Nineteen-Twenty : The High Tide
Excerpts from Albert E. Kahn,Storming the Gates of Heaven: A History of the Comintern , (Cambridge, MA: Progress Publishers, 1962).
The Second World Congress of the Comintern laid out the basic doctrine of the international communist movement from early July to late August of 1920. To the modern eye, the decisions made at the Second Congress seem frightfully premature. While Lenin sent his 21 Conditions for approval by the Congress, he and his comrades were still bitterly engaged in the Soviet Revolutionary War. Yet the delegates prefaced their speeches with talk of the imminent world revolution, while all of the major capitalist powers had encircled Russia with bayonets, and threatened to strangle that very revolution in the cradle. Still, the deputies at the Congress maintained sufficient foresight to at least tackle the issues of the future of the movement.
[…]
The severity of the 21 Conditions would prove too much for most delegations. While the inability to compromise on certain areas of doctrine, such as the strict adoption of democratic centralism, or the requirement for the complete expulsion of members deemed to be reformist, would deepen the already disastrous rift in the international Left, the splits caused by the question of reform or revolution revealed ultimately how degenerated the workers’ international had become. The conceits made by the reformist parties of the Second International had put them within reach of taking office in the bourgeois states of Europe, yet these ostensibly socialist parties would find themselves managing the instruments of a capitalist state to alleviate the crises of capital. This short-sighted Faustian gambit demonstrated the barely skin-deep penetration of Marx’s class analysis and historical materialism among the self-described Marxist intellectuals.
The Lassallean vulgar conceit had attained a tactical victory over Marxian social science. The unfortunate nature of reality, though, is that it does not care whether you agree with it or not. The Social Democrats’ failure to seize the moment in the decay of the capitalist world system following the First World War would prove to be ruinous in the long run. When Ebert ended his dithering and turned the guns of Freikorps reactionaries on the revolutionary workers of Berlin, and the parties of the dead Second International moved to expel their revolutionary sections, the Social Democrats would unwittingly condemn Europe to the worst bloodletting in known history in the coming decades. Every fascism is an index of a failed revolution, and in shoring up liberal capitalism with reactionary guns, the Social Democrats had in effect signed their own death warrants.
This is not to say that the parties of the Comintern were at all blameless. The failure of the revolutionary upsurge left the Bolsheviks hung out to dry. In the period immediately after, the consolidation of the Bolshevik state caused almost irreparable harm to the international communist movement. The Comintern itself was increasingly an arm of Stalinist foreign policy, using Lenin’s conditions to create insidious weapons for internal witch-hunts and factional squabbles.
[…]
The American delegation to the Comintern faced the same unenviable choice as the French Section. While the use of state terror during the war years and the massive revolutionary surge during the Biennio Rosso had destroyed much of the Socialist Labor Party’s moderate faction, either by pushing them to the Left or out of the movement altogether, even many on the Left were hesitant to completely endorse the 21 Conditions. While many conditions were rather agreeable, the second, seventh and seventeenth conditions proved particularly worrisome. The party was simply in no shape for the internal purge necessary to put “tested communists” in every important decision. Similarly, a drastic restyling of the party was most unsavory at a time when the existing party name was finally gaining strength among the proletariat.
[Comintern Chairman] Zinoviev, and Lenin himself if Zinoviev is to be believed, argued these fears to be moot. The decisive actions of the Biennio Rosso , and the ongoing revolt of 1920’s “Red Summer” had proven to him that the SLP had already proven itself to be filled with tested communist. The masses were in a revolutionary mood, and the experience of struggle had tempered the party into a proper vanguard. The seizure of power by the working class could be mere months away at this rate.
[…]
In the end, the American delegation gave their unanimous recommendation to adopt the 21 Conditions and join the Comintern as a full member. However, that decision would ultimately be put to the test at the Socialist Labor Party National Convention, to be held in the Chicago Commune in January of 1921. The debate would be heated, and threatened to split the party in two. The rump of the reformist faction, severely depleted of delegates and speakers, clustered around president of the former Typographical Union Max S. Hayes, and vehemently opposed joining the Comintern.
The Left, which comprised of the vast majority of the party, was divided as well. The past year had seen a split among the pro-Bolshevik membership into groups usually referred to as the Left and Ultra-Left. The growing Ultra-Left faction instead attacked the state of the Comintern and the Bolshevik Revolution from the left, and was arguably more committed to revolutionary socialism than the Bolsheviks. Hence their many reservations with the 21 Conditions. They centered on the leadership of famed academician Walter Lippmann, and the young and brilliant son of Daniel DeLeon, Solon.
