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An ex-Trotskyist of many years standing, looking down on the revolutionary movement from the Olympian height of social democracy, nonetheless confessed to feeling “just a little sadness” over events in the SWP. He recalled that in the organization of Trotsky and Cannon “what caught my fancy the most was a certain spirit of open debate.” The prohibition of this, the abandonment of old programmatic principles, and the expulsions of those who disagreed made him feel that “it is a sad spectacle: old-timers who have devoted a lifetime to their beliefs, expelled from a 'Trotskyist' organization for being undeviating Trotskyists.” (Emanuel Geltman, “Sclerosis of a Sect,” Dissent, Summer 1984, pp. 361-362)
Far more than victims, however, these expelled “old-timers” were proud revolutionary militants reaffirming their beliefs and their life's work, and waging a struggle for political ideas, values, and practices which they were convinced must be the bedrock of any socialist workers' party capable of transforming the United States. Some of them had been half-persuaded that it was their duty—in the interests of renewing the SWP, allowing for a transition to a younger leadership, etc.—to allow the Barnes leadership to move forward unimpeded, repressing any critical thoughts they might have, and getting out of the way if they couldn't lend a hand. When they finally came to the conclusion that the new leadership was betraying a trust, through destructive manipulations and bullying, and that Barnes was intent on breaking with the revolutionary Marxist program of the Fourth International, they came to life as an opposition. They consequently inspired and were joined by some comrades of a younger generation who had concluded that the spirit of the above-quoted verse of Bob Dylan's song is neither the beginning nor the end of political wisdom.
In the aftermath of the California expulsions, as we have seen, the SWP conducted a systematic purge of all known oppositionists, including the four veteran revolutionaries whose writings are offered in the following section of this book.
As has been documented in The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party, the central leader of one oppositional current was George Breitman (1916-1986). This current had been represented by Frank Lovell and Steve Bloom on the SWP National Committee, and eventually it would be forced to reconstitute itself outside the SWP as the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. Breitman had been part of the Trotskyist movement since 1935 and had been a national leader since the 1940s. Best known as the editor of Trotsky's writings and as a pioneering editor and interpreter of Malcolm X's work, Breitman's integrity shines through in the appeal of his expulsion. Additional biographical information can be found in Naomi Allen and Sarah Lovell, ed., A Tribute to George Breitman, Writer, Organizer, Revolutionary (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1987).
Jean Tussey (1918- ), a union organizer and member of the Socialist Party's left wing at the beginning of World War II, joined the Trotskyist movement in 1942 and became a member of the SWP's National Committee in 1952. At various times she was a part of the Newspaper Guild, the International Association of Machinists, the United Steelworkers, and the International Typographical Union—for many years serving as an organizer for this last organization in the Cleveland area, where she was also an energetic and well-respected builder of the SWP and of numerous social struggles. Active as a labor historian, she may be best known to some as the editor of the popular collection Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). After her expulsion, described in her letter of appeal that is reprinted here, she joined the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.
George Lavan Weissman (1916-1985), whose substantial contributions to the Trotskyist movement encompass almost fifty years, is described in an obituary reprinted in this section. An intellectual of high caliber, he served as the U.S. literary representative of the Leon Trotsky estate. Under the name George Lavan he edited the widely read collection Che Guevara Speaks (New York: Merit Publishers, 1967; Evergreen Black Cat Edition, 1968); he also edited a collection of Trotsky's war correspondence, The Balkan Wars, 1912-13 (New York: Monad Press, 1980), which has a more obvious relevance in the 1990s as nationalist and ethnic conflicts once again erupt in Eastern Europe.
Larry Stewart (1921-1984) was a working-class intellectual and party activist whose roots in the African-American community moved him to give special attention to the “the national question” in relation to the Black liberation struggle in the United States. The two articles reprinted here—“Permanent Revolution and Black Liberation in the U.S.” and “Black Liberation and the Comintern in Lenin's Time”—are polemics against the Barnes leadership which focus on these issues; he died while still working on them, and they were edited after his death by George Breitman for inclusion in the pamphlet Permanent Revolution, Combined Revolution, and Black Liberation in the United States (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1985). These and similar concerns are also voiced in his open letter to Mel Mason, the 1984 SWP candidate for president (originally published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, June 1984).
New York City
April 13, 1984
National Committee, SWP
Dear Comrades:
I appeal to you against my expulsion for “disloyalty” by the Political Committee on January 4. I ask you to reverse the PC action and reinstate me to membership with full rights to participate in the coming preconvention discussion. If you sustain my appeal, I urge you to also reinstate the many other members who were expelled on the same basis that I was expelled. I don't make that a precondition for my appeal, but it obviously would be inconsistent to reinstate one or some of us without reinstating others who are equally innocent of the PC's “disloyalty” and “splitters” charges.
It is a difficult thing for the NC to reverse an action of the PC, which is your subcommittee. That is why it happens so rarely. But sometimes such a reversal is advisable, even necessary. I think this is one of those unusual occasions.
Unusual steps are justified by crisis situations, and the party certainly is in a crisis now. The morale of the members has been badly shaken by developments in the party since the 1981 convention. The size of the party is around half of what it was in 1977; the decline since the 1981 convention has been close to 30 percent, and the hemorrhaging did not stop with the January purge—members are still being expelled or pressured to resign because of real or potential political differences. Several branches built with such difficulty in the last decade are being dissolved. Many sympathizers or active supporters are aghast at the purges. Our influence in other movements is at its lowest point since the early 1960s. The SWP has never been so isolated in the Fourth International.
The PC, and the smaller “central leadership team” that dominates it, deny that the party is in crisis, but even they concede it has many problems today. And the cause of these problems (or crisis)? According to the central leadership team, they (or it) are the result of a disloyal secret faction that conducted a split operation against the party. But this is a fairy tale. There was no secret faction: there were different oppositional tendencies in the party, and two of them formed an opposition bloc in the NC at the May 1983 NC plenum. The central leadership team designated them a faction although they said they were a bloc of tendencies and not a faction. But what was “secret” about them? They announced their bloc openly, presented you with their platform in writing, and asked you to inform the party members about their formation and platform. The central leadership team persuaded you to deny this reasonable request and—even worse—to decree that the members could not be informed in plenum reports of the very existence of the Opposition Bloc. So the only thing “secret” about it was your action to prevent the members from knowing that it had come into being in accord with the party's organizational norms. It was neither a faction (as defined by the central leadership team) nor secret.
Equally fictional are the charges about disloyalty and a split operation. The central leadership team began to abuse the whole concept of loyalty/disloyalty in 1980. Some of you who were on the PC then will recall that I protested against this at plenums in 1980 and 1981, when I was still on the NC. After a temporary retreat, the central leadership team has resumed these abuses, making the mere holding of political differences with the team the equivalent of disloyalty to the party. I feel embarrassed at the thought of having to prove my loyalty to the party—my record speaks for itself. If I was a loyal member up to the 1981 convention, when the nominating commission tried to force me into accepting reelection to the NC against my wishes, when did I become disloyal? And why? When Stalin accused the Old Bolsheviks of having become agents of the Nazis, Trotsky replied that such a thing was impossible for lifelong revolutionists psychologically as well as politically. I think a similar statement would be applicable to the many founders of the SWP who have been purged in recent months. Call them what you wish—behind the times, outdated, too rigid, resistant to change, senile, etc.—but the last thing they can rightly be accused of is disloyalty to their party. I hope that the party members and a majority of the NC will recognize this charge as fraudulent, not only in my case, not only in the case of other founding members, but of all those who were expelled because they refused to “repudiate” things allegedly said or not said at the California state convention. You know very well that if the same demand had been presented to all the members of the party, not just oppositionists or critics of the central leadership team but many other loyal members, including supporters of the team, would in self-respect have done the same thing we did—that is, refuse to repudiate other members on the basis of inadequate information. That was why only oppositionists or critics, real or presumed, were asked to answer the fatal repudiation query.
There was a split operation, but not on the part of oppositionists. The central leadership team began talking about a split the day after the last convention in August 1981. In September 1981, two of its representatives, Ken Shilman and Mac Warren, told Les Evans in Minnesota, who was then a supporter of the majority group, that the leadership in New York expected the party membership (then near 1,300) to be thinned down to 850 before the next convention. This was a remarkably accurate forecast, which most of you present members of the NC must have heard at the time. The reason it was accurate was that the central leadership team has been busy ever since trying to make it accurate by driving people out of the party. Another name for such an operation is “split.”
