The Workers' Dreadnought (Vol. 5 No. 21 - 17 August 1918)

Ms Pankhurst's words on the betrayal of revolution by the Social Democrats of Russia are so blurred as to be unreadable.

Opened it in a different Reader and it is clear now.

The words that resonate most today are those of Lloyd George:

The people who made the war for the purpose for which they made it are still there prosecuting the same sinister purpose.

No words to be read here from Comrade Pankhurst on the role of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in betraying proletarian revolution worldwide.

Maybe this AI thing is useful after all:

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is often seen as a betrayal of the proletarian revolution worldwide because it forced the fledgling Soviet government to cede vast territories to Germany, essentially abandoning revolutionary movements in those regions and undermining the idea of international solidarity among working classes, ultimately fuelling scepticism about the Bolsheviks' commitment to global revolution.

The Thumbnail looks better, Fozzie.

For her saving grace, Sylvia at least saw the errors of her ways.

To Lenin, as representing the Russian Communist Party and the Russian Soviet Government.

We address you as representative of the Russian Soviet Government and the Russian Communist Party. With deep regret we have observed you hauling down the flag of Communism and abandoning the cause of the emancipation of the workers. With profound sorrow we have watched the development of your policy of making peace with Capitalism and reaction.

Open letter to Lenin - Sylvia Pankhurst

It’s unnerving posting some of these with all the optimism about Russia…

I had noticed that as well; the Dreadnought's position on Russia/Lenin certainly evolved over time. To be fair though, a lot of anarchists (e.g. Berkman and Goldman) were also initially optimistic about the Bolsheviks' coming to power. The Dreadnought captured events as they unfolded and contains a lot of useful primary sources that haven't been published elsewhere (e.g. the manifesto of the Unemployed Workers' Organisation), which is why the paper is worth a read.

why the paper is worth a read.

As a contrast between the Marxist position and what Marx would have made of the takeover of bourgeois state power by the former Social Democratic Labour Party (excuse if that is not the correct title of the "Bolsheviks"), the paper is useful.

But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralised state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour... serving nascent middle class society...

Thinking about the already bourgeois nature of Imperial Russia, the country was state capitalist a long time before the Marxists coined the phrase:

'The [pre-Revolutionary] Russian government also participated directly in the economy, buying almost two-thirds of the country's metallurgical production in 1899. The government also owned vast tracts of land, numerous mines and oil fields, and extensive forests.'

Thank you, adri, for directing us to the Unemployed Workers' Organisation's Manifesto. We should note, and contrast, the economistic plea of these Marxists, i.e. social-democrats, for "Abolition of the Wage System" as a means of addressing the Unemployment Problem, with the invariant position of the communist party, dictatorship by the proletariat for the abolition of wage labour itself.

Fozzie wrote: history is a messy business

In what sense is history messy? To the extent that history is written by the victor? That is why someone has to shine the light of truth, to be the mess of history solved. Presumably that is the role of libcom.org. Or is it just here to record the victors of history, thus far?

In short, to publish this Number with no critical disclaimer is tantamount to playing into the hands of our enemy.

Perhaps this is wrong? Perhaps this site is just a library for academics? If so, may we be so bold as to call it out as a degenerated workers' state? :-)

I remember looking at the original copies in the British Museum newspaper archives in Hendon in the late 1980s. Already 70+ yrs old by then and printed on cheap paper, they were fragile and some were disintegrating. I wonder if they managed to digitise them all.

I would personally just rework the main intro page to better express the evolution of the paper so that people know. I think it sort of goes without saying that hosting/archiving something doesn't at all mean that one agrees with all its contents.

Often, in the past, libcom have attached introductions citing disagreement with the content of the articles published on the site. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty is such a pivotal moment between proletarian revolution and the bourgeois reaction to it that this Number deserves particular note as demonstrating the failure to call out the capitulation on the part of the Bolshevik regime. Hopefully our comments have served this purpose.

I went ahead and modified the index-page intro, if that's ok with everyone.

Very good. Just made one minor alteration:

Capitalised Communist, in "left-wing Communist".

Communism as a peculiar, social-democratic, period of capitalism is capitalised in writing.

This other—"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution"—is neither left, nor right.

In this sense communism is always correctly written in the lower case. Whether this latter sense can be descried as libertarian communism is debatable. It is not unbounded freedom of the individual as individual freedom is relative to the necessity of the community of struggle to survive.

No idea what you're on about, as usual, so I reverted back to my revision and would appreciate it if you would not touch anything.

Who coined the phrase Left-Wing Communism?

“...The question arises: who is to exercise this dictatorship: the Communist Party or the proletarian class? ... Fundamentally, should we strive for a dictatorship of the Communist Party, or for a dictatorship by the proletarian class?...”

Excerpt from Vladimir Lenin’s, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder