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Reconstruction is in the air. One of the first principles of reconstruction is the freedom of women through birth control.
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March, 1919 3
"THE HOUR
HAS OF THCOME"
E PEOPLE
PROLETARIANS? Men and Women of labor! Comrades! " The revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of the soldiers who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse for the sake of capitalistic profits; the masses of workers, who for four years were exploited, crushed, and starved, have revolted. That fearful tool of oppression-Prussian militarism, that scourge of humanity-lies broken on the ground. Its most noticeable representatives, and therewith the most noticeable of those guilty of this war, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince, have fled from the country. Workers and Soldiers' Councils have been formed everywhere.
" Proletarians of all countries, we do not say that in Germany all the power has really been lodged in the hands of the working people, that the complete triumph of the proletarian revolution has already been attained. There still sit in the Government all those Socialists who in August, 1914, abandoned our most precious possession, the International, who for four years betrayed the German working class and at the same time the International.
" But, proletarians of all countries, now the German proletarian himself is speaking to you. 'We believe we have the right to appear before your forum in his name. From the first day of this war we endeavored to do our international duty by fighting that criminal Government with all our power and branding it as the one really guilty of the war.
" Now at this moment we are justified before history, be-fore the International and before the German proletariat. The masses agree with us enthusiastically, constantly widening circles of the proletariat share the knowledge that the hour has struck for a settlement with capitalist class rule.
" But this great task cannot be accomplished by the German proletariat alone; it can only fight and triumph by appealing to the solidarity of the proletarians of the whole world.
" Comrades of the belligerent countries, we are aware of your situation. We know very well that your Governments, now since they have won the victory, are dazzling the eyes of many strata of the people with the external brilliancy of the triumph. We know that they thus succeed through the success of the murdering in making its causes and aims forgotten.
" But we also know something else. We know that also in your countries the proletariat made the most fearful sacrifices of flesh and blood, that it is weary of the dreadful butchery, that the proletarian is now returning to his home, and is finding want and misery there, while fortunes amounting to billions are heaped up in the hands of a few capitalists.
" The imperialism of all countries knows no ' understanding,' it knows only one right-capital's profits; it knows only one language-the sword; it knows only one method-violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well as ours, about the ' League of Nations,' ` disarma
went,' ' rights of small nations,' ' self-determination of the peoples,' it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.
" Proletarians of all countries! This must be the last war! We owe that to the 12,000,000 murdered victims, we owe that to our children, we owe that to humanity.
" Europe has been ruined through the infamous international murder. Twelve million bodies cover the grewsome scenes of the imperialistic crime. The flower of youth and the best man power of the peoples have been mowed down. Uncounted productive forces have been annihilated. Humanity is almost ready to bleed to death from the unexampled blood-letting of history. Victors and vanquished stand at the edge of the abyss. Humanity is threatened with the most dreadful famine, a stoppage of the entire mechanism of production, plagues, and degeneration.
" The great criminals of this fearful anarchy, of this chaos let loose-the ruling classes-are not able to control their own creation. The beast of capital that conjured up the hell of the world war is not capable of banishing it again, of restoring real order, of insuring bread and work, peace and civilization, justice and liberty, to tortured humanity.
" What is being prepared by the ruling classes as peace and justice is only a new work of brutal force from which the hydra of oppression, hatred and fresh bloody wars raises its thousand heads.
" Socialism alone is in a position to complete the great work of permanent peace, to heal the thousand wounds from which humanity is bleeding, to transform the plains of Europe, trampled down by the passage of the apocryphal horseman of war, into blooming gardens, to conjure up ten productive forces for every one destroyed, to awaken all the physical and moral energies of humanity, and to replace hatred and dissension with fraternal solidarity, harmony, and respect for every human being.
" And therefore we call to you: ` Arise for the struggle ! Arise for action ! The time for empty manifestos, platonic resolutions, and high-sounding words has gone by! The hour of action has struck for the International ! ' We ask you to elect Workers' and Soldiers' Councils everywhere that will seize political power and, together with us, will restore peace.