The reason why the central leadership team organized a split is perfectly obvious. Prior to the 1981 convention it decided that the SWP should distance itself from Trotskyism, permanent revolution, political revolution, etc., because these and related programmatic concepts were unacceptable to the Castroist currents to whom the team thought the party should orient and adapt. Instead of presenting this fateful proposal to the party in the 1981 preconvention period, so that the members could consider, discuss, and decide it, the central leadership team kept it from the membership and even from the NC before the convention, where a large number of NC members were not reelected merely because they could not be counted on to go along with the new anti-Trotskyism orientation. It was not until after the convention that the central leadership team began to implement the new orientation, taking one step at a time while vehemently denying any new orientation was intended. The first open step was at an expanded PC meeting two days after the convention when it was decided to organize “Lenin classes” whose main purpose was to lay the basis for downgrading Trotsky, Trotskyism, and the Fl. Two months later came the first Doug Jenness article in the ISR publicly signalling the repudiation of Trotskyism and permanent revolution, which Jack Barnes made explicit 14 months later in his speech to the YSA convention at the end of 1982.
It was inevitable that changes of such scope and depth, made piecemeal without any discussion or decision by the party, would create indignation or consternation in the party and demands that they be discussed. But the central leadership team did not want them discussed—it wanted to change the party's positions without a discussion because it feared that it could not get the membership's consent through a democratic discussion. The same lack of self-confidence and mistrust of the membership led the central leadership to decide that opponents of the new undiscussed orientation had to be discredited and ousted before the next preconvention discussion period would open in the spring of 1983.
So when Frank Lovell asked the November 1981 NC meeting, shortly after the first Jenness article, to open a literary discussion in the party about Leninism and its relation to Trotskyism, he was maligned as an opponent of the study of Lenin and his motion was defeated. The very idea of a discussion was denounced as a ruse to reopen questions decided at the convention, although the Leninism dispute had not even been mentioned at the convention. When Lovell and Steve Bloom one month later set up the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the NC, again calling for a literary discussion of Leninism and Trotskyism, they asked the PC to make their five-point platform available to the members; the PC rejected this as a trick to “reopen the party internal discussion bulletin,” which they had not even mentioned. (The falsity of this claim was exposed nine months later when the PC did circulate the F.I.C. platform to the members without reopening any internal discussion bulletin.) When Lovell dared to show the F.I.C. platform to a member who asked him about it, the NC plenum of February-March 1982 ruled that he and other NC oppositionists had “forfeited” their membership in the party, and adopted a series of 27 motions establishing “new norms” that would make it easier to expel oppositionists or critics. From then on the internal situation deteriorated drastically month by month and expulsions became commonplace. That is the origin of the party crisis—it was created by the central leadership team, not by a nonexistent secret faction.
Whenever critics of the new orientation tried to say anything at branch or district meetings, they were declared out of order and were 'told, repeatedly, that they would have a chance to present their views at the “proper” time—when the preconvention discussion would be opened in the spring of 1983. But the central leadership team had no intention of letting oppositionists discuss the new orientation in 1983, or any other time. It voted down the Opposition Bloc motion to have the convention in August 1983, two years after the previous convention. Then it voted in August 1983 to postpone the convention for a full year, to August 1984, and simultaneously ousted all four oppositionists in the NC from both the NC and the party on the flimsiest of charges (cynically accusing them of conducting a split operation). The central leadership team had hoped that the ouster of the four NC members would provoke a split, which could be blamed on the oppositionists. When that didn't happen, it was forced to resort to the clumsy and transparent mass purge at the beginning of 1984. Bad as that looked to the members of the SWP and other sections of the Fl, it was considered necessary by the central leadership team, which was determined to get rid of all oppositionists before your plenum this month opened the preconvention discussion.
That brings us to the present situation, which is absolutely unprecedented in the long history of our party. Never before has our NC opened a preconvention discussion after expelling all members known to have or suspected of having differences with the leadership. What kind of discussion can it be when the remaining members are all acutely aware of what happened to those who were going to defend political positions the party has had since its inception? Such a discussion cannot impart genuine authority to any leaders elected by such a process, and it can only discredit the party in the eyes of revolutionary workers everywhere.
How can you get the party out of the impasse to which the central leadership team has led it? There is only one way, the one proposed by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in its March 26 letter to you: Reinstate the members expelled for political reasons since the last convention if they pledge to abide by the decisions of the convention and let them participate in the preconvention discussion on the same basis as other members. This alone will make a real discussion possible; this alone will enable the party membership to hear all sides of the dispute over the central leadership team's new orientation away from Trotskyism and to pass judgment on it in a democratic and definitive way; this alone can lead the party out of its present crisis. If we oppositionists actually are splitters and disloyal, that will be demonstrated to the members in the discussion, and you will be able to expel us again after that with their approval. If on the other hand the discussion disproves the charges against us by the central leadership team, that too would benefit the party.
It will be difficult for you to make such a move, as I said earlier. But you can do it without necessarily passing judgment on the PC or the central leadership team. All you have to decide and say is: “It would be in the best interests of the party to have a democratic discussion of all the issues confronting us, but that isn't possible when the defenders of the positions challenged by the central leadership team are excluded from the discussion. Therefore, in the best interests of the party, and without prejudice to charges that the central leadership team may want to bring against oppositionists at the end of the political discussion culminating in the convention, we hereby grant the appeals of members expelled since the last convention who agree to abide by the decisions of the convention and of the leadership it elects, and reinstate them to membership at once so that they can participate fully in the preconvention discussion and other work of the party.”
I think the party members would support such a move by you with enthusiasm and gratitude. I think it would also have a healthy impact on those expellees whose unjust expulsions have had disorienting or demoralizing effects on them.
Comradely,
/s/George Breitman
January 23, 1984
National Committee Socialist Workers Party
Dear Comrades:
On January 10, 1984, I received a letter dated January 5, 1984, informing me that the Political Committee had voted to expel me from the Socialist Workers Party, and calling my attention to the provisions for appeal of such disciplinary actions in Article VIII, Section 5 of the SWP constitution.
Accordingly, I am hereby appealing my expulsion to you, as members of “the next higher body” of the party, to reverse the decision of the Political Committee.
Enclosed for your information are copies of: (1) the charges against me dated 1/1/84 signed by Mac Warren and handed to me by him; (2) my 1/3/84 Mailgram to the Political Committee requesting dismissal of the charges; and (3) the 1/5/84 letter from Craig Gannon, National Organization Secretary, informing me of my expulsion.
In addition, since I do not know and can only speculate as to what considerations led to the change in the basis for my expulsion from Mac Warren's original charges, I propose to give you a brief report of the conditions under which I was charged with disloyalty, and why I believe the action of the Political Committee was incorrect.
On Sunday, January 1, I received a phone call from Comrade Omari Musa from St. Louis asking whether I could meet his plane that evening and give him a ride from the airport. This was not an unusual personal request and I readily agreed to do so.
When I picked him up at the airport, Comrades Mac Warren and Pedro Vasquez were with him and he asked that I drive to the branch headquarters rather than to his home, since they wanted to meet with me. I had no indication of the purpose of the meeting and only learned on our arrival at the hall that Mac and Pedro were a subcommittee of the PC delegated to meet with me.
On the basis of a summary account by Comrade Warren of a California State Convention, which I heard for the first time, and his report of the actions of nameless minority delegates and of their subsequent expulsion by the State Committee for failing to repudiate remarks of a reporter concerning relations with Socialist Action, I was asked to repudiate their failure to repudiate.
Never in my 44 years in the socialist and labor movement have I been asked to make such a political judgment under such peculiar circumstances. I explained that one thing I have learned in the Socialist Workers Party is the importance of making serious political decisions as objectively as possible, on the basis of documented factual information and time to think about it. I could not repudiate something I did not know enough about.
I asked why I, in Ohio, should be asked to repudiate the actions, whatever they were, of a minority delegation in California. I could just as well be asked to repudiate actions of any comrade in any branch in the country, of which I have no knowledge.
Mac explained that the Political Committee had decided to ask all supporters of the Weinstein-Bloom-Lovell minorities to repudiate the actions of the California minority delegates. I asked whether that included me because I had supported the Breitman amendments in the 1981 convention. Mac said yes, supporters in the past three years.
He repeatedly asked whether I was clear about what I was being asked to repudiate—the actions of the minority delegates to the California State Convention in failing to repudiate the comments of their reporter.
I replied that I could not repudiate something I don't know enough about and I could not understand the reason for this extraordinary procedure, which was the opposite of the views of the National Committee as described by Comrade Barry Sheppard in his November 28 plenum report to the Cleveland Branch about the political differences which exist in the party.
