Glory! Glory! Ypsilanti’s Black Freedom Fighters Assault Fort Wagner!

We continue covering the sesquicentennial of the Civil War Today marking the anniversary of a milestone this day in the history of the black liberation struggle in the United States; the battle of Fort Wagner, July 18th, 1863. Though black troops had seen action in the west earlier, notably when they fought at the battles if Island Mound in Missouri, Port Hudson, Louisiana and just the day before at the battle of Honey Springs in Indian Territory on July 17th, 1863, it wasn’t until this day 148 years that black troops were widely seen to have joined the war as combatants.

The 54th Massachusetts saw horrific combat on this day leading a doomed assault on a Confederate fort protecting Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Wagner. Dispelling the racist notion that blacks would not fight, they fought like people fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. They fought for their own future, the future of blacks in America and the future of freedom around the world. And they fought ferociously.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was a pioneering black regiment largely staffed by white abolitionists and composed of free blacks form the North as well as some escaped slaves from the south. It was the first black regiment raised in the north and one of the few to retain its state designation throughout the war. Some of those enlistees included noted black abolitionists and activists including the sons of Frederick Douglass. It was, if such a thing might be said, the ‘elite’ black unit of the Civil War.

Some 1,500 Union soldiers, black and white, were counted as casualties that day. Of the 54th, only 315 men remained after the battle. thirty were killed in action, fighting which saw the 54th reach the parapet of the fort and engage the enemy with their very hands. The dead included regimental leader and abolitionist Colonel Shaw as well as Captains Russel and Simpkins. These white officers were buried in a mass grave with the black enlisted men where they remained until a storm washed the burials out to sea. Twenty-four later died of wounds, fifteen were captured, and fifty-two were reported missing after the battle and never reported again.

Massachusetts was the citadel of the abolitionist movement and the raising of black troops enjoyed the active support of the state government, then held by the more radical, if not The radical, wing of the Republican Party and attracted people from all over the North; from my small town, Ypsilanti, Michigan as well. Around twelve men, impatient with the lack of progress in raising a regiment in Michigan, joined some of the first regiments in the country to be raised: the deservedly famous 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In several contingents, and organized by a network of black Masonic lodges, the men left from Ypsilanti for Camp Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts in the Spring of 1863. After the 54th was full the 55th Massachusetts was formed and also served with distinction throughout the war, including at the battles of James Island and Honey Hill. Three units with Ypsilanti men; the 54th, 55th and the Michigan raised 102nd USCT, which included over seventy Ypsilantians, would all serve together in the same operations from South Carolina to Florida and there is ample evidence that the men related across the regimental boundaries, including at memorials for fallen comrades from Ypsilanti.

Mostly young, mostly without families and mostly working as laborers and living as borders these men all had pasts, all of them were from somewhere else. Some lied about their pasts, some concealed them. Some were undoubtedly escaped slaves, others were exiles from racist communities. Many knew each other, others were recent arrivals. Only months after they enlisted their regiment would be decimated at Fort Wagner, their service a badge of honor for the rest of their lives, if they lived. What went through the minds of these men as they headed by steamers down the coast to slavery’s shores, guns in their hands and freedom on their lips?

They included Elias Rouse, an escaped slave from Kentucky who joined Company K of the 54th and was wounded in the arm in the assault on Fort Wagner.He would later marry the widow, Mary, of another volunteer, John Gay of the 102nd United States Colored Troops, who died of disease and is buried in South Carolina. Elias is buried in Ypsilanti’s Highland Cemetery.

John Bird a farmhand originally from Ohio, who joined the 55th and died of disease on Morris Island, South Carolina in January.

Nelson Wilson, a young hotel worker claiming to be from Canada though he was from Kentucky, also possibly an escaped slave, joined the 55th and was promoted to Full Corporal and later moved to Saint Louis.

James Wood originally from Indiana would join the 55th and serve through the war moving to Detroit afterward where he became a cook.

Napoleon Hamilton, originally from Alabama, joined the 54th and was promoted for his role at Fort Wagner later to have his rank reduced for ‘carelessness’.

William Casey, originally from Virginia, joined the 55th at the age of 48, though he lied and said he was 40. He injured his back doing fatigue-duty and was assigned to regimental duties after that, discharged for disability at the very end of the war.

