Ten
Days That Shook The World
There's a Valley in Spain Called Jarama...
Third Way, the
Twenty-One Conditions, The
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Ten
Days That Shook The World
The title of a book
by American journalist John Reed (1887-1920), published in 1919 and
with a foreward by Lenin. This was one of the few eyewitness accounts
of the Russian Revolution in English (another was by Arthur Ransome,
better known for his Swallows and Amazons books), written from
a pro-Bolshevik point of view. Archive film clips, Eisenstein reconstructions
and the voiceover of Orson Welles later combined in an excellent documentary
film with the same title. The ten days that shook the world ran from
16-26 October, 1917 (Old Style).
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There's
a Valley in Spain Called Jarama...
A song of the Spanish
Civil War's Abraham Lincoln Battalion (whose fine internet archive site
is here), sung to the tune of "Red River".
The Dictionary of the Turtle presents here two sets of words:
we believe the first set is more commonly sung today, but that the second
set are the original words, written by British volunteer Alex McDade
shortly after the battle for Jarama in February 1937.
FIRST VERSION
There's a valley
in Spain called Jarama,
It's a place that we all know so well.
It was there that we gave of our manhood,
And there that our brave comrades fell.
We are proud of the Lincoln Battalion,
And the fight for Madrid that we made,
Where we fought like true sons of the people,
That Fascism never should reign!
Now we're leaving this valley of sorrows,
And its memories we'll never forget.
So before we continue this reunion,
Let us stand to our glorious dead!
SECOND VERSION
There's a valley
in Spain called Jarama,
It's a place that we all know so well.
For 'tis there that we wasted our manhood,
And most of our old age as well.
From this valley they tell us we're leaving,
But don't hasten to bid us adieu,
For e'en though we make our departure,
We'll be back in an hour or two.
Oh we're proud of the Lincoln Battalion,
And the marathon record it's made,
Please do us this little favour,
And take this last word to brigade:
"You will never be happy with strangers;
They would not understand you as we,
So remember the Jarama valley
And the old men who wait patiently.
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Third
Way, the
By now we are all
well aware of the historical antecedents of Tony Blair's Third Way,
whether it is one of the (failed) attempts by Thomas Aquinas to prove
the existence of God or the more recent (failed) effort of the Italian
Communist Party to navigate a parliamentary road to socialism. The most
important precursor, however, is the use of the label by apologists
for fascism in midcentury Europe, who were concerned to chart a new
politics beyond liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism. And, interestingly
enough, this discourse on occasion produced political analyses that
sounded strikingly similar to those of the New Labour Modernisers.
Take Angelo Tasca,
for example. Tasca (1892-1960) is best known for his activities in the
Italian Communist Party in the 1920s, where he was one of the leading
opponents of Antonio Gramsci in the debates over party organisation
and strategy. Having been expelled from the Communist Party in 1929,
he wound up in France, where he made the significant error of choosing
to collaborate with the Vichy regime, for which he occupied an important
post in the Ministry of Information. According to Alexander De Grand's
political biography, In Stalin's Shadow (Northern Illinois University
Press, 1986, p.161), Tasca introduced the idea of the Third Way in courses
he gave at Vichy training academies. The key text was a set of lectures
on 'Le role de l'état' delivered in April 1943; it remains
unpublished, in the Tasca archives at the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli
in Milan, but De Grand usefully highlights some of the key themes in
Tasca's political thinking during this period.
In particular, Tasca
called for a reconceptualisation of the idea of rights, as he
sought a new understanding of rights that would be distinct from both
a liberal treatment of rights as inviolable possessions and the totalitarian
ambition to have the scope and content of all rights dictated by the
state. Tasca also broke decisively with the socialism he had hitherto
espoused. He rejected, for example, the natural equality of citizens,
and went as far as to insist that there was no "problem of the
élites" and that "the masses" were a "negative
factor in the Revolution". (The Pétainists, of course, used
the radical rhetoric of the "National Revolution" as a front
for their politics of conservative authoritarianism, of Travail,
Famille, Patrie in place of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité).
Tasca further argued that the middle class was the sole active historical
force; he emphasised themes of social stability and inter-class harmony;
and he thought that those who sought change should work for a moral
transformation of the already existing political class, rather than
seek to transform the social or economic structure of France.