(Comrade Sheppard had said that no general re-registration of the party was proposed; that those who boycott party finances or activities would be brought up on charges; and cautioned the comrades against falling into factional stances. He also indicated that discussion of political differences would be opened not later than April in preparation for our August convention. Comrade Warren was present as the reporter on the discussion on the setback in Grenada, and heard the report and discussion at the November 28 meeting in Cleveland.)
As I explained to Comrade Vasquez, I have been on different sides of many discussions in the party in the past 42 years, sometimes voting with the majority and sometimes with a minority. I consider it my obligation to vote honestly on the basis of my judgment at the time; to let further experience demonstrate whether I was right or wrong; and to change my position if convinced by additional facts or reasoning that I had been incorrect. My loyalty had never been questioned on the basis of my political opinions or my actions.
When Comrade Warren declared the meeting ended, and handed me the piece of paper charging me with disloyalty, nothing in our previous discussion had indicated any basis for the second charge. I asked, “Are you charging me with 'violation of the National Committee decision concerning relations of party members with Socialist Action'?” He replied that the meeting was over and if I wanted to make any further statements I could do so to the Political Committee which would be considering the charges on Wednesday, January 4.
As you can see by the January 4, 1984, motion, the Political Committee revised the failure-to-repudiate charge from the one with which Comrade Warren presented me, and dropped the totally unexplained and unexplainable charge of “violation of the National Committee decision concerning relations of party members with Socialist Action.”
In view of all this, it appears to me that the action of the Political Committee is an incorrect application of the decision of the National Committee, and a serious infringement of the rights that go with the obligations of membership and responsible leadership in the Socialist Workers Party.
I request that you reverse the decision of the Political Committee to expel me, and that you restore my membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
I also urge that you reject the entire procedure of the Political Committee for finding me or any other comrade disloyal, as a dangerous innovation and incorrect method for dealing with political differences in a Leninist party.
Comradely,
/s/Jean Y. Tussey
February 24, 1984
National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
14 Charles Lane
New York, N.Y. 10014
Comrades:
In a note of January 31, 1984, I notified you that I wished to appeal my expulsion and that I would send you a detailed appeal. Receipt of this notification was made to me by Rob Cahalane for the SWP National Office on February 14. Here is an account of how I was expelled and my appeal.
On January 2,1984, I received a phone call from Comrade Louise Goodman, organizer of my branch (Brooklyn), saying it was urgent that she see me the next day on behalf of the Political Committee. We set the time for the afternoon of January 3.
At the appointed time Comrade Goodman arrived accompanied by two others—Comrade Norton Sandler and a comrade whose face was familiar to me but whose name I do not know. No introduction was made other than that the Political Committee had authorized them as a subcommittee to ask me questions about a matter that had arisen at the state convention in California during a report on Socialist Action.
I replied that I had nothing to do with Socialist Action and did not intend to have anything to do with it; that I had received a copy of it in the mail only that day and had not read it as yet but that it was only to be expected that people expelled from the party would publish something and that they had a right to do so. Comrade Sandler said that while that might be true for those expelled from the party it was a question of the political attitude of people still in the SWP towards Socialist Action. To this I responded that in my opinion they should abide by whatever the party directed on the subject—if it chose to lay down any such guideline.
I then asked why I had been selected for a visit by the subcommittee or whether all party members were receiving such visits. Comrade Goodman said that not everyone was but only those who, it was thought, had an affinity for the position of the minority delegates at the California convention.
When I asked what made the subcommittee think I had any such “affinity,” she responded: “You voted for the Breitman amendment in 1981.” I was surprised by this answer and replied that this was absolutely not so. After a moment's silence she resumed by saying she would now describe what had happened in California and began an account of how a statement had been made by a spokesperson for the minority at that convention which the other minority delegates had failed to repudiate and were consequently expelled and how those whom they represented had failed to repudiate that failure to repudiate and had also been expelled; and that now I was being called upon to repudiate the failure, etc.
This complicated account was delivered in a rapid and often indistinct fashion. When I attempted to interrupt with a question, Comrade Goodman asserted: “You can assume that what I am saying is accurate.” “How can I assume that,” I asked, “when I know what you told me just a minute ago about my voting for the Breitman amendment was false.”
I added: “If what happened in California is so crucial, I'm not going to decide on the basis of a hurried, mumbled explanation. Give me something in writing, let me see a transcript of the proceedings there.”
The angry reply was: “You'll get no transcript from us!”
“Then you'll get nothing from me,” I said, “so you had better leave,” and, getting up, I showed them to the door.
Comrade Sandler tried to hand me a previously typed sheet of paper (with my name written in) charging me with disloyalty to the SWP. I refused to accept it and declared: “Look, I'll make a full confession right here and now: I'm a Trotskyist, I still believe in permanent revolution and I refuse to regress to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” He then tried to leave the paper on a table, but I picked it up, crumpled it into a ball and threw it after them as they went down the front steps. I told them: “If you understand what this purge of the party means you are no longer revolutionists but cynics; if you are unknowing tools you are nonetheless contributing to the degeneration of the party.”
Finally, as they made their way down the block towards their parked car, I called out, “You're taking part in a dirty and dishonorable business!”
Trying to look back calmly on the episode I feel regret if I made the three comrades who came to interview me feel that my anger was against them personally and would appreciate it if you would convey that fact to them. I do not think that they displayed any animus towards me nor indicated in any way that they really thought I was disloyal. I think they are well-meaning, devoted comrades who, out of ignorance and the effects of deliberate miseducation about how democratic centralism functions and what past practices in the SWP have been, believed that they were carrying out an unpleasant but necessary task for the advancement of the party.
To explain my conduct let me point out that I became infuriated upon hearing I was under suspicion of disloyalty to the Socialist Workers Party. I have been a member of the American Trotskyist movement uninterruptedly for 48 years—since 1936, two years before the founding of the SWP. In that time I have been entrusted with posts of responsibility and confidence, among them branch organizer in Boston and Youngstown, member of the National Committee and Political Committee, staff member of the Militant for almost two decades and finally its editor. I declined renomination to the National Committee to allow the election to it of more younger comrades and was quite satisfied to remain an ordinary branch member. Heretofore there had never been a whisper, let alone any charge, against my devotion and loyalty to the party.
Now, I found that all this did not weigh as a feather in the scales, but I was being subjected to a shotgun procedure to brand me as disloyal if I failed immediately and without adequate information to condemn some comrades in California for their failure to disavow an alleged statement of some alleged spokesperson at a state convention about which I knew practically nothing.
This, moreover, was confirmation of what I had already begun to sense—that I was on some sort of “enemies list” or list of suspects kept by the party leadership and that there probably was a dossier on me. And that as with most dossiers it contained erroneous and false information, such as my alleged voting for the Breitman amendment. (It so happened that I did not participate either on the branch floor or in the Internal Bulletin in the 1981 preconvention discussion or voting because of ill health and absence from New York.)
But consider for a moment what it signifies for freedom of thought and voting within the party if, under the new type of regime we are now witnessing, positions taken in preconvention discussions are to be used years later as a basis for loyalty investigations.
It is true that in the past two years I have come to hold views critical of those of the leadership. I have been greatly disturbed by the attempt to belittle the importance of Trotsky's contributions to revolutionary theory and practice, particularly to the preparations to jettison the theory of permanent revolution. I consider this a form of opportunism embarked upon in the illusory expectation of making the SWP more acceptable and attractive to the leaderships of the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions and a hoped-for new international to be set up by them.
I watched with dismay as legitimate attempts by comrades to voice disagreements with the new line, which was being imposed by the leadership without the sanction of a convention, were squelched and as trials and expulsions of individual comrades—often with great injustice and on the flimsiest charges—reached figures exceeding the total of all such trials and expulsions in the party's entire prior history. Despite my critical views I kept silent, not because I wanted to conceal my views but because no opportunity was afforded to express them—a measure of how different things are under the new type of regime in the party from the way they used to be.
As a loyal and disciplined party member I submitted to all the strictures and multifarious new ordinances against “factional” activity or discussion outside of preconvention periods. I paid my dues and pledges, increased my pledge on request, contributed to all fund drives and special funds, brought substantial financial contributions from a sympathizer to the National Office and, when asked, signed over my shares in the ownership of the West Street building to Jack Barnes.
I was determined to wait until the opening of the preconvention discussion period to air my disagreements. To be sure the postponement and unconstitutional cancellation of the convention made me wonder whether a leadership capable of such actions would not “discover” or invent some pretext to purge the party of all suspected and potential critics before allowing a discussion period bulletin. Nonetheless, I persisted in my determination to hold my tongue until one was allowed to speak.
