By Steve Halpern
Most
historians who write biographies center on one person. In this blog, I’m
writing about three women who lived during the same years in the United States.
I’m also writing about one man who lived in tsarist Russia during the same
years. These women had different political orientations, and there was little
or no contact between the women during their lives.
I
found one outstanding characteristic that these three women had in common. All
three experienced unimaginable and traumatic periods in their lives. Yet, all
three women developed an iron willed tenacity to advance the cause of working
people for many years.
There
is a clearly outdated and absurd idea that women are the “weaker sex,” who need
men to be their protectors. When we look at the lives of these three women, we
see how they didn’t hesitate to challenge men who had power. They did this even
when their actions led to threats on their lives, or resulted in a prison
sentence.
The
story of these three women outlines one chapter in the revolutionary heritage
working people have in the world today.
I’ve
included a summary of the life of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His life and the world
he lived in were different from the women in this blog. However, I believe that
the life of Lenin gives us a perspective to have an even greater appreciation
for these women.
Ida Wells
(1862-1931)
Ida
Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. This was during
the Civil War or the second revolution in the United States. Throughout the
1800s slave owners dominated the United States government. Conflicts erupted
sparked by those who opposed the slave owners.
When
Abraham Lincoln became President, this meant that slave owners would no longer
control that branch of the government. They responded by seceding from the
United States and attempted to form a slave owning nation.
About
350,000 union soldiers died in order to remove slave owners from their
positions of power in this country. The United States adopted the Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed slavery. When the confederate armed
forces surrendered to the Union, this meant that chattel slavery was no more in
this country. Ida Wells as well as
everyone in her family were no longer slaves.
Ida
Wells had seven brothers and sisters. Her father was a carpenter and her mother
was a cook. When the yellow fever came to Holly Springs, Ida Wells’ mother, her
father, and a sibling perished from the disease. As a young woman, she
supported her family by working as a teacher at a segregated school.
After
the Civil War, until the year of about 1877 federal troops occupied the former
confederate states. Reconstruction governments instituted radical reforms and
several Black people were elected to public office. Then, the administration of
President Rutherford B. Hays made a deal to withdraw the federal troops.
Supporters of terrorist white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux
Klan then organized to militarily defeat the reconstruction governments.
In
1884 Ida Wells purchased a first class train ticket to go from Memphis to
Nashville, Tennessee. The conductor of the train told her that she could not
sit in the first class section and needed to go to the section of the train
reserved for Black people. She refused and was forced to move. She later sued
the railroad and won a $500 settlement. However, this decision was appealed and
the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against Wells. She had been offered a deal to
keep the $500 if she dropped all charges against the railroad, but she refused
on principal.
Then,
in the year 1892 something happened that would change Ida Wells life. Ida had a
friend named Thomas Moss who was a postal carrier and opened People’s Grocery
store in Memphis. Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart also worked at the
grocery. Ida was the godmother to Moss’
daughter Maurine.
A
white storeowner argued that People’s Grocery was taking business away from his
store. A white mob organized to intimidate Moss, but he and his associates
defended themselves. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart were then
arrested, but were lynched before they ever stood trial.
Before
this lynching Thomas Moss had this to say. “Tell my people to go west. There is
no justice here.”
Ida
Wells had become a newspaper reporter and had this to say about the lynching.
“A finer, cleaner man than he never walked the streets of Memphis. He was well
liked, a favorite with everybody; yet he was murdered with no more consideration
than if he had been a dog….The colored people feel that every white man in
Memphis who consented in his death is as guilty as those who fired the guns
which took his life.”
She
also argued that: “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every
black home.” “for protection the law refuses to give.”
Ida
Wells then argued that Black people needed to take the advice of Thomas Moss
and leave Memphis. Responding to Ida Wells advice, white mobs destroyed the
newspaper she worked for while she was out of the city. These mobs threatened
her life. Ida Wells would never return to Memphis.
