It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Cosmonautics in Russia: the last chance for survival
Cosmonautics Day: is there any hope for the Russian space industry to stay afloat On the eve of Cosmonautics Day, Roscosmos revived. The corporation began to actively announce new developments, report on all kinds of projects, increasing activity in the information field. But what are the chances that everything stated is being realized, taking into account the fact that the domestic cosmonautics was isolated from the world? СюжетThe government and the people
There has been no significant news from Roscosmos for a long time. Sometimes it seemed that all his activities were curtailed before the launch of a few satellites commissioned by the state and the Ministry of Defense. But at the beginning of 2023, the organization under the management of Yuri Borisov began to catch up: news from the field of rocket science, space exploration, scientific programs, interplanetary flights poured out of the cornucopia.
Shock five-year plan of space exploration
To begin with, the first specifics appeared on the future Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS): it will begin to be deployed in 2027, up to 350 billion rubles will be required for the initial stage, and up to 600 billion rubles will be required for the entire project, taking into account the construction of infrastructure.
And in order not to be left without manned cosmonautics until the creation of ROSS, Roscosmos proposes to extend the work of the ISS until 2028.
If the plans of Roscosmos come true, then we will not remain without missiles. At the Vostochny cosmodrome, work on the creation of a launch complex for the long-awaited Angara-A5 rockets should be completed by the end of 2023.
Work on the creation of infrastructure for the Angara began in 2018, was temporarily stopped in 2021 due to violations detected, and finally by the end of the year the site should be ready to launch missiles. At the same time, it was stated that the first flight model of the Soyuz-5 rocket (localized in Russia and modified Zenit) should be ready by the end of 2023, and the first flight will take place in 2024. Also, after some lull, it was announced that work on a completely new reusable rocket with methane engines "Amur" was continued. And the GRC named after. Makeeva, which is part of Roscosmos, presented a near-fantastic project of a reusable single-stage (this has not yet happened in the history of cosmonautics!) Korona missiles. Up to this point, it was believed that it was too expensive to drag excess mass into orbit – they always made drop stages. In Russia, we have to put up with the fact that the first and second stages are disposable – they either crash into the ground or burn up in the atmosphere. And foreign private companies were forced to learn how to return the first steps in order to save money.
The exploration of more distant space was not abandoned in Russia either. After the launch of the Luna-25 lander was canceled in September 2022 due to a malfunction in the equipment, uncertainty persisted for a long time. But now a new launch date has been determined for the lunar vehicle: July 13, 2023. And Russian cosmonauts will be able to visit the Moon, according to the leading employee of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nathan Eismont, in 7-10 years. And this is just the beginning: the Research Center named after M.V. Keldysh recently announced that it is developing and testing an ion engine for the Zeus space nuclear tug, which can be useful for interplanetary flights.
There are a lot of plans. But how realistic is all this? After all, Roscosmos used to exist within the framework of international cooperation, earning money by delivering satellites, cargo and people into orbit. Now, international cooperation has come down to the fact that Roscosmos was able to agree with the European Space Agency on the return to Russia of equipment for the closed ExoMars-2022 project and with NASA on the continuation of cross–flights (American astronauts will continue to fly on Soyuz, and Russian cosmonauts - on Crew Dragon). Even Kazakhstan, for the debts of the "Center for the Operation of Space Infrastructure Facilities" (CENKI), arrested the launch pad at Baikonur, which could be used for the launch of Soyuz-5…
Has space not been ours for a long time?
But it is not only Russia that generates news.
In the United States, regulators gave Elon Musk's SpaceX permission to make a trial launch of Starship, a fully reusable, the world's largest two–stage rocket, the second stage of which can be used as a full-fledged spacecraft for a flight to Mars.
Since the beginning of 2023, SpaceX has already made 23 successful launches of the Falcon 9. On average, it turns out to be launched every 4 and a little days. The train on the Murmansk — Sevastopol route and that in the summer season of 2023 will run less often – 1 time in 7 days. Roscosmos, by the way, has so far made only 6 rocket launches.
And on March 21, the Hakuto-R lander from the private Japanese company ispace entered the orbit of the Moon. If the landing is successful, the Hakuto-R will become the first ever private vehicle on the surface of the moon.
Launches of private rockets after SpaceX and New Zealand's RocketLab have become commonplace at all. Recently, the first test launch of the Terran 1 rocket from Relativity Space was made. A distinctive feature of the rocket is that it is almost entirely made using 3D printing technologies. Yes, "Terran 1" has not completed its flight, but this is only the first attempt for a young company. But in early April in China, the first successful flight was made by the Tianlong-1 rocket from the private company Beijing Tianbing Technology (Space Pioneer). But not so long ago, China was catching up in the field of cosmonautics, borrowed Russian and Soviet technologies…
With modern technologies, space is getting closer, space is becoming accessible to private companies. There is no longer a need to mobilize all the resources of the country, to involve dozens of research institutes, which employ tens of thousands of specialists, in solving problems. So maybe it's better to dissolve all state corporations like Roscosmos and NASA and put the whole initiative in the hands of private owners? But the popularizer of cosmonautics, Philip Terekhov, is sure that this is not the best option – each structure has its own tasks.
- Large state agencies allow you to implement large, long and expensive projects that do not promise immediate profit. A good example is the James Webb telescope or the Russian Spectrum series of telescopes. This is unique scientific data, new knowledge about the universe, but not profit for shareholders. Also, a large space agency can grow new private companies, as NASA did with SpaceX and not only. Private traders receive orders, acquire competencies, expand and move forward the space services market. Roscosmos gives students and even schoolchildren the opportunity to launch their satellite, such projects are invaluable for educating a new generation of engineers, even if they do not link their adult careers directly with space. The confrontation between "colossal" space agencies and private space companies is largely polemical, they solve different tasks at different levels and complement each other, not compete.Vitaly Egorov, a journalist and popularizer of cosmonautics, is also sure that private cosmonautics would not exist without state participation.