The Turtle wonders
whether he or she is the only one to hear the not-so-faint echoes here
of much New Labour ideology. Tony Blair has made much of his "social"
understanding of "rights and responsibilities", of course,
but many other New Labour buzzwords happily slot into the ideological
framework which Tasca was sketching out: "equality of opportunity",
"modernisation", "middle England", "Tory sleaze",
"social exclusion", and so on, ad nauseam. This is
more than a mere coincidental use of the same Third Way label here;
in these lectures Tasca seems to have presented a significant statement
of the guiding principles of Tony Blairism. There are, to be sure, important
arguments against the use of the indiscriminate fascist smear, as Chris
Brooke shows in his review
of John Laughland's excitable book on European union. But one likes
at the very least to believe that those who speak New Labour's language
might be a little more embarrassed than they are, if they realised how
smoothly -- and sincerely -- the same words once tripped off the tongues
of the propagandists of Marshal Pétain's Vichy France.
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Twenty-One
Conditions, The
The Twenty One Conditions,
or the Theses on the Conditions of Admission to the Communist International,
were presented to its Second Congress on 30 July, 1920 by Leon Trotsky,
and passed on 6 August.
Lenin had originally
developed the "Bolshevik" model of political organisation
in What is to be done? as a way of adapting socialist strategy
to the exigencies of the Russian situation where open, legal political
organisation was impossible. By 1920 he was insisting that the success
of the Russian Revolution showed instead that all the Western Communist
Parties should model themselves closely on the Bolshevik strategies.
The entire document is a little long to be included in the Dictionary
of the Turtle in its entirety, but we will make do with a summary
which will highlight the major points.
The first three
conditions introduced the general themes and emphases of the document.
The first condition insisted that "all propaganda and agitation
must bear a really Communist character and that the Party's press activity
must be under control of the political leadership. The second condition
demanded that "every organisation... must regularly and methodically
remove reformsts and centrists from every responsible post in the labour
movement... and replace them with tested Communists". Third, the
party aspiring to membership had to recognise that the class struggle
in the industrialised countries had reached its civil war phase, and
that no trust could be placed in bourgois legality.
The next set of
conditions went into great specificity about the policies and emphases
to be adopted by the Party in its national struggles. Condition four
called for a special propaganda effort to be made in the army. Condition
five demanded agitation in the countryside among the rural proletariat
and poor peasantry, and forbade the Party from entrusting this work
to "unreliable, semi-reformist hands". Sixth, the Party had
to strive to unmask social-patriotism and social-pacifism, wherever
they were to be found. The seventh condition called for a break with
reformism and centrism; the eighth insisted that the Party support movements
for colonial liberation; and the ninth demanded that the Party encourage
the spread of communist activities in the trade unions and other workers'
organisations, to develop communist cells, and to expose "the vacillations
of the centrists". The tenth condition mandated struggle against
the "scab" Amsterdam International. The eleventh insisted
that the Party's parliamentary faction be reliable, militant, communist
and disciplined. The twelfth demanded that the principles of democratic
centralism be adopted. The Party was, in the thirteenth condition, required
to purge itself of petty-bourgeois elements from time to time. It had,
number fourteen, to give uncondititional support to actually-existing
soviet republics. And it was required by condition fifteen, if applicable,
to replace its old social-democratic programme with an authentically
communist one.
The final set of
conditions dealt with the Party's relationship with the international
Communist movement. The sixteenth condition insisted that the Party
accept the binding authority of the decisions of the Congresses and
Executive Committees of the International itself (which must, however,
"take into account the differing conditions under which the individual
Parties have to fight and work"). The seventeenth condition mandated
the name "Communist Party". The eighteenth condition called
for the national Party press to print the important documents that emanated
from the International itself. Number nineteen required that the Party
hold a special congress to approve the Twenty One Conditions. Number
twenty demanded that two thirds of the central committee of any party
wanting to join the International consist of "comrades who even
before th Second Congress of the Communist International spoke out unambiguously
in public" supporting membership. And the final, Twenty First Condition,
laid down that any Party member who rejected these Conditions was to
be expelled.
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