Revolution Calling

Revolution Calling ​

“We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal War
Irreconcilable, to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav’n.”
~John Milton, Paradise Lost ​

Provisional First Secretary William Z. Foster’s “Red Dawn” speech, broadcast 1 May 1933.

Foster, serving as the spokesman for the new troika that had taken the reins of the anti-fascist resistance, delivered the most famous speech of the 20th century a little after 10 a.m., Central Standard Time. The address was heard across the nation. It was the first ever declaration of a revolutionary overthrow of the old system, indicative of the bloodless coup that had swept through the Provisional Government. Opponents of revolution were silenced or co-opted, and now the Workers’ Party would definitively act in a vanguard role for the class struggle.

Comrades, I do not have to tell you that we are living through the American people’s darkest hour. You have seen it first hand with the relentless march of the jackboot through our nation’s countryside and great cities. Everywhere the forces of reaction tread, they leave suffering and death in their wake. Their collaborators, the faithless Junkers of American industry, who would sooner see the whole house burn down than part with a single coin, have at each and every step of the way enabled this atrocity.

This is a class war being waged against the American masses. It is conspiracy by the opulent and powerful and their hangers-on to drive the American worker into chains of slavery. And in this mad grab for power, this bourgeois reaction, helmed by the despot MacArthur, has waged war not only on the proletarians of all nations, but against all the hallowed institutions they claim to uphold.

The fascists have accused the class-conscious proletarians, schooled in the university of the working classes that is the Communist Party, of being godless. These same fascists have immolated churches, and their congregations of poor but pious Negroes, in a campaign of racialist reactionary terror. They have claimed to have protected the constitution by systematically destroying all its protections, and overthrowing the lawfully elected government of the United States. They respond to the democratic will of the people with bayonets. Make no mistake, fellow sufferers, this is not just a political conflict. They have waged a total war against human decency itself.

The senselessness of this war against democracy is a fitting end for the bourgeois epoch. Amidst America’s stupendous wealth there is also stupendous poverty. Our industry, the great machinery of abundance, has left us in want. The great wealth piled high by centuries of unrequited toil is being squandered in fruitless war at the merest hint of political leveling.

But amidst this savagery, all hope is not lost. The Antifascist forces have fought on, enduring hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their freedom. The brave men and women of the Red guards and workers’ militias have delivered several humiliating defeats to the Fascists. Their forces striking the great proletarian strongholds of the Northeast and Midwest have been routed.

The old world, mired in the hate, greed and bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress, is in its death agony. We have only to seize the moment and strike while the iron is hot. What the new world will bring is up to us, and right now we can safely say this is not a question of Left or Right. There is only forward. We must resist the temptation to give into the comforts of familiar evils and rebuild the corrupt and rotten old world. We will only be condemning our children and our children’s children to poverty and misery, doomed to repeat the cycle of class conflict and revolution yet again.

We must have the courage to make a clean break with the past. We can no longer be satisfied with a simple fight to restore the old Constitution and the old world it represents. We must fight for a new world; a decent world that will give men good work, give youth a future, and give old age security.

Capitalism promised these things to the pious and hardworking. It could not fulfill that promise to the great multitudes, and in our current epoch it has failed to deliver its rewards even to the masters of capital. It never will.

It is up to the American worker to fight to fulfill that promise. In the name of democracy and socialism, let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, hate and intolerance. We shall cast aside the old order, and build a new world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. And under the leadership of the Popular Front, uniting all proletarian and liberal political forces, we shall tear down the despotic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and establish the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.

To mark the beginning of this new dawn, we declare the formation of a Union of American Socialist Republics as a free association of the workers, soldiers, sailors, farmers and people of the United States.

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Wikibox by@Asami

Though often overshadowed by the decisive victory at the Battle of Chicago, the two-week long siege of the industrial port city of Toledo, Ohio would be another formative event in the foundational mythology and the doctrine of the Workers’ and Farmers’ Revolutionary Army. Under the command of the archconservative Major General Robert E. Wood, the Army of the Ohio committed to a pell-mell charge deep into the rear area of the Red forces, severing the lines of communication between the Eastern and Midwest fronts.

Blocking the final artery, the Straits of Detroit, would require taking the city to secure his rear area. As a major industrial hub, it was also central to the production of armaments for the Red war effort. The Toledo Arsenal, a federal munitions plant built in 1916, had been reactivated in the February uprising, produced nearly a quarter of the small arms ammunition, and twenty percent of the artillery munitions that the Reds depended on.

