By John Riddell
1. A Quest for Personal Autonomy
2. My Background in Activism
3. Setting Sail for Europe
4. Arrival in Germany
5. Work Camp and Language School
6. Dissident Socialists in Divided Berlin
7. Student Life in Freiburg
8. A Brush with Germany’s Rightists
9. Socialist Discord over Cuba
10. An Instructive Stay in France
11. A Spectrum of Paris Socialists
12. Frankfurt Interlude
13. Vacation School in La Charité
14. World Youth Festival in Helsinki
15. Through Russia and Ukraine
16. Homeward Bound
17. Assessing My Year in Europe
1. A Quest for Personal Autonomy
In June 1961, with the aid of a modest bequest and encouragement from a number of European student friends, I left my home in Toronto and set out for a year of study in Germany.
Nineteen years old, I saw my journey as a step toward personal autonomy as well as a small contribution to the global movement for peace and socialism. I aimed to broaden my understanding of socialism while gaining fluency in German and French and an understanding of these two cultures in continental Europe.
In leaving Canada, I sought to go beyond the limitations of family life. The death of my father ten years earlier had left an emptiness that my family circle – mother and younger sister – could not fill. I hoped the voyage would bring a wealth of new personal connections and experiences.
As a young social justice activist in Toronto, I had become convinced that the cold-war crisis in world affairs needed to be countered by a massive international movement for peace and socialism. I was a strong supporter of freedom struggles in the colonies and semi-colonies, above all in Cuba, where the revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro was now in its second year. I wanted to get a feel for the workers’ movement in the region where Cold War tensions were then highest and the socialist movement was most deeply rooted: in central Europe.
In 1961, when I left for Germany, it was rare for a university undergrad to leave Canada for a lengthy stay in Europe. My trip was all the more unusual because I ventured on it quite alone. I had no institutional support, travelling companions, or links with host organizations at the European end. During my year-long stay in Europe, for the most part, I would be alone. I would receive an allowance of C$100 a month, which I hoped would cover living costs, student fees, and travel.
I made the acquaintance of hundreds of students, from Germany, France, and many other countries. During my year in Europe, I encountered only one student from the USA and none from Canada. I wrote many letters home, but there were considerable periods of time in which I spoke only rarely in English.
I never had direct access to a telephone. Making a trans-Atlantic call involved a trip across town, a wait until a phone came free, and then a complex dialing process with no assurance of success. I made such a call only once, to convey Christmas greetings to my family in Toronto. Otherwise, I kept in touch with the world through the output of my Smith-Corona portable typewriter, which churned out scores of letters during my European travels.
My European journey was in the spirit of my father, R. Gerald Riddell, a historian and Canadian career diplomat, who had died ten years previously. I received encouragement for my trip from international students at the University of Toronto. I had met many of them through the work of my mother, Kay Riddell, who headed services at the university for overseas students.
I planned for a one-year stay. I researched travel options, language schools, and universities. I located a handful of contacts in Germany. Many of my European friends in Toronto had recommended Germany as offering the most promising array of study options and suitable universities. I kept France in mind as a logical secondary destination. My goal was to gain a working knowledge of German and French, languages where my high-school education had given me a head start. During my trip, I made a start at learning Russian, but fell short of a workable knowledge at that time.
From discussions with family friends and from history books in my father’s personal library, I had a general grasp of European and German history. I was familiar with the Cold War that then divided Germany into two separate and mutually hostile political blocs, East and West.
As an advocate of nuclear disarmament, I was skeptical regarding the prospects of achieving Germany’s reunification through what was termed a policy of strength (“Politik der Stärke”). That approach, I believed, could only perpetuate Germany’s division. Moreover, in terms of Cold War tensions, the “policy of strength” was extremely risky. The peace movement in Germany, I learned, sought a peaceful negotiated reunification to create a neutral, non-nuclear Germany – an approach similar to that of the peace movement I supported in Canada. Peaceful negotiated reunification, I believed, would also promote the longer-range struggle for socialism in Germany and beyond.
2. My Background in Activism
When I left for Europe, I had been attending occasional Marxist public meetings in Toronto for two years. In 1957, aged fifteen, I had organized an anti-government protest that made headlines and left its mark on a Canadian federal election (see “My Search for Socialism”). A year before my departure, I had helped form a small socialist youth group in Toronto – the Young Socialists – which had ties to a Marxist group in Canada.
In Europe there was no group like the Young Socialists to which I could transfer membership. Once arrived, I would be on my own. In compensation, my initial knowledge of French and German, while limited, went well beyond the norm for North American students in western Europe. I made diligent preparations for my venture, brushing up my language skills and gathering information on schools and universities in Germany where I might study.
In May 1961, a month before my planned departure, the Toronto Young Socialists hosted a visit by James Robertson, the lanky and voluble head of my group’s New York-based sister organization, the Young Socialist Alliance – a sympathizing group of the Socialist Workers Party. During his Toronto visit, Robertson urged me to visit him and his comrades in New York City. I made that trip the following month, visiting Robertson and his partner, Rose Jersawitz.
In New York, I met Shane Mage, one of Robertson’s close collaborators, who had spent the previous year in Europe. Mage provided me with a short list of socialist contacts in Europe, which turned out to be extremely useful. During my New York visit, I encountered a vigorous debate among my socialist comrades regarding the character of the Cuban revolution. Just a month earlier, on 17 April 1961, the Cuban people had defeated an armed counter-revolutionary invasion sponsored by the U.S. government. Unimpressed by this turn of events, Robertson and his cothinkers denied that the Cuban government represented in any sense an expression of workers’ power. The Socialist Workers Party in the United States, by contrast, contended that Cuba, although “lacking as yet the forms of proletarian democracy”, was a workers’ state. The debate on Cuba that I encountered in New York had not yet spread to my organization in Canada.
I listened carefully to the New York debate but held back from expressing an opinion. Still, as my trip to Europe approached, my international connections beyond Canada were with Robertson and his supporters, a fact that was to complicate my activity in Europe.
3. Setting Sail for Europe
A month after my New York trip, I took a train to Montreal and climbed aboard the Arkadia, a Greek ship with a German crew bound for Bremerhaven, Germany. Ocean liners were then still standard for cross-Atlantic travel, although they lost their primacy before my return trip to Canada.The sea voyage was a moment of unique excitement. The five-day journey was enlivened by a storm, which tossed about belongings in my cabin and drenched everything with seawater from a porthole carelessly left ajar. But I paid little attention to the dramatic weather. I focused on German language study, as if cramming for a final examination. My goal was to function fully in German during my stay and develop fluency in the language, and indeed I largely achieved that goal. I carried my pocket dictionary always with me and made an effort, before every social interaction, to look up a couple of key words likely to cause problems.
During my stay in Europe, I encountered very few travellers from North America or Britain. When I made friends, they were almost always German or French – and usually male. Only later in the 1960s did the influx of women students and students of colour change the social atmosphere in university institutions.
As my ship approached Europe, I first sighted land at the southwest tip of Ireland. The Arkadia then made brief stops in Cork, the London docklands, and the French port of Le Havre, before delivering me together with its remaining passengers to Bremerhaven.
4. Arrival in Germany
After stepping ashore, somewhat bewildered, I bought a street map and set out on foot to the local youth hostel. The notion of taking a taxi did not occur to me; that would have been a wild extravagance. Suitcase in hand, I quickly lost my way. I took refuge in a pay telephone booth and called a shipboard acquaintance, who soon arrived and gave me a lift to the Bremerhaven youth hostel. As we drove through the quiet streets, I noticed the absence of scars from the wartime bombing that had devastated the city only 15 years earlier. This impressive reconstruction – here and elsewhere in Germany, East and West – testified to diligent labour by the local population, boosted in West Germany by funds from the U.S.-led Marshall Plan for capitalist economic recovery.
After a restful night at the Bremerhaven youth hostel, I walked to the train station and examined its displays of information: a large white panel for arriving trains; a yellow-orange panel for departures. I spotted a train listed as going south with a stop in Schwerte. That rang a bell. Schwerte, a small city on the edge of the industrial Ruhr district, was only a dozen kilometres from my destination, a locality known as Villigst. I would be staying at Haus Villigst, a residence run by the Lutheran Church for students preparing to enter university. About sixty students in residence worked at industrial jobs during weekdays, followed by discussion and academic study during evenings and weekends. I too would be working for my keep, in the role of assistant to the gardener who tended the grounds.
