Talk on Behalf of the White Rose Before the Green Liberty Caucus, December 2nd, 2024

Note: The White Rose is a new Bolshevik-Leninist group, comprised by members exiled from the Australian based “Workers League”, because of their dissatisfaction with what they consider to be its repressive, dysfunctional process in handling dissent.

The Green Liberty Caucus is a Caucus operating within and without the U.S. Green Party. Like the White Rose and the Workers League, this Caucus is dedicated to promoting medical freedom, and opposed to vaccine mandates and the Great Reset. We disagree only on our respective political strategies and our vision of a liberated society.

We came together to debate these disagreements, out of our mutual interest in the U.S. presidential campaign of Emanuel Pastreich.

I would first like to discuss the agreements we in the White Rose have with the rest of the Green Liberty Caucus, and then go on to areas that are more controversial.

Areas of Agreement 

I am largely in agreement with the GLC, of which I am a member, on the fact that this so-called “pandemic”, which was so obviously rather a “plandemic”, was part of a larger and ongoing, extremely nefarious agenda. It was and continues to be a “SCAD”, to use Lance DeHaven-Smith (author of Conspiracy Theory in America)’s term: A “State Crime Against Democracy”.

We are in agreement about what are the forces that are calling the shots, or at least, who the useful idiots are who are working for the actual, secret, elite puppet masters for this insidious scheme. This cabal includes oligarchs and their puppets such as billionaire and eugenicist Bill Gates, World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab, WHO Director Tedros, the head of Pfizer Albert Bourla.

Finally, we agree in our analysis of the motives for this terrible project. Unlike some in the medical freedom movement, we understand that this was not just based on a desire to resolve the crisis of profitability that the major fractions of Capital were encountering—Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance—by creating a new version of a government controlled and compelled market, similar to the military industrial Pentagon complex created during and after WWII. Out of this scheme, of course, these fractions of Capital reaped billions, and, simultaneously, employed the lockdowns to drive their smaller competitors out of business--much like the Big Industrialists and Bankers in Germany did through fascism in the 1930s. And most fundamentally, under the guise of “concern for public health”, they eviscerated the basic democratic rights of the working class.

We also agree that there is more to this than just profitability. According to the GLC’s Liberation Manifesto, with which we concur, this is “a Globalist project to create global controls over world populations”

Where We Disagree

As eco-socialist, however, and d Bolshevik-Leninists (Trotskyistd), we differ from the rest of the Caucus on the strategy and goals I think the medical freedom movement ought to adopt, to stop this fiendish scheme.

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The leadership of the GLC, by and large, supports the following:

I.                 Murray Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism”, or John Spritzler’s “voluntary communalism” as both a strategy, and the ideal structure for the creation of a good, “egalitarian” society. This is a society of direct decision-making purely by the members of local communities. While there might be higher bodies to which delegates may be elected, these would have no power to compel the local community to accept their decisions.

II.                  The creation of a “big tent” political party, which is a liberty “coalition” of people with different ideologies: populist, libertarian, as well as socialist.

What we in the White Rose support, and you oppose, seem to be as follows:

I.                    Strategically

a.      The formation of a vanguard party, initially led by largely middle class elements like ourselves, reaching out with a broad program that appeals to the working class, and opening up its ranks, on an egalitarian basis, those members of the working class, who have advanced to the level of socialist consciousness, via our own educational efforts, theirs, and the pressure of the deepening crisis of capitalism.

b.      This party and its candidates should be explicitly socialist in the ideology and goal for the ideal society that it promotes.

c. The party--our socialist party--should lead other workers based socialist parties, and revolutionary parties--probably more populist than socialist-- representing other, lower classes--the urban middle class, the peasantry--in a democratically structured coalition, within the councils/soviets, before and then after the insurrection where we take power.

II.                  Goal for the ideal society: should be socialism: a planned economy under the democratic control of the working majority, to meet the needs--economic, social, and cultural--of the vast majority of the population, rather than permit a ruling class to suppress and exploit them, as under capitalism and previous class bound modes of production. The political system for this is best, but all too briefly, outlined by the late J. David Edelstein, in his article for Against the Current, “Politics Under Socialism”.[i] In his socialist scheme, local communities, in their participatory assemblies, make many of the decisions that concern them. But central assemblies that are universally and proportionally elected and recallable directly, make decisions about issues concerning the areas, larger than the local, that they have been delegated to manage: region, nation, continent, globe. These decisions must be complied with by the subordinate governmental bodies. In case of corruption, however, the more local bodies will have the facility to band together against a tyrannical center, and guide citizens to recall the corrupt officials. 