Ida
Wells became friends with Frederick Douglass who appreciated Wells work in
exposing the hypocrisy of lynching. Prominent writers at that time argued that
Black men routinely raped white women. Wells gave the evidence showing that in
most cases, rape wasn’t even the issue. She also was vehemently criticized for
giving the evidence showing that many of the Black men who were lynched had
consensual relationships with white women.
Frederick
Douglass published his autobiography after he escaped from slavery before the
Civil War. This act meant that Douglass acknowledged that he was a fugitive,
since escaping from slavery was against the law. So, he left the United States
and moved to Britain.
In
Britain Douglass found that on the one hand there was support for slavery since
a considerable amount of British manufacturing depended on the slave labor in
the U.S. He also found that there was support for the abolitionist movement.
Supporters of abolition purchased Douglass’ freedom and he then was able to
return to the United States without the threat of returning to slavery. Later
in his life he encouraged Ida Wells to visit Britain and campaign there in opposition
to lynching.
Ida
Wells acknowledged that she didn’t trust white people. She felt that she never
experienced equality in the United States. However, she was surprised that in
Britain, this was not the case and she won significant support for the campaign
against lynching. Many supported her argument to boycott the purchase of cotton
grown in the United States.
In
1913 there was a demonstration in Washington demanding that women have the
right to vote. Ida Wells lived in Chicago at that time and led the Illinois
delegation to this demonstration.
At
this time racism had infected the ranks of those who favored women’s suffrage.
The leaders of the march told the Black suffragettes that they should march at
the end of the demonstration. Ida Wells refused to bow to that racism and
marched at the head of the Illinois delegation.
Throughout
her life Ida Wells organized to fight against the routine repression of Black
people. When not organizing, she wrote about this repression that erupted
throughout the country.
Her
husband Ferdinand L. Barnett was a lawyer and elected official in Chicago. He
understood the leadership role his wife Ida played in politics and took
responsibility for raising their children and making sure all the day-to-day
tasks were taken care of. This was so Ida Wells could carry on her political
activity.
Of
the three women in this blog, Ida Wells had the best understanding of the need
to challenge all forms of discrimination against Black people.
Mother Jones
(1837-1930)
Mary
Harris was born in Cork, Ireland around the time of the Irish Potato Famine. As
a child she witnessed Irish people who had starved to death being thrown into a
wagon in order to dispose of their bodies. For the rest of her life, Mother
Jones didn’t talk about her childhood in those horrendous conditions.
Her
parents managed to move to Canada and she later married, had four children and
settled in Memphis, Tennessee. This was in the vicinity of where Ida Wells
lived and worked in the early years of her life. Just as Ida Wells lost her
parents to an epidemic, Mary Jones lost her husband and four children to a
similar epidemic in the same area.
Mary
Jones then moved to Chicago and established a dressmaking business. At that
time, Chicago was a center for the emerging labor movement. Mary Jones
witnessed the immense disparity between those who had obscene amounts of
wealth, and those who struggled every day in order to survive. She lost her
business to the Chicago Fire of 1871
For
several years, Mary Jones supported various movements promoting the interests
of labor. Then the United Mine Workers hired her as a labor organizer.
She
learned how the miners lived from day-to-day, working twelve to fourteen hour
days for a wage that barely allowed a family to survive. Parents routinely sent
their children to work in the mines because this was an absolute necessity so
families would have the food they needed. These children worked long hours
knee-deep in mud or hunched over to separate the coal from the shale of the
mine.
Here,
Mary Jones became Mother Jones and talked to the miners as if she were their
mother. She told them of the grim reality of the lives they lived. She told
them that as things were, the only thing they had to look forward to was being
crippled in old age. Then, she gave them the facts of how all their labors went
to a class of people who broke the Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” The
union was their only way to begin to escape from this reality.
In
Arnot, Pennsylvania the mine owners made it dangerous for the men to walk the
picket lines. So, Mother Jones organized an army of women with mops and brooms,
and succeeded in intimidating the scabs who attempted to cross the picket
lines.