When I reached Villigst, I bade farewell to spoken English. Haus Villigst provided the first major test of my conversational German, and I was pleased with my progress. There was a bonus: Haus Villigst alumni were organized across West Germany, with groups in many university cities that could, if need be, provide timely assistance. My decision to spend time at Haus Villigst, a relig7iously- oriented residence, was consistent with my family background. As the grandson of two pastors, I had been raised in the Methodist-oriented United Church of Canada. As I entered my teens, I had been drawn to the Quakers, whom I respected for their pacifism and socially progressive outlook. While at Villigst, I attended nearby Lutheran church services. I was greatly impressed by their hymns, sung in authentic 16th-century musical style. After I left Villigst, however, I did not maintain a link with religious organizations and practices, which did not seem to fit into the new context of my life in Germany.
The Role of Religion during My Youth
In retrospect, it seems odd that my break with religion left very little mark in my letters and discussions at that time. My family was strongly committed to a left-wing Protestantism that found expression in parts of the United Church of Canada. Both my grandparents were Protestant educators, directors of United Church colleges in Winnipeg and St. Thomas. I embraced these traditions and took up membership in the United Church. I also linked up with the Quaker congregation in Toronto. When I joined in forming the Young Socialists in Toronto, I inserted in the minutes of the founding meeting a reference to seeking support among the Quakers.
My initial months in Germany were consistent with this background. I spent my first months at Haus Villigst, an educational wing of German Lutheranism, attending Sunday services on my own initiative at a nearby church. It was my Haus Villigst connections that enabled me to rent a room in Freiburg for the first six months of my stay. Yet once established in Freiburg, I paid no further attention to religious institutions. My letters home in that period show no evidence of concern with religion. My religious beliefs seemed to melt away like snow in spring.
In retrospect, it seems that the intellectual power of German Marxism, as reflected in the Socialist German Students League (SDS), sapped my religious faith. Another factor was the deepening of my understanding of Marxism resulting from my encounter with the Frankfurt School of Social Science. I took lecture courses there given by the School’s renowned leaders Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). This influence was further deepened by my encounter that year with History and Class Consciousness, a classic interpretation of Leninism by Georg Lukács, which I read in French translation.
5. Work Camp and Language School
After two months at Villigst, I made my way to Heidelberg, the home of Ellen and Günter Hoffmann, family friends who had offered to provide a point of support for my German venture. Once arrived in Heidelberg, I took a streetcar to the city’s historic core, where the Hoffmanns lived just a few doors from the Neckar River. Receiving me warmly, Ellen and Günter helped me with many practical tasks: setting up a personal bank account and permanent postal address for me, providing storage for my cumbersome suitcase, and enrolling me in Europe’s network of youth hostels. Ellen and Günter also led me on a ramble across the 180-year-old Alte Brücke (old bridge) across the Neckar and up the “Snake Trail” (Schlangenweg) that wound its way up the hill on the other side of the river.
After a couple of busy days in Heidelberg, I set off for Bavaria, where I was to take part in a two-week-long work camp. Such projects were then common in Western Europe as a method of promoting ties of friendship among peoples that only a few years earlier had been locked in fratricidal war. In the work camp, I joined two dozen other young people 18 to 20 years old in building a children’s playground in Treuchtlingen, a small town in central Bavaria.
Work camp participants stayed in a rudimentary hikers’ shelter at 72 Grüntäleinstrasse, perched at the edge of a great forest. On working days we performed light construction work; we also took time for visits to nearby sites of cultural and historical interest. I vividly recall walking a nearby circular wall around Rothenburg on the Tauber, a mediaeval city nearby that had suffered major wartime damage and had then been painstakingly recreated.
The work camp participants, from a dozen European countries, were a congenial lot, and some work-camp friendships lasted throughout my stay in Europe and beyond. Although the project leader was from Britain, the camp functioned in German. We also listened to some 78 rpm recordings of the sardonic French chansonnier Georges Brassens, whose songs decades later played a role in historical presentations by my wife, Suzanne Berliner Weiss (see her memoir Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey).
I found common ground politically at the youth camp with Inge Lescow, a left-wing activist from Hamburg. Inge was a member of the Falken, a Social-Democratic youth group that was suffering harassment from the Social-Democratic party top brass. Inge lived in Hamburg, only an hour by bicycle from Lüneburg, where I would be attending a language school later that summer.
On leaving the work camp, I got surprising news from home. My mother, Kay Riddell, was headed for Germany, where she was to take part in an academic conference on services to welcome international students at German universities. Kay was the head of such a service for international students at the University of Toronto. Kay’s plans included a visit with Olav Brennhovd, a well-known figure in German student life, who lived in Göttingen. Kay and Brennhovd would both be attending a conference on welcoming international students to be held that month in Munich.
I met Kay in Munich, accompanied her to Heidelberg, and – after a brief visit with the Hoffmanns – rented a car for the trip north to meet the Brennhovd family in Göttingen. It was an unusual break from my usual routine of travelling in Europe by rail. Following our visit with the Brennhovds, Kay and I spent a week visiting historical monuments in Germany. We made our way northward to Lüneburg, where I had enrolled for two months of study at the Lüneburg branch of the Goethe Institute – a network of schools teaching the German language.
I said goodbye to Kay at the Lüneburg railway station as she began her return trip to Toronto. I rented a room close the station, taking my meals there every day and walking to the Goethe Institute school. Instruction was useful and not arduous. I won praise for a short essay in German on the 1953 uprising of workers in East Germany and also for another German text discussing the celebrated Communist writer Bertolt Brecht.
Meanwhile, I bought a bicycle, which greatly facilitated my travel in the Lüneburg region. During my subsequent jaunts around Germany, I would wheel my bicycle into the station, buy a “bicycle ticket” for two German marks (the equivalent of 50 cents), carry my bike onto the railway platform, park it in the baggage car, and retrieve it at my destination. I had to be quick about retrieval, for German trains were known for punctual departure. Fortunately, every time I stepped off a train, my bicycle and I were happily reunited.
My friend Inge Lescow and her family lived quite close to Lüneburg, and I was thus able to visit them several times by train or bicycle. Inge and the Lescow family were supporters of the German Peace Union (DFU), a newly formed left-wing party running in the West German elections on a program of initiatives for peace and negotiated German reunification. The DFU’s striking election poster declared it to be “in the spirit of Albert Schweitzer,” displaying a handsome photo of the renowned pacifist humanitarian. The DFU prefigured in many ways the Left Party (“Die Linke”) that was founded in Germany a half-century later. I was critical of the DFU’s failure to affirm an orientation to socialism. Nonetheless, I accompanied the Lescows to a DFU rally close to Hamburg and also met with DFU members in Lüneburg.
A politically sophisticated family, the Lescows gave me an intense workout in conversational German, in which I was now increasingly confident. I also discussed at length with Axel Lüders, proprietor of a Hamburg left-wing bookstore. I made friends in Lüneburg with a DFU stalwart, Wolfgang Hein, who was a published poet. At his request, I declaimed for him from memory a couple of short poems by Goethe, which he considered a signal accomplishment for someone from far-off America.
While in Lüneburg, I got in touch with Monika Mitscherlich and her partner Jürgen Seifert, who lived in Frankfurt. They were well known leaders of the Socialist Student League of Germany (SDS), which was then affiliated to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The student league was locked in a programmatic dispute with the SPD, a quarrel that had already resulted in a significant breakaway from the SDS ranks.
The heart of this dispute was the opposition of SDS to the “cold war” waged by the West German government and its NATO allies against the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. Rejecting the cold-war framework, the SDS advocated a path toward socialism through mass action. When I moved to Freiburg in October, I became an active and vocal member of SDS.
6. Dissident Socialists in Divided Berlin
Only a few days after my arrival in Lüneburg, the authorities in East Germany closed the internal border bisecting the city of Berlin. Henceforth, German citizens could no longer freely cross the East-West demarcation line in Berlin. Political tension flared up across the country. As a Canadian, I was exempt from the closing of the border in Berlin. I therefore set out on a quick trip that was now beyond the reach of German citizens. Taking a break from the language school, I paid a short visit to friends in both West and East Berlin. In East Berlin, I attended a performance by Bertolt Brecht’s renowned “Berliner Ensemble“ at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. I also bought volumes of Das Kapital in East Berlin that still serve as my reference copies of this work.
