put to rest. Prior to the financial crisis, Phillips-Fein argues that New York City was a bastion of social democracy created by decades of militant working-class struggle. It could only have through such a crisis that those gains could have been unmade. Even those in seats of authority called to helm the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) and the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) saw themselves more in line with the liberalism of the Great Society than that of the Third Way.
The MAC was a public-benefit corporation set up to financialize the city’s assets in the face of mounting debt and the EFCB was an institution set up to oversee the city’s spending. Both institutions exemplify how the financial crisis created two political-economic functions characteristic of the emergent neoliberal state: with one hand the state privatized its assets to make up for shrinking state coffers, and with the other, took away those services deemed unnecessary to the accumulation of capital in general. In the case of men like Felix Rohaytn who helped create the MAC, it would be their experience of saving the city from itself that would transform their thought, rather than their thought transforming the city. However, we should not assume that it was unavoidable that such a view would become the hegemonic one. Indeed, it took the mythologizing of the moment by politicians like New York Mayor Ed Koch for the notion that there was no alternative to austerity for the view to take hold. Koch did so by painting the crisis as a teachable moment that allowed the city to see the error of its ways and to move on “in a positive direction.”58
Aside from explaining the formation of the new dominant bourgeois ideology of late capitalism, Mandel also described the actions that would be necessary to restore the rate of profit during the depressive wave that began in 1973, signaled by the oil shocks of that year. He predicted that in order to lay the foundation for a restored rate of profit which would eventually give way from a stagnating wave to an expansionist one, there would need to be a disciplining of organized labor through the use of unemployment. This would simultaneously allow capital to increase the level of exploitation through a degradation of conditions and circumstances of work, the further concentration and centralization of capital, which would lead to reduced cost in means of production like equipment, raw materials, and energy—and most importantly “massive applications of new technological innovations” and “a new revolutionary acceleration of in the rate of turnover of capital.”59
Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate,” Series LNS14000000 (Washington DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 26, 2020).Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Percent of Employed Members of unions,” Series LUU0204899600 (Washington DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 3, 2020).
Taking up Mandel’s point about the necessity of unemployment to weaken labor organizations, it is no accident of history that from the mid-1970s forward the rate of unemployment never reached the consistent lows of the preceding periods, at least until the precipice of the current century. Nor does it appear to be a coincidence the same period saw a massive dip in levels of unionization as unemployment grew. While this development was by no means inevitable, and was most certainly did not come to pass without resistance, the necessary preconditions for the neoliberal subject were forged through this moment. There was “no alternative,” not because Reagan and Thatcher said so, but because attempts to move beyond the New Deal and the Great Society had become stalled and the material preconditions for the working class to fight in their own name were increasingly closed off from them. The experience of that process for working people and their institutions will be picked up below.
Keeping in mind the fact that expansionary waves are not an unavoidable exit from a depressive one, Mandel highlights a certain point about the expansion of the world market that warrants close inspection. He argues that “one should not confuse an overall expansion in the world market at a rapid pace with an overall restructuring of the international division of labor.” That is, “employment at lower wages in certain countries is substituted for employment at higher wages in other countries,” and “equipment [being] shifted from one part of the world to another” at best leads to a marginal increase in effective demand through lowered operating costs, but this is not enough on its own to engender “a new long-term wave of accelerated growth.”60
Source: UN Conference on Trade and Development, “Foreign direct investment: Inward and outward flows and stock, annual,” China (Geneva, Switzerland: March 4, 2020) https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.aspx.Source: UN Conference on Trade and Development, “Foreign direct investment: Inward and outward flows and stock, annual,” India (Geneva, Switzerland: March 4, 2020) https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.aspx.Source: UN Conference on Trade and Development, “Foreign direct investment: Inward and outward flows and stock, annual,” United States (Geneva, Switzerland: March 4, 2020) https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView.aspx.
Neoliberalism as a political project is often spoken of as going hand in hand with globalization. In other words, in order to return to an era of fiercer capitalist competition, barriers to trade between nations needed to be overcome, either by trade agreement or military coup. Except, rather than completely transforming the international division of labor, for a time neoliberalism amounted to tinkering around its edges. Meaning that, what is thought of as the rapid development of countries like China and India did not occur as rapidly as is often assumed. It took decades to move from countries which provided raw materials to components of manufactured products to countries that finished goods themselves. It took years of reinvestment in themselves before their economies could stand on their own two feet. Looking at levels of foreign direct investment as an indicator of multi-national development of national economies, it seems clear that it took years before even the levels of investment in formerly colonized countries began to approach those of the dominant economic player of the twentieth century: The United States. Despite these changes, following decades of infrastructural neglect, catalyzed by the devaluation and privatization of the Great Recession, the U.S. once again became a haven for foreign investment in the 21st century.
Source: World Bank, “GDP growth (annual %),” China (Washington DC: March 4, 2020).Source: World Bank, “GDP growth (annual %),” India (Washington DC: March 4, 2020).Source: World Bank, “GDP growth (annual %),” United States (Washington DC: March 4, 2020).
This data on foreign direct investment taken alongside GDP growth makes clear that rather than completely transforming relations between the United States and the developing world, FDI reified the existing order of things. Of course, this does not mean that nothing changed between 1973 and 2008, but instead that it took the deepening of the long-term crisis of capitalism (more accurately described as malaise or stagnation) for this incremental process of capitalist realignment to achieve a qualitative shift from a quantitative one.
The only thing that kept the machine of capital in motion was the industrialization of the developing world as a means of propping up advanced industrial economies. What this means is that despite the massive economic growth across the last 40 years, these developing economies were still relegated to junior partners of American and European firms due to the need to attract the investment needed to develop their productive forces in order to compete with the level of productivity of those companies. This means that they still played their historical role of furnishing raw materials and later cheap manufactured goods to advanced industrial economies, which in return provided capital goods, means of transport, and management methods.
When all of this is taken into account, a picture emerges of a unique phenomenon: what might be called a stagnating expansionary wave. In a word, while there was a recovery from the prior lows, it never matched that of the previous cycles. This is where Mandel’s notion of non-self-sustaining cycles can be of some use. Without the massive “creative destruction” of worldwide warfare or a global catastrophe, and the continued application of Keynesian monetary policy without its commitment to demand stimulating fiscal policy, the conditions created could only partially restore the rate of profit following the crisis of the 1970s. This analysis fits with some recent scholarship of Kondratieff waves or K-waves, particularly those working within the world systems tradition. While three such practitioners: Grinin, Korotayev, and Tausch, argue that the period from the 1970s forward is not out of line with the long-term historical trajectory of K-Wave cycles, they, at the very least, seem to see its effect on the core/periphery dynamics within the world market.
They characterize the period from 1968/74 to 1984/91, or what they term Phase B of the Fourth K-Wave in the history of capitalism, as a moment in which:
The Core was ‘attacked’ by the Periphery economically—first of all through a radical increase in oil and some other raw material prices. In the meantime, the West invested rather actively in the Periphery (especially, through loans to the developing countries).61
At the same time, the following period, or Phase A of the Fifth K-Wave (1984/91 to 2006/08), saw the centers of growth slowly shift from the traditional Core to the Periphery. In other words, economic development moved from the First to the Third World, from developed to the developing world. On a purely economic level, they assert that this period represents red in the ledger for the core and black for the periphery, which of course leaves out so many of the social realities that sustained these processes, but that problem has already been addressed by countless thinkers and needs not be relitigated here.62 What is important for the moment is their preoccupation with a mechanically-determined system change, in both the literal technological sense and an economic one, a framework for understanding long waves that both Trotsky and later Mandel criticized as removing human agency from the equation of world history.
Staking a claim against those that see the period from the 1970s on as one of “decelerating scientific and technological progress,” they contend that the further development and generalization of new technology is a product of the need for the periphery to catch up to the level of development of the core.63That is, the further accelerated development of the core over the periphery would risk a fracturing of an integrated world system, and to be charitable, they do account for the necessity of “structural changes in political and social spheres” for “promoting their synergy and wide implementation in the world of business.”64 However, from this perspective, it seems the capitalist and international state system bends to fit the needs of developing technology, rather than vice versa. If it is assumed that humanity has created a machine too big to control, then such a view makes sense. However, if we still believe that the technology we build and the economic system we live within is capable of being transformed through our own force of will, then it is imperative that such a view be rejected.
Indeed, a general proliferation of advanced technology on a global scale, at least that imagined in their work, would require the transcendence of capitalism. As Mandel wrote in Late Capitalism, there are real limitations on the professionalization of the workforce and the automation of labor, as those movements tend to diminish the total amount of surplus-value being produced by reducing the number of workers employed by capital, at the same time that they transform the mental and manual separation of labor—a division that ensures discipline and hierarchy among the working class. To brush up against those limits is to go against the drive toward “self-preservation.”65
Grinin, Korotavev, and Tausch may not see the new economic order that rose from the ashes of the postwar compact during the 1970s as outside the ordinary pattern of long wave cycles. However, their own data does seem to point to a newly emergent pattern of development, one that vindicates the Mandelian notion of expansionary long waves as often contingent upon exogenous triggers to restore the rate of profit. On the surface, this seems to lend credence to the idea of stagnating expansionary waves outlined above, but it would take more than the work examined so far to legitimate these waves as a category of analysis.
Source: H. Armstrong Roberts, 1970s People In, Getty Images
The 1970s and the Failure of Capitalist Production
Marxian economist Andrew Kliman’s work on the rate of profit and the underlying causes of the Great Recession helps to bridge the gap between the work of Grinin, Korotayev, and Tausch and Mandel. At the same time, it makes the existence of stagnating expansionary waves not only seem likely, but also the most probable explanation for the movement of capitalist development over the last half-century. This work, The Failure of Capitalist Production, is fairly straightforward in its line of argumentation. There is very little in the way of literary frills or flourishes that a historian might like to see in his attempt to correct what he calls the “conventional left account” of neoliberalism. Regardless of form, its content empirically validates what had only been examined previously through tangential bourgeois economic measure: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marxist economists like Mandel used measurements like GDP, CPI, and Industrial Capacity Usage as stand-ins for actually measuring the rate of profit, among other things, to grasp through darkness towards answers—to see beyond the form of appearance. For instance, a lag in GDP growth might point to a lag in new productive investment or low Industrial Capacity Usage might point to a lack of incentive to invest productively, but Kliman does something different with his book. Applying the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s value theory, he uses the extensive U.S. economic data to measure fluctuations in the rate of profit.66
In doing so Kliman finds that, in contrast to what more traditional accounts have argued, the discipline of labor and the shift in advanced industrial economies away from manufacturing to service and finance did not produce an upswing in the rate of profit. Instead, he shows this to be on the whole a failed fix to increase productive investment, due to the unwillingness on the part of policymakers to unleash the destructive potential of an untethered capital upon the world. The fear of what a crisis as deep as the Great Depression would do to the system as a whole acted as a failsafe against a pure market fundamentalism. To unchain the latent extirpative force would be folly, as it represents an existential gambit on the part of capital on whether it would survive the destruction intact or if it would be felled by the gravediggers it might produce.
Ultimately, this double-bind creates conditions in which “artificial government stimulus…produces unsustainable growth” that “threatens to make the next crisis worse when it comes,” and all for nothing, as “the economy will remain sluggish unless and until profitability is restored”—that is unless the character of production changes.67 From this perspective, what could be termed neoliberalism did not begin in the 1980s, but rather, was born out of the beginning of a “long period of relative stagnation” that began in the 1970s.68 The Reagan Revolution and Voodoo Economics were themselves a means of saving the system from itself without recourse to Pascal’s wager of pure creative destruction, and not the crucible of economic transformation themselves.
Kliman pulls from two data sets to measure the rate or profit in the United States: the first, before tax-profits; and the second, what he describes as the “property-income” rate of profit. The second data in his estimation is closer to the spirit of Marx—in that it “counts as profit all of the output (net value added) of corporations that their employees do not receive,” including “money spent to make interest payments and transfer payments (fines, court settlements, gift contributions, and so on, to pay sales and property taxes, and other minor items.”69 Such an approximation of the Marixan rate of profit makes sense, when we consider that Marx wrote in the second volume of Capital that it is:“immaterial for the rent collector of a landlord or the porter at a bank that their labor does not add one iota of value of the rent, nor to gold pieces carried to another bank by the sackful.” Rather, all that mattered was that they received a portion of value produced from the point of view of the total social production.70Kliman demonstrates this historical decline in the rate of profit by applying various methods of control to both data sets in different ways. For instance, including inventories in the before-tax rate as a way to factor in the importance of turnover or adjusting for inflation, among other methods.71
All of this serves to illustrate the economic stagnation of the last fifty years, the collective process of kicking the can down the road on the part of the bourgeoisie and their representatives in the bourgeois state. Both wings of neoliberalism failed to address the problem of the falling rate of profit and instead papered over the contradiction with a series of stopgaps that have ultimately made capitalism more unstable, and not less. However, to just understand the economics and not the accompanying social realities are to do a disservice to the Marxist project. Knowing the problem, on the other hand, better shapes the line of inquiry into the historical experience of working people and how they have reacted to and shaped the unfolding of historical processes.
Working from Fordism to Neoliberalism
Before dissecting the economic basis of the emergent neoliberal era, this essay sought to illuminate the difficulty in which those writing at the time of breakdown of the postwar order had in seeing that the systems built through the crises of the 1930s and 1940s struggle under the strain of globalization. For many, collapse appeared as a bump in the road, one that could simply be smoothed over. But as the expansionary wave of the postwar boom gave way to the stagnating depressive wave in the middle of the 1970s, the possibility of simply repaving the same road became untenable. The ability to maintain an adequate rate of profit and the truce between capital and labor became a pressing contradiction that had to be resolved one way or another. In the end, it was capital that won the battle over who would determine the future, but not without struggle.
From the standpoint of the working class, how lopsided the bargain struck in the shadow of the Great Depression became increasingly clear. They had given up control over the workplace in favor of higher wages and better benefits. While the latter had served them well and brought generalized affluence unseen in American history, the importance of the former was clarified by the continuing deskilling of work through automation and an increasingly complex division of labor. At the same time, there had been those left out of the pact between labor and capital from its inception. For them, the promise of bread and butter unionism and the prospect of collective bargaining still held an appeal. From their fight to unionize, Marx’s contention that the relationship between economic base and the cultural superstructure are not a one to one relationship becomes clear. Even as the economic basis to organize was curbed, these workers fought for a dream deferred. They fought with the same militancy of their 1930s forebears, conjuring “the spirits of the past to their service.”72
Both this alienation of workers and their struggle for a seat at the bargaining highlight the difficulty in seeing beyond the present. More importantly, it highlights that it is not enough to simply have the right understanding of political economy. We must understand how this reality is experienced in the daily lives of the working class, not just at a higher level of abstraction. What follows is an examination of working people in their own words, and how they understood the social relations they found themselves.
Source: Preston Stroup, “A workman adjusted a Ford Mustang at the final assembly line in a Detroit-area factory on Nov. 6, 1967”, Preston Stroup/Associated Press
Studs Terkel’s classic book Working stands as both a transhistorical and period-specific documentation of life on the job. While the social relations of labor under capitalism change over time, there will always be a fundamental sense of alienation that accompanies work for others until the capitalist mode of production is transcended. In contrast to the works of Bell and Braverman released in the same year, Working let American workers speak for themselves. They described their own social relations, rather than through the pretense of heady theory. A collection of interviews that includes insight from as wide-ranging occupations as assembly-line workers, truckers, waitresses, bank tellers, and salesman, the book reminds us that despite its romanticization, the postwar period itself produced highly alienating relations of production precisely because American society never went beyond the constraints of social-democracy.
Phil Stallings, a spot welder at a Ford assembly plant in Chicago exemplifies the Fordist alienation. He describes the feeling of being trapped in three-foot area, pulling the trigger of his welding gun 10,240 times a day as creating an almost out of body experience:
You dream, you think of things you’ve done. I drift back continuously to when I was a kid and what me and my brothers did. The things you love most are the things you drift back into.73
Not only did his work make Stallings have this sense of incorporeality, he felt alienated in the more traditional Marxist sense. The machines, or the product of social labor, were given better than he received on the job. Indeed, he believed “they’ll have more respect, give more attention to that machine,” and further “you get the feeling that the machine is better than you are,” and if he were breakdown for whatever reason, he would be “pushed over to the other side till another man takes my place,”—ultimately he felt that he was more disposable than the components that made up the tools of his trade.74
While Stallings was a younger man, the problem of capitalist alienation does not discriminate by age, Ned Williams, who worked on the line from 1946 until shortly before his interview with Terkel, expressed a similar feeling which was, however, manifested differently. Williams says of his time on the line that he was constantly exhausted, “but I got a job to do. I had to do it. I had no time to think or daydream. I woulda quit.”75 Williams may not have dreamed of his childhood in the way his younger counterpart did, but he too lost himself in his work to the point that:
Sometimes I felt like I was just a robot. You push a button and you go this way. You become a mechanical nut. You get a couple of beers and go to sleep at night. Maybe one, two o’clock in the morning, my wife is saying, ‘come on, come on, leave.’ I’m still workin’ that line.76
The degradation of work in this period was of course not limited to those working in factories, as Doc Pritchard, a room clerk at a hotel near Times Square, attests to. He explained that:
I’ve had people to me just like I was some sort of dog, that I was a ditchdigger, let’s say. You figure a fellow who comes to work and he has to have a cleanly pressed suit and a white shirt and a tie on—plus he’s gotta have that big smile on his face—shouldn’t be talked in a manner that he’s something below somebody else.
It affects me. It gives you that feeling: Oh hell, what’s the use? I’ve got to get out of this. Suddenly you look in the mirror and you find out you’re not twenty-one any more. You’re fifty-five. Many people have said to me, ‘why didn’t you get out of it long ago?” I never really had enough money to get out. I was stuck, more or less.77
While it may be obvious from these accounts that the social peace of the postwar era was predicated on a utopian vision of American society that did not exist. That consumer culture of the affluent society did not live up to the promise of a free society. Workers could purchase more for sure and there was certainly more leisure time, but at what cost? The president of UAW Local 685, which represented workers at Chrysler transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana, spoke to that deal in an interview conducted in 1996. Of the life in a union ship in the ‘60s and 70s, he reminisced that “you knew something was going to come in the contract that improved either your economic status or your leisure time,” but that was not the whole bargain, the main light at the end of workers in that period was leaving the job for good, “on the first day they walked in there, everybody lived for that day they could walk out and retire.”78
At the same time, it should not be forgotten that the ability to have the last chapter of life in the form of a comfortable retirement, or even the ability to have some sort of leisure time was materially a step forward for the working class of the advanced industrial countries, something that the erosion of those gains has laid bare. This progressive element of an ultimately conservative collective bargaining system would have been self-evident to those standing outside it even at the time.
Lane Windham’s recent work Knocking on Labor’s Door shows that even after what Cowie calls “the last days of the working class” in the 1970s, those outside of the labor-capital compact continued to try to wedge their foot in the door.79 And this was not just a timid knock, but a pounding on the door by an increasingly diverse working class traditionally left out in the cold by the postwar boom. Rather than looking at strike levels, she utilizes data on unionization drives both successful and not. Instead of decline, this National Labor Review Board data points to an increase in struggles to form unions throughout not just the 1970s, but also the Reagan eighties, particularly those in the emergent service sector.
The reason is that in the American context, many of the necessities of daily life including healthcare and retirement were tied to employment in a way they were not elsewhere where more expansive social democratic safety nets had been created. In order for workers to assure access to these social goods, they required a union contract, something that as Windham illustrates, became increasingly difficult. This was accomplished through the dual process of, on the one hand, the rise of labor management consulting as a cottage industry to help employers sidestep existing laws, and on the other, the exponential growth in lobbying efforts that would make union organizing a more difficult process than it already was. This is an ongoing process that the recent Janus decision provides just the latest example of. Put simply, as new segments of the working class were opening the door to perceived prosperity, the door was slammed in their face.
The continued militancy of the working class in the face of growing structural obstruction to organizing their workplaces certainly dilutes Cowie’s claim that the working class was made a force of cultural conservatism and irrelevant by the end of the 1970s. That said, the validity of his larger point about the fragility of the order built around the New Deal remains. As he concludes in his book’s final chapter:
Whatever working-class identity might emerge from the postmodern, global age will have to be less rigid and less limiting than that of the postwar order, and far less wedded to the bargaining table as the sole expression of workplace power. It will have to be less about consumption and more about democracy, and as much about being blue collar as being green collar. It will have to be more inclusive in conception, more experimental in form, more nimble in organization, and more kaleidoscopic in nature than previous incarnations.80
While I must disagree with Cowie slightly (we cannot simply talk about simply creating a better working-class identity), the thrust of his statement is true. Any working-class movement must move beyond a trade union consciousness to a socialist one. This entails a commitment to democracy and environmentalism, and of course, a move beyond narrow chauvinism to embrace universal humanity.
Twilight of Neoliberalism: The End of the Eternal Present?
I began writing this essay in January, before the electoral coup against Bernie Sanders, before the coronavirus put the world on lockdown before we plummeted into a recession that may be on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, before American brownshirts marched armed through the streets unimpeded before nationwide uprisings began in response to the killing of George Floyd. Before, before, before. But very little of what has come to pass changes the facts of history laid out here. As the famous quote attributed to Lenin goes “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”81 We are seeing the end of the “end of history.” What will come next is anyone’s guess. But at the same time, it seems certain that the eternal present of neoliberalism is dead. The sense that we have seen it all is gone. However, the problems left to us by the old form remain. The stench of its rotting corpse has stultified us. Leaving us to stare in horror as the body putrefies. Even as the left tries to find a way from subculture to the seats of power, it remains haunted by the neoliberal ghost of civility and procedure.
Announcing the passing of another age, historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle performed an autopsy of the New Deal order just before the End of History. In their assessment, they wrote that while that order was “dead”:
the problems bedeviling that order from the early 1960s live on: class and racial antagonisms, the resentments of status and power, the corruptions and frustrations of engorged federal bureaucracies, the antipodes of authority and resistance, still occupy a central place in our nation’s political life.82
While the neoliberal response to those problems had the effect of further retrenching them, this was not the only possible future. Another was possible, one that would have represented the resolution of those contradictions in favor of the working class, rather than a regression that eroded the gains made by those that built the New Deal in the first place. However, that window closed as the organizations of the working class became either more marginal or a cornerstone partner in managing the affairs of capitalism. The window again appears to be cracked, will we choose to fling it open or seek to rebuild an idealized past that never existed?
One thing remains clear: the crises of capital will continue until they are overcome. They will be overcome either through the transition to socialism or through a descent into barbarism. There really is no alternative. How we do so is to learn the lessons of the past. I posited earlier the question of whether a second shot at the New Deal was possible or even ideal. To which my response is a resounding no. Sure, it proved long-lasting in a juridical sense and a temporary boon for the living standards of the working class, but in the long view of history the New Deal was a misstep for the working class. It limited the horizon of struggle to what could be accomplished through law, rather than what could be gained through the further development of class warfare.
Most importantly, it required the accumulation of capital on the national scale, and with that requirement of the continuous production of value by the working class—something that precludes the international character of socialism. In the long run, even the strongest social democratic reforms are eroded by coercive law of competition. Businesses that can no longer live with the expanded consumer participation of their workers and maintain a sufficient rate of profit will always choose their own interests over their workers. Just like they know their interests, we must learn ours. This is not to say that reform means nothing in the short term, but it should never be forgotten that revolution is the endgame. We need to widen the horizon of the possible and ensure that we begin to think not just beyond the limits of our present, but to those of our imagined past. Seeing beyond the crisis of the 1970s that gave way to the flattened history of the neoliberal era, it is possible to see a new world, but a world in which the contours are unknown and will likely remain undefined for the foreseeable future, that is, until we start to make it.
Daniel Lazare writes on the US Constitution, its inherent contradictions, and why socialists should oppose it.
1982 poster by Soviet artist Evgeny Kazhdan
In order to theorize the United States, socialists must theorize the US Constitution.
By “theorize,” we mean a theoretical analysis not of certain parts, but of the phenomenon as a whole. Rather than focusing exclusively on racism, sexism, and the like, as leftists are wont to do, this means coming to grips with “USA-ness” itself – why it arose, what it means, how it managed to conquer much of North America in a matter of decades, and why it has played such an outsized role in world history ever since.
The same goes for the US Constitution. Law reviews and poli-sci journals overflow with articles about this or that clause or theory of interpretation. But attempts to grapple with the Constitution in its entirety are rare. Why did eighteenth-century patriots attach so much importance to a written document? Why has it proved so durable? Why do increasingly undemocratic features such as a lifetime Supreme Court or a Senate based on equal state representation draw so little attention? To be sure, articles about the Electoral College have grown common since Republicans used it to steal the presidency in December 2000. But once it becomes clear that reform is impossible within current constitutional confines – which is indeed the case – everyone goes back to sleep.
So what are we to make of a plan of government that seemingly “disappears” its own shortcomings? Is it simply that Americans are too busy or lazy to care? Or is passive acceptance part of a social contract that is more contradictory and ambiguous than people realize?
What, moreover, does this have to do with socialism? Is Marxism above such local concerns when it comes to the international capitalist crisis? Or, given capitalism’s multi-dimensional quality (which is to say the fact that it is not just an economic system but a political and social one as well), shouldn’t Marxists recognize that the US constitutional crisis is part and parcel of the larger capitalist breakdown and that it is impossible to understand one without the other?
The answer is obvious. Capitalism is concrete. It arises out of real institutions and real societies. We can’t understand it as a whole unless we understand its various components as a whole and determine how they figure in the larger process.
Is the Constitution rational?
The logical place to start is with the document itself. The Constitution (which originally consisted of just 4,300 words but has since grown to around 7,500) consists of a Preamble, seven articles, plus twenty-seven amendments. Article I deals with Congress, II with the presidency, III with the federal judiciary, IV with the states, V with the amending process, while VI contains the all-important supremacy clause declaring that, once adopted, the document “shall be the supreme law of the land.” Article VII, finally, outlines how the ratification process is to proceed.
Since the Constitution says it’s the law of the land, and since law must be rational, the implication is that the document as a whole must be rational as well, meaning that the various pieces must hang together in a logical manner that makes sense. Every legal textbook and every last judicial decision assumes this to be the case; indeed, it would be hard to imagine a society basing itself on laws that it frankly admits are nonsense.
But how do we know this is the case? The Preamble, for instance, seems to advance a straight-forward theory of popular sovereignty in which “we the people” can do whatever they want “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,” and so forth. Article VII drives the point home even more forcefully since it is clearly at odds with the Articles of Confederation, the plan of government approved by all thirteen states in 1781 and still the law of the land when the framers gathered in Philadelphia six years later. The reason it’s at odds is simple: where the Articles of Confederation stipulate that any constitutional change must be approved by all thirteen states (“…nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made … unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every state”), Article VII’s “establishment clause” says that the new constitutional alteration will be considered valid when ratified by just nine.
Since this was contrary to the Articles of Confederation, this means that the Constitution was illegal at the time it was drafted, a problem it promptly rectified via the miracle of self-legalization. It’s like telling a cop who’s pulled you over for speeding not to bother writing a ticket because you’ve just changed the law in your favor. But what would be absurd for an individual is the opposite for a sovereign people as a whole. Just as “we the people” can make any law they want in order to improve their circumstances, they’re free to disregard any existing law for the same reason.
To paraphrase Richard Nixon: if the people do it, that means it’s legal. This is the definition of popular sovereignty— people are over the law rather than under it and hence legally unbounded when it comes to their own self-advancement. So the Preamble states in combination with Article VII. But the rest of the Constitution goes on to say something very different. Article I establishes a complex legislative process whose purpose is clearly to limit the people’s decision-making abilities. Article II establishes an equally roundabout way of electing presidents. Article III says that federal judges may “hold their offices during good behavior,” which effectively means for life even if the people want to remove them mid-stream.