" Not Lloyd-George and Poincare, not Sonnino, Wilson, and Erzberger or Scheidemann, must be allowed to make peace. Peace is to be concluded under the waving banner of the socialist world revolution.
" KLARA ZETKIN,
"'ROSA LUXEMBURG,
" KARL LIEBKNECHT, " FRANZ MEHRING."
• manifesto issued by the Spartacans a few weeks before Llebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed. Reprinted from the N. Y. Times.
THE LIBERATOR
Vol. 1, No. 13 March, 1919
EDITORIALS
T HE Peace Conference has invited the Soviet Government to " come down behind the barn," and talk it over. This is a recognition of their power, if not a tribute to their merit, and we have no doubt that with some perfectly reasonable stipulations, they will accept the proposal.
An interesting feature of the matter is that the " democratic " governments at Ornsk, Archangel, Paris and else-where, replied immediately to the Allied proposal. The " dictators " at Moscow had to consult their constituents.
Meanwhile they telegraphed to Comrade Jean Longuet of the French Majority Socialists, asking for advice as to the meaning of the Allied proposal. Comrade Longuet says that he is " touched by their confidence in him." We surmise that he was meant to be touched, and even perhaps a little bit gently pushed into the clear position where he belongs.
Bob Minor and the Bolsheviki
SEVERAL years ago the New York World fired Robert Minor from their staff and took measures to avoid any further association of their name with his. The reason was that Robert Minor had become an anarchist.
Today Minor is featured as a former member of their staff by the New York World in a sensational cablegram from Europe, in which he repudiates Nicolai Lenin and denounces the Soviet Government. He denounces them because they are not anarchistic enough, and nobody who understands the difference between Anarchism and Social-ism, or understands Bob Minor, will be unduly surprised. But the World so handles this cablegram as to let it appear that Minor was a " radical socialist," who, after going to Russia and seeing a socialist government in operation, got disillusioned and came back into the Bourgeois fold.
Fortunately for those who desire to get the truth about Russia, Bob Minor's personal integrity is above question, and he quotes actual words which Lenin spoke to him. Every one of these words is so wise, and calm, and practical, that we give profound thanks that Lenin, the socialist, and not Bob Minor, the anarchist, is in the position of leadership of the international proletariat.
Here is the principal part of the interview:
" I have just come from Moscow, where, a little more than one week ago, I had a talk with Lenin which bears materially upon the present difficulty in which the Entente finds itself
in relation to the Bolshevik Government. Previously I had talked with him casually during my stay of nine months in Russia. This time Lenin knew he was giving an interview, and he appreciated the effect it might have on the outside world. As far as I know it is the only interview he ever granted since he has been in power in Russia . . . .
" I may say it is not easy for the Bolshevik chiefs to show any spirit of compromise before the anarchist forces in Russia, which, while they are fast subsiding, yet remain much stronger than the men who are trying to rule Russia. I approached Lenin with the view of helping him to pave the way for a definite answer to the invitation to the various Russian factions to meet in conference with representatives of the Allies at Princes' Islands, in the Sea of '_Marmara. I said to him I was leaving Russia and wanted something definite to carry away. He exchanged glances with his collaborator, Boris Reinstein, the former Buffalo soapbox orator, and slowly replied:
The Russian Government would be inclined to pay its debts if by that means the war against it could be stopped.' As he spoke I wrote down the words and read them aloud. ' That is correct,' he said.
" After silence for a moment he went on : "We want peace and have proposed peace many times, but '-pausing with an expression of intense seriousness-' we are prepared to go on with the war, and are confident of victory. Our armies have had fine successes since the capture of Kazan and Samara, down to the present time. In the last few days we have heard of nothing but new victories.'
" Lenin evidently intended to rest with that, and so I approached to the second point of the interview.
"'What about the League of Nations?' I asked him. ' Has the recent entry of the Menshevik leaders into the government affected the eligibility of the Soviets for the League of Nations?'
