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A Fourth International Tendency (FIT) pamphlet, February, 1988. Used by permission.
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The present economic, social, and political situation in the U.S. results from the gradual breakdown of capitalist production and distribution worldwide. The erosion of the system in the post-World War II period brought on the demise of the Bretton Woods international monetary arrangements in 1971, signaling the end of U.S. economic hegemony. The world depression of 1974-1975 was a sure sign that the rebuilding and expansion of capitalist production, which followed in the wake of the terrible carnage and destruction of the second World War, had come to an end.
The system is again clogged with its overproduction of commodities and a lack of profitable markets for their distribution (the temporary upturn, fueled by massive deficit spending, notwithstanding). It now suffers from the same inherent contradiction that beset capitalism in the 1930s and that has plagued it since the start of the 20th century, creating the conditions for two devastating wars of capitalist rivalry for control of the world market.
The U.S. ruling class remains dominant in the capitalist world, but far from united within its own ranks and still further removed from its illusory goal of regulating and harmonizing capitalism on a world scale. Its military power was challenged in Vietnam. Its economic controls and political wisdom were questioned by its imperialist allies in Europe during the Johnson administration. Since 1971 each succeeding administration in Washington has tried to revitalize and stabilize the economy at home and abroad by austerity measures for the working class and military expansion for capital investment.
The result at the start of the second term of the Reagan administration is an impending economic crisis among the most severe that has been known in this country. The staggering weight of the unprecedented federal deficit with its huge interest burden threatens to shatter the monetary structure. At some point, as the debt continues its inexorable accumulation, interest rates will climb again, business expansion will be choked off, and unemployment will rise drastically. Such was the sequence of events in the 1981-82 economic decline. At that time the collapse was postponed and the monetary system shored up by government loans.
Major bankruptcies of the Chrysler type were avoided under the Carter administration. Likewise the catastrophic ramifications of the debacle of the Continental Illinois bank were curtailed in early 1984 under Reagan; and the most recent crisis of the Ohio savings and loans was averted. Even so, more than 30,000 business failures were recorded in the 1981-82 shakeout. A score of banks failed. Twelve million people were jobless.
The option of government bailouts for big business is no longer the same as three years ago because of the rapid rise in the federal deficit. Such loans aggravate the crisis. The reason is the bloated size of the federal budget and the refusal of the Reagan administration to cut military spending which is a major source of capital investment.
The economy seems to be in a holding pattern – having delivered stunning blows to organized industrial workers, to Blacks and other minorities, to women, to working farmers, and to others. There is an appearance of social stability, but this remains more of a ruling class hope than a reality. The gathering storm clouds on the social horizon are not yet sufficiently menacing to cause either panic in government or organized self-protection by the governed. Under these circumstances the employing class of this country is becoming less confident, the middle class more volatile, and sectors of the working class are beginning to think about what is happening to them and to challenge the ruling class’s take-back offensive.
The labor and radical movements are in general disarray, striving to understand and overcome the 20-year heritage of class collaboration in the expanding postwar economy from 1950 to 1970. During those years a class analysis and the socialist program for the reorganization of society by the working class found little sympathy. Stalinism and the brutal dictatorship in the Soviet Union were identified with socialism by bourgeois propagandists, and the uneven but continuous rise in the working class standard of living here and in Western Europe created illusions in “Western democracy.” This provided a material basis for popular acceptance of the slander against the socialist ideal of an egalitarian society.
The trade union bureaucracy, preaching its doctrine of class collaboration, gained ascendancy within the working class movement at the close of World War II – and quickly diverted all vestiges of what mass sentiment still existed for independent political action into the Democratic Party. During the war the anti-Stalinist bureaucrats in the union movement shared control and accepted a division of labor with the CP-controlled unions in their joint support of the imperialist military effort. But after the war, when U.S. imperialism turned on the Soviet bureaucracy and instituted the Cold War (a hot war in Korea), and the witch-hunt at home under the Truman administration, the Stalinists were driven from the unions. From that time to the present the pro-capitalist trade union bureaucrats have controlled the unions and their particular variety of class collaborationist ideology has prevailed. Even so, class-struggle pressures create divisions within their ranks.
Stalinism as a working class political tendency lost credibility in the union movement and in the Black community during the 1950s and 1960s, maintaining a peripheral existence in intellectual circles and among some radical workers. It found new support in the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s, but not much.