How can a supposedly sovereign people submit to restrictions on their own power? Finally, there is the amending clause set forth in Article V, which imposes the most astonishing restriction of all. It says that the people cannot change so much as a comma without the approval of two-thirds of each house of Congress plus three-fourths of the states. Back when there were just thirteen states, this meant that four states representing as little as ten percent of the population could veto any constitutional reform sought by the other ninety percent. Today, it means that thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent can veto any reform sought by the other 95.6.
What is even more remarkable is that Article V goes on to lay out two instances in which the people’s power disappears entirely. The first says that “no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article,” which deal with the slave trade. The second says that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”Even if every last American agreed that the slave trade should be abolished immediately, in other words, the Constitution says they couldn’t do so for a full twenty years after ratification. Even if the overwhelming majority agreed that a Senate based on equal state representation was intolerable affront to democracy, the Constitution says they can’t alter it in the slightest without the unanimous agreement of all fifty states, which effectively makes it impossible. It thus renders the people powerless as well – not for twenty years but for as long as the Constitution remains in effect.
How can the Constitution declare the people to be simultaneously omnipotent and impotent? This would appear to be the very definition of incoherence. The rightwing Federalist Society claims to believe in “natural law, the idea of law as founded upon reason and logic and not merely the ipse dixit [unproven assertion] of a given power.”1 But if the Constitution is not founded on reason, as it clearly isn’t, then isn’t this a case of seeing logic where it doesn’t exist?
Of course, it’s not just the Federalist Society but the ruling class in general, who feel this way. All schools of constitutional analysis claim to interpret the Constitution in meaningful ways. Hence, all assume that a kernel of meaning lies at the core. But since we know that the opposite is true, that liberal society can be described as a gigantic conspiracy aimed at pulling the wool over the people’s eyes regarding the essential meaninglessness of their founding document. The result is a classic blind spot concerning a flaw that bourgeois society cannot allow itself to see so that it may continue to function.
Such contradictions are hardly limited to the US. To the contrary, liberal society in general rests on such blind spots. Classic English liberalism, for example, prides itself on the rule of law, political moderation, slow and steady reform, and so forth. “I hear you’ve had a revolution,” Harry Truman remarked to Britain’s George VI following Labor’s sweeping victory in the 1945 parliamentary elections. “Oh no,” the king replied, “we don’t have those here.” Revolutions were for lesser people like the Russians or French, not for a civilized nation like the Brits. Yet, British moderation is in fact a product of a century of turmoil beginning with the English Civil War in 1642 and ending with the Battle of Culloden, the result of an attempted takeover by the vanquished Stuart dynasty, in 1746. England had to go through the fire before Victorian legalism could be achieved. It had to be immoderate in order to become moderate and then forget that it had ever been immoderate at all.
The US Constitution accomplishes the same trick in virtually the same breath. First, it invokes popular sovereignty but then cancels it, so that “we the people” can submit to a rule of law beyond democratic control – and all in the name of democracy no less. It performs the operation so neatly that bourgeois legal scholars forget that popular sovereignty existed in the first place.
So is this our theory of the US Constitution, i.e. that of a self-denying system of government whose purpose is to blind the people to its own contradictions? One that declares the people to be sovereign in theory while denying it in fact? The answer is not quite. First, we’ve got to examine what purpose this blind spot serves.
Political playing field or instrument of class rule?
E.P. Thompson closed his 1975 study, Whigs and Hunters, an examination of eighteenth-century politics and law, with a swipe at a “highly schematic Marxism” that holds that “the rule of law is only another mask for the rule of a class” and that therefore “[t]he revolutionary can have no interest in law, unless as a phenomenon of ruling-class power and hypocrisy; it should be his aim simply to overthrow it.” Against this sort of “structural reductionism,” Thompson argued in favor of a more supple mode of analysis:
…in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the law had been less an instrument of class power than a central arena of conflict. In the course of conflict, the law itself had been changed; inherited by the eighteenth-century gentry, this changed law was, literally, central to their whole purchase upon power and upon the means of life.… What had been devised by men of property as a defense against arbitrary power could be turned into service as an apologia for property in the face of the propertyless. And the apologia was serviceable up to a point: for these “propertyless” … comprised multitudes of men and women who themselves enjoyed, in fact, petty property rights or agrarian use-rights whose definition was inconceivable without the forms of law.2
Rather than merely imposing class rule, law achieved hegemony by laying out a political playing field with room for everyone to take part. While obviously benefitting the high and mighty, it offered a measure of protection for the “petty property rights or agrarian use-rights” of those below. The poor thus ended up trusting in the law as well, thereby rendering its hegemony all the more complete. The situation was much the same in British North America, where, if anything, everyone had more of a stake since property was more widespread – not counting slaves and Native Americans, that is. Consequently, New England wound up even more legalistic than Old England back home.
Since travel was difficult from north to south, politico-legal arenas of conflict tended to unfold within colonial lines. The War of Independence changed this by drawing the ex-colonies into a common polity, while the Constitution fairly revolutionized it by deepening political integration in general. Moreover, it continually turned up the heat by trying to accomplish several tasks at once: create a powerful central government while ensuring states’ rights, establish an unprecedented level of national democracy while entrenching slavery even further than the British, etc. The elaborate compromises that the framers carved out in 1787 ended up both infuriating and enlivening all sides, which is why the entire structure exploded in civil war just 74 years later.
While the Constitution summoned up and cancelled popular sovereignty in practically the same breath, it offered a consolation prize in the form of a powerful new politico-legal system in which eighty percent of the population could take part. The new politics were vast and dramatic, especially once slavery emerged as a major point of contention with the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The people were still not sovereign in the strict sense, but they were politically alive in a way they never had been before. In France, the people created constitution after constitution after 1789. In America, the Constitution created the people by taking scattered seaboard communities and molding them into something approaching a unified polity.
Structuring politics
But not only did the Constitution create a new politico-legal arena, it shaped it.
Of the 85 Federalist Papers written by Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay from October 1787 to May 1788, the most frequently cited is the tenth, with good reason. In it, Madison takes aim at the “factious spirit” that he says is forever the bane of stable government and comes up with both a diagnosis and a cure.
First the diagnosis: “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”
Hence, it not only different degrees of property that lead to conflict, but different kinds of – “[a] landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests,” as the Tenth Federalist puts it. “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation,” Madison adds, “and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.” So how can we make sure that all these interests and factions behave themselves for the good of larger society?
Reading between the lines, it is evident what Madison is up to. Not only is he concerned about struggles between rich and poor, but between different economic sectors, slave-owning planters on one hand and bankers, merchants, and incipient manufacturers on the other. Since he feels it would be unjust to allow one sector to violate another, his concern is how to keep them separate but equal.
Hence his cure: Madison admits that in the rough and tumble of daily politics, the task is not easy. Ordinarily, he says,
…the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures … are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good.
What Madison understands as bullying seems inevitable, but Madison hoped to prevent it via the miracle of complexity, i.e. the division of the polity into so many sub-units and sub-sub-units that political movements will wind up dashing themselves upon the rocks. As the Tenth Federalist notes:
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire state.
And, of course, the wickedest and most improper project of all would be the abolition of slavery since it would strike at the Southern landed interest’s very existence. Therefore, the goal was to scatter and confuse the abolitionists. This was the purpose of non-sovereign sovereignty: to prevent the movement from spreading from state to state and thus coming together as a mighty whole.
This explains both the success and failure of the Civil War. Despite Madison’s efforts, abolitionism succeeded in crossing some state lines. But it didn’t succeed in crossing the Mason-Dixon Line thanks to various pro-slavery provisions that the Constitution had put in place: states’ rights; a three-fifths clause in Article I providing slaveholding states with as many twenty-five extra seats in the House of Representatives and twenty-five extra votes in the Electoral College; a southern-controlled Supreme Court that ruled in Dred Scott that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”; a Senate in which slaveholding states were guaranteed parity, and, finally, an amending clause that gave the South an unchallengeable veto over any and all constitutional changes.
Since the Constitution rendered slavery secure within its southern redoubt, the only way around the problem was to suspend the Constitution and launch a revolutionary war aimed ultimately at expropriating the plantocracy. Even though they would never admit it, this is precisely what northern politicians set out to do.
But once “normal” politics resumed after Appomattox, northern politicians restored the Constitution in full since it had established the only politico-legal arena of struggle they had ever known. Rather than venture deeper into revolutionary waters, they opted almost instinctively to stick with the existing framework. To be sure, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments abolished slavery and federalized citizenship in 1865-70, which is why Popular Frontists like the historian Eric Foner extoll the supposedly radical changes they wrought. But, in fact, such reforms rapidly disappeared within the constitutional morass. Former slaves sank into neo-slavery while the notion that they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” once again became the law of the land throughout the old Confederacy. Roughly one American in fifty had died, yet the only thing the Civil War accomplished was to eliminate southern secession as a political threat.
Such are the results of democratic self-nullification.
The circularity of American politics
The ups and downs of the socialist movement that emerged after the Civil War are too numerous to cover in this essay. But it suffices to say that the Constitution “over-determined” its failure by scattering the movement’s energies and preventing it from coming together in a single mighty mass.3 It did so by entrenching racism, (one of the SP’s best-selling pamphlets was a broadside against the “ni*ger equality” that bosses sought to impose by forcing whites to work side by side with blacks)4, and fairly mandating massive repression. Officials called in the state or federal troops to break some five hundred strikes between 1877 and 1903, cementing US labor history as the bloodiest and most violent of any industrial nation outside of czarist Russia.5
The constitutional recrystallization of the post-Civil period resulted in a curious paradox: class unity at the top and disaggregation below. In 1902, the leader of a group of anthracite coal-mine owners declared: “…the rights and interests of the laboring men will be protected and cared for – not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.” Sociologist Michael Mann observes: “…no other national capitalist class behaved with quite such righteous solidarity.” Yet workers, split along racial, ethnic, religious, and geographical lines, did the opposite. Socialism requires “a sense of totality,” Mann adds, yet it was precisely a totalizing working-class perspective that the Madisonian constitution was designed to prevent.6
Which brings us to … Islam. A footnote that Frederick Engels included in an essay he wrote about the history of religion in 1894 turns out to be oddly relevant to America’s current plight:
Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e. on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the “law.” The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. This is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English. It happened in the same way or similarly with the risings in Persia and other Mohammedan countries. All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes; and yet, even when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched. So the old situation remains unchanged and the collision recurs periodically.7
Engels had apparently read the fourteenth-century Moroccan polymath Ibn Khaldun and was therefore familiar with his famous thesis about the three-generation lifespan of Muslim dynasties. What makes the passage relevant is that both systems, modern America and medieval Islam, unfold under a static body of law, the Constitution on one hand, and shariah on the other. Since the law is assumed to be perfect and unchanging, all problems must be the result of laxity in its observance. The solution, therefore, is to restore the law in all its ancient purity.
This was the message of medieval Muslim reformers like the Almoravids and Almohads, as Engels points out, and, curiously enough, it is the message of American reformers today.
At the height of Watergate, for instance, the black Texas Democrat Barbara Jordan declared in ringing tones: “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.” The solution to Nixon’s misdeeds was to put the Constitution back on the pedestal where it belonged. A liberal New York Democrat named Elizabeth Holtzman excoriated Nixon for never stopping to ask himself, “What does the Constitution say? What are the limits of my power? What does the oath of office require of me? What is the right thing to do?” If he had read the Constitution, he would know the answer. Nearly half a century later, Nancy Pelosi denounced Donald Trump in the same ringing tones for “undermining a system, the beautiful, exquisite, brilliant, genius of the Constitution, the separation of powers, by granting to himself the powers of a monarch, which is exactly what Benjamin Franklin said we didn’t have.”8
The problem is always the same, and so the answer must be the same as well. When presidents go rogue, the faithful must draw them back to what ancient prophets like Benjamin Franklin said were their proper constitutional limits. If the Constitution says it it must be right because, after all, the Constitution is the Constitution. But, then, the Qur’an is also the Qur’an, so does that make it right as well? Here is what Ibn Khaldun said about Islam’s founding document:
The Qur’an … is in itself the claimed revelation. It is itself the wondrous miracle. It is its own proof. It requires no outside proof, as do the other wonders wrought in connection with revelations. It is the clearest proof that can be, because it unites in itself both the proof and what is to be proved. … All this indicates that the Qur’ân is alone among the divine books, in that our Prophet received it directly in the words and phrases in which it appears. … Inimitability is restricted to the Qur’an.9
So is the Constitution, that wondrous miracle that is its own proof, inimitable as well? According to liberal politicians such as Jordan, Pelosi et al., the answer is yes.
Towards a theory of the Constitution
The upshot is a political system as arid and unchanging as the constitutional structure that controls it. Which is what Madison wanted to accomplish, i.e. to sterilize politics so that the plantation system could continue ad infinitum.
The result is a society that is unable to grow and hence address a growing list of problems in a constructive and meaningful way. This is not to say there haven’t been bursts of reform. There have, obviously, but it’s invariably a case of one step forward and two steps back. Reconstruction led to Jim Crow and the unbridled corporate dictatorship of the 1880s and 90s. The mixed bag of reforms that comprised the Progressive Era led to the violent suppression of the Wobblies, grim wartime repression under Woodrow Wilson, the Palmer Raids, and Prohibition. The black revolution of the 1950s and 60s gave way to a growing “southernization” marked by the growth of pro-gun and anti-abortion movements and a sophisticated effort aimed at rolling back civil rights. This was observed the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson in 2004: “One of the surprise developments of the last thirty years has been that, where it was once assumed that the South would become more like the rest of the country, in politics and in many aspects of culture, the rest of the country has come to resemble the South.”10
Obviously, popular prejudice is a factor. But it’s an effect rather than a cause, given a slave constitution subject to no more but the most cursory reforms. Take the three-fifths clause that gave southern slaveholders twenty-five extra congressional seats and electoral votes. One might imagine that the abolition of slavery would have done away with such abuses. But with the termination of Reconstruction in 1877, the opposite was the case as black individuals now counted as “five-fifths” of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment— even though they couldn’t vote. Racism wound up expanding all the more, not despite the Constitution, but because of it. The seniority system rewarded racism by allowing the one-party South to expand its tentacles throughout Congress while the Electoral College and the Senate multiplied the power of agrarian states that were less populous and less developed, thus undermining democracy as well.
Despite the civil-rights reforms of the 1950s and 60s, the situation today is largely unchanged. In fact, in many ways, it is worse. Equal state representation, for instance, allows the majority of the population living in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one in the Senate by the minority living in the other forty. Sixty years ago, the implications were neutral, at least in terms of race, since the top ten actually had fewer minorities than the nation as a whole. Today the situation is reversed with the top ten most populous states home to twenty percent more minorities. The result is a growing premium for whites in places like Montana, the Dakotas, New Hampshire, and Vermont and a growing disadvantage for minorities in places like California, Texas, and New York.
This is why America is racist – not because of some disease that Americans can’t kick, but because of a slave-era constitution that is beyond their control. Meanwhile, the filibuster allows senators from 21 states, like Montana, the Dakotas, etc., to veto any and all bills while the Electoral College gives voters in lily-white Wyoming more than twice as much clout in presidential elections as voters in a “minority-majority” giant like California.11
Not only does the Constitution prevent the people from tackling the problem of racial inequality, but it also prevents them from advancing on other fronts as well – environmental protection, labor, women’s rights, and so forth. Corporations adore the Constitution because by sterilizing democracy, it gives them a free hand to plunder society as they wish. The working masses are paying a growing price for a constitution that prevents them from taking society in hand and making it work for the benefit of the overwhelming majority.
Towards a theory of constitution breakdown
If the Constitution’s structure has remained static over the centuries why is it breaking down now? Why has Congress been gridlocked since the 1990s, why has the Electoral College overridden the popular vote in two out of the last five presidential elections, why do Supreme Court nominations generate such bitter fights on Capitol Hill, and why is everyone filled with trepidation over what November will bring – whether the vote count will be honest, whether Trump will leave the White House peacefully if he’s defeated, whether there will be fighting in the streets, etc.? There’s more than a whiff of Weimar in the air. But why now as opposed to, say, the 1950s?
The answer has to do with the larger arc of capitalist development. Les trentes glorieuses, the golden age of postwar capitalism, was a time when seemingly everything worked. In Washington, three white men, two Texans and a Kansan– Dwight Eisenhower, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson – essentially ran the government. Although some leftists feared that Joe McCarthy represented a fascist resurgence, what’s striking now is how neatly Eisenhower was able to nip the threat in the bud. Ike handpicked lawyer Joe Welch to confront the senator at the Army-McCarthy hearings, and the patrician Welch was careful to rehearse his famous line – “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” – beforehand.12 In the end, McCarthy was denied his beer-hall putsch and collapsed just a few months after the Senate voted overwhelmingly to condemn his behavior.
So the center held – and what’s more, it continued to hold even during the tumult of the 1960s. Indeed, Watergate marked a high-point of constitutional reverence in 1974. In that moment Alexander Cockburn couldn’t resist poking fun at American piety, as a columnist at the old Village Voice:
On the word front, the sky is still dark with clichés coming home to roost. The nightmare of Watergate is slowly receding, the long national trauma is over, the country’s profound need for rest has been appeased, a catharsis has taken place, a curtain is falling on a tragedy almost Greek in its dimensions, agony is giving way to peace, the nation’s wounds are being healed, the healing has begun, the Constitution has worked, the system has worked, pretty well everything you’ve ever heard of has worked, except the economy.13
The economy had ceased working thanks to the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the unraveling of the great postwar boom, this meant that the Constitution would soon stop working as well. Although Republicans went along with Watergate, temperatures quickly started to rise. The 1980s saw the Iran-contra scandal in which a lieutenant colonel named Oliver North denounced Congress like a two-bit Latin American putschist, with legislators too intimidated to say anything in return. House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared war on the Clinton administration with his 1994 “Contract with America” and then tried to use the Monica Lewinsky affair to drive him out of office in 1998. November 2000 saw the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in which Republican thugs tried to disrupt the vote count in Miami in order to steal the election for George W. Bush.14 Republicans tried to use “Birthergate” and “Benghazi-gate” to sabotage another Democratic administration after Obama won office in 2008. Then, as if to prove that subversion was not a one-way street, Democrats tried to overthrow Trump via a no-less-bogus pseudo-scandal known as Russiagate.
Russiagate deserves a book in itself. Although liberals will no doubt cry out in protest, it plainly amounted to an attempted coup d’état by Democrats, the corporate media, and the intelligence agencies, all of whom were up in arms over Trump’s confused ramblings about a rapprochement with Russia and who therefore pushed the theory that he was a Kremlin agent. It was a paranoid fantasy cooked up by unrepentant cold warriors like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Robert Mueller. But beneath it lay a crisis of imperialism that had been building for years, a crisis of capitalism, and a deepening constitutional breakdown. It was the interaction of all three that made the situation so explosive.
As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has noted, capitalism has been in the grips of a crisis caused by declining profitability since the late 1960s. The 1970s, the decade of de-industrialization and rocketing energy prices, saw a long sickening plunge in corporate profits, while the neoliberal “reforms” of the 1980s saw a brief uptick. With the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the dot-com bust in 2001, capitalism resumed its downward course. It plunged again in 2007-08 and, thanks to Covid-19, has now gone crashing through the floor.15
Each downward plunge caused the mood in Washington to turn nastier and nastier while convincing disgruntled whites in the hinterlands that the cost of empire is not worth the blood that they had to shed. Deteriorating social conditions among rural whites sparked the anger that provided Trump with his margin of victory in 2016. American society was coming apart at the seams because the constitutional structure was disintegrating with astonishing speed.
The Declaration of Independence, America’s original founding document, says with regard to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” After nearly a century and a half, Americans have arrived right back where they started, i.e. with a government that is undermining their safety and happiness at every turn and which they therefore must replace, not in part but in toto. They can’t do so with eighteenth-century methods— only those of the twenty-first, which is to say with revolutionary socialism.
Joshua Morris discusses the development and deployment of anti-communist rhetoric in the United States from the beginnings of the 20th Century to the early Cold War.
“The student of the history of progressive thought is well aware that every idea in its early stages has been misrepresented, and the adherents of such ideas have been maligned and persecuted.” – Emma Goldman
Language is one of the most powerful tools human beings possess. Language has not only the power to convey ideas but also to influence new ones, curb older ones, and contain the specifics of one idea versus another. Those who study the history of anti-communism and the McCarthy period in the United States are all-too-familiar with the tragic breaches of personal and constitutional rights conducted by federal agencies for the purpose of national security and cultural conformity in an era of uncertain international dilemmas. Stories like that of John Gates, who was forced to “strip naked while a guard searched every part of [his] body” each morning prior to his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government, form a central theme for analyzing the pervasive and intrusive nature of anti-communism in the postwar years.1 A lesser-known story is the means by which the colloquial language of the nation could not only conform to such acts that only in hindsight are understood to be unconstitutional, but also sustain the idea that certain individuals could be denied constitutional rights. Much of the scholarship on anti-communism in the United States has addressed the issue of passivity toward congressional breaches only tangentially. Jennifer Luff notes that as a force in American history, anti-communism was pushed by a coordinated network of individuals and agencies dating back to the 1920s and the post-WWI strike wave that included both public and private efforts to curb the influence of labor activism in the communities. Ellen Shrecker argues that anti-communism was the continuation of a “counter subversive tradition” dating back to the nativism of the 18th century which sought to publicly ostracize and demonize individuals viewed as “peculiarly barbaric and dangerous.”2 James Zeigler, in his 2015 publication on black radicalism during the Cold War, argues that anti-communist strategies which decried acts of civil justice performed by non-whites as un-American was an “all-too-familiar charge” that pushed a narrative of suspicion and fear regarding civil rights activism.3
During the interwar and postwar period, people with positions of power in both business and politics wielded the rhetoric of anti-communism as a social and political weapon intended to normalize discrimination, in both the physical and legal sense, of civil rights activists, labor activists, people of color, and other marginalized groups in the United States. Those who used anti-communist rhetoric during the interwar and postwar years sought to abridge large contingents of the civil rights and union movements, including communists but also labor activists and civil rights activists, as counter subversives engaged in a conspiracy of sedition and treason. The language targeted what Robert Korstad called “civil rights unionism,” or the alliance forged between labor and civil rights organizations between 1934 and 1944, a period of activism communists refer to as the Popular Front.4 Those who used such weaponized words were also not limited geographically to one part of the nation; they could be found in the business interests of Detroit automakers, the efforts by police to limit labor organizing in California, and in the legal language used to deny free speech rights to people of color in the Jim Crow South. Although anti-communist rhetoric in American history is not always examined as a form of weaponized language, it is a prime example of when the use of such acutely-targeted rhetoric has been demonstratively successful at achieving its ultimate aim of normalizing the effort to persecute and discriminate against certain groups for their ideas, lifestyles, and identities.
By 1947 the label of “communist” was one of the most effective forms of weaponized rhetoric to associate “otherness” upon citizens. It embodied the totality of anti-Americanism dominant in mainstream colloquial language and, much like other kinds of weaponized rhetoric, was not viewed as inherently inflammatory but rather as an assertion of a fact which alone implied guilt. What made anti-communist rhetoric weaponized was its conversion of older traditions of ‘nativism’ into traditions of American patriotism relatable to 20th century Americans and its perpetuation by individuals in positions of power. By targeting individuals that lacked the legal and physical means of defending their rights, individuals both public and private in positions of political, legal, and cultural power normalized the use of derogatory and, in many cases racist, rhetoric by equating domestic concerns over social inequity with foreign nationalism and sedition. Whereas the nativism of the 18th and 19th centuries were built on broad concepts of localism and religious traditions, the anti-communism of the post-1920 period aimed to reinforce highly specific political, social, and economic views while deeming pro-Socialist and pro-syndicalist views as fundamentally un-American.
As a topic, anti-communism dominates most of the written scholarship on the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), its leadership, and the overall American communist movement between 1945 and 1957. James Barrett depicted post-war anti-communism as the root cause of the movement’s decline “largely by government repression and the conservative political climate of the McCarthy period.’5 Edward Pintzuk, similarly, focused his study of anti-communism on its political nature undertaken as “covert actions” by the state.6 More recent studies of anti-communism have finally corrected the long-standing thesis that political oppression against communists in the United States was relegated to a relatively short period of time in the postwar years colloquially known as “McCarthyism.” Jennifer Luff and Ellen Schrecker both demonstrated that anti-communism was not an isolated phenomenon nor was it relegated solely to political repression in the post-WWII years. In her book, Luff examines the extent to which anti-communism blended with nativism and joint efforts by business leaders and reactionary union leaders, such as Samuel Gompers, to repress the influence of socialists and communists in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Schrecker also examined the ways in which anti-communism encompassed more than simply political repression; targeting not just political advocates of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) but also “fellow travelers,” known associates of CPUSA organizers, and people of interest whose views could be perceived as aligned with the ideology of the CPUSA. Another important aspect of American anti-communism was its presence in African American communities; a topic that requires further examination and research. By focusing exclusively on political aspects of the repression, Eric Arnesen notes, historians have misinterpreted the “fully-throated embrace of anti-communism” by the African American community in the postwar years. The same could likely be said about the interwar years based on the testimony of Hosea Hudson.7 This essay examines the impact of weaponized rhetoric used by individuals in positions of power on others by focusing on the experiences of those who were on the receiving end of such rhetoric. Rather than examine an exclusively political dynamic of anti-communism, examining the impact of language on individuals unveils a more personalized experience with societal repression and the alienation sought and created by the users of such language.8
For the purposes of this study, I am not simply referring to ‘red-baiting,’ which has a specific goal of denying someone access to a job, or a position, or participation in a discussion. The weaponized rhetoric of anti-communism went beyond the scope of political ideology and individualism to charge an entire movement with sedition and countersubversion. This movement was not strictly pushing a communist political agenda, nor was it strictly trying to advance civil rights, nor was it strictly trying to sustain the momentum of organized labor; it was doing all three at once to create an all-encompassing image of “otherness” among the American citizenry. As such, communists were associated with civil rights and with labor, and civil rights/labor activists were associated with communism. By the onset of the Cold War in 1946/47, this language had become normalized to the extent that to be a labor activist or a promoter of the rights of non-whites implied associations with communists and suspicion of one’s ideals, lifestyle, and identity.
Some of the first radicals to face public ridicule and the use of such targeted rhetoric leading into the 20th century were prominent anarchists and socialists, such as Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs. Goldman was called the mastermind behind the assassination of industrialist Henry Frick, a proponent of “unlawful assembly” and an advocate of sedition.9 Like other anarchists of her time, Goldman was attacked because of her desire to stand firm in her convictions regarding marriage, the state, and labor against a tide of reactionary and powerful nationalist forces. These forces were themselves the product of tremendous shifts in the social and political attitudes of working Americans at the turn of the century that united trade unionists with anarchist and socialist organizations in an effort to radicalize the progressive movement. Subsequently, a string of nativist rhetoric—which historically targeted “otherness” in American society such as Catholics in the 17th century, in addition to Irish and German immigrants in the 1840s—evolved into a political weapon wielded against Debs during his 1908, 1912, and 1920 presidential campaigns, where Debs received over 420,852, 901,551, and 919,799 votes (respectively). This occurred particularly after Debs carried a sizable minority in the 1912 election throughout key states such as California (11.68%), Washington (12.43%), Oklahoma (16.42%), and Nevada (16.47%).