I say that I had already sensed that I was on some sort of list of suspects. I believe that the principal cause of this was that I had maintained close personal friendships with comrades with whom I had long worked in the party and who apparently have been for some time marked out for expulsion—particularly George Breitman and James Kutcher. But that I was on such a list was confirmed for me by the remarkable runaround I got when I attempted to obtain some personal files at Pathfinder Press. When I had been editor there and had a small office I kept a file folder of personal correspondence as well as several folders of correspondence containing materials about Trotsky's literary estate. (In 1965 Trotsky's grandson, who had inherited the Old Man's literary estate from Natalia, gave me a power-of-attorney to deal with those commercial publishers in the U.S. who still had contractual rights to books by Trotsky. This required some correspondence and efforts on my part to make them pay up delinquent royalties.)
After I left Pathfinder the file cabinets were moved and after several drastic reductions in Pathfinder's floor space the cabinets and/or their contents were not to be found when I went into the office to consult them. I asked that my folder and those for the Trotsky literary estate be located and given to me to keep at home. After repeated requests Comrade Bruce at Pathfinder found them. But then a hitch developed. He was “too busy” to hand them over to me. I suggested that he or some other comrade there take five or ten minutes to look through the contents of the folders and to take out anything pertaining to Pathfinder that might have wandered into them. But he remained “too busy” and couldn't find anyone else who wasn't “too busy” to do it. It became apparent to me that he was reluctant to assume the responsibility so I suggested that he take the files to the NO and have Jack Barnes or Barry Sheppard go through them, that they could photocopy anything or everything in them if they wished, but to send me what was properly mine. When I called some days later I was informed that I could not get the file folders because the Political Bureau had discussed my request and had ruled that no documents could be taken out of the building but had to be retained there for “historical purposes.”
I then demanded by phone to be allowed to speak to Jack Barnes or Barry Sheppard. Repeatedly I was told that they were in meetings and could not be disturbed. I left messages asking that either one of them call me when their meetings were over. I never received a call.
I was unable to attend the Memorial Meeting for Farrell Dobbs in New York so I went to the one held in Boston. Barry Sheppard was the principal speaker there. My wife and I had arrived early and Barry came over to me and said that as soon as he got back to New York he would see to it that I got the files I had been seeking for the past six months.
I am still waiting.
I hereby formally request the National Committee to reverse the verdict of the Political Committee or Political Bureau on January 4,1984, expelling me from the Socialist Workers Party for disloyalty. If reinstated in the party I shall continue to support and build it to the best of my ability and I shall also attempt to make my voice heard at the appropriate times to reform the party to a democratic internal regime and to a correct revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist political line.
With revolutionary greetings,
/s/George Lavan Weissman
by the Editorial Board
Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, May 1985
George Lavan Weissman died of a heart attack in Concord, New Hampshire, on March 28, after almost half a century of service to the cause of revolutionary socialism. He had suffered from emphysema for some years but remained politically active until he had a stroke in January.
He will be remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International in 1938 and as a founder of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1984. He worked on the Militant editorial staff from 1948 to 1967 and was a member of the editorial board of our Bulletin in Defense of Marxism at the time of his death.
Weissman was born in Chicago in 1916, the only child in a petty-bourgeois family. He grew up in Boston, where he was educated at prestigious schools—Boston Latin School and Harvard College. His father, of a Jewish background although not religious, had belonged to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society at Yale before World War I. His mother came from an Irish-American background and a family that was deeply involved in trade union activity.
He became a Marxist during the Great Depression while he was at Harvard, and at the age of twenty joined the Young People's Socialist League and the Socialist Party in Boston. In the SP he met Trotskyists, including Dr. Antoinette Konikow and the Trainor brothers (Larry and Frank), who influenced his continuing evolution to the left. When they were expelled from the SP in 1937, he went with them and helped found the SWP.
While still in college, Weissman became a volunteer organizer for several unions in New England. In this capacity he was active in a rank-and-file seamen's strike in Boston in 1937, a textile workers' organizing drive in Rhode Island, a shoe workers' strike in Maine, etc. He himself was a member of the CIO National Maritime Union and the AFL Retail Clerks when he worked briefly in those industries.
But he had decided to devote most of his time and energy to building the revolutionary workers' party, and that is how he utilized his many talents from then on. Despite his petty-bourgeois origins, he spent his adult life reaching, organizing, and educating revolutionary workers. This was true even during World War II when he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private and emerged as a captain of artillery (1941-46).
After the war he was what he called a “party functionary,” an elastic term covering a broad variety of functions which the SWP assigned him to. He was a local or branch organizer in Boston (1939-41) and Youngstown (1946). At the SWP national center in New York he was director and editor of Pioneer Publishers and Pathfinder Press (1947-81); organizer for the American Committee for European Workers' Relief after World War II; manager of Mountain Spring Camp in New Jersey (1948-62); as well as editor and writer for the Militant and other party publications. He was also a member of the SWP's National and Political committees for many years and a regular or fraternal delegate to most of its national conventions before the 1970s.
Weissman and another SWP member, Constance Fox Harding, were married in 1943, and they became an exemplary team of party workers. Together they worked in all kinds of defense and solidarity cases, and together they broke new ground for the SWP by getting its presidential ticket on the ballot in several states where there were no SWP members or branches. Over the years hundreds of people in the movement were guests at “Connie and George's place” in Manhattan—some overnight, others for months at a time. Their warmth and hospitality to people in need, both party members and non-members, were almost legendary. Connie Weissman died in 1972.
Among the many organizations Weissman belonged to were the Boston youth branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the American Student Union at Harvard; the NAACP in New York; the American Veterans Committee in the Bronx, NY; the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (in the Monroe, NC, “kissing case”), of which he was secretary; the Civil Rights Defense Committee during the period when it defended Carl Skoglund, a revolutionary leader whom the government repeatedly tried to deport to Sweden, and James Kutcher, the legless veteran purged from the Veterans Administration in Newark; and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Weissman was East Coast regional organizer.
In addition, he found time to be literary representative in this country of the Leon Trotsky estate, and to write hundreds of articles for the party press. The subjects that evoked his best writing were the Black struggle in the U.S. and American history. Perhaps a collection of these will be published some day.
Because of poor health Weissman did not play any role in the internal debates over Castroism and Trotskyism that divided SWP members prior to their 1981 national convention. Nevertheless, the SWP leadership sensed that he would never support its efforts to revise the party's program, and included him among more than 100 members purged for “disloyalty” in 1983-84.
In February 1984 he joined with other expellees in forming the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and became a member of the Bulletin IDOM editorial board. He attended the FIT's first national conference in Minneapolis last October and planned to attend the second in May 1985.
When the SWP convention in August 1984 rejected the appeals of Weissman and the others who sought reinstatement, they turned to the Fourth International and asked its recent world congress (February 1985) to intercede on their behalf. The congress responded with an overwhelming majority vote to demand that the appellants be reinstated in the SWP.
Although by this time Weissman was hospitalized after his stroke, he was exhilarated by the reports of the congress's action on this and other issues. In a message to our editorial board, he said:
I hope you won't forget to let the congress delegates know somehow how grateful we are for their support to our fight for reintegration into the party. Of course they were only doing their duty, given the facts about the purge. But not everybody does it when it is needed, or does it as effectively as it was done in this case, and I for one would like our comrades to know how much we appreciate their adherence to the principles of our International.
Surviving Weissman are Muriel McAvoy, his second wife; three stepchildren from his first marriage—James Harding of Manhattan, Dorothea Lobsenz of Los Angeles, and Timothy Harding of Los Angeles; and six grandchildren. We extend our condolences to them and to his many friends here and in Mexico.
The revolutionary movement has lost a tireless builder and a wise counselor. We honor him by continuing the struggle he conducted for forty-nine years and by seeking to recruit and educate others in his mold. Young revolutionaries will not find a better model.
Newark, NJ February 4, 1984
National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
I appeal my expulsion from the party on the false charge of disloyalty. I deeply resent such a charge because there is absolutely no valid reason for it.
On January 4, I was the subject of a hearing which consisted of a single question asked by Wendy Lyons accompanied by John Studer. She demanded that I “just answer yes or no” to a statement she had, at my insistence, written: “I repudiate the disloyal action of the minority delegates to the California state convention in not repudiating the reporter's refusal to abide by the NC motion governing relations with Socialist Action.”
My written reply: “I am/was not privy to minority delegation response and have no way of knowing what occurred, other than Wendy's account. Will not pass judgment.”