- When we talk about the success of private cosmonautics, we must understand that more attention is being drawn to them, because they appeared for the first time at all. And now, despite the fact that state space agencies are not just continuing their activities, but some are even increasing, for example, American or Chinese, not much attention is paid to them, because this is a more familiar type of activity, it lasts for decades, it started back in the 60s, and it just became routine. But the scale of the activities of space agencies still surpasses all the achievements of private cosmonautics. The same SpaceX conducts most of the programs in the public interest. And when we look at the success of private companies in different countries, it is almost directly proportional to how much the state contributes to the success of these private companies.So, it is no longer possible to imagine modern space without state corporations or private companies.
In theory, both directions exist in Russia. But, as we can see, today the pace of development of the space industry abroad is more intensive and productive. Why is this happening? Why we can't wait for the appearance of "Russian Ilon Masks" and whether there is even a chance for the development of private cosmonautics in Russia - read in the second part of the special project "NI" dedicated to Cosmonautics Day.
India-Canada conclude 7th round of talks on Early Progress Trade Agreement
India and Canadian officials said there was “some progress” during the four-day discussions in Ottawa last week.
Indian and Canadian negotiators have concluded their seventh rounds of discussions towards securing an Early Progress Trade Agreement or EPTA between the two countries.
India and Canadian officials said there was “some progress” during the four-day discussions in Ottawa last week, as the two teams lead by their chief negotiators met in the Canadian capital.
The meetings took place between Monday and Thursday last week. Some differences persist, officials said, but are not insurmountable.
The EPTA process commenced when Canadian Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development Marg Ng visited New Delhi in March and held a Ministerial Dialogue on Trade & Investment with Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on March 11 last year. The EPTA, if concluded, will be a transitional step towards the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement or CEPA.
Both countries originally hoped to finalise the agreement within a year but that deadline has elapsed and they are targeting potential finalisation of the document this autumn.
Both nations have focused on strengthening trade ties recently. After Canada’s minister of foreign affairs Mélanie Joly met external affairs minister S Jaishankar in New Delhi this March, the latter tweeted the talks encompassed bilateral issues including, among other matters, “trade, connectivity and people to people ties.”
Joly told attendees at the Indo-Canadian Business Chamber or ICBC meet in New Delhi in March the “economic potential contained in strengthening the Canada-India relationship can’t be understated.”
While negotiations will continue, overcoming key hurdles will depend on political will, and critical decisions could be made when Ng meets Goyal on the margins of the G20 Trade Ministers vertical in Jaipur in August.
According to Global Affairs Canada, in 2022, India was Canada’s 10th-largest merchandise trade partner, and “the relationship has been steadily growing”. Two-way foreign direct investment between Canada and India amounted to CA$ 4.6 billion in 2021, with Canadian direct investment in India standing at CA$ 2.9 billion. In addition, Canadian portfolio and institutional investment into India reached CA$ 70 billion.
Anirudh Bhattacharya is a Toronto-based commentator on North American issues, and an author. He has also worked as a journalist in New Delhi and New York spanning print, television and digital media. He tweets as @anirudhb.
Thousands rally in Georgia against government
TBILISI
April 10,2023
Thousands of opposition supporters rallied Sunday in the Georgian capital Tbilisi as the Black Sea nation's government faces mounting accusations of backsliding on democracy.
Demonstrators gathered outside the Georgian parliament for a rally organised by the country's main opposition force, the United National Movement (UNM), founded by jailed ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Protesters waved Georgian, Ukrainian and European Union flags and held a huge banner that read "For European future."
The crowd chanted "Long live Misha!", referring by his diminutive to Saakashvili, who is serving a six-year jail term for abuse of power -- a conviction that international rights groups have condemned as politically motivated.
Doctors have said the pro-Western reformer is at risk of death from a litany of serious conditions which he developed in custody.
The ruling Georgian Dream party's government faces accusations of jailing opponents, silencing independent media, covertly collaborating with the Kremlin and leading the country astray from its EU membership path.
Addressing the rally, UNM chairman Levan Khabeishvili listed protesters' demands that included the "liberation of political prisoners and implementing reforms" demanded by the EU as a condition for granting Tbilisi a formal candidate status.
"(The) Georgian government is being controlled from Moscow and our obligation is to save our homeland from Russian stooges," former Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili told the crowd.
"We are freedom-loving people, part of the European family, we reject Russian slavery."
One of the demonstrators, 27-year-old painter Luka Kavsadze, told AFP: "Our struggle will be peaceful but uncompromised and will lead us to where we belong -- the European Union."
Last month, tens of thousands took to the streets in Tbilisi after parliament gave initial backing to a draft law "on foreign agents", similar to the legislation used in Russia to suppress dissent.
The bill, which has sparked strong criticism from the European Union and the United States, was dropped under pressure from street protests that saw police use tear gas and water cannon to disperse crowds.
The ruling party has insisted it remains committed to Georgia's EU and NATO membership bids, enshrined in the constitution, and supported -- according to opinion polls -- by 80 percent of the population.
But party leaders have stepped up anti-Western rhetoric after Washington last week banned visas for four powerful judges in Georgia over alleged corruption.
The move marked the latest toughening of Washington's approach towards an ally after concerns of a shift in Tbilisi toward Russia.
Georgia applied for EU membership together with Ukraine and Moldova days after Russia invaded its pro-Western neighbour in February 2022.
Last June, EU leaders granted formal candidate status to Kiev and Chisinau but said Tbilisi must implement reforms first.
UN Committee on the Rights of Migrant Workers Closes Thirty-Sixth Session after Adopting Concluding Observations on Reports of El Salvador, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines
10 April 2023
The Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families this afternoon concluded its thirty-sixth session after adopting concluding observations on the reports of El Salvador, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines.
The concluding observations will be available on the webpage of the session in the coming days.
Edgar Corzo Sosa, Committee Chair, said some 281 million people currently lived and worked in countries that were not their own. Migration was a symptom and effect of deep social, economic and environmental stresses and change. Migrants, notably those in an irregular situation, were disproportionately vulnerable to human rights abuses and violations. They frequently had no access to guarantees of due process or to remedies.