Charles August, a black smith originally from Delaware was captured during the assault and died in the notorious Andersonville prison in September of 1864.

John Leatherman, a merchant marine, joined the 54th and was either killed in the assault on Fort Wagner or was captured and later died at Andersonville (the records say both). The thought of an experience of a captured black soldier is terrifying. Very few of the men captured at Wagner survived.

Charles Scott, a day laborer, joined the 54th and died of wounds received in one of the very last battles of the war, Boykins Mills, South Carolina in April, 1865.

Others from Michigan who fought with these storied regiments include Armistead Williams, a 36 year old laborer from Detroit, who joined the 54th and was captured two days before the assault on Fort Wagner, dying in July, 1864 of typhoid fever.

William Brown, a 19 year old merchant marine from Detroit died at Folly Island, South Carolina in December, 1864. He joined Company E and was in the thick of the fight at Wagner.

William Griffin, a twenty year old blacksmith from Detroit, had joined the 55th and was killed in action at the battle of Honey Hill on November 30th, 1864.

Richard Richie, a farmer from Greenville, Michigan joined the 55th as well. Originally from Mississippi, he was killed at the battle of Honey Hill as well.

Alfred Harris, a 28 year old sailor from Detroit, joined the 54th and was declared missing, never to be seen again, following the assault on Wagner.

Henry Steward, a 23 year old farmer from Adrian, joined the 54th and was promoted to Sergeant. He died of wounds received during the assault on Wagner in September of 1863 in a hospital in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

John Stevens, a farmer from Pontiac was 23 when he joined the 54th. He died this day, 148 years ago fighting for the liberation of his enslaved race on the walls of Fort Wagner.

These are the names of only some of the veterans of the 54th and 55th. There were many who answered freedom’s call from Ypsilanti and headed south in a war of liberation with other black units, mainly with the Michigan raised 102nd USCT. So many of their stories are lost forever, whatever we might do to rescue their legacy is not worthy of their sacrifice, yet we must do it. Remember their names comrades, they are heroes.

Below is a letter from Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis to his sweetheart Amelia, whom he would later marry, in the days following the battle that gives a sense of the assault and the men who made it.

Long live the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts! Freedom will be taken by the sword!

MORRIS ISLAND. S. C. July 20

MY DEAR AMELIA: I have been in two fights, and am unhurt. I am about to go in another I believe to-night. Our men fought well on both occasions. The last was desperate we charged that terrible battery on Morris Island known as Fort Wagoner, and were repulsed with a loss of 3 killed and wounded. I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible. I need not particularize the papers will give a better than I have time to give. My thoughts are with you often, you are as dear as ever, be good enough to remember it as I no doubt you will. As I said before we are on the eve of another fight and I am very busy and have just snatched a moment to write you. I must necessarily be brief. Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.

If I survive I shall write you a long letter. DeForrest of your city is wounded George Washington is missing, Jacob Carter is missing, Chas Reason wounded Chas Whiting, Chas Creamer all wounded. The above are in hospital.

This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here. My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war. Good Bye to all Write soon Your own loving LEWIS

Bastille Day: Don’t Make Us Wait Anymore!

Four years after the revolution
And the old king’s execution
Four years after I remember how
Those courtiers took their final vow

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests
Let them live on their fat

Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell

Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their ass

Good old Marat by your side we’ll stand or fall
You’re the only one that we can trust at all

Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest
The businessman, the bourgeois, the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
Of the sons of the ass-licking dying regime

We’ve got new generals,
Our leaders are new
They sit and they argue
And all that they do
Is sell their own colleagues
And ride upon their backs
And jail them
And break them
And give them all the axe
Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all

Marat we’re poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don’t make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don’t care how
We want our revolution now

Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power
Why why why
Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We’ve got nothing
Always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes

Marat we’re poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don’t make us wait anymore
Poor old Marat they hunt you down
The bloodhounds are sniffing all over the town
Poor old Marat you work ’til your eyes turn as red as rust

Poor old Marat
We trust in you …

I Am A communist

I am a communist. You might call me a Marxist, a socialist, an eco-socialist, a radical, a revolutionary, a Trotskyist or number of other names, but I prefer ‘communist’. Though I am not a Communist. However, while rejecting utterly the Stalinist aberration, it is not possible to also erase that legacy. Including what might have been inherent in the Bolshevik experience that allowed for the part of the bureaucracy, including Stalin, to emerge from its ranks. It has to be embraced and subjected to context and critique in order that we might understand it with the imperative of avoiding such future cataclysms, so profoundly criminal and obfuscatory.