In West Berlin, I got in touch with Wolfgang Hohmann, a student activist mentioned on Shane Mage’s list. Wolfgang’s apartment building near the city centre had a battered look, having suffered a damaging hit during wartime bombing. About five years my senior, Wolfgang welcomed me warmly and showed me around the city, while explaining the political makeup of the German student milieu. Wolfgang headed a small group of dissident socialists in West Berlin. One member of Wolfgang’s circle, Oskar Hippe, was a heroic figure from a previous generation. Then in his sixties, Hippe was a veteran of the early days of German communism – the era of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. A victim of repression first by the Nazis, then by the Stalinist authorities in East Germany, and now by the West German government, Hippe radiated courageous stubbornness and determination. His memoirs were later published under the title “And Our Banner Is Red” (Und unsere Fahn’ ist rot).
Wolfgang and Oskar shared a political outlook close to my own, known as “Trotskyism”. This label was applied to followers of Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Russian revolution and a revolutionary opponent of the rule of Joseph Stalin.
At that time, the Trotskyist world movement, known as the Fourth International, included groups in half a dozen cities in Germany. I already belonged to the Fourth International through my membership in the League for Socialist Action in Canada. Wolfgang, it turned out, shared the concern of many students in SDS regarding the hesitancy of many Trotskyist groups in Germany to public avow their Trotskyist allegiance.
Wolfgang’s group in Berlin was independent; its members believed that left-wing socialists must find a way to express their revolutionary perspective openly. Like myself, Wolfgang thought that socialist students should support the German Socialist Student League (SDS). He sought to combine this orientation with efforts to build an independent group seeking not merely to reform the capitalist order but rather to initiate mass action for a transition to socialism.
The underlying issue before us was how a small group with revolutionary goals should relate to the SPD, the mass political party of the German working class. The Fourth International’s forces in Germany were guided by a long-term orientation, adopted by the International in 1953, of working within the SPD. They paid a price for this course of action: they could not carry out effective public educational work in their own name without prompting their expulsion from the SPD. In the Fourth International’s jargon of the time, the German Trotskyists were carrying out a “deep entry”, within which the revolutionary group had no independent public “face”. My organization in Canada, the League for Socialist Action (LSA), faced a similar problem with regard to its members’ activity in Canada’s labour-based social democratic party, which in 1961 took the name New Democratic Party (NDP). However, in one key respect our “entry” in Canada was quite different from that practised in Germany. While joining the NDP and working within it, LSA members also published a newspaper that circulated widely across Canada and maintained public headquarters in Vancouver and Toronto.
7. Student Life in Freiburg
A few weeks after my Berlin visit, I attended the SDS national convention in Frankfurt. I presented greetings there to about two hundred convention participants, who welcomed my remarks warmly. I explained the approach of my current in Canada to the newly-formed NDP, pointing out similarities of our Canadian policy to that of the SDS toward the German SPD. In both cases, socialists within reformist-led mass parties were seeking to counterpose a revolutionary strategy to the pro-capitalist outlook of social-democratic leaderships.
In October 1961, I made arrangements to move to Freiburg, in the south-west corner of Germany and enrolled for study at the University of Freiburg. When I set out for Freiburg, however, a train mishap delayed me for several hours. On arrival, I hiked to the address where I had arranged to stay, but no one was home. It was now nearly midnight, far too late to stay at a youth hostel. Uncertain as to my next move, I walked to a nearby park and bedded down behind a hedge. After a few hours of fitful sleep, I brushed the twigs and pine needles off my clothes, made my way into town, found a restaurant, and hiked to the address where the Haus Villigst network had offered to help me rent a room.
I succeeded in renting a third-floor room on the southern edge of the town. The room was spacious, with a grand view across the roofs of the picturesque city, but it lacked access to a shower – for that I trekked across town to the public baths.
Relations with my landlady were delicate. Prior to the German revolution of 1918, she had been the reigning duchess of a small principality in Saxony; she had then been ousted by the popular upheaval. Still resentful against the Social Democrats who led that uprising, my hostess disapproved of the volumes by Marx and Engels visible on a bookshelf in my room. Reluctantly, I removed them from view. I recall my landlady as proud and conservative in outlook, but generous and warm-hearted. Wikipedia has an entry for Grand Duchess Feodora von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach that omits her later years in Freiburg. She died ten years after I left Freiburg.
Life in Freiburg quickly settled into a rewarding routine. Apart from weekends, I rode my bicycle to the university every morning, attending lectures and seminars. I participated in group discussions and took meals at the campus canteen. The university library was surprisingly inadequate, so I studied and prepared assignments at home. I met often with my SDS comrades and, less often, with the Haus Villigst group. I maintained links with my family, comrades, and friends in Toronto by mail, not always with success. To my dismay, ties to my sweetheart back home in Toronto did not stand the strain.
My isolation was eased by my friendship with the mother of Siegfried Neukirch, a close friend of my family in Toronto then working with Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa. Frau Neukirch invited me to a heart-warming celebration of a German Christmas. Curiously, years later I learned from Siegfried that his mother had courageously hidden a Jewish person from Nazi persecution. I did not hear any similar narratives from Germans having lived through the Nazi years.
8. A Brush with Germany’s Rightists
In November 1961, I received an unexpected letter from Bill Hatton, who had been my close ally and friend during my years as a high-school rebel in Toronto. (See “Pipeline Wars of the 1950s.”) Hatton told me that he had arranged for a year’s study in Germany and was living in Marburg, close by the border of East Germany. Hatton’s arrival in Germany took me by surprise. His family milieu was conventional, far removed from my Toronto world of politically alert international students. Hatton had stood together with me and other dissidents against our high school’s compulsory military instruction and heavy-handed discipline. Yet ideologically his outlook was conservative, and that side of his character came to the fore during his stay in Germany.
Hatton invited me for a visit. I grabbed at the chance and took the train north to Marburg, a picturesque university town close to the East German border. When I arrived, I was startled to learn that Hatton had joined up with one of the duelling fraternities at the university that were a traditional stronghold of arch-conservative rightists in Germany. Duels were fought with sharp and dangerous rapiers. In this milieu, facial scars were a traditional mark of courage and strength of character. Hatton steered clear of the sword-fighting, but otherwise he seemed well integrated into the culture of his fraternity. Hatton took me on a beer-drinking outing with his fraternity mates, in which we crowded into a horse-drawn cart plodding through fields close to Marburg. I heard no talk of politics on this boozy excursion, but I nonetheless sensed in Hatton’s fraternity the ominous presence of German right-wing reaction. After my disquieting visit to Marburg, I dropped my link with Hatton. A few years later, however, he surfaced in Canadian politics as a prominent aide to John Diefenbaker, assisting the former Conservative prime minister’s unsuccessful attempt at a comeback. Diefenbaker died in 1979; Hatton then dropped out of sight.
9. Socialist Discord over Cuba
In October 1961, I made an effort to get expert help with my historical studies. Taking up a suggestion of Ross Dowson, a prominent leader of the League for Socialist Action back home in Toronto, I contacted Gerry Healy, head of the LSA’s sister organization in Britain, the Socialist Labour League (SLL). Many SLL members were well known as historians. Moreover, the group was our ally in the “International Committee,” one of the two major internal alignments in the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International. The movement’s other wing, led by Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank, was linked with the “International Secretariat.” I wrote Healy asking if an SLL comrade could advise me on my Marxist historical studies.
When I sent that letter, I was unaware that Healy had grown hostile to Cuba’s revolution. In contrast to the strong support for Cuba expressed by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party and by my own organization, the LSA, Healy’s group opposed any notion that Cuba’s government, led by Fidel Castro, represented an expression of workers’ power.
I soon heard more about this disagreement from Healy’s most prominent co-thinker in the United States, James Robertson. He copied me on a circular letter that claimed the SWP’s position on Cuba to have “revealed its complete political degeneration”. Robertson’s assertion looked to me like a step toward a political split. I brought my LSA comrades in Toronto up to date on this threatening development.