As border controls had become stricter and regular pathways to entry and stay had narrowed, migrant journeys had become longer, more fragmented and more dangerous. More than 40,000 women, men and children between 2014 and 2021 had been reported dead or missing en route, and countless other disappearances were never reported. Yet the human rights dimensions of migration remained widely neglected. Migration was usually discussed in terms of economic development or security and border control. Inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric against migrants helped politicians win votes, and in times of crisis, the migrant made a convenient scapegoat to blame for social and economic difficulties.
The Committee, in its concluding observations, considered that regularisation was the most effective measure to address the situations of vulnerability faced by migrants in an irregular situation. Regular migration remained a central mechanism for protecting the rights of migrants and their families, especially those in a particularly vulnerable situation, and as a factor that contributed to the fulfilment of the goals of numerous public policies in destination countries. The Committee was appalled by the increased number of victims of enforced disappearances in the context of migration, as demonstrated by the numerous recommendations it had made concerning disappeared migrants.
During the session, in addition to reviewing the reports of El Salvador, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines, the Committee also adopted the list of issues prior to reporting for Seychelles and Niger in relation to their second periodic reports; assessed follow-up reports concerning Argentina, Colombia and Guatemala; and adopted the evaluation follow-up letters.
Mr. Corzo Sosa commended the Governments of El Salvador, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines for engaging with the Committee, a positive demonstration of the commitment of those States to their reporting obligations and engagement with the treaty body system.
Also during the session, the Chair said he presented a “zero” draft of the Committee’s general comment 6 on the Convergence of the Convention and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Committee Expert Pablo Ceriani also updated the Committee on the status of a joint general comment between the Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on policies to address racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. Finally, Committee Experts Myriam Poussi and Can Unver updated the Committee on the status of the Committee’s Roadmap on Working Methods and on the Ratification Campaign, respectively.
The Committee would soon hold discussions on its 2023-2024 bi-annual Work Plan, the intensification of its ratification campaign, the harmonisation of its working methods with other committees, its partnership with champion States of the Convention and the Global Compact on Migration as well as with civil society organizations and the African Network of National Human Rights Institutions. The Committee had taken several important decisions to enhance its work and visibility.
The thirty-seventh session of the Committee is scheduled to be held from 27 November to 8 December 2023.
Lebanon still proxy battleground, 50 years after Israel raid
By BASSEM MROUE
yesterday These two cars found just outside Beirut, Lebanon, are believed to be those used by the Israeli troops in raids on Palestinian leaders on April 10, 1973. The Israeli commando force led by a man disguised as brunette. Ehud Barak, who later rose to become Israel's prime minister, infiltrated a posh Beirut neighborhood shooting dead three top officials with the Palestine Liberation Organization in two separate adjacent buildings. (AP Photo/Zaven Vartan, File)
BEIRUT (AP) — It was a cold night 50 years ago when an Israeli commando team led by a man disguised as a woman infiltrated a posh Beirut neighborhood and shot and killed three top officials from the Palestine Liberation Organization in their apartments.
The anniversary is little noted, but the April 10, 1973 operation has a relevance that continues today.
The raid was one of the first times that Lebanon became the arena where Israel and its opponents would settle their accounts. Fifty years later, it remains so, as highlighted by last week’s exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes across the border between Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Lebanon.
The boldness of the assassinations — by an Israeli team slipping in and out of Beirut with little resistance — stunned the Lebanese. At the time, two years before civil war erupted, their country was mainly known as a tourist attraction where visitors came to party, visit archaeological sites, ski on snow-capped mountains or sunbathe on sandy beaches. It signaled a new era that has lasted to this day, one in which regional powers have repeatedly intervened in Lebanon.
The raid was led by Ehud Barak, who later became Israel’s top army commander and then, in 1999, prime minister. Its targets were Kamal Adwan, in charge of PLO operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; Mohammed Youssef Najjar, a member of the PLO’s executive committee; and Kamal Nasser, a PLO spokesman and a charismatic writer and poet.
On the night of April 9, 1973, Adwan’s wife Maha Jayousi was suffering from a toothache and went to bed in the room of their young children. Adwan usually worked late and had a planned meeting with some PLO officials that night, said Jayousi, describing that night to The Associated Press. She spoke from Jordan, where she has lived since the raid.
Around 1 a.m. she was woken up by a strong sound and the shattering of the window above her bed. Adwan rushed into the bedroom carrying a gun and told her to stay in the room. Seconds later, shots rang out and Adwan fell dead in the corridor between the bedrooms. Two armed men came into the bedroom and shined a torch on Jayousi and the children.
One of them said into his radio in Hebrew, “Mission accomplished. His wife and children are here, should we kill them too?” The reply came back, “If they don’t resist, don’t kill them,” recalled Jayousi, who had studied Hebrew at Cairo University.
When the Israelis left, she rushed the children into a bathroom to hide, then looked around her home. The main entrance was broken wide open and riddled with bullet holes, and there were bloodstains on the stairs. She didn’t know at first that the team had also killed Nasser, who lived one floor above them.
Jayousi went to her balcony and shouted to Najjar, who lived in the building across the alley — not realizing that Najjar and his wife had also been killed. Jayousi said that weeks before the raid, she had noticed unknown people coming to their building’s parking area and that people across the street were taking pictures of their building. She said Adwan was concerned and told her he would ask for protection to be boosted.
The raid, known as Operation Spring of Youth, killed the three PLO officials as well as several Lebanese policemen and guards who responded to the assault. Two Israeli commandos on a separate team died after being wounded in a gunfight as they attacked another target in Beirut.
The operation was part of a string of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian figures in retaliation for the killings of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics during a hostage-taking by the Palestinian group Black September. Adwan’s son, Rami, later said his father had nothing to do with the attack in Munich.
Years later, Barak described the operation, saying that he and two other commandos were dressed as women with wigs and makeup so the team would attract less attention than a group of men walking along a Beirut street at night.
The Israelis landed on Beirut’s coast in boats and were met by Mossad agents, posing as tourists, who drove them to the neighborhood of Verdun.
There, three squads slipped into the two buildings and blew open the apartment doors, while Barak and a back-up team stood outside. They killed a guard who approached them and opened fire at a Lebanese police vehicle that responded to the shootings, Barak said in a television interview years later.