"Lenin caught me up before I had finished, his usually mild voice becoming suddenly harsh. ` They are not forming a League of Nations,' he said, ' but a league of imperialists to strangle the nations. President Wilson is a shrewd man,' he added dryly.
" Turning to the other angle of the question he continued:
` The Menshevist Martoff Caine into the government be-cause he saw he must choose between the Russian Soviet and extreme reaction.'
` What are the Allies going to do with their troops in Russia?' he demanded. ' Do they want to support the old feudal interest here, which is comparable to the German
6 THE LIBERATOR
Dunker interests? What are the American soldiers like individually; would they be susceptible to propaganda?'
" In order to regain control of the interview, I asked:
"' What will you do if the Allies send big armies against you? '
' If they send anything short of very big armies,' he replied, ` we will defeat them.'
' And if they do send very big armies?' I persisted.
" `Then they will make a very big war,' he answered, smiling, but without mirth.
" `How soon will the revolution get to America?' was his question. The tone was confident. He did not ask me IF it would reach America, but WHEN, as if he took for granted that some day the red flag would wave in Washington. I did not reply, and he went on.
' America is a great country, great in technical achievements. Marvellous developments are possible there. The American Daniel De Leon first formulated the idea of a Soviet government, which grew up in Russia on his idea. Future society will be organized along Soviet lines. There will be Soviet rather than geographical boundaries for nations. Industrial unionism is the basic state. That is what we are building.' "
And here are Bob Minor's antagonistic comments:
" I did not agree with Lenin's idea of what he is building, but said nothing. There is no more industrial unionism in Lenin's highly centralized institutions than in the United States Post Office. What he calls industrial unionism is nothing but nationalized industry in the highest degree of centralization."
" Lenin could not afford to tell the whole truth about the entrance of non-Bolsheviki into the government, for he must maintain the intransigent front. The main fact in the new situation is that the so-called nationalization of Russian industry has put insurgent industry back into the hands of the business class, who disguise their activities by giving orders under the magic title of ' People's Commissaries.'
Anarchism is a natural philosophy for artists. It is literary, not scientific an emotional evangel, not a practical movement of men. With the spirit of the 18th century libertarians, who never saw industrial capitalism, the anarchists still think that human freedom can be achieved through the mere negation of restraint. They have no appreciation of the terrific problem of organization involved in revolutionizing the modern world. What the working-class has to accomplish is to reconstruct a tremendous and complex machine of social industry, so that besides producing an increased quantity of economic goods, it will distribute those goods to the people who produced them. They have to abolish the economic slavery involved in the present system, and until that is accomplished any conflicting ideal of freedom is a superficial impertinence. That is what the anarchists, like the liberals, find it impossible to see.
So it is not a new thing for an honest and artistic apostle of anarchist rebellion to denounce "the march of the iron
battalions of the proletariat " as " nationalized," and " centralized," and all the other bad names for good organization. When Bob Minor tells us that Lenin and Trotsky have advanced their own salaries above the prevailing wage-scale, then we will begin to listen to these old complaints.
It is a new thing, however, for an anarchist to retail his criticisms of any proletarian movement to a capitalist news-paper which will use them, as he well knows, for an attack on all proletarian movements-socialist, anarchist or trade-unionist. And to understand this, we have to know another strange fact about Bob Minor. Just before he sailed for Russia he went down to Washington for a week, and there he fell under the spell of some strong men who had been inoculated with the Wilson virus. He came back to New York full of dark and mysterious intimations that the president of the United States was only waiting until he won the war, to put over a truly monumental program of world-wide economic democratization. Only a little while after that, we saw the men who had inoculated Bob Minor with this too pervasive malady, and they were already cured and completely disillusioned. But Bob was gone then. We had induced him to put down on paper, not for publication but just for a memorandum, this great budding faith of his which surprised us so much more in him than it would have in ourselves. We still have the memorandum, and it looks sick indeed in these days of the Grand Council of the Silk Hats of Democracy.
Bob Minor needs to come home and get arrested a little.
MAX EASTMAN.
THE LIBERATOR.