Maj. Gen. Wood detached the 4th Infantry division’s infantry brigades, the 7th and 8th, as flying columns. Marching doubletime, the half-strength 7th Brigade arrived on the city’s outskirts on the night of 18 April. The defenders set up barricades along the main roads leading into the city. Organised into a number of independent light infantry battalions, the Toledo Spartacists fought the initial advance block by block, enduring heavy casualties from Wood’s regulars.

The next day, the Toledo Committee for Public Safety enacted strict emergency protocols. A number of political prisoners were summarily executed to prevent their possible liberation, and White paramilitaries and police taken prisoner in the February streetfighting were organised into shtrafbats building defenses for the city. The initial period of fighting, lasting until 22 April, were a period of desperate defense as more White soldiers arrived to reinforce the attackers. While ammunition was plentiful, the large volunteer battalions raised by the Committee for Public Safety lacked in rifles and machine guns. On 22 April, Colonel Benjamin Davis Sr. arrived by ship from Erie, Pennsylvania, with a brigade of the Ohio Red Guards.

Col. Davis was placed in overall operational command. The ships brought not only well trained troops, but also mortars, artillery, and engineering equipment. As the Reds dug in harder, Maj. Gen. Wood’s artillery train arrived. With the majority of his force committed, Maj. Gen. Wood subjected the city to a vicious shelling by 155mm guns. International Brigade volunteers arrived soon after, bolstering the city’s morale, including a small force of Soviet T-26 tanks and crack Soviet Naval Infantry.

Casualties mounted on both sides. As the rest of the Army of the Ohio gave ground near the other major cities in Ohio, the supply situation became more perilous for the 4th Infantry. The well trained regulars were dying or being wounded, and being replaced by irregulars drawn from far-right paramilitary groups. The roads and rails supplying the vanguard were under constant partisan and now aerial attack, as the small force of Army Air Force planes attached to his command proved inadequate to secure the air.

On 28 April, the Red Army’s 577th regiment, under the command of Ulysses Grant IV counterattacked and broke the land cordon around the city by day’s end. With the rail connection to Michigan restored, supplies and personnel could flow in freely. The stalemate would continue for three more days. With news of the disastrous outcome of the Battle of Chicago spreading through the ranks, and more volunteers and regulars arriving daily, Maj. Gen. Wood began an orderly retreat from the city. At high cost, the Reds had defended the city, and given the Army of the Ohio a major bloody nose. Though the Reds tried to begin exploit operations, they would ultimately only nip at the White’s heels in the withdrawal.

The battle proved that the outcome in Chicago and Long Island were not flukes. The National Salvation Front had needed crushing victories to shore up its fragile support, and had found none.

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Excerpts from William F. Buckley Jr., “Review:Our Bullets Are For Our Own Generals, ” Labor Literary Review, Vol XII, No 1, March 1967.

Perhaps Goldstein’s greatest strength is the tremendous amount of work he has put towards demythologizing the Revolution. In this way, it is the history text equivalent of Delaroche’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps ; only by stripping away the romantic veneer do the real admirable qualities come to light.

This has been made possible by an extraordinary level of access to the papers, effects and personal recollections of the men and women involved in the tumultuous days of the Revolution. There is, of course, a litany of the sordid that inevitably comes out in such an intimate examination. For example, the chapter titled “Settling Accounts,” an aside which leaves the general chronological flow of the work to discuss the record of atrocities committed by revolutionary forces, from the street executions of putschist saboteurs, to the pillaging of homes and churches tied to the reactionary causes, to the outbreak of revenge rape and murder by guerillas in the South.

Goldstein quickly dismisses the conventional apologetics. This may have been war, he argued, but it was revolutionary war. He recontextualizes the body of thought on just war, focusing heavily on developing a modern, secular theory of jus in bello (right conduct in war). To defend revolutionary terror as merely reactive, done in retribution to reactionary terror, is insufficient. For Goldstein, drawing as much on Kant as Marx, revolutionary terror must be justified solely on its own relation to the human emancipatory struggle. He uses this schema to separate the just use of terror from the indefensible.

Some of the more hyperbolic elements of the intelligentsia have denounced Goldstein’s work as being tantamount to counterrevolution. There is no point in mincing words: these people are idiots. As Goldstein notes in the chapter’s conclusion, “There is an old evangelical aphorism, which was quickly adopted by motley revolutionary militias across the nation: ‘Fight the devil with fire.’ Some of these graffiti are preserved as revolutionary monuments. There can be no doubt that revolutionary terror can be an effective tool. But like fire it is a dangerous tool that must carefully controlled in its application. When the application of revolutionary terror expands beyond a narrow focus on active, organized agents of counterrevolution, it becomes counterrevolutionary itself.”