Barak said after eight minutes, the three squads returned, drove back to the shore and headed out to sea on the boats. The team made off with documents that led to arrests of PLO operatives in the West Bank.
Days after the killings, over 100,000 people took part in the funeral of the three leaders, who were buried at the “Martyrs Cemetery” where scores of Palestinian officials and fighters were laid to rest over the years.
The raid stoked already enflamed divisions among Lebanese between supporters and opponents of the PLO and other Palestinian factions. The Palestinian groups had adopted Lebanon as their base in 1970, relocating there after being expelled from Jordan and three years after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. From Lebanon, they were staging attacks inside Israel.
The ensuing political crisis led to the resignation of Lebanon’s then-Prime Minister Saeb Salam’s government. Less than a month later, clashes erupted between the Lebanese army and Palestinian guerillas. Those divisions were one factor that pushed Lebanon into its 1975-1990 civil war — during which Israel invaded and occupied part of the country until withdrawing in 2000.
Since the end of the civil war, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah stepped in as Israel’s main adversary in Lebanon. A 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah wreaked heavy destruction in Lebanon, especially in the south.
Palestinian factions also still have a presence. Israel blamed the Palestinian militant group Hamas for a volley of rockets into its territory last week — apparently a response to Israeli police raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a major shrine built on a hilltop revered by Muslims and Jews.
After Israel’s retaliation with airstrikes in Lebanon on Friday, some of the same Lebanese politicians who were bitter enemies of Palestinian fighters in the past denounced Hamas.
Samir Geagea, whose Christian Lebanese Forces often battled Palestinian fighters in the civil war, demanded the government ensure peace at the border. He also urged against leaving “strategic decision-making to the Iran-led alliance,” a reference to Hezbollah and Hamas. Fouad Abu Nader, another former Lebanese Forces commander, called for the arrest of the Hamas leader.
The wars and conflicts of the past 50 years have overshadowed memories of the 1973 raid, but it still stands out as a stunning moment.
Lebanese writer Ziad Kaj lived nearby in Verdun and was 9 years old when the raid took place. He said he remembers the shock as shooting rang out and electricity was cut. Many of the people in his building took shelter in his family’s apartment on the ground floor.
“It was a horrible sleepless night that still echoes in my head,” Kaj said.
Paul Robeson: The Left’s Tragic Hero
The musician, actor, and socialist should be remembered for both his heroic contributions and his attachment to Stalinism
AUTHOR Mario Kessler Mario Kessler is senior fellow at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. An earlier version of this article appeared in the magazine Sozialismus. NEWS | 04/09/2023
Paul Robeson gives a performance to dockworkers in Oakland, California, 1942.
Paul Robeson, African American singer and actor, lawyer and football player, political activist and Communist, was born 125 years ago today on 9 April 1898. Robeson was a masterful and prolific musician — he recorded almost 300 songs between 1925 and 1961, in 20 different languages, with a repertoire that included folk, blues and jazz standards, pop and musical pieces, classical as well as political songs. But he was also a vitally important champion in the struggle for black liberation. Until the onset of the Cold War he was, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, “the best-known American on Earth” — and not only among Communists.
School, Studies, and First Professional Successes
Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898 to a freed slave, Presbyterian preacher William Drew Robeson, and his wife Mary Louise, née Bastille, who died at an early age; he was the youngest of five children. In Westfield and Somerville, New Jersey, where Robeson lived after 1910, he excelled in all school subjects, including sports. In 1915 he won a nationwide academic competition for a scholarship to study at Rutgers University (then Rutgers College).
Robeson was a standout player in American football. He was twice selected to the nation’s top college amateur football team, but experienced racial discrimination even there — an opposing team refused to play because a black man was on the field. Robeson subsequently gave up a brief career in the National Football League in favour of his artistic ambitions, although he had experienced discrimination there too: Robeson, though blessed with an outstanding bass voice, was not allowed to become a member of the college choir.
Robeson completed his undergraduate studies with honours in 1919 and studied law at Columbia University. After graduating in 1923, he briefly worked in a law office; he happened to meet pianist Fletcher Henderson in Harlem who was looking for a new singer for his Four Kings of Harmony. After listening to several of Robeson’s songs, Henderson offered him a place in the quartet. It was also around that time that Robeson met his wife Eslanda Goode, whom he married in August 1921. From that point on, Eslanda worked as his agent in a partnership that was by no means free of tension. Paul Robeson Jr, the couple’s only child, was born in 1927.
Robeson was also offered an acting career. In April 1921, he played one of the title roles in Mary Hoyt Vyborg’s play Taboo; sang in the chorus of the Broadway production of Shuffle Along shortly afterward, and performed in England for the first time in 1922. It took until February 1924 for Robeson to be offered the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s Wings Are Given to All Children of Men, despite the racist agitation of the Hearst press. This was followed with the role of Brutus in O’Neill’s tragedy The Emperor Jones. In March 1925, Robeson recorded his first song, the spiritual “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit.” Robeson’s first European tour followed. The recording of Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” brought him global success in 1928. This and other successes gave Robeson financial security for a long time.
Robeson’s Path to Communism
Robeson returned to London in 1930 to take the lead role in Shakespeare’s Othello. He took up part-time studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in early 1934, majoring in Swahili. Sergei Eisenstein invited him to Moscow at the end of 1934 for his (unfinished) project to bring the Haitian Revolution to screen under the title “Black Majesty”. In contrast to Berlin, where he was harassed by an SA squad during a stopover, Robeson was impressed by Moscow. “In Russia, for the first time, I felt like a full human being,” he said after arriving. “No colour prejudice like in Mississippi; no colour prejudice like in Washington.”
Robeson’s experiences in the USSR were marked by the overwhelming feeling that, for the first time in his life, he was not discriminated against or excluded on the basis of his skin colour. This tragically led him to ignore the brutality of Joseph Stalin’s government. When commenting on an execution of persons who the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), called “counterrevolutionary terrorists”, Robeson argued, “from what I have already seen of the workings of the Soviet Government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot.” He continued:
It is the government’s duty to put down any opposition to this really free society with a firm hand, and I hope they always will, for I already regard myself at home here ... I feel more kinship to the Russian people under their new society than I have ever felt anywhere else. It is obvious that there is no terror here, that all the masses of every race are contended and support their government.
