Why ‘Geese’ ?
2023
The historical origin of the name Geese, like much of Communist Party history, is, today, largely obscure. It comes from a dispute between two factions of what would become the Communist Party USA in the early 1920's, when the majority of the Party was still underground and disagreements over political approach within the Party were far more common than they are today. Coming out of the context of state suppression and the Palmer Raids (the first, smaller Red Scare) and inspired by the example of the Bolsheviks, one section of the Party insisted that all genuinely revolutionary work was necessarily illegal, and that the purpose of a legal party, if there should be one at all, was to act as a subordinate and dependent body which had its main purpose in acting as a means to find potential candidates for underground work. As Max Bedacht, one of the founding members of the Party, writes in his memoir: "This illegality for our Party was elevated into a principle." This was the "Goose caucus." The opposition to the Geese, acerbically dubbed the "Liquidators," argued to the contrary that it was of necessity for Communists to fight their way back to legality and to establish a popular presence among the masses. Bedacht represents this latter faction's views, again from his memoir:
"[The Geese] insisted that for revolutionary struggles there must be favorable conditions. That, of course, is true. However, one of the needed favorable factors is the existence of a revolutionary working class. And that commodity does not grow in secret dark rooms. It must be developed by propaganda, by agitation, and by continuous political efforts on the part of the Communists."
The struggle between the two factions was incredibly acrimonious, as struggles between Communists so frequently are, and "Geese" comes out of one these venomous back-and-forths, described by Irving Howe:
"According to [Benjamin] Gitlow, when Abraham Jakira, who stuttered badly, was heckled during a faction debate for "cackling like a goose," [Israel] Amter rose to his defense by declaring that ‘the geese saved Rome and we shall yet save the Party.’ [Jay] Lovestone, a bench-jockey for the opposing faction, thereupon shouted back: ‘All right then, from now on you're the Goose Caucus.’ And so it was."
Of these names, Jakira passes away less than a decade later; only Israel Amter remains a consistent and faithful Party member into the next period, while both Gitlow and Lovestone later become devoutly and intensely anti-Communist. In either case, today all of them are more or less forgotten. And yet these men, and so many more, were the foundation of the Communist movement in the United States; not nameless, silent functionaries, but energetic, enterprising, and genuinely intelligent revolutionaries whose individual paths pointed in multiple potential directions.
In terms of the purely political question, the editors of this magazine find our sympathies to be wholly on the side of the "Liquidators." Only through energetic participation in mass discourse, with a firm, historically rooted, convincing political standpoint can the revolutionary situation ever be meaningfully developed. The debate carried on but, ultimately, history was to decide the result. As the Palmer Raids subsided in the face of increased liberal and progressive disgust with what were seen as blatant violations of democracy, and as the Communist International recognized that proletarian revolution was further off than at first expected, shifting to the united front policy accordingly. The demand for an underground party, and in fact for any illegal apparatus at all, became increasingly anachronistic. The final death blow to the Geese perspective was dealt by the Comintern itself through a "special American Commission" that ruled decisively in favor of the "Liquidators." "Illegality for the sake of illegality must cease," it stated, "The main efforts must be devoted to legal work." And in fact the proceeding history of American Communism, and the developments in American politics and society, make it clear that this conclusion was essentially true.
One hundred years later, there remains something romantic about this era of Party history. Party members, reading whatever of the sparse and badly translated Bolshevik theory they could get their hands on, still reeling from the residual hangover from their upbringing in the dual American radical traditions of ultra-left Syndicalism and right-wing reformist Socialism, waging intellectual war on each other with the feeling that they were on the precipice of a November revolution of their own gives these early years a sense of independence and enthusiasm that we feel is lacking in the attitude of the Communist movement today. The habit of deferring factional disputes to the Comintern, began here, had not yet fully set in; later, disagreements over Party line would often be glossed over or otherwise subordinated until the pressing nature of this or that political crisis demanded that they be pushed to the forefront and at least addressed, if not systematically resolved. The post-WWII crisis of the Communist Political Association's liquidation of the Party, for example, or the mood of re-evaluation in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the successful isolation of the Communist Party in American society produced by the second Red Scare and what Party leader Eugene Dennis called a "deeply-ingrained, left-sectarian approach," led to theoretical disputes and argumentation that furnish extremely important interesting material for study. In those particular episodes, the debates were cut short, or resolved through ineffective means, that often stunted the Party's theoretical development and led to repeated confusions and crisis.