Revolutionary socialism with its class analysis of society and its program for the working class overturn of capitalism gained new adherents (especially among radicalizing youth) beginning in 1955 with the development of the civil rights movement. It continued to grow through the 1960s with the student upsurge, antiwar demonstrations, women’s liberation, and similar social protest movements.
During the past decade, from the world depression of 1974-75 to the present, the working class has been under attack and poorly prepared to defend its economic interests and living standards. The union leadership has defaulted in this struggle, granting concessions, seeking compromises with the employers, hoping for economic recovery.
As a result, Stalinism has increased its influence at the present juncture, in relation to the trade union bureaucracy – even though both are essentially class collaborationist. The Stalinists have succeeded in regaining some credibility in the unions as oppositionists to the entrenched officialdom, and by painting up their “heroic” past in the CIO movement of the 1930s.
Revolutionary socialism as an organized political tendency and an ideological current in the labor and radical movements in this country has declined since 1978. This is due largely to the crisis of leadership in the SWP, combined with the general offensive of capitalism against the working class and the reemergence of Stalinism as a viable political current in the workingclass movement.
These are the main organizational and ideological forces within workingclass politics today. ?’hey must be understood and explained in order to see clearly the U.S. political picture at this moment of impending crisis. It is a crisis of capitalism. But this crisis, as Marx explained long ago, can be resolved only by the working class in struggle to establish the more just and rational system of socialism.
The most important political organizations within the working class movement of this country – each offering its own solution to the economic and social crisis – are Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the most active and viable branch of Social Democracy; the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), identified with and a defender of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union; and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which despite its continuing programmatic and organizational crisis remains the political party that embodies the heritage of the Russian revolution.
On the other side of the U.S. political scene stands the ruling class. Its political organization is the U.S. government, with its democratic trappings and its repressive apparatus. The two-party system, maintained and controlled by the employing class, is in fact an integral part of the governmental structure. Through the medium of the two-party system the capitalist rulers operate their monopoly of the electoral arena, and through their elected representatives in government they organize and regulate society to suit their changing needs.
Compared to this vast political machinery of the capitalists the working class political organizations seem puny. The only massive working class organizational structure is the unions, a potentially powerful but loosely affiliated social and political force. The employers have, however, through the years since the rise of the CIO movement which built the modern union structure, taken precautions to limit its uses by enacting a special body of law to control and regulate labor unions. This guarantees that the workers will not be able to marshal their forces without their own political organizations.
The present political situation, including the existing relationship of class forces in U.S. society, is not likely to endure for long. Vast political changes are in store as the economic crisis deepens. The working class is driven by the employers to defend its share in the social division of wealth, and in so doing it will develop a new political consciousness. The major political currents indigenous to the modern international working class movement will increase in size and influence in this country and will compete here for mass support as in all other countries of the world.
The political situation in the U.S. and throughout the world will be influenced decisively by present developments in the international working class political movement – especially in the Fourth International, which presents an uncompromisingly anticapitalist (i.e. revolutionary socialist) program. The ability of the working class to intervene effectively in the historic process depends upon how well the revolutionary socialist current organizes its forces.
In 1929, in a letter to the Bolshevik-Leninists in the United States, Trotsky wrote: “The work to be achieved by the American Opposition has international historic significance, for in the final analysis all the problems of our planet will be decided upon American soil.” This observation about the centrality of the third American revolution remains valid. The present crisis of the Fourth Internationalist movement in the U.S., therefore, is of key importance-and not just for this country.
The Barnes faction in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party challenges the post-1917 organizational and theoretical acquisitions of Marxism, especially the concept of permanent revolution and the analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union. The political resolution endorsed by delegates to the 1984 SWP convention with virtually no prior discussion, and adopted at the 1985 special convention, is a departure from the Marxist method of political analysis.
In addition to Its implicit repudiation of the transitional program upon which the party was founded, and its explicit rewriting of party history to suit its factionally motivated schematic projections, the 1985 resolution introduces an ambiguous treatment of crucial issues confronting the labor movement today – failing to state forthrightly where it stands. This makes it essential to summarize clearly the correct approach to some of the issues in debate:
What is frequently referred to as the “anti-imperialist struggle” encompasses entrenched governments in colonial and semicolonial countries as well as revolutionary uprisings of workers and peasants in the colonial world. In the post-World War II period numerous “independent” national governments representing native capital and similar interests have come in conflict with U.S. imperialism. At the moment these include such regimes as the Syrian, Iranian, Libyan, etc.