A pre-prepared charge of disloyalty and a notice of trial, my name on both, were whipped out immediately. The trial was held the same day “late afternoon or early evening” without me. I was in fact on a granted leave of absence at the time.
It was a farcical, kangaroo court proceeding: “give 'em a fair trial, then hang 'em.” No transcript of what was said, nor by whom. It was demanded that I fink, condemn, and “repudiate” comrades in a situation about which I knew nothing. All on the say-so of two members of the PC.
I do repudiate! I repudiate the unprincipled conduct of a leadership that resorts to such shameful methods of silencing political opposition by framing up and kicking out people from the party in secret. These so-called trials violate the near fifty years' long tradition of Lenin and Trotsky's concept of democratic centralism in the Socialist Workers Party.
The present leadership is embarked upon a changing course in respect to the validity of the permanent revolution, Trotsky's transitional program, and “repudiation” of Trotsky himself. The public disavowal of Trotskyism by Barnes in his YSA speech and then in the first edition of New International presages a break with the Fourth International.
My appeal stems from the belief that the SWP has not yet (though well on its way) become just another of the many pseudo-Marxist/Leninist parties that now abound. It is still a revolutionary party.
My appeal for reacceptance comes from a willingness to loyally help in a reversal of direction. I don't believe the members will allow the Barnes leadership to continue passing itself off as the party.
/s/Larry Stewart
May 26, 1984
Dear Comrade Mason:
This letter is directed to you as a fighter for Black liberation and leader in the working-class struggle for justice in this country. It comes from a Black worker who for many years was a loyal member of the SWP and who supports your presidential candidacy and the SWP's overall political platform without any reservation.
I have voiced that support to all my friends and everyone I know. By letter to the SWP and vocally I have volunteered to work for your campaign in any way that I can. These offers have received no response—until last Sunday night, May 20, when I was physically barred from attending your campaign rally in Newark.
I was one of many members undemocratically expelled from the SWP early this year under the guise of “disloyalty.” The real reason we were expelled was that we hold political perspectives different from the current leadership and possibly a majority of the membership. When we protested and asked to be reinstated, the leadership took a step to prevent any kind of collaboration, fraternization, or discussion between us and the SWP membership: it instructed all branches to ban us from all public activities of the party, including its forums, bookstores, and election rallies. The pretext given is that we are disrupters linked to anti-party enemy groups and possibly government Cointelpro operations.
I shall not dwell at length on the mingled feelings of outrage and resentment I experienced in the May 20 incident. I found it necessary to state and restate the truth that I only wanted to attend the public election rally and had no intention of trying to force my way in. I had to repeat a number of times that I wasn't there to cause any disturbance or provocation. Surely you can understand the intensity of my feelings at being confronted and barred from participating in a party event by comrades, including some I've known for many years—at the same time that members of actual opponent and hostile groups, like Stalinists and Social Democrats as well as Republicans and Democrats, were free to enter the rally from which I was barred.
Later I learned that racists had made a death threat against you that very day. What a bitter irony that the defense guard that day spent time and vigilance in excluding a supporter of your campaign!
But it is necessary to subordinate subjective feelings and to pose the problem politically. That is the main reason I am writing to you now.
An election campaign is an opportunity for the revolutionary party to reach many more people with its message than it normally does. This is doubly true of presidential campaigns, which usually result in the SWP and YSA getting more new contacts, friends, and recruits than at other times.
For this to happen the party of course has to have an open and outgoing policy and attitude toward the non-party forces it encounters during the election campaign. That has traditionally been the course followed by the SWP since its first presidential campaign in 1948, as I can personally testify. We reached out to non-party members, invited them to participate actively in the campaign work, even if they did not fully agree with our platform. We did not bar anyone from petitioning or campaigning with us merely because they did not measure up to our internal standards for party membership. As a result, there were thousands of workers over the years who regarded Farrell Dobbs as their candidate and the SWP as their party even though they did not join it.
This year the SWP has invited all who support your campaign to participate actively in it—by collecting petitions to get on the ballot, by circulating our literature, by helping to finance the campaign, by joining the SWP or YSA, etc. This is unquestionably a correct non-exclusionary policy in full accord with our best traditions and methods.
But how effectively can it work if simultaneously the non-party elements we are reaching can see other Mason-Gonzalez supporters excluded from election rallies simply because of some internal party difference that really has nothing to do with the campaign? Won't that make the SWP look sectarian and hypocritical? Won't that antagonize and alienate the forces we are trying to attract through the campaign?
This is a point that Frank Lovell made recently at the end of his article about the 1984 election campaign, in the May issue of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (No. 7): “Significant new forces cannot be won in an atmosphere which demands total agreement with the SWP leadership on every point as a condition for participating in the Mason-Gonzalez campaign.”
I am not trying to embarrass you or put you on the spot. I am not asking you to agree with everything said above. What I want is to urge you, as the party's chief banner-bearer in this year's campaign, as the party member having major responsibility for the effectiveness of the campaign, to try to persuade the party leadership that the best interests of the party will be served by cancelling the present exclusion policy. Nobody should be barred from SWP events merely because they are on some blacklist compiled by the SWP leadership. Such blacklisting may serve temporary factional purposes but only at the expense of the SWP's public standing and authority.
The party leadership will listen to you if you raise this question with them because they know that you will do it only out of concern for the best interests of the campaign. The party membership will breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of this exclusionary millstone around their necks. And non-party workers reached in this campaign will have an additional reason to come closer to the campaign and the SWP.
Comradely,
/s/Larry Stewart
Before he was hospitalized, Larry Stewart wrote the first draft of an appeal to the 1985 World Congress of the Fourth International.
Newark, NJ., U.S.A.
November 7, 1984
To the 1985 World Congress of the Fourth International
Comrades:
In 1939 I joined the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party simultaneously (at that time, before the Voorhis Act prohibited such affiliations, the SWP was a section of the FI). The FI was then a few months old, the SWP a little over a year old. So I have been a Fourth Internationalist for over forty-five years—in good times and bad, in wartime and in peacetime. Similarly, I was a loyal and disciplined member of the SWP for more than forty-four years—until I was condemned as a “secret factionalist” and “splitter” last January and was expelled without a chance to confront my accusers at a trial.
But my appeal to you—to reject my expulsion and to help me and others expelled to be reinstated in the SWP—is not based on the length of my membership or “seniority.” It is based, first of all, on the elementary requirements of proletarian justice. I am innocent of all the charges against me (like the other victims of the recent SWP purge). I am the victim of a frame-up. You owe it to me and to all the other members of the International to defend me and to clear my name of the muck that the SWP leadership tried to drown us in. This is not something I ask as a special favor—I demand it as the right of every honest member of the International.
The second basis for my appeal is that it serves the best interests of the movement as a whole—the interests of the SWP and the interests of the FI. What both need, in order to strengthen our movement for its great liberating tasks, is the reunification of all Fourth Internationalists in the U.S. inside the SWP and under the banner of the SWP But this cannot be achieved as long as some of us bear the stigma of “splitters,” “secret factionalists” and participants in “disruption campaigns against the SWP.” That is why you have to uphold the appeals of the expelled SWP members as the first step on the road to a solution of the crisis of SWP-FI relations.
I do not make the error of thinking that our appeals are the most important point on the agenda of your Congress. Far more important and decisive is the need for the International to reject the various liquidationist schemes, proposals, and moods that have surfaced since the 1979 Congress; and, within that context, to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted splits. But there is no contradiction between these major tasks and favorable action on our appeals. In fact, they fit together quite harmoniously.
In conclusion, I hope that your Congress will be successful in maintaining and preserving the revolutionary character the FI has always had, and I subscribe to the words of Leon Trotsky in 1938, shortly before I joined: “Long live the Socialist Workers Party of the United States! Long live the Fourth International!”
Comradely,
/s/Larry Stewart
At its meeting in February 1985, the World Congress of the Fourth International decided by an overwhelming majority that Stewart and his comrades had been unjustly expelled and demanded their reinstatement in the SWP.
Larry Stewart was still working on this article when he died in November 1984. His notes were edited by George Breitman, with whom he collaborated throughout his 45 years of activity in the Marxists Black, and labor movements.
Jack Barnes and his group in the SWP leadership decided, before the party's August 1981 convention, that the SWP should junk the theory of permanent revolution and other aspects of the traditional Trotskyist program that are repugnant to Fidel Castro and the current he represents. But instead of saying this openly at the convention and letting the delegates decide what to do about it, the Barnes group denied that they had any intention of changing the party's position on permanent revolution, and waited until two days after the convention before taking the first open steps to disassociate themselves from Trotskyism and principal parts of the SWP program.