Robeson’s own family was eventually directly confronted with Stalin’s terror. In a 10 May 1936, interview, he described the apartment of his brother-in-law, John Goode, who was working in Moscow at this time. “While in the Soviet Union I made a point to visit some of the workers’ homes”, he said,
and I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings, apartments with nurseries containing the most modern equipment for their children … I certainly wish the workers in this country — and especially the Negroes in Harlem and the South — had such places to stay in.
It did not occur to Robeson how atypical this was of the general housing situation in the Soviet Union. But just 21 months later, Robeson had to use his connections to help his brother-in-law, accused of terrorist conspiracy, to escape from Moscow; he therefore must have known how perilously people lived who did not have a famous advocate such as himself.
Robeson later revealed that his young son would be enrolled in school in Moscow, where he would not be discriminated against because of the colour of his skin. Paul Robeson Jr was accepted to an elite school whose students included Stalin’s daughter and Vyacheslav Molotov’s son. His father went back to London and appeared in films and plays of varying quality until he once again received highest recognition for his role of François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Robeson formed a close friendship with C. L. R. James, the author of The Black Jacobins, on which the play of the same name was based, which lasted until 1949.
The Spanish Civil War and its international repercussions finally turned Robeson into a political activist. With the beginning of the war in 1936, he sent proceeds from his concert performances to aid the Spanish Republic and performed there himself in 1938; Robeson in addition donated the proceeds of his concert performances to the strike funds of striking miners in Wales. After a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru in June 1936, Robeson publicly advocated India’s independence and also supported anti-colonial efforts in Africa. On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday in 1998, CPUSA secretary general Gus Hall revealed that Robeson had been a party member for decades, but had kept it a secret in consultation with the party leadership.
From World War II to the Cold War
Shortly after the beginning of World War II, the Robesons settled in Enfield, Connecticut. In July 1940, Robeson set out on a concert tour of the western parts of the United States, the highlight of which was to be a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. But none of the hotels contacted wanted to accept a black artist. He was finally forced to rent a room at an inflated price if he agreed not to eat his meals in the hotel’s restaurant.
Robeson contributed the voice of the narrator to the film Native Land, directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, which premiered in 1942. It was one of the first films to document civil rights violations in America. Despite the fact that the United States and the USSR were now allied and Communists in the US were temporarily in less danger, the FBI saw the film as covert Communist propaganda. Among Robeson’s barely countable activities of those years was a recording of the “March of the Volunteers” in both English and Chinese, which became the anthem of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In 1943 Robeson was also a leader in the campaign to eliminate segregation in baseball leagues — still without success.
The war against fascism, in which black and white soldiers fought together in the US Army, put — not for the first time — the overdue question of equality for black people in the military on the agenda. It became urgent after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June 1941 that prohibited discrimination in the defence industry on the part of federal agencies.
Robeson appeared as an almost heroic representative of the ‘Other America’, not only to the Communists, but also to many independent leftists and left-liberals.
But the CPUSA, which until then had been committed advocates of black and white equality, curbed all campaigning for this cause after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and especially after the US entry into the war the following December. If until then the party had supported a policy of strict defeatism and isolationism (“The Yanks are not coming!”), it now unconditionally supported US government policy, even at the cost of alienating the African American civil rights movement, for which the struggle against “racial segregation” was far from over.
On 25 July 1946, Robeson managed to talk to President Harry S. Truman, telling him that, if the federal government refused to defend its black citizens against lynchings, black people would have to defend themselves. The president assured Robeson that the United States and Britain were the best guarantors of a democratic society, to which Robeson replied that England was one of the greatest slave-holding nations in human history, while the practice of lynching in the contemporary United States reminded him of the worst of European fascism. American and British policy today, Robeson argued, would not support anti-fascism. Truman declared that this was not the time to introduce legislation against lynching. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, the legendary cofounder of the African American civil rights movement, then started a campaign on 22 September 1946, the day on which President Abraham Lincoln had officially declared slavery abolished in 1862.
That same year, 1946, Robeson was summoned to appear before the so-called Tenney Committee, the California subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). There, and likewise in May 1948 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he refused to answer questions about his CP membership, citing the Constitution. In 1948 he, along with Albert Einstein, also actively supported the presidential candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, chairman of the newly formed and short-lived Progressive Party. Wallace refused to exclude Communists from his party. He was fiercely attacked in the election campaign by the two anti-Communist camps, with the Democrats around Truman and the Republicans around Thomas E. Dewey, but also by Norman Thomas, the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Wallace stood no chance against the victorious Truman.
Jackie Robinson, the best African American baseball player of this time, whose successful integration into white professional baseball was championed by Robeson, was compelled to appear before HUAC on 18 June 1949, to answer the question of whether he knew that Robeson was a Communist. He replied somewhat ambiguously that, if so, it would not be a reason to deprive Robeson of his constitutional right to refuse to testify. Robeson himself repeatedly declared, for example at the Paris World Peace Congress in 1949, that African Americans, deprived of civil rights by their own country, would never go to war against the Soviet Union, in which the dignity and equality of all people was guaranteed. Robeson called Gerhart Eisler’s escape in May 1949, evading prosecution after his interrogation by HUAC, “the greatest victory for the forces of peace in the world”. His former friend Max Yergan, who had become a fanatical anti-Communist, now labelled him a “black Stalin”.
But Robeson appeared as an almost heroic representative of the “Other America”, not only to the Communists, but also to many independent leftists and left-liberals. His long self-deception about Stalin and the nature of the Soviet Union therefore was all the more tragic.