Earlier, the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, and Chile – part of a long list – came under attack by imperialism, or tried to establish some degree of independence from it. The workers’ and farmers’ government of Nicaragua is presently under economic and military attack by the U.S., as were the governments of Grenada, Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea earlier. Under the rubric of “anti-imperialist struggle,” all those who come into conflict with imperialism are lumped together.
There is a basic difference, however, between those governments like the Cuban and Nicaraguan today, and the Chilean and Indonesian of yesterday. It is a class difference. The workers’ and farmers’ government in Nicaragua represents the interests of the poor and exploited against the privileges of the local landowners and small capitalists. The governments of Allende in Chile and Sukarno in Indonesia tried to combine the interests of the poor with those of the rich in their countries – in a “united” fight against imperialist domination. Their “anti-imperialism” paved the way for blood-drenched takeovers by the native capitalists in collaboration with foreign powers.
Revolutionary socialists cannot give political support to liberal capitalist or bourgeois nationalist governments, even though it is frequently necessary to defend them or to fight side-by-side with them, against imperialist attacks. The revolutionary mobilization of the working class and the peasantry-with the goal of instituting their own government – is the only hope for successful struggles against imperialism.
The concept of “anti-imperialist struggle” cannot be counterposed to class struggle in the colonial world without leading to defeat of the oppressed masses. That is a lesson of the entire history of colonial uprisings and revolts in this century which continues to maintain all of its relevance today (as evidenced by the present situation in Iran).
Imperialism may be weakened and is often frustrated by the rebellion of those nations it oppresses, but it cannot be destroyed simply by the spreading colonial revolution. Imperialism can be destroyed finally only in its centers of power, in the industrial nations. Its ultimate demise will come at the hands of the modern industrial proletariat.
The 1979 victories in Nicaragua and Grenada, and the continuing struggles of the revolutionary forces in those countries, as well as in El Salvador and Guatemala, are extensions of the 1959 victory in Cuba. Their future depends upon the material and ideological support of working people throughout the world. The extension of the revolution to other Latin American countries is an essential and inevitable part of this historic process, leading to the socialist united states of Central and South America.
The first five years of the victorious Nicaraguan revolution are now part of the unfolding history of the working class political movement, its lessons still to be mastered. It is true that the revolutionary process in Central America is at the center of world politics in one sense – that the Reagan administration is using extraordinary means to destroy the Nicaraguan government and prevent the spread of revolution. It is also true that the U.S. financed counterrevolution in Central America is a threat to working people and to the labor movement throughout the world.
But it is not true that the immediate future of the colonial revolution, or for that matter of the present Nicaraguan government, will be decided exclusively in Central America. Other factors which will have a major, perhaps even decisive, impact include the course of revolutionary struggles in other parts of the world, and mobilizations of working people in the U.S. and other countries in solidarity with the right of the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran peoples to self-determination. (Even the tactical considerations of the Soviet bureaucracy in its dealings with the U.S.A. can play a significant part in the actual unfolding of events.)
The 1980 uprising of Polish workers and their self-organization in the Solidarity movement is a new factor in world politics. The Stalinist bureaucracy that usurped power in the Soviet Union in the 19U)s and extended that power after World War II through its domination of the deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe recognized instinctively that the revolt in Poland threatened not only the bureaucratic structure in the East European states but in the USSR as well. It sought initially to contain the Polish upsurge and, having successfully thwarted sympathetic demonstrations and uprisings in adjacent states, it encouraged the December 13, 1981, military coup of General Jaruzelski, head of the Polish army. Thus the Soviet bureaucracy managed to create the superficial impression that it was not implicated in “the Polish Affair.”
Despite the jailing of Walesa and several thousand other leaders and members of Solidarity, and the outlawing of the union movement, the Polish workers were not crushed. Their outlawed independent unions comprise an underground network, the necessary organizational structure for the continuing struggle against repression. In this way the leadership of a new mass uprising is being trained and assembled.
