Date: 21 Apr 97 01:31:55 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-G: class consciousness


dear Catapult,

The workers have indeed thru the last hundred years 
expressed high forms and content/organization  of militant  battle
and  revolutionary class consciousness in action .
This experience has however been buried by both the
right and left wings of capital , form rotten bourgeois 
militarists  to 'left' legalist  and pacifist outfits....

The most serious onslaughts against  bourgeois
state power were the mass revolts of workers 
and soldiers sialors in Russia , Germany, Hungary 
adn Italy  that forced the capitalist to end their stalemate
on the WW1 imperialist battlefields of Europe  because the
home front had collapsed on them in a tidal wave of 
workers/soldiers revolts that took the forms of soviet/councilist
mass movements which rocked europe from 1917-23-
THE biggest  revolutionary wave of this century.

Workers actually took the factories, land and the
state from the bourgeois/landlord regime in Russia
and held this power valourously for a handfull ofyears 
until their class brethren , the Western soviet/worker/
soldier  revolts in Europe were crushed by bourgeois and
 white guard reaction .
 E.g in Hungary, 1918-9, Italy 1919-20 and most profoundly  
Germany of the years 1918-21 where the western soviets and
 communists made scattered bids for power but failed..

The Russian revolution decayed much after soviet/workers
council power was devasteted by Russian civil war +
14 nation inetrvention and Russian leaders retreats 
back toward capitalism afterr 1921 as Russia was too 
economically backward and demolisheed to build 
socialism without help from other workers  revolutions
 in advanced  countries to help.

If you want more researched info on this "hidden history'
of the working class in revollt against capital  and 
why the workers today still must  still struggle for its
own class interests and for  a new society without
wage slavery and  class rule write for the study
on "Socialism or Barbarism from :

CWO
Box 338
Sheffield S3 9YX
UK


PS-- you might also look to the history of the Spanish Civil War
of 1936-9 and its lessons for the class today.

Neil 

'




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