What drove the transition of 19th-century nativist rhetoric into 20th century politically weaponized rhetoric was the fact that many of those who rallied behind individuals like Goldman and Debs, as well as organizations such as the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were either first or second-generation immigrants. The rhetoric which sought to delegitimize their political ideals thus targeted their perceived associations with enemies of the state and was advanced primarily by individuals in positions of power and only in such instances where the execution of said power did not elicit public backlash. During World War I, for example, newspapers and court prosecutors targeted Debs and his supporters by utilizing language that blended nationalist patriotism with anti-immigrant nativism and fostered the general idea that anything “revolutionary” must be understood as fundamentally anti-American. When the SPA and the IWW attempted to defend their views on the grounds of free speech they simultaneously “stirred debate across the country about the limits and responsibilities of free speech”, making it clear that the process of overcoming nativism would be an uphill battle.10 Throughout the post-WWI red scare against radical labor organizers, anti-immigrant rhetoric—mainly in newspapers and over the radio—sought to associate the idea of foreignness, a more political/nationalist version of “otherness,” with the political traditions of socialist groups. Upon these conditions, the foundation for an entirely new form of weaponized rhetoric and social oppression was built; the language of anti-communism.11
Dating back to the late 19th century, labor leaders and craft unionists, such as Samuel Gompers, held numerous reasons to resist associations with the SPA, the IWW, and other populist socialist organizations since these organizations emerged as rivals to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Some of the rhetoric which became colloquial anti-communism by the 1920s had its roots in reactionary tendencies by labor unionists like Gompers, dated back to the formation of the AFL and its formative years from 1886 – 1915. According to Jennifer Luff, Gompers was “indifferent to violations of the civil liberties of others and hostile to the free-speech campaign waged by radicals in the [IWW].” The leadership of the AFL, following Gompers’ lead, worked to “suppress the opinions of which they disapprove,” particularly fights for free speech in the labor movement since it inevitably involved the courts. This reactionary tradition lingered throughout the AFL’s formative years and served as a wedge between the union and other progressive trade unionists who sought an expansion of union inclusion. When Eugene Debs began organizing mass contingents of the Socialist Party to resist “the crime of craft unionism,” he pointed to the AFL and their stances on free speech.12 To activist Daniel DeLeon, who at the time worked with Debs and the SPA, the AFL sought to “organize themselves in such a way as to leave their fellow wage-slaves out in the cold.” When the SPA showed signs of prominence in the years leading up to and during the 1906 Presidential election, Gompers denounced what he believed would subvert professional labor to “party slavery” and instead insisted that organized labor remain independent of the political system. Gompers’ efforts, which amounted to “proselytizing against party entanglements,” however, were more effective in distancing the AFL from working Americans than they were at uniting the two groups; as made evident by the outcome of the 1906 election and the sway of northeastern urban labor districts to Republican William Taft.13
Gompers’ tradition abandoned efforts to mobilize voters around labor and instead began to focus on solutions through government policy. The AFL “honed their skills as Washington lobbyists” by following precedent labor legislation, speaking to Congress on the passage of such legislation, and advocating a policy of temperance with regard to the passage of labor laws. After the 1906 election, the AFL “succeeded in terrorizing members of Congress” and quickly turned their attention to local organizing drives, encouraging members to run for Congress and tightening the AFL’s associations within the Democratic Party. By the 1912 election, Gompers and his fellow cadres in the AFL had solidified a dependency between the district organizers of the union and Democratic lawmakers in Congress. Gompers then further bolstered his ties with the Democrats by advocating “a politics of labor laissez-faire,” which had the dual effect of depicting the AFL as a progressive, but moderate and upstanding organization, while depicting alternatives as idealistic and radical. Eventually, as Luff put it, “this strategy hardened into an ideology” and an entire network of spycraft and surveillance over labor organizers was put into place at the state and federal level through offices of the Bureau of Investigation (BI).14
The way nativist rhetoric was used against radicals and who used them changed significantly after two events near the end of World War I; one of which transformed the nature of American radicalism itself. The first and arguably most significant was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which caused a schism within the SPA whereby numerous members of the ‘left-wing’ caucus began to label themselves ‘communist’ and began to support the idea of socialism following the immediate path of the Bolshevik Party. A little over a year after the Russian Revolution, in January of 1919, the left-wing insisted on unequivocal support of the newly formed First Communist International (Comintern) after Vladimir Lenin personally invited the SPA’s left-wing to join the first worldwide convention of socialist organizations (First Communist International, or Comintern). When the leaders of the SPA refused to accept the demands of the left-wing caucus, despite a Party-wide referendum that passed with 90% support, the leadership expelled 12 of the left’s leadership out of power in Party elections, followed by the expulsion of numerous state organizations. Most of these expelled units went on to join various language federations organized by C.E. Ruthenberg and Louis C. Fraina formed the basis of the underground Workers’ Party of America (WPA), which served as a front for the Communist Party of America (CPA) by 1920. Although the CPA did not immediately suffer attacks from the Federal government, the rise of even more radical alternatives to the SPA triggered a reaction by the Justice Department over concerns of collusion with the German government—who was believed to be involved in the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
In September of 1917, the Justice Department, using its paramilitary predecessor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), targeted the IWW by raiding their national offices. Gompers followed up by meeting with Attorney General Thomas Gregory to assure him that the AFL was neither affiliated nor supportive of the IWW. Gompers was told that the state would take “great care” to differentiate between the AFL and the “treasonable, treacherous” organizers of the IWW. Gompers had already done this in part by declaring the AFL’s full support of President Wilson and the war effort. When the show trial of 1918 in Chicago proved to be ineffective at providing an immediate link between the IWW and Germany, however, the BI turned their attention to Debs and the SPA.15 Unlike the IWW, the SPA did have a more immediate link with Germany, and both Gompers, as well as the Justice Department, focused on the fact that the European nation was the birthplace of Karl Marx and revolutionary socialism extending back to the failed revolution of 1848. The language of nativism surfaced as Gompers labeled the SPA “the most important disrupting agency” of foreign nationalism and stated that the SPA preached “the doctrine of sabotage” by aiding domestic efforts to slow the trafficking of munitions to Europe. On the topic of socialism itself, Gompers labeled it a conspiracy put forth by German Chancellor Otto von Bismark in an attempt to disrupt the culture of other nations while building nationalism within his own country.16 This rhetoric by Gompers might not have gone anywhere if Debs had decided against making his risky speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 16th, 1918. There, amidst a crowd of over 1,200, Debs told his fellow citizens that if they wanted war to “let it be declared by the people.” Shortly into his speech, BI agents made their way through the crowd, demanding to see draft cards and arresting Debs for violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. Within a day The Washington Post declared that Debs invited his own arrest and set a trend for the depiction of those who came under the suspicions of the federal government.17
Political cartoon depicting the imprisonment of Eugene Debs
Debs’ arrest, as well as the upholding of convictions against individuals charged with violating the Espionage Act, signaled the start of government involvement in the repression of organizations and individuals previously only sought by business interests and craft union leaders like Gompers. It also signaled how the weaponized language was normalized through its use by people in positions of power. It proved effective at separating Gompers’ craft unions from the more grassroots unions that sought mass appeal and more political involvement. The Federal Government, particularly the Supreme Court, charged that Debs was guilty of attempting to arouse mutiny and promote treason among drafted soldiers of the US Army by giving a speech about how it was difficult to use the freedom of speech during wartime. When the Supreme Court denied Debs’ first appeal, their decision was charged with powerful words—particularly by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—that pejoratively linked “socialism” with “a glorification of minorities” but also downplayed the significance of Debs’ grievances as nothing more than “the usual contrasts between capitalists and laboring men.” To cite precedent, Justice Holmes referred to his own decision in a case just a few months prior, Frohwerk v. US (1919), where he had deemed criticism of US involvement in warfare unprotected by the First Amendment. The language thus delivered to the public in the decision was clear: Debs was guilty, and his promotion of socialism and civil rights was sufficient in disregarding his free speech.18
Once the war ended, the Justice Department ceased further investigations into the SPA and even ignored, for the most part, the splinter factions that would go on to form the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). What remained, however, was the new federal policing apparatus and the means to convict those deemed dangerous, forcing the WPA, CPA, and their supporters underground thereby making them for the most part ineffective as organizations. The first and most immediate of targets for this new federal apparatus was the massive movement for civil liberties resulting from citizens’ resistance to government repression and the jailing of Debs as well as numerous other activists during the war. Even though AFL leaders “were more often collaborators than victims of federal crackdowns,” they reversed their stances on free speech amidst the massive strike wave of 1919-1920. The strikes began in January, in Seattle, and within months swept across the nation’s industrial centers. On June 2nd, bombs exploded simultaneously in eight different cities, apparently targeting judges, business owners, and politicians believed to be involved in the crackdowns. The Justice Department responded with full force and taking advantage of its newly acquired powers in prosecuting those charged by banning red flags, raiding clubhouses of ethnic groups for communist propaganda, allowing the arrest of individuals for endorsing the strikes—in most cases not seeking warrants in advance.
These now infamous “Palmer Raids” created the uniform colloquial identity of leftist labor organizers and supporters of civil rights in the minds of the public: foreign, anti-American, criminal. Since communism as an ideological force could be so easily associated with notions of foreignness and the political ideals of Russia—who in the public eye was still guilty of backstabbing the United States during the war by its conditional surrender—communism and communists came to embody the peak of what ‘nativist’ sentiment sought to resist in the early 1920s. Within just a matter of a few years, those targeted by this newest manifestation of nativist rhetoric increased in number significantly and served to reinforce traditional customs and norms while limiting the practice of ethnic or cultural alternatives. During the early years of the Depression, potential targets included civil rights organizations active in combating racial discrimination in housing and education, civic projects within communities to combat homelessness and evictions, labor efforts to organize grassroots union drives in major urban areas such as Detroit, Atlanta, New York City, and Los Angeles. To create a narrative which depicted the political ideals of Marxism as un-American, individuals, and groups, both public and private, worked extensively to draw associations between socialists, anarchists, and eventually communists, with long-standing fears held by the predominantly white, Christian, male-dominated culture of the 1920s. Eventually, associations between communists and political radicals of all types, including those who advocated against long-standing traditions such as Jim Crow, were all too common. In making such associations, politicians were able to “suggest that black American protest is actually un-American sedition and, conversely, that support for the traditions of the segregated South is an expression of American patriotism.”19 This also had the effect of normalizing the idea that all three categories of radicals (anarchists, socialists, communists) were one-and-the-same; more common in their radicalism than different in their ideas and identities.
Even after the Palmer Raids, conservative union leaders like John L. Lewis and William Green remained the most publicly outspoken proponents of accusatory and at times violent rhetoric aimed at communists. Lewis first dealt with communist organizers in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1924 during his bid for re-election as President of the union. Running in opposition was George Voyzey, a relatively unknown figure in the union but a prominent organizer for William Foster in the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL). Voyzey brought two other key communist organizers into the UMWA, Patrick Toohey and Alex Reed, who helped build a grassroots electoral campaign against Lewis’ leadership. While Lewis pulled strings at the national union level, such as personally overseeing the counting of ballots, to ensure his electoral victory, Voyzey held the praise and admiration of the UMWA’s rank-and-file. This was made clear less than a year later when Voyzey teamed up with WPA member and UMWA district organizer John Brophy to create the International Miners’ Progressive Committee (IMPC) in the spring of 1925; which helped spearhead an amalgamation campaign to link up railroad unions with local districts of the UMWA to facilitate a massive strike in 1927. In 1926, Brophy ran another campaign against Lewis and netted a little over 25% of the total votes in one of the union’s most highly contested elections. Lewis’s refusal to accept the demands by the IMPC, such as nationalization of the mines and a five-day workweek, only increased further support for Brophy and Voyzey throughout 1926. Before the strike in ‘27 broke out, however, Lewis turned to William Green, who became President of the AFL two years earlier following Gompers’ death. To assure businessmen of the conservative nature of the UMWA leadership with regard to strikes, he insisted that communist propaganda from Russia did not emanate from within their union, but rather was the result of outside agitators acting on behalf of Moscow. Green depicted working with Lewis and the UMWA leadership as the more fitting choice than appeasing the radicals of the IMPC. Support for the IMPC by the union’s rank-and-file, then, was omitted from Green’s public statements on the issue. Public appeals such as Green’s and the divisive policies of union leaders like Lewis further contributed to the depiction of Left-leaning unionists as spies and loyalists to Moscow long after the government gave up on public ridicule of anarchists and socialists while also perpetuating a sense of ‘otherness’ in the public’s consciousness regarding anyone who dared to organize on behalf of workers’ rights.20
Although the raids ended in more public scrutiny than they succeeded at destroying elements of radicalism in the American labor movement, the BI conducted routine checks on known WPA/CPA associates as well as known communists in major unions across the country. In part, the policies of conservative unionists like Green and Lewis welcomed government involvement in overseeing union roster rolls so as to facilitate a more cooperative relationship with the Coolidge, and eventually Hoover, Administration. One way the BI succeeded with such operations against perceived radicals was to rely on local, private companies, such as the Corporation Auxiliary Company (CAC), to hire private investigators to infiltrate suspected unions and workplaces. These investigators were taught about their jobs in a manner riddled with the kind of rhetoric intended to delegitimize the constitutional rights of their targets, similar to the logic of nativism targeted toward the arrival of Catholic immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. One such investigator, William Gernaey of Detroit, stated how most people in his unit, as well as the general attitude of his middle-management associates to whom he reported, believed that “communists were all foreigners or Russians with beards and bombs.” In his autobiography, Gernaey explained how his understanding of radical union organizers came less from his actual experiences with such individuals and more from the caricatures of them by local newspapers and their depictions from upper management.21 Gernaey’s story paints a picture of how Americans isolated from the socialist Left viewed such political traditions through hyperbolic overgeneralizations about foreignness and acts of terror. It also suggests that even prior to the breakout of the Cold War, government agencies were actively seeking ways to depict socialist and communist movements in labor organizing as akin to terrorist cells promoting sedition among the citizenry.
According to communist organizer Dorothy Ray Healey from California, in terms of identifying company spies and police informants, in most cases “the company police and the state police were indistinguishable.” This was likely due to communists’ awareness that company informants such as Gernaey were not only numerous but also supported both company and local police in tracking down labor organizers and radical political advocates. Prior to the rise of the CPUSA in certain cities such as Detroit and New York after 1932, communists were routinely beaten in public, forcing activists like Healey to take on a methodology of working with other organizations to downplay associations. In doing so, however, Healey and other communists like her likely exacerbated concerns by local police instead of quelling them. Such was certainly the case when Healey organized for the Youth Communist League (YCL) in Pittsburg, California between 1930 and 1931. There she noted that in order to try and confuse local authorities, communists tended to organize around the headquarters of the Progressive Labor League located at 1020 Broadway, where each day of the week a different organization would hold meetings; ranging from the local CP-backed Unemployment Council on Tuesdays to the CPUSA’s legal arm in the International Labor Defense (ILD) on Wednesdays to the YCL on Thursdays. The League was an offshoot of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and while they shared the CPUSA’s passion for progressive change they were not openly a Marxist or revolutionary organization. Rather than convince local authorities that communists were doing legitimate work, however, police and company informants became convinced that all organizations which could be associated with the CPUSA were run by communists and that their goals—whichever they may be—were aligned with an international communist conspiracy and demanded immediate government attention.22
Dorothy Healy in 1949
Such associative tactics proved coercive and useful to local authorities, particularly when such information was leaked to the press. This was evident to Healey with the use of police brutality against communists during a strike at the California Packing Corporation (CPC) outside San Jose in 1931. Healey was tasked by the YCL and the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) with abandoning her educational goals to instead organize the workers of the CPC and create a base for infiltrating the canneries of California. The principal moment came when workers of the CPC walked out in response to the firing of a worker. At just sixteen, Healey found herself designated the “Youth Activities Director” and was officially organizing her first strike, given authorities to set up shop committees, Party nuclei, and facilitate the educating of workers on the benefits of the union. Local San Jose authorities began their resistance efforts by refusing to permit licenses to picket throughout the city, forcing Healey and other activists to promote the union in public illegally. When police discovered Healey’s organizational meeting location, St. James Park in downtown San Jose, they assaulted the organizers and used the lack of permission to justify a series of bloody attacks. As far as the general public was concerned, Healey noted that “there was no consciousness on the part of anybody else that there was anything wrong in what [the police] were doing;” indicating that such behavior was at the least understood as justified. The peak of this expression of power came when the police shot tear gas bombs into the crowd of organizers, permanently wounding one activist, Minnie Carson, and incapacitating others. Although this fueled momentum for a short-lived campaign to protest police brutality in addition to the strike, the strike ultimately was busted and Healey left San Jose having failed to gain any ground.23
In a large majority of the cases, it made little difference if communists were organizing in a public hall or a private home or how “quiet and disciplined” the meetings were. It also mattered very little if the space used, such as St. James Park, was deemed protected for the use of free speech and assembly. Such treatment was instead viewed as “dominant in the culture of the period” and served to remind the public that to be an open communist or to associate with them was to invite discrimination and suspicion from authorities. Police continued to use their informants to find the locations of meetings, raid them, assault activists, net catchy headlines, and haul leaders off to the local jail. In 1931, Los Angeles police broke up a legal demonstration held by Healey and other communists at the “free speech zone” near Pershing Square between 5th and 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. A year later, when CPUSA leader William Z. Foster spoke at Pershing Square while campaigning for president in 1932, he was arrested and deported from the city by local authorities. By targeting demonstrations that were both questionably legal and defended by geographic space for free speech, police and local authorities made it clear to the public that city laws and civil protections did not apply to advocates of unemployment relief, civil rights, and labor legislation.24
Associating civil rights goals of combating discrimination and social inequality with the ideals of communism continued throughout the interwar and postwar years and allowed police as well as legal prosecutors to avoid focusing on the validity of their charges against individuals and instead focus on the “otherness” of the social movements as a whole. Such was the case with Benjamin Davis and his defense of Angelo Herndon in the mid-1930s. Davis witnessed the evolution of white supremacist rhetoric into anti-communist rhetoric in legal cases as he advanced in his career during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Davis recalled his first experience of weaponized rhetoric in a legal setting while attending his own trial for sitting in the “white section” of an Atlanta trolley car, long before he became involved in the American Communist movement. He recalled how police officers and the court magistrate used racially-charged language as a “form of entertainment” or “sport” used at the expense of “the hapless, humble Negro workers caught in the complicated toils of the Jim Crow laws” which segregated treatment within the courts. In one example, Davis watched as “one Negro woman was virtually stripped bare by the lewd language and gestures of the magistrate.” During his own turn, the judge used harsh, racially-charged rhetoric to inform Davis’ father that he was a terrible parent for sending Davis up North for an education that taught equality among whites and non-whites, a philosophy deemed akin to communism.25
Anti-communism and Jim Crow agenda often merged into one.
After graduating from law school, Davis met with associates of the International Labor Defense, who at the time were defending the Scottsboro Boys, and began a law career with a focus on civil rights. When he took on the defense on Angelo Herndon, Davis believed, as did others in the legal community, that the trial was less about prosecuting a specific individual that it was aimed “to intimidate the people in the growing unemployment movement” throughout Atlanta and the nation during the early 1930s, of which the CPUSA was highly integrated via a network of unemployment councils. Herndon was charged with insurrection after participating in a demonstration outside the Fulton County Courthouse on June 30th, 1932, with about 1,000 black and white unemployed workers, most of whom were seeking relief payments. The local news depicted Herndon as an organizer of white and non-white workers “of the lowest economic level together in comradeship” in direct defiance of local customs on “segregation and white supremacy.” 12 days after the demonstration, Herndon was arrested while checking his mail by Atlanta Police detectives. The officers searched his local hotel room, found his CPUSA paperwork and books, then cited a 66-year old Reconstruction Era law against organizing non-Whites. At the time, insurrection in Georgia carried the death penalty, making the case of national significance to civil rights organizations. Although numerous other activists were involved in the demonstration, including white unemployed citizens of Fulton County, Herndon proved “the most convenient scapegoat” for the prosecution’s goals, with his library of communist and socialist literature, to delegitimize the efforts of the demonstration and turn national public sentiment against the accused.26
During the case, Judge Lee B. Wyatt directed charged rhetoric at not only Herndon, but also Davis in an attempt to label him as both ignorant and radical. When Davis asked to be heard on a motion to deny indictment due to a lack of African American representation on the jury, Wyatt stated that “nothing [he’d] say wouldn’t make no difference, nohow [sic].” When the prosecution attempted to cross-examine Davis’ white witnesses to the validity of his claims about disproportionate juror representation in the county’s history, and thus the discriminatory nature of the trial, the prosecuting attorneys asked each witness if they would want their daughters marrying “a negra [sic].” Each attempt to object to the line of questioning as unfounded and “lynch-inciting,” by Davis was overruled by Judge Wyatt. That night, after just one day of trial, Davis joined the CPUSA Atlanta District branch at the age of 29. During the next court meeting, the prosecution opened their case against Herndon by ushering in that all-too-familiar association; labeling the case a crusade against “the godless assaults of communism and Negro domination.” This association demonstrates the precise point in the use of language when racism and anti-free speech is deemed justified. Although Davis and the International Labor Defense would ultimately end up with a victory for Herndon, it came after a long battle of appeals which replicated the experiences of the Fulton County court at higher levels of governance until the Supreme Court ruled the insurrection law unconstitutional in 1937.27
Like Davis, Danny Rubin from Philadelphia described his turn to communism as a result of his experiencing such kinds of weaponized language and estrangement in the public sphere. Rubin grew up in the Northeast side of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, where his father worked in a local lumber yard while attending night courses to practice law and his mother organized with the local Socialist Party. Rubin remembered growing up around “routine discrimination” as a working-class Jew in a neighborhood controlled by the dominant local property owners, the Disston family. At the time, the Disstons owned one of the largest manufacturing plants of saws and wood equipment and from 1871 to 1945 transformed the small area of Tacony into an industrial town.28 With their influence, the Disstons promoted a restrictive city covenant of “no negros, no Jews, no dogs, no bars” that emphasized the community’s predominantly white, Catholic identity. When swastikas and graffiti began regularly appearing at Rubin’s synagogue during the mid-1930s, his parents tried to explain that as members of the Jewish community they were not welcomed by their neighbors. In school, Rubin found acceptance among other marginalized students such as African Americans and Italian Americans. Continued experiences of anti-Semitism led Rubin to the American Youth for Democracy and eventually the CPUSA, who promoted policies against “white chauvinism” and promoted cooperation among different ethnic, religious, and cultural groups.29
Stories such as Healey’s, Rubin’s, and Davis’ are much more common in the interwar period than one unversed in the history of the Communist Party might think. One historian described African Americans by 1935 as “predisposed to be receptive to the Communist Party” because of their “emphasis on white chauvinism more favorable than others who saw it as exaggerated or as an error.” When they joined the CPUSA, neither Davis nor Rubin had read a single text by Marx or Lenin, but were instead converted to the Party’s ideals due to a combination of their experiences of racial/ethnic discrimination and the promotion of the ending such hostility in society and in language. To make their stances clear to their members and the public, the CPUSA took steps against communists whose actions were deemed racist and divisive. In January of 1931, the CPUSA directed its national membership to focus on the internal-Party trial of Finnish communist August Yokinen for his refusal to allow three African American workers entry to a Finnish Workers’ Club dance in Harlem. To show their dedication to combating white chauvinism and contrast their practices with that of the Scottsboro and Herndon cases, the CPUSA organized a Party jury of seven white and seven black Party members who quickly charged Yokinen guilty and expelled him from not only the Party’s circle of associates but the entire network of organizations that worked with the Party; including Workers’ Clubs and Unemployment Councils.30 Acts like these attracted individuals displaced by racist and discriminatory rhetoric, such as Davis and Rubin, but it also likely contributed to the ongoing association of civil rights equality and communist philosophy so dominant among anti-communist and reactionary groups.
Cover of the Communist Party’s pamphlet publicizing the 1931 Yokinen Trial
When communists began setting their sights on bigger and larger organizational targets, the rhetoric used against them intensified. Between 1932 and 1941, the CPUSA’s presence in Detroit swelled after a presidential campaign speech by William Z. Foster and efforts to support striking workers at the Ford Rouge plant ended with four workers shot dead by Dearborn police and hired Ford Security officers. The Detroit Unemployment Council (DUC), which was staffed and funded predominantly by the Michigan District CPUSA branch, created a base of operations in Southeast Michigan to link together various community and labor organizations in response to the massacre at the Ford Rouge. Throughout the 1930s, both the DUC and the CPUSA facilitated drives to provide food to striking workers and served as principal organizers for the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37. Due to the testimony of William Gernaey, we also know that the CPUSA had integrated shop-floor organizers into various Ford plants by 1936 and actively worked with the UAW.31
During this period in which the CPUSA expanded its reach across Detroit, the Ford Security “Service Department” acted under the command of Henry Ford’s top security advisor, Harry Bennett. Bennett was described as the ringleader of a “gang of thugs” by labor organizers for his firing upon unarmed striking workers after Foster’s speech, his involvement in the public assault of union organizer Richard Frankensteen on May 26th, 1937, and his ordering of the kidnapping of UAW organizer Walter Reuther.32 In the latter instance, Reuther, who had recently succeeded in organizing a strike against Federal Screw—a parts supplier for Ford—was threatened at gunpoint by two of Bennett’s men the evening of the bargaining settlement. Bennett’s men burst into Reuther’s apartment filled with relatives celebrating a birthday and yelled “ok, Red, you’re coming with us.” Although the kidnapping was a failure, as Reuther’s family and friends informed the men that they would never leave the apartment alive, the event struck fear into union ranks. Many began to arm themselves for fear that Bennett had the power to mark people for death.33
In 1941, holding out as the last auto manufacturer to cave to the union, Ford and Bennett decided to make their move against the UAW by discharging eight union organizers from the Rouge plant. The response by 50,000 workers was to walk out in a wildcat strike that sparked national headlines. As Bennett set up machine gun nests to attempt to prevent strikers from barricading the plant, the workers maneuvered around to barricade the incoming boulevard exits at Michigan Avenue. Bennett’s next solution was to promote interracial violence among the workers. As Stephen Norwood explained in his book on strikebreaking strategies, interracial violence among white and black workers at Ford was a genuinely real threat since African American employees tended to look favorably upon Henry Ford’s philanthropy in the local black community and the company’s providing of some of the best job opportunities found for non-white workers in the area. Bennett capitalized on this by issuing propaganda that stated the UAW wanted nothing to do with the African American community and that the union was “dominated by nefarious Jews;” once again proving that anti-Semitism formed a core association with radicalism for strikebreaking purposes among union busters.34 Much of the situation changed less than a year later as the United States became fully involved in World War II, and both the unions and the CPUSA agreed to no-strike pledges to maintain the war effort.
World War II served as a temporary relief valve for the intensification of attempts to demonize and delegitimize communist individuals. When the 1940 Smith Act was passed, it was tacitly supported by the CPUSA since it was believed the policy would help root out not only fascist and reactionary groups such as the German-American Bund but also destroy alternative communist factions such as the Socialist Workers’ Party. Throughout the years of the Smith Act’s dominance, between roughly 1940 and 1957, anti-communism transformed from a legal/political tool to limit domestic activity into a predominant societal norm capable of sustaining itself through foreign affairs and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. What did not change was that the circumstances of guilt were not as important as the desired result; as was the case with Davis’ legal battle. Communists were not charged as un-American counter subversives because they were guilty of a specific constitutional violation or of a societal expectation; we know this because their charges were all expunged by the Yates v. US (1957) decision. Communists were instead deemed guilty until proven innocent and put the burden of such proof on the Communist Party. In 1957, however, the Yates decision exposed the truth that communists, in acting as they did and promoting what they did, were in fact upholding the highest levels of respect for the Constitution by using their protected rights of assembly, free speech, and the right to a fair trial. The only explanation left for this persecution, then, is that communists were charged in public and in private for the primary purpose of delineating “otherness” among citizens deemed radical.