The Polish events during the past four years have inspired the labor movement in all countries with new hope. A revolutionary victory of the workers In one of the bureaucratically ruled workers states of Eastern Europe would shake up the entire bureaucratic apparatus and release the revolutionary energy of the vast mass of humanity in that sector of the world where capitalism has been defeated and has never recovered. When the political revolution of the working class destroys the reactionary machinery of government in the deformed workers’ states it will be the greatest blow to world imperialism that has ever yet been dealt, more damaging to the capitalist system than anything except the working class revolution in one of the industrial centers of imperialism.
This is why the revolutionary Marxist current in the world labor movement hailed the Polish events from the first day, and tried in every way to promote the success of the protest strikes and mass uprisings. The Fourth International seeks to prepare the political revolution and topple the governments in the bureaucratized workers’ states. But the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. and those in the FI who agree with them failed to endorse and promote the worldwide campaign in support of the embattled Polish workers. Not only has the SWP failed to promote this campaign, the Barnes faction in control of the party has prohibited party members from participating in it.
The political resolution adopted by the 1985 pre-World Congress convention of the SWP, The Revolutionary Perspective and Leninist Continuity in the United States, despite its length and seeming comprehensiveness, makes no mention of the Polish events and their impact on the U.S. working class. Nor does it mention the political revolution that will overthrow the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union and eradicate the pernicious influence of Stalinism.
Many radicals think of themselves as “Marxists” and see the world today as divided between Stalinist “socialism” and U.S. imperialism. They tend to look to the Soviet bureaucracy for support against the crimes of capitalism and close their eyes to the crimes of Stalinism, fearing that they will be accused of “falling into the imperialist camp.”
Reagan and other bourgeois spokespeople seek to divert attention from the murderous brutality of U.S. imperialism by decrying the absence of democracy in the USSR, Poland, and other bureaucratized workers’ states. They say such things as, “the old cries of ‘power to the state’ are being replaced by cries of ‘power to the people.’” Such demagogy is easily exposed, but it will remain effective so long as workingclass opposition and open political debate is suppressed in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, and other workers’ states.
The 1963 reunification congress of the Fourth International adopted the resolution Dynamics of World Revolution Today, which explains, “It is important to recognize that the three main forces of world revolution – the colonial revolution, the political revolution in the degenerated or deformed workers’ states, and the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries – form a dialectical unity.” This assessment remains true today, and is central to a correct assessment of the international political scene.
Our task in 1985 is to explain this dialectical unity and its workings – to show how the revolutions in Central America and in Poland are parts of a single, unified process of world revolution, at the same time as they are distinct entities requiring independent study and analysis. And we must also show how the ongoing struggles in the colonial world and the bureaucratized workers’ states – of which Central America and Poland are the most important examples today – tie in with the third part of that whole: the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.
Any attempt to deal with these three sectors in strict isolation from each other, any attempt to separate one part of the international socialist revolution from this totality, will severely undermine the ability of the revolutionary Marxist current to act effectively as a conscious instrument to advance the revolutionary process.
The Cuban revolution produced genuine revolutionary leaders, men and women devoted to the liberation of workers and other oppressed people not only in Cuba but in all lands. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the two outstanding leaders, part of a generation that matured in the revolutionary struggles in Latin America.
In Cuba the revolution began as a national democratic revolution under the leadership of Castro and the others who fought in the mountains against Batista’s army, in collaboration with a stratum of the Cuban bourgeoisie that wanted to rid itself of the dictatorship. The revolution very quickly developed into a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. Revolutionary socialists everywhere were inspired by these events, identified with the leaders of the Cuban revolution, and organized to support and defend it.
The defeat of Batista was, in many respects, closer to the beginning of the revolution than to its culmination. As the revolutionary process unfolded in Cuba and spread to other countries in the Caribbean and Central America, the middle class intellectuals who were the majority of the July 26 Movement, and who began as sincere national democrats, were transformed by the struggle into proletarian revolutionaries. Castro and the others around him became part of the revolutionary current in the working class political movement, but their further development was arrested by the pressures that bore down upon Cuba almost from the beginning.
The revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada have been fully endorsed and supported by Castro and by the Cuban government, which is greatly to their credit. The Castroist current derives its identity and reputation from the viability of the Cuban revolution and the extension of that revolution to other countries.