Some weeks later, I received another circular letter from Robertson in New York, this time stating that his co-thinkers should not be guided by loyalty to the “rotten hulk” of the SWP. This confirmed my suspicions. Robertson’s ill-advised initiatives were increasing the danger of a damaging split in the Fourth International. I wrote back to Robertson, expressing disagreement with this aspect of his letter.About three weeks later my letter to Robertson received another reply – from Gerry Healy in Britain. Healy denounced me for having, through my supposedly provocative remark, put the unity of the Fourth International at risk, and cut me off from communication with any of his supporters. I replied immediately, pointing out to Healy that my comments had, in fact, affirmed the need to defend the International’s unity. Healy quickly backed down, promising to assign a colleague to write me on historical issues. One of his collaborators followed up with a helpful letter. I expressed thanks, and that ended the matter. Still, the incident struck me as utterly bizarre. Healy had met me earlier that year in Toronto and knew I was a teenager and very young and quite new to the socialist movement. His actions toward me were strangely erratic. Despite his many decades of political experience, Healy was decidedly short on diplomatic finesse.
10. An Instructive Stay in France
In March 1962, at the close of my semester in Freiburg, I utilized an end-of-semester vacation from my university studies by taking a vacation in France. I joined up with a group of two dozen Freiburg students on a guided study tour of great French mediaeval cathedrals. The tour touched down on Laon, Reims, Amiens, Jemappes, and Rouen before its final stop on the Rue Saint-André des Arts in the Latin Quarter of Paris. During this trip, as part of a group where everyone spoke in German, it was assumed by many of those we met that I too was German. None of us encountered any visible hostility. On arrival in Paris, I enrolled for language classes with the Paris wing of the Alliance Française. Through this affiliation, I obtained access to a wide range of rooms offered for rental. I chose a room in residential house in Meudon, a short train ride from Paris.
11. A Spectrum of Paris Socialists
I spent about four months in France during my year in Europe, during which I had three different experiences there. The first was a guided tour of German students visiting the great monuments of high-Gothic architecture in France. I then spent a week in a small left-bank hotel on the Seine, followed by two months in the Paris suburb of Meudon, reinforced by classes at the Paris branch of the Alliance Française. It was a good moment to arrive in France. On March 18, the government approved the “Evian Accords,” formally ending its resistance against the independence struggle of the French colony of Algeria. A bombing campaign waged in France by the extreme rightist Secret Army Organization (OAS) was now fizzling out, and conditions were now more favourable for radical activity. I arrived in Paris the morning after a government-launched referendum that rallied 91% support for the Evian Accords. My socialist friends in Paris were sceptical of this maneuver and advised supporters to spoil their ballots with the words, “Oui à la paix, non à De Gaulle.” The overwhelming approval of the Evian accords marked the effective end of the war by the French government and army against Algerian independence.
On arrival in Paris, I got in touch with the Parisian socialists on my contact list. I first reached out to Jean-Marie Vincent, a prominent figure in the PSU (United Socialist Party), a left-wing social-democratic party. Jean-Marie introduced me to the PSU’s local branch in Meudon, and I attended several of its activities. The PSU was one of several “new left” currents in Europe functioning to the left of pro-Moscow and social-democratic parties, among which the forces around New Left Review in Britain were the best-known example.
I then contacted Pierre Frank, who for two decades had been prominent in the “International Secretariat” wing of our divided world movement. Over lunch in a bar on the Rue Vieille du Temple, Frank outlined to me the exemplary role played by young members of his group in rallying solidarity with the national liberation movement in Algeria. Frank’s group had recruited many young activists linked to the Communist Party, he said. My cordial chat with Pierre Frank did not lead, however, to ongoing contact with his group.
My third contact, Jean-Jacques Marie, was prominent in a wing of the French Trotskyist movement known then and now as the OCRFI, which was headed by veteran Marxist Pierre Lambert. My own group in Canada, the League for Socialist Action, was aligned with Lambert’s current in the “International Committee” of the Fourth International. Jean-Jacques, about five years older than me, briefed me on the Lambert group’s political outlook and activity. I also got acquainted with François de Massot and Jacqueline Bois, OCRFI activists of an older generation, who invited me to take part in the OCRFI’s summer cadre school in south-central France. On another front, I attended an open-air educational event (“foire”) organized by l’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. There I picked up a French-language edition of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which I studied assiduously during the rest of my stay on Paris. It was during these months that I attained enough fluency to function politically in French.
12. Frankfurt Interlude
When I returned to Freiburg from France, in May 1962, I packed up my belongings, bade a cordial goodbye to my esteemed landlady, and moved to Frankfurt. I rented a room in a student residence at Beethovenplatz 4 that was convenient to both the Frankfurt university and to the national office of the SDS student league. My primary goal was to learn how the SDS, now excluded from the massive Social Democratic Party, was handling its relations with the broad student and worker movement. Once again, I saw a clear parallel between the challenge facing left socialists in the German Social Democratic Party and that experienced by my comrades in Canada in countering the pro-capitalist policies of the New Democratic Party leadership.
My shift to Frankfurt enabled me to get to know prominent figures in the German Trotskyist movement, including Bertolt Scheller, Jakob Moneta, Rudolf Segall, and Georg Jungclas, all veterans of the socialist resistance under Nazi rule. Despite my skepticism regarding their “deep entry” in the SPD, I admired the German Trotskyists’ record of courageous struggle and their firm stand for the unity of our international movement.
It happened that my home in Frankfurt was only a few paces from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, widely known as a centre of “Western” non-Stalinist Marxist thought. I attended lectures there given by the internationally renowned leaders of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their presentations were major events: standing-room-only assemblies of more than 200 students crammed into a university lecture room. At that time, the work of the Frankfurt School was not widely known in North America. More recently, it has received much critical attention in North America through the work of John Bellamy Foster and the late Paul Burkett in publications of Monthly Review Press such as Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature.
During my stay in Frankfurt, I presented a discussion paper in German to the local socialist student group (SDS) taking up a section of Marx’s Capital (“Use Value and Value”). I also began to study Russian and Spanish, languages that later became vital to my socialist activity. On another front, I applied to join the Canadian delegation that would attend the World Youth Festival scheduled to be held in July in Helsinki, Finland.
In June 1962, a year after my arrival in Europe, I shut down my operations in Germany, took my leave from my Beethovenplatz residence, shipped home my most valued belongings and materials, took a train to Paris, and checked in with my Paris contacts.
13. Vacation School in La Charité
On arriving in Paris, I was invited by my friends in the Lambert group (OCRFI) to attend their two-week educational seminar that month in La Charité, near Nevers in the French countryside. On my way to the OCRFI vacation school, I fell ill with a severe skin ailment that forced me to seek emergency medical care in Nevers. This was the most frightening moment of my stay in Europe. I had no health insurance in either Canada or Europe. There was no way for me to contact my friends in the vacation school, and I had no connections in the region. I had to throw myself at the mercy of the local hospital. Fortunately, the hospital admitted me and carried out the very next day an operation that removed the malignant growth.
Two days later I paid a modest fee and was discharged, good as new. I boarded a bus for the half-hour ride from Nevers to La Charité and hiked from there to the OCRFI encampment. I was warmly welcomed and had a fruitful stay. Particularly memorable was Pierre Lambert’s presentation on the role of Trotskyists in France during the Nazi occupation. Lambert also noted the destructive and sometimes traitorous role played at that time by members of the Stalinist movement.
The Lambert group’s vacation school presented the most intensive challenge I had yet encountered in the French language. I was pleased to note that my capacity in spoken French had developed much more quickly than had been the case a year earlier when I switched from English to German.
14. World Youth Festival in Helsinki
Earlier in 1962, I had written the Canadian organizing committee of the Youth Festival and signed up for the Canadian delegation, which was to include several dozen participants. My trip to Finland – with stopovers in Belgium, Hamburg, Denmark, and Sweden – took me several days by train, boat, and airplane. For the first time in Europe, I travelled without my typewriter.
The Youth Festival’s theme, “For Peace and Friendship”, struck me as overly cautious in tone, evading the question of socialism and other pointed issues. Yet the mood of the Festival was militant, thanks above all to the large and spirited delegation from revolutionary Cuba, backed up by delegates from the Algerian liberation movement that was now achieving a decisive triumph. The Festival represented a big change in my cultural framework. After a year of immersion in the languages of Germany and France, I was now conversing again in English and in a Canadian context. Among the several dozen delegates from back home were colleagues from my radical organizing prior to my Europe trip. A number of other participants from Canada later joined the League for Socialist Action.