This was done in a one-step-at-a-time fashion during the next 17 months, partly in the party's public press and partly through an internal reeducation program centered around carefully selected writings of Lenin. When some party members asked for an internal literary discussion to discuss changes of such magnitude before they were made publicly, they were assailed as disrupters, factionalists, and petty-bourgeois capitulators to the pressures of capitalism, and they were warned they would be expelled if they tried to organize any unauthorized discussion.
But finally, on December 31, 1982, in a speech at a Young Socialist Alliance convention in Chicago, Jack Barnes dropped the other shoe with a public declaration that the theory of permanent revolution must be “discarded.”
When opponents of this position protested such a public change without approval by any SWP convention, or even any discussion by the membership, they were told they would be able to discuss the Barnes speech during the next preconvention discussion period (then slated for the summer of 1983) and that they were prohibited from discussing it before then. But the Barnes group postponed the convention until August 1984, and in the meantime used phony charges to expel each and every member who they thought might object in the preconvention discussion to the rejection of permanent revolution.
In this way the members of the SWP were deprived of their democratic right to hear a two-sided discussion of the correctness or incorrectness of the program and policies that have guided the SWP and FI since they were founded in 1938. And that is why I and other advocates of permanent revolution never had a chance inside the SWP to explain what we thought was wrong and dangerous in the Barnes position (printed in the Fall 1983 New International under the title “Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today”).
Other expelled members and some members of the FI outside of the U.S. have written effective replies to Barnes. It is not my intention here to repeat their arguments, which the Barnes group has never bothered to answer. All I want to raise are some questions about a single aspect of the new position which I haven't seen discussed by others and which I would have raised inside the SWP if I hadn't been expelled.
To buttress his position that our movement must “discard” the theory or strategy of permanent revolution, Barnes painted a very negative picture of the effects it has had on our movement since 1928.
“Especially in relation to the class struggle in the oppressed nations,” and “especially in this hemisphere since 1959,” he said in the NI article, the weaknesses in Trotsky's theory have opened the door to “leftist biases and sectarian political errors.” He doesn't prove that such errors result from adherence to permanent revolution, he only asserts that they do. For more than a century all kinds of stupid and criminal things have been done by people who call themselves and consider themselves to be Marxists. Barnes wouldn't propose discarding Marxism on that basis, so how can he pretend it is valid to discard permanent revolution merely because errors or sins are committed by people who think or say they stand for that strategy?
Permanent revolution, Barnes continued, has nothing to offer us and in fact can only be an “obstacle.” It “does not contribute today to arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist revolution.” It is an obstacle to “reknitting our political continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the first four congresses of the Communist Intemational.” It has been an obstacle in our movement to “an objective reading of the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin.” It will be an obstacle to “our own progress toward a deeper integration into the organizations and struggles of the working class and its oppressed and exploited allies.”
If these claims are true, or even only half-true, why did it take Barnes and his group more than 20 years to discover them? Can it be that he is distorting not only the real meaning of permanent revolution but also its effects on our movement?
It certainly can. As most SWP members in the 1960s could testify, permanent revolution has had highly beneficial effects on the SWP and was a major source of its strength and attractiveness in the 1960s, when Barnes was recruited. The two issues that won most of the new members to the SWP at that time—the Cuban revolution and the Black struggle in this country—were both linked inextricably to the strategy of permanent revolution, in reality and in the minds of SWP members, new and old.
Contrary to Barnes's implications (about “this hemisphere” and “since 1959”), the SWP played a thoroughly revolutionary role in relation to the Cuban revolution, in its practice as well as in its theory. In fact, it was this combination of the SWP's correct practice and correct theory regarding the Cuban revolution that drew Barnes and others like him to Marxism in the first place.
Until a few years ago nobody in the SWP questioned the link between permanent revolution and the SWP's position on Cuba. As recently as 1978, Barnes took the initiative in collecting Joseph Hansen's writings on Cuba in book form as Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution. From start to finish that book is an exposition and defense of Trotsky's theory, which Hansen held had been fully confirmed by the Cuban experience. It is a book that cries out against the new positions of the Barnes group since 1979, when Hansen died. Whatever “weaknesses” they now profess to see in permanent revolution, the SWP's record on Cuba is evidence of the healthy and fruitful effects it had for decades in “arming ... revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power.”
Barnes pretends to review the ways in which permanent revolution “has actually been used by us” since 1928; he even specifies the number of ways (three). One of these ways he pronounces harmless, but unnecessary, and the other two he condemns as harmful. Despite his attempt to seem objective, what the uninformed reader will “actually” get from this is a misleading concept of the place and centrality of permanent revolution in the life and thought of our movement. I will try to demonstrate this through the SWP's relation to the Black struggle in the U.S. I am compelled to do this because Barnes completely ignores the connection between the SWP's position on Black liberation and permanent revolution—a connection that happens to be a major hallmark of the SWP since its foundation.
The Black struggle presents a challenge and test for every organization seeking to play a revolutionary role in this country. The way in which the SWP responded was always a source of pride and inspiration to its members, white as well as Black. Barnes and most of his generation in the SWP acknowledged and reflected these feelings hundreds of times in the 1960s and 70s. A thick book could be filled with their statements and writings on the SWP's special and unique understanding of the Black struggle and its dynamics.
As a matter of fact, the SWP's position was so exceptional that it was given a special name: “combined revolution” (or “combined character” of the coming American revolution). This name was coined in 1969, in preparation for the SWP's 23rd national convention, where Barnes and members of his generation first assumed political leadership status in our party.
“Combined revolution” was not a new concept in the SWP in the 1960s. It referred to the combination of the Black struggle against racist oppression and for self-determination with the workers' struggle against capitalist exploitation and for socialism, and said that this combination was indispensable for the victory of both these struggles. This idea was adopted at the SWP's 1963 convention (in the resolution called “Freedom Now”). What it got at the 1969 convention was a new and more effective expression, thanks to the development of Black nationalism and the rich experience of the entire decade.
But the lineage or continuity of the combined revolution idea goes back further than 1963. It goes back to the 1930s and Leon Trotsky, who introduced it to our movement at a time when we had a correct understanding of the class character of the Black struggle but an incorrect understanding of its national character. And the name used then for the idea of combining the democratic struggles of the Blacks with the anticapitalist struggles of the workers was—permanent revolution.
The first one who seems to have said that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was applicable to the Black struggle in this country was Albert Weisbord, an ex-CP member briefly on the fringes of the Left Opposition. When Trotsky was told about this at a discussion on self-determination in 1933, he said, “Weisbord is correct in a certain sense that the self-determination of the Negroes belongs to the question of the permanent revolution in America.” [1]
Trotsky reiterated this thought in 1939 during a discussion with members of the newly founded SWP, and the party itself, in a 1939 convention resolution influenced by Trotsky's views, said: “The SWP must recognize that its attitude to the Negro question is crucial for its future development. Hitherto the party has been based mainly on privileged workers and groups of isolated intellectuals. Unless it can find its way to the great masses of the underprivileged, of whom the Negroes constitute so important a section, the broad perspectives of the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction and the party is bound to degenerate.” [2]
If combined revolution is permanent revolution applied to a particular problem, was a new name really needed? Why not continue to call it by its original name? My personal opinion is that the new name was better than the old—it made it easier for us to communicate the idea to people we wanted to introduce it to. Also, every generation has the right to its own terminology and vocabulary. When I was young, we used to speak of “Negroes” and “colored people,” but later generations prefer other names. If young revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s felt more comfortable with their own name for the revolutionary strategy based on the necessity to combine democratic and socialist tasks and struggles, there was nothing wrong with that. The important thing was the political content behind the names, which was essentially the same in both cases.
This is not just my opinion, it was the opinion of the whole party. The main political resolution adopted by the 1969 convention contained an excellent presentation of the combined revolution concept. I will quote a few passages from it to illustrate how its content and language were interchangeable with those used in our writings about permanent revolution:
The movement for Black liberation is a complex and contradictory fusion of two explosive trends. One is an irrepressible and powerful democratic thrust for self-determination as a distinctive national minority. This is combined with a proletarian struggle against the capitalist rulers. All those who fail to understand the dual character of the Afro-American movement and combined characteristics of the coming American revolution are bound to go astray in comprehending its development and orienting correctly toward it.
The problem of winning full democratic rights and national emancipation for Black Americans is a task that was unsolved by the American bourgeois revolutionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been handed down for solution to the socialist revolution of the twentieth century....