Cuba lives under constant threat from the U.S. colossus. It has had to depend heavily on the USSR for economic assistance and military protection. Despite this, Castro has never become a political puppet of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, nor a pawn in their diplomacy. He maintains a significant degree of independence, even though he adapts to Stalinism in ways that are harmful for the future of the Cuban revolution. His rationalization of the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and his unqualified endorsement of the Jaruzelski coup in Poland in 1981 are the clearest examples of this.
Like other revolutionists in the colonial world, Castro has espoused the “anti-imperialist struggle” theory, which has its origins in Stalinist ideology. The uncritical acceptance of this incorrect perspective for the colonial revolution combines with a neglect of the revolutionary movement in the centers of imperialism. Within Cuba, the influence of the Soviet bureaucracy and the ideological remnants of the pre-Revolutionary Cuban Communist Party have contributed to the monolithic character of the present party, and to the absence of workers’ control over economic planning. One effect of Castro’s adaptation to Stalinism is the refurbished image that the Stalinist current acquires through its association and identification with the Cuban revolution.
The Barnes faction in the SWP also tries to identify with Castroism, but it is not Castroist. It is a dangerous adaptation to what it perceives Castroism to be. It is in fact an adaptation to the negative features of Castroism, which in turn reflect the adaptations by Castro and the Cuban government to Stalinism.
A campaign to orient the SWP toward the industrial workers and to put the majority of party members in industrial jobs was, and remains, a correct orientation for party-building. But this has to be coupled with a correct approach toward the political activity of these members, or else it can be transformed into its opposite – as it has been by the Barnes leadership.
The decision to turn the SWP’s major attention to the industrial workers of this country was amended in 1978 to concentrate the existing membership in a few “key” unions. Henceforth this was known in the party as “the turn.” It was accomplished by shifting members from wherever they may have been working, regardless of the kind of political activity they were engaged in or their union responsibilities, into the designated industrial unions. By 1981 the party leadership was urging a national concentration in the garment industry.
This narrow, and to a large extent arbitrary, selection of unions in which the “large majority” of SWP members is concentrated is part of the process of party reorganization called “political centralization” by the leadership. In this process the national fractions supplanted the branches as the basic organizational units of the party, thus contributing to the disorganization of the party as a political factor in areas where the branches were established. Members in the fractions are shifted from area to area as deemed necessary by the National Office, and this contributes to the disruption of serious and consistent work in the unions.
What happens in the labor movement generally – including the largest unions such as the National Education Association, Teamsters, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, and over 100 more – completely escapes the attention of SWP members who are concentrated in a limited sector of the union movement where the party leadership has decided “the action will be.” This contributes to the isolation of the SWP and to its degeneration. It does not contribute to the education or morale of the members, nor to the necessary political attention that the SWP ought to devote to the work of helping rebuild and reorient the union movement in this time of its decline. This is of great importance to the future, and ought to be the primary objective of the turn. The labor movement badly needs the revolutionary vanguard – to recruit and educate the radicalizing workers through close association and collaboration with them in the daily problems of the unions;
The false notion that a revolutionary socialist party with a predominantly petty-bourgeois (or at least non-industrial proletarian) membership and leadership can become proletarianized simply by subjecting its members to industrial work needs to be corrected. The experience of the SWP for six years has demonstrated that something is lacking. The membership has not changed in class composition, only in size. It has grown smaller. “The turn” as projected by Barnes, needs demystification. It is not a magic formula for proletarianization of the party. That can be accomplished only by recruiting proletarians, and one of the ways to do this is through the serious union-building activity of members assigned to work in industry.
The labor party question has a long history in the Marxist movement in the United States, going back to the time of Engels. It was an issue in the debates and faction formations within the early Communist Party in the 1920s, and has held the attention of the Trotskyist movement since our formation.
There has hardly ever been full agreement on how, when, and under what circumstances to advance the slogan for a labor party. But there has been general agreement that the American workers need to break decisively with the capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. They must organize their own mass party based on the unions to run their own candidates for public office. This has been recognized as a necessary first step in the independent political action of the working class as a class.
This was widely discussed in the SWP soon after its founding. General agreement was reached in the party that the formation of a labor party would qualitatively change the union movement, and that all members of the SWP should work for the formation of such a party. We believed that the struggle for transitional demands in the unions would facilitate the formation of a labor party, and that the transitional program as adopted by the SWP could become the labor party program.