The Helsinki conference was also attended by an array of Fourth Internationalists from several continents and from diverse political currents. During the event, they gathered for an informal chat, an optimistic encounter offering a foretaste of the Fourth International’s reunification that took place the following year. Among the many new friends I met in Helsinki, I talked extensively with András, who was from Budapest. A few years older than me, András had taken part in the 1956 anti-Stalinist uprising in Hungary and had experienced its defeat when confronted with Soviet tanks forcibly occupying the city centre. András had then joined in the exodus of activists who crossed into Austria and sought refuge there. He went on to Britain, where he spent several years in exile and then – like many other Hungarian exiles – returned back to his home country. András invited me to meet him in Budapest during my return journey from eastern Europe.
15. Through Russia and Ukraine
At the end of the World Youth Festival, I joined a group of about two dozen delegates from Canada in a two-week guided tour of historic and artistic sites in Russia and Ukraine. Our journey, in a most uncomfortable school bus, offered few opportunities for probing discussions of Soviet reality. I noted the unavailability of non-Communist publications on Soviet international newsstands. Nonetheless, in encounters with Russians and Ukrainians, there was no mistaking their prevailing mood of pride and optimism. They spoke freely of negative experiences in the Stalin years and of the gains they were experiencing after the government’s turn to “destalinization.”
My bus journey across Eastern Europe proceeded at a halting pace. The tour included stopovers in Novgorod, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Moscow, Orel, Kharkov, Kyiv, and Lvov, before winding up in Budapest. András and I met as planned in the Hungarian capital. As we toured Budapest together, András described some of the positive changes for Hungarians since the 1956 uprising had been defeated by Soviet military intervention. András stressed that the wound of repression in those days had not healed. He pointed out that the authorities had plastered over all the visible effects of the armed conflict of 1956 while demonstratively leaving intact the damage from World War Two. I left Hungary alone by train, making my way through Austria, Bavaria, and Switzerland. I arrived in Paris on the morning after the French national holiday, Bastille Day (14 July 1962). I was just in time to see workers clearing away debris from the previous evening’s festivities.
16. Homeward Bound
I paid brief visits to friends in Paris before setting out on my homeward journey. I had decided to cross the Atlantic on the new and relatively inexpensive Loftleiðir (now Icelandair) service via Reykjavík, which was soon to attract a flood of North American students seeking a low-cost method of visiting Europe. Loftleiðir flights to America took off from Luxembourg, which was not served by a direct train from Paris. My best option was a late-evening train to Longwy, a mining town close by the Luxembourg border. A couple more hops by train took me to a suburb of the city of Luxembourg. In the characteristic style of my European travels, I hiked into town. Rounding the top of a hill, I saw spread before me a vista of the historic city in the early morning light. As the sun rose, I was just in time to see, across a green valley, about a hundred workers filing into a mine shaft for the day shift. I made my way into town and bought a ticket on the next Loftleiðir flight. As it happened, the flight left later that same day for Reykjavík and New York.
17. Assessing My Year in Europe
When my plane landed in Idlewild – now JFK International Airport – I made my way by bus and subway to the Socialist Workers Party at its 116 University Place headquarters in lower Manhattan. There I met Barry Sheppard, Chair of the Young Socialist Alliance at the time, the SWP’s youth wing. We talked at length.
I shared with Barry Sheppard my reservations about the Fourth International’s forces in Germany and their reluctance to explain their political outlook fully and openly. I also reported on my clash with Gerry Healy of the SLL. Barry maintained that the weaknesses I had encountered in our world movement could best be addressed in a reunified world organization. I found common ground with Barry and the SWP in support of the Cuban revolution and its government. I also agreed with Barry on the need to pursue possibilities for reunification of the International. (Barry’s activity at that time is described in his two-volume memoir, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960–1988). Barry assessed my European experience as a positive step in terms of promoting the International’s reunification. We both viewed the defence of Cuba and of newly independent Algeria as an urgent priority for a reunified Fourth International. Politically speaking, I was home again. And for the first time in a year, I was having an extended political conversation in English.
Soon after my return, the Socialist Workers Party, aided by my organization in Canada, initiated a mimeographed international news bulletin published in Paris by Joseph and Reba Hansen and mailed around the world. The main task of this publication was to promote the goal of reunification of the world movement. The following year (1963) a fusion did indeed take place that embraced most of the Fourth International’s active forces. The forces led by Gerry Healy in England and Pierre Lambert in France stood aside from this process. That cut short my promising collaboration with the Lambert group.
On my arrival in Toronto in August 1962, I had a happy reunion with my friends, the Canadian Fourth Internationalists, and plunged into our work. My top priority was to engage with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee – a promising vehicle for building Cuba solidarity across North America, whose Toronto-area rallies and banquets drew hundreds of participants.
During the years that followed, my familiarity with European languages led to several subsequent assignments in Europe, some brief and one lasting a year. In Canada, my knowledge of French enabled me to help my organization expand its operations to Quebec. In 1965 I was chosen to head the Young Socialists in Canada; in 1972 I became Executive Secretary of the League for Socialist Action. My knowledge of German and my other language skills qualified me, in 1983, to take the helm of the Comintern Publishing Project, a multi-volume effort that has, over several decades, published about ten thousand pages of documents from the first four years of the Communist International, translated from German, French, Russian, Italian, and other languages. Sponsored in its early years by Pathfinder Press, this effort is now directed by Mike Taber, and its volumes are published by Brill Publishers and Haymarket Books.
The Comintern Publishing Project remains today a major focus of my socialist activism. Through this effort, more than sixty years after my initial trans-Atlantic voyages, I continue to give expression to the vision and impact of my youthful year in Europe.
With thanks to Jeff White for copy editing.
©John Riddell 2024
HALT ISRAEL/U.S. SLAUGHTER IN PALESTINE!
The following speech was made by Suzanne Weiss at a Defend Palestine rally held in Toronto’s City Hall Square on December 2, 2023. The rally was called by Toronto4Palestine.
Stop US/Israel resumption of genocide on Palestine!
* For an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza
* Trudeau, end Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide
* Lift the siege on Gaza – end the Occupation!
We gather here today in great distress because US/Israel has resumed their full-scale genocide of the Palestinian people. The Israeli government goal, as they have repeated stated, is to rid the land of the Palestinian people.
Shamefully, Israel is led and financed by the US government. And Canada is complicit.
Why is the US government bankrolling Israel with $3.8 billion per year and now $14.5 billion more for the genocide this year?
Is it because American big business seeks control of the Middle East to reap profits from the land’s natural resources such as oil, and natural gas? Are genocide Israel and the big business US working together, each for its own goals?
I am a survivor of another genocide. Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews in Europe. He had similar goals. It was to secure colonial conquests and to rid the land of Jewish people.
The Nazis were racists much like the Zionists of the Israeli government. My mother died in the death camp of Auschwitz. I was saved by the Jewish Resistance. Many individuals helped me with acts of kindness, and I was hidden by an entire community.
It was world solidarity that defeated the Nazis. Solidarity of the world’s peoples will also help liberate the Palestinians.
Now the genocide has resumed with bombardments equivalent to two nuclear bombs since October 7. Supplies have been cut off – electricity, fuel, medications, food, and water, to starve the Palestinians. Israeli bombs and rockets have killed close to twenty thousand.
What should we do?
We must redouble our efforts. We should organize peaceful disruptions, sit-ins, occupations and other projects that educate and are inclusive of the masses who wish to unite for Palestinian freedom.
We must end government, corporate, and institutional complicity with Israel’s 75-year-old regime of apartheid. We must give meaningful solidarity to stop Israel’s genocide.
We should support the campaign for world boycott, divestment and sanctions. BDS gives us examples of meaningful actions that can make a difference on apartheid Israel’s economy and have an impact on genocide Israel.
* Major trade unions in India, in Belgium, in Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey have called on workers to boycott Israel products and refuse to handle Israeli cargo.
* Trade unions in Canada have signed on the Canadian Cease Fire Now statement. They have more to do.
* In the US, the United Auto Workers, a very large union, have joined the call for ceasefire now.
We call on Canada to stand for peace and for the protection of fundamental freedoms. Muslims are suffering violent acts of hate in their neighborhoods because of the US/Israeli genocide.
They need our solidarity.
Israel claims to represent the Jewish people. That is a lie! Judaism is not Zionism. Criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies is deceitfully labeled anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. In fact, many demonstrations are led by the Jews who defend the Palestinians and their rights to share the land in equality, dignity, and peace.
We are all under attack by big business government and its institutions, including big business media. We are not safe to freely discuss or express opposing opinions on Israel’s genocidal policies. We are not able to freely say that we support Palestinian freedom without risk of losing jobs.
We must condemn this world-wide witch-hunt and identify it as part of the governmental attack on Palestinian freedom. Let’s meet it head on and insist on free discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. University students and faculty are leading the way. Many high-school students are participating. We demand:
* An immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
* Trudeau, end Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide.
* Lift the siege on Gaza – End the Occupation!
Palestinian freedom is our freedom. It is freedom for humanity!
A new feature-length video on the League for Socialist Action and the radicalization of the 1960s.
By John Riddell: A dramatic feature-length video is now available online portraying the achievements of the socialist movement in Canada sixty years ago.
Let’s Rent a Train! is a unique film portrayal of socialist activism in the 1960s, now available online at https://www.letsrentatrain.ca/.
The 93-minute film, created by Doug Williams and Darrel Furlotte, offers a mosaic of video clips from sixty participants in the League for Socialist Action (LSA/LSO), describing the League’s activities during the 1960s and 1970s.
The film’s title recalls a dramatic episode in the early days of the movement against the U.S.-led war in Vietnam and Canada’s complicity in the killing. Ian Angus recalls that when the idea of organizing a protest in Parliament Hill in Ottawa came up, “somebody said, ‘Why don’t we rent a train!’ We rented a train and took a trainload of people to Ottawa!”
Many protests in Canada demanded an end to Canadian complicity and withdrawal of the U.S. military from Vietnam. “We needed something very focused,” recalls Pam Dineen in Let’s Rent a Train! ; something “very clear on exactly what we wanted: Bring the boys home!”
Don Tapscott remembers vividly the response he heard from the Vietnamese themselves during Don’s visit to Vietnam: “Thank you! You made a difference.”
Let’s Rent a Train! also takes up the League’s campaign in the 1960s to win the right of free speech in Toronto’s parks. Before this victory, Toronto’s police were routinely arresting poets that ventured declaim poetry in Toronto’s Allen Gardens: “They read their poems and as one was arrested another would take his place, and it made the cops look stupid,” Ian Angus recalls. “It got national publicity.”
Gary Kinsman, co-author of The Canadian War on Queers, notes that, “It was through the Young Socialists [the LSA/LSO’s affiliated youth group] that I learned about the ‘we demand’ demonstration, the first gay rights demonstration on Parliament Hill. We had influence in the gay movement because of our experience as organizers.”
The LSA/LSO also intervened in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, created by the government Pierre Trudeau in 1967. The LSA submission covered all the main issues later raised by the women’s liberation movement.
A high proportion of LSA/LSO members were union members, and many of them worked in the educational sector. Liz Barkley recalls, “More and more teachers came to our fraction, that is, the group of teachers who were organized in the LSA, to get oriented on what to do.”
LSA/LSO members were also a dynamic force in building solidarity with Cuba through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and in building a socialist caucus within the New Democratic Party.
Let’s Rent a Train! also describes the League’s initiative during the imposition of War Measures Act in 1970, when the Pierre Trudeau government suspended civil rights in Canada on the pretext of kidnappings in Quebec. Let’s Rent a Train! records that the LSA/LSO organized a protest in front of army barracks in Montreal, in which I took part, demanding repeal of the War Measures Act.
Participants displayed posters calling for withdrawal of Canadian army from Quebec and handed out French-language leaflets and posters. The action was a calculated provocation to prove that such initiatives could be carried out with success.
The film includes an apt summary of the LSA/LSO approach by Ernie Tate (1934–2021): “We were prepared to do what was necessary, with some imagination, to break through the old sectarian practices and to meet the political needs of the working class at that time.”
Let’s Rent a Train! can be viewed online at https://www.letsrentatrain.ca/.
The relevance of his praxis for Africa in a world undergoing geopolitical reconfiguration
By Ameth LO, Pan-African militant and Member of GRILA (www.grila.org), Toronto Dakar June 20th, 2022.
The renewed general interest in Pan-Africanism among young people, and interest in the work of Cabral in particular, can be largely explained by the urgency of current issues confronting Africa and the world. In West Africa, these issues present themselves as a skilfully orchestrated redeployment of imperialism in collusion with elite heads of state through a violent process of monopolising resources and agricultural lands by multinational corporations.
Ultimately, the success of elites in these endeavours call into question the fundamental goals of liberation struggles and independence movements; particularly the right of African people to reclaim their means of production as a precondition for self-directed development.
The sub-region is at the center of major dislocations (jihadism, inter-imperialist rivalries, the collapse of democratic states, and so on) which threaten the stability of all of Africa. At the heart of these struggles are issues linked to the trafficking of narcotics given new drug trafficking routes from Latin America to Europe. But there is also the emergence of new conflicts such as those currently underway in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and so on. These conflicts involve multiple actors such as the USA, France, Jihadist networks, drug traffickers and others who have some interests that coincide, but others that diverge particularly around the fundamental issue of control of the immense natural resource of the region such as gold, oil, uranium, and the potential for setting up a strategic operating base in the region. Another issue of concern relates to the structures of a global capitalist system in crisis, and based on a consumption model that increasingly demands the energy and mining resources of which Africa abounds.
Today, fifty years after Cabral’s death, it is clear that the persistence of these issues shows that the national liberation movement, led by African nationalists such as Cabral, has not reached its objectives despite its significant progress. Security issues persist, urban-rural inequality is growing, creating a double movement. On the one hand, there is a massive rural exodus of peasants to the cities in search of better living conditions. On the other hand, directionless African youth are tempted by the mirage of the West to make sometimes suicidal attempts to traverse the desert or the oceans to emigrate to the Global North.
But how did we get here despite the enormous sacrifices made by leaders such as Cabral to free their people from all forms of domination and exploitation? Which factors stalled the transformation of national liberation into true social revolution? Which factors internal to Africa have favoured the systematic elimination of revolutionary leaders like Cabral who had led these movements? How can we interpret Cabral’s political vision in light of current issues facing Africa and the world?
A set of questions that should be reflected on in order to draw lessons from the past (but not to take pleasure in it as Professor Cheikh Anta DIOP said) but to guide future struggles with greater clarity and precision. We will try to explore Cabral’s vision through several reflections he produced in the context of struggle against Portuguese colonialism and imperialism more broadly. Themes such as: the role of culture in the national liberation movement, the problem of class struggle in Africa, and how to go beyond the stage of national independence through social, economic and cultural revolution; only a multi-pronged revolution can support the many aspirations of African people.
Ameth LO
By John Riddell: I made the presentation that follows on 26 February to a webinar organized by the International Manifesto Group to mark the 175th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The International Manifesto Group is a solidarity collective based in Winnipeg and chaired by Radhika Desai.
Other speakers on this panel were:
- Cheng Enfu and Jun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. For a link to their written contribution, see footnote #2;
- Sara Flounders, Contributing Editor of the US communist newspaper Workers’ World and a key anti-war organiser for decades;
- Alexander Buzgalin of Moscow State University;
- Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER coalition and a central leader of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the US;
- Frank Chapman, Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Central Committee member of the US communist group Freedom Road Socialist Organisation; and
- Xin Yuzhou, a member of the Communist Youth League working in the International Department of the Communist Party of China.
My talk was first posted by Carlos Martinez on the website of the Friends of Socialist China. A video of full event can be viewed on YouTube.
Presentation by John Riddell
“Workers of the world, unite!” This celebrated call, first voiced by Marx and Engels almost two centuries ago, continues today to resound worldwide in the struggles of working people seeking political and social liberation….
| Thomas Sankara: ‘Better One Step Forward with the People Than Ten Steps Without!’ |
 The following historic speech by President Thomas Sankara was delivered in 1983 in New Delhi, India. Sankara, the leader of a popular revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso, was assassinated 45 years ago in a foreign-backed coup d’etat. The text of his speech and the introductory paragraphs are reproduced from The Internationalist, a publication of the “Progressive International.”
Sankara was a socialist revolutionary and pan-Africanist. Inspired by the worker-led Madagascan uprising he had witnessed as an officer, Sankara launched programs for social, ecological and economic change….. His government vaccinated 2,500,000 children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles in just a few weeks. His literacy campaign increased the number of people who could read from 13% in 1983 to 73% in 1987. His land redistribution programme was so successful that wheat production increased more than 200% during his presidency. In 1983, four years before his assassination, Sankara took the stage at the 7th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in New Delhi and delivered a speech that is widely regarded as a seminal moment in his presidency. This Special Issue of The Internationalist translates Sankara’s speech from its original French and reproduces it in abridged form. If you want to receive speeches, essays, and critical analysis from around the world, we invite you to subscribe to The Internationalist and support our efforts to make solidarity more than a slogan. Madam President, Excellencies, Heads of State and Government, Honourables, Delegates, …. |
The socialist movement lost a long-time organizer and master builder with the death on December 26, 2022, of George Bryant, at the age of 91. George and his life partner Bea Bryant were influential figures in the Ontario socialist movement from the 1950s. Bea Bryant died in 2016 (see A Life for Socialism).