‘Communism’, nowhere in the entire canon, practice and traditions that armed the working class movement in the decades before the Soviet experiment, those same traditions that helped guide the Russian working class in forging that revolution, could have been taken to mean anything like the Stalinist nightmare that came. Stalinism, in too many ways, became the antithesis to the vision which made the revolution. So I remain a communist without contradiction. It is in Stalinism that contradiction, grotesque contradiction, is held.

The date of the fall, of the degeneration, is entirely secondary for it was a process that began as soon as the Russian revolution found itself starving and alone in the world. And further back, a revolution whose roots were burrowed deep into a base and backward, absolutist feudal past. No one, not one person, with a genuine understanding of the communism of Marx (or indeed of Lenin), could dare describe the Gulag State as communism without first redefining the term until it lost all its emancipatory and historical meaning, all its theoretical and analytical foundation. It is for those very meanings, those foundations that I find it impossible to not embrace the term for myself. I am a communist.

And speaking of losing all meaning, what could it possibly mean to call oneself a ‘socialist’, a term deemed more approachable, when Tony Blair, in a fit of nostalgia or guilt or whatever, might call himself one as well. In deed the entire, disastrous, neo-liberal agenda has been implemented by so-called Socialist parties. Even at these parties’ best (many years ago now) when ‘socialism’ meant the capitalist state taking ownership of capitalist enterprises then not only am I not a socialist, I am, in a sense, an anti-’socialist’. When a serial rapist like (recent) International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss Kahn; a rapist of women, of resources, of workers, of whole nations is a leading member (and possible Presidential candidate still) of a ‘Socialist Party’ then shouldn’t our movement be as resistant in confusing our vision by calling ourselves socialists as we are resistant in calling ourselves communists because of Stalinist ignominy?

But isn’t this is just as true of words like ‘democracy’ (what, pray tell, does THAT mean anymore?) or ‘feminism’ or ‘environmentalism’ or any other term that I positively use all of the time. It is no accident, however, that each of those words has been positively appropriated by the ruling classes for their own ends (even as we struggle to appropriate them for ours), but the term ‘communism’ (with a good deal of assistance from the Stalinist debacle) has only been vilified and damned. It is because that word, in its essence, cannot belong to them. They cannot appropriate it, for it would stick in their throats and choke them to death. So it is ours, let us treat it so.

We can not escape words, each of which have their own history, any more than we can escape history. Part of our task is to rescue definitions made wrong; to define, in our own terms, the tasks and vision of our project and use the words most fitting to illuminate the goal and the practice. There was a reason, as opposed to other trends in the movement of workers and the oppressed, that the progenitors of our movement, the one that still lives and still breathes despite all, despite everything, called themselves ‘communists’. It is thoroughly modern as it looks to the horizon; it posits the foundations of the future in the capitalist present at the same time it proudly inherits a tradition of the commons, of the egalitarian impulse and the deeply social needs our species have displayed so consistently and in such variety that it might rightly be said to be a part, a core, of our human nature.

‘Communism’ as envisioned and, in the past and in different form, lived, has no need for state or coercion or institutions vested with power standing apart of the whole. It is a ‘free association’ where in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ or it is nothing. It is classless and produces only use values. Its wealth is defined by the satisfaction of needs, and those needs are defined by a people free of commodity, of commodification and in cooperation with, not antagonism to, the natural world of which we are a part and now apart. The natural world which is required for us to live.

I recognize that anything we say about ourselves and what we propose requires explanation, requires us to wash away the muck our enemies, and ourselves, have covered our project and our ideas with over these many years of struggle. That we have to choose our words carefully and that we must be creative in responding to the subjectivity of folks, we must meet them where they are now; we can’t use words that confuse rather than make clear and for that reason I do not walk around talking about ‘communism’ as part of my real-world political practice.