The Afro American struggle for liberation is the most formidable expression of the logic of permanent revolution in American life today. It has begun on the basis of a fight for national emancipation. But this democratic objective cannot be obtained except through all-out combat against the entire capitalist system, which holds down the Black masses for its own profiteering reasons. Thus, regardless of the prevailing ideas of its participants, the thrust toward national liberation inexorably tends to merge with the broader class struggle against capitalist domination ...
The combined character of the mass Afro-American movement to gain power to have control over their own future precludes any separation of stages in the struggle for its nationalist demands and socialist objectives. There cannot first be a successfully concluded struggle for national independence and democratic rights and afterwards a struggle for social liberation. The two must be indissolubly combined and will, in fact, reciprocally reinforce each other. The nationalist demands must be tied in with working-class demands in order to obtain either. [3]
At that 1969 convention Jack Barnes was the Political Committee reporter in behalf of the political resolution, and he did a good job in presenting its main lines, especially on the Black struggle. Among other things, he said:
The basic characteristic of the Afro-American struggle is the struggle by an oppressed nationality for self-determination: the struggle to accomplish the historically deferred tasks that the American bourgeoisie proved incapable of accomplishing in their second revolution and that they turned away from as the United States became an imperialist power ...
The alliance between the struggle by the Afro-Americans and the other oppressed national minorities or nationalities in this country and the struggle of the workers is the key to the success of the American revolution .... It is basically a question not of morality but of necessity. If there is no alliance, the American revolution will be impossible ...
The third American revolution will have a combined character. It will be a workers' struggle for power and a struggle by the oppressed nationalities for liberation and for self-determination. It will be a struggle that only a workers' government established in the United States will be able to bring to a successful conclusion. And through it, not only will all the democratic rights of the oppressed minorities and nationalities finally be brought into being and guaranteed, but also the proletarian demands of the workers of all sections of the country will be met. The problem that has bothered, confused and stood somewhat in the way of American radicalism for many, many years (and outside of our movement it still does) is clearly seeing the independent character of the Afro-American struggle for self-determination and the combined character of the coming struggle for power in the United States.
This struggle is the clearest manifestation in the United States of the permanent revolution. By this we mean that there will be no division of this struggle into separate stages; there will be no middle solution. There will be no solution to the national-democratic demands of the Black masses apart from the solution of the exploitation by capitalism of the workers themselves. The revolution will be combined, or it will not take place ...
This key question of the American revolution is one that is hopeless to solve without the tools of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism and the experience of the last period as revolutionists. [4]
If I had room, I could cite dozens of other quotations by members and supporters of the Barnes group showing that until recently they considered combined revolution to be an application or manifestation or expression of the logic of permanent revolution and that they consistently interpreted and explained combined revolution along the lines that Trotsky had done with permanent revolution. But I think it will be adequate to submit the testimony of just two people whom I have not quoted up to now.
One is George Novack, who was interested in the Black struggle ever since he joined our party in the 1930s and who participated in the writing or editing of most of the SWP's major resolutions on Black liberation. In 1971 he gave lectures on the Transitional Program at Oberlin, in the course of which he traced the development of the SWP's assessment of the successive stages of Black nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s and its theoretical analysis of its motive forces, principal features, and aims:
They [American Trotskyists] were greatly aided in this task by the method of Marxism, the positions worked out by Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the national question in our era, and by the acute previsions of Trotsky contained in the pamphlet Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination ...
We can claim a certain amount of success in this theoretical-political work. It is widely recognized in radical circles, black and white, that the Socialist Workers Party outstripped all other tendencies in grasping the importance of black nationalism ...
All this indicates the capacity of our cadres to recognize what is new in a mass ferment and adjust our views, strategy, and tactics accordingly. That would not have been possible without the aid of the theory of the permanent revolution and the law of uneven and combined development, taken from Trotsky's teachings. [5]
The second witness I will cite is Gus Horowitz, who is no longer a member of the SWP. In the late 1960s and 70s he was a leader of the party's educational and publishing work, assigned among other things to promoting understanding and literature about the national question.
Between the 1969 and 1974 world congresses of the FI, sharp factional debates took place in our International over a great many political and theoretical issues. One of these was about the national question and its application in imperialist countries. Ernest Mandel, a leading member of the United Secretariat, said in a criticism of SWP positions in 1973: “The whole notion of applying the formula of permanent revolution to imperialist countries is extremely dubious in the best of cases. It can only be done with the utmost circumspection, and in the form of an analogy.” [6]
The SWP leadership assigned Horowitz to rebut Mandel. I don't know what either Mandel or Horowitz thinks about this question today, but here is what Horowitz said on behalf of the SWP leadership in 1973:
Circumspection is always desirable, of course, but Comrade [Mandel] is simply wrong. The permanent revolution can indeed be applied to the advanced capitalist countries, and the Trotskyist movement has been doing so for a long time (particularly in regard to the national question). And a revolutionist in Canada, in Spain, or in Ireland who does not know how to apply it will be in deep trouble....
Trotsky developed the theory of permanent revolution, an extension of the Marxist understanding of the law of uneven and combined development, in relation to the problems of the Russian revolution. The specific features of that situation were quite different than, say, the problems of the revolution in Black Africa today. But using the method of the permanent revolution, we can apply it there. The problems of the revolution in advanced capitalist countries are much more different, but it remains essential for Marxists to tackle the problems there that stem from uneven and combined development—for example, the still-existing uncompleted national tasks in the framework of an advanced capitalist economy. That is why the revolution in Canada, for example, will most likely be a combined revolution—combining the Quebecois national independence struggle with the proletarian socialist revolution in Quebec and in all of Canada. [7]
Barnes, as I have noted, alleged that he was reviewing the different ways we have used the concept of permanent revolution since 1928. Why then did he omit all the material showing the numerous links between permanent revolution and the SWP's position on Black liberation in the U.S.?
It wasn't because he was unaware of this material. And it wasn't because he was ignorant about the weight and centrality of combined revolution in the SWP's total program. So what was the reason?
Thus far, I am unable to offer an answer. But I am very concerned about the Barnes omissions on this point whatever the answer may be. Because it seems to me that they place a question mark over the party's hard-won and precious analysis and program for the Black struggle. Is the Barnes group preparing to change that too?
I am not saying that they are preparing to do so, I am asking—are they preparing? If raising such a question gives the impression that I am “too suspicious,” I must have got that way as a result of recent party history. If anybody had told me five years ago that the SWP leadership would repudiate permanent revolution, and would do it in such a dishonest and undemocratic way, I would have considered the teller a nut of some kind. The Barnes group committed those offenses against proletarian politics and morality without ever announcing in advance what they were up to. That is why my question is in order now, before it may be too late. At the very least, the Barnes group should be watched closely and pressured to disclose their real aims whenever they are ambiguous or diplomatically silent.
The question I ask is not based only on the omissions by Barnes. Even more it is induced by things the SWP leadership has been saying and doing (or not saying and not doing) in relation to the Black struggle itself during the last three or four years. To discuss this adequately will take another article, but I will mention aspects of the problem because it is part of the background to my question about whether the party's position on the Black struggle is being changed without discussion.
It is obvious, first of all, that the Black struggle no longer receives the kind or amount of attention—politically, theoretically, practically, educationally—that it used to command in the SWP. It is not the central question it used to be for the party. The level of writing on the subject, which used to be one of our chief assets, is now embarrassingly low. New members get more of agitation than of education in the ideas of combined revolution. They are encouraged to talk to each other rather than trained how to participate effectively in the Black movement.
It has been several years since party resolutions have made any serious analysis of the Black community and the trends in it or provided any guide to action for our Black cadres. The exception is in relation to the National Black Independent Political Party, a very small group that tried to establish a new political pole in the Black community.
It was correct for us to join NBIPP, explore its potential, and aid in its development toward independent politics. But within a year it was absolutely clear that NBIPP was incapable of playing any serious role in the community, that its leaders were leaning toward the Black Democrats, that they were energetic only about expelling Marxists, and that most of the founding members had quit. NBIPP not only never led a single action among Blacks anywhere in the country, but it was incapable of even producing any literature to educate anybody about politics. Some of its leaders found their way to Jesse Jackson in the Democratic Party, and through Jackson to Mondale. After several years it remains a tiny sect, self-isolated and unknown in the community.
Yet the SWP leadership persists in shutting its eyes to this reality and continues to view this hopeless shell as the center of the Black struggle, devoting more time and attention to it than to all other Black forces and trends. And whenever questions arise about NBIPP's viability, it defends this obtuseness by pointing to, praising, and reprinting the radical-sounding sections of the charter that NBIPP adopted when it was founded. Nobody else in NBIPP ever considered the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist paragraphs in the charter as anything but rhetoric, and NBIPP itself never even printed the charter. [8] But the SWP leaders were obsessed by what I can only call “charter fetishism” and invoked it to ward off facing reality.