In
the anthracite strikes of the 1890s Mother Jones lived with the miners and
experienced the same conditions of life without a living wage. She took a mule
with a wagon and appealed to the neighboring farmers to contribute food for the
strike. She would return late at night, under frigid cold and snowy conditions
with the wagon filled with food.
In
the year 1900 one out of every six children worked for a wage. Before the 1890s
only one percent of all children attended high school. Mother Jones was so
incensed with the idea that very young children slaved away in factories, she
worked at two factories in Alabama where she witnessed child labor for herself.
She wrote about her experiences in these factories in the magazine International Socialist Review.
In
the year 1903, Mother Jones came to Philadelphia to support 100,000 textile
workers who were on strike. Their demand was for a reduction of hours they
worked from 60 to 55 hours. 16,000 of these workers were children.
Mother
Jones then organized her March of the Children where she led her army of child
laborers from Philadelphia to the summer home of President Theodore Roosevelt
in Long Island, New York.
In
Princeton, New Jersey she gave some of the students of the University a lesson
in economics. She pointed to the children who had gnarled hands and missing
fingers. She pointed to a ten-year old soldier in her army, James Ashworth,
who’s back was hunched over from carrying seventy-five pound loads for three
dollars per week. She argued that these children worked so that many of the
students at Princeton University had money for their tuition, so they might
receive a higher education.
In
the March of the Children, Mother Jones spoke of the fact that the
revolutionary army under the command of General George Washington resided in
this same area of New Jersey. She drew the parallel that the army of child
laborers had the same goal outlined in the Declaration of Independence. This
was the “pursuit of happiness.”
The
U.S. oil companies had huge interests in the Mexican oil fields at the
beginning of the 20th century. They used the President of Mexico,
Porfirio Díaz, to consolidate their interests. The Díaz regime was known for
subjecting Mexico to abject poverty as well as ruthless punishments for those
who questioned his authority. Many Mexican revolutionaries moved to the United
States to escape this repression in their homeland.
In
1907 Manuel Sarabia a Mexican revolutionary was arrested in Douglass, Arizona
and sent to Mexico where he was placed in prison. Mother Jones immediately went
on a campaign to free Sarabia. While this campaign succeeded in freeing
Sarabia, he and other Mexican revolutionaries were arrested in the United
States. Mother Jones continued to work on their behalf.
By
the year 1913, the miners of Colorado went on strike. The Rockefeller owned
corporation attempted to import workers from Mexico to scab on the strike.
Mother Jones went to Juarez, Mexico and became friends with the Mexican
revolutionary Francisco “Poncho” Villa. She then spoke to Mexican workers
through an interpreter and no Mexicans would cross the union picket lines in
Colorado.
Mother
Jones made three attempts to support the miners strike in Colorado by
travelling to the center of the strike in Trinidad. Each time the armed forces
of the state commanded by General John Chase intercepted her. The owner of the
mines, John D. Rockefeller, paid the salaries of the forces under Chase’s
command.
In
her last attempt to join the strike, the military placed Mother Jones in an old
prison that had been condemned. There she smuggled out a letter that was read
on her behalf at a rally in New York City. She said that in this prison she
battled sewer rats with a beer bottle. She said that if she were out of the
prison she would be batting human sewer rats.
The
socialist Eugene Debs asked people to compare Mother Jones in her dark cell to
the Governor of Colorado Elias Ammons, who lived in the governor’s mansion.
“Behold them both, the one inspired liberator of the masses, the other the
servile lackey of the princes of plunder and assassination; the one as glorious
in her guarded cell as the other is despicable in his guarded sanctum!”
The
Denver Express wrote, “The fire of MERCY is in her eye, the love of HUMANITY in
her heart, the TRUTH upon her tongue, FEAR of nothing this side of God within
her soul.”
Two-hundred
women marched in Trinidad demanding her release from prison. General Chase gave
to order to charge this demonstration. The sabers they used injured several
women and effectively tore through the Constitution of the United States.
Mother
Jones had this to say about these experiences. “The miners lost because they
only had the Constitution. The other side had the bayonets. In the end,
bayonets always win.”