If, however, we allow the ruling class to invest the language we use with their fears and prejudices, with their hollow truths, then they have won already. Language is the greatest of all social institutions; it is the medium in which ideas travel and action organized, it is not neutral and our role in the waging of the class war is, in part, to wage a war to (re)appropriate language that elucidates and to expropriate the words that have been made obscure, an obscurity which hides their true history, as they are spoken through the ruling class. In doing so our history is lost, through the words used to understand it, to the whims of the enemy. If we are ever to win the battle, or even effectively engage it, we must win the words we use to define our struggle. It is an essential component in that most precious, for the survival of our species, of processes; that process by which the working class is transformed from a class ‘of itself’ into a class ‘for itself’.

To pose an alternative that might capture the imagination of masses of folks it is necessary to name that alternative and to place its realization in the transformation of the present and not in the faith of an idealized future. However, that transformation, both its beginnings and its outcomes, is only made real by a vision; a goal worthy of the terrible cost liberation entails. And for this we revolutionaries, as communists, ‘disdain to conceal [our] views and aims. [We] openly declare that [our] ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.’

To win that world the working class must also win on the field of language, which is essential if we are to win on the field of ideas and of ideology. With clarity and the legitimate audacity history, when deeply absorbed and understood by the best of working class combatants and the communities of struggle they lead, affords us we can remake words into weapons and refound ideas as the power to wield those weapons. We must do so without jargon or dogmatism or sentimental fealty to moribund traditions, but we must do so. In so doing we take power into our own hands, the power of ideas and the power to communicate those ideas. And, in my opinion, that is one giant step on the path to communism, or at least to a revolution which might make communism a possibility many years after all of us are gone. And yes I am, proudly, a communist.

Ernest Mandel: Communism

As a companion to the rant above, I offer the great Belgian Marxist, Ernest Mandel giving a too brief explanation of the term ‘communism’. Written when Stalinism still lived, barely, and claimed the mantle, I imagine Ernie, in his wisdom, would have said this or that differently today, added or deleted as the case might be. After all, as each generation gets its own Shakespeare, so each it gets its own Marx. Its own communism. Mandel did more than most to help define the communism needed by his generation. That we might do the same for ours.

Communism

Ernest Mandel

The term ’communism’ was first used in modern times to designate a specific economic doctrine (or regime), and a political creed intending to introduce such a regime, by the French lawyer Etiénne Cabet in the late 1830s; his works, especially the utopia L’Icarie, were influential among the Paris working class before the revolution of 1848.

In 1840 the first ’communist banquet’ was held in Paris – banquets and banquet speeches were a common form of political protest under the July monarchy.

The term spread rapidly, so that Karl Marx could entitle one of his first political articles of 16 October 1842 ’Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung’. He noted that ’communism’ was already an international movement, manifesting itself in Britain and Germany besides France, and traced its origin to Plato. He could have mentioned ancient Jewish sects and early Christian monasteries too.

In fact, some of the so-called ’utopian socialists’, in the first place the German Weitling, called themselves communists and spread the influence of the new doctrine among German itinerant handicraftsmen all over Europe, as well as among the more settled industrial workers of the Rhineland. Under the influence of Marx and Engels, the League of the Just (Bund des Gerechten) they had created, changed is name to the Communist League in 1846. The League requested the two young German authors to draft a declaration of principle for their organisation. This declaration would appear in February 1848 under the title Communist Manifesto, which would make the words ’communism’ and ’communists’ famous the world over.

Communism, from then on, would designate both a classes society without property, without ownership – either private or nationalised – of the means of production, without commodity production, money or a state apparatus separate and apart from the members of the community, and the social-political movement to arrive at that society. After the victory of the Russian October revolution in 1917, that movement would tend to be identified by and large with Communist parties and a Communist International (or at least an ’international communist movement’), though there exists a tiny minority of communists, inspired by the Dutch astronomer Pannekoek- who are hostile to a party organisation of any kind (the so-called ’council communists’, Rätekommunisten).