Robeson’s Tragic Self-Deception
Robeson again travelled back to Moscow in June 1949 and sought contact with his Jewish friends Itzik Fefer and Solomon Michoels. Fefer, who had been arrested as a result of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges, was brought to Robeson’s hotel. Knowing that the room had been bugged, Fefer indicated through gestures that Michoels had been murdered and that the same fate awaited him. Robeson sang a Yiddish partisan song in Moscow shortly afterwards as an encore (possibly arranged with the organizers of the concert tour). After his return to the United States, however, Robeson declared that there was no antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
Robeson’s unrepentant Stalinism showed itself again in his behaviour toward American Trotskyists. Robeson addressed a conference at New York’s Henry Hudson Hotel on 17 July 1949 that was devoted to the defines of 12 indicted CP leaders who had been charged with subversive activity under the Alien Registration Act, also known as the Smith Act. One provision of this law, passed by Congress in June 1940, was that foreign-born persons guilty of subversive activities against the government could be deported to their country of birth. Its first defendants in 1941 were not Communist Party members but instead eighteen members of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that had organized several large truck driver strikes in Minnesota; they received prison sentences but were not deported.
While numerous figures on the non-communist Left expressed solidarity with the defendants, the CPUSA attempted to discredit the Trotskyist strike leaders. Worse, Communist cadres compiled a dossier on the Trotskyists for the US Department of Justice, and thus for the FBI, that was used unofficially to reach a verdict. Nevertheless, there were quiet fears among Communists that their anti-Trotskyist campaign might ultimately be turned against CP members. This finally happened in 1949.
The once-condemned Trotskyists immediately declared their solidarity with the now-persecuted CP leaders. But in preparation for the conference at Henry Hudson Hotel, the Daily Worker warned that the Communist Party should not allow the forum to defend bourgeois liberties for Trotskyists, as they were agents of counterrevolution. According to a New York Times report, Robeson appeared on stage and attacked conference chairman Paul J. Kern, who advocated support not only for Communists but also, wherever warranted, for Trotskyists. Robeson denounced Trotskyists as “allies of fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world” — meaning the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. “Let’s not get confused. They are the enemies of the working class.” He went so far as to ask demagogically, “Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?” Kern’s resolution in defines of civil rights also for Trotskyists was overwhelmingly rejected. Robeson argued against defending the Trotskyists even though knew that some of the erstwhile strike leaders and their supporters, including Max Shachtman, were from Eastern Europe and would face the death penalty if deported there.
Instead of the maligned Trotskyists, it was the actual Ku Klux Klan that, over a three-hour period, beat a crowd assembled for a concert with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger on 27 August 1949 in Peekskill, New York. The frenzied mob burned benches and chairs and overturned buses and cars, while it was mainly Trotskyists who had arrived in an effort to defend concertgoers.
The concert had to be cancelled, but when it was made up on 4 September, buses and cars were once again pelted with stones. Despite Robeson’s slander, Trotskyists protected him against racist attacks from the Ku Klux Klan as well as, subsequently, from the US judiciary. Among these Trotskyists was C. L. R. James, whose personal friendship with Robeson had suffered lasting damage after the incidence at the Henry Hudson Hotel. The Trotskyists and other socialists outside the CPUSA had believed that mutual solidarity in the face of racial hatred would be stronger than any political difference between them. Robeson’s equation of the Trotskyist with the KKK tragically showed them that this was not the case.
Robeson appeared in court on 20 September 1949, to testify in favour of 12 accused Communists, but he was not allowed to do so. The government subsequently revoked his passport in summer 1950. His attorneys were told that at this time foreign travel by Paul Robeson would be contrary to the fundamental interests of the United States. This meant that he lost the opportunity to perform abroad, which, together with the boycott policy of the major American radio stations and record companies, represented a severe financial loss for him. (Still, a concert he gave in New York in 1957, transmitted via submarine cable to England and Wales, received worldwide attention.) Robeson spent many of the following years struggling to regain his passport.
On 22 December 1952, Robeson received the Stalin International Peace Prize, which he accepted in New York (instead of Moscow). Shortly after Stalin’s death in April 1953, Robeson praised the dictator as a humanitarian and peacemaker, and praised the Soviet Union as a great family of nations. In Stalin's country, he declared, “Yakuts, Nentses, Kirgiz, Tadzhiks had respect and were helped to advance with unbelievable rapidity in this socialist land. No empty promises, such as coloured folk continuously hear in the United States, but deeds.” Robeson kept silent about the deportation of entire peoples who were accused of being collaborators of Adolf Hitler in World War II: Balkars, Ingush, Karachays, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans, and Baltic peoples. Nor did he publicly comment on Nikita Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.
Later Years
Robeson received a summons to HUAC on 12 June 1956, after refusing to sign an affidavit that he was not a Communist. Although HUAC had by then become less dangerous, its questioning was still somewhat of a risk. Invoking the Fifth Amendment, Robeson again refused to reveal his political affiliation. When asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union because of his proximity to their political ideology, he replied: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it.” In that regard, he said, it would not matter whether he was a Communist or not.
Robeson’s passport was returned to him in 1958. Despite deteriorating health, the following three years were marked by concert appearances in several countries, including the Soviet Union and, for the first time, the German Democratic Republic, where Humboldt University in (East) Berlin awarded Robeson an honorary doctorate.
Socialists would be well advised to clearly acknowledge Paul Robeson’s tragedy and self-deception in order to honour him, despite his contradictions and illusions, as a great and steadfast personality, as a universalist and internationalist.
During his final stay in the Soviet Union in March 1961, Robeson locked himself in his Moscow hotel room after a concert and attempted to take his own life by slitting his wrists. He was found and rescued. Some have speculated that Robeson’s attempted suicide was connected to his despair over Stalinism; his biographer, Martin Duberman, believes that bipolar disorder was the main cause. Robeson remained under medical care in London until 1963 before his family took him to the GDR capital. After temporary recuperation, he returned to the United States in late 1963.
While still in London, Robeson hailed the March on Washington on 28 August 1963 as a “turning point” in the American civil rights movement. He sporadically attended meetings of the civil rights movement in 1964, but he attempted to commit suicide for a second time while staying in San Francisco in 1965. He was saved once again; his health, however, was permanently shattered. Immediately afterward, double pneumonia and kidney blockage forced him to give up all public activities.