In
the year 1930 Mother Jones passed away. In just a few years, millions of
workers would join the unions that Mother Jones used her life to build.
Lucy Parsons
(1853-1942)
Lucy
Parsons claimed that she had Mexican and Native American parents and was born
in Texas. Jacqueline Jones wrote a recent biography of Parsons life. In her
book, Jones argued that she found evidence stating that Parsons maiden name was
Lucia Carter, and she lived as a slave for her first fourteen years. This
evidence shows that Parsons was born in Virginia.
Thomas
J. Taliaferro, the person who owned her was afraid that he might loose his
slaves to the Civil War. During this war hundreds of thousands of Black people
left the plantations where they were slaves to join with the Union forces.
So,
Taliaferro moved his slaves about 1,200 miles to Texas. We don’t know the
conditions twelve-year-old Lucia experienced on this forced march. However, we
do know that these kinds of forced marches or coffles were a common way of
transporting slaves long distances. The slaves were routinely chained at the
neck and legs to prevent them from escaping. We also know that slave owners
used various methods of torture to coerce slaves to do extraordinary amounts of
work without being paid a wage.
Lucia
Carter would eventually marry Albert Parsons who was caucasian. They married in
Waco, Texas just a few weeks before the Texas state government declared mixed
race marriages to be illegal. During the 19th and early 20th centuries
the idea of mixed race marriages was highly controversial in every part of the
United States.
So,
we can only speculate as to why Lucy Parsons did not identify as a Black woman
who had been a slave. However, just as Mother Jones didn’t speak about her
horrendous experiences as a child, we can speculate that Lucy Parsons may have had
similar reasons why she felt uncomfortable speaking about her childhood.
In
Waco, Texas Lucia Carter was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. Teachers from
the northern states came south because they felt it was important to educate
the former slaves as well as their children. Ida Wells also received her
preliminary education in this environment.
Lucia
Carter married Albert Parsons, who had served in the confederate army. After
the war, he transformed himself, became a Republican, and argued eloquently
that the rights of Black people needed to be advanced. These arguments
attracted Lucia and they had a loving marriage for as long as Albert lived.
With
the defeat of the reconstruction governments the ideas of Albert and Lucy
Parsons became intolerable to those who favored segregation. For these reasons,
they moved to Chicago and started a family.
In
Chicago Albert became a printer and Lucy worked as a dressmaker. They both
gravitated to the German section of the city where radical ideas flourished.
They learned of the socialist ideas of Karl Marx as well as the philosophy of
anarchism.
When
the Parsons arrived in Chicago in 1873, there was a depression and the city was
recovering from the 1871 Chicago fire. They learned very quickly of the
indifference of the people who had power to those who struggled to survive.
Albert Parsons began to see that the power brokers of Chicago had similar
interests as the former slave owners of Texas.
Then,
the owners of the rail lines instituted a sharp wage cut. This sparked the rail
strike of 1877 and Chicago was a center for the strike. In all about 100
workers lost their lives as a result of the strike. About 100,000 workers
supported this strike across the country.
In
the year 1871 the workers of Paris briefly took over their government in an
event known as the Paris Commune. Capitalists in this country feared that the
strike of 1877 might spark a similar takeover of the government here.
We
might also consider that the United States became a nation because of a political
revolution and that the Civil War was in effect the second revolution in this
country. The segregationist forces supported by the Ku Klux Klan took power in
the former Confederate states because of a military overthrow of the
reconstruction governments.
So,
when we see the violent nature of the events that transpired in these years, we
can clearly understand why Ida Wells argued that, “a Winchester rifle should
have a place of honor in every black home.” “for protection the law refuses to
give.” Lucy Parsons was older than Ida Wells and was one of the first to
advocate for Black people to arm themselves in self-defense.
Albert
and Lucy Parsons both became advocates for working people and spoke eloquently
on their behalf. However, like Ida Wells, they both believed that working
people needed to be armed in order to defend their interests. They didn’t just
think of arming people with Winchester rifles, but also with dynamite.
