The Cultural Revolution

_At the Fulcrum of History
_A Short Biography of William Z. Foster​

Since the ill-fated attempt to install a pliant anticommunist regime in Washington, the world had been turned upside down. America was once the beating heart of the world capitalist system. Now she is the headquarters of an authentically global communist revolutionary movement. A storm of revolution has swept across almost the entirety of the New World, with local revolutionaries joining hand-in-hand with their neighbors to answer the call to arms.

At the center of this maelstrom, William Zebulon Foster is the American Revolution personified. More than any man living, he embodies the American experience of class struggle, its own internal frictions, its prides and its prejudices.

Born the son of poor Irish immigrants, never completing formal education, working a string of hard, dangerous and ill-paying jobs for much of his young life, Foster was the last person anyone would expect to amount to anything. In his youth, he’d left schooling and an apprenticeship as a die-sinker to take up dangerous industrial work to help support his family.

Class struggle became his education. He joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1901. Barely twenty years old, became he very quickly recognized as a fiercely effective and intelligent organizer in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Never employed in any one job for very long, he became an organizer-at-large for industrial unionism, agitating in everything from sailors and longshoremen to lumberjacks. All the while, he immersed himself in the theory class struggle, reading the old Marxist classics as well as new works streaming in from Europe. He became fluent in German and French, wrote critical appraisals of Kautsky and Bernstein, and became a leading figure in the fight to organize steel workers.

Like many low and mid-level labor leaders, he found himself drafted into the military. He served in the navy for three years, starting in 1915, owing to his sailing experience. He found the experience not much worse than the hated conditions aboard the merchant ships he’d worked on.

With the armistice, Foster returned to the class war. During the Biennio Rosso, his reputation within the party soared. Intelligent, resourceful and authentic; he could appeal to the rank and file as well as the intellectuals, and speak in both lingoes fluently. He ran for US Congress in 1920, winning a seat to represent his old home town in Philadelphia. He reached true national prominence in the 1921 SLP National Convention. He had criticized the Bolsheviks from the left during the Biennio Rosso, but the arguments made by luminaries like Debs, Reed and Hilquit convinced him that the future lay with the nascent Communist International.

Now a newly baptized Bolshevik, Foster divided his time between intellectual pursuits and organizing. He became finance secretary for the Spartacus League from 1923 to 1926. During this period, he secured funds from the Soviet government to support the League’s operations. He began his lifelong friendship with Harry Haywood in this post. The two would hammer out the Party’s “Southern Strategy,” to harness the great revolutionary potential of Southern blacks and poor whites.

As Haywood had put it, “Foster approached the issue of Negro equality with the level of zeal that only a guilty conscience can provide.” Foster talked openly of the experience of his youth; as a teen he’d been part of the gang activity endemic among working class youths. In that culture, ethnic bigotry, especially against blacks, was a major focus of activity. The Southern Strategy would serve to bring about a new class consciousness among American workers, which would equate racism with class treason.

This would be put into practice in 1926 when Foster stepped down from his post in the Spartacus League to join the Politburo of the WPA. He worked hard to include a continued emphasis on ethnic interunity in the Party’s organizational mission. His success was hard won.

When the Great Depression hit, all of his careful preparation would have to turn into action. He had feared that the WPA was losing its edge. Like the SPD before it, it had become a veritable state-within-a-state. Under its organizational umbrella, a large array of independent proletarian civic organizations had flourished, from youth groups to art societies to hobby collectives. With capitalism in crisis, the task of pushing workers back into militancy was paramount. As the leader of the opposition, and one of the most influential members of the Politburo, Foster would use the umbrella organizations as weapons of the class war.

The need was clear: all aspects of life were political, and the workers needed to be reminded of this, to have that drilled into them. In the lead up to the fateful 1932 election, Foster was unambiguously a man from the party’s left; increasingly critical of the Bolshevism he had once pledged to, against all capitulations to reformism.

While his faction had won the day at the convention, in the aftermath the party’s more rigid elements moved to reassert control. Foster condemned the WPA’s support for MacArthur’s ascension to Secretary of War as “Letting a rabid dog into the house.” His criticism of the rightward turn, the no strike pledge and of the naïve trust they had in the guardians of the bourgeois state earned him a stint in the political wilderness. He was removed from the frontbench after the victory, condemned to being “kicked upstairs” to the increasingly impotent Senate.

