First part of recently published Class War pamphlet “Down with Tyrants and Traitors All!” is since now also available also in English. You can download it as PDF on our download page. What is the content of this pamphlet in the concrete we describe below.
This project focused on Czech proletarian movement in the period of revolutionary wave 1917 – 1921 was not designed as a kind of written “history” of the proletariat. Even if an excavation of our class brothers´ and sisters´ experience – an experience for a long time drowned and distorted by deposits of bourgeois ideology (Stalinist, liberal…) – would be by itself an interesting and meritable act, nevertheless as communists we strive to break the ideological separation between theory and practice, between a mere enumeration and description of past class struggles and drawing practical lessons for future struggles. Our aim was, in other words to appropriate all points and levels, which represent a then classist militants´ rupture with capitalism and an affirmation and development of our class´ historical programme.
The first volume of „Down with Tyrants and Traitors All!” is carried with subhead „Contribution to the Communist Critique of the Proletarian Movement in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 1914-1918“ and it describes the First World War and proletarian revolutionary defeatist movement against this slaughter. This movement, which developed many huge ruptures with capital using them up either as cannon fodder or as labour force; was however finally defeated by its own weaknesses. Weaknesses that give a birth to new forms of social democracy which took this movement back to capitalist prison of new independent national state even if the proletariat stayed calm between its walls only for two years (as we are going to show in the second issue).
As we have said above it is not our aim in this text to imitate bourgeois historiography and pile up facts, whom we will ascribe either positive or a negative sign according to an ideological key. Facts are important for us only as a source of appropriating – based on practical experience of the then proletarian movement – all points and levels, which represent a then classist militants´ rupture with capitalism and an affirmation and development of our class´ historical programme. And of course, we do not want only to affirm strengths of the movement, but also to criticise its weaknesses. That is the only way how to develop important lessons to be used in confrontations, which are only awaiting our class.