This historical lesson has not yet been fully learned, I fear. It is perhaps too easy to dismiss Goldstein’s analysis; after all, the revolution still succeeded even with the alleged excess. Goldstein himself offers no diagnosis, but it is easy to draw a conclusion that revolutionary excess has helped to engender enduring problems of reaction within the nation.

It is worth noting at this point that this book’s reception in the FBU has not been at all lauded. Far from being celebrated as presenting a “revisionist schism within the intelligentsia,” as Harry Haywood condemned, on the whole it has been treated by the FBU commentariat as an apologetic for the permanent revolution.

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**Excerpts from Alasdair MacIntyre , Organic Law in the UASR (Oxford University, 1979).
**
It is worth sketching out a brief history of the formation of the current organic laws. Their development is a disjointed process, formed by the rapid evolution of conditions during the Revolution. When what would be known as the first All-Union Congress of Soviets (All-Union Rätekongress) met in Chicago on 4 February, they developed and passed two resolutions that would later be retroactively incorporated into the constitutional canon. The first, a set of rules governing the procedure for the national CoS, as well as a framework for constituent provincial, city and local soviets, was ratified in the first week.

This act, the Fundamental Principles for the Soviet Congresses (Grundgesetz für die Rätekongress) , was an overtly revolutionary document, reflecting the mood of the Workers’ Party rank-and-file. The second, passed after an alliance was brokered with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the anti-putsch left-wing of the Republican Party, followed a more bourgeois conciliatory tone. This more moderate document, often styled as Labor’s Declaration of Independence, harkened back to the First Republic’s founders and their national liberation struggle against the British Empire.

The Labor Declaration formalized the dual power agreement between the CoS and the Provisional Government. It admitted a mass of DFL and Republican delegates to the Congress, and made the Provisional Government responsible to the CoS, foreshadowing the eventual relationship between America’s standing parliament, the Central Executive Council (Zentraler Executivrat), and the Congress of Soviets. The resolution also committed to a combined antifascist struggle to put down MacArthur’s unlawful coup, and restore the 1787 constitution. In return, the resolution committed the states and parties to call a new constitutional convention after victory was achieved to “correct the deficiencies of the existing constitution.”

Of these, the latter has been given the most symbolic weight, but the former has the greatest enduring influence on American government. The Fundamental Principles are still governing the basic rules and procedures of matryoshka-style government, and the rules governing elections – most notably, the absolute, irrevocable guarantee of universal adult suffrage to all residents of the country. As we shall see, this document’s enduring legacy, both functional and symbolic, has shaped the evolution of American jurisprudence.

The Labor Declaration is part of the body of law that establishes a legal continuity between the United States of America and the Union of American Socialist Republics. As constitutional law itself, it is a threadbare document. Its content is primarily aspirational, much like the original Declaration of Independence. It endures in the national mythology of the UASR because it offers a clear, concise statement of principles. After difficult compromises, and bitter political fights, the I Congress of Soviets and the Provisional Government managed to produce a document that captured the aspirations of most Americans, from the most steadfastly class-conscious to disaffected bourgeois liberals. “Under the old regime of industrial feudalism,” the Labor Declaration argues, “politics is the shadow cast on society by capital.”

It diagnosed the evils facing America as systemic ones, not personal or human evils. The regime of industrial feudalism is “a great machine with no conscious designer, that runs entirely on its own internal logic outside of human control.” Even MacArthur, the bête noir of the day, was no more than an agent of this historical system.

The Labor Declaration lionized the great liberal principles of the Bill of Rights, condemning the bourgeois regime for destroying fundamental liberties like habeas corpus and the right of free speech. It lists, in great detail, the numerous abuses of power by the federal and state governments during the previous twenty years before condemning the turn to outright fascist reaction to contain democratic forces. But beyond that, the document is deliberately vague.

It talks in vague terms, like the establishment of a socialist republic after the defeat of reactionary forces. But its real importance is that it serves as the legal resolution, under Article V of the old constitution, directing the states to vote on whether or not to send delegates to a new constitutional convention.

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Excerpts from the AH.com political chat thread “The lawful government of the United States”

RuleBritannia: May Day is tomorrow. Though you Yanks prefer to call it “International Worker Day” or “Revolution Day” or other claptrap. May Day is for may poles, keep your bloody Bolshevism out of it!