While we respect the immense and historic contributions, and the sufferings endured, by the countless revolutionaries, both within the Party and without, we term ourselves "Geese" out of homage to that old Party culture of militantly and creatively setting before itself the questions of the day and deciding them, and the Party's future, with boldness and self-consciousness. These episodes, marked by fundamental and often vitriolic disagreement over Party line, were not aberrations or unimportant, they were not secondary to the Party's political work, but provided the only real basis upon which that work could meaningfully proceed and the Party itself develop. And the determination of that common ideological and political worldview is essential. Louis Fraina, an incredibly intelligent and puzzling founding member of the Party, writes in his book, Revolutionary Socialism:
"A collapse of Capitalism, in one form or another, is inevitable; but the coming of Socialism is not equally inevitable. It may become a collapse of all civilization.What determined the supremacy of the bourgeoisie was its possession of actual material power, of the ownership of capital. It was a propertied class, and property as a class prerogative imparts power and ultimate ascendancy. The proletariat is a non-propertied, an expropriated class; what will determine its supremacy is revolutionary energy and integrity, and these alone. [...]
Only an uncompromising adherence to the revolutionary task, only the conscious and definite emergence of revolutionary Socialism, may avert the catastrophe. [...]
The proletarian revolution is not in any sense of the word an automatic process: it will conquer only through uncompromising action, courageous and unrelenting adherence to the class struggle, and by developing the necessary clarity of understanding of the epoch we are in, an understanding that will avoid tactical mistakes and offer a definite, decisive program of revolutionary action to the proletariat."
We celebrate these principles. Today, that famous statement that "there is no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" has become a truism that, more often than not, becomes an excuse to avoid that other phrase which has also become a truism, that revolution demands a "concrete analysis of the concrete conditions." Demands! That word is a powerful one, it is a word of necessity. Socialism cannot be won by the celebration of its tenets by nominal partisans; communism cannot be victorious as the byproduct of the activism of this or that social crusader; Marxism is not a tool, it is a totality; theory is not the product of practice, practice is not the implementation of theory, but both of these concepts are fundamentally inseparable. The critical project is the revolutionary project.. Dialectical materialism does not subordinate thought, but celebrates it; it treats it not as the motive-force of history, but as the means by which history develops. Labriola, an early Italian Marxist who significantly influenced his successors, particularly that genius Antonio Gramsci, makes clear that revolutionary consciousness is itself the essential point of the Marxist worldview:
"Critical communism dates from the moment when the proletarian movement is not merely a result of social conditions, but when it has already strength enough to understand that these conditions can be changed and to discern what means can modify them and in what direction. [Our emphasis.]"
Or, as Gramsci writes in his Prison Notebooks:
"That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals is an affirmation that can easily lend itself to mockery and caricature. But if one thinks about it, nothing could be more exact. What matters is the function, which is directive and organizational, ie., educative, ie., intellectual. A tradesman does not join a political party in order to do business, nor an industrialist in order to produce more at a lower cost, nor a peasant to learn new methods of cultivation [...]
In the political party the elements of an economic social group get beyond that moment of their historical development and become agents of more general activities of a national and international character. [Our emphasis.]"
Or, later, more simply:
"An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies [...]"