After Eslanda’s death in December 1965, Robeson moved in with his son’s family in New York, and in 1968 with his sister in Philadelphia, living there in complete seclusion. On 15 April 1973, 3,000 people gathered at New York’s Carnegie Hall to mark his seventy-fifth birthday. In his last taped public address, he said, “Although I have been unable to engage in social activities for several years, I want you to know that I remain committed to the struggle for freedom, peace and the brotherhood of man on earth.” On 23 January 1976, Robeson died in Philadelphia at age 77 after suffering a stroke. He was buried next to his wife Eslanda in Ferncliff Cemetery in New York.
Robeson’s Legacy
Paul Robeson’s artistic and political career, as well as his physical and mental health, were severely damaged by decades of racist hostility. His ultimately ineffective means of coping involved ignoring the increasing contradictions between his socialist ideals and the reality of the Soviet Union. For him, the Soviet Union remained the lifeline to which he increasingly clung in despair. He was not willing to talk about this personal tragedy, neither in public nor even with his family. The anti-Stalinist New Left viewed him critically as a result.
Some chroniclers today hide Robeson’s Stalinism in order to avoid inconvenient questions; for others, it becomes a pretext to consign Robeson’s name and his achievements to oblivion. Socialists would be well advised to clearly acknowledge Paul Robeson’s tragedy and self-deception in order to honour him, despite his contradictions and illusions, as a great and steadfast personality, as a universalist and internationalist.
Making critical use of Robeson’s legacy and his experiences is of crucial importance. Paul Robeson contributed decisively to giving black people and other oppressed groups the level of self-confidence necessary to move from being victims to being actors in history. This is what constitutes his special, unique value as an artist and socialist activist.
Watch the 1933 Hollywood classic movie, The Emperor Jones.
Unscrupulously ambitious Brutus Jones escapes from jail after killing a guard and through bluff and bravado finds himself the emperor of a Caribbean island.
Movie Name: The Emperor Jones
Stars: Paul Robeson, Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson
Director: Dudley Murphy, William C. de Mille
Rosa Luxemburg Was the Great Theorist of Democratic Revolution
The latest volume of her Complete Works provides a unique perspective on her political thought
AUTHOR Peter Hudis Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and the General Editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. This article first appeared in Jacobin.
Generations of socialist thinkers and activists have grappled with the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet there are many surprises still in store for those interested in her legacy, as seen in the recent publication of Volume Four of the English-language Complete Works. Along with the previously published Volume Three, the new collection brings together her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution, one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.
Luxemburg’s analysis of 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions is already well-known (and appears in Volume Four in a new translation). However, more than four-fifths of the material in the new volume, covering the period from 1906 to 1909, is appearing in English for the first time. Most of her writings that were originally composed in Polish — about half of the volume’s 550 pages — have never appeared in any other language. Learning to Speak Russian
Luxemburg, like most Marxists of her generation (as well as Karl Marx himself) held that a democratic republic with universal suffrage was the formation best suited for waging the class struggle to a successful conclusion. Like many of her contemporaries in the Second International, she saw no contradiction between fighting for democratic reforms within capitalism while reaching for a revolutionary transformation that would abolish capitalism — even as she relentlessly battled those who separated the two.
In doing so, Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in “peaceful” as against those used in revolutionary periods. The aim in both scenarios was to enhance the consciousness and power of the working class. However, “in peacetime, this struggle takes place within the framework of the rule of the bourgeoisie”, which required that the movement operate “within the bounds of the existing laws governing elections, assemblies, the press”, trade unions, etc.
Luxemburg referred to this as “a sort of iron cage in which the class struggle of the proletariat must take place”. Hence, mass struggles in such periods “only very seldom attain positive results”. A revolutionary phase was very different, she argued:
Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered ... the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.
For Luxemburg, the activity and reason of the masses during the 1905 Revolution, in which millions engaged in mass strikes aimed at bringing down the tsarist regime, was a clear example of such a moment. As she wrote in early 1906: “With the Russian Revolution, the almost-sixty-year period of quiet parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie comes to a close.” The time had come for the socialist movement in Western Europe to begin to “speak Russian” by incorporating the mass strike into its political and organizational perspectives:
Social Democratic tactics, as employed by the working class in Germany today and to which we owe our victories up until now, is oriented primarily toward parliamentary struggle, it is designed for the context of bourgeois parliamentarianism. Russian Social Democracy is the first to whom the hard but honourable lot has fallen of using the foundations of Marx’s teaching, not in a time of the correct, calm parliamentary course of state life, but in a tumultuous revolutionary period. Immediate Tasks
In the years since Luxemburg penned these words, numerous commentators have praised her efforts to push the rather staid social democratic parties in a more revolutionary direction, while others have criticized Luxemburg’s perspective on the grounds that it downplays the stark differences between the absolutist regime in Russia and Western liberal democracies. There are several points worth noting in this context.
Firstly, Luxemburg held that the mass strike “is and will remain a powerful weapon of workers’ struggle”, but went on to stress that it was “only that, a weapon, whose use and effectiveness always depend on the environment, the given conditions, and the moment of struggle”. Secondly, she held that the Russian proletariat was “not setting itself utopian or unreachable goals, like the immediate realization of socialism: the only possible and historically necessary goal is to establish a democratic republic and an eight-hour workday”.
In Luxemburg’s view, socialism could not be on the immediate agenda in Russia for two main reasons: the working class at the time constituted only a small minority of the populace of the Russian Empire (less than 15 percent), and it was impossible for socialism to exist in a single country:
The socialist revolution can only be a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time.
In a lengthy essay addressed to the Polish workers’ movement, she further developed this point:
In its current state, the working class is not yet ready to accomplish the great tasks that await it. The working class of all capitalist countries must first internalize the aspiration to socialism; an enormous number of people have yet to arrive at an awareness of their class interests ... When Social Democracy has a majority of the working people behind it in all the largest capitalist countries, the final hour of capitalism will have struck. A Workers’ Revolution
However, this did not mean that the Russian Revolution would be confined to a liberal or bourgeois framework. Much like Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik current — and in direct opposition to their Menshevik rivals — Luxemburg held that the immediate task facing revolutionaries in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class. Since the liberal bourgeoise was too weak and compromised to lead the revolution, “the proletariat had to become the only fighter and defender of the democratic forms of a bourgeois state”.
She stressed that conditions in Russia today were not like those existing in nineteenth-century France:
The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc., but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the [French] proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.