But I digress; since May Day is tomorrow, I thought I’d start a memorial thread for the legitimate government of the United States of America, illegally overthrown by the Browder-Foster-Reed troika, and now in permanent exile on the island of Cuba. And while I still hope for an eventual restoration of the lawful American constitution, this is not bloody likely. The insurrectionary regime in Washington is probably here to stay, and if the people on this forum are any indication, it seems that most Americans have accepted the yoke enthusiastically. And no one, not a single soul, has seen justice for the Red Terror, nor has there been any admission of wrongdoing.

Flibbertygibbet: This will end well…

Ubermunch: RB, you’ve just come back from a kick. What the hell man?

LeninsBeard:

KittehKommitteh: What a crock! The right of revolution is absolutely fundamental to any social contract. The Hoover government had lost all legitimacy. And lost an election by the largest landslide in American electoral history, I might add.
The Second Republic was already in its terminal phase during the ‘32 election. MacArthur raised its corpse in a twisted, perverted zombie version of the old government, which continues to linger on in spite of all efforts by revolutionary forces to bury it.

AdmiralSanders: KK, I recall not last week you were blasting the bourgeois sentimentality of Kantians and the social contract. Now you’re parroting it to justify the revolution.
Sorry, but no. You can’t have it both ways. You may think it’s permissible to hit below the belt as long as it is in service to The Cause, but some of us have principles.

FallingOutsideTheNormalMoralConstraints: I agree with RB, to a point (never thought I’d see myself say that).

Hoover’s suspension of habeas corpus, the declaration of insurrection and the suppression that followed were all legal under some admittedly strained interpretation of the law. MacArthur really didn’t assume any more executive powers than the much hallowed Abraham Lincoln did, at least at the time. He just did it for a cause we find abhorrent.

Trying to justify the revolution on bourgeois terms is going to be a losing proposition everytime.

The Zeroth Doctor : I dunno RB, it’s hard to disagree with the historical record. There was, by any reasonable account, an illegal regime that had seized power by military force occupying the capital and much of the country. To me, that seems to make the constitution dead letter, but I’m not a lawyer.

But regardless, the Reds did go through the trouble to legitimise their new regime under the old Constitution. They called an Article V convention, and named that convention the Congress of Soviets. That Congress drafted new constitutional documents (some, admittedly, before it was even called as a constitutional convention), and these were subsequently ratified by all the states. Sure it’s post facto legitimacy, but they went through an awful lot of trouble to make it seem above board. It definitely had popular legitimacy, which is sort of depressing to me.

I mean, we tell ourselves stories about illegal regimes occupying America to console ourselves, and some people imagine entire networks of thought police and hidden gulags to enforce it. But the truth is the American people chose pretty overwhelmingly to abandon fundamental liberties like the right to private property, and they continue to affirm this.

DeOppressoLiber: Wow, look at all this heresy…

JaneTheAdmin : RuleBritannia, you just came back from a kick. Insinuating that all Americans have been brainwashed is bordering on flamebait, especially with such an inflammatory thread. Cool it.

LeninsBeard, one week kick for picspam. This isn’t your first offense, and you’ve been here long enough to know better.

flibbertygibbet, DeOppressoLiber; one sentence replies are not appreciated in polchat. Continued behavior like this will result in a Warning for spam.

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Scenes from Vanguard (1987)

When Vanguard first aired on PBS-4 on 3 April 1987, it was the most expensive television program ever ordered. Conceived originally as a three hour feature film detailing the story of the unvarnished, unromanticized history of the American Revolution; under the ambitious (some would say vainglorious) direction of LJ Fonda, it grew into a sprawling six hour epic. After repeated battles within the Director’s Guild, and political action including strikes by the rest of the United Artists union federation, Fonda was retained on the project.

With a large endowment from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a donation pledge campaign, the project was able to finish production. It debuted as the most watched show in the history of American television.

INT. WPA HQ – NIGHT

Three men enter a hall. Their leader, THEODORE “TED” ROOSEVELT III (Ed Harris) walks in with soldierly determination. The others, ROBERT TAFT (John de Lancie) and ORLAND LOOMIS (Kelsey Grammer), view their surroundings with disdain. They are clearly in the middle of a long conversation

LOOMIS​

…All I’m saying is that they are clearly trying to coax concessions out of us for when the lawful order is restored.​

TAFT​

Don’t be daft, Loomis. We have no choice but to take these moves by the Communists at their face value.​

ROOSEVELT​

I am inclined to agree with you Bob, but your suggestion that we cancel the alliance because of this is very premature. But we will be playing hardball with them.​

The three storm through the hall, and enter the OFFICE without knocking.

Two men loom over a desk in the office, discussing the war effort. EARL BROWDER (Tom Selleck) points at maps with the stem of his unlit pipe. FLOYD OLSON (Peter Fonda) nods along.