A key instance of this happened in organizing the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) Local 328 in New York, shortly after the passage of the Smith Act in 1940. Although the act was exclusively political, in that it sought to charge people through the courts with treason, its passage had an immediate effect on how private organizations at the state level viewed communists among their ranks. Beatrice Lumpkin, a communist and organizer for Local 328, remembered how the national organization appointed delegates to the New York State CIO convention without consulting the Local’s membership. Although not a communist-organized union, Local 328 voted a communist leadership board in 1939, which included Lumpkin. After hearing about the national union’s attempt to overstep the Local’s authority, Lumpkin called for an emergency meeting where she and four other union organizers were elected as official convention representatives. They left the meeting immediately to make the 300-mile drive to Rochester, where the convention was held. Lumpkin and her cohort entered the convention and objected to the presence of the appointed delegates, stating that they were not chosen by the workers of 328.35
Following the convention, the ACWA’s leaders targeted Lumpkin and her lot of “troublemakers” and helped state prosecutors open up charges against Local 328’s bargaining agents, Michael Coleman and George McGriff. The ACWA then called for a local meeting and bused in numerous workers from other locals with the tactic of “shouting down any supporters of the business agents.” Lumpkin managed to quiet down the inflammatory rhetoric by stating that the elected delegates of 328 were only there “because [their] wages are too low and [they] cannot pay their bills.” The next day, the ACWA’s national leadership opened union charges against Lumpkin and the elected delegates for practicing and preaching communism. Seeing the prominent union leaders, such as Frank Rosenblum and Jacob Potofsky, sitting on the condemnation side of the trial convinced Lumpkin that “the trial was a formality” and that their guilt “was already written.” According to the rules of the trial, the accused had to pick a ‘lawyer’ from their union local, and without any actual legal defender Lumpkin took on the role. The charge Lumpkin had to defend against was not a violation of any crime or act of disunity, it was simply membership in the CPUSA. In a routine that would be repeated at the federal level once Smith Act trials began targeting CPUSA leaders, the ACWA brought forth a series of “witnesses” to attest to the support of the Communist Party by the elected delegates. The witnesses were former members of the CPUSA, typically in dire straits such as suffering from a gambling addiction and in need of the union’s financial support.36
Once the trial concluded, the ACWA expelled the accused and informed the national union via their newspaper Advance that Local 328 was under the complete domination of the Communist Party. The workers did not even realize the full impact of the ACWA’s trial until it was too late. Following expulsion, Lumpkin and some of her fellow workers at Local 328 wanted to form an independent union, but this went against the Communist Party’s philosophy of resisting “dual unionism.” Other union members rejected this proposal because it would have voided the contractual gains made by the local in the previous years as employers would have deemed the ACWA contracts null. Lumpkin and her fellow organizers thus found themselves trapped in a situation of either renouncing their organizational strategies and possibly losing previous gains or giving up. In either case, the union leadership proved that staunch rhetoric purported under the veil of patriotism was a sure-fire means to both control the union and lessen the role of local activists.37
Part of what contributed to the colloquial nature of this kind of targeted rhetoric was its acceptance and use by some of the highest levels of government, including Congress and the Presidency. The public became exposed to political usage of such rhetoric through newsreels and public speeches; most of which mimicked the previous decade’s attempts to label communists as “others” and depict their reach and influence within American society far beyond what it was ever capable of. Much of this was contextual, as differences in approach and policy with regard to postwar Germany between the United States and the Soviet Union culminated into what we now call the Cold War. By then, President Truman exhausted much of the support he had among labor and civil rights groups by turning his attention to foreign policy. In mid-1946, as Greece broke out into a civil war between communist and republican groups, Joseph Stalin declared the incompatibility of capitalism and communism in the postwar era.38 This served reactionary politicians in the United States better than the Soviet dictator likely expected, as anti-communism became a prominent foundation upon which to exploit for political gain. The Truman Doctrine and the subsequent foreign policy of Truman’s administration until the election of Eisenhower in 1952 exemplified the way in which the Cold War transformed anti-communism into a highly-specific political tool; involving loyalty oaths and an increased budget for the House Un-American Activities Committee.39
A photograph of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on March 23, 1953.
In terms of how weaponized anti-communism impacted the development of domestic policy, President Truman found support among anti-communists within Congress and the AFL who never dropped their suspicions and doubt about the possibility of Soviet involvement in American affairs. This made the subsequent resistance by the CIO, who tended to refuse participation in federally-mandated loyalty oaths, appear suspicious and further fueled public debate about where the moral hearts of labor activists lay. In a newsreel published by Universal Pictures in March, 1947, J. Edgar Hoover stated that the CPUSA was “far better organized than the Nazis” and was committed “to weaken America, just as they did in the era of obstruction when they were aligned with the Nazis;” referring to the CPUSA’s temporary non-interventionist stance that resulted from the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. Hoover went on to describe communism in a more general sense as “an evil and malignant way of life,” using language that equated its supporters as viruses who were in need of “quarantine” to prevent them “from infecting [the] nation.”40
Language such as this defined the postwar political rhetoric used with regard to the Second Red Scare, and made it much more difficult for organizations with a strong communist organizing presence. The dividing moment within the labor movement came when communists within the CIO fully rejected support for the Marshall Plan and backed Henry Wallace for President in 1948. The CIO national leadership found itself in a quagmire; unable to trust that Wallace could defeat the Republicans and incapable of persuading their communist organizers otherwise. When the Washington Post decried that Wallace was nothing more than a “sickle cleaving” puppet of the Soviets, the CIO “began systematically sidelining communist members” to distance themselves from absorbing such criticism.41 After Truman won the election, the CIO made their full move and expelled 11 of the largest communist-led unions. Those that remained, such as UAW Local 600 in Detroit, survived solely because the union could not maintain control over the Locals without the help of local communists.42
We even see this kind of rhetoric used as a political weapon against President Truman when he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Truman deemed the act “bad for labor, bad for management, and bad for the country.”43 Less than a year later in June of 1948, Truman argued that an increase in social programs for housing, education, and wage controls would be an effective counter to the program of the Communist Party. In his message to the GOP in Chicago, Truman reiterated his stance on avoiding pursuing tactics that relied on breaches of Constitutional rights by stating he would veto any bill that attempted to “set controls over the Communist Party.”44 Republicans subsequently attacked the President for being “soft” on communism and threatening postwar diplomacy, an effort pushed largely by Robert Taft. Taft argued that both Roosevelt and Truman during and after the war advanced an agenda known as “the wise democratic doctrine,” which included open diplomacy with the Eastern bloc and constituted “a general practice of secrecy in all the initial steps of foreign policy.” Although he likely did not realize it until after the fact, Taft’s criticism of the President in the early stages of the Cold War allowed him to become “the most prominent and influential Republican politician in Congress and the conservative wing of the Republican Party;” proving that focusing on the supposed leniency with communism was just as effective of rhetoric as openly accusing the President of collusion.45Truman continued to combat these accusations through the 1948 election, stating in his 1949 inaugural address that communism was a “false” philosophy that “purports to offer freedom, security, and greater opportunity to mankind.” To fully push back against Taft and the Republican caucus, however, the President needed a conflict that could justify both a domestic and an international crusade against communists.46
The first instance of relief for the President came when the Foley Square Trial of 1949, which put anti-communist rhetoric on the headlines of nearly every major newspaper in the nation. The trial itself ironically mirrored the Soviet and Nazi show trials of the 1930s; where the CPUSA leaders accused—William Foster, Eugene Dennis, Carl Winter, Benjamin Davis, John Gates, Gus Hall, John Williamson, Gil Green, Henry Winston, Jack Stachel, and Robert Thompson—were presumed guilty and in need of proving their innocence. The situation turned even dimmer for activists and their families in the public eye, with newsreels accepting the prosecution’s narrative that defendants were terrorists conspiring to overthrow the government. Newsreels even went so far as to assure the public that despite questions about the defendants’ constitutional rights, the trial was in the safe hands of “the stern but impartial eye of Judge [Harold] Medina.”47 Known for his short temper, Medina faced communist defense lawyers that “tried to make him lose judicial composure with ‘guerrilla tactics,’” such as continuous motions to delay court proceedings and accusations of a prejudiced court—a tactic likely encouraged by Benjamin Davis. To push their case of conspiracy to commit treason, the prosecution argued that the dictums of Marxism required communists to seek the means of overthrowing the government. When some defendants, such as John Gates, refused to answer questions by using the Fifth Amendment, their appeals were hastily denied by Medina and were charged with contempt of court. The court returned a verdict of guilty for all eleven members accused. The defense’s case failed in part because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had already made it clear that the court’s entire goal was to set the precedent forth that “the Communist Party as an organization [was] illegal.”48
Foley Square Trial defendants Robert Thompson and Benjamin Davis surrounded by pickets as they leave the courtroom.
Although the court did not enforce prison sentences until two years after the trial, the subsequent “repressive atmosphere went beyond the legal issues and quickly affected tens of thousands of rank and filers.” Individual communists and activists across the nation faced criticism and ridicule in the public.49 Communist organizer Sherman Labovitz from Philadelphia was reading about the trial’s turnout in June of 1950 when a stranger wearing a “dapper suit,” who he suspected was either a public or a private investigator, followed him down a street and began asking if he knew any of the men on trial. Of course, Labovitz, a veteran organizer of the Philadelphia CPUSA branch, knew of the men but he did not expect to be publicly called out for his associations. While trying to flee the scene, the unnamed stranger continued to harass Labovitz, hurling insults and chasing him to his car. Labovitz explained in his autobiography that this moment left him feeling “absolutely violated.” Less than three years later, Labovitz was indicted on similar charges of conspiracy via the Smith Act.50 In her oral history on the experiences of her father in the Smith Act Michigan Six trial of 1953, Vicki Wellman expressed that alienation and a general sense of indifference with people her same age and background was a common experience throughout her social and public life as a young adult. These experiences demonstrate that life as a radical youth in the early postwar period was permeated with a combination of rhetoric and action that sought to teach kids that their parents were not only wrong, but evil.51
Truman’s decisive moment to further exacerbate the language of anti-communism came in June of 1950. First, on the 16th, communist labor organizer Harry Bridges had his citizenship revoked after a federal judge deemed his application for citizenship fraudulent on the basis that he denied membership in the Communist Party, second on the 17th when Julius Rosenberg was arrested by the FBI on the charge of espionage, and finally third on the 25th, when North Korean troops crossed South across the 38th parallel to begin the Korean War. Combined, these events provided Truman with the ideal conflict to satisfy Congress’ thirst for anti-communism. Federal judge George B. Harris set a trend for future treatment of suspected communists when he sentenced Bridges to five years for perjury, upholding the idea that inquiry about membership in a legal organization was a valid and non-intrusive method of determining one’s constitutional rights.52 Truman publicly condemned the Rosenbergs for putting the nation at risk by “empowering the Soviets, and by extension the North Koreans.”53 When the international community showed signs of suspicion on Truman’s actions as overtly pandering to domestic Congressional affairs, the President altered the narrative to be acutely focused on charging the Rosenbergs with treason and sedition as opposed to interfering with national security and the Korean War.54
Both the criticisms directed at Truman and the President’s response did less to refocus national attention acutely onto specific individuals and specific acts of treason than it did to normalize the language which incorporated all proponents of social change under the monolithic image of countersubversion. In a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, Truman elaborated on how the Democratic Party had not only resisted the identity of being soft on communism but also had accomplished more in the battle against domestic communism than Republicans through the use of “money and courage—not just a lot of talk.” To be a true anti-communist, Truman charged, one must mix one’s rhetoric with action to produce results.55 In this case, the results were the success of the 1949 Foley Square Trial of CPUSA leaders, the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and the wave of Smith Act trials targeting mid-level communist organizers, such as Dorothy Healey and Sherman Labovitz. The President proved that by 1948, to justify one’s use of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric against specific individuals, one merely had to point to the Rosenbergs and the precedents of guilty verdicts delivered by courts across the nation.
One last important component to the colloquial nature of anti-communist rhetoric by the 1950s was its use by prominent individuals in popular culture. The words of Arthur Koestler, for example, attempted to equate social justice movements with the movement of international communism as a means to delegitimizing the political rights of those who promoted equality. Koestler charged that wars could be waged even under the slogan of peace, and that “intellectual sanity” can only be restored by abandoning such movements for dramatic change.56 Perhaps no individual, however, held as much gravitas with the sentiments of average American families—particularly those who had children—than California-based cartoonist and film producer, Walt Disney. By the late 1940s, Disney had become a household name with five full-length animated feature films, most of which have become classics of the fantasy/childhood genre. When asked by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC) of his opinion of the Communist Party and the suspicion of communists working in his production studio, Disney explained that it was his understanding that communism was an “un-American thing” that trapped “good, 100 percent Americans” into a world of ideology that tainted not only their own sense of patriotism but the entirety of “American liberalism.” Communists, in turn, were understood as victims of a kind of foreign nationalism—but victims that could not be saved.57 Newsreels reciprocated Disney’s sentiments in a common twist of irony endemic of the early Cold War. Showcased before most films, the newsreels informed citizens about HUAAC’s mission to unveil the “communist penetration of the Hollywood film industry” with the goal of pushing “subversive propaganda.”58 On the surface, this language appears exactly as it was intended: as passive, non-hostile, and concerned. The effect of the use of this language by cultural icons with a significant amount of cultural power, however, was the continued normalization of physical and legal estrangement in an era of political repression. To question if someone was a communist was to not only question their citizenship, but also to question if they were akin to a terrorist, or a mafia-like henchman which lacked a sense of what was “American.”
What are we to learn from understanding anti-communist rhetoric in both the public and private sense as a form of “weaponized” rhetoric differentiated from the highly-charged racist and sexist language used today against certain groups? We can get a glimpse into the process of how such language becomes normalized and colloquial; particularly by its use and perpetuation by individuals in positions of political, legal, or cultural power. By depicting communism as a monolith that contained the various organizations pushing for progressive change in the United States, anti-communists in business and the government were able to advance the narrative of ‘nativism’ under a broad new political headline. This had the effect of normalizing both legal and physical acts of discrimination against civil rights and labor organizations and pacifying public concern; a tradition that unfortunately still lingers in our society to this day. Experiences like that of Healey, Davis, and Lumpkin confirm that anti-communist rhetoric had the power to condemn individuals for their actions—even if such actions are not immediately linked to communism as a political philosophy or ideology. Furthermore, the fusing of such rhetoric with physical repression demonstrated the extent to which the general public was made passive about such acts of injustice.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, this language was sustained by 20th-century notions of nativism, political attempts to redirect the focus of international conflicts, and the words of prominent cultural icons. The secret to normalizing weaponized rhetoric that seeks nothing short of delegitimizing proponents of a particular idea, lifestyle, or identity, exists in the history of anti-communism, as it is the most successful conscious application of such language. By successful, I do not just mean how the use of such language produced the desired results from its application, but also in how the mainstream culture was wired to passively accept, endorse, and participate in the perpetuation of such language and social condemnation. Anti-communist rhetoric in newspapers, court cases, business efforts to bust unions, union efforts to expel radicals, and political doctrines performed by the Executive Branch all passively endorsed and encouraged subsequent acts, both legal and physical, of discrimination against American citizens and denials of free speech for supporting civil rights, trade unionism, and alternative political ideologies. Its success lay in the fact that it could be wielded for two different but interlinked purposes: First, it could be used to target communists and socialists as a means to discrediting and delegitimizing their voice in the public or private sphere. Secondly, it could be used as the means to discredit those groups which by association were also deemed radical. One could attack William Foster’s 1932 presidential campaign for promoting communism, or one could attack Angelo Herndon and use his association with communists as evidence for guilt—even if there was no crime committed in either case. By the start of the Foley Square Trial of Communist Party leaders in 1949, charging individuals as a communist was a means to spearhead one’s career into American politics via HUAAC.
While the acts taken against communists by businesses and the government took center stage in the public consciousness of the United States throughout the interwar and postwar years, by 1957 the language not only sustained irrational fears about the supposed goals of communist activists but perpetuated a public hysteria to the point where the language ceased to contain the effectiveness it had just one decade prior. The Yates v. United States (1957) trial which commuted previous verdicts against communists proved the limit of such language; once the language could be proven ineffective at arguing against the Bill of Rights, the weaponized use of anti-communism lost its impact. It is only in hindsight that the Smith Act trials and acts of red-baiting are perceived as unjust and unconstitutional and it is insufficient to conclude that it was merely the context of the Cold War which allowed such language. The Yates decision ended the effectiveness of such rhetoric in legal settings, but it did not end the use of such weaponized words nor did it prevent the process of normalizing such rhetoric in future instances. Similar patterns of the use of such language in both legal and private settings surfaced during the Civil Rights Movement, during Second Wave Feminism, and still to this day with instances such as “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter” and the emphasis on “normality” versus “alternative” in the LGBTQ community.The usefulness of the rhetoric is how easy it is to adapt to different settings, which makes it attractive to individuals in power who seek to curb the interests of the public away from an idea, concept, or group of people they might otherwise know very little about.
The weaponized use of words was forged in an effort by public and private groups to quell free speech and assembly that had been deemed ‘radical.’ Some groups, such as the AFL, contributed to this process without realizing the consequences. Others, such as the Bureau of Investigation, the Corporation Auxiliary Company, and the Ford Motor Company did so with highly specific intent of curbing public interest. Finally, others—mainly politicians after the passage of the Smith Act—used this rhetoric to advance a political agenda that advanced their careers and justified acts of injustice after the fact. Healey organized minority workers who lacked the means to combat company unions. Davis defended the constitutional rights of an African American caught up in the throes of the Jim Crow era. Lumpkin tried to promote fair representation of the workers at her union local. It is only through the normalization of weaponized anti-communist rhetoric, to the extent that charges of treason could be made, that these actions were deemed dangerous. Furthermore, it is only by dehumanizing and delegitimizing the rights and identities of individuals that the rhetoric is sustained in colloquial language.
Matthew Strupp examines economic debates in China during the leadup to the Great Leap Forward and assesses comparisons made between Mao and Bukharin.
Depiction of a People’s Commune in Mao-era People’s Republic of China
A common understanding of the political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is that it underwent a grand “two-line struggle” in the years from the completion of “socialist transformation” with the nationalization of industry in 1956 up to Mao’s death in 1976. The two sides between which this supposed struggle took place were the Liuists, or capitalist-roaders, and the Maoists, the genuine Marxist-Leninists. This view is still common among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and until Liu’s rehabilitation under Deng1this was the official verdict of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its own history. It was replaced by a view that attributed to Mao the great merit of having revolutionarily unified the country but no longer asserted the correctness of his line in these struggles, no doubt since his line, posed against capitalist-roaders, had uncomfortable implications for the new leadership.
The problem with the original “two-line struggle model” is that it washes away much of the complexity of the actual politics and virtually ignores the competing bureaucratic interests involved in the decision-making process of the Chinese state, though this is also true of the view that replaced it and in questioning the one the author by no means intends to endorse the other. The effect is to thoroughly reduce the economics and politics of this attempt at socialist construction to a caricature, replacing political and historical analysis with a confession of faith.
An interesting alternative framing to these ways of understanding the politics of the PRC is the approach of R. Kalain. In a 1984 paper, Kalain argued that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” phase in the late 1950s, coming to similar politics as the Bolshevik revolutionary, statesman, and economist Nikolai Bukharin despite a lack of a direct influence from him. Bukharin is known for advocating for the continuation of a modified version of the New Economic Policy. He opposed the early ’20s “super-industrializers”, as well as the late ’20s forced collectivization of the peasantry and the first Five-Year Plan.2 Kalain argues that Mao criticized the “Soviet Model” of development for its promotion of heavy industrial construction at the expense of light industry and agriculture along Bukharinist lines. At first glance, Kalain provides a compelling wrench to throw into the “two-line struggle” argument. However, he fails to provide a useful explanation for the developments in Chinese economic policy in the years he describes. In particular, why would Mao have gone from a “Bukharinist” position in 1956 to launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958?
This article will advance an argument for an understanding of Chinese economic debates, and particularly those between 1956 and 1962, in terms of a “three-line struggle.” This is a notion borrowed from David M. Bachman in Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System. This framing is opposed to the model of “two-line struggle” and to understanding Mao as a Bukharinist. It will particularly highlight the figure of Chen Yun as one whose role is especially illustrative to understand this period. This approach will reveal the Great Leap Forward to not have been simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but a case of his intervention into an existing bureaucratic struggle. The aim is a treatment of the dynamics of an “Actually Existing Socialist” society that goes beyond the standard focus on big personalities, or treating the state and ruling parties of such societies as either monoliths or as engaged in struggles limited to those between defenders of the communist faith and heretics. Rather, we will emphasize the conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state, both to correct one-sided historical narratives, and to stress the importance of questions of state and civil institutional arrangements to future attempts to realize the emancipated society of communism.
The “Three-Line Struggle” Model
We will begin with a summary of the “three-line struggle” model. In his 1985 China Research Monograph, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System, David M. Bachman lays out the ideas as well as the bureaucratic support groups of the “three lines” in Chinese economic debates preceding the Great Leap Forward. Bachman refers to the three groups as the “planning-heavy industry coalition”, the “extraction and allocation coalition”, and the “social transformation group.” The latter is referred to as a “group” rather than a coalition because its support was concentrated in the Party rather than across a handful of ministries.
The planning-heavy industry coalition was represented in speeches at the 8th Communist Party Congress in 1956 by Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission and Bo Yibo, Chairman of the State Economic Commission. It had a base of support in the heavy industrial ministries.3 The extraction and allocation coalition was represented at the Congress by Chen Yun, fifth-ranking member of the CCP and first Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic, Li Xiannian, Minister of Finance, member of the Politburo, and Vice-Premier, and Deng Zihui, head of the Party’s Rural Work Department and Vice-Premier. This coalition had its base of support in the ministries of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture.4 The social transformation group was primarily based in the Party. It favored mass mobilization as a method for solving social and economic problems and was ideologically opposed to the divide between mental and manual labor, city and countryside, and worker and peasant. Its views were frequently espoused by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party.
The planning-heavy industry coalition tended to favor higher rates of investment in heavy industry, direct allocation of goods by the ministries, and higher rates of extraction from the peasantry to finance capital construction. This policy served the bureaucratic interests of the ministries who supported the coalition. This was because it maintained their control over a larger portion of the social product, and created a closed loop in which the products of factories operated by a ministry would be allocated by that same ministry for new construction.5 These policies were a far cry from the policy favored by the extraction and allocation coalition, who controlled the taxation system, the budget drafting process, and the distribution of the products of agriculture and light industry.6 Due to its role in the distribution process and its contact with the working-class, and especially with the peasantry, the extraction and allocation coalition was highly sensitive to the new problems in the Chinese economy that had come along with the completion of “socialist transformation,” the previous focus of most bureaucrats, and shifted their focus toward these new issues. These problems included the over-extraction of grain from the peasantry, the supply problems related to the disorganization of production, and disproportion in investment that favored heavy industry over light industry and agriculture which led to shortages of agricultural products. They also pointed to the availability of too few consumer goods to satisfy the increased worker purchasing power that had come with recent wage increases, which threatened inflation in the short run.7 The extraction and allocation coalition thought that these problems had to be paid special attention, and that above all, rashness should be avoided. They tended not to think of the benefits of a planned economy in terms of rapid industrialization, although they affirmed the goal of a “strong, socialist country.” Instead, they focused on its ability to avoid the irrationality, disproportion, and destructive instability of capitalism. They thought that uses of the planning system that resulted in such instability and did not meet the needs of the population were abuses of this system. As Li Xiannian put it at the 8th Communist Party Congress, due to the existence of the planned economy in China:
…it is possible for us to pay attention to the connection between one year and another in a planned way, and to regulate the range of the year to year fluctuations, so as to avoid, as best we can, excessive fluctuations …. Had we been a bit more conservative last year and thus saved some raw materials and commodities, it would be helpful for working out the plan for 1957 …. We should gradually expand our material reserves . . . and thus ensure the even, smooth progress of our national construction, thereby further exploiting the superiority of a planned economy.8
This was a view that stressed evenness in development, rationality in planning, and the avoidance of a destructive level of fluctuation.
The extraction and allocation coalition favored moderate levels of grain extraction and increased investment in agriculture and light industry. They believed in the “three balances” of budgets, loans and repayments, and material production and allocation. They also advocated use of the market in distribution where the planning system did not yet have the requisite capacity to distribute all products, increased prices for grain to increase peasant standards of living and incentives for production, and larger private plots for peasants. They favored cutting investment in heavy industry in the short term, but thought that the increased revenue provided by the quick turnaround of investments in light industry would put heavy industry on a more solid basis in the long term.9 This was a far-reaching alternative to the policies that the CCP had hitherto followed. It stood in clear opposition to the program of the planning-heavy industry coalition.
Bachman argues that while this debate was raging through the state ministries, much of the Party, and therefore the social transformation group which included Mao himself, were too distracted by the ongoing Hundred Flowers campaign to pay much attention to economic matters.10 When they did pay attention, it was the planning-heavy industry coalition that was able to successfully make the case to Mao and the Party that its policies were superior. It promised to resolve what the CCP had declared to be the principal contradiction in Chinese society: the contradiction between the advanced “socialist” relations of production and the backward “underdeveloped” forces of production, while also addressing the inequalities in Chinese society that had persisted since the completion of “socialist transformation.” These inequalities had begun to worry Mao more and more.11
It was State Economic Commission Chairman Bo Yibo and State Planning Commission Chairman Li Fuchun who pioneered the approach that synthesized the preoccupations of the social transformation group with the policies of the planning-heavy industry coalition. This approach involved embracing the construction of small and medium-sized enterprises in the localities funded by the localities themselves; calling for greater efficiency in production through sheer voluntarism to make up for proposed cuts in light industry investment, and making up for cuts in the central investment in agriculture by relying on peasant labor mobilization and additional investment in heavy-industrial fertilizer plants. This would allow them to achieve their desired results of greatly increasing investment in large heavy-industrial plants while decreasing the external demands for heavy industrial goods by the localities. The localities would now be supplied by the small and medium-sized enterprises. The fears of Mao and the social transformation group about the divide between city and countryside, a divide which was growing as China industrialized, would be assuaged by bringing industry to the countryside, and the concerns about neglect of agriculture would be assuaged by advocating peasant labor mobilization. Mao rallied to this program at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September-October 1957. There, he summed up its ethos as “more, faster, better, and more economical,” and the Great Leap Forward was set in motion.12
Backyard Steel Furnace during the Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was not simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but the program of an alliance of bureaucratic interest groups. These were the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group, who had come together in the course of the “three-line struggle” in the Chinese state and the Communist Party. Their battle against Chen Yun and the extraction and allocation coalition would continue over the course of the Great Leap Forward. Chen conveniently claimed to have fallen ill between the Third Plenum and late summer-early fall of 1958, the period of the initial offensive of the Great Leap. He then gained Mao’s full favor between March and May of 1959, a period when Mao was more critical of the Leap. He supposedly fell ill again during the renewed radical phase of the Great Leap Forward between May 1959 and the fall of 1960. Chen only returned to prominence in 1961 as a leader of the economic recovery effort after the extent of the damage caused by the Great Leap Forward was undeniable.13
Assessing Mao’s “Bukharinist Phase”
After having undertaken a survey above of the “three-line struggle” in the economic debates occurring in the PRC before the launch of the Great Leap Forward, it should now be easier to assess the merits of R. Kalain’s argument in their 1984 paper, Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Bukharinist’ Phase. Kalain argues that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” period in the late 1950s that he abandoned by the time of the Great Leap Forward. According to Kalain, Mao’s views in this period were characterized by a preference for “a more balanced relationship between agriculture and industry in contrast to the Soviet model’s emphasis on heavy industry” and he “viewed agriculture and light industry as the foundation for the development of heavy industry and the economy in general.”14 Kalain claims that the core of Mao’s “Bukharinist” case can be found in his 1956 speech On the Ten Major Relationships, and in his works critiquing Soviet books on economics: Concerning Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1958), Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1959), and Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy (1961-62).15
One problem with this claim should be immediately clear. With the exception of the 1956 speech, all of these works in which Mao supposedly argues for a position which he had abandoned by the time of the Great Leap forward were written during the period of the Great Leap itself, that is, in the period 1958-1962. Kalain mitigates this problem by only using quotes from the 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships16,in their paper. However, it is undeniable that the purpose of these later texts was to provide theoretical underpinnings for the Great Leap Forward. By looking at the text this picture becomes even starker. In Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “The vast majority of China’s peasants [are] ‘sending tribute’ with a positive attitude. It is only among the prosperous peasants and the middle peasants, some 15percent of the peasantry, that there is any discontent. They oppose the whole concept of the Great Leap and the people’s communes.”17 It is difficult to see how this statement by Mao can be reconciled with Kalain’s claim about this text: that it represented a position that was opposed to the Great Leap Forward.