She further expanded on this point elsewhere:
The bourgeois revolution in Russia and Poland is not the work of the bourgeoisie, as in Germany and France in days gone by, but the working class, and a class already highly conscious of its labour interests at that — a working class that seeks political freedoms not so that the bourgeoisie may benefit, but just the opposite, so that the working class may resolve its class struggle with the bourgeoisie and thereby hasten the victory of socialism. That is why the current revolution is simultaneously a workers’ revolution. That is also why, in this revolution, the battle against absolutism goes hand in hand — must go hand in hand — with the battle against capital, with exploitation. And why economic strikes are in fact quite nearly inseparable in this revolution from political strikes.
Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism, including those pertaining to freedom struggles in the technologically developed capitalist lands. As she later wrote in December 1918, on behalf of the group she led during the German Revolution: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League.” One Step Forward
Luxemburg’s perspective on the 1905 Russian Revolution raises a host of questions, which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world in the decades following her death. How can the working class maintain power in a democratic republic after the overthrow of the old regime if it represents only a minority of the populace? How can it do so if, as she claims, “Social Democracy finds only the autonomous class politics of the proletariat to be reliable” — since the hunger of the peasants for landed private property presumably puts them at odds with it? And how is it possible for such a democratic republic under the control of the proletariat to be sustained if revolutions do not occur in other countries that can come to its aid?
Luxemburg addressed these questions in a remarkable essay written in Polish in 1908, “Lessons of the Three Dumas,” which has never previously appeared in English. By 1908, the situation in Russia had radically changed since the revolution was by then defeated. She surveyed the course of its development, encouraging Marxists to “redouble their commitment to subjecting every detail of their tactics to rigorous self-criticism.” She did so by evaluating the history of the three Dumas — the parliamentary bodies established in the Russian Empire from 1906 as a concession to the revolution, with a restricted franchise that became progressively more biased in favour of the upper classes:
The Third Duma has shown — and from this flow its enormous political significance — that a parliamentary system that has not first overthrown the government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power (a belief the First Duma vainly held), not only cannot hold its own against that power as an instrument of opposition (as the Second Duma tried to do), but can and must become, on the contrary, an instrument of the counterrevolution.
She proceeded to look ahead in thinking about the possible fate of a future revolution that, unlike the one in 1905, did succeed in overthrowing the old regime:
If the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly — realizing political freedom across the Russian state — but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow. Revolutionary Realism
Yet the question remained: How could the workers maintain themselves in power in a democratic republic over the long haul if they constituted a minority of the populace? Luxemburg’s answer was that they could not — and yet the effort would still be worth it:
The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.
Shortly before writing this, in an address to a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, she made the following remarks:
I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever-broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances ... But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat, the vanguard that discloses new contradictions, new tasks, and new paths for class struggle, as the French proletariat did in the nineteenth century.
She did not shy away from acknowledging the implications of this argument:
Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended.
This was a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. Luxemburg was fully aware that even a democratic republic under the control of the working class — which is how she as well as Marx understood “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constituted a minority. And yet, even though the revolution would therefore have “failed” from at least one point of view, it would have produced important social transformations, providing the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.
In short, Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required to achieve the transition to socialism was “thoroughgoing democracy”. If a nondemocratic regime stayed in power, the transition to socialism would become impossible, since the working class would be left without the means and training to exercise power on its own behalf. Yet on the other hand, if a proletarian democracy existed even for a brief period of time, it could help inspire a later transition to socialism. Self-Examination
This argument speaks to what would unfold a decade later, when tsarism was finally overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution, followed in short order by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware at the time that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was why Lenin worked so hard to foster proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.
However, two fundamental issues separated Lenin’s approach from that of Luxemburg. Firstly, his regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties — a development that Luxemburg sharply opposed in her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, Lenin held that once the Bolsheviks seized power, they intended to keep it — permanently. This was very different from Luxemburg’s statement that “the inability of the proletariat to stay in power” would not be the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspired others to take up the fight against capitalism.
Luxemburg’s position is especially striking because she was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Indeed, she lost her own life following the defeat of the January 1919 Spartacus League uprising in Berlin, which she initially opposed on the grounds that it lacked sufficient mass support. However, Luxemburg was equally aware that any effort to forge a transition to socialism through nondemocratic means was doomed to fail. In this sense, she anticipated the tragic outcome of many revolutions in the decades following her death.
Whatever one makes of Luxemburg’s reflection on these issues, one thing is clear: she developed a distinctive, though rarely discussed, conception of the transition to socialism (especially for developing societies, which is what the Russian Empire was at the time) that has received far too little attention. The publication of these writings in English will hopefully remedy that neglect.
Although many of Luxemburg’s ideas speak to issues that democratic socialists, anti-imperialists, and feminists are grappling with today, on at least one critical issue, her perspective has not stood the test of time. It is to be found in her oft-repeated insistence: “When the sale of workers’ labour to private exploiters is abolished, the source of all today’s social inequalities will disappear.”
Luxemburg’s contention that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would provide the basis for ending “every inequality in human society” was not hers alone. Virtually every tendency and theorist of revolutionary social democracy in the Second International shared it, including Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and many others. Yet it is hardly possible to maintain this view today.
Neither the social-democratic welfare states, which sought to limit private property rights, nor the regimes in the USSR, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, which abolished them through the nationalization of property, succeeded in developing a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. A much deeper social transformation that targets not alone private property and “free” markets but most of all the alienated form of human relations that define capitalist modernity is clearly needed.
That is a task for our generation, which can be much aided by returning with new eyes to the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of the logic of capital. This entails a critical re-evaluation of the meaning of socialism that may not have been on the agenda in Luxemburg’s time, but which the overall spirit of her work surely encourages. As she wrote in 1906:
Self-examination — that is, making oneself aware at every step of the direction, logic, and basis for the class movement itself — is that store from which the working mass draws its strength, again and again, to struggle anew, and by which it understands its own hesitation and defeats as so many proofs of its strength and inevitable future victory.
_workers_in_singing_the_Star_Spangled_Ba_-_NARA_-_535874.jpg){kind=link}