Working from their home in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, George and Bea set the pace in community-based social-movement organizing. They were instrumental in rallying opposition to Canada’s role in the U.S.-led war against Vietnam and in building solidarity with socialist Cuba.
In recent decades, George and Bea lived in the village of Dealtown in southwest Ontario, while maintaining links with socialist and antiwar activists in Chatham, Detroit, and Toronto.
Largely self-educated, George grew up in a working-class community in Toronto. In the 1940s he became active in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of today’s NDP; he met Bea at a square dance at St. Andrews United Church in Toronto. George quickly discovered a shared commitment with Bea to progressive social action. “George was a feminist, even then,” Bea later commented. “He felt that I had as much right to get into politics as he had.”
George’s friend from that time, Ernie Tate, recalls that George “worked at renovating homes to make a living, but his real passion was photography and documentary film making, having worked with John Grierson on documentary film making at the National Film Board.”[1]
George and Bea gravitated to the CCF’s left wing, and linked up with some other CCF leftists in forming the League for Socialist Action (LSA). In 1958 they joined the effort to launch a new labour-based left political party, which was born in 1961 as the New Democratic Party (NDP). George, Bea, and their young son David marked these events by joining in a tour to revolutionary Cuba.
The Cuba trip deeply affected their subsequent course, Bea later recalled. “We stayed at a hotel in Havana that had just been taken over by the workers. There was a sign on the hotel, ‘Free territory of Cuba.’ It was filled with brigadistas (young participants in Cuba’s great literacy campaign), with their little lanterns, going out to teach in the countryside.”
“When we came back I gave a talk on Cuba,” Bea added. “That was a public forum with quite a few people there, organized by the [Richmond Hill] Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” This fledgling effort won attention among left activists across the country.
Three years later, George and Bea took a similar initiative in response to the U.S. war in Vietnam, which aimed to crush an uprising for national liberation. Committees to end the war sprang up across Canada, and George and Bea’s initiative in Richmond Hill stood out in terms of originality and impact.
At that time it was common for charities to raise funds by holding “tag days” on street corners and in malls across the community. “Just the thing,” thought Bea and George. “We’ll have a tag day to assist the victims of the Vietnam war.” The York Committee to End the War in Vietnam applied to the local authorities for a tag day permit. They were met by a curt refusal.
The York Committee appealed for reconsideration. Support poured in from across the community, including from local resident Pierre Berton, then Canada’s best-known English-language writer. In the end, the abashed city council gave way. The dust-up in little Richmond Hill made the news across Canada and beyond.
Over the years, George worked at many jobs, most of them in carpentry, a field in which he was an expert craftsman. This skill carried over readily to his political work, where he was called upon to fix up and rebuild socialist movement bookstores, meeting halls, and offices in Toronto and beyond.
George’s carpentry skills were applied to a particularly ambitious project in the late 1960s, when a League for Socialist Action member acquired a vacation property north of Deseronto, Ontario, and invited the LSA to use it for educational purposes. George designed and managed construction of a fine meeting and dining hall and accompanying tent floors and cabins. The centre was named Camp Poundmaker, after the renowned Indigenous leader of the late 1800s. Many weekend discussion circles and recreational evenings were held there on summer evenings.
The LSA was then expanding rapidly, and it was hoped that the League would grow into full utilization of this handsome property. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and the League’s leading role in Camp Poundmaker did not survive a spate of factional discord in the 1970s.
During the 1980s, I lived in New York City and had little touch with George and Bea. On my return to Canada I found the situation vastly changed. George and Bea had moved to Dealtown, in south-west Ontario. George rebuilt their little Dealtown home, with sculpted flower beds, raised to ease Bea’s work as master gardener. The large south-facing window looked into a little pond designed to attract the birds and comfort the resident goldfish. Their son, David, lived close by.
After many years of separation, close-knit family life was restored. Bea and George worked closely with social activists in nearby Chatham and Detroit.
George and Bea were convinced ecologists, long before this approach came to be widely shared among political activists. These convictions found expression in all the Bryants’ varied activities in and around Dealtown.
As always, George and Bea’s actions pointed to the road ahead.
By John Riddell, Toronto
[1]. Ernest Tate, Revolutionarya Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir, vol. 1, p. 29.
The socialist movement lost a long-time organizer and master builder with the death on December 26, 2022, of George Bryant at the age of 91. George and his life partner Beatrice Bryant were influential figures in the Ontario socialist movement from the 1950s. Bea Bryant died in 2016 (see A Life for Socialism).
Working from their home in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, George and Bea set the pace in community-based social-movement organizing. They were instrumental in rallying opposition to Canada’s complicity in the U.S.-led war against Vietnam and in building solidarity with socialist Cuba.
In their later years, George and Bea lived in the village of Dealtown in southwest Ontario, while maintaining links with socialist and antiwar activists in Chatham, Detroit, and Toronto.
Largely self-educated, George grew up in a working-class community in Toronto. In the 1940s he became active in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), predecessor of today’s NDP.
Ernie Tate, who met George in the 1950s, recalled that George “worked at renovating homes to make a living, but his real passion was photography and documentary film making.” George had worked with John Grierson on documentary film making at the National Film Board,” Ernie reports. [1]
George met Bea at a square dance at St. Andrews United Church in Toronto. George and Bea quickly discovered a shared commitment to progressive social action. “George was a feminist, even then,” Bea later commented. “He felt that I had as much right to get into politics as he had.”
George and Bea gravitated to the CCF’s left wing, and linked up with some other CCF leftists in forming the League for Socialist Action (LSA). In 1958 George and Bea joined the effort to launch a new labour-based left political party, which was born in 1961 as the New Democratic Party (NDP). George, Bea, and their young son David joined in a tour that year to revolutionary Cuba.
The Cuba trip deeply affected their subsequent course, Bea later recalled. “We stayed at a hotel in Havana that had just been taken over by the workers. There was a sign on the hotel, ‘Free territory of Cuba.’ It was filled with brigadistas (young participants in Cuba’s great literacy campaign), with their little lanterns, going out to teach in the countryside.”
“When we came back I gave a talk on Cuba,” Bea added. “That was a public forum with quite a few people there, organized by the [Richmond Hill] Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” This fledgling effort won attention among left activists across the country.
Three years later, George and Bea took a similar initiative in response to the U.S. war in Vietnam, which aimed to crush an uprising for national liberation. Committees to end the war sprang up across Canada.
George and Bea took an initiative in Richmond Hill on the Vietnam war issue that stood out in terms of originality and impact.
At that time it was common for charities to raise funds by holding “tag days” on street corners and in malls across the community. “Just the thing,” thought Bea and George. “We’ll have a tag day to assist the victims of the Vietnam war.” The York Committee to End the War in Vietnam applied to the local authorities for a tag day permit. They were met by a curt refusal.
The York Committee appealed for reconsideration. Support poured in from across the community, including from local resident Pierre Berton, then Canada’s best-known English-language writer. In the end, the abashed city council gave way. The dust-up in Richmond Hill made the news across Canada and beyond.
Over the years, George worked at many jobs, most of them in carpentry, a field in which he was an expert craftsman. This skill carried over readily to his political work, where he was called upon to fix up and rebuild socialist movement bookstores, meeting halls, and offices in Toronto and beyond.
George’s carpentry skills were applied to a particularly ambitious project in the late 1960s, when a League for Socialist Action member acquired a vacation property north of Deseronto, Ontario, and invited the LSA to use it for educational purposes. George designed and managed construction of a fine meeting and dining hall and accompanying tent floors and cabins. The centre was named Camp Poundmaker, after the renowned Indigenous leader of the late 1800s. Many weekend discussion circles and recreational evenings were held there on summer evenings.
The LSA was then expanding rapidly, and it was hoped that the League would grow into full utilization of this handsome property. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and the League’s leading role in Camp Poundmaker did not survive a spate of factional discord in the 1970s.
During the 1980s, I lived in New York City and had little touch with George and Bea. On my return to Canada I found the situation vastly changed. George and Bea had moved to Dealtown, in south-west Ontario. George rebuilt their little Dealtown home, with sculpted flower beds, raised to ease Bea’s work as master gardener. The large south-facing window looked into a little pond designed to attract the birds and comfort the resident goldfish.
Their son, David, lived close by. After many years of separation, close-knit family life was restored. Bea and George worked closely with social activists in nearby Chatham and Detroit.
George and Bea were convinced ecologists, long before this approach came to be widely shared among left-wing activists. These convictions found expression in all the Bryants’ varied activities in and around Dealtown.
As always, George and Bea’s actions pointed to the road ahead.
By John Riddell, Toronto
[1]. Ernest Tate, Revolutionarya Activism in the 1950s & 60s A Memoir, vol. 1, p. 29.
Second International Congress 1904
By Mike Taber: Virtually all socialists today are direct descendants of the Second International of 1889 to 1914. Also known as the Socialist International, this movement grouped the greater part of the world’s organized working class under the banner of socialist revolution, and was viewed by capitalists everywhere as a threat to their existence. Yet relatively few twenty-first-century socialists know much about this organization’s history or what it represented.
Editor’s note: This text has also been published by Monthly Review Online.
For left-wing socialists in particular, the Second International is often associated almost exclusively with its betrayal of internationalism in 1914 at the start of the First World War. At that time the Second International suffered an ignominious collapse, as its leading parties abandoned socialist principles and gave open support to their respective governments’ war efforts.
The fact that the Second International was re-created in 1919 as a formation committed to maintaining the capitalist order, with a few reforms, has contributed to such an image. Not only did the post-1919 Second International oppose the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, but it worked energetically to suppress the revolutionary wave that engulfed much of Europe and Asia following the end of the war. Its social-democratic successors have largely continued along these lines up to the present day.
This image of the pre-1914 Second International helps explain the fact that prior to the publication of my book, Under the Socialist Banner, the resolutions of its nine congresses had never before been assembled and published in English. Some of these resolutions were virtually unknown. Many had been exceedingly difficult to even find.
While there are good reasons to reject what the Second International became after 1914, ignoring or downplaying its legacy is nevertheless a mistake. Doing so means turning one’s back on an important part of the socialist movement’s history and traditions. Moreover, it means ceding this legacy to social-democratic currents that have betrayed or distorted socialism’s message for over a century. The best of this legacy, however, legitimately belongs to revolutionary socialists. Understanding the Second International’s strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions can be of major benefit for the movement today. Read more…
Editor’s Note on the 21 Conditions
During 1920, a wide range of socialist parties and currents were considering affiliation to the newly formed Communist International. Many of these formations were still mired, in their policies and practices, in the weaknesses of the Second International, which had collapsed at the outset of the World War in 1914.
Capitalism in Europe was still deeply shaken by the impact of world war and post-war crisis.
When the Communist International gathered for its first full congress in July 1920, many delegates raised the need to establish criteria for membership in the new International.
Giacomo Serrati – a leader of the centrist current in the Comintern’s Italian section – told the Congress that no tool yet existed – no “sincerometer” – to measure the sincerity of would be Comintern members.
Lenin retorted that “we already have an instrument for defining tendencies,” referring no doubt to the program of Marxism.
Nonetheless, the congress set up a commission to draft written standards. The result was a short list, the “Twenty-One Conditions,” which proved to be instrumental in the International’s subsequent expansion and consolidation. The first 19 conditions were drafted by Lenin; Theses 20 and 21 were developed in a commission during the World Congress. The Twenty-One Conditions appear here on line for the first time in searchable form. Read more…
In his presentation to the London-based Online Communist Forum – printed on this website (“Debates in the Second International”) – Mike Taber made the following statement on Ukraine, drawing parallels to Second International debates on the question of militarism and war:
“Consistent with the approach that revolutionary socialists took following 1914, one can completely oppose and condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while at the same time refusing to give an ounce of support to the forces of the Ukrainian capitalist regime and its US and NATO backers. Above all, socialists within the United States and other imperialist countries should see as their number-one task to oppose the war moves of their own government.”
That statement elicited several comments by readers, along with a response to these by Taber. Given the importance of the question, we thought it best to separate these comments out into a separate post, beginning with Taber’s response.
By Mike Taber
Here is my response to various points raised in the exchange. Read more…
The following is an edited version of a talk given at the Online Communist Forum, based in London UK, on 27 March 2022. In it Mike Taber discusses a new book he is preparing, to be published by Haymarket Books.
By Mike Taber: Thanks for the invitation to speak at the Online Communist Forum. Some of you will remember my forum here two years ago, when I spoke about Under the Socialist Banner, then in preparation. That book helped provide a clearer and more rounded picture of what the Second International of 1889–1914 actually was, as registered in its adopted congress resolutions.
It also posed the way the Second International is viewed today by both right-wing and left-wing socialists. Most contemporary social democrats think there was too much Marxism in the pre-1914 Second International, not enough political realism, as they see it. For their part, many left-wing socialists and communists tend to think either that the Second International was fundamentally flawed from the outset, or else they simply don’t give it a lot of attention.
What such views have in common is that they tend to look at the Second International as a thing, a historical object. Not as a movement. And like any living mass movement, it had its own strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions that need to be studied and assessed accurately and in context. Read more…
The following review was first published in Marx and Philosophy and is reposted with permission. Mike Taber’s 220-page collection of resolutions of the Second International is available as a paperback from Haymarket Books with bundled ebook for US$13.26. Page references are to the Haymarket edition.
By Daniel Gaido: Mike Taber has edited for the first time the resolutions adopted between 1889 and 1912 by the nine congresses celebrated by the Socialist International, which is also known as the Second International. This scholarly edition involved a considerable work of translation: the official proceedings of the congresses were published in German (all nine) and French (six of them), and only one congress had its proceedings published in English (the London Congress of 1896).
Besides providing English versions of all the resolutions in chronological order, the editor has accompanied them with an exceedingly useful critical apparatus. Taber’s Introduction provides an overview of the general characteristics and development tendencies of the Second International, its accomplishments and strengths as well as its weaknesses and contradictions, and finally its legacy and contemporary relevance. The critical apparatus also includes shorter introductions to each one of the nine congresses, expounding key debates within each congress, together with an Afterword on the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and an Appendix on several unapproved resolutions. Read more…
Address to the Fifth Comintern Congress, 1924
Edited by Bob Schwarz: The following extended address by Clara Zetkin to the Communist International’s fifth congress (1924) presents the most rounded defense by a Marxist leader of the call for a workers’ united front, which the International had adopted in 1921. Toward the end of Part 2 of this address, she provided a compact explanation of the “workers’ government” concept, probably the most precise left to us from the Comintern’s early years.
Zetkin’s speech was delivered 24 June 1924, at the 11th session of the fifth congress, during discussion of Grigorii Zinoviev’s opening address, “Report on the Work of the Executive Committee.”[1]
This English translation of Clara Zetkin’s speech is taken from International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr) issue no. 47 (23 July 1924) pp. 485–8. The transcript of Zetkin’s speech published in Inprecorr (English edition) is reproduced with light editing after comparison with the German-language stenographic transcript printed at the time in Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz, no. 85 (1924), pp. 1066–1070.
Zetkin’s address has been divided here into two sections of roughly equal length:
- October 1923: Zetkin Assesses a Communist Bid for Power
- 1924: Zetkin Reviews the Comintern’s Failed “October”
Zhang Tailei
The following short biography of an early Chinese Communist was first published in Friends of Socialist China with the following introduction.
In this paper, presented at the Fifteenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE), held 18-19 December 2021 at the Shanghai International Studies University and online, John Riddell introduces the life of an early pioneer and martyr of the Chinese revolution, honoured in his own country, but who deserves to be better known internationally.
John, a lifelong socialist activist, is the founding editor of the Comintern Publishing Project and probably the foremost contemporary scholar of the early Communist International (Comintern) working in the English language. He has translated and edited numerous volumes of Comintern proceedings. We are grateful to him for making his paper available to us. – Friends of Socialist China.
By John Riddell: To understand the rise of China, it is helpful to get acquainted with the life and work of lesser-known figures who contributed to the liberation struggle. Such an activist is Zhang Tailei (1898–1927), whom I learned of while translating the proceedings of a global Communist congress held in 1921.[1] Read more…