[…]
John Reed, the boyish face of the future, personally presented Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin’s personal remarks to the American proletariat, offering their reasons in favor of the Comintern and the conditions it imposed. He ended his speech with his own reflections of his time in Russia during the revolution, and the decisive moment the question of whether to strike in Petrograd was considered. “This decision,” he argued, “will be no less momentous than that fateful decision by the workers of the Putilov Plant, in Petrograd, to consider their shivering and starving children’s plight, throw caution to the winds and a spanner in the Putilov works. That one decision […] set off the chain of events that toppled an Emperor, ended a war, and established the first workers’ republic. Fortune favors the bold, my comrades.”
[…]
Solon DeLeon spoke after Big Bill Haywood, delivering his rebuttal to the Reed-Haywood platform. While he congratulated the stout Wobbly on his work organizing the industrial unions and fighting against the imperialist game of the Great War, he offered his own annotations to Anton Pannekoek’s criticism of the of the Bolsheviks, relating them directly to the matter of the Comintern’s conditions. DeLeon accused the Bolsheviks of an errant, right-wing deviation from the fundamentals of Marxism.
In his critique, DeLeon accused the Bolsheviks of playing an adventurist gamble, supported not by dialectical materialism, but the “fiction of the utopian society supplanting the capitalist nation.” This old fiction, long held by maligned petit-bourgeois, had simply found its latest form in Bolshevism. Bolshevism had merely militarized the Lasallean “People’s State” and Kautskyan “educational dictatorship” modes of parliamentary party organization:
“Leninist-Kautskyist staatsozialismus has produced, instead of the taking of political power by the workers in the dictatorship of the proletariat, a self-perpetuating political autocracy of a self-declared ‘communist’ party over a state capitalist monopoly. Lenin’s red bureaucracy is just as sinister, and just as opposed to the political rule of the working class, as the old bourgeois bureaucracy.”
[…]
Ultimately, what stole the show and sealed the decision were some fashionably late arrivals, and a speech by the most unlikely of party members. Both Eugene Debs and Former Senator LaFollette arrived at the convention fashionably late, excusably so. Having both been recently pardoned on the recommendation of the Cabinet and President-elect Wood for conviction under the Sedition Act, the former Republican and moderate fellow traveler of socialism came to the convention barely in time for the close of the debate.
Debs hadn’t let his stint in federal prison hold him back, and had headed the party’s presidential ticket while in prison in an act of revolutionary defiance. While he sympathized with the Ultra-Left’s critique, he countered by arguing the necessity of an international working class movement in opposition to international capitalism. The Comintern, while imperfect, was the best tool for that job.
Freshly divorced, penniless, and emaciated from his stay in federal prison, LaFollette proved to be another strange convert to the Left. He spoke of how his trust in the American dream had been shattered by the events of the last six years, half-cursing the naivete of his past. As a pariah now, he accepted his fate handed down from on high, but did not shrink from fighting against it. Shocking everyone, he spoke in favor of the Comintern and endorsed the 21 Conditions. In the end, the Left prevailed. The Ultra-Left agreed to ratify the conditions, though they urged solidarity and fairness in their application. And the majority of the Right, though they voted against acceptance of the 21 Conditions, agreed to abide by them and to not quit the party. On 15 February 1921, the newly rechristened Workers’ Party of America formally joined the Communist International.
**Some excerpts from the alternatehistory.com thread titled “Revolution in the Biennio Rosso?”
SpessCowboy: **Hey guys, I’m new here and this is my first post, so I don’t know if this has been done yet. But I was wondering if it would be possible for the American Revolution to occur right after WWI, during the Biennio Rosso. Have any good timelines been done on that subject? What kind of change would be needed for the labor militancy of the period to break out into full blown revolution?
AdmiralSanders: An act of god
DamnedTory: Be nice to the noob, Sanders.
To expand, basically the consensus we’ve reached here on the board is that it just won’t be possible without a POD going so far back that the history of the early 20th century is unrecognizable. It’s basically like Operation Sea Lion but for politics (another thread that’s been done to death).
Domestically, the American government had done just about everything possible to fuck up. The rationing system was heavily abused, and the rich basically ended up having their luxury consumption untouched as well as their sons effectively undraftable. Heavy handed attempts to contain labor fifth columns in war industry most often just ended up pushing everyone into the trade unions, even those who had previously been patriots and opposed to war resistance. It is difficult to imagine a government that could possibly have screwed up the home front more.