This should not prevent us from acknowledging that Kalain is not totally off base in including Mao’s early critiques of Soviet economics as examples of his “Bukharinism.” At points Mao’s critique does seem to line up pretty well with what Kalain describes as a “Bukharinist” perspective insofar as Mao criticizes the prioritization of heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry as well as the inequalities between the city and countryside. For example, in his 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships, Mao indeed offered a more “Bukharinist” solution to some of these problems. He states that “The emphasis in our country’s construction is on heavy industry,” but claims that in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, “there is a lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry.” He claims that if more importance is attached to agriculture and light industry and a greater proportion of investment made in them “there will be more grain and more raw materials for light industry and a greater accumulation of capital. And there will be more funds in the future to invest in heavy industry.” On the subject of the extraction of grain from the peasantry he stated:
The Soviet Union has adopted measures which squeeze the peasants very hard. It takes away too much from the peasants at too low a price through its system of so-called obligatory sales and other measures. This method of capital accumulation has seriously dampened the peasants’ enthusiasm for production. You want the hen to lay more eggs and yet you don’t feed it, you want the horse to run fast and yet you don’t let it graze. What kind of logic is that!18
This should not be seen, however, as a new and distinct proposal for sweeping changes to the policies of the PRC or an argument for the abandonment of a whole economic model. Although Mao points out some problems with the economic policies of the PRC, in this speech he mostly counterposes China as a positive case against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as negative cases because of the PRC’s already prevailing lower rates of grain extraction in comparison with these other countries.
While Mao’s concerns on the balance in investment between agriculture and industry could indeed be called “Bukharinist,” because Bukharin paid considerable attention to similar problems in the early Soviet Union, and his early approach to these problems bore some resemblance to Bukharin’s, Mao’s ultimate solution to these problems in the Great Leap Forward was anything but “Bukharinist.” Again in Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “If we want heavy industry to develop quickly everyone has to show initiative and maintain high spirits. And if we want that then we must enable industry and agriculture to be concurrently promoted, and the same for light and heavy industry.”19 Unlike Bukharin, who advocated investing a greater share of revenue into light industry and agriculture, and using the faster turnover time on these investments to finance heavy industry; Mao proposed solving the disproportion in development between agriculture and industry and between light industry and heavy industry through initiative and high spirits. If we follow David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates in the Chinese state and Communist Party, it becomes clear that Mao’s critiques in these later texts represent his social-transformationist concerns about the inequalities baked into the “Soviet Model” of development. And this mobilizational approach to the problem was precisely the program of the alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group that formed in opposition to the more “Bukharinist” extraction and allocation coalition.
Mao’s overall trajectory in economic matters in the late 1950s should not be seen solely in terms of individual innovation, that is, from an innovative Bukharinist policy to the innovative Great Leap Forward. Rather, it should be thought of in terms of Mao coming to actively intervene in an already existing bureaucratic struggle taking place within the state and the Communist Party. His position was initially closer to that of Chen Yun, one of his highest ranking economic advisors, and soon to be one of the leaders of the extraction and allocation coalition. Once the “three-line struggle” heated up and Chen became known as a partisan of the extraction and allocation coalition, though, Mao shifted his position to be in favor of the side that he felt had the superior program for industrialization and social transformation, that of planning-heavy industry coalition leaders Bo Yibo and Li Fuchun, in the Great Leap Forward, justifying this policy in his critiques of Soviet economics written between 1958 and 1962.
Chen Yun: Conservative Marketizer or Communist?
The departures Mao makes from the Soviet Model should not be understood as unique to him. Rather, as David M. Bachman argues, departures from the Soviet Model were precisely the sort of thing that Chen Yun had already been saying for years, beginning in 1954 in speeches he gave on the PRC’s first Five-Year Plan.20 The figure of Chen Yun is a relatively neglected one in the standard narratives of the PRC’s history. This is unfortunate because, in the actual political struggle that preceded the Great Leap Forward, the program of his bureaucratic coalition, the extraction and allocation coalition, wasthe only alternative proposed at the heights of the party leadership to the new course. It was also aimed at solving the broader problems that the Chinese economy faced after the successful completion of “socialist transformation.” At least in the English language literature, Chen Yun seems to have hitherto only attracted interest from supporters of China’s capitalist restoration. These tend to downplay his differences with Deng Xiaoping. They value him both as a leading champion of the market in the CCP for many decades and as a moderating influence on a process of marketization that ran into difficulties when it proceeded too rashly. This is certainly true of David M. Bachman, as well as of Nicholas R. Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal, authors of the introduction to a collection of Chen’s speeches from 1956-1962 translated into English, titled Chen Yun’s Strategy for China’s Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative; and of Ezra Vogel, who wrote a biographical paper on Chen titled Chen Yun: his life.21
Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978
For example, Bachman stipulates in a number of places that Chen Yun was categorically not a “market socialist” of even the Yugoslav variety, and that he saw the market solely as a supplement to the plan. Bachman stipulates that in all cases Chen thought it should be subordinated to the needs of a socialist society, becoming the leading internal opponent of the Deng marketization after it went far beyond the measures he recommended.22 Yet, Bachman does not consistently portray Chen as someone with serious communist commitments that might lead him to come at the problem from a totally different perspective than that which motivated this latter process.23Bachman makes an open-ended process of “reform” one of the key tenets of Chen’s economic thought and refers to him as on the conservative end of a spectrum of reformers that ends with Zhao Ziyang, the most aggressive of China’s marketizers.
However, Chen Yun’s economic thought offers something to those of us interested in the project of a planned economy as well. He offered a serious assessment of the problems that the Chinese economy faced after “socialist transformation” and proposed measures he thought would strengthen the overall planning system even if it required making limited use of the market. In both the Mao era and the Deng era he opposed every round of “overheating” forced on the Chinese economy, which usually carried detrimental consequences. This was in accordance with an overall view of the benefits of a planned economy which insisted that the goal of socialist planning was to serve the needs of the population in a way that avoided the violent disproportion and irrationality of capitalism. Lastly, he had a “bird-cage” model of the relationship between planning and the market, in which the bird is the market and the cage is the plan. If the cage is too small, the bird will suffocate, if there is no cage the bird will fly away. This metaphor offers an interesting light in which to view the plan-market relationship.24
Reflections
David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates taking place in the CCP and in the state bureaucracy of the PRC preceding the Great Leap Forward is a useful lens for understanding the bureaucratic interests involved in the debate. It holds that the policies at the heart of the Great Leap Forward came into being as a result of an alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group in opposition to the extraction and allocation coalition. We have applied this model to assess the veracity of R. Kalain’s claim of a novel “Bukharinist” approach coming from Mao. We found this model to be insufficient because it confuses Mao’s social-transformationist concerns in his writings critiquing Soviet economics with earlier proposals that were in line with recommendations made in 1954 by one of his highest-ranking economic advisors, Chen Yun. We have also reassessed Chen’s legacy in light of scholarship that has cast him as simply a “conservative marketizer.” In contradistinction to this portrayal, we ought to emphasize his communist convictions and the usefulness of his thought to those attached to the project of a planned economy today.
Overall, this article has looked to explore the nexus of politics and economics in the PRC, going beyond cardboard cutout narratives of capitalist-roaders and genuine Marxist-Leninists still popular today, and to refine our understanding of the complex interplay of the two, taking into account conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state. This has been carried out in the interest of correcting one-sided historical narratives of “Actually Existing Socialist” societies and for the benefit of future attempts at the realization of a communist project, stressing the importance of questions of the arrangement of state and civil institutions to the course of such projects.
Today Lassalle is one of the most marginalized and vilified of the classic German social-democrats. His most essential works have never been translated or spread outside of Germany and his political career is mostly remembered for his secret dealings with Bismarck and the critiques Marx wrote against him and his followers. At the same time, he was one of the most celebrated figures in the socialist workers’ movement during the late 19th century and early 20th century. From Russia to Sweden to Germany he was still a notable influence long after his passing.
The focal point of Kautsky’s Memoriam is the relation between the real essence of Lassalle and his historical legacy. Can one really understand what drove Lassalle without understanding him in his context? No, says Kautsky. His program was never finished and his agitation was by necessity limited and formed by the conditions he worked within. Yet Lassalle’s perspective was unique for its time and he was one of the first to understand that the growing working-class is one of the most powerful and tireless classes once mobilized. His revolutionary act was to break with the liberal Progressive party and build an independent working-class party, the General German Workers’ Association.
According to Georg Brandes’ biography, one year before his death Lasalle told his followers that in one year their party office would be draped in black for mourning. This could be interpreted as a prediction of his death as a person or the death of the organization and limited program he built, superseded through the political revolutions described by Kautsky.
Ferdinand Lassalle: A 25-year memorial
On the 31st of August, a quarter of a century will have passed since the guardian of the German proletariat closed his eyes for the last time. Everywhere there are German workers, or even, everywhere there is a labor movement who have been influenced by German socialism, will on this day gratefully remember the late Lassalle, who with both large success and courage stood up for rights of the proletariat as one of the few who understood the power, endurance and heroism that the working-class can show while for others it seemed hopeless, desperate really, to spend time on this class.
To try and give a sketch of Ferdinand Lassalle’s life and actions for the working-class here would be a waste of time. There are few who have become so popular and whose life story has become so known to the masses. Maybe there is no other socialist whose greatness is admitted by both sides, by enemies as well as friends.
It is not without its issues that the enemy praises Lassalle. They do it to mark him with tendencies to make him out to be a nationalist, royalist state-socialist as opposed to the international, republican social-democracy; they want to play Marx and Lassalle against each other.
This is of course only possible by using false facts. Lassalle never showed any opposition against internationalism and never hid his republican convictions. The spirit that carried his agitation was the same spirit that permeated the Communist Manifesto and dominated the International.
His demands for universal suffrage and for state-supported worker-owned production associations, his struggle against the Progressive Party and Manchester Liberalism, these are all aligned with the essence of modern socialism as they proceed from the fundamental understanding that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, through class-struggle, which is by necessity also a political struggle that must have to goal of seizing state power to use it in the interest of the working class for the socialist transformation of society.
But if Lassalle’s agitation and demands were filled with the same thought as the Communist Manifesto it follows that it was adjusted to the period that he was active; it corresponds to Germany during the 1860s, more specifically the turbulent time in Prussia. Alongside the genius and fiery passion of Lassalle it was not the least of all the adjustment of his agitation that produced such surprising and great results that gave rise to a real legend that still distorts the image of the great agitator.
But this adjustment to a specific time and place was only meant to be provisional; Lassalle’s program was as half-baked as the country he wanted to change. To the misfortune of both his work and our party he died right before the great upheavals in Germany started, which would surely have led him to develop and expand his program. Modern Germany first came to be in the political revolutions in 1866 and 1870, alongside the industrial revolution, and which is still developing.
Lassalle’s primary political demand, universal suffrage, has long since been carried out. The Manchester rule is dead, the Progressive Party has shrunk and become marginalized, and the production associations of one-off workers, which Lassalle never put too much emphasis on, in the age of international production no longer make up a transitional form to a higher mode of production but instead the last elements of a dying mode of production. But the economic workers’ organizations, which were in Lassalle’s time not known by name in Germany or anywhere on the continent for that matter, but Marx advocated their importance for the class-struggle already in 1847 – we mean of course the trade unions.
That all these revolutions must firstly benefit the most revolutionary of all parties, social-democracy, is a simple fact. They did not simply expand the number of members but also the goal. It became more than Lassallieanism.
It is no wonder that the opposition against Social-Democracy, weary in the face of its success, long for the time of Lassalle’s beautiful agitation. These fools don’t understand that that the course of events is always stronger than its largest genius, they also forget that Lassalle stood on the same groundings as modern Social-Democracy when he started his agitation; he would have been the first to develop his program after the changing conditions; that his work for a free and united Germany would never have brought him to see the modern Bismarckian as the realization of his goals; and his ideas for state cooperatives would have made him a resolute enemy to the “social-kingdom” of Wilhelm the First and Second, who without a doubt would have taken up the demands of Lassalle but changed its meaning to something else entirely.
But the state-socialists don’t have a real reason to wish that Lassalle was still alive, or even a real reason to appeal to the dead Lassalle against modern and living social-Democracy, differences of opinions notwithstanding in their expressions. Even if Lassalle’s agitation was made for a specific time and place they are still to this day the best propaganda texts that Social-Democracy has. Here we can see the real greatness of the man. It pulls every reader in, regardless if one is a worker, scientist, an experienced politician or an illusion filled young one. The clarity and depth of his thinking, expressed with sharp and certitude, the proud superiority and fiery passion – all work together to make for inspiring and overwhelming agitation.
As a politician, and no less a theoretician, Lassalle already belongs to history and has been tried through its critique. But as an agitator he still lives in his youth among all German-speaking workers, still brings fire to the heart of the working-class struggle for emancipation, and still hardens one’s character against persecution and oppression. When we remember Lassalle we should not only remember the fallen hero, who fought for our cause and has been a role model, let us also remember the immortal Lassalle – “the fighter and the thinker”, as is written on his gravestone – that which lives inside and with us: the spirit which is communicated through his texts. And what better way to celebrate his memory than to occupy ourselves fully with his spirit and spreading it among the proletariat, “the rock on which the future church will be built.”
Christian, Donald, and Rudy sit down for a podcast discussion on Che Guevara’s program for a socialist transition using Helen Yaffe’s book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution as a background. We visit the economic “Great Debate” of Cuba in the early 1960s, the different approaches to using the law of value for socialist transformation, Che’s critique of market socialism, his model of Cuba as a single socialist factory, and how this model compares to contemporary approaches such as the People’s Republic of Walmart. We emphasize how Che’s humanistic outlook in molding new humans prefigured some of the problems that other socialist societies such as Yugoslavia or the Brezhnev USSR would face, and how his contributions add to the debate around cybernetical socialism today.
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Doug Enaa Greene on the Hungarian Soviet Republic and its tragic defeat.
Automobile loaded with Communists going through the streets of Budapest, March 5, 1919.
It is 1919 and Russia is in the midst of a ruthless civil war with fronts stretching for thousands of kilometers across a ruined country. On one side are aristocrats and capitalists who had been overthrown less than two years before and are now desperately fighting to return to power. On the other side are the workers and peasants of the former Russian Empire, who had seized power from their former masters and were now determined to defend it. It is a savage struggle between two irreconcilable worlds with only two ways it can end: total victory or death. The Bolsheviks did not see their struggle as merely the concern of Russians but as the spark of a world revolution against exploitation and oppression. During the early months of 1919, the Bolshevik spark appeared to set fire to the old order of Europe. Revolution and revolt gripped Germany, Austria, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, and Italy. Other countries seemed poised for upheaval. Understanding the importance of these events, Commissar of War Leon Trotsky explained to soldiers of the Red Army:
Decisive weeks in the history of mankind have arrived. The wave of enthusiasm over the establishment of a Soviet Republic in Hungary had hardly passed when the proletariat of Bavaria got possession of power and extended the hand of brotherly unison to the Russian and Hungarian Republics….To fulfil our international duty, we must first of all smash the bands of Kolchak. To support the victorious workers of Hungary and Bavaria, to help the revolt of the workers in Poland, in Germany and throughout Europe, we must establish Soviet power definitively and irrefutably over the whole extent of Russia.1
When Trotsky spoke those words, Russia no longer stood alone. On March 21, workers’ revolution had come to Budapest and Soviet power was proclaimed. The Soviet Republic of Hungary joined with Soviet Russia in attacking the bastions of bourgeois power and showed the possibilities of a new socialist order. Unfortunately, Soviet Hungary did not last long and was toppled after only 133 days by the armed power of the internal counterrevolution and imperialism. Those were not the only causes of Soviet Hungary’s defeat. Poor Communist leadership and rash policies made Soviet Hungary’s loss swifter and more certain by alienating many potential supporters. Even though the Hungarian Soviet Republic provides many negative examples of how to make a revolution, they deserve to be remembered for their boldness in attempting to accomplish the impossible in the worst conditions.
Towards the Abyss
In the years before World War One, the reign of the ancient Hapsburg dynasty over the Austro-Hungarian Empire appeared secure. The Hapsburgs had successfully co-opted potential unrest from the Magyar nobility in 1867 by creating a Dual Monarchy. The Compromise of 1867 granted the Magyar aristocracy unparalleled autonomy with control over their own government and budget. Only in foreign policy, a common army, and a customs union did the Magyars remain united with Austria.
However, this apparent success of the Hapsburgs in Hungary masked deeper centrifugal forces that threatened the Empire’s stability. By the turn of the twentieth century, a fifth of Hungarian land was owned by just three hundred families. The question of land was acute in Hungary since nearly two-thirds of the population worked in agriculture. Land concentration affected not only the peasantry but also the lesser nobility. Many of these new “landless gentry” looked for employment in the new state bureaucracy. Before 1867, the bureaucracy possessed only a skeletal structure in Hungary. Afterward, it expanded rapidly with the construction of post offices, schools, railways, and tax collectors.2 According to the historian Perry Anderson
“The Hungarian nobility henceforward represented the militant and masterful wing of aristocratic reaction in the Empire, which increasingly came to dominate the personnel and policy of the Absolutist apparatus in Vienna itself.”3
The social problems of Hungary were further compounded by the fact that only a minority of the population were Magyar (or ethnically Hungarian). In 1910, out of Hungary’s population of 21 million, only 10 million were Magyar. The majority were Croats, Slovenes, Romanians, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs, Ukrainians, and Jews. Jews formed less than 5 percent of the population, but they were heavily concentrated in urban centers such as Budapest (forming one-fifth of the populace). Many Jews played key roles in industrial and cultural life, fostering the growth of “popular” antisemitism. Antisemitism would be further exacerbated among the aristocracy and the peasantry by the fact that future leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic such as Georg Lukács, Béla Kun, József Pogány, Tibor Szamuely were Jews. Thus, the unresolved national question had revolutionary potential in Hungary. The Compromise of 1867 benefited the Magyar nobility immensely. They gained a great deal of power and privileges that they had no intention of surrendering. The nobility ensured that both non-Magyar and the lower classes were denied any democratic rights. In 1914, only six percent of the population had the vote. William Craig explained the dilemma of the Hungarian nobility as follows: “Pretending to be Magyar, it gave no political rights to the Magyar peasants, the bulk of that nationality. Pretending to be liberal, it gave no political voice to the non-Magyar nationalities, very nearly a majority of the population.”4 The Dual Monarchy created a situation that Trotsky would characterize as combined and uneven development.5 On the one hand, it reinforced the weight of absolutism, feudalism, and the oppression of national minorities. On the other hand, it enabled the rapid expansion of capitalism and the creation of a bourgeoisie in Hungary. However, this bourgeoisie was not prepared to play a revolutionary role. For one, the development of capitalism was facilitated by Austrian and foreign capital, meaning the Magyar bourgeoisie was dwarfed by them. Secondly, the bourgeoisie was more interested in entering the ranks of the nobility than in overthrowing them. Magyar capitalists purchased large estates and married into the aristocracy. Lastly, the bourgeoisie was unable to play a truly Jacobin role because they could not rely on the working class. To do so would threaten their power and property as much as that of the aristocracy. As Michael Löwy concluded: “the real class interests of the bourgeoisie… wisely preferred the status quo to any revolutionary-democratic adventure, with all the attendant dangers for its own survival as a class.”6
Industrialization had created a modern working class. Out of an active labor force of 9 million, there were 1.2 million workers. Approximately a third of whom worked in small factories numbering between 1 and 20 workers. On top of this, 37 percent of laborers worked in factories numbering more than 20.7 At least 300,000 laborers worked in businesses with more than 100 workers and a third of them were located in Budapest.8 Thus, Hungary possessed a highly concentrated and volatile industrial working class, who possessed the potential social weight to lead both a bourgeois-democratic and a socialist revolution. In fact, the Hungarian proletariat had a long history of militancy. In 1894, there were clashes between agricultural workers and the army in Hódmezővásárhely that left a number dead. Three years later, there were strikes in 14 counties by agricultural workers. In 1905, 1912, and 1913 the working class launched mass strikes and demonstrations for universal male suffrage. However, the Hungarian Social Democratic Party/Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt (MSZDP) was not prepared to lead a working revolution. Formed in 1890, the MSZDP based its program on the German Erfurt Program, which had the ultimate aim of socialism, but it focused on immediate goals such as achieving democratic and social reforms such as universal suffrage. In general, the MSZDP tended to embrace a reformist and legalistic strategy, which was ironic considering they were excluded from parliament by the nobility and the bourgeoisie. All this meant that the MSZDP was a marginal political force in Hungary. The MSZDP possessed a narrowly “workerist” ideology, reflecting their base among the elite and skilled sections of the unionized working class. Thus, the party paid only lip-service to demands for Hungarian independence or rights for national minorities. The MSZDP was hostile to the peasantry, writing them off as one reactionary mass: “The peasantry is reactionary in the true sense of the word…. This… makes it impossible to enter into even temporary alliances with the peasantry.”9Due to their reformism, mistrust of the peasantry, and national minorities, the MSZDP was not up to the task of playing a revolutionary vanguard role.
A scattered left opposition did oppose the MSZDP leadership. The most significant came from a librarian, translator of Marx, and anarcho-syndicalist theorist named Ervin Szabó (1877-1918). Szabó criticized the MSZDP’s opportunism and parliamentarism, demanding internal democratization of the party. Uniquely, Szabó advocated autonomy for cultural minorities within Hungary. He managed to exert influence upon a number of young students and founders of the Communist Party such as Jenő László and Béla Vágó.10Vágó organized a small radical faction in the MSZDP that included other future communists, including Gyula Alpári, Béla Szántó, and László Rudas. By 1907, Szabó and his supporters were effectively isolated inside the MSZDP and driven out. Szabó’s influence extended far outside the ranks of the Social Democratic Party. Among those who were shaped by him was a young and brilliant philosopher and future communist named Georg Lukács (1885-1971).11 While outside of organized politics before World War One, Lukács was involved in a number of philosophical and intellectual circles that were influenced by radical ideas, many of whom would later join the Communist Party. Despite all the challenges, the Hungarian Ancien Régime resisted all calls for reform. Prime Minister István Tisza thwarted all attempts for land reform and even the most modest expansion of voting rights. While these efforts prevailed, the strength of Hungarian conservatism came not from any brilliance among the aristocracy, but from the weaknesses of its opponents. As World War One would prove, the Hungarian social order was built on feet of clay and unprepared for a great trial of strength. When the guns went silent, it collapsed like a house of cards.
World War One
When war was declared in 1914 there was mass jubilation in Hungary. All social classes shared in it, as for many the war appeared to be a chance for glory and conquest. When mass mobilization began, crowds in Budapest shouted for the defeat of Serbia. Priests blessed the soldiers marching off to far-off battlefields. Even the socialists were not immune from national sentiment. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the MSZDP abandoned its internationalist commitments and pledged their support to the government’s war effort. While the Social Democrats had no seats in parliament, there is little doubt that they would have voted for war credits if given the opportunity. Very quickly, Hungary was on a war footing. In 1915, the army took over the management of most major industries and mines in a sort of “military socialism.” The war also brought on full employment and increased wages since skilled workers in armaments industries were at a premium and exempted from military service. Since munitions workers were determined to protect their bargaining power, the membership of organized labor increased to 200,000 by war’s end.12However, the war economy took its toll on the home front as inflation grew and real wages plummeted. Labor shortages caused the production of fuel and foodstuffs to fall by half, leading to the introduction of rationing and the rise of a black market that benefited a small elite. Many blamed the Jews for war-profiteering and speculation. Conditions were overall appalling. Urban centers lacked new housing construction and were overcrowded due to an influx of 200,000 refugees.13 Despite the sacrifices, production failed to meet the needs of the army. Hungary contributed disproportionately to the Hapsburg war effort. Of the 9 million soldiers Austria-Hungary drafted during the war, 4 million came from Hungary. The Hungarians suffered heavy casualties as well with at least 660,000 killed in battle, 740,000 wounded and nearly 730,000 taken prisoner.14 The heavy losses served to embitter the Hungarians, who believed they were being used as cannon-fodder. As suffering increased during the course of the war, public opinion shifted from chauvinistic militarism to disillusionment and hatred for the government. István Tisza headed the Hungarian government during the war and was committed to victory. He also believed that victory could come without granting any major reforms. An opposition to Tisza’s conservative intransigence coalesced around Mihály Károlyi and the Party of Independence. From an aristocratic background and holding the title of Count, Károlyi broke with his class in advocating liberal and nationalist reforms. The Party of Independence vaguely supported suffrage to veterans, demands for Hungarian economic independence, and an end to the war. Károlyi himself was too radical for the party and resigned in 1916. He formed the United Party of Independence and 1848 that forthrightly supported Hungarian independence, universal suffrage, land reforms, a welfare state, and an end to the war. The new party had a base among democratic intellectuals and ultra-nationalist members of the gentry. It also formed the main parliamentary opposition. In 1917, Károlyi managed to gain support from the MSZDP for his peace and democratic reform program.15 All of this meant that Károlyi and the United Party of Independence and 1848 were now the nucleus of a future government.
Count Mihály Károlyi
Until the Soviet peace proposals of 1917, the MSZDP was doggedly committed to the war effort. Thus, any anti-war voices that appeared did so without official sanction from the party. The first anti-war socialists began organizing in 1915 when activists created a network to coordinate anti-war propaganda in the army and illegal strikes. The police clamped down and stopped their organizing. Two years later, a more serious anti-war opposition formed as socialists and labor activists among engineers, metalworkers, and technicians created their own unions to coordinate strikes and force concessions from the government. They did this without support from the MSZDP. Undaunted, these “engineer socialists” built support in a number of union locals in Budapest.16 This new center of militant syndicalism provided an invaluable organizing center for future working-class struggles against the old regime.
Another leftist pole known as the Revolutionary Socialists was created in 1917 bySzabó-style syndicalists and intellectuals from the Galileo Circle. Among their members were future communists Ottó Korvin, János Lékai, József Révai, and Imre Sallai.17 The Revolutionary Socialists were inspired by the anti-war propaganda coming out of Russia. Their propaganda highlighted real grievances and called for strikes, sabotage, and an end to the war. Arguably, the Revolutionary Socialists were the first Bolshevik center inside Hungary, not only rejecting both the status quo and Social-Democracy but also supporting a working-class revolution based upon workers’ councils.18The Hungarian revolutionary left viewed workers councils or soviets as a real way to mobilize workers for revolution. In contrast to the reformist MSZDP and trade unions, councils organized workers at the point of production and engage in militant direct action. The Russian Revolution also showed that workers’ councils could provide the foundation for a working-class state against the bourgeois state. On December 26, 1917, two syndicalist activists,Antal Mosolygó and Sándor Ösztreicher set up the first workers council.19 The “engineer socialists” created this council to organize and coordinate the workers for a national strike which momentum had been building up for since November as the economic situation deteriorated. To counter leftist agitation the government banned the Galileo Circle and had its members arrested for sedition. News of the punitive terms demanded by Germany to Russia at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations ended up sparking mass strikes in Wiener Neustadt in Austria in January. Before long these strikes had spread to Hungary. On January 18, the Revolutionary Socialists and syndicalists still at liberty called for a strike. The strike was supported by railway workers and engineers, but more than 150,000 took to the streets, shouting slogans “Long Live the Workers’ Councils!” and “Greetings to Soviet Russia!” At the last minute, the Social-Democrats threw their support behind the strike, but only in order to end it. Several unions refused, notably the metalworkers’ and the rail-workers unions. Ultimately the resignation of the MSZDP from the strike’s executive committee forced a return to work. Mere weeks later, the MZSDP held an extraordinary party congress. On the surface, it was a victory for the moderates. The party managed to contain rebellion from militant unions and the incumbent leadership was supported by an overwhelming majority. However, the party executive was no longer unchallenged and revolutionary politics were on the political map. Political polarization was only just beginning. The January strike was only the start of social unrest. Soldiers in the barracks revolted and it was difficult for the army to send new recruits to the front. During the summer, more than a hundred thousand deserted. Over the course of the next few months, workers engaged in wildcat strikes. From June 22-27, Landler and the railroad workers launched another major strike, demanding wage increases. Soon a million workers were in the streets of Budapest. In response, the government had Landler arrested. Once again, the Social-Democrats joined the strike but ended it once minor concessions were granted. Tellingly, the MSZDP did not demand the release of Landler as a condition for returning to work. The June defeat only incensed the radicals and union leaders, deepening the divide between them and the MSZDP leadership. In early October, the socialists took advantage of the relaxed censorship and demanded universal suffrage and a secret ballot, peace based on American President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, nationalization of major industries, land reform, and equal rights for all nationalities. The MSZDP’s program for a “People’s Government” was denounced by the revolutionary left as too little, too late. While the divide between moderates and revolutionaries in the MSZDP was deep, it had not yet been consummated in a formal split. The revolutionary left lacked a coherent program to rally around. The split would finally come in late November when a prisoner-of-war named Béla Kun returned from Soviet Russia to provide guidance to the revolutionary left.
