RED BUTTERFLIES FLAP THEIR WINGS:
A PARALLEL TWENTIETH CENTURY

First, a small item from our mailbag. We learn that Ernest Amatniek, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away on April 9, 2005 at age 90. The booklet prepared for his memorial tribute was sent to us, and it contains this entry (excerpt):

Hello everybody. . . . As yet have not received your shipment, but the rumor is that it has arrived. The Brigade has a sound truck, so phonograph records can be played. . . . Send Science & Society. Boots would be very good, but they cost too much. Recently we were moved again, past the olive grove. All day long our planes and [the] Fascist[s'] are flying overhead . . .

— letter from Spain, October 11, 1937,
undisclosed location

"Send Science & Society." So, in our own small way, we were there. We thought readers, who can read this issue without fascist planes flying overhead (for the moment, at least!), would like this little item.

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Those of you who are coming of age in the early 21st century need to know your world's recent history, so you can build upon it and meet the new challenges facing you. Here is a thumbnail sketch.

As you of course know, the October Revolution in 1917, born of the carnage of the Great War, ushered in a new post-capitalist era — the defining transition of our time. Surrounded by enemies determined to crush it and saddled with centuries-old cultural and technological backwardness, the Soviet Union nevertheless held its ground. The Soviet Premier, V. I. Lenin, lived until 1933, when he died at the age of 63. In the late 1920s he formulated a comprehensive vision for socialist construction in insufficient conditions, with two main pillars: first, the absolute importance of harnessing the religious feelings and consciousness of the vast majority of peasants and workers to the socialist project, and isolating the authoritarian upper levels of the Church hierarchy; second, placing ground-level mobilization and a culture of critical debate and controversy at the core of socialist development.

The first of these led to the famous Red Priests movement in the USSR, which captured the imagination of people in many parts of the world and led to a Christian-Marxist dialog in Western Europe, the USA and Latin America, as well as the massive jami'a allah wa ijtamiya ("Society of God and Socialism") movement in the Islamic world. The second was embodied in many aspects of early socialist construction, including direct election of enterprise managers, team councils in both industry and agriculture, continuous referenda and systems of negotiated coordination in the political sphere, and the use of television (first introduced in the USSR in the 1930s) for ongoing debate and mandate formation in the preparation of annual and five-year plans. The result was both rapid industrialization and social transformation. While there were of course pressures from the old authoritarian traditions — one Georgian Party leader, J. V. Dugashvili, tried to take control and turn the country in a bureaucratic and repressive direction, but his bid for power was thwarted — the Soviet commitment to a participatory and critical process kept socialist development dynamic and constructive. The favorable intellectual environment and principled financial support for research led many of the world's scientists and intellectuals, among them Albert Einstein, Norbert Weiner, Wassily Leontief and Marie Curie, to emigrate to the USSR, where they formed Akademgorodok, the Siberian Science City in Novosibirsk. This center of learning became the cradle of major scientific advances and gave rise to the information technology revolution of the 1940s and 1950s (about which more below).

All this, in turn, fired the imagination of working people around the world. Although some sections of the socialist left in the West had early misgivings and threatened to divide the working-class movement, the most influential socialist leaders, such as Norman Thomas in the USA, convinced their followers to pursue the socialist commitment to individual liberty while supporting socialism in power. The Socialist Party and the Workers (Communist) Party — the latter having been formed out of the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America in 1925 — merged in 1928 to form the Peoples Communist Party USA, an organization that became a mass movement and embraced a diversity of socialist positions, from A. J. Muste and W. A. Domingo to William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and James P. Cannon. Similar formations appeared in Western Europe and in the southern hemisphere.