Class Struggle Must be Placed at the Center of our Analysis and Strategy

One of the root causes of our disagreement, I think, is our respective explanations for WHY these oligarchs seek control over the global population.

From his electoral statements, Emanuel seems to favor an eighteenth century style explanation, favored by such libertarians as Matthew Ehret. For these thinkers, it’s just all about the bankers and their desire to rule the world tyrannically.

Marxists like ourselves, Kees van der Pijl, and David A. Hughes, argue that we need instead to analyze the motive for this in terms of the class struggle between the global bourgeoisie, and the working class. Like the anarchists that Lenin critiqued in his 1901 Notes On Socialism and Anarchism, you don’t, I fear, understand the centrality of this class struggle to the present crisis.

The Contradictions of Capitalism

This struggle arises inexorably from the inner tendencies and consequent trajectory of capitalism itself. These grow right out of the basic contradictions of capitalism. As Marx and Engels argued in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist League, capitalism’s basic drive, like no other previous mode of production, is to revolutionize the forces of production. This is because each capitalist attempts to out compete other capitalist firms in the same industry, by replacing its workers with a greater level of machine production. As Adam Smith argued, the market value of any commodity is determined by the amount of human labor that produces it. But the capitalists continually increase what Marx called the “organic composition of capital”.  In other words, in their competition with each other, they reduce the proportion of human labor, with respect to a growing input level of machine labor, in the production of commodities. Thus both the price of these commodities--and the rate of profit gained from their sale by the capitalists--falls.

This means, first, that ownership of capital will more and more greatly centralize into fewer and fewer hands, while the mass of the working class will more greatly expand. Here is the basis, solidly rooted in the capitalist system itself, for the rise of these sociopathic, eugenicist billionaires threatening humanity itself. And so if by some miracle, aliens kidnapped these maniacs onto their flying saucers, and spirited them off to another galaxy, so they couldn’t carry out their fiendish schemes, another crop of such ilk would soon take their place.

From an economic system mostly characterized by competition between multitudes of small family owned businesses, in the early part of the nineteenth century, capitalism, by its very internal drive, has led to monopoly capitalism, and then what Hilferding, Bukharin ,and Lenin called “Finance Capital”: where a tiny group of bankers and financiers--like Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street--now own and control most of the economy. To wish, as Proudhon did, to have capitalism without its tendency toward monopoly, is like wishing for “Catholicism without the Pope”.

The capitalists will attempt to compensate for this fall in the rate of profit, by increasing their investment in production, so that even though the rate falls, the mass of profit will stay the same, or even, for a time, during the boom phase of the long economic cycle, rise. But eventually the fall in the rate of profit will catch up with the mass of profit, bringing it down as well, until there is a crisis. This crisis reaches explosive proportions, because to increase their investment, the capitalists will resort to borrowing more and more heavily, bidding up their stock profiles, etc. So when the crash comes, it’s all the more devastating.

We have seen such a crisis unfold, since the 2008 crash. As a result of this crisis, and frustration of the working and other lower classes throughout the world, as Van der Pijl has revealed[ii], the greatest upsurge in global popular protest occurred shortly before the pandemic was announced.

         The Flaws in the “Progressive” Reformist Response to the Crisis

In response to the plandemic, Progressives, or former Progressives, such as Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Del Bigtree, and Emanuel, have called for what is essentially mere “better government” We need to restore the Constitution, Emanuel argues--forgetting that the Constitution itself was created by the elite ruling class of that era, and, that it created merely a new form of monarchy, which they knew their class could control: as Randolph Bourne points out in his posthumously published, 1918 essay “The State”, and as has been later documented by the great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood.

On the other hand, Kennedy and Bigtree argue that we just need better regulatory agencies, freed from the control of unscrupulous Big Pharma corporations. They thus ignore the historical record, established by historians Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein. Their history of the Progressive movement, shows that despite the dreams of its rank and file, professional management supporters that it would rein in both the abuses of the Robber Barons, and the “dangers” they saw in a socialist workers revolution, the Progressive movement and government reforms were largely created, and controlled, by the very same corporations whose abuses this movement would supposedly regulate.