Béla Kun
During the war,Austria-Hungary experienced its heaviest fighting in Romania and Russia where millions died. At least 10 percent of the Austria-Hungarian army was taken prisoner there, including 600,000 Hungarians.20 Among them was a conscript and former socialist journalist named Béla Kun (1886-1938), who was captured in 1916 and sent to a POW camp in Tomsk. He would prove to be in the right place at the right time.
Béla Kun
As the Russian Empire collapsed in revolution, thousands of Hungarian prisoners including Kun were attracted toBolshevism. In April 1917, Kun befriended members of the local soviet and expressed his desire to work with them on behalf of the socialist cause. In an article written around this time, Kun explained his attraction to the Russian Revolution:
Although I worked for the common cause far from the Russian comrades, I too absorbed the air of the West, where the great ideas of social democracy were born. Now, in the light of the Great Russian Revolution, I understand: ex oriente lux.21
Kun was quite a catch for the Tomsk Soviet and proved to be energetic, talented, and dedicated. He was a “jack of all trades” who wrote for the leftist Novaia Zhizn on foreign affairs and organized Hungarian POWs in support of the revolution. After the October Revolution, Kun was transferred from Tomsk to Petrograd, where he began working for the International Propaganda Department of Foreign Affairs under Karl Radek. There, he worked with the Bolsheviks to conduct antiwar propaganda amongst German troops at the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations. He also continued his agitation among prisoners of war scattered throughout Russia. Once the negotiations at the Brest-Litovsk broke down in February 1918, the Germans launched a major offensive against Russia. Kun attempted to rally Hungarian prisoners to fight on behalf of the Bolsheviks. Even though Russia signed a humiliating peace treaty, Kun’s efforts to organize Hungarians continued. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Hungarians were fighting for the revolution. Due to the efforts of Kun about 80,000-100,000 more Hungarians enlisted in the Red Guard to defend the Soviet Republic in the Civil War.22 Kun himself served in an internationalist unit that defended Moscow, where he helped to put down an abortive putsch by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in July 1918.23 Over the next three months, Kun fought in the Urals, commanding a Red Army company and, later, a battalion.24 He proved himself to be one of the most valued, talented, and influential foreign socialists in Soviet Russia.
Kun’s efforts to organize the Hungarian POWs inspired similar endeavors by the Bolsheviks among German, Czech, Serb and Romanian POWs. Lenin believed that they were naturally sympathetic to communism, but their sympathy had to be translated into action. The Bolsheviks hoped that the POWs would not only serve in the Red Army but act as “carriers” by bringing international revolution back to their homelands. While the Bolsheviks had mixed results among the various nationalities, their efforts among the Hungarians proved to be quite successful. In March 1918, a core of communists was created among the Hungarians and they formed a Hungarian section of the Bolshevik Party. It was the plan of Kun and his close comrades,Tibor Szamuely and EndreRudnyánszky, to train cadre for a return to Hungary in order to foment revolution. From March onward, a series of meetings were held in Russia for the purpose of forming the Hungarian Communist Party, which was established on November 4 in Moscow. Between May and November of 1918, the Hungarians organized an educational program to provide a crash course in communism. Five seminars were held in Moscow on a variety of themes ranging from the ABCs of communism, the Marxist theory of value, imperialism, and the Russian Revolution. Kun, Szamuely, and Kráoly Vántus taught most of the lectures. One hundred and twenty agitators were trained and 100 of them returned to Hungary in November. Despite their small numbers, they proved invaluable in laying the foundation of an organized communist party in Hungary itself.25 Considering the chaotic situation in Hungary, Kun and the Bolsheviks believed it was imperative for the Hungarians to return home with all due haste.
Kun left Soviet Russia on November 6 along with 250-300 Hungarian communists. They were only a drop among the approximately 300,000 prisoners, who returned to Hungary in the closing months of 1918. Kun and his comrades used false documents and had little trouble crossing the border.26 Their revolutionary work was just beginning.
The Chrysanthemum Revolution
By September, military defeat for the Central Powers was no longer in doubt. The German offensive on the Western Front had failed and the Allies were advancing everywhere. The Hapsburg Empire was beginning to come apart as various nationalities prepared to secede. Rather than fight for a lost cause, Hungarian soldiers at the front spontaneously refused to fight and the mutiny quicklyspread to the entire Hungarian army. On October 16, in an effort to placate the Allies and save the Austro-Hungary from collapse, Emperor Karl I declared that he accepted the principle of federalism. The Hapsburgs planned to create a series of national councils composed of German, Czech, South Slav and Ukrainian, who would cooperate with the Imperial government. This last-ditch effort could not save the Hapsburgs. Over the next month, the Romanians, Czechs, Southern Slavs, and other nationalities seceded and formed their own states. The end of Austria-Hungary was all but an accomplished fact. Interestingly, Karl I’s proclamation exempted the Magyars and ensured the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary. Even at this late date, the Magyar ruling class still hoped to preserve Greater Hungary without granting any autonomy to the subject nationalities. As Austria-Hungary collapsed, the Hungarian government declared the 1867 compromise null and void. They declared that Hungary had regained full sovereignty. The revolt from below meant the old system of aristocratic government was no longer viable. The only political alternative now was a democratic republic, which the Magyar ruling class had rejected for generations. There was only one figure with genuine democratic credentials who could lead a Hungarian republic: Mihály Károlyi. The new government took shape in a meeting held on October 23-24 at Károlyi’s mansion. The attendees included representatives of Károlyi’s party, the small Radical Party led by Oszkár Jászi and the Social-Democrats. The following day, the three parties announced the formation of a National Council which was effectively a new government-in-waiting. The National Council released a progressive program of democratic and social reforms, national independence, an end to the war, land reform and a more equitable distribution of wealth. It was a shrewd and brilliant move to include the MSZDP. Unlike the other parties, the socialists possessed the sole organized force in the country with its one million strong trade union constituency. The socialists had no intention of launching a socialist revolution but could use their apparatus to provide legitimacy to a bourgeois one. This coalition of liberal aristocrats, middle-class reformers, and opportunist socialists, was heterodox and unwieldy, but also the only social force who saw themselves as capable of filling the political vacuum. Emperor Karl I hesitated to recognize the Hungarian National Council. Instead, he appointed Count Janos Hedik, as Prime Minister of Hungary on October 29. On October 30, Hungarian troops showed their lack of confidence in Hedik by taking over strategic positions in Budapest. The following day, Hedik resigned and Károlyi was appointed Prime Minister in his stead. The Hedik government lasted barely two days. There was jubilation in the streets of Budapest with many of the troops wearing white chrysanthemums. The white chrysanthemums were popular this time of year for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. In turn, the chrysanthemum became the symbol of the victorious revolution.
The Interlude
It appeared that Hungary had all ingredients for a successful bourgeois-democratic revolution: the transfer of power was peaceful and bloodless, the majority of the population gained the vote, and the government was supported by both liberals and leftists. However, the very circumstances that had allowed the Chrysanthemum Revolution to occur meant it had limited chances to fulfill its program. For one, Károlyi’s government inherited the defeat and ruin left by the Hapsburgs. Even though an armistice was signed with the Allies on November 3, this contained no agreements on Hungary’s borders. In fact, French, Romanian and Yugoslav armies continued to threaten Hungary from the east and south. Ten days later, Károlyi signed a further armistice that deprived Hungary of more than half of its former territory. On top of this, there was no longer an army to defend the frontiers, with only scattered units around to offer any resistance. As time wore on, Magyar nationalists believed that Károlyi was incapable of defending Hungary. The Allies showed no concern for the Hungarians but appeared only interested in punitive measures, which only served to undermine Károlyi’s government. Nearly as threatening as the territorial losses and the armistice negotiations was the catastrophic economic situation at home. Due to territorial changes, only about one-fifth of coal mines remained inside Hungary’s new borders. Thus, fuel and electricity were rationed in Budapest, which forced businesses to close early. The dire state of transport meant food rotted in the countryside and could not be sold in the cities. As a result, starving workers launched food riots. Inflation was rampant. Unemployment skyrocketed with the return of prisoners of war and an influx of refugees. The Károlyi government had no plans to reconvert industry to civilian production. The situation in Hungary was like the war had never ended since the Allied economic blockade remained in force. Károlyi’s government was unprepared to handle these manifold crises. Most of them had little to no experience in government. They were forced to rely upon the benevolent neutrality of the old state bureaucracy and the officer corps. Nor did the government have much legitimacy outside of Budapest. Both the United Party of Independence and 1848 and the Radical Party had no mass support or political organization. The only group that possessed both was the socialists. According to Rudolf Tőkés: “The government… could not implement a single major decision… without the tacit or expressed consent of the socialists.”27 However, the Chrysanthemum Revolution placed the socialists in a dilemma. On the one hand, they had the support of organized labor and could potentially use that base to take power, nationalize industries and carry out a socialist program. On the other hand, they could use their power to consolidate a bourgeois-democratic revolution. The MSZDP leadership refrained from taking power and decided to enter the government as a responsible junior partner.28 Beyond its influence in the trade unions, the socialists held commanding positions in the workers’ councils. While Károlyi formerly controlled the reins of government, genuine power was in the hands of the councils. It was important that the MSZDP use its influence in the councils to halt any radical impulses. Out of 365 delegates to the councils, the socialists held a commanding majority of 239. The socialists’ power was so great in the workers’ councils that they were able to exclude the revolutionary left from them in November. The radicals only managed to hold onto a small audience in the soldiers’ councils.29 While the MSZDP kept the councils loyal to the government, other ideas developed. As the economy collapsed, workers found themselves more and more drawn into managing industries with thoughts of workers’ control. The socialists planned to use their control of the workers’ councils to restore production. In November, Zsigmond Kunfi, one of the socialist members of Károlyi’s cabinet called for a “six-week suspension of class struggle.”30 However, calls for calm and restoring production seemed like a cruel joke to workers as the economy and their livelihoods disintegrated. Learning nothing from the example of the Russian Mensheviks, Hungarian Socialists supported a democratic government where they shared blame for its decisions. Many socialists believed that the MSZDP had relinquished its socialist program in order to befriend its bourgeois allies. Many workers also distrusted a government that was controlled by aristocrats and capitalists. As the failures of the Károlyi government mounted, the party’s base and the councils began to look elsewhere for solutions.
The Hungarian Communist Party
On November 24, the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) was officially founded in Budapest. Béla Kun was the acknowledged leader of the new party. The new central committee included thirteen members, including former POWs such as Vántus, György Nánássy, and Szamuely (who headed an alternative central committee). Among the party’s founders were left-wing socialists such as Korvin, Béla Vágó, and Béla Szántó.31 The new HCP’s program was uncompromisingly revolutionary:demanding an end to class collaboration, exposing the right-wing leadership of the MSZDP, nationalizing estates, creating unemployment insurance, workers control in the factories, alliance with Soviet Russia, and a dictatorship of the proletariat based upon the workers’ councils. As Béla Kun’s biography György Borsányi said of the party: “In summary we may state: the organizational principles of the new party were underdeveloped, its ideology was messianic.”32
Hungarian Communist Party founder Tibor Szamuely (second from the left) and V. I. Lenin in Moscow, 1919
Unlike the MSZDP, the HCP was not a parliamentary vote-catching organization, but a dynamic and youthful organization committed to revolutionary action. They began publishing a newspaper Vörös Ujság (Red Journal) to reach the broader populace. Kun and the HCP were uniquely placed to rally all forces of the radical left to their banner and fan the flames of discontent. Despite its small size, the opportunities for the HCP to grow were immense.
Georg Lukács
Among the earliest adherents to the HCP was Georg Lukács, who became its most internationally renowned member. Lukács had long stayed away from organized politics in exchange for literary and philosophical pursuits. He was a romantic anti-capitalist and opposed to the war, but saw no social force capable of creating a new order. Lukács viewed the MSZDP as irredeemably bourgeois. The success of the October Revolution made a deep impact upon him, even though he found many of the Bolshevik’s tactics to be abhorrent. In November 1918, Lukács wrote “Bolshevism as an Ethical Problem” expressing his central objection:
We either seize the opportunity and realize communism, and then we must embrace dictatorship, terror and class oppression, and raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class in place of class-rule as we have known it, convinced that – just as Beelzebub chased out Satan this last form of class rule, by its very nature the cruelest and most naked, will destroy itself, and with it all class rule.33
However, Lukács passed quickly from his abstract ethical objection of Bolshevik violence after reading Lenin’s State and Revolution and attending communist meetings.34 During this same period, he met Béla Kun, who explained the need to use revolutionary terror and violence. Lukács accepted Kun’s arguments on the necessity for revolutionary violence, saying later:
… we Communists are like Judas. It is our bloody work to crucify Christ. But this sinful work is at the same time our calling: only through death on the cross does Christ become God, and this is necessary to be able to save the world. We Communists then take the sins of the world upon us, in order to be able thereby to save the world.35
Twelve days after the Communist Party was founded, Lukács officially joined as its fifty-second member.36 He was co-opted onto the editorial board of the party’s journal Internationale and became a member of the alternative central committee.
Georg Lukács around the time of the Soviet Republic
The Road to Power
Over the course of the following months, the HCP grew from a tiny sect into a mass party and, finally, the second communist party in the world to take state power. The HCP was aided not only by the revolutionary situation in Hungary; they had a clear goal and worked methodically towards it. Vörös Ujság was an organ ideally suited to agitation on a mass scale. By contrast, Internationale, lectures, and seminars appealed to artists, writers, and intellectuals. Lastly, the communists were utterly dedicated to spreading the revolutionary message throughout the country. Kun himself was able to deliver twenty speeches a day. As József Révai observed: “There was hardly a worker who was not at some time and in some way exposed to communist propaganda.”37
Over the next few months, the HCP went to work. The HCP targeted selected groups whom they believed were open to radicalization, such as unionized workers in heavy industry, particularly miners and steelworkers in Budapest. They also hoped to win over the soldiers’ council and the unemployed. It was not simply that all these groups had grievances, but the cautious tactics by the MSZDP and the union leadership had disillusioned militants. While the socialists remained committed to its middle-of-the-road course, a great deal of its rank-and-file were dismayed with the party’s moderate stance. They grew fascinated by the Communist élan and that history appeared to be on their side. Considering the economic breakdown in Hungary, many workers began to doubt the possibilities of democratically reaching socialism. Only the communists seemed to promise something more than accommodating the bourgeoisie. Despite the HCP’s rigid qualifications for membership, these were often ignored in the breach. As a result, the party grew from 10,000 in January to 25,000 in February, with 10,000 located in Budapest alone.38 At the beginning of January, the communists took over the Young Workers’ League, which had previously been under MSZDP leadership. Even though the HCP only managed to recruit a small minority, it was both vocal and active. By January, there were calls inside the workers’ councils for the creation of a purely socialist government. While a compromise plan was adopted that doubled the socialist membership in Károlyi’s cabinet, it was clear that the MSZDP leadership was divided. The HCP did not hesitate to exploit these divisions, calling for a split:
We do not intend to push the Social Democratic toward the left…but rather to help the revolutionary elements break away, so that the reformists and the believers in legal methods would be isolated. We must push he reformists to the right, by splitting off the revolutionaries and uniting them in the [Communist] Party. This is the only way to enable the Hungarian proletariat to take advantage of the revolutionary situation and participate in the international proletarian revolution.39
The HCP’s call for open rebellion in the Socialist Party provoked a response. On January 28, the MSZDP used its majority in the workers’ councils to have the communist faction expelled and its members physically removed. However, the MSZDP’s commitment to the government meant that they had cleared the way for the communists to take charge of the streets. Over the course of January and February, mass struggles escalated. On January 2, a strike broke out at one of the largest coal mines in Hungary. The miners proceeded to occupy the pits, the nearby buildings, and railroad stations. The government sent in troops to put down the strike. As a result, ten strike leaders were shot. On January 22, the HCP called for a rent strike in Budapest, which prompted the government to issue a general rent reduction. Lastly, there were public demonstrations of soldiers and the unemployed in Budapest that led to violence. The arrival of the HCP on the political scene alarmed the Károlyi government, who hoped to contain the situation. The police were granted new powers and new legislation was passed to curtail the “excesses” by the workers’ councils. In February, the government made a show of authority by moving against a number of right-wing groups and raiding the offices of Vörös Újság.
Things were not quiet in the countryside either. The slow pace of land reform led to a rash of land seizures by the peasantry. To protect themselves from the threat of revolution, the local gentry raised their own militias. In an attempt to pacify the peasantry, the Károlyi government passed a much-heralded land reform law on February 16. The law limited the size of holdings to 500 acres with compensation to be paid by the government. In a symbolic gesture to commemorate the new law, Károlyi personally divided up his own immense estate. Károlyi’s gesture did little to inspire other landowners, who remained determined to hold onto their holdings. The peasantry was disappointed in the law, believing it set the limits of estates to be too high and that the whole process of land redistribution was too slow and marred with red tape. Instead of relying upon the law, the peasants decided to take matters into their hands by occupying large estates and forming cooperatives. Ultimately, the land reform remained a dead letter.40 It was the hope of the government and socialists that their measures would provoke a response from the communists. By February, the HCP had grown enormously, but they were still far from overtaking the MSZDP, not to mention taking power. It was still possible to permanently curb their influence. That opportunity came on February 20. On that day, a communist-led demonstration in Budapest of the unemployed marched to the offices of Népszava (People’s Voice), a Social-Democratic newspaper, criticizing their coverage of the unemployed movement. A cordon of police was waiting for them and guarding the offices. The ensuing clash between demonstrators and the police left several dead and injured. Károly Dietz, the police commissioner of Budapest, used the demonstration to demand that the government take immediate action against the communist threat. The government wanted assurances from Dietz that arrests could be carried out successfully and without sparking any backlash. After Dietz gave his assurances, the government gave him permission. That night, the police arrested forty-three leading communists, including Béla Kun.41 Once in custody, Kun was severely beaten and nearly killed by the police. By the end of the month, party headquarters and the Vörös Újság offices were closed and dozens more communists were arrested.42 The entire MSZDP, including its left-wing, supported the anticommunist crackdown. The following day, the socialists staged a mass demonstration of upwards of 250,000 in Budapest to support the government. However, the mood of the marchers changed dramatically once word reached them that Kun had been beaten. According to György Borsányi: “The impact was tremendous. Within minutes the mood on the streets had changed drastically. The shooting at the Népszava building became an insignificant misunderstanding compared to the news that the police had bludgeoned Kun to death, or at least half-dead.”43 Workers remembered the police brutality of the old regime and all that bitterness came rushing back. Suddenly, an anti-communist demonstration transformed into one sympathizing with the communists. This was exactly the backlash that the government had hoped to avoid. Despite the arrests of the HCP leadership, its back-up central committee under Lukács, Szamuely, Gyula Hevesi, Ferenc Rákos, and Ernő Bettelheim went into action within days. Vörös Újság published again and agitators were entering the factories. As the socialist writer Lajos Kassák observed: “It was business as usual for the communists.”44 The HCP found that Kun’s martyrdom was a very effective propaganda weapon. Not only did the HCP recover quickly, but they gained mass support and sympathy from the population. It became clear to the socialists that they would have difficulty filing charges against the communists because they would have to use the laws of the old regime. This would provide a golden opportunity for Kun to agitate against both them and the government. To salvage the situation, the government did an about-face and condemned the mistreatment of communist prisoners. Soon the communists were granted preferential treatment and Kun was able to lead the HCP from prison. Over the ensuing weeks, the right-wing leadership of the MSZDP lost a great deal of influence. The voice of the leftists such as Pogány, Jenő Landler and Eugen Varga in the party grew. They condemned the socialist leadership for abandoning the class struggle, as well as making increased calls for unity with the communists and an alliance with Soviet Russia. The old party apparatus could no longer silence them. On March 3, in a sign that the working class was moving leftward, the Budapest Workers’ Council voted to allow the communists to rejoin after expelling them only weeks before.45 Four days later, the council approved a plan for socialization. On March 10, the workers’ council of Kaposvar took power, posing a direct challenge to the government. In the countryside, land seizures and unrest continued to grow. On March 13, the Budapest police force recognized the authority of the soldiers’ council. This effectively meant that the last shred of governmental authority had vanished in the capital. Days later, trade unions at the Csepel iron and steel factories passed resolutions in favor of freeing the communistsand denounced the MSZDP in favor of socializing industry. On March 20, a printers’ general strike paralyzed Budapest, and thousands of ironworkers joined the HCP. During the strike, the air was rife with rumors of an armed uprising to free the communists and create a soviet regime. On March 5, an electoral law was passed with democratic elections planned for the following month. It was hoped that the elections would finally provide legitimacy for the government. While the reformist wing of the MSZDP placed faith in elections, the left was more attracted to Bolshevism. The election campaign was plagued with outbursts of violence and on March 19 the Radical Party declared its intention to abstain. As authority slipped away from Károlyi, the MSZDP’s rationale for staying in the coalition government grew more tenuous. Hungary seemed headed towards civil war.46 Károlyi’s last hope to win support from the Allies to lift the blockade in order to shore up his government vanished on March 20. On behalf of the Entente, Lieutenant-Colonel Vix arrived in Budapest, delivering an ultimatum demanding that Hungary accept heavy territorial loses to Romania and to withdraw its troops from the frontier.47 Even more, Hungary was only given a single day to accept the terms. Károlyi knew that this marked the utter failure of his pro-Allied strategy. This left Károlyi’s government in an untenable position, leaving him no choice except to resign. Knowing that a purely socialist government would succeed him, Károlyi observed that he “was handing power over to the Hungarian proletariat.”48 However, the MSZDP leaders did not believe they could govern alone. They wanted the support of the HCP and, behind them, the military might of Soviet Russia. In the negotiations, Kun demanded that the socialists accept the Communist program and transform Hungary into a Soviet Republic. Seeing that they had no other options, the socialists agreed to Kun’s demands: the fusion of the two parties and the creation of a revolutionary soviet government. There was opposition inside the two parties to the merger, but most supported a unified party. Support for the merger came from the workers and soldiers councils in Budapest. Once the deal was accepted, Kun was released from prison and formed the revolutionary government.
No doubt speaking for others of her class, the anti-Semitic writer and aristocrat Cécile Tormay described the scene in disgust when the workers came to power in Hungary:
About seven o’clock a young journalist friend came to us, deadly pale. He closed the door quickly behind him, and looked round anxiously as if he feared he had been followed. He also looked terrified.
“Károlyi has resigned,” he said in a strained voice. “He sent Kunfi from the cabinet meeting to fetch Béla Kun from prison. Kunfi brought Béla Kun to the Prime Minister’s house in a motor car. The Socialists and Communists have come to an agreement and have formed a Directory of which Béla Kun, Tibor Szamuely, Sigmund Kunfi, Joseph Pogány and Béla Vágó are to be the members. They are going to establish revolutionary tribunals and will make many arrests to-night. Save yourself don’t deliver yourself up to their vengeance.”
Even as he spoke, shooting started in the street outside. Suddenly I remembered my night’s vision . . . We are in the big ungainly house . . .the door handle of the last room is turning, and the last door opens . . .
An awful voice shrieked along the street :
“LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!”49
On March 21, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed, raising the specter of the Bolshevik revolution engulfing central Europe.
Proclamation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic on March 21, 1919
The Republic of Councils
The Revolutionary Government
The first act of Soviet Hungary was the creation of a revolutionary government. The summit of power was located in the Revolutionary Governing Council (RGC). Following the Russian model, the twelve members of the RGC were known as People’s Commissars and the various branches of state as People’s Commissariats. In addition, there were twenty-one deputy commissars serving in the government. While none of the commissars were practicing Jews, twenty-eight of them came from a Jewish background, which reactionaries took as proof that the revolution was a Jewish plot.50
Anti-semitic and anti-communist poster
The revolutionary government itself had a largely socialist make-up. Out of the total of thirty-three commissars, socialists made up a majority with seventeen. However, many of these socialists were leftists such as Kunfi (Culture), Pogány (Defense), Landler (Interior), and Varga (Finance). Kun was the only communist to head a Commissariat (Foreign Affairs). Nine of the twenty-one deputy commissars were communists including Lukács (Culture), Szántó and Szamuely (Defense), Mátyás Rákosi (Commerce).51 The RGC’s president was a former MSZDP member named Sándor Garbai. Despite his position, Garbai held little actual power and the real leader of Soviet Hungary was Béla Kun.
Among the leaders of Soviet Hungary were journalists, philosophers, union activists, engineers, and professional revolutionaries, but the overwhelming majority had no prior experience in government. They not only had to contend with the immense problems left by the Hapsburgs and Károlyi, but had taken on the additional task of constructing socialism. The revolutionary government had little in the way to guide them, save the Russian experience, their Marxist education, and an almost superhuman belief in the communist future.
Economic and Social Measures
In their plans for the reorganization of industry, Kun believed that Hungary could improve upon the Bolsheviks, who originally followed a cautious approach to nationalization. To that end, the Soviet Republic nationalized all businesses employing more than twenty employees without compensation within a manner of days. Many smaller firms were spontaneously taken over by workers’ councils. By the end of April, at least 27,000 industrial enterprises were nationalized. This crash course in nationalization would have been a heroic undertaking in an advanced capitalist country, but Hungary was not only a backward one, but it faced economic collapse and possessed no planning infrastructure to integrate the industries.52 The Soviet Republic intended for production to be run by government-appointed commissars, who would work in consultation with the workers’ councils. In practice, the economy was disorganized with a clash of authority between unions, councils, and the government. This resulted in a decline in production, rationing, and shortages. In a series of measures to alleviate the housing shortage, the Soviet government nationalized apartments and family homes in the cities and the countryside. To the horror of the middle class and landlords, more than 100,000 homeless workers were given shelter with their rent either lowered or canceled outright.53Over the following months, other social measures were instituted including the right to work, equal pay for equal work, an eight-hour day, paid maternity leave, higher wages (undercut by inflation), unemployment benefits, and free medical care. Due to a lack of time, most of these measures were barely carried out, if at all. However, the Soviet Republic left an impressive balance sheet of one dedicated to defending the working class.
Institutionalizing the Revolution
Early on, the revolutionary government intended to institutionalize itself by ratifying a new constitution. On March 31, delegates from a number of district councils and party organizations approved a draft constitution for the Republic of Councils. It was the second socialist constitution in the world and as a result was heavily modeled on the Russian one. The constitution declared the “Socialist Federal Soviet Republic of Hungary,” which planned to federate with other soviet republics.54Hungary was now a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where all power was vested in the working class and the constitution granted them rights to education, democratic rights, and many aforementioned social measures. The constitution enacted the most far-reaching democracy in Hungarian history and all men and women over the age of 18 granted the right to vote, while all members of the old exploiting classes and the clergy were stripped of suffrage. The constitutional system envisioned a vast structure of soviets at the local and district level that would make the dictatorship of the proletariat a living reality. Delegates to national-level soviets were elected indirectly at meetings of the lower level soviets. Their mandate was for six months and – in the tradition of the Paris Commune – they could be recalled at any time.55 At the highest level was the National Congress of Councils, which would elect a Governing Central Committee (GCC) as the highest organ of the state. Finally, the GCC would elect theRGC that had the power to issue decrees and was technically responsible to both the National Congress of Councils and the GCC.