Prior to World War II and in the postwar strike wave, and subsequently until the reaction of the 1950s, one of the central slogans of the SWP was “Build a Labor Party Now.” During the 1950s and 60s the SWP used the labor party idea to educate on the need for independent working-class participation in the electoral arena.
In January 1976 in a report to the SWP National Committee, National Secretary Jack Barnes said, “The time for a labor party is now. Look at the facts of this American capitalist society as we have just outlined them, the facts that dictated the party’s turn. it is unassailable that the time for independent political action is now. There is no discernible motion in that direction; we don’t pretend there is. But objectively that is what is needed, and this way forward can be made clear to growing numbers of people.”
The 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns of the SWP were conducted around the need for a labor party in this country. The 1980 campaign committee issued a labor party pamphlet by Andrew Pulley, the SWP presidential candidate that year. Since then, the SWP has not said much about a labor party in this country.
The 1984 campaign committee included the need for a labor party in the literature it issued, but not much emphasis was given to this point. The latest political resolution, adopted at the 1985 special convention, predicts that a labor party “will emerge as a byproduct of advances in class combat by the unions against the bosses and the policies of the bosses’ government.” It goes on to say, “The call for an independent labor party will be part of the program of any class-struggle left wing in the unions forged in the course of these battles.” These references to the labor party are under the general heading “Stranglehold of Electoralism.”
It is clear that the present SWP leadership has abandoned any notion that the campaign in the union movement for the formation of a labor party is a necessary and useful tool in the arsenal of revolutionary Marxists – part of the education and radicalization of workers. It rejects the possibility that the light for political independence may even be a stimulating factor in the formation of a class-struggle left wing in the unions, in which case the labor party campaign would call into existence the class-struggle left wing rather than the other way around. In any event, propaganda for a labor party is badly needed in the union movement today for the education of the SWP as well as for the education of the unions.
Two of the major political currents in the working class movement are long accustomed to lending support to the political parties of the employing class in national elections. The Social Democrats openly endorse and work for the candidates of the Democratic Party, and preach “lesser evilism.” The Stalinists run their own candidates for propaganda purposes and campaign to defeat the greater evil at all costs. This time they campaigned to defeat Reagan and elect Mondale.
Most of the radical sects that tried to get on the ballot or otherwise participate in the electoral process came out openly in favor of the Democratic candidate or maneuvered themselves into the swamp of bourgeois politics by endorsing and working for the election of Jesse Jackson, the Black candidate in the Democratic Party primaries. The radical weekly with the widest circulation and most diverse readership, The Guardian, which has sometimes endorsed SWP candidates in the past, campaigned for Mondale in this election. The Marcyite Workers World Party campaigned for Jackson in the primaries and ran its own candidate in the general election.
Only the SWP ran a campaign against the politics and the parties of the employing class, and for the interests of the working class. This time, however, the SWP campaign suffered from the programmatic revisions of the Barnes leadership and failed to accomplish what was possible.
In reference to the campaign the SWP resolution says, “Above all, our candidates – true to the Comintern’s 1920 resolution on electoral activity explain revolutionary ideas” in some ways the SWP campaign was similar to the kind of campaign the Communists might have conducted in 1920, or the kind they did run in 1928. In 1984 the SWP candidates devoted themselves almost exclusively to explaining what the revolutionary workers’ and farmers’ government in Nicaragua was doing and did not pay much attention to what was happening here at home. Consequently, when opportunities to speak to striking workers opened up the SWP candidates were ill-prepared to discuss the problems of the strike or to offer a program of transitional demands to create jobs.
The failure of the party to participate in union building work or strike activity contributed to the weakness of its election campaign. In addition to that, the party leadership is more interested in exposing the “stranglehold of electoralism” than explaining the opportunities of independent working class participation in the electoral arena. They do not give serious and appealing answers to such critical problems as unemployment, high prices, plant closings, housing shortages, declining wages, union-busting, and tax increases.
One of the purposes of a revolutionary Marxist election campaign must be to explain these evils of capitalism, how they are connected, and what working class organizations can do to combat them under present circumstances. It does nothing to mobilize the class to fight in its own defense if we limit our proposals for action to those that can be implemented only after a workers’ and farmers’ government is established.