Mere Reform of The Modern State Cannot Be Looked To for Our Salvation:

It is “...but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”[iii]

The capitalist state is controlled by the capitalist class, just as much as that class controls our economy. It always has been this way. As Engels, and Lenin, and Bourne, argued, it cannot be used to reconcile the interests of the contending classes--the interests of the working class, with that of the ruling capitalist class. It can not be used to rein in the problems of capitalism. To those who think it can, we respond by saying that the the same analogy--that wishing for Catholicism without the Pope--applies to the idea that the ruling class, this tiny , extremely powerful fraction of the human race--or their replacement by aliens--will suffer lightly the prospect of giving up their extreme wealth, privilege and power to the vast working majority of this planet, without resort to the most fiendish of means: and, as we have seen, with the full complicity of their political lieutenants: political officials, trade union bureaucrats, and administrators.

We Call Upon the Working Class, Explicitly, for Socialist Revolution!

The pandemic, or rather, the plandemic, was created to contain this upsurge by the global working class. And so it is to this class--and not to these fantasies of reforming the capitalist economic system or its State--that we must turn, for our salvation and liberation. This majority class has the power and the basic potential inclination, due to its alienation, to defeat the Capitalists’ Great Reset

The calls by John Spritzler and by Chuck Fall for a program to appeal to the demands and needs of the working class for health, housing, education, etc. are thus calls we in the White Rose heartily welcome. These are akin to Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Program[iv], an early version of which he and the Bolsheviks called for in the summer of 1917, to raise the consciousness of the Russian working class, to bring about the October Revolution. Through this program, we make demands that our deeply felt by the working class to raise their political consciousness about their need and their power to create a socialist revolution and society.

But we want to argue now that such demands must be coupled with an explicit message that socialism must be our goal. While we should try to make our movement as big as possible, and should make our case for socialism to everybody we can, those to whom we award membership, should have to “earn it”. They have to embrace our socialist goals. Otherwise, we invite a lot of trouble later on. Instead of an organic movement, like a Leviathan, with a common purpose and direction, we can easily become Behemoth, and dissolve into disparate factions.

The Need for Centralized Authority/Discipline, Promoted by a Democratic Coalition of Revolutionary Parties Representing Different Subaltern Classes (Working, Middle, Peasant)

Taking as our source, the views of Marx and Engels and their Communist League in the 1840s and early 50s, as well as from the history of socialist revolutions in the twentieth century--specifically, with all their strengths and weaknesses, both the Russian and the Spanish Revolutions, we believe that this socialist political system would be held together, and attain its cohesion and revolutionary discipline, by a coalition of revolutionary parties, representative of both the working class and its middle class and, in relatively non-industrial, non-ubanized societies, peasant allies.

There was such an alliance that lasted briefly between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, in the Russian Revolution, before this coalition fell apart. I agree with historian Robert Payne[v] that this coalition did not have to be destroyed, that the Left SRs conspired neither to kill the German ambassador, nor stage a coup against Soviet rule. Instead, I follow Payne in arguing that the whole thing was a false flag operation, a State Crime Against Democracy, perpetrated by Lenin and supported by Trotsky. This is proven by the facial expressions and comments made by Lenin and Trotsky, recorded and reported by Trotsky himself, during the meeting after news of the assassination was announced--and by the fact that the lead assassin of Mirbach was welcomed with open arms into the Communist Party a few year later, and then into Trotsky’s Left Opposition!

But even it the leadership of the Left SRs was complicit in the murder of Mirbach (not just after the fact, when they took responsibility for it, but beforehand) and even if this leadership did plan to overthrow the Bolshevik regime--still, we believe, this was not a legitimate reason for what the Bolsheviks did “in response”: suppress the entire party--the party that represented the majority of the Russian population!

Lenin was misguided into doing this, by his mistaken belief in the totalitarian scheme, which he derived from his idol, the Populist Blanquist Petr Tkachev, that one and only one doctrinally pure proletarian party can and should rule Russia to achieve socialism. And so here we do have revolutionary discipline, which did permit the Bolsheviks to defeat the White counterrevolutionaries. But it was based not upon a democratic alliance with the majority, but instead, political repression. Thus it devolved in just a few years into the Stalinist quagmire.