The first attempts to arrive at a communist society (leaving aside early, medieval and more modern christian communities) were made in the United States in the 19th century, through the establishment of small agrarian settlements band upon collective property, communally organised labour and the total absence of money inside their boundaries. From that point of view, they differed radically from the production co-operatives promoted for example by the English industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen. Weitling himself created such a community, significantly called Communia. Although they were generally established by a selected group of followers who shared common convictions and interests, these agrarian communities did not survive long in a hostile environment. The nearest contemporary extension of these early communist settlements are the kibbutzim in Israel.

Rather rapidly, and certainly after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, communism came to be associated less with small communities set up by morally or intellectually selected elites, but with the general movement of emancipation of the modern working class, if not in its totality at least in its majority, encompassing furthermore the main countries (wealth-wise and population-wise) of the world. In the major theoretical treatise of their younger years, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels stated emphatically:

“Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of dominant peoples ’all at once’ and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. . . . The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a ’world-historical’ existence.”

And, earlier in the same passage:

“This development of productive forces (which at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it privation is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored . . . (1845-6, p. 49).”

That line of argument is today repeated by most orthodox Marxists (communists), who find in it an explanation of what ’went wrong’ in Soviet Russia, once it was isolated in a capital environment as a result of the defeat of revolution in other European countries in the 1918-23 period. But many ’official’ Communist Parties still stick to Stalin’s particular version of communism, according to which it is possible to successfully complete the building of socialism and communism in a single country, or in a small number of countries.

The radical and international definition of a communist society given by Marx and Engels inevitably leads to the perspective of a transition (transition period) between capitalism and communism. Marx and Engels first, notably in their writings about the Paris Commune – The Civil War in France – and in their Critique of the Gotha Programme (of the German social-democratic party), Lenin later – especially in his book State and Revolution – tried to give at least a general sketch of what that transition would be like. It centres around the following ideas:

1) The proletariat, as the only social class radically opposed to private ownership of the means of production, and likewise as the only class which has potentially the power to paralyse and overthrow bourgeois society, as well as the inclination to collective co-operation and solidarity which are the motive forces of the building of communism, conquers political (state) power. It uses that power (’the dictatorship of the proletariat’) to make more and more ’despotic inroads’ into the realm of private property and private production, substituting for them collectively and consciously (planned) organised output, increasingly turned towards direct satisfaction of needs. This implies a gradual withering away of market economy.

2) The dictatorship of the proletariat, however, being the instrument of the majority to hold down a minority, does not need a heavy apparatus of full-time functionaries, and certainly no heavy apparatus of repression. It is a state sui generis, a state which starts to wither away from its inception, i.e. it starts to devolve more and more of the traditional state functions to self-administrating bodies of citizens, to society in its totality. This withering away of the state goes hand in hand with the indicated withering away of commodity production and of money, accompanying a general withering away of social classes and social stratification, i.e. of the division of society between administrators and administrated, between ’bosses’ and ’bossed over’ people.

That vision of transition towards communism as an essentially evolutionary process obviously has preconditions: that the countries engaged on that road already enjoy a relatively high level of development (industrialisation, modernisation, material wealth, stock of infrastructure, level of skill and culture of the people, etc.), created by capitalism itself; that the building of the new society is supported by the majority of the population (i.e. that the wage-earners already represent the great majority of the producers and that they have passed the threshold of a necessary level of socialist political class consciousness); that the process encompasses the major countries of the world.

Marx, Engels, Lenin and their main disciples and co-thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Bukharin et al. – incidentally also Stalin until 1928 – distinguished successive stages of the communist society: the lower stage, generally called ’socialism’, in which there would be neither commodity production nor classes, but in which the individual’s access to the consumption fund would still be strictly measured by his quantitative labour input, evaluated in hours of labour; and a higher stage, generally called ’communism’, in which the principle of satisfaction of needs for everyone would apply, independently of any exact measurement of work performed.

Marx established that basic difference between the two stages of communism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, together with so much else. It was also elaborated at length in Lenin’s State and Revolution.

In the light of these principles, it is clear that no socialist or communist society exists anywhere in the world today. It is only possible to speak about ’really existing socialism’ at present, if one introduces a new, ’reductionist’ definition of a socialist society, as being only identical with predominantly nationalised property of the means of production and central economic planning. This is obviously different from the definition of socialism in the classical Marxist scriptures. Whether such a new definition is legitimate or not in the light of historical experience is a matter of political and philosophical judgement. It is in any case another matter altogether than ascertaining whether the radical emancipators goals projected by the founders of contemporary communism have been realised in these really existing societies or not. This is obviously not the case.