The Trotskyist movement has accumulated a vast experience in electoral activity in this country. It is hardly necessary at this date to appeal to the 1920 resolutions of the Communist International to learn how a revolutionary working class party ought to run an election campaign. During the 1976 presidential campaign, which was conducted in accordance with the transitional program of the party, 700 new members were recruited. The number of new recruits in 1984 has not been reported.
When the Fourth International was founded it proclaimed in its programmatic document, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (or transitional program), the need to pay particular attention to the young generation of workers, and those discriminated against: because of race and sex. “All its policies strive to inspire the youth with belief in its own strength and in the future,” it declared. “Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle; only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution. Thus it was, thus it will be.
“The decay of capitalism,” it explained, “deals its heaviest blows to the woman as wage earner and as housewife.”
On the question of race discrimination the transitional program declared: “An uncompromising disclosure of the roots of race prejudice and all forms and shades of national arrogance and chauvinism, particularly anti-Semitism, should become part of the daily work of all sections of the Fourth International, as the most important part of the struggle against imperialism and war. Our basic slogan remains: Workers of the World Unite!”
During the radicalization of the 1960s, when significant mobilizations of students, women, Blacks and other minorities took place in this country, the SWP became an active component and supporter of these efforts. With the relative downturn that followed the end of the Vietnam war, the party gradually withdrew from such activity. In the name of “the turn” (i.e., in the name of “proletarianization”) this abandonment became virtually absolute, and a process began of theoretically belittling the importance of such independent movements of the allies of the working class.
This has reached the stage where the present political resolution declares that, “A higher percentage of women than of men are susceptible to reactionary ‘solutions’ and right-wing demagogy, which is aimed against the class interests of the proletariat.” The Young Socialist Alliance has virtually abandoned activity on the high school and college campuses (which remain the largest concentrations of youth, including working class youth, in the country) – treating it as an afterthought at best; and this has led to a dramatic decline in numbers and increase in age level of the “youth.” The influence of the party in the Black struggle, in the Puerto Rican, Chicano, and similar movements of the nationally oppressed has diminished.
Revolutionary Marxists in the United States must take an interest in, become part of, and champion the demands of every group which suffers special discrimination under capitalism. The growth and development of such movements do not conflict with the development of working class radicalization, but are a part of it and help to advance it. They create political conditions which will stimulate the mobilization of the working class as a class and facilitate its victory over the capitalist system.
The organizational conclusion which must be drawn from our ideological commitment to a revolutionary Marxist program – including all of the points enumerated above – is the need to build the world party of socialist revolution, the Fourth International. Only a firm, united, programmatically clear international movement can play the essential role of assembling and training the cadres who will be essential for the victory of the socialist revolution on a world scale.
There are no substitutes today for this difficult task of international party-building. The idea put forward by the SWP leadership – of a “New Mass Leninist International” based on the Cuban and Nicaraguan leaderships – cannot have any practical reality.
We are in favor of the formation of Fourth Internationalist groups in every country. We agree with the SWP position on the Cuban CP as stated by Joseph Hansen in his 1978 introduction to the book, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: “For a Leninist-type party that guarantees internal democracy.” This ought to be our slogan everywhere in the world.
This does not mean that in countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, or El Salvador, where other revolutionary forces are in the leadership of the masses, that there is any need to counterpose our own movement. That would be wrong and sectarian. In such situations, the goal of Fourth Internationalists is to become integrated into the overall process, collaborate with the existing leaderships, and in that context raise whatever programmatic issues distinguish our current, or discuss tactical matters, in a comradely and collaborative spirit.
None of these points represents any new thinking or change from what our movement has said in the past. It is the Barnes leadership which is trying to fundamentally transform the political program of the SWP – but it does so without openly proclaiming its goals, and by quoting selectively from old documents to try to give its new positions an orthodox mask. The task of those who have been expelled from the party, and those who remain in it but who do not agree with the present course of the leadership, is to conduct an uncompromising struggle against this process. It must be a struggle to win a majority of fraternal members of the Fourth International in the United States – which today remains inside the SWP – back to the perspective of building a revolutionary Marxist vanguard party on a correct programmatic basis. Such a party is the indispensable nucleus of the future leadership for the third American revolution.