Certainly, they had a unique problem with the fact that the First World War really wasn’t you Yank’s fight to begin with. But properly managed, they could have at least not driven half the working class into revolutionary socialism.
The main reason for the big uprisings after WWI is that the wartime controls could no longer be maintained post-armistice. So the pent-up rage exploded into some real Jacobin shit across America. But while the workers were angry, and taking it out on everyone else in a giant temper-tantrum, they really didn’t have a concrete idea of where to go. Neither did the party leaders, who were by-and-large behind the uprisings, not leading them.
AdmiralSanders: As much as I am inclined to agree with your politics, DT, calling the Biennio Rosso period a “temper-tantrum” is baseless and ahistorical. The masses involved in the trade unions, the various labourist groups and even the Spartacists were fighting for their liberty against a tyrannical regime and its cronies.
Said regime was at least smart enough to back away from the precipice after the Armistice, and worked to placate its people, rather than degenerate into autocracy, something you’ve advocated on more than one occasion.
You call yourself a liberal conservative just as I did, but you seem to have forgotten important parts of the “liberal” part of that equation. Supporting autocracy as a means to suppress leftists is just plain barbaric and counterproductive.
Demographics in the Nineteen-Teens
America’s entrance into the Great spurred a series of immense demographic changes. America’s conscript army was raised primarily from city dwellers, including recent immigrants. With millions of young hands removed from the factories to be sent to France, the manpower shortages in America’s cities spurred the beginning of a great exodus of young men from the farmlands of the West and Midwest back to the very cities their fathers and grandfathers had fled from.
In part, this exodus was made possible by relatively good harvests in the period from 1912 to 1918. The high farm prices spurred on by war mobilization spurred on mechanization in farms, assisted by a variety of cooperative associations. The high demand for labor in the cities encouraged many farm laborers and farmer’s sons to seek their fortune in the cites. Young men, used to the self-managed rhythms of farm labor, unaccustomed to collective solidarity, and often xenophobic, threatened to break the urban labor movement in the early years of the War.
The arrival of a tide of rural workers to the industrial cities was absolutely crucial to breaking the February-March 1915 general strikes organized by Solidarity in opposition to the declaration of war and subsequent mobilization.
Simultaneously, reforms in federal immigration law allowed several million Chinese persons to immigrate in the 1910s. Predominantly young unmarried men, but also a large number of families, these immigrants tended to come from the urban classes of a China rocked by revolution and civil war. Many were educated, and had already been learning English or other European languages, forming a nucleus of ethnic solidarity affinity groups to assist integration into their new homes.
Alongside a million immigrants from Latin America, these recent immigrant groups would face hostile conditions in their new homes. While fears of taking the jobs of natives were dampened by the unusually high labor demand driven by the war, the spike in unemployment that began with demobilization would stoke the fires of nativist resentment. Even the unions and the Socialist Labor Party, which ostensibly sought to unite all workers in their common interest, faced difficulties overcoming mutual resentment in presenting a united front.
But no group faced more difficulties than the blacks leaving the South in the “Great Migration”, pulled by the prospect of industrial jobs and pushed by the omnipresent fear of Jim Crow terror. Prior to the Great War, the Socialist Labor Party had made notable inroads in building cross-racial unions, even in the South. But this was put to the test by the migration of nearly two million blacks to the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast, predominantly in the period of 1914 to 1919.
In the steel mills, meatpacking plants, and arsenals they would butt heads with similar numbers of poor Southern whites leaving agricultural poverty for the promise of jobs in northern cities. It would take years of dedicated organizing and the harsh wartime conditions to build the transracial working class coalitions that took the streets and occupied the factories in the Biennio Rosso, protesting everything from falling rations of bread, meat and other essentials, to the widespread appearance of corruption available to the wealthier classes.
By 1919, recent migrants from the rural areas of the United States, black or white, were more highly represented in the labor movement than immigrants. The very reason that made them the best scabs available in 1915 was also the very reason why they would make the quickest converts to communism.
The régime of industrial management was entirely alien to them. Having been raised with the expectation of self-regulated labor, which they would benefit from the fruit of, industrial capitalism became quickly intolerable. Working under a sadistic foreman for long days for very little gain, a slave to the tempo of the machines and the pattern of the clock, these young men (and women too, though in smaller numbers), found their way into the labor movement, heading to the hard left with greater propensity and frequency than other groups.