According to then-member of the U.S. Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party Felix Morrow, in his 1938 book, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain[vi], such an alliance was also proposed by the Trotskyist “Bolshevik-Leninists” in the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s: in a leaflet of theirs on July 19, 1936, which pointed “the road [forward]: the united front of struggle of the CNT-FAI, POUM, the Bolshevik-Leninists and the dissident anarchists: [and] between themselves and the anarchist ‘Friends of Durruti’”. But because this alliance was not attempted in time, according to historian Burnett Boloton, in his The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, it lacked the necessary discipline that might have prevented the Stalinist class collaborators from subverting and destroying the revolutionary process. So here we do have a potential alliance, which was beginning to form. And yet precisely because the anarchists adopted the same doctrine of pure voluntary communalism that Bookchin, John, and Chuck espouse, this alliance failed to stop the victory of the fascists, because it lacked the centralized authority and discipline, and thus the cohesion and the vigilance against class collaboration, necessary to stop the victory of the fascists.

Clearly, from the historical record, both the alliance of revolutionary parties, and the exercise of centralized authority, are required, if liberation is to be achieved. One, without the other, will fail--and fail miserably and horribly. The Stalinist quagmire. The victory of Franco.

The Problems with Anarchist and neo-Anarchist Doctrines Which Believe That We Don’t Need the Working Class, or Revolutionary Authority, for Liberation

Let’s deal with the anarchist alternative to socialism, promoted by both the late Murray Bookchin, by Chuck Fall, and by John Spritzler: libertarian muncipalism/voluntary communalism.

As I’ve written elsewhere, such schemes simply will not work. They hold an enormous potential to break down into social chaos. John claims that his scheme is not anarchist, because, like Henry David Thoreau, he doesn’t want an end to all government. He just wants “at once a better government” (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience), “good” (John) government. But such a government is not the democratic workers' State that we Marxists understand is necessary. John’s good government contains absolutely no centralized authority. While this may not be formally anarchistic, it borrows heavily from the anti-authoritarianism of anarchism. But theirs is not in line, at least not formally, with the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner or the playwright and lyricist Maxwell Anderson. They support instead the communal, as opposed to individualist, branch of anarchist doctrine

However, this only shifts the locus of reification, from the individual, to that of the local community.

The individualist anarchist raises to the heights of reverence, as an absolute good, bourgeois individualism. Marx discusses the contradictions in this individualism in Part I of his essay, “On the Jewish Question”. Here he notes the contradiction created by the bourgeois political revolution in France in 1789, which on the one hand, overthrew the feudal absolutist ancien regime, but on the other, produced a kind of split personality in every member of society. Regretfully, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this split is not acknowledged by Emanuel, when he calls upon us to think of ourselves purely as citizens. As citizens, we have the right to fully participate in the political community. This means we get to go into a ballot box and vote for the candidate that we prefer among the two pre-selected by the ruling class. And it means, when our views are convenient for the ruling class (and not judged to be “disinformation” by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and co.!) that we have freedom of speech and assembly. On the other hand, the individual possesses an absolute abstract right, here back on Earth, not just not to take the shots, or to have an abortion (rights I of course both agree with), but also, and primarily, to build a fence around his own private property and tell the community to go to hell if they try to interfere with his plot of land.

Instead of reifying the individual as the bearer of sovereignty, Bookchin, John, and Chuck, our communal anti-authoritarians, reify the local community. Here too, there is a fence--but a fence that encompasses a larger area, and more people. Rather than the individual enjoying inalienable rights to absolute sovereignty over himself, it conveys such a right upon the local community. The local community must be permitted to go its own way, without regard to any directives foisted upon it by the regional, national, or global assemblies of popular delegates.

In an exchange I had with him via email, John pointed to the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution as providing an example of his ideal of voluntary communalism. He argued that the only reason why the Spanish Revolution failed, was because the anarchists refused to “take power” and create a ‘good’ government. As I pointed out in my response, this begs the question of how such a popular good government, could prevail, and how it could function, without the exercise of central authority, and compliance by local communities and individuals with that authority?