In October 1929 the stock markets of the advanced capitalist countries crashed, ushering in what came to be called the Great Depression. The massive chaos and suffering caused by this general capitalist crisis of overproduction brought working-class forces into power in several countries, and close to power in the major capitalist centers. Fascist movements, which demagogically turned people's anger and fear against ethnic and religious minorities and inflamed national passions, had taken power in Italy and in some central European countries. When Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he encountered widespread opposition. Anti-Semitic atrocities, especially the Krystalnacht rampage of the Nazi stormtroopers, forced the Nazis to call an election in 1938. A Social Democratic-Communist coalition contested the election, and supported by massive street demonstrations won power and forced the Nazis to retreat — although not without ushering in a period of violent rebellion, the German Civil War.

In the United States and Western Europe, the depression triggered powerful political forces pressing for major relief and reform. In the USA, this took shape as President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Forced to retreat, the capitalist ruling classes sought refuge in the only form of state intervention ultimately acceptable to them: military spending. Seeking to demonize the Soviet Union for this purpose, they unleashed a massive disinformation drive, but popular support for the USSR stood in the way, and the people's movement pushed the New Deal forward, toward a point of qualitative transformation. Similar developments occurred throughout Europe. In Spain, a Republican electoral victory in 1936 spurred a fascist backlash and civil war; however, with German and Italian fascism in crisis and about to be deposed, external military support for Generalissimo Franco was limited, and the Spanish Republicans, with the aid of international volunteers from many countries, were able to prevail. Dolores Ibarruri, "Las Pasionaria," was elected President of the Spanish Peoples Republic in 1939.

In 1940, the Baltic States — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — together with Finland and Sweden, voted to join the USSR. There was, however, strong internal opposition in these countries, based mainly on historically rooted national and cultural identities. In what subsequently came to be seen as a watershed display of socialist principle, the Soviet government rejected the application, and instead urged the countries involved to form their own federation. Thus the Alliance of Northern European Socialist Republics (ANESR) was born. In the meantime, a low-intensity Civil War had been raging in China for several years. Without significant Western support, the Chinese Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-Shek, held their ground until 1941, when the Communists took power. The federal principle increasingly took shape worldwide, and within a few years developments elsewhere in Asia brought about the South East Asian Socialist Alliance, consisting of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillippines. SEASA, ANESR, USSR and People's China held prolonged talks, and agreed to form a global international agency, which came to be called the United Nations (UN). To emphasize the intent to make this a truly worldwide deliberative body, the founding convention was held in San Francisco in 1945, over the opposition of powerful ruling class forces in the United States but with the nominal support of the U. S. government and true enthusiastic support from labor and community-based popular movements there.

In the United States, capitalism, buttressed by similar forces retreating and regrouping from Europe and Asia, held onto power, but not without granting major concessions in the form of New Deal-type programs. The battle for the actual social content of these programs defined the political process at mid-century. The various agencies of the New Deal were progressively merged into two umbrella organizations — the Agency for Social Production (ASP) and the Industrial Recovery Administration (IRA). These eventually merged into the (conveniently acronymed) ASP-IRA. The drive for vertical trade union organization crystallized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which came to recognize the need to incorporate community and neighborhood forms of working-class organization as well, thus becoming the Congress of Workers' Organizataions (CWO). The old American Federation of Labor withered and eventually disappeared, holding its last convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1949.

The embattled capitalist classes sought breathing space by uniting with every manner of precapitalist oligarchy and despotism, in all countries. Their base in the United States was in the south, where racism and segregation kept an elite in power with historical links to slavery. Under pressure from a region-wide anti-racist popular front, led by Benjamin Davis, William Patterson and (later) Dr. Martin Luther King, the worldwide reactionary "southern strategy" took form, as capitalist elites formed alliances with landowners, latifundists, oligarchs and dictators in South America, parts of Africa and Asia — what came to be called the Second World. In the second half of the 20th century, the capitalist-agrarian axis was able to find material bases in some strata within the Second World, and from there to launch a series of wars and conflicts, with the United Nations trying to contain aggression and lend support to popular resistance. A particular focus has been on the Islamic countries, especially in the Middle East and Central Asia, where the dangers of "Second Worldism" and reversion to precapitalist fanaticism and terror have loomed large. These struggles continue today.

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