The present objectives of the revolutionary Marxist movement in the United States are to prepare for the coming upsurge of American workers. This means above all paying attention to the essential party-building tasks of assembling and educating a cadre – constructing an organization of class-conscious vanguard fighters and leaders.
The primary work of such a party in the union movement, and in most other arenas of mass activity today, is as socialist propagandists. But this cannot be interpreted in any kind of sterile or mechanistic way. To revolutionaries, propaganda means patiently explaining the realities of life under capitalism – the reason why this social system is the fundamental cause of the problems faced by working people and the oppressed. But to have any meaning such explanations must be formulated in a language which can be understood in terms of the day-to-day lives of workers. Revolutionary propaganda must include raising ideas about how working people can start to break out of our present predicament and move forward. This is the transitional method, the Leninist method, the Marxist method of propaganda.
The Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, provides a basic guide to the kinds of slogans and demands which revolutionary Marxists must be raising today within the union movement: slogans for class independence and solidarity, against imperialist war, in defense of oppressed nationalities and women, to open the books of the corporations crying bankruptcy, for a shorter work week with no cut in pay, for escalator clauses in all union contracts to keep pace with inflation, for unemployment compensation at union wages, for a labor party.
Where our propaganda around these and similar proposals strikes a responsive chord among a layer of activists, we must be prepared to move from the level of simple propaganda to the level of agitation – or even of action. We can expect some such opportunities today, though there won’t be many; and even those initiatives which we do take are by no means guaranteed to result in significant gains. But as the crisis of capitalism deepens the opportunities for this kind of development will become more and more numerous, and the likelihood that they will lead to the motion of significant forces increases as well. The revolutionary party must be constantly on the lookout for even modest openings along these lines.
A similar situation exists in such areas of mass work as the women’s movement and the Black struggle. Here, too, revolutionary Marxists will be active participants – explaining our analysis of events and raising our proposals for action. Here too we must be prepared to actively implement our ideas when others respond to them in a positive way.
In the movement against U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean the situation allows for a more agitational approach. The April 20 demonstrations in Washington D.C. and other cities show that there is a willingness on the part of the U.S. population to actively protest the war policies of their government. This is one arena of mass activity where the revolutionary party can today become actively and deeply involved.
The task in this sphere is to apply a united front approach toward unifying all who will actively oppose U.S. intervention against the revolutions in Central America. Our experiences with those forces which created and led the national April Actions coalition – both before and after the April 20 demonstrations – show that they are hesitant to follow through on the necessary tasks. They tried twice to cancel the mass action on April 20; despite the success of the actions themselves, they have proven hesitant to lead the movement forward toward building a new round of demonstrations in the fall – demonstrations which are objectively required.
In order to bring about the necessary unity of the movement as a whole – including the hesitant elements – we must attempt to build a mass-action, “U.S.-hands-off’ wing that can be the stimulus to broader forces which are prepared to take action, and can keep those actions focused on an effective political course. The first Emergency National Conference Against U.S. Intervention in Central America/the Caribbean held in Cleveland last September began this effort. The second ENC, scheduled for Minneapolis in June, promises to continue it.
While we must never make the error of believing that the forces which have come together around the ENC at this point can substitute themselves for the broader movement, we must also never lose sight of the crucial role that a conscious united force working to bring a correct strategic outlook and political focus to that broader movement can play – as the ENC did leading up to the April 20 demonstrations themselves.
We do not project the orientation outlined in this resolution as one simply to be applied by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. Adequately carrying out these tasks requires a party, and we have never thought of ourselves as a party, or tried to be one. We are an expelled tendency – part of the nucleus of a future party – which would continue to belong to the Socialist Workers Party except for the bureaucratic purge carried out by the party leadership.
Until this status changes, we will continue to carry out activities in the mass movement along the lines projected in this resolution. But that by itself will not be adequate. A powerful, class struggle left wing within the U.S. working class can only come into being and maintain itself on an effective course as a result of the conscious and active intervention of a revolutionary Marxist vanguard party. This underlines the overwhelming importance of the fight to reunify within the Socialist Workers Party those in the U.S. who maintain fraternal affiliation to the Fourth International. It is such a united revolutionary Marxist vanguard party in the United States which could most effectively carry out the necessary orientation presented in this resolution, and it is for such a party that we project these tasks.
May 27, 1985
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