Then,
on May 4, 1886 there was a demonstration in the Haymarket on Chicago’s West
Side demanding an eight-hour workday. Towards the end of the event, the police
mobilized to attack the demonstration. A bomb was thrown and several police
officers lost their lives. The police retaliated by firing into the
demonstration of workers. An unknown number of workers died as a result.
Although
there were no witnesses or any evidence as to who threw the bomb. Albert
Parsons and seven other workers were arrested and charged with murder. While
they were in prison each of the eight defendants wrote their life’s story and
explained why they supported the labor movement. Albert Parsons gave the
following explanation as to why he was being victimized.
“Anarchists
do not advocate or advise the use of force.
Anarchists disclaim and protest against its use, and the use of force is
justifiable only when employed to repel force.
Who, then, are the aiders, abettors and users of force? Who are the real revolutionists? Are they not those who hold and exercise
power over their fellows? They who use
clubs and bayonets, prisons and scaffolds?
The great class conflict now gathering throughout the world is created
by our social system of industrial slavery.
Capitalists could not if they would, and would not if they could, change
it. This alone is to be the work of the
proletariat, the disinherited, the wage slave, the sufferer. Nor can the wage-class avoid this
conflict. Neither religion nor politics
can solve it or prevent it. It comes, as
a human, an imperative necessity.
Anarchists do not make the social revolution; the prophesy its
coming. Shall we then stone the
prophets? Anarchists do not use or
advise the use of force, but point out that force is ever employed to uphold
despotism to despoil man’s natural rights.
Shall we therefore kill and destroy the Anarchists? And capital shouts “yes, yes! exterminate
them!”
Parsons
was also more specific about the actual issues that were involved in this
quotation:
“Two
hours, taken from the hours of labor, throughout the United States by the
proposed eight-hour movement, would make a difference annually of hundreds of
millions in values, both to the capital invested in industries and existing
stocks.”
The
state of Illinois executed Albert Parsons and three of his co-defendants. The
other four defendants received long prison sentences.
In
1892 Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the four remaining prisoners
who had been convicted in the frame-up trial that resulted in the execution of
four workers. Altgeld argued that the state, “has never discovered who threw
the bomb which killed the policeman, and evidence does not show any connection
whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.”
Years
after these events the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs had this to say about
the frame-up and execution of the Haymarket Martyrs:
“The
sordid capitalism which preys upon the life-blood of labor, whose ethics are
expressed in beastly gluttony and insatiable greed, and whose track of conquest
is strewn with the bones of countless victims, pounced upon these men with the
cruel malignity of fiends and strangled them to death.”
Workers
from around the world celebrate May 1 as May
Day. The original idea of May Day was to commemorate the Haymarket Martyrs
who the state of Illinois executed for demanding an eight-hour day.
So,
at this point in her life, Lucy Parsons had experienced both the horrors of
slavery and the frame-up and execution of her husband. She believed concretely
that the government in this country needed to be replaced.
She
also learned that in giving speeches defending her husband, that there were
masses of people who enthusiastically supported her point of view. She also
learned that the authorities would do everything in their power in preventing
her from giving speeches many workers wanted to hear.
However,
there was a problem with the message of Lucy Parsons. When she was about sixty
years old she argued that her listeners should disrupt production at it’s
source: “If this cannot be done by peaceful methods, use force, tear machines
apart, destroy property, and force capitalists to listen to the demands of
employees.” She gave this definition of what an anarchist is: “An anarchist is
a man with a bomb in each hand and a knife between his teeth.”
Given
the reality of her life we might understand why Lucy Parsons felt this way.
However, this was the kind of rhetoric the government used to execute her
husband. Mother Jones appealed to workers to organize themselves in unions in
order to improve their lives and was critical of Lucy Parsons brand of
anarchism. I believe that Mother Jones made a legitimate point.
We
might think about the fact that advocating for individual acts of terrorism is
completely different from advocating for masses of people to defend themselves.
When revolutions erupt workers use all kinds of weapons to put in place a
completely different government. However, advocating for individual acts of
terrorism only gives the ruling powers an excuse to unleash repressive measures
against the working class. This was the horrendous lesson of the Haymarket
martyrs.
