No one is sacrosanct in the Marxist World

SEP/WSWS engaging in some historical revisions in its pursuit of its middle class clientele, "Hands off the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant!"

6/23/2020

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/22/pers-j22.html

Even the title of their article is revealing of its attitude to the masses. It is not an appeal to one's mind, but a patronizing emotional appeal to misguided ignorant masses looking for guidance from a bunch of sectarian petty bourgeois who cannot organize anything but a website after decades in politics. There is not even the least concession that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and the founder of the modern Democratic party which SEP accuses of being behind the masses ``confusions" and bad behavior. Where they state that Democratic party monuments have not been attacked. Jefferson was a gross hypocrite who did not lift a finger to assist the French or Haitian revolution. To the contrary Jefferson did everything he could to suppress both revolutions. As did Washington another plutocrat and slave owner. The cult of personality surrounding Washington and Lincoln would have made Stalin blush. The cult of Jefferson was almost as totalitarian.

Lincoln was a racist, he regularly used racist pejoratives.. He married into a rich slave owning family, who he protected as much as he could get away with during the War. He wanted to deport all Blacks born in the US. He appointed the worse form of red neck as his vice president Andrew Johnson, who almost single handedly restored chattel slavery to the South. Only the superhuman efforts of true progressives like Thaddeus Stevens and other like minded true abolitionists stopped the KKK sympathizing President Johnson.

Grant was extremely corrupt by even the very low standards of corruption in the American political system. He also wanted to deport American Blacks and took only the most limited steps to protect Blacks in the South from KKK terror. He did so not from any real concern to protect blacks but to protect Black votes for the Republican party. Grant instituted no social programs to assist American Blacks, which resulted in mass deaths, from suicides, disease and starvation. These are deaths in addition to that of outright mass lynching and state wide terror in the South. The condition of American Blacks in the North was just marginally better. There were no social programs in the North either that assisted the ex slaves.

Marx is their trump card behind all their historical revisions whether that of the American revolution or the Civil war. According to these sectarians one cannot be a Marxist, unless one supports every position Marx took. Well Marx was wrong. Both the American Revolution and the American Civil war failed. One can forgive Marx but not Engels for not living long enough to see the disaster which the United States developed into after the Civil War. America went from a economy based on chattel slavery directly into the purest form of plutocracy. There has never been a bourgeois democracy in the US at any time of its history. It has recently developed into a liberal facist state, starting with its overthrow of its own plutocracy with the JFK assassination. When money alone could not be trusted with the gross manipulation of government.

Of course Marx is fully guilty of the worst forms of revision regarding the American Revolution. It is ironic considering what low regard Marx had for SImon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America. In a letter to Engels he repeats his damning conclusions, calling Bolívar "the most dastardly, most miserable and meanest of blackguards", and compares him to Soulouque, the flamboyant Haitian caudillo who in 1852 had himself crowned emperor under the name Faustino I. Whatever the many real defects of Bolivar, he was certainly a better leader and and more progressive then the very self interested Washington. Someone who only entered politics because the British were preventing him from going to war with Natives living in the Ohio valley in his blood lust for their land. Bolivar was already wealthy of which he gave to the movement and made real altruistic sacrifices. Washington married, murder and stole into most of his fortune.

Neither Marx nor Engels were perfect human beings with infallible political judgement. Marx was not beyond sucking up to Northern American capitalists during the war to earn his living as journalist for the New York Tribune. Nor are Engels hands unstained during his decades as a millionaire factory owner. He died with a vast fortune. It's time we acknowledge the limitations of the petty bourgeois leadership which has dominated the working class in history including our own era. Some one must answer for the terrible state Humanity finds itself in today. We need strictly proletarian leadership leadership for the Working class. Middle class sympathizers should be welcome only as specialists to be called for consultations only. They should not be allowed in the party, much less party leadership!!!

Marxism is a good start and a foundation for a revolutionary theory but it is not by any means the final word on revolutionary theory. Only a Permanent and complete Revolution has the right to be accepted without question, criticism and revision!!! I for one I am not willing to wait for either castration or even the extermination of the Human race to begin to ask questions of why we have failed. We need to go beyond standard denunciation of liberalism and anarchism, etc.... and look closer into our own revolutionary house. No one is sacrosanct among Marxists!!

Richard