A Journal of Revolutionary Progress
Editors, Max Eastman
Crystal Eastman
Associate Editor, Floyd Dell Business Manager, Margaret Lane
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS :
Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, K. R. Chamberlain, Eugene V. Debs, Hugo Gellert, Arturo Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, Maurice Sterne, Alexander Trachtenberg, Louis Untermeyer, Clive Weed, Art Young.
Published monthly and copyright 1919, by the
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at New York City pending.
March, 1919 7
Anarchist Sabotage
(We are able to add this further word, in explanation of
the Lenin Interviews, from an d,nerican observer of
Russian affairs.)
B OB MINOR in his anti-Bolshevik articles in The World talks as if the Bolshevik revolution were originally brought about by Anarchist forces, and that these were gradually subdued by the machinations of Lenin, Trotsky & Co., who are now running a kind of highly centralized state Socialism. The facts are quite otherwise-and Bob ought to know it.
When he arrived in Petrograd in April, nearly six months after the inauguration of Bolshevism, he found the Anarchists in disgrace with the revolution. Originally a very small party, their ranks had been swelled by new converts from the riff-raff of the aristocracy, who took advantage of Anarchist theories and proceeded to confiscate pocket-books, overcoats, automobiles and empty palaces and residences. The Anarchists had as a result' got the name of being simply hoodlums and thieves. Their representatives in the Soviet acknowledged this disgrace publicly and pleaded that they be allowed to conduct their own " house-cleaning."
Meanwhile, however, the real as well as the fake anarchists conducted a campaign of sabotage against the reorganization of Russia under the Bolshevik regime. They stood for disintegration, ,pure and simple; they opposed everything that made for order and stability.
They made such a nuisance of themselves that they were finally ordered out of the houses which they had taken possession of and from which they were conducting their campaign of disruption, and in an early morning battle their " Black Guards" were defeated and driven out by the Red Guards.
Bob Minor was very much disturbed over this state of affairs. An Anarchist himself, he was being lodged at one of the government hotels by the Bolshevik Government. All he did during this whole period was to draw one anti-German cartoon for the Pravda. He spent his whole time worrying about the Anarchists.
He was ashamed of their conduct, and when an American friend who was returning home threatened to tell in America how the Anarchists had behaved, he pleaded with him not to do so. " Remember," he said, " that the Anarchists in the United States have supported the Bolsheviki. It wouldn't be fair to give Anarchists a black eye by telling how they behaved over here!"
At the same time he was spiritually out of sympathy with the expanding proletarian organization of Bolshevism, and that hostility has finally pushed him over definitely into the anti-Bolsheviki counter-revolutionary movement of sabotage.
His accusation against Bolshevism-that it is merely a disguise in which the bourgeoisie have returned once more to power-is a rehash of the propaganda which appeared day by day in the Anarchist papers of Petrograd. X.
A Letter from Bernard Shaw
E sent Bernard Shaw the Liberator containing an rr account of some " Adventures in Free Speech," which contained the news'that a man had spent four days in jail in Detroit for reading his book, " An Unsocial Socialist," in the street car. Here is his answer:
You must be reasonable: you cannot have glory and liberty at the same time.
But- neither can you have revolution and liberty at the same time. Liebknecht under the Kaiser was treated with extraordinary indulgence (only four years imprisonment for rank treason in the face of the enemy) compared with Americans who ventured to stick to the principles of George Washington (imprisonment for life!) ; and the revolution had just killed him, and treated Rosa Luxemberg as the Septembrists of the French Revolution treated the Princesse de Lamballe.
Four days for reading An Unsocial Socialist is a very lenient sentence. Think of what he would have got if he had been discovered reading the New Testament! G. B. S.