However,
this aspect of Lucy Parsons was only one part of her overall political
orientation. Jacqueline Jones gave the following summary of the politics of
Lucy Parsons:
“She
decried the profit making imperatives that made so many work places sites of
soul deadening boredom, repetition, and physical danger. In the new consumer
economy, ‘everything now has a price’: but in the future, ‘when labor is no
longer for sale, society will produce free men and women who will think free,
act free, and be free.’ She exposed the corrupting influence of corporate money
on politics, and charged that authorities used prisons as a means of
controlling their critics. She lamented the vulnerability of the elderly, ‘worn
out working people’ reduced to penury after a long life of honest toil. She
railed against employers who one day professed horror at workers defending
themselves and the next day paid thugs to beat strikers nigh unto death. She
exposed the hypocritical arrogance of reformers who chided the working man for
spending 5 cents for a beer on Saturday afternoon. She excoriated a system that
placed property rights above human rights. Even her Victorian-inflected defense
of children—for example, comparing the little brother and sister on their way
to the sweatshop with the vulgar, lavish wedding of a daughter of John Jacob
Astor—had a universal, timeless quality.”
Towards
the end of her life Lucy Parsons met James P. Cannon. Cannon, who had been a
member of the International Workers of the World Party, and the Communist
Party. On a visit to the Soviet Union Cannon discovered a document written by
Leon Trotsky that was critical of the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. This
document convinced Cannon to break with his former comrades in the Communist
Party and become a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party.
For
many years Lucy Parsons had been distributing literature about the Haymarket
Martyrs. Cannon understood the importance of this work and volunteered to help distribute
that literature making sure that Lucy Parsons received her portion of the
revenue.
Today
the Socialist Workers Party organizes Pathfinder Press that publishes the
autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. Pathfinder also publishes the
speeches of Mother Jones.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
(1870-1924)
Vladimir
Ilyich Ulyanov’s young life was completely different from the women in this
paper. While Ida Wells, Mother Jones, and Lucy Parsons either experienced
slavery, hunger, or epidemics, young Vladimir’s father was an educator who
lived in a relatively comfortable environment. Vladimir was a diligent student.
One
big difference between in the experiences of young Vladimir and the women in
this paper was in the difference between the reality of the United States
compared to what existed in tsarist Russia.
The
United States was born as a result of a revolution against a feudal power. In
feudalism a person’s stature in life was determined by their birth. The
nobility claimed that it’s power was ordained by God, and that power lasted
throughout their lives. The majority, who were not part of the nobility, had no
rights and lived at the mercy of their masters.
The
first revolution in the Americas changed that reality. While the wars against
Native Americans as well as chattel slavery continued, for the first time
people considered the idea that workers and small farmers had certain rights.
However, those rights did not include the right for women or those without
property to vote.
Then
the Civil War was, in effect, the second revolution in the United States. As a
result, the horrors of chattel slavery were abolished and slave owners lost the
power they had in this country. However, after the defeat of reconstruction,
Jim Crow segregation emerged and Black people effectively lost citizenship
rights in this country.
Russia,
in the time before the revolution, was run by a feudal monarch known as the
tsar. There was a parliament known as the Duma, but the tsar had the power to
dissolve the Duma at any time.
Most
of tsarist Russia consisted of farmland that was made productive by peasants.
These peasants had lives that were similar to the slaves on plantations. The
owners to the vast estates had the power to dictate their own laws that
included executing peasants when they chose to. Corporal punishment was routine,
and the wives of peasants were routinely beaten by their husbands. Peasants
also needed an official pass just to travel in the nation of their birth.
During
Lenin’s life, millions of peasants left the countryside and came to the cities.
Many worked 11 hour days and lived in dormitories. The police in the cities had
absolute power and had the right to inflict beatings whenever they wanted. The
factories of Russia were largely owned by French capitalists.
So,
while there was a significant middle class in the United States, the tsar as
well as French capital were the power brokers in tsarist Russia.