On the basis of the new constitution, the local soviets held elections from April 7-10. Most of the urban candidates were industrial workers and the rural ones were largely agricultural laborers. These candidates were selected based upon a single electoral list drawn up by the unified Socialist Party. This was far from being a rubber stamp election. Many of the electoral restrictions were ignored with priests, capitalists, and landlords running against the socialists. Despite being formally united, the socialists and communists jostled with each other during the election campaign for greater influence. The results of the April elections did little to institutionalize the revolution. Only about one-sixth of those elected in Budapest were communists.56 While voting was compulsory, only 30 percent of those eligible in the cities and 10-20 percent in the villages showed up to the polls.57 In June, the National Assembly of Councils met to approve the new constitution. However, they were decidedly unrepresentative of the population. Two-thirds of the assembled delegates came from the Budapest region, and the peasantry only enjoyed scant representation. The communists composed only one-third of the delegates, but between them and the left socialists, they claimed a slim majority.58 Since the National Assembly of Councils met for such a short period of time, real authority remained in the RGC and the councils, particularly the Central Workers’ Council in Budapest. Due to the mounting external and internal crises facing Hungary, actual power came to reside more in the hands in the RGC.
Far from being a centralized totalitarian state, Soviet Hungary possessed multiple and competing centers of power such as the “united” socialist party, trade unions, Red Army, and councils. At the same time, the soviet regime faced resistance from the holdovers of the old bureaucracy, who showed little enthusiasm for the revolution or actively obstructed its directives. Perhaps with time, the revolution could have overcome these manifold problems, but time was one thing that Soviet Hungary did not have.
Hungarian Council of People’s Commissars
Power Struggle
In an April essay entitled “Party and Class,” Lukács hailed the unification of the MSZDP and the HCP as the restoration of working-class unity. According to Lukács, the unification showed that Social Democrats had “accepted without any reservations, as the basis of their activity, the communist, Bolshevik programme.”59 Furthermore, he said this was proof of the superiority of the Hungarian over the Russian Revolution because it proved “that power passed without violence and bloodshed into the hands of the proletariat.”60
In contrast to Lukács’ naiveté, Lenin was far more cautious about the fusion of the two parties. On March 23, Lenin sent a telegram to Béla Kun, where he demanded to know: “Please inform us of what real guarantees you have that the new Hungarian Government will actually be a communist, and not simply a socialist, government, i.e., one traitor-socialists.”61 Kun cabled back to Lenin that the merger was a success and assuring the Russian leader of his own paramount role in the revolutionary government as proof that the dictatorship of the proletariat had been created.62 Kun was certainly correct about his leading position in the government, but Lenin’s fears were completely justified. Many of the social democrats were late-comers to the revolution, who only supported the Soviet Republic due to expediency and not because of principle. Furthermore, due to their organizational experience, socialists tended to dominate the administrative apparatus of the party and government. As Tökés observed: “It took the Hungarian SDP just seven days to fully absorb the CP’s secretariat, agitprop apparatus and network of clandestine factory cells.”63 If anything, Bolshevik norms did not prevail in the governing party of Soviet Hungary. A left opposition of communists such Révai and Szamuely condemned the fusion as “immoral” and “spell[ing] the doom of the Soviet Republic.”64 In the unified party, Kun and the communists were a distinct minority. Before the revolution, the HCP had numbered approximately 30,000-40,000, but now they were submerged in a mass party that reached 1.5 million members.65 The new party dwarfed the pre-war social democrats as well. Many of the working-class members were no doubt enthusiastic and sincere, but also politically uneducated. No doubt many careerists found their way into the party, but on the whole this rapid expansion threatened to dilute the party’s working-class character. Under the Soviet Republic, many new unions were organized and all their members were automatically enrolled in the party. The communists believed that this strengthened the role of the trade union bureaucracy over the working class.66 This fear was not unfounded since the union leaders did act as a brake on the radicals and kept their distance from both party and state. The growth of the unions coincided with the decline of unemployed and soldiers’ organizations, previous bastions of communist strength.67All this meant communists had difficulty controlling the unified party organization. The division between the socialists and communists found its way into the revolutionary government, which reduced its ability to provide clear and united leadership. In April, Kun managed to remove the distinction between deputy and full commissars, lessening the socialist majority in the RGC. This increased the number of communist commissars to thirteen out of thirty-four. At the same time, Kun also played a moderating role in the government in the hopes of gaining concessions from the socialists. As a result, he was willing to sideline radical communists: “With the cooperation of Landler, Garbai, and Bohm, Kun gradually excluded the leftists from sensitive positions in the Revolutionary Governing Council… exiling the leftists to the peripheries of power.”68 This did little to win Kun any support from the socialists and only served to alienate the communist left. The struggle between the two factions continued at the first congress of the united party held in June. Out of a total of 327 delegates, at most 90 were communists. A majority were socialist trade union officials.69 Once more the communists were outnumbered by the socialists. Kun’s proposed program was vague enough to be adopted by the delegates without much debate. A more contentious issue arose over the party name. The socialists did not want to mimic the Russians, so they objected to the name “communist party.” A compromise was reached and the clunky name of “Party of Hungarian Socialist-Communist Workers” was adopted.
Tibor Szamuely and Béla Kun in Budapest
Another point of contention was on the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Speaking for the socialists, Kunfi advocated a more “humane” approach and a retreat from terror and socialization.70 Discussion on the issues of national minorities was shelved. The socialists gained a victory when trade union delegates were granted voting rights that superseded those of party delegates. The election of the party executive committee showed the extent of communist isolation. They held only 4 seats out of 13.71 For the time being, the socialists and communists maintained an uneasy unity as the revolution faced its most desperate hour. In the end, the experience of the Hungarian Soviet Republic would see Lenin proven correct:
The evil is this: the old leaders, observing what an irresistible attraction Bolshevism and Soviet government have for the masses, are seeking (and often finding!) a way of escape in the verbal recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and Soviet government, although they actually either remain enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or are unable or unwilling to understand its significance and to carry it into effect.72
The merger between the socialists and communists granted the former an unearned “soviet” and “revolutionary” facade, meaning that the working class remained under reformist hegemony. Due to the factionalism between the socialists and communists, the Soviet Republic provided inconsistent revolutionary leadership and its policies were often poorly conceived, driving many potential supporters into apathy, if not the camp of the counter-revolution. Coupled with the communists’ own mistakes, the shot-gun marriage with the socialists effectively tied their hands during the duration of the Soviet Republic. It was a fatal error.
The Peasantry
The majority of the peasants were hungry for land and determined to get it by any means necessary. If the new Soviet Republic wanted to stay in power and not be strictly urban-centered, then it was imperative for them to transfer land to the peasantry. This was precisely what the Bolsheviks had done two years before. However, the communists had no intention of doing so. Both the HCP and MSZDP were completely indifferent to the demands of the peasantry. Béla Kun, like Rosa Luxemburg, viewed the Bolshevik’s land reform as an unnecessary concession to the petty-bourgeois tendencies of the peasantry.Instead, the Soviet Republic favored nationalizing the land outright. This dogmatic approach to land reform was one of the shoals that doomed Soviet Hungary. Kun and the Soviet government believed that Hungary was more advanced than Russia and could immediately create socialist agriculture. On April 3, the RGC nationalized all medium and large-scale estates, affecting more than half the land in Hungary.73 Considering it would take time to fully create state farms, cooperatives were set-up in the interim. The cooperatives needed capable administers to run them and ensure that production continued. However, the only ones with the necessary experience available to the Commissariat of Agriculture were the old bailiffs and owners. The Soviet’s appointment of their old oppressors to positions of authority provoked bitter resentment among the peasants, who believed that nothing had fundamentally changed.74
The Soviet’s policy to the countryside alienated all strata of the peasants. The landless peasants who worked on the new state farms enjoyed higher wages than before, but they were paid in worthless currency, sparking indignation and protests.75Poor and middle peasants saw the government’s abolition of land taxes as the first step to nationalizing their holdings.76Wealthy peasants were opposed to the revolution from the very beginning and the decree only confirmed their opposition. In June, delegates of the National Association of Agricultural Workers opposed the Soviet Republic’s treatment of the peasantry. The main agenda of the conference contained no discussion on land redistribution or Soviet policy in the countryside, but the peasant delegates protested so loudly about them that the meeting was abruptly ended.77 Two weeks later, protests erupted once more at the National Congress of Councils. The delegates complained about the Soviet bureaucracy and the overzealous commissars, and they demanded genuine land reform. Urban communists, supposedly servants of bourgeois Jews, were condemned as alien to the peasantry.78 The conference showcased the unbridgeable chasm between the countryside and the city due to the Soviet Republic’s rural policies. In the waning days of Soviet Hungary, opposition to Kun’s peasant policy developed, but as Hajdu notes, it was too late by then:
In the more passive Transdanubia and the area between the Danube and the Tisza it proved easier to carry through the ideas that had the support of higher authority. Later, in the final weeks of the revolution, two corps’ commanders, Landler and Pogány proposed the division of some of the land in order to increase the enthusiasm of peasant soldiers, but it was too late by then.79
However, one must keep in mind that the Soviet Republic’s approach toward the countryside was not determined solely by ideological concerns but also by short-term expediency. The population of Budapest and other urban centers were starving. The Red Army needed to be fed in order to fight. This meant that Soviet Hungary needed to find a way to feed the urban centers and the troops. While the government seized food stocks, this was not enough and it was necessary to requisition grain from the countryside. This caused resistance from the peasantry, who either hid food or destroyed it rather than surrender their stocks to the Red Guard.80 Not all the failures of Soviet Hungary in the countryside can be laid at the feet of the government. The new regime inherited a legacy of ignorance, superstition, and feudal backwardness, which could not be changed overnight. Fear of the cities and its “godless” ways was deeply ingrained among the peasantry. Peasant fears of atheistic communism seemed to be confirmed by the communist program of secularization and attacks upon the cultural power of the Catholic Church. The Red Terror and fanatical commissars sent from Budapest only made the situation worse. As a result, the landlords, army officers, and priests who led the rural counterrevolution found willing supporters among the peasantry in the struggle against the forces of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” According to William O. McCagg:
“anti-semitism was a unifying feature of the counterrevolution in Magyar Hungary, which, oddly enough, featured efforts to bring landed gentry and peasant together on a common anti-urban ideological platform.”81
Kun and the communists’ belief that socializing agriculture would win them the support of the peasantry backfired spectacularly. They mistakenly assumed that rural class antagonisms overrode the desire for land. The communist line managed to combine the worst of both worlds: stoking fear in the wealthy peasants and alienating the poor peasants. There were few practical benefits gained in the countryside from the Soviet Republic’s laws. State farms were marked by corruption, inefficiency, and poor productivity. In many respects, Hungarian agriculture under the Soviet Republic was simply the old order painted a light shade of red. While a better approach to the peasantry would not have saved Soviet Hungary from military defeat, it would have made the victory of counter-revolution far more difficult.
Cultural Front
On March 21, Georg Lukács was in Budapest delivering a lecture entitled “Old Culture and New Culture.” During the lecture, Tibor Szamuely burst into the room and announced to the audience that the MSZDP and HCP founded the Soviet Republic. The lecture broke up as the excited crowd went out to celebrate. Only in June was Lukács able to finish his lecture, which he delivered as the inaugural address for Marx-Engels Workers’ University that he helped create. In his remarks, Lukács stated:
Liberation from capitalism means liberation from the rule of the economy. Civilization creates the rule of man over nature but in the process man himself falls under the rule of the very means that enabled him to dominate nature. Capitalism is the zenith of this domination; within it there is no class which, by virtue of its position in production, is called upon to create culture. The destruction of capitalism, i.e., communist society, grasps just these points of the question: communism aims at creating a social order in which everyone is able to live in a way that in precapitalist eras was possible only for the ruling classes and which in capitalism is possible for no class.82
By now, Lukács was People’s Commissar for Education and Culture, and he intended to realize that vision. The Hungarian Soviet Republic aimed at was nothing less than a “cultural revolution” whereby culture would be made available to the working class. The Commissariat’s rationale was as follows: “from now on the arts will not be for the sole enjoyment of the idle rich. Culture is the just due of the working people.”83
Literacy Poster
To that end, the Soviet Republic socialized the movie industry and museums. They also confiscated the bourgeoisie’s private art collections and put them on public display on June 14.84 The Commissariat passed decrees making attendance at theaters cheap and available to the public. These performances included not only works like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Shaw, but new avant-garde plays by workers.85 During the life of Soviet Hungary, concerts and lectures proliferated.
While Lukács was devoted to the communist cause, he was no cultural philistine and possessed classical tastes. He wanted to ensure that the classics were mass-produced and within easy reach of the people. The Commissariat created mobile libraries in order to deliver literature to the workers. Lukács also commissioned translations of Marx’s Capital, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky into Hungarian. The number of books produced by Soviet Hungary was impressive. By June 1919, 3,783,000 copies of books and pamphlets were printed in Hungarian and German along with nearly 6 million more in Croatian, Romanian, Slovak, Serb, and Hebrew.86
Whether musicians, scholars, painters, intellectuals, actors, or writers, there was genuine enthusiasm for the goals of the revolution. One such was the actor Bela Lugosi, later known for his work on Dracula (1931). He was one of the organizers of the National Trade Union of Actors, set up in April. In the union’s first issue Színészek lapja (Actors’ Journal), Lugosi took issue with the view that actors were not proletarians:
It is that 95 per cent of the actors’ community has been more proletarian than the most exploited worker. After putting aside the glamorous trappings of his trade at the end of each performance, an actor had, with few exceptions, to face worry and poverty. He was obliged either to bend himself to stultifying odd jobs to keep body and soul together … or he had to sponge off his friends, get into debt or prostitute his art. And he endured it, endured the poverty, the humiliation, the exploitation, just so that he could continue to be an actor, to get parts, for without them he could not live. Actors were exploited no less by the private capitalist managers than they were by the state …The actor, subsisting on starvation wages and demoralized, was often driven, albeit reluctantly, to place himself at the disposal of the former ruling classes. Martyrdom was the price of enthusiasm for acting.87
Lugosi was one of the thousands of cultural workers who saw the Hungarian Soviet Republic as the chance to make art that was no longer subjected to the imperatives of capital and to instead use their creativity to serve the people. There is little wonder why so many cultural workers, including Lugosi, were forced to emigrate after the Republic collapsed.
Béla Lugosi
Despite the short life span of Soviet Hungary, it was one of the pioneers in revolutionary film production. Under director Sándor Korda, forty films were completed ranging from ones based on works with strong progress content by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Upton Sinclair. Other films produced included newsreels and communist agitprop.88 In April, a Proletarian Academy was set up, headed by writer and stage manager Dezső Orbán with the goal of training workers for a socialist film industry. One film the academy produced was the agitprop film Tegnap (Yesterday), which was written and directed by Orbán.89 One of the ways that the Soviet Republic promoted its revolutionary goals was the use of colorful posters. According to Robert Dent, the poster was ideally suited to this task:
During the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, the poster functioned as the propaganda means par excellence. Its striking power of expression and exhortation involving red, with figures in dramatic poses was recognised as being worth more than a thousand words. Revolutionary placards were everywhere, on almost every wall of almost every street. The quantity is difficult to imagine today. A large proportion were in colour, and red certainly dominated. Each had a clear message to convey and pictorially was simply presented.90
One of the biggest cultural displays of Soviet Hungary occurred on May First – International Workers Day – when Budapest was covered in red. Few expenses were spared as the RGC commissioned musicians, sculptors, writers, actors, and other artistic professions to create a true festival of communism. Slogans, posters, songs, banners, statues, and poems were located everywhere in Budapest for the historic day. A half-million marched through the city that day in a festival of the oppressed. Considering that the Soviet Republic was barely a month old and facing military disaster, the May Day celebrations showed the genuine enthusiasm of the new regime to the arts.91 Soviet Hungary not only raised the cultural level of adults but ensured the education of the next generation. Therefore, all schools were nationalized, tuition fees were abolished, and education was made free and compulsory for all until the age of 14. The Soviet Republic also instituted laws promising free medical care for all children. Schooling was taken out of the hands of the Church and controlled by the State. Lukács said it was a point of pride that children began their days with breakfast, not prayers.92 The curriculum was reorganized, dropping classical languages and emphasizing instead modern languages, and natural and physical sciences. The history curriculum was radically restructured with a new focus on class struggle, internationalism, and Marxism. Teachers were given pay raises and hastily instructed in the works of Marx, Engels, and Bukharin. The Soviet Republic believed that teachers were vital to the creation of future citizens with communist virtues. According to Commissar Kunfi: “The schools from now on will become, through the efforts of teachers, the most important institution for the training of socialism.”93 One of the most innovative education measures the Soviet Republic introduced was sex education for primary school students. To the revulsion of the bourgeoisie, children were instructed in free love, the nature of sex, and the archaic nature of the traditional family. According to one critic, Victor Zitta, the Soviet Republic’s educational policy was “something perverse” and that Lukács was a “fanatic . . . bent on destroying the established social order.”94 The hasty introduction of sex education and the severe backlash it resulted in its removal from the curriculum.95
There were severe limitations to the Hungarian cultural revolution. Due to the ever-present threat of counterrevolution, the Soviet government censored publications. Many of its cultural programs and ideas were ad hoc and too ambitious to be implemented during the brief existence of Soviet Hungary. To many of its conservative critics, the Soviet government accomplished nothing when it came to culture. The reactionary Cécile Tormay said Marxists like Lukács “kill literature in Hungary.”96 Even asthe official Commissar for Culture and Education, Kunfi condemned Lukács’ approach for showing “an absolute barrenness of our cultural life.”97
These criticisms were decidedly unfair. For all its mistakes, the Hungarian cultural revolution was truly innovative. Far from destroying culture, commissars like Lukács were truly committed to ensuring that the people finally had access to it. The Soviet Republic did not impose a rigid Stalinist-style orthodoxy but rather allowed a hundred flowers to bloom. Lukács believed that everything, save openly counterrevolutionary works, should be promoted:
The People’s Commissar for Education and Culture is not going to officially support any kind of literature tied to a particular line or party. The Communist cultural programme only makes a distinction between good and bad literature, and is not prepared to throw out Shakespeare or Goethe on account of their not being socialist authors. But neither is it prepared to let loose dilettantism in art, under the pretext of socialism. The Communist cultural programme stands for the highest and purest art reaching the proletariat and is not going to allow its taste to be corrupted by editorial poetry badly used for political purposes. Politics is only the means, culture is the goal.98
In the end, Soviet Hungary showed the real potential that socialism offered in creating a new culture.
‘Long live the proletarian dictatorship!’ Temporary communist monument in Budapest
Red Terror
From its inception, the Hungarian Soviet Republic faced real threats from both internal and external counter-revolution. Based on the recent experiences of Russia, Germany, and Finland, Kun believed that terror was necessary:
If you want our revolution to avoid bloodshed, to cost only the minimum of sacrifice, and to be as humane as possible- although for us there is no supra-class “humanity” – then it is necessary to act in such a way that the dictatorship is exercised with the utmost firmness and vigour . . . . Unless we annihilate the counter-revolution, unless we wipe out those who rise up with guns against us, then it will be they who will murder us, massacre the proletariat, and leave us with no future at all.99
The suppression of counter-revolutionary revolts was the task of the Red Army. To institute terror on the home front, the old judiciary was swept away and replaced with revolutionary tribunals. The revolutionary tribunals drew their membership overwhelmingly from the working class: 90 percent of the revolutionary tribunal’s members in Budapest were workers and in the provinces, more than 75 percent of their membership were either workers or peasants. The tribunals mostly focused on severe crimes such as murder and theft, but they had the added duties of defending the Soviet Republic against conspiracies and counter-revolutionary agitation.100 However, the tribunals did not dispense summary justice. Defendants were entitled to legal defense. Many of the new lawyers were drawn from the working class. Of the 4,000condemned by the tribunals, only a quarter was convicted of counter-revolutionary activities. Another quarter was convicted for violating the prohibition on alcohol and the majority of them were simply fined. In total, only 27 were executed following the tribunals’ verdicts. Considering the desperate circumstances facing Soviet Hungary, the tribunals were often an encumbrance to carrying out terror. On April 21, the government allowed Szamuely, Commissar of War to bypass the tribunals and he was granted vast powers to use to safeguard the revolution: “in the service of this objective, to rely on every possible instrument, including doing without revolutionary tribunals.”101 Similarly to Trotsky, Szamuely was a man of action who traveled on an armored train throughout the countryside to dispense summary justice.
Tibor Szamuely
Szamuely’s squad also carried out requisitions of food and livestock to relieve the food shortage in the cities. While Szamuely’s cadre were generally disciplined and honest in their actions, they were an exception to the rule. Other communists kept the peasants in a state of constant terror with hangings and requisitions. As word of these excesses reached Budapest, Kun and the other commissars tried to rein them in, but their orders were often ignored.102 To complement Szamuely’s efforts, Commissar of Internal Affairs Ottó Korvin created a 500-member political police force. The secret police largely functioned autonomously and relied on a network of spies among the working class to keep a close watch on suspected enemies. The “Hungarian Cheka” was a feared agency that carried out preventive arrests, torture, and seized hostages.103 Affiliated to the Cheka and acting as Szamuely’s personal guard were the much-dreaded “Lenin’s Boys,” who acted as muscle against the counterrevolution. Lenin’s Boys were under the command of József Cserny and composed of approximately 200 devoted workers, communists, and sailors. The unit had their own distinctive style with leather jackets, scarfs, thick scaly caps, and an almost romantic swagger. Among both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie, Lenin’s Boys had a reputation for blood-lust and depravity. According to Cécile Tormay, they were “a gang organized for common wholesale murder and robbery.”104 They were accused of wanton torture and murdering the bulk of the 500 victims of the Red Terror. The fearsome image of Lenin’s Boys was more a product of myth than reality. According to Tibor Hijadu, the acts of terror carried out by Lenin’s Boys was quite mild:
These leather-jacketed ‘terrorists’, who looked most romantic, no doubt did much more to curb the counter-revolution than the Red Guard, thanks also to the bloody rumours spread about their deeds. The truth is they killed altogether 12 people other than such as had been condemned to death by a court, including three gendarme officers who had taken part in counter-revolutionary conspiracies, and, at the start of the Rumanian attack when they collected hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, three well-known politicians, two earlier Secretaries of State — the Holláns — and Lajos Návay, who had been Chairman of the House of Representatives.105
Still, moderate social democrats in the government such as Vilmos Böhm were dismayed and outraged at the Red Terror. To them, it appeared more as an excuse to loot and plunder than a defense of the revolution. By late April, the socialists presented an ultimatum to Kun to cut back arbitrary police measures or risk a split with the trade unions. Kun gave in to their demands. The police detectives dismissed by Korvin were reinstated, the Lenin Boys were disbanded, and control of the secret police and Red Guard was transferred to the socialist József Haubrich.106 Kun’s appointment of Haubrich would prove to be a stroke of good luck. In June, counterrevolutionary forces composed of ex-officers, war veterans, and cadets planned an anti-communist coup. After learning that the socialists under Böhm were planning their own insurrection for the same day, they launched their own putsch first. The coup failed to attract support from either the factory workers or the Red Guard. Haubrich made sure that Red Guard remained loyal to the government. Due to a complete lack of coordination among the coup plotters, the uprising was crushed within a day. In response to the June 24 coup, radical communists demanded the creation of a powerful Cheka and true red terror. Both Kun and the socialists equivocated on those demands. The socialists preferred to show leniency to the coup plotters. Szamuely and Korvin were incensed and reconstituted Lenin’s Boys, but the unit was quickly disarmed and dispersed.
Lenin’s Boys
As the Soviet Republic approached its final days in July, the proliferation of coup attempts took on ridiculous proportions. One effort was led by Szamuely, with Kun’s implied support, which planned to overthrow the socialists and create a truly communist government.107 Their preparations were cut short when another coup plot led by 200 anarchists financed by Ukrainian officers was uncovered. The abortive anarchist coup was quickly dispersed on July 19.108 While the communists were correct that force must be met with force, Red Terror did not save the Soviet Republic. In fact, the Red Terror was carried out in a contradictory and confused manner and subject to the shifting politics in Budapest. However, atrocity stories of the Soviet Republic were largely the product of the counterrevolutionary imagination, who believed that godless Jews were ravaging innocent Hungary. Certainly, it is true that many communist commissars did have fantasies of bloody retribution and at least 500 people were killed.109 However, the Red Terror was not indiscriminate and targeted enemies with weapons in hand. According to Béla Bodó: “In Hungary, the political violence during the Council Republic was focused: the great majority of the victims of the Red Terror died with arms in their hands or were executed shortly after the suppression of uprisings.”110 Far more deadly was the White Terror that followed the overthrow of Soviet Hungary. Fired by a frenzied hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” mobs of soldiers such as those led by Pál Prónay, put the Red Terror to shame. The White Terror launched a campaign of torture, humiliations and summary executions across Hungary against communists and Jews which killed upwards of 4,000.111
“Long Live the World Revolution!” May Day in Budapest, 1919
World Revolution
a. The Beachhead
When speaking before the Budapest Workers’ Council on March 19, MSZDP leader Sándor Garbai asked the executive to endorse the creation of a Soviet Republic. According to Garbai, the pro-Entente policies of both Károlyi and the socialists had failed Hungary, leaving them only with Russia for aid:
We must obtain from the East what has been denied to us by the West. We must join the stream of new events. The army of the Russian proletariat is approaching rapidly. A bourgeois government…will not be able to cope with these new developments…Therefore, we must bring about peace between the Social Democrats and the Communist Party, create a Socialist government, and institute the dictatorship of the proletariat…[then] we shall announce to the entire world that the proletariat of this country has taken the guidance of Hungary and at the same time offered its fraternal alliance to the Soviet Russian government.112
Garbai’s argument won over the Budapest Workers’ Council without debate.
In March 1919, Hungary was completely isolated and alone in Central Europe, facing hostile imperialist and local powers. For the socialists, as much as army officers, a military alliance with Soviet Russia was seen as the only way to save Hungary. To symbolize the pro-Russian orientation of the Council Republic, Béla Kun was given the position of Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Both the socialists and communists hoped that Kun could secure Russian military and diplomatic assistance. While Kun worked diligently to secure Russian help, he believed that Soviet Hungary could not survive in the long-term without international proletarian solidarity. On the day after the formation of the Soviet Republic, Kun outlined this vision in his address “To Everyone”:
[Soviet Hungary] declares its complete theoretical and spiritual union with the Russian Soviet government and welcomes an armed alliance with the proletariat of Russia. It sends its brotherly greetings to the workers of England, France, Italy and the United States. It calls on them not to tolerate, even for a minute, the horrid gangster war of the their capitalist governments against the Hungarian Soviet Republic. It calls the workers and peasants of the Czechoslovak state, Rumania. Serbia and Croatia to join in an armed alliance against the bourgeoisie, against the great landlords, and against the great dynasties. It calls on the workers of German-Austria and Germany to follow the example of the Hungarian working class, to completely break their ties with Paris, to join in an alliance with Moscow, to establish soviet republics and to oppose the conquering imperialists with weapons in their hands.113
It was Kun’s hope that working-class solidarity, strikes, and sabotage in the Entente countries and Romania would halt military operations against Hungary. Even more, he wanted Hungary to spread world revolution. This was a realistic gamble since central Europe was simmering with proletarian revolution in 1919. At this time, there was real hope for a socialist revolution in Germany since a Bavarian Soviet Republic was formed in early April. If Soviet Hungary joined together with Soviet Bavaria, then they could prevail. It was Kun’s intention to instigate a working-class uprising in Austria in order to secure the central European revolution. Together, the proletarian dictatorships in Austria, Hungary, and Germany would not only end the isolation of Soviet Russia, but defeat the Entente and spread socialism across the continent.