Drawn by William (yapper
"Before we help Russia, we must kill the Bolsheviki F'
Lenin and Wilson
By Max
SOCIALISM is a recognition by persons of democratic mind that the essential facts and forces of mass-history are economic rather than moral or political. The socialist philosopher continually strips off the idealistic disguises by which these facts and forces are shrouded and kept out of the consciousness of people. He seems a little diabolical, a little ironical and ruthless, for that reason, but it is the ruthlessness of intelligent love. He approaches the political and literary ideal-mongers in the way that a psycho-analytic physician approaches a neurotic patient. The physician seeks to uncover simple egotistic and sex motives beneath the over-elaborated ideas which occupy the consciousness of his patient; the socialist uncovers equally simple egotistic and economic motives under the grand langauge of politics and history.
It seems to me that in the art of repressing these motives into the unconscious, and building up ideological " disguise formations,'.' Woodrow Wilson excels any other statesman that ever was born. His speeches and writings are always on a plane so far above the ordinary prepossessions of men as to suggest the meditations of a God, and yet his conduct is shrewd and opportunistic in the extreme. The sharpest possible contrast to this unctious and. Victorian mode of speech is supplied by the few communications that have come from the socialist government in Russia. In them we have the language of concrete purposes. I like to think of a personal meeting between Wilson and Lenin as a result of this invitation to the Sea of Marmora, and I think of Wilson as typifying the bourgeois world in its state of false tension, exalted and all bound up as it is in " defense-mechanism," and of Lenin' as the kind but deadly-candid physician.
Assuming for the sake of brevity that a good deal of conversation has preceded, and the major " resistances " are broken down, we can imagine the physician saying: " I notice, Mr. Wilson, a very frequent recurrence of the word democracy in everything you say. There must be a reason for that. Would you tell me what first comes into your mind now when I saw the word democracy?"
WILSON : I may say that I think of the system which prevails in my own country.
LENIN: Ah, and according to the latest census reports practically all of the visible and tangible material of your country-the land as well as the things that are on it-belong to about ten, or at the most twenty per cent. of the people. Sixty-five per cent. of them, at least, possess only five per cent. of the country. Two per cent. of them possess over sixty per cent. Is that not correct?
W.: I believe that is according to the census.
L.: And your position and income have of course placed you for many years safely among the two per cent.?
Eastman
W.: It is true, I believe, that my income has been as generous as that, although I am not a man of great property. L.: And your social position?
W.: That also is secure.
L.: Now, is it not true that to possess the earth is to possess power upon the earth? Do not these people who own your country own the newspapers, and by that means, and by setting the standards of respectability and propriety, and so influencing the schools and the churches and centers of intercourse, do they not really control the minds of the people?
W.: In a large measure, undoubtedly.
L.: Could you not say then that, except for the purely formal privilege of voting-which by the way is still denied to many women and men of the black race-the majority of the people in your country really have their destinies con-trolled by a small minority?
W.: I cannot think that voting is a purely formal privilege, but I suppose the facts are substantially as you state them.
L.: It is a formal privilege, in so far as wealth means power and influence over the thoughts of people and over their wills, and that you have acknowledged is pretty far.
W.: I did acknowledge it.
L.: When you speak, then, of defending democracy against the " poison of Bolshevism," what you really mean is defending the substantial ascendancy of a small class-ten or at the most twenty per cent.-to which you belong. Is that not true?
W.: I have to confess that you make it seem true.
L.: Only because I insist upon considering the economic relations of men as the vital ones, and I refuse to disguise them with pleasant-sounding political names. For instance, you will notice that we speak of our system as a " dictator-ship of the proletariat." That is from the standpoint of ultimate ideals the very worst name we could give it. The sound is far worse than the fact. Our proletariat already includes more than ninety per cent. of the people, and our resolute purpose is that it shall very soon include them all. Nevertheless, we were convinced that the only way in which a real, or economic, democracy could be established, was for the people who work to take over the sovereign power, and let the other people, if they wanted to participate in the democracy, go to work. And we did not care to pretend that this procedure was any more delicate or gentle than it was, and so we did not call it a " Worker's Republic," or a " Super-Democracy " or a " New Freedom," or any of those eulogistic names such as your press might have supplied. We called it a " Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
W.: May I say that I think that was a diplomatic error?
L.: Yes, but it was a material truth, and it kept our