Some notable events, 1920
January 12: The governments of the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic sign a treaty establishing a unified command structure for their allied armed forces, as well as important economic cooperation measures.
January 16: The League of Nations Covenant is promulgated. The inaugural meeting will begin in Geneva, Switzerland.
January 20: Faced with collapsing demand due to demobilization, the Amalgamated Coal Corporation (a trust controlling 88% of American coal production) announces harsh pay cuts for its workforce as well as mass terminations.
January 24: The State of South Carolina becomes the first to ratify an amendment to the US Constitution to ban the production, sale and consumption of alcohol, having become a dry state the previous year.
January 30: The Netherlands refuses requests by the Entente to extradite the former Kaiser Wilhelm II for war crimes trials.
February 5: The Republican Party, now the second place party in the House thanks to a slew of resignations, and a few untimely deaths, votes to leave the national coalition. The Democratic minority government places Champ Clark in the First Secretary chair.
February 12: In Mingo County, West Virginia, a group of coal miners associated with the fledgling SLP local call a wildcat strike. The powder keg explodes, and soon the strike is spreading like wildfire across West Virginia coal country.
February 15: The Conference of London opens, as representatives meet to discuss the fate of the Ottoman Empire.
February 18: British troops withdraw from Murmansk and Central Asia, ending major foreign intervention in the Soviet Revolutionary War.
February 21: The first meeting of the League of Nations begins in Great Britain.
February 24: State police and hired goons attempting to put down strikers in Matewan, West Virginia are routed by armed miners led by Great War veterans. The tragic death of several of the miners’ families in the pitched battle shocks even the bourgeois press.
March 3: The United Mineworkers announce a general strike in Appalachian coal country, in sympathy with their comrades in West Virginia. Intended to be a peaceful downing of tools, a combination of revolutionary fervor and anger at management result in occupations at most major mines.
March 9: General Leonard Wood takes over the Massachusetts Republican Party, beginning negotiations with the SLP and union locals to restore the rule of law. As part of his bid to stem the class war, he promises the introduction of new reforms, including workplace safety and powersharing with unions.
March 15: British forces occupy Constantinople, beginning the chain of events leading to the Turkish Liberation War.
March 18: Under diplomatic pressure from the UK, the US government re-invokes the Sedition Act to block the raising of funds or the provision of aid in kind to Irish nationalist rebels.
April 4: Amidst protests by Irish-Americans, the US Marshals arrange the extradition of Éamon de Valera to Great Britain to face trial for his role in ongoing war of independence in Ireland.
April 17: The Communist Party of Great Britain is founded, following a secret conference of revolutionary socialist groups.
April 24: Polish forces launch an offensive into Soviet Ukraine.
May 12: The Bolshevik campaign to take the Caucasus ends after long, grueling months of fighting. The Menshevik governments of the area capitulate against the overwhelming might of the Red Army.
May 14: In response to spreading rumors of a renewed federal and state crackdown on the forces of organized labor, workers and farmers begin a new wave of en masse strikes. The ranks of the armed paramilitary Spartacus League swell, as many yeoman farmers and proletarians take up arms. Inspired by developments in Russia, soviet councils and congresses begin to form across the areas in uprising.
May 24: Irish nationalist leader Michael Collins is killed by a Royal Irish Constabulary hit squad while organizing for the National Loan in Cork City.
June 1: As police and National Guard sporadically clash with Spartacists across the Midwest and Midatlantic regions, the Clark government declares martial law on the home front. Invocation of the Posse Comitatus Act fails due to united Republican opposition.
June 9: The revolutionary wave reaches the West coast, as insurrectionary soviets take control of the cities of Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. In the Mountain West, the revolutionary fervor is dampened by Republican reform governments.
June 17: The Socialist Labor Party’s National Congress meets in the union-controlled city of Chicago. In spite of being behind the bandwagon, the Party decisively adopts a revolutionary platform, supporting the wave of uprisings.
June 25: While soviets and factory committees form begin forming in New England, compared to revolutionary insurrections of much of the industrial heart of America, the local Socialist Labor groups decide to pursue more modest reform programs. Compared to the rest of the country, New England is surprisingly passive.
July 4: While the American Railway Union’s general strike has stopped many efforts to restore order in insurrectionary centers, they lack the strength or the will to decisively seize control. Consequently, most revolutionary centers are isolated, and while rural areas have supported insurrectionary actions in some places, they are considerably less organized, motivated and supported compared to urban counterparts. In Chicago, the heart of the revolutionary surge, the mayor and other city leaders return to negotiate an end to the uprising.