He was in Chicago, meeting with allies in the unions and the Spartacus League when the coup began. Amidst the devastation of the Party’s leadership, he made a pact with his old rival Earl Browder to take the reins and fight back. He organized the All-American Central Committee for Anti-Fascist Resistance with another stalwart of the left, Martin Abern. Soon, he was tapped to lead the Provisional Government itself.

As head of government, he proved brutally effective in war. His compassion was unencumbered by sentiment, and he did not balk at the necessary evils. While he lamented that social transformation proved to be a murderous process, he borrowed Marx’s own formula: terror was the midwife of revolution, easing the pains of a new birth.

The Red Terror began on his watch, and he would see it through to the end of the Civil War and the establishment of the new system.

With the revolution all but won, he met with British Prime Minister Baldwin in Toronto in December. By all accounts, he was rough and abrasive to his British counterpart. He did not varnish his words. There was no talk of “peace in our time”, or a return to normal relations. The friendship between Great Britain and America was over, and Foster did not mourn its loss. While British support for the White cause was ultimately inconsequential (advisors, some ineffectual tanks, and decent aircraft), Foster never forgave them for it. It was proof to him of where the next war would come from. So in his dealings, he talked only of a pact among thieves: the nascent UASR would continue commerce with Britain much as before because it was in their interest to do so. Britain would do the same. A settlement on private and public debt owed to British nationals would be hammered out.

He would return to Washington, “the ill-fitting capital of a revolutionary republic” as he’d called it, to news that MacArthur had fled to Cuba. With the war won, Foster would set his sights on winning the peace.

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**Excerpts from Murray Bookchin,Post-Scarcity Communism (Boston: Affinity Books, 1971)

**Capitalism is the heir of history, the legatee of all the repressive features of earlier hierarchical societies, and bourgeois ideology has been pieced together from the oldest elements of social domination and conditioning. These elements, the “traditions of all dead generations,” as Marx put it, are ancient and so seemingly unquestionable, that we often mistake them for “human nature.”

The legacy of the color line, the social domination of women, the regimentation of bodies into a sexual and gender binary; these evils could not be vanquished on the battlefields of the Civil War. Just as bourgeois society was the heir of history, so to is our immanent proletarian society. For nearly forty years, North America has been caught in between capitalism and communism, in a period of revolutionary transformation is not fully one or the other.

The imposition of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat did not annul the inheritance from the dead generations. They remain the nightmare from which we must awake.

The liberation of Washington and the scourging of the renegade MacArthur from the continent did not constitute the end point of our revolutionary struggle, but rather its real beginning. It was not the struggle against a regime or a man, who spoke into being the doctrine of the body-politic possessed by the devil.

Revolutionaries who could accept the continued existence off the value form as a necessary evil could also be made to accept the “necessity” of the other evils of class society. The forces of liberation—the trained cadres and the vanguard party—could be turned against the liberatory impulse of subaltern groups. Worse, if there is anything to be learned from the demythologization of the Soviet Union in the late 30s and 40s, it is that class domination, national chauvinism, and sexism are all the more effective if the centralism appears to be “democratic”, if the leaders don the character masque of the “revolutionary”, and if the state appears to belong to the proletariat.

While revolution itself can become a smokescreen for counterrevolution, we should not succumb to total cynicism about the revolutionary project. The last four decades have been filled with struggle, both within and without the workers’ republic, but that struggle has been far from fruitless.

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Excerpts from the AH.com thread “The First Cultural Revolution: top-down or bottom-up?”

Occams Laser said:

So my high school history textbook mentioned an ongoing historical controversy regarding the First Cultural Revolution. It didn’t go into much detail about the controversy, but it did outline it and name some of the partisans.

Basically, there’s one school that say the FCR was a bottom-up mass-based movement. The revolutionary transformation in social norms and culture was already born in the workers’ movement before the revolution. And with the constraints of the old world gone, the movement spread like a wildfire with nothing left to contain it. It said that Cornell West, Theodore Draper, and Edward Johanningsmeier are the main luminaries of this school.