Young
Vladimir was very close to his brother Alexander Ulyanov. Both Vladimir and
Alexander were aware of the horrors of their homeland and both wanted to make a
change. Alexander felt that the only way to change things would be to murder
the tsar and organized an assassination attempt that failed. As a result, the
authorities executed Alexander Ulyanov.
Lenin
learned two important things from his brother. He learned to have the courage
to stand up for a point of view that many would not support. He also learned
that his brother’s actions had no chance of making things better for anyone.
For the rest of his life, Lenin would be obsessed with advancing a political
course that he felt had a chance of success.
Lenin
initially attended meetings with workers where they discussed Marxist politics.
The secret police of the tsar known as the Okrana routinely attended these
kinds of meetings. The participants in these gatherings needed to talk in a
code language so they wouldn’t appear to be disloyal to the regime.
These
tactics were only partially successful. The authorities arrested Lenin and many
of his comrades. Lenin was exiled to Siberia. He escaped and lived in Europe
until the revolution.
Under
these conditions Lenin advocated for a centralized political party. He argued
that when revolutionaries operated on their own, it was easier for them to be
victimized. With a centralized party, democracy existed at national meetings,
but once decisions were made, all members were obligated to carry out the line
of the party. This political orientation split the social democrats into the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
In
1905 there were massive demonstrations in Russia. Workers councils, known as
Soviets organized the rebellion. One demonstration appealed to the tsar to make
desperately needed reforms. The armed forces of Russia attacked this
demonstration and murdered about 1,000 protesters.
After
this defeat many leaders were exiled from the country. When we look at the
history of the U.S. labor movement, we see that many activists also served time
in prison. However, these were usually short sentences and they were able to
return to political activity. In tsarist Russia leaders not only experienced
exile, but spies from the tsar kept track of them while they lived outside the
country. Only with the Revolution were they allowed to return to their
homeland.
Then
in 1917 another revolution erupted. At that time the tsar was effectively
forced to join in the international holocaust known as the First World War.
Literally millions of Russian soldiers lost their lives in a war Russia was not
going to win. This war brought with it famine in a nation that had been a
breadbasket to the entire region.
Under
these conditions workers organized to remove the tsar from power. At this time
even the armed forces understood the profound crisis that Russia experienced
and refused to put down the revolution. A provisional government took power.
Within
a short period of time the Russian people discovered that the new Provisional
Government had no intention of making any meaningful changes. Lenin returned to
Russia and demanded All Power to the
Soviets and for Peace, Bread, and
Land.
At
this time, the most of the other leading Bolsheviks didn’t think it was
possible to place a workers government in power. They felt that since Russia
was a feudal power, the nation first needed to experience capitalism. Lenin
turned the party around and argued that if workers failed to take power at that
time, this would signal a disaster and everything working people had been
demanding would be lost.
In
order to make this revolution possible, Lenin understood that the Bolsheviks
needed to oppose all forms of national oppression. The nations that made up
Russia, that included Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, and Armenia. Three of my
grandparents were Russian Jews who came to this country before the revolution.
In all, there were about 160 different nationalities in tsarist Russia.
With
the revolution, tsarist Russia became the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics. For the first time in their history, the
cultures of each republic flowered in the first years after the revolution.
This included the use of their distinct languages. These republics were
socialist and worked in a union with each other.
Workers
began to see real measures that began to relieve the crisis they faced. The
Bolsheviks organized extraordinary measures to insure that everyone had access
to bread. The Bolsheviks also exposed the fact that massive amounts of wealth
had been going to those who found ways to gouge out profits from the horrendous
war. The Bolsheviks ended this practice.
Lenin
wrote his pamphlet The State and
Revolution. Here he explained how the state
was created with the capitalist system as an instrument of repression that
is used against workers. When the Bolsheviks came to power the state was then
used to advance the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population
and repress the tiny minority that controlled the wealth in the past. As a
result, workers replaced corporate managers and became genuine leaders of the
working class.