July 5: The First National Congress of Soviets meets, with considerable difficulty, in the high tide of the Red Summer. Even as the delegations are meeting in Chicago, many groups across the country are losing steam and turning to the negotiation table.
July 11: Congress officially censures President Marshall and First Secretary Clark for their disastrous handling of the national crisis. The Democratic Party is in shambles, and the minority government is sustained only due to the imminence of the election and the need for someone to hold the reins until then.
July 15: The Second World Congress of the Communist International takes place in Petrograd.
July 30: Amidst the crumbling of the revolutionary wave, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party begins its national convention. They adopt a program mixing the tradition of American populism with reformist socialism.
August 2: The Republican National Convention meets much later than expected. Leonard Wood, having become somewhat of a hero to both the establishment and reformers, wins the nomination on the first ballot. The more conservative Calvin Coolidge is nominated as his running mate.
August 10: Order is restored in New York. By the end of the week, the guns mostly fall silent. As part of the agreement, the trials of Italian immigrant labor organizers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are allowed to proceed. With the guarantees made by the New York state government, and the personal contributions of even some establishment figures to their defense, Sacco and Vanzetti are likely to be the first Italians to ever get a fair trial in the United States.
August 18: Talks to form an American professional football association end in failure, thanks to insufficient commitment from investors. The unreformed sport is perceived to be too savage to make a commercial endeavor in violent times.
August 30: Following the end of the ARU’s strike campaigns, most of the Midwest has returned to normalcy, marking the end of the Red Summer.
September 5: In the VII Olympiad, the US rugby union team takes home the gold medal amidst much fanfare.
September 18: Through a combination of superior organization, subterfuge, and outright chicanery, Ukrainian Bolsheviks take total control of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic following soviet elections. Nestor Makhno is placed under house arrest while the Black Army is disarmed.
October 1: With Irish nationalist forces exhausted on one hand, and the British unionists facing tremendous pressure from both the public as well as diplomatic pressure from the United States, a truce is made between the Irish Republican Army and Great Britain. Negotiations to end the ongoing civil war begin.
October 10: Carinthian Plebiscite: Under the terms of the Treaty of St. Germaine, Carinthia, a largely Slovenian district in southern Austria, votes narrowly to join the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), in a vote largely determined by the political-economic instability in Austria.
November 2: General Leonard Wood is elected President of the United States in the first national election broadcast by radio.
November 18: The Russian SFSR and the Second Polish Republic agree to an armistice for talks to end the Polish-Soviet War.
November 29: Rationing ends in the United Kingdom.
December 14: The Interallied Commission meets in London to begin determining the total value of reparations owed by Germany, to be divided at a ratio of 45 percent to France, 25 percent to the UK, 15 percent to the US, Italy 8 percent, Belgium 8 percent, and the rest divided among the other Entente members and associates.
1920 General Election Results
_Wikibox courtesy of@Asami _
Full results
Presidential
Presidential Candidate |
Party |
Home State |
Pop vote |
pct |
Electoral vote
---|---|---|---|---|---
Leonard Wood |
Republican |
Massachusetts |
12,234,885 |
44.05% |
293
Eugene V. Debs |
Socialist Labor |
Indiana |
9,213,154 |
33.17% |
124
John W. Davis |
Democratic |
W. Virginia |
2,956,156 |
10.64% |
114
James M. Cox |
DFL |
Ohio |
3,228,153 |
11.62% |
0
Aaron S. Watkins |
Prohibition |
Indiana |
115,423 |
0.42% |
0
Other | | |
27,056 |
0.10% |
Total | | |
27,774,827 |
100.00% |
531
Needed to Win | | | | |
266
House of Representatives
Party |
Leader |
Home State |
Seats |
Last |
Net
---|---|---|---|---|---
Republican |
James Mann |
Illinois |
222 |
190 |
32
Socialist Labor |
Upton Sinclair |
New Jersey |
136 |
63 |
73
Democratic |
Claude Kitchin |
North Carolina |
70 |
182 |
-112
DFL |
Burton K. Wheeler |
Montana |
5 |
0 |
5
Independents | | |
2 |
0 |
2
Total | | |
435 | |
Needed to Win | | |
218 | |
Senate
Party |
Seats |
Change
---|---|---
Republican |
54 |
4
Democratic |
18 |
-7
Socialist Labor |
16 |
2
DFL |
8 |
1
Total |
96 |
0
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