ca's Rebel Tradition House. It would take a very vivid imagination to picture Gerald Ford as a descendant of Tom Paine.
tage. The best American tradition is an international tradition, a an international history and tradition that is centuries old-the history of the common people of gles of famous politicians, or the and groups that aimed somewhat higher than that. Ours is a history of great social dreams and the atto reality. It certainly doesn't lead to the White gins to fear this."
We revolutionists are the true descendants of the American Revolution, and we should claim our heriworldwide rebel tradition. We have the world, the tradition of working Our history doesn't deal with the intrigues of royalty, the power strugfinancial machinations of entrepreneurs. We're interested in the people temps to translate those dreams insun... and ere noon they will bite, depend upon it ... The gentry beI think that's a perfect description, even though it's meant to be hostile. You can just see the mob, beginning to think and reason, testing its strength, resting in the sun with one suspicious eye on the gentry, but slowly, surely, getting ready to bite. Revolutionary history is the story of that mob.
As Lenin put it: "Politics begins where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begins."
It's this interconnection between mass action and individualism that explains why so many of the great individuals in revolutionary history are nameless. Tom Paine is part of our revolutionary tradition, with his book Common Sense. But so is the trader who took 150 copies on his rounds, or the soldier's wife who copied a chapter into each letter to It is this interaction between individual and crowd that gives even the legendary figures of revolutionary history a basic truth. John Brown had no gift for symbolism. He didn't live long enough to do or say half the things that were attributed to him. Yet his act struck a chord so deep in the masses of anti-slavery Americans that they lation. assumed he represented them per haps even better than he really did.
There is a poetry in revolutionary tradition and history the kind of poetry that filled out the sparse outlines of the raid on Harper's Ferry and turned it into a song sung by a hundred thousand voices going to war. But we don't take advantage of poetic licence. Revolutionary history is truthful in every essential.
We haven't buried our mistakes and failures. But we do have a different definition of failure than the historians of the ruling class. For the ruling class, the aim of life is to hold off history long enough to die of old age with one's titles and money intact. They judge success or failure by that yardstick.
Our view is very different. What counts isn't what you have when you die, but what you leave for the revolutionary struggle. Patrick Pearse was shot for his part in the Easter 1916 uprising in Ireland, but before he died he called it a victory: "To refuse to fight would have been to lose, to fight is to win; we have kept faith with the past and handed on a tradition to the future.' That's a concise statement of the revolutionary "success story'-the story of people who didn't refuse to struggle Future But our revolutionary heritage is more than a great vision, more than the inspiration to fight for that vision, more even.than the con crete lessons on how to conduct our struggle. It is also a living piece of the future.
The repression of the Paris Commune cost Paris 50,000 workers-jailed, killed, or exiled Now we're finished with socialism for a long time', said the Minister of Finance, Thiers. But the Paris Commune outlived its executioners. It left us not only an extraordinary example of human courage, but the basic techniques of workers' representation and legisSuch examples, though, can barely indicate the richness of the international history of the revolutionary movement. The only way to really understand revolution ary tradition is to engage in revolutionary action. The Socialist serve and defend the history of our torebears in the revolutionary movement out contmue to make revolutionary history through our leadership of daily struggles here in America, as well as in our international struggle against world imperialism As Alfred North Whitehead once said, knowledge doesn't keep any better than fish. The best way to preserve history isn't to bury it in a library or museum but to use it. And you won't find a safer place to store history than in the foundations of a new society.
1. Wobbly was the nickname given to members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a mass syndicalist organisation mat fourished auring the carty 1 yous.
2. Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the authors of the Declaration of Independence 3. Harriet Tubman, herself a former slave, was an organiser of the Under. ground Railway, which helped thousands of Blacks to escape North from the plantations in the late 1840s and 1850s Frederick Douglass, a black leader in in mid-19th century, also spoke out strongl for women's rights.
4. Eugene Debs was the leader of the Socialist Party in the early 1900s. Jailed for his anti-war activities, he never. theless polled a million votes in the 1920 presidential election.
5. La Raza Unida is the party of the Chicanos (Spanish-Americans) in the US
----- pull-quotes -----
Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance not only pre-