‘Join the Red Army!’
b. Austria
In many respects, the conditions in Austria were similar to those in Hungary. In November 1918, the Hapsburg Empire collapsed in Austria and the old Imperial Army was replaced by a People’s Militia or Volkswehr, a working-class militia who wore red cockades. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils were created alongside a bourgeois government. The moderate Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAPÖ) dominated both the councils and was in a coalition with liberals in the new republican government. Like the MSZDP, the SDAPÖ used their influence among the masses to curb the revolution and stabilize a parliamentary democracy. According to leading SDAPÖ member and Foreign Minister Otto Bauer, the social democrats was uniquely suited for this task:
Only the Social Democrats could have safely handled such an unprecedentedly difficult situation, because they – enjoyed the confidence of the working masses. . . .Only the Social Democrats could have stopped peacefully the stormy demonstrations by negotiation and persuasion. Only the Social Democrats could have guided the people’s army and curbed the revolutionary adventures the working masses. . . . The profound shake-up of the bourgeois social order was expressed in that a bourgeois government, a government without the participation in it of the Social Democrats, had simply become unthinkable.114
The chances for a proletarian dictatorship in Austria were high in 1918 and 1919, but the SDAPÖ decided against it. Otto Bauer wrote a letter to Béla Kun on June 16, 1919, explaining why SDAPÖ decided against creating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bauer explained that Austria could not supply itself with food in the event of an Entente blockade and they could not rely upon Russian aid. Secondly, an Austrian Soviet Republic would likely provoke military intervention that they could not survive due to their weakened army. Lastly, the peasantry were opposed to revolution and would turn against Vienna, precipitating a bloody civil war.115 Every point Bauer raised was a real concern, but he forgot one thing: revolutions require a willingness to risk everything in order to win. In forfeiting their chance at a socialist revolution in Austria, the SDAPÖ doomed Soviet Hungary to defeat. As the Austrian revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska concluded:
…the final rejection of any seizure of power by the proletariat, again on the grounds of subjugation and destitution, occurred at an historical juncture in which the formation of a block of revolutionary states might have been possible. In such a framework, German-Austria, with its very considerable stocks of armaments, could have been the bridge between two Councils’ Republics: the Bavarian and the Hungarian, which were struggling valiantly at the very borders of Austria, but in isolation.116
Even though the SDAPÖ were averse to following the Hungarian example there were revolutionaries who were eager to do so. The most important was the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), formed on November 3, 1918 under the leadership of Elfriede Friedlander (later known as Ruth Fischer) and Franz Koritschoner. The KPÖ was smaller than its Hungarian sister party and it was overshadowed by the SDAPÖ. The communists’ small amount of influence was largely confined to radical soldiers, the unemployed, a minority in the workers’ council of Vienna. Amongst the Austrian workers was a strong sense of sympathy for the Hungarian Soviet Republic. On March 23, the Central Workers’ Council of Vienna published a resolution declaring their sympathy for the Hungarians, but refused to follow their example:
You have appealed to us to follow your example. We would do this wholeheartedly, but we cannot do so at this time. There is no more food in our country. Even our scarce bread rations depend entirely on the food trains sent by the Entente. For this reason, we are enslaved to the Entente. If we were to follow your advice today, the Entente capitalists would cut off our last provisions with cruel mercilessness and leave us to starvation…Our dependence on the Entente is total . . .
While Austria was willing to maintain trade relations with Soviet Hungary and even offer verbal support to the revolution, that was as far as they were willing to go. Not all Austrians were willing to stand paralyzed with inaction before the Entente, however. Approximately 1,200 Austrians volunteered for the Hungarian Red Army with a third of them dying, including Leo Rothziegel of the Viennese Soldiers’ Council.118 Despite the KPÖ’s small size, they were determined to take power in order to aid the Hungarians. On April 18, the communists launched a putsch in Vienna. Several hundred armed demonstrators attempted to set fire to parliament. In the ensuing firefight with the Volkswehr, approximately 10 were killed and a further 30 were wounded.119 It proved to be an utter fiasco. Undeterred by failure and widely exaggerating the revolutionary situation that existed in Vienna, Kun wanted to push events along. Soon, the Hungarian embassy in Vienna became a center of revolutionary propaganda. In May, Kun sent Ernö Bettelheim to work with the KPÖ and finance their activities.120 Abusing his position, Bettelheim took it upon himself to usurp the leadership of the KPÖ by proclaiming himself the official emissary of the newly-formed Communist International, who was charged with organizing an Austrian Revolution.
Bettelheim planned another coup for mid-June in order to coincide with the National Assembly of Councils in Budapest and the Red Army’s offensive into Slovakia.121 A pretext for the uprising came when the Entente demanded that the Volkswehr be reduced by one–fourth. The KPÖ successfully organized a number of demonstrations against the pay reduction. Alarmed, the Austrian government persuaded the Entente to rescind their demands. Buoyed by their triumph, the KPÖ went ahead with plans for an uprising on June 15. Warned of communist plans, the Social-Democrats arrested the KPÖ leadership on June 14. Bettelheim escaped the dragnet and remained at liberty. Soon, Vienna was flooded with leaflets calling for insurrection:
The hour for the emancipation of the proletariat has come! . . .
On Sunday the 15th. of June at 10 a.m. the revolutionary workers will demonstrate for the setting up of a soviet dictatorship, against hunger and exploitation, for social revolution!
Every member of the People’s Militia has the duty to participate in this demonstration with weapon in hand…
Long Live the Soviet Republic of German Austria.122
The Workers’ Council of Vienna and the Volkswehr opposed calls for revolt. On June 15, only five to ten thousand came out in the streets of Vienna in support of the KPÖ. The demonstrators attempted to release their comrades from prison, but they were met by the police. After 20 were killed, the communist demonstration was defeated. Comintern representative Karl Radek was scathing in his criticism of Bettelheim’s actions: “The messiah of the Budapest bureau of propaganda did not have a glimmer of the meaning of communism; every word of his charge against the German-Austrian Communist Party proves this… The vanguard of the German-Austrian proletariat, the communists, frustrated during the June days the putschist tactic of the Bettelhelms. They did not plunge themselves into the adventure of the Soviet Republic without Soviets.”123 The coup was not only a disaster for the KPÖ, but the end of Kun’s dreams of spreading revolution to the west.
Communist coup attempt in Vienna on June 15, 1919
c. The National Question and Romania
Kun wished that the various successor states of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire would support Hungary. To show that the Soviet Hungary had repudiated Magyar nationalism, the revolutionary government proclaimed its internationalist ideology and adopted the communist red flag as its “national flag.”124 Béla Kun even went so far as renouncing the principle of Hungarian territorial integrity. While these gestures were sincere, Soviet Hungary failed to adequately deal with the nationality problem they inherited from the Hapsburgs. The Hungarian constitution outlawed national and racial oppression, and supported cultural autonomy for all nationalities. There was an uneasy mix of nationalism and internationalism in the constitution with the latter taking precedence. According to Tibor Hajdu: “The Hungarian Soviet Republic took the principle of the self-determination of peoples as its basic stance, but this principle was applied to concord with the conception of world revolution.”125 Thus, the Soviet Republic’s treatment of different nationalities was inconsistent to say the least. On the one hand, Germans were able to gain autonomy while the Slovenes lost theirs. On the other hand, Translyvanians were condemned as “hirelings of Rumanian boyars” and denied autonomy.126 The Croats were also denied cultural autonomy and complained about chauvinistic behavior emanating from Budapest. Their concerns were ignored, meaning that counterrevolutionaries had greater sympathy in Croat territories.127As a result, its internationalist efforts remained limited and the Hungarians were unable to win over sizable numbers of non-Hungarians inside and outside its borders.
When it came to nationalities, the question of Romania loomed large. Romania was an immediate threat, militarily aided by the Entente and its troops were deep inside Hungarian territory. Wounded national pride about Entente support for Romania had brought the Soviet Republic to power and motivated many of the officers and soldiers of the Red Army. The communists also opposed Romania since it was openly counter-revolutionary, fighting against soviet power in both Hungary and Russia. However, sympathy for Soviet Hungary existed in the Romanian labor movement. In April, Romanian railroad workers launched a general strike against intervention leading to hundreds of arrests.128 Yet most Romanian socialists were opposed to Bolshevism and severed ties with Budapest.129
A small minority of Romanians based in Hungary were attracted to communism, and in November 1918, they formed the Romanian Communist group in Budapest. In early 1919, they began operating in Romania, organizing peasants and returning veterans in Oradea. The Romanian communists received scant support from the HCP and they alienated the peasantry by attacking the church and downplaying the importance of nationalism.130As a result, they were largely unsuccessful in their efforts.
When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was formed, the Romanian Communist group hailed it as the harbinger of world revolution. Unfortunately, Romanians suffered a great deal of Magyar chauvinism. This hampered the Communist group’s effort to organize Romanian volunteers for the Red Army.131 On June 8-9, Romanian Communists in Budapest “complained that Magyar chauvinism had not disappeared from the Socialist movement in Hungary and that they as Romanians were continually subjected to discrimination.”132 The Romanians insisted that Hungarian socialists live up to their egalitarian convictions and treat them as equals. A few days later Hungary declared itself a federal republic and the Romanian communists were promised organizational autonomy, a split between the two nationalities was avoided. This gesture was too late since there was little growth in the Romanian Communist Group during the final weeks of the Soviet Republic. In the end, the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s confused approach to the national question and its lingering chauvinism meant it failed to win over large numbers of Romanians to its cause.
d. Slovak Soviet Republic
Czechoslovakia was one of the neighboring states that was at war with Hungary. While the Czech Social-Democrats supported Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s government and the war effort, the war was unpopular not in Slovakia, which had a large Hungarian minority.133Opposition to the war manifested itself in demonstrations and draft resistance. In response, the Czechoslovak government imposed martial law and arrested real and suspected communists en masse.
Considering the large number of Slovaks living in Hungarian borders, Kun believed it was imperative to win their support. To that end, a joint Czech and Slovak committee was organized in Budapest under the Czech journalist Antonín Janoušek on March 27. The committee also had the mission to recruit Czechs and Slovaks for the Hungarian Red Army.134 This only achieved moderate success with 200 Czechs joining the International Brigade of the Red Army. A final goal of the committee was to spread proletarian revolution to Czechoslovakia itself. On May 20, the Hungarians launched a major offensive against the Czechoslovaks. Even though the Romanians posed a larger threat, a number of factors determined their decision to move against Czechoslovakia. First, the Hungarians believed that the Czechoslovaks were militarily weaker than the Romanians. Second, Czechoslovakia had a larger industrial working class than Romania, whom the Hungarians expected to welcome their troops as liberators. Finally several industrial regions in Nógrád and Borsod in Czechoslovakia were considered essential to the health of Hungary’s economy. The Hungarian offensive went well and the Red Army occupied large swaths of Slovakia. On June 16, the Slovak Soviet Republic was created with its capital in Kassa. The Slovak Soviet Republic was clearly a Hungarian creation. The Revolutionary Governing Council was headed by Janoušek and other Slovak communists from Budapest staffed the government. No plans were made for Slovak self-determination and new state planned to federate with Soviet Republics in Russia, Hungary, Ukraine and Czech lands.135 The Slovak Soviet Republic passed decrees nationalizing industry and large estates, granting universal suffrage for workers, abolishing debts for small farmers, and creating old-age pensions. All decrees were published in regional dialects so that ordinary people could understand the new laws. A rudimentary Slovak Red Army numbering 3,000 was also hastily created.136 The fact that the Slovak Soviet Republic had been imposed by Hungarian guns more than local revolutionaries meant it had a very thin basis of popular support.
Hungarian Red Army in Budapest
Despite the successes of the Hungarian Red Army, their supply lines overextended and its morale dropped as they occupied a hostile population. It was clear Hungary could not maintain itself in Slovakia for the long-term. The Entente was frightened at the Hungarian advances into Slovakia and wanted them to withdraw. On June 16, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau sent a message to Budapest, promising that Romania would evacuate Hungarian territories in exchange for the Red Army’s withdrawal from Slovakia. Considering the critical situation at home, the socialists demanded acceptance of Clemenceau’s terms. Like the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, Kun believed that it was necessary to buy time and agreed to pull the Red Army out. In early July, the Red Army retreated from its captured territories and the Slovak Soviet Republic left with it. Kun’s decision ended up being a fatal strategic error. The pull out not only damaged Hungarian national pride, but led to many desertions from the Red Army. The agreement did not end the war. In July, the Czechs and Romanians violated the agreement and renewed attacks on the Hungarians. Only weeks later, the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed.
e. Russia
Mere days before Károlyi resigned, he informed his cabinet that “in the judgment of the government’s military experts that it would be only a matter of weeks before the Russian Red Army would break through the Romanian lines and reach the eastern boundaries of Hungary.”137 Liberals, nationalists, and communists all hoped that the Russian Red Army would rescue Hungary. For their part, Soviet Russia wanted to do everything possible in order to reach Budapest. However, the Romanian army not only stood in the way, but fighting in the Russian Civil War was at its height. Undaunted, Lenin ordered Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the commander of the Ukrainian Red Army to halt his advance towards the Black Sea and move to southeastern Galicia in order to reach the Hungarians. Instead, the Red Army captured Odessa, then advanced on Moldova and Bessarabia, hoping to reach Hungary that way. Lenin demanded that the Ukrainian Soviet to have the Red Army attack Galicia, but once again he was ignored. On April 25, Lenin bypassed the Ukrainian Soviet and ordered Antonov-Ovseenko directly to launch the original plan of attack.138
The Red Army offensive was launched on May 7. Finally, as Kun had hoped, Russian deliverance was on its way. Unfortunately, disaster struck the following day when Partisan forces under Ataman Grigoriev switched sides and began fighting the Ukrainian Red Army. The partisans cut off the Red Army’s supply lines and bogged them down in heavy fighting. It took until the end of May before the partisans were defeated, only for the Red Army to be immediately confronted with a renewed offensive by the White General Anton Denikin.139 By late June, Denikin pushed the Red Army so far back that there was no chance they could reach Hungary.
The Entente and Versailles
In January 1919, the “Big Four” Entente leaders of David Lloyd George (Britain), Vittorio Orlando (Italy), Georges Clemenceau (France), and Woodrow Wilson (USA) arrived in Versailles to determine the fate of both defeated Germany and the shape of postwar Europe. Even as the delegates discussed the intricacies of the treaty, discussions were dominated by foreign affairs, particularly by the Russian Revolution. According to Arno Mayer “the Paris Peace Conference made a host of decisions, all of which, in varying degrees, were designed to check Bolshevism.”140 Despite the end of the war only months before, the Entente had not laid down their arms. The Allies had all sent troops and aid to the counterrevolutionary armies fighting the Bolsheviks. To keep communism from spreading, the Allies supported new nations in Eastern Europe as cordon sanitaire. Despite this counteroffensive, the Russian example inspired labor unrest and revolution throughout the European continent. The Entente also maintained blockades of food and other supplies as a form of blackmail against Germany, Hungary, and Austria in order to contain the “Bolshevik contagion.” The Entente’s plans backfired in the case of Hungary. Both the blockade and the Vix Note had brought Béla Kun to power. Now there was a real danger that Bolshevism would spread further west. While Clemenceau favored direct military intervention against Hungary, David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson favored a diplomatic solution. Kun gambled on an international revolution, but he was acutely aware of Hungary’s isolated position and the need to buy time. In one of his first statements, Kun offered an olive branch to the Entente: “The government stands for peace and wants to live in peace with all the world. Our road leads to true peace because we strive for an understanding of the peoples and not for the conclusion of military alliances.”141 Even though the Entente distrusted Kun, it seemed possible to reach a modus operandi with Hungary. On April 4-5, the Allies sent South African General Jan Smuts to Budapest on a fact-finding mission and to meet with Kun. The soviet leader had a favorable impression on Smuts, who declared: “I liked Kun.”142 The Allies seemed open to moderating the Vix Note’s harsh demands and lifting the economic blockade. For his part, Kun appeared willing to bargain. Károlyi was astonished at the Entente’s concession and wrote bitterly from his self-imposed retirement: “Within a week the attitude in Paris towards Hungary had changed. … The Peace Conference sent General Smuts to negotiate. So what my Government had not been able to obtain in five months was granted to the Communists after a week.”143 Despite the promising meeting, no agreement was reached. Kun was not willing to commit and saw talks with Smuts as only the first step to further negotiations. Second, Kun could only accept the Entente’s proposal by undermining his own political position. Just three weeks before, Kun had come to power in defiance of the Entente’s demands. Third, there was no guarantee that the Entente would recognize Soviet Hungary. Fourth, at the time Kun was unwilling to make a “Brest-Litovsk” retreat like the Bolsheviks. He still expected an immediate outbreak of world revolution. And finally, Kun doubted the Allies’ sincerity and expected military intervention in any case. The Red Army was already arming and the day after Smuts left a recruiting rally of several hundred thousand was held in Budapest.144 On the last point, Kun was correct. While Smuts advocated for negotiating with Hungary, he was ignored by the Big Four. The Allies did not want to negotiate with Kun or grant Soviet Hungary any political legitimacy. The Entente had no intention of reaching any agreement with Soviet Hungary. Despite divisions among the Big Four on the best way to deal with Béla Kun, there was no disagreement on the end: the destruction of Soviet Hungary. According to Mayer: “Admittedly, [the Paris Conference of 1919] never elaborated and implemented a coherent plan for the strangulation of the Hungarian Soviet. On this issue, as on most others, the Big Four were far from unanimous. Their differences, however, were not over intervention as such. Within a broad anti-Bolshevik consensus they merely differed about the strategy, tactics, and scope of intervention.”145Ultimately, they decided to use Romania as their military proxy. On April 6, French General Franchet d’Esperey arrived in Bucharest and reached an agreement with the Romanian army to begin operations as soon as possible. Ten days later, the Romanian offensive began.
Downfall
After coming to power, the Soviet leadership knew that they stood no chance against the Romanians or the Entente without a well-equipped, trained and disciplined army. One of the revolutionary government’s first measures was the creation of a Red Army. During its first few weeks, the Red Army was largely a phantom force. A lot of this can be attributed to the first Commissar of Defense, József Pogány. Pogány was extremely unpopular with his deputy Commissars Szamuely and Szántó. At the beginning of April, he was replaced by Vilmos Böhm.146
József Pogány speaking to Red Army soldiers
It is under Böhm that the Hungarian Red Army truly took shape. While the Red Army inherited 60,000 troops from the old army, most of those units were an advanced state of decay and needed to be reorganized. The Red Army could count on small numbers of volunteers drawn from the working class. These volunteers were devoted to the revolutionary cause, but they lacked both training and experience. To staff the Red Army, Böhm allowed all officers from the old regime to continue their service. Most of the officer corps came from the landlord class and there were justified fears that they would betray the Soviet Republic. Borrowing from the Russian example, the Red Army instituted a system of political commissars to ensure the loyalty of the officers. Some of the commissars, such as Lukács (assigned to the Red Army’s Fifth Division) were dedicated and brave, but most were incompetent and only added to the Red Army’s difficulties. By the time the Romanians launched their offensive, the Red Army was short of ammunition and medical supplies but had a fighting force of approximately 55,000.147 However, the Hungarians were out-manned and outgunned. The Romanians outnumbered them two to one and the Czechs three to one. The Romanians especially were armed by the Entente. The opening days of the war saw them both make major advances. The Romanians seized Nagyvárad and Debrecen. The Czechs took Sátoraljaújhely and continued to advance deeper into Hungary. At the end of April, the two armies linked up. The Romanians pressed onward and reached the River Tisza in early May. The Hungarians were disorganized and the Red Army lacked the same revolutionary determination as the Russians.
Believing that the Soviet Republic would be overthrown soon, Hungarian aristocrats and capitalists backed by the French created a “government-in-waiting.” On May 5, a “National Government” headed by Count Gyula Károlyi (a cousin of the liberal Mihaly Károlyi) was set up. The new minister of war was Admiral Miklós Horthy (future dictator of Hungary), who proceeded to organize a “National Army.” They were ready to not only move into the chambers of government in Budapest, but to take their revenge on the working class.
May Day Poster
As Budapest celebrated May Day, it appeared that the Soviet Republic was on the verge of collapse and Kun planned to resign. The following day, Kun told the RGC that the fighting ability of the Red Army was non-existent. Most of the RGC were resolved to fight on, but Kun believed that was not enough. Kun took the appeal to continue the war directly to the Budapest Workers’ Council and the Hungarian proletariat. He believed that unless the workers were willing to fight to the last drop of blood that Budapest would fall. He posed the question starkly: “The issue my dear comrades, whether we should hand over Budapest, or fight for it; whether the proletariat of Budapest should fight to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat in Budapest?”148 The Budapest Workers’ Council announced the slogan: “Be a Vörös Hadseregbe!” (“Join the Red Army!”). The steelworkers union resolved to defend Budapest. Bright red recruitment posters filled the capital. Dedicated workers flocked to the Red Army. In mid-May, The Red Army had an additional 44,000 men were under arms for a total of 120,000.By early June, the Red Army’s strength peaked at 200,000 men.149 The workers’ revolutionary flair translated into victories on the battlefield. On May 20, the Red Army defeated the Czechs and liberated Miskolc and other places in the northeast. The Hungarian offensive continued into Czechoslovakia itself with the capture of Kassa on June 6. The Red Army had the Romanians bogged down and eventually forced them to retreat. In early June, Hungary had regained territories on its old borders and seemed poised for further advances. However, Hungary could not hope to prevail against their combined foes in the long run and needed to end the fighting. As mentioned earlier, Kun accepted Clemenceau’s June 13 memorandum to withdraw from Czechoslovak territories in return for ending the war. The Red Army’s commanders opposed withdrawal since the memorandum offered no guarantees that the Romanians would withdraw. In protest, Böhm resigned and was succeeded by Jenő Landler as Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army. Aurél Stromfeld resigned as the Chief of Staff and was replaced by Ferenc Julier. Both Böhm and Stromfeld were correct. While an armistice was signed with Czechoslovakia on June 24, the Romanians had no intention of ending the war.150 At the beginning of July, Soviet Hungary had lost the majority of the previous month’s territorial gains. On July 2, the Romanians refused to recognize Hungarian borders and demanded the Red Army’s demobilization. The socialists believed that the situation was hopeless and put out peace feelers to the Allies. Kun and the communists remained determined to fight on. Universal military service was announced on July 20. The Comintern called for an international general strike on July 21 in solidarity with Soviet Hungary. Kun planned a last-ditch offensive to defeat the Romanians on the Tisza and repeat the same success as in May.
Due to betrayal inside the Red Army, the Allies and the Romanians knew about the planned offensive. After several days of bombardment from July 17-20, the Red Army crossed the Tisza and managed to retake Rakamaz. Yet this was only a fleeting moment of success. Hungarian efforts to outflank the Romanians failed and the Romanians managed to bring in reinforcements. On July 26, they launched a counter-offensive putting the Hungarians into retreat. The Romanians crossed the Tisza in a number of places and the Red Army was falling apart. On top of all of this the Comintern’s general strike failed. By this point, many socialists were prepared to negotiate with the Allies. The end of Soviet Hungary was only a matter of days.
Romanian cavalry entering Budapest in August 1919
On August 1, the RGC held its final session. Despite last minute appeals for final resistance by some communists, the decision was made to hand over power to a caretaker government of socialists. Once these administrative tasks were completed, Kun rose to deliver his farewell speech. In it, he absolved himself of blame and blamed the workers for betraying the revolution:
The proletariat of Hungary betrayed not their leaders but themselves. After a most careful weighing [of facts]… I have been forced to come to this cold sobering conclusion: the dictatorship of the proletariat has been defeated, economically, militarily and politically. It need not have fallen had there been order here. Even if the transition to socialism had been economically and politically impossible…if there ha been a class-conscious proletariat vanguard [in Hungary], then the dictatorship of the proletariat would not have fallen in this way. I would have preferred a different ending. I would have liked to see the proletariat fighting on the barricades…declaring it would rather die than abandon its rule. Then I thought: are we to man the barricades ourselves without the masses? Although we would have willingly sacrificed ourselves…would it have served the interests of the international world revolution…to make another Finland in Hungary? In my opinion, any political change in this country can be only temporary and transitory in character. No one will be able to govern here. The proletariat which was dissatisfied with our government, who, despite every kind of agitation, kept shouting “down with the dictatorship of the proletariat” in their own factories, will be even more dissatisfied with any future government… Now I see that our experiment to educate the proletarian masses of this country into class-conscious revolutionaries has been in vain. This proletariat needs the most inhumane and cruel dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in order to become revolutionary. During the forthcoming transition period, we shall step aside. If possible, we shall endeavor to maintain class unity; if not, we shall fight with other means, so that in the future, with renewed strength, more experience, under more realistic and objective conditions, and with a more mature proletariat, we shall engage in a new battle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and launch a new phase of the international proletarian revolution.151
Shortly after, Kun, his family, and close friends left Hungary by train for the border. They were fortunate Austria had granted them diplomatic immunity. Lukács and a small number of communists stayed behind in order to organize an underground communist party. Even before the Romanians reached Budapest on August 3, the counterrevolution had already begun. Nationalized firms were returned to their former owners, the Red Army was disbanded and the old laws were restored. Any trace of the Soviet Republic was to be erased.
Tibor Szamuely, Béla Kun, Jenő Ländler. Monument in Budapest
Aftermath
In reflecting upon the bourgeois denunciation of Red Terror, Peruvian communist José Carlos Mariátegui noted their cynical hypocrisy:
And, the good bourgeois, so concerned about the red terror, the Russian terror, are not concerned at all by the white terror, by Horthy’s dictatorship in Hungary; nevertheless, there is nothing more bloody, more tragic, than this somber and medieval period of Hungarian life. None of the crimes imputed to the Russian revolution can compare to the crimes committed by the bourgeois reaction in Hungary.152
For the next quarter-century, the Hungarian bourgeoisie under Admiral Horthy took its revenge upon the working class. The rule of capital was restored, unions outlawed and support for leftist ideas was greeted with prison or the gallows. More than 100,000 Hungarians were forced into exile.153 Among the victims of the White Terror were fourteen former commissars of the Soviet Republic, including Korvin and László. Szamuely was captured and committed suicide. Many other communists were able to escape Hungary and organize abroad. Unfortunately, loyal communists who ended up in Moscow such as Kun and Pogány were killed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. In 1944, the Red Army entered Budapest, ending Horthy’s rule and creating the Hungarian People’s Republic, led by one of Kun’s former comrades, Mátyás Rákosi. However, People’s Hungary was a bureaucratic police state imposed by Stalinism. The new Hungary bore little resemblance to the Soviet Republic of 1919, which, for all its faults, was a genuinely revolutionary regime. When revolution reappeared in Hungary in 1956, it was only appropriate that it was supported by one of the giants of Hungarian Communism, Georg Lukács. Since the restoration of capitalism in 1989, anything associated with communism, including the Soviet Republic, was reviled and condemned. This is the bourgeoisie’s judgment, but it should not be that of the working class. Soviet Hungary’s efforts merit a place of honor in the annals of working-class history and have many lessons for us today. The Republic of Councils truly was a heroic creation that proved that the working class could take the first steps to create a new world free from exploitation and oppression. However, Soviet Hungary’s revolutionary enthusiasm was not enough to enable them to prevail. They made many mistakes that we should remember: by unifying with the reformist socialists, the communists tied their hands and were unable to exercise clear leadership. Instead of challenging the reformists, the communists gave the socialists unearned prestige to the ultimate detriment of the revolution. The desire for unity should not be at the cost of revolutionary principles or denying the need for firm communist leadership. Lastly, Soviet Hungary had a partisan base of support in the cities among the working class and the intelligentsia. However, the Council Republic’s narrow workerism not only ignored the demands of the peasantry, but ended up turning many of them against the revolution. As Hungary proved, if communists desire victory, then they must represent and lead, not just the workers, but all of the oppressed and exploited in the struggle against capitalism. In our time where leftist politics have been reduced to a crass opportunism and a “kinder” capitalism, it is important to remember and emulate those who dared to do so much more. Despite their mistakes and final defeat, Soviet Hungary’s courage and daring remain an example of the true meaning of revolutionary communism.