The other school states that it was substantially imposed from the top-down. The party exercised more than just a leadership role, but actively engaged in social engineering. The Red Terror was not just a protection against counterrevolution, but an active tool to bring the country into compliance. J.K. Galbraith, George Kennan, and Karl Hess are closely associated with this school.

So, pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: where do you fall on this debate.

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KittehKommittee said:

Well, I’m more in the bottom-up school of thinking. The state was acting based on the impulse transmitted from the revolutionary base. I had to read Draper and Kennan for a revolutionary era history class at university. Draper’s New American Century eviscerates Kennan’s arguments.

Draper documents quite thoroughly the continued mass political action by party cadres, affinity groups, and civic organization after the Civil War, and all their rallies, protest marches, and consciousness raising drives. Sometimes in support of the government, other times opposed, but each time advancing the libertine vision.

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Ubermunch said:

Wait…wasn’t Kennan also an infamous cold warrior public intellectual? Why would he be writing in criticism of the Cultural Revolution?

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FallingOutsideTheNormalMoralConstraints said:

While no doubt KittehKom would have you believe that Kennan, as one of those no good liberals turned latter-day communists, did not grasp the currents of American history, the truth is that Kennan wasn’t being critical.

Kennan believed that the Cultural Revolution was a blueprint that the revolutionary vanguard imposed on society. He also believed that this was a good thing. For Kennan, it represented a constructive political vision, and one that he favored more than he disfavored. It was the corrective for a century and a half of letting illiberalism fester in the heart of the American republic. In particular, it was the cure for a now all but forgotten phenomena, “The Lost Cause of the South,” which lionized a gang of traitors, slavers and despots for their vainglorious war to preserve slavery. The Cultural Revolution pulled out that reactionary, aristocratic weed root and stem, and prodding American workers to get on board with the revolution was simply a matter of course.

It should be noted that Kennan was on the frontlines of that struggle. When the revolution broke out, he was part of the diplomatic delegation from the US in Moscow. He turned almost instantly, and pretty soon became the revolutionary government’s chief diplomat in the country. When he was recalled at the end of the crisis period in August, he convinced Reed of his genuineness enough to take part in the reconstruction process. It’s probably apocryphal, but he’s been quoted as telling a group of Southern planters who came to his office to protest their land being subject to collectivization that “You can live in the new world or die in the old one.”

Really, I think their (Draper and Kennan’s) disagreement as public intellectuals is more a matter of being colored by different experiences. Draper saw the phenomenon from the bottom up; his was his personal experience throughout the revolution. He was an organizer and an activist. Kennan was a technocrat who believed in the moral cause of the revolution, and sought to use state power to serve its ends, even if the people did not necessarily know it was in their interest.

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Empire of Endless Monologues said:

Interesting to see Galbraith on that list. He’s well known here in Britain and France equally, owing to speaking both languages quite fluently. I did not think he’d be a well-received intellectual in America. Perks of being Canadian, I guess

In any case, I think that FOTNMC teased at the issue with his excursus on Kennan: there doesn’t appear to be a one size fits all answer. Any history buff in the FBU can tell you that the American Revolution was at its most brutal in the South. A quick survey of the locations of most of the notable acts of the Red Terror will tell you that the big infamous ones mostly took place south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The WPA applied power judiciously in service to its revolutionary mission. They used the tools appropriate to the area. In centers of proletarian power, they were much more hands off. There’s that famous stock photo of the New York women workers marching topless in opposition to the legacy of obscenity laws, which historically have been more about controlling marginal groups than actually advancing public decency. Everything from promoting female bodily shame to criminalizing contraceptives and sexual education, and they made such a show of force when Metropolis began drafting its new criminal code in early 1934 that it left an indelible mark on social expecations.

The national Workers Party followed the lead. They spread the issue (not without controversy) and made it a national one. And more grassroots support followed.

But at the same time, they deployed troops to protect sexual health clinics from mob violence in the South. They forced Southern schools to adopt a curricula that would excise reactionary dogmas from the students. They destroyed monuments to slavers, and erected new ones celebrating freedmen and progressive whites.

It’s easy to disagree with the methods. I often do. But I really have a hard time disagreeing with the results.

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