It is a common idea today that the Communists must "prove" their sincerity and dedication to the working class through a focus on local, daily issues and local, daily activities (or even material incentive). Alongside this mutual aid attitude, is the belief that a purely educational (as contrasted to a critical) approach to Marxism, which consists of the sharing of facts, "debunkings," informative books, moralistic condemnations of other political tendencies, etc., is sufficient to win people over. Both of these tendencies are often exhibited simultaneously by most Communists and within most organizations, and they both represent the same underlying ethos: that of economism. Lenin writes in his Two Tactics that the real danger to the "Social-Democratic" (the contemporary term for Communist) movement was liquidation. But liquidation from what angle?:
"The final political result of the revolution may prove to be that, in spite of the formal "independence" of Social-Democracy, in spite of its complete organizational individuality as a separate party, it will in fact not be independent, it will not be able to put the imprint of its proletarian independence on the course of events, will prove so weak that, on the whole and in the last analysis, its "dissolving" in the bourgeois democracy will nonetheless be a historical fact."
In other words, the Party (or the Communist movement more broadly) will, while retaining its formal independence of thought and action, will be so divorced from the real popular movement that, in terms of its effect on historical development, it may as well have never existed. Today the Communists stand in that position. We are independent, we engage in our own activity, and we preach our own politics—but in every case, our inability to articulate an effective political program that realizes the motion of a living social mass leads the result to be that the Party acts as a purely secondary and derivative social actor. In the text quoted, Lenin is responding to the accusations by the Mensheviks, the communist faction opposed to the Bolsheviks, that, by pressing the working-class movement and the party to rally behind and lead the democratic revolution in Russia, he is a supporter of liquidationism, or of dissolving the Party's independent role; they, on the other hand, insist it is the party's task to stay aloof from these struggles and focus on economic organizing and preparation for socialist revolution, that the Social-Democratic Party cannot taint itself by participation in politics and "must remain the party of extreme revolutionary opposition." But Lenin understood that to adopt this position was to separate the Communist movement from the historic tasks of the period; by seeing the decisive political struggles of the day as outside the pure scope of Marxism, the Mensheviks did not advance the revolution, but only advance the descent of the Communist movement into the mire.
The task of the Communist movement is, in our view, fundamentally to give a decisive, sharp political answer to every question of the day—not to avoid these questions by seeking refuge in economic organizing and uninspiring and underdeveloped political agitation. There is nothing wrong in principle with either economic or educational work, and these both invariably hallmark every leftist sect. But they are fundamentally insufficient and, insofar as they impede the development of a Marxist politics, actively harmful. This is because the movement of millions in history is not the result of base economic incentive or "real" statistics about the Soviet Union, but of the development of a real political worldview. The various democratic movements, BlackLivesMatter movement, the LGBTQ movement, etc., all show that people are fundamentally guided by an ideological vision of what they believe the world should be—a concrete ideological vision that guides, largely implicitly, the participation of the entire progressive section of American society in their struggles against fascism, racism, misogyny, etc. These issues are not "distractions" or "mistakes" that need to be fixed by the Party, but the real manifestations and daily battles of the impending crisis within capitalism, and the ferment for the incipient worldview of Communism.
The millions marching around BlackLivesMatter, the millions resisting, in their way, the development of fascistic politics that threaten to draw the United States into a sharp spiral of reaction, the millions fighting for social economic policies and progressive reforms–these are the vanguard of the proletarian side of the class struggle. They are in embryo; they are the substance of the revolutionary movement. Gramsci writes:
"The modern Prince [ie., the political party] must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realization of a superior, total form of modern civilization. [Our emphasis.]"
The fundamental task of the Communist movement today is the articulation of this democratic movement, giving it self-consciousness of its place in history, to ‘give’ this movement in embryo a worldview that provides the intellectual basis for a new form of society. In total opposition to all ’Marxists’ who believe that this new worldview stands in direct contrast to the popular and progressive strivings of the millions, in direct contrast to the real struggles the results of which the working class stakes the future of the United States and the world upon, we insist that this worldview cannot but be where that progressive working class is itself moving towards—that history is made by the masses, not the sectarian intelligentsia. It is this sense of historical autonomy and faith in the creative potential of the people they claimed to represent that pervades the thinking of the early Party and, since we can't name ourselves the "Liquidators," leads us to name ourselves, tongue-in-cheek, "Geese." Our thesis can perhaps be summed up in other, more famous words:
"We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.
The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.”