Die Like a Dog

This band, Peter Brotzmann on saxophone and taragot, Toshinori Kondo on electronic trumpet, William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums, is the Die Like a Dog Quartet (the Trio is all minus Kondo). Ferocious, reaching, charged sounds mutating before your ears. It is not background music, it is consuming and you are the one being consumed. Consumed by possibilities, not eventualities. These sounds do not lie; they are the truth and you can not be neutral. In my mind this is what The Revolution sounds like; the New Dawn’s beautiful pangs of birth. Die Like a Dog, comrades. All the fucking way.

The Social Spirit

The Social Spirit, Eugene Debs 1915

We need to grow out of the selfish, sordid, brutal spirit of individualism which still lurks even in Socialists and is responsible for the strife and contention which prevail where there should be concord and good will. The social spirit and the social conscience must be developed and govern our social relations before we shall have any social revolution.

If there are any among whom the social spirit should find its highest expression and who should be bound fast in its comradely embrace and give to the world the example of its elevating and humanizing influence, it is the Socialists. They of all others have come to realized the hardening and brutalizing effect of capitalist individualism in the awful struggle for existence and it is to them a cause of unceasing rejoicing that they live at a time in the world’s historic development when the very conditions which resulted from this age-long struggle forbid its continuance and proclaim its approaching termination.

The rule of individualism which has governed society since the days of primitive communism has effectually restrained the moral and spiritual development of the race. It has brought out the baser side of men’s nature and set them against each other as if the plan of creation had designed them to be mortal enemies.

Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit. The very nature of the catch-as-catch-can encounter in which they are engaged makes them wary and suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other, and the latent good that is in them dies for the want of incentive to express itself.

The other day I saw two such capitalists shake hands. It was pitiable. Their hearts had no part in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They happened to meet and could not avoid each other. And so they mechanically touched each other’s reluctant hands, standing at right angles to each other for a moment — not face to face — and then passing on without either looking the other in the eyes.

This cold and heartless ceremony typified the relation begotten of capitalist individualism in which men’s interests are competitive and antagonistic and in which each instinctively looks out for himself and is on alert to take every possible advantage of his fellow man.

The result of this system is inevitably a race of Ishmaelites. How differently two Socialist comrades shake hands! Their hearts are in their palms and the joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong and the other weak, the stronger shares the weakness and the weaker shares the strength of his comrade. The base thought of taking a mean advantage, one of the other, does not darken their minds or harden their hearts. They are joined together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship. They multiply each other and they rejoice in their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, and not the worst, as in the contact of individualism, is appealed to and brought forth for the benefit of both.

What an elevating, enlarging, and satisfying relation!

And this is the “dead level” of mediocrity and servitude to which we are to sink when this relation becomes universal among men as it will in the International Socialist Republic.

So at least we are told by those who in the present system have acquired the instincts and impulses of animals of prey in the development of their imagined superiority by draining the veins and wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, but we are not impressed by the virtues of the shining system of which they stand as the shining examples.

Through all the ages pas men, civilized men, so called, have been at each other’s throats in the struggle for existence, and the spirit of individualism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with unutterable anguish and woe.

But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic individualism is in sight. The social forces at work are undermining and destroying it and soon its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an emancipated world.

The largest possible expression of the social spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the Socialist movement. In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our present environments and relations, we may yet cultivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mutual good and to the good of our great movement.

In our propaganda, in the discussion of our tactical and other differences, and in all our other activities, the larger faith that true comradeship inspires should prevail between us. We need to be more patient, more kindly, more tolerant, more sympathetic, helpful, and encouraging to one another, and less suspicious, less envious, and less contentious, if we are to educate and impress the people by our example and by the results of our teachings upon ourselves, win them to our movement, and realize our dream of universal freedom and social righteousness.

Published in The American Socialist [Chicago], v. 2, no. 22, whole no. 162 (Dec. 11, 1915)