In a
nation that had extreme repression against women, The Soviet Union immediately
gave women the right to vote in 1917. Women in the United States needed to wait
until 1921 before they received the right to vote.
The betrayal of the revolution
We
might recall that in the United States about 350,000 union soldiers died in the
Civil War that abolished chattel slavery in this country. The Republican Party
of Abraham Lincoln was the party that was in the leadership of this historic
transformation.
However,
it was also the Republican Party headed by President Rutherford B. Hayes that
ordered the federal troops to leave the former confederate states. This action
effectively allowed terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to militarily
take power in those states.
As a
result of those actions, the former slaves who lived in those states lost
citizenship rights in this country. Thousands would be murdered in lynchings,
and the federal government would do nothing to prosecute the murderers. Ida
Wells dedicated her life to putting an end to the practice of lynching in this
country.
A
few years after the Russian Revolution an assassin attempted to murder Lenin.
He never fully recovered from his injuries.
Joseph
Stalin then organized to betray the revolution. The Bolsheviks had been
victorious in a civil war where 14 nations joined in an attempt to overthrow
the revolutionary government.
Because
of the fact that Russia had experienced the horrors of war, the destruction of
their economy, as well as international isolation, there was a desire in the
country for some stability. Therefore the movement to prevent Stalin from
betraying the revolution was weak.
However,
Stalin was not able to reverse all the gains made by the revolution. While
Germany was able to militarily defeat Russia in the First World War, the German
Fascist military of Adolf Hitler was decisively defeated by the Red Army in the
Second World War. This was in spite of the horrendous military leadership of
Joseph Stalin that cost the Soviet Union about 27 million deaths.
Conclusion
Ida
Wells dedicated her life, not just to the practice of ending lynching, but to
the full liberation of Black people in the United States. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
showed how the liberation of oppressed nationalities is possible with a
revolution led by working people in alliance with farmers.
Mother
Jones dedicated her life to advancing the cause of workers in this part of the
world. Lenin demonstrated how it is possible for workers to not only bargain
for better conditions, but to actually take control of the government and run
it in the interests of all workers. Mother Jones recognized this and stated
that she was an ardent supporter of the Russian Revolution.
Lucy
Parsons became a champion of those who were unjustly incarcerated in this
country. She also imagined a future world where workers would be fully
liberated.
This
past year, I was a member of an international brigade that lived and worked for
two weeks in Cuba. Clearly Cuba is an underdeveloped country. Yet they have
their own way of organizing their country.
However,
given the limitations they live with, Cuba has given working people an example
of how it is indeed possible for working people to become fully liberated. We
can see this clearly when we look at the education and health care systems on
the island.
After
the revolution of 1959, Cuba mobilized hundreds of thousands of young people,
mostly women, to teach everyone on the island to read. Our tour guide told us
that in other countries working people become desperate when they lack the
necessities of life. In Cuba, because of the educational system the people find
ingenious ways of dealing with difficult situations that include the United
States embargo against the country.
This
literacy drive was the foundation of the health care system on the island.
Today Cuba has twice the number of doctors, per capita, as the United States.
Infant mortality is lower in Cuba than in this country. Cuba has not only
trained doctors, free of charge from around the world, many Cuban doctors have
spent years treating patients in some of the poorest places on the planet.
We
can contrast this to the United States where there have been consistent
cutbacks in medical care, in spite of the fact that this country spends much
more for health care then Cuba.
I
wrote this paper to demonstrate that history teaches us that women have the
real potential to become genuine leaders of the working class. This is
completely different from the women who today are corporate officers, politicians,
or media moguls.
The lives
of Ida Wells, Mother Jones, and Lucy Parsons illustrate that workers will
welcome women who dedicate themselves to our cause. Yes, women have been and
will continue to be leaders of working people.
Looking
at the unspeakable horrors of the past, we can say that while the tasks of
working people are clearly difficult, our tasks are easier than the tasks of
workers in the past.
Understanding
all of this, there is good reason to be optimistic that working people have the
potential to deal with the enormous problems that face us today.
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