Both greet the three interlopers with some amusement.

BROWDER​

Nice of you to stop by, Ted. Though we’re a bit busy trying to keep MacArthur from tightening the noose ‘round our necks – but we’re always open to suggestions to advance our democratic struggle.​

ROOSEVELT​

“Our democratic struggle,” huh? That’s a nice way of describing planting a knife in our back.​

TAFT​

We agreed, for the sake of our mutual anti-fascist struggle, to leave the economic question for after constitutional restoration. Your party has been testing that agreement since day one, but you assured us that this was either pageantry to boost morale, or the work of “left of the Party” rabble-rousers you could not control. Well, imagine our surprise when we find orders, signed by you, to declare the formation of a soviet republic.​

BROWDER chews his pipe thoughtfully as he heads to close the door to his office.

LOOMIS​

Well? Do you deny it?​

BROWDER​

No, I’m just surprised it took you this long to figure out. Come the First of May, we will be elevating our aims towards a higher calling, and I expect you to find it in yourselves to be on the right side of history.​

TAFT​

What? You gave us your word when we accepted-​

LOOMIS interrupts

LOOMIS​

-Grudgingly-​

TAFT​

-Grudgingly accepted Communist leadership in the struggle to restore the Constitution. We trusted you to not endanger our alliance with your petty politics.​

PAN TO:​

OLSON​

Trust? I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I was under the impression that our profession was politics , and not Sunday school teaching.​

BROWDER​

This “order” you speak of merely recognizes the political reality. The whole of the bourgeoisie, save the present company it seems, have given up on your hallowed Constitution. Why should the workers put any more faith in it?​

BROWDER and ROOSEVELT face off over the maps on the desk. The faint crack of distant gunfire penetrates the silence.

ROOSEVELT​

That may be the case, but it is still the law. And the rule of law must be preserved. And yet we find, when the morning has finally come, and the darkest hours are over, that our supposed allies are undermining the rule of law too. With friends like these, who needs enemies?​

BROWDER​

Aw, don’t give me that hokum. Your own vaunted Constitution was an act of lawlessness against the legitimate order when it was drafted and ratified.​

ROOSEVELT​

I sympathize with your revolutionary aims, I really do. But the formalities of the law must be obeyed. When we have triumphed over the NSF, and restored the Constitution, your party can seek to institute socialism in a constitutional manner.​

BROWDER​

Revolution is the negation of formality, comrade. This nation’s Founding Fathers understood that when they seized the moment and threw off the English yoke. Like it or not, the wheel of history keeps moving forward. The progressive bourgeois such as yourselves can join with us in instituting the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. Or you can oppose the march of history and be crushed by it.​

TAFT​

Is that a threat?​

BROWDER​

A historical truism.​

WIPE TO:​

At a military camp south of Pittsburgh, Colonel GEORGE PATTON (George C. Scott) marches through the mud with his aide, Lieutenant WILLIAM BASIE (Ernie Hudson). He inspects a batch of tanks, American Christies and Soviet T-26s, as well as their tankers.

PATTON approaches a Soviet Volunteer, Lieutenant IVAN MATSKEWICZ (Robert Downey Jr.).

PATTON​

What’s your name, comrade?​

MATSKEWICZ​

International Brigade volunteer IVAN ALEXEIOVICH MATSKEWICZ, comrade colonel.​

His accent is thick, but his English is very good.

PATTON​

And you’re in charge of this tank column? Well, we sure could have used your help defending Pittsburgh.​

MATSKEWICZ​

Apologies, comrade. We arrived as fast as the boats and trains would take us. But we’re in good working order and ready to fight.​

A RUNNER arrives, carrying an urgent communique. He slips in the mud in his haste to deliver the message. BASIE takes the communique while PATTON inspects the treads of MATSKEWICZ’s T-26.

BASIE​

Sir, I think you better read this.​

PATTON puts on reading glasses before taking the telegram

INSERT: Telegram close up​

PATTON​

(Reading)

To commander, Eastern Antifa Combined Group. In accordance with P.G.’s changing political line, you are directed to make any and all necessary preparations to evict the White regime from Washington with all deliberate haste. All measures should be taken to effect the apprehension of the traitor MacArthur.​

BASIE​

March on Washington? Sir, we’re not even remotely prepared for the task.​

PATTON​

Oh, there’s more, Will. The Moment has come. We’re not an army fighting to preserve a dying bourgeois republic anymore. Our cause has been elevated.​

BASIE​

About damn time, if I do say so myself.​