A more accurate assessment of the problems with the Spanish Revolution was made by the then-Trotskist Felix Morrow. In his book written at the time (1938), Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain, Morrow argued that the main problem with the anarchists was not just that they rejected the project of wresting national state power away from the bourgeois Republican government, but more importantly, precisely the fact that they either rejected the construction of such central authority, or were too slow in creating it. This permitted the class collaborators--the Stalinists, socialists, the big Anarchist leaders--to undermine the revolution, and this paved the way for the fascist victory by Franco.

The truth is that any local community is riven by differences in class. Superimposed upon, and only roughly corresponding to, those class differences--as Antonio Gramsci argued--there are differences in ideological propensity to support, or oppose, bourgeois ideological and cultural hegemony. While there is a strong tendency for the middle class to be petite bourgeois in their consciousness, nevertheless, most if not all of the revolutionary leaders of the 19th and 20th century--Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, etc.--were from the middle class, or even, as with Engels, a member of the capitalist class. Similarly the workers, driven by their coerced participation in the estranged capitalist labor process, have a strong tendency toward egalitarianism (as John has written), socialism and revolution. But, as a result of the treachery and opportunism of their reformist trade union, and Labour, Social Democratic, Communist misleaders, they also can be bound up with pro-capitalist and authoritarian tendencies. As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote and sung about these betrayals of the working class, in what is probably the Rolling Stones’ most politically communist, 1968 album, Beggars Banquet, in the last song on the album, “Salt of the Earth”, “they need leading but get gamblers instead.”

Just attend a MAGA rally, and you’ll see what I mean. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and as unpalatable as this may sound, some people need to be “forced to be free.” No, I’m not advocating mRNA vaccine mandates. What I’m advocating is revolutionary discipline.

Thus you cannot trust, as John does, purely in the “egalitarian tendencies” of the masses, middling and working, to get them to see that they all must ‘cooperate with the Revolution’. There needs to be some level of political pressure exerted on those who refuse to fall into line. Even John’s assertion, based on this naive view, that the anarchists creation of agricultural collectives throughout Catalonia was on a purely voluntary basis, was disputed by historian Burnett Bolloton, in his book, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. He revealed that while many of the peasants joined the collectives voluntarily, many were reluctant, and only did so because they came under enormous pressure by the anarchists. John replied to my presentation of this fact, by arguing that the Spanish anarchists fell short of his ideal, and that we should nevertheless try to implement it. But this begs the question: if the Spanish Revolutionary example was his example for this ideal, and they actually didn’t implement it, where is the objective evidence that his ideal will actually work, rather than just exist as a utopia--a word whose use for this instance is accurate--it means “nowhere”.

John Spritzler argues that his ideal voluntary communal society can be held together by an ethos of sharing, which working people, as opposed to the oligarchs, are endowed with.

But such an ethos also imbued tribal society—alongside a fratricidal, militaristic ethos—the omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all, which Hobbes, rightly, thought was the human social condition before civilization. So just the ethos of sharing is not enough !. What is needed is some institutional basis by which to tie the local communities to each other and to regional and global human community. Thus we do need higher bodies, whose members are delegated by the majority, to make decisions about issues that are of a broader scale than just those of particular concern to the local community. This is particularly important with regard to matters of economic planning. Each community making its own decisions about how it will provide for itself, with the resources it possesses, will easily devolve into a chaotic situation, where those, as in the Billie Holiday song, God Bless the Child:

Them that's got shall get

Them that's not shall lose

So the Bible said and it still is news

Thus there needs to be, along with decentralized decision making, central economic planning.

The coalition of revolutionary parties, led by the vanguard party of the working class, albeit structured democratically, with decisions made by delegates in proportion to their support by election from the workers’, urban middle class’, and peasants’ councils, must be the glue that holds the whole thing together. This coalition will strive to win majorities on the higher delegated bodies as well as local community assemblies.

Bookchin and Other Anti-Authoritarians’ Pessimistic Dismissal of the Working Class as the Agency for Liberation.

Chuck has argued for Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism”, and counterpoises this to Marxism. I would say that Bookchin’s idea of libertarian municipalism, and his concomitant rejection of Marxism, has two bases, both of which were deeply flawed:

I.                    The notion, shared unfortunately by leading members of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse—that the bourgeoisie by the 1950s had done two things

a.      Resolved and ended the tendency of the capitalist system toward long term crisis

b.      Socio-psychologically incorporated the working class into acceptance of capitalism, completely, once and for all future time.

Thus for Bookchin, the dialectic of history no longer results in class struggle. It results instead in a struggle “between the nation-state and the municipal confederation”.

This pessimistic view has obviously become obsolete. The class struggle has, as everyone has noticed  over the years returned with a vengeance.

When, where and how, through what social and political agency, is this “municipal confederation” arising to take on the nation-state? If he means anarchist confederations, like the old “Love and Rage North American” one, these tendencies tend decidedly to be underpopulated: as a result of both the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, which, now more than ever, gets working people to wave their flags, vote for Trump, and yell “USA, USA, USA!”, as well as just plain common sense shared by most working people that this is not the way to go about meeting their basic needs or in improving their living and working conditions.

If such a confederation of municipalities did manage to arise, what would prevent the capitalist class from using its army and its intelligence operatives to crush one of them after another? What these municipalities lack, what the working class possesses, is the latter’s potential class power: their capacity to shut down all production on at least a nation-wide if not global scale. Cities just can’t do that. So what’s their special power?

In the German Revolution of 1923, according to the account by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello[vii]. Trotsky saw a chance to build upon the electoral victories of the Centrist Independent Social Democratic Party (the USPD) in the regions of Saxony and Thuringia. The USPD had invited the Communists to join their governments. The Communists refused. But Trotsky, now increasingly sidelined by Stalin’s machine in the Kremlin, argued that they should have joined these regional governments, and used their ministerial positions to give out arms to the masses. Then there would have opened up the possibility of using these regions as “red bases”, from which to launch a revolutionary civil war.

What would Bookchin, in his liberatory municipal days, as opposed to his later, more mature “Third Revolution” work, have said to this? What would Chuck and John say to this. “No, no, no! Each region and each city must, all by their lonesome, all by themselves, decide whether or not they want to join a Revolution”?!

Really?!

A revolutionary situation only comes rarely if ever. It’s not a cafeteria line, where each person determines whether they want to have meat, fish, or vegetables; pacificsm, or armed revolt and civil war! Carpe diem! Seize the day! You must do everything you can to win! Otherwise, the bourgeoisie will crush you! And thus voluntarism is not the order of the day. As Tariq Ali writes, “Where there is no revolutionary party or one that has been defeated and decapitated, it is reaction rather than reform that triumphs.”[viii]

II.               Bookchin in effect rejected Marxism because its Russian version—distorted greatly by Lenin’s Blanquist penchant for building a one party state—failed to create liberation. Prematurely, he concludes from the devolution of Bolshevism into Stalinism that any and all socialist projects, as well as parties, must devolve into a Stalinist nightmare, because it advocated centralized control.

This response is more phobic than reasonable. The more Orthodox Bolshevik Leninists--such as the current leader of the Workers League--explain the failure of the Russian Revolution as purely the result of the imperialist invasion, encirclement, and boycott, and the treachery of the Central and Western European Social Democrats. As I hope you heard in the previous part of this speech, I also attribute it, however, to the Bolsheviks’ machinations by which they destroyed their alliance with the majority party, the Left SRs, and then suppressed that party. Whatever these explanations you choose to accept, they are far more credible, because they dwell with the particulars, than Murray Bookchin’s anti-communist explanation. It’s not because the Bolsheviks were communist, or that they believed in centralized authority, that their Revolution failed to produce liberation. Centralized authority during a revolution may harbor the danger of tyranny. The far greater danger, however, is the victory of fascism. And so, centralized authority must be accepted, as a kind of lesser, but necessary evil.

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Notes:

[i]https://againstthecurrent.org/atc034/socialism-edelstein/

[ii]Kees van der Pijl, States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check. Clarity Press, 2022.

[iii]Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.

[iv]Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/

[v]Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, 1964.

[vi]https://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1938/revolution-spain/index.htm

[vii]Trotsky and Gramsci: debates on strategy concerning the revolution in the ‘West’  https://www.estrategiainternacional.org/IMG/pdf/trotsky_and_gramsci-ea-mm_final_eng.pdf

[viii]Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution. Verso, 2017. P. 6.

Two new books on the German Revolution of 1923 have just been published, just last year. Perhaps the GLC will join with the White Rose in starting a reading group on this history?

      I.        1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Hitler's Putsch Hardcover – August 29, 2023

by  Mark William Jones

     II.        Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis

By Volker Ullrich and tr. Jefferson Chase

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