All this is a sign of acute disorientation on the part of the Barnes group. They could not commit such errors if their thinking about the Black struggle was still firmly rooted in combined revolution. This reinforces, for me, the urgency of my question, and the need for the whole SWP membership to seek an unambiguous answer:
Does the repudiation of permanent revolution signify or imply any alteration in the SWP's theory and practice of combined revolution?
1. Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, Pathfinder Press, 1978, p. 25.
2. The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, Monad Press, 1982, p. 357.
3. Towards an American Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1970, pp. 164-6. (My emphasis — L.S.)
4. Ibid., pp. 143-5. (My emphasis — L.S.)
5. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1977, pp. 43-4. (My emphasis—LS.)
6. International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 4, 4/73, p. 34.
7. IIDB, Vol. 10, No. 10, 7/73, p. 7. (My emphasis—LS.)
8. This was true at the time Stewart died, in November 1984. Since then, a split in NBIPP, following the witch-hunt of SWP members and sympathizers, resulted in the emergence of two factions, each calling itself NBIPP. One of these published the 4-year-old charter.
This article was originally written as part of “Permanent Revolution and Black Liberation in the U.S.,” which Larry Stewart was still working on when he died in November 1984. George Breitman divided it into two separate articles when he edited the unfinished manuscript after Stewart's death. The first was published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism No. 17, April 1985.
More than any other person, Leon Trotsky shaped the SWP's thinking about the nature of the Black struggle in the U.S. Despite his considerable influence and prestige among us, he wasn't able to accomplish this all at once.
In 1933, when Trotsky was exiled in Turkey, he tried to convince the leaders of our movement that they should support the right of self-determination for Blacks in this country. But they didn't understand his arguments and they didn't agree.
It was not until 1939, when Trotsky was living in Mexico, that he persuaded us of the progressive character of Black nationalism and helped the SWP to adopt our first resolution having a fully Leninist approach to self-determination. (Both episodes are documented in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, Pathfinder Press, 1978.)
This, plus the development of the Black struggle itself and the lessons we learned from that during the next 30 years, enabled us to work out our policy of “combined revolution.” An application of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution to a particular American reality, this policy combines the democratic struggle of Blacks against racism with the workers' struggle against capitalism. For a long time it gave the SWP a definite theoretical and practical advantage over all other tendencies in the radical movement.
But now the Barnes group in the SWP leadership has set itself the goal of fusion with the Castroist current and puts this goal ahead of everything else. It has repudiated the policy of permanent revolution (without explaining what effect that repudiation has on the policy of combined revolution) and it is trying in other ways to indicate that the SWP should no longer be considered “Trotskyist.”
One of the ways of doing this is to demote Trotsky from the highest level of revolutionary authority and stature, next to Lenin, to a secondary level, alongside Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, etc.
Demoting Trotsky doesn't necessarily involve belittling him directly or denying that he was a good revolutionary (except with regard to permanent revolution, political revolution, etc.). Often it only involves assertions or hints that when Trotsky was doing certain good things, these were not exceptional contributions because he was only acting in accord with decisions made by the Communist International in Lenin's time.
Efforts along this line are being made by the Barnes group especially in relation to Trotsky's views and record on the U.S. Black struggle. They can't attack him on these matters—yet—but they can and do try to whittle down his place in the history of our party's long fight to achieve a correct policy and correct practice in that struggle.
Here, for example, is what Jack Barnes said in his most famous speech (“Their Trotsky and Ours,” Dec. 31, 1982) when he was listing the things Trotsky had done in the 1930s that Barnes approved: “Trotsky also carried on the Comintern's work of educating revolutionists in the United States about the centrality of the struggle for Black self-determination and of the vanguard role of Black workers in the class struggle.” v[9]
Carrying on the Comintern's work—how can anyone object to Barnes saying that? What's wrong with putting Trotsky's contributions in their historic context? Nothing at all, if the Comintern's work is assessed correctly and if Trotsky only continued it and did not add to it significantly.
Operation-Cut-Trotsky-Down-to-Size started two days after the SWP's August 1981 convention, at an expanded meeting of the Political Committee where the Barnes group introduced a new educational-reorientation program focused on carefully selected portions of Lenin's writings. Two reading lists were introduced to show SWP members what to read. The second, entitled “Reading List on the Communist International Under Lenin,” is relevant here because of its last section, which we are reprinting from Party Organizer, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1982, p. 3:
VII. The Black struggle
* Lenin on the United States, New World Publishers, pp. 123-131 and pp. 303-306; Progress Publishers, pp. 124-132 and 301-304 (also in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 22, pp. 24-31; Vol. 23, pp. 271-273).
In 1915 in his study of agriculture in the United States, Lenin took up the question of Black oppression. In early 1917 in an article on the national question inside the advanced capitalist countries Lenin says that Blacks, “should be classed as an oppressed nation....”
* The National Liberation Movement in the East, Lenin, p. 272.
In the “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” presented to the second congress Blacks are again characterized by Lenin as an oppressed nation.
* The Second Congress of the Communist International, Vol. I, pp. 120-124.
In his remarks at the second congress on the Black struggle in the United States John Reed argues that the key question facing Blacks is class exploitation rather than national oppression.
* Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos, “The Black Question,” pp. 328-331 (also in The Communist International Documents 1919-1943, Degras, Vol. I, pp. 398-401).
This resolution, adopted at the fourth congress, took up the struggle of Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
* First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. II, Trotsky, “A Letter to Claude McKay,” pp. 354-356.
Lenin was the greatest revolutionary that the human race has produced so far. His teachings and example are precious and irreplaceable for revolutionaries of our time. As a Pathfinder Press note puts it, he “restored Marxism as the theory and practice of revolution in the imperialist epoch after it had been debased by the opportunists, revisionists, and fatalists of the Second International.” Where would we be today if he had not been on the scene then?
But Lenin was only one man, with limited time and capacity. He could not solve all problems for his and later generations. He did make very valuable contributions to the revolutionary comprehension of the far-off U.S. Black struggle, but he did not have the time or opportunity to study the question deeply, and it would be foolish of us to expect or pretend otherwise.
First of all, Lenin's comments on the Black struggle in the U.S. are quite brief, and are usually made in the course of broader discussion of other questions. Because of their brevity, almost anyone can look them all up in a few hours if you have access to a good library.
The library I went to has the 45 volumes of the latest English translation of Lenin's Collected Works plus a two-volume index, all published in Moscow. In the subject index you can find all the places where Lenin ever mentioned Negroes, slaves, Africans, etc. It doesn't take long because there are only 30 to 40 such places. Most of the references are quite insignificant—sometimes only a word or a sentence. Some are very important and suggestive, despite their brevity.
“Lenin took up the question of Black oppression” in his 1915 study of U.S. agriculture, the SWP reading list says. Yes, but unfortunately only in passing. In this 85-page pamphlet he said:
There is no need to elaborate on the degraded social status of the Negroes; the American bourgeoisie is in no way better in this respect than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Having “freed” the Negroes, it took good care, under “free,” republican-democratic capitalism, to restore everything possible and impossible for the most shameless and despicable oppression of the Negroes.
Later in the pamphlet he refers to “the existence of still-unparcelled slaveholding plantations in the South, with its downtrodden and oppressed Negro population ... [10]
These passages show that in 1915 Lenin unquestionably considered U.S. Blacks to be oppressed, but they say nothing about the specific nature of that oppression. It would have been difficult for most people reading that pamphlet in 1915 to conclude that Lenin was referring to national oppression.
That is not the case with the next excerpt in the SWP reading list, a 1917 passage saying that Blacks “should be classed as an oppressed nation....” A part of a paragraph about the national composition of the U.S. and Japan, in a pamphlet entitled “Statistics and Sociology,” here is the passage in its entirety:
In the United States, the Negroes (and also the Mulattos and Indians) account for only 11.1 percent [of the total population]. They should be classed as an oppressed nation, for the equality won in the Civil War of 1861-65 and guaranteed by the Constitution of the republic was in many respects increasingly curtailed in the chief Negro areas (the South) in connection with the transition from the progressive, pre-monopoly capitalism of 1860-70 to the reactionary, monopoly capitalism (imperialism) of the new era, which in America was especially sharply etched out by the Spanish-American imperialist war of 1898 (i.e., a war between two robbers over the division of the booty). [11]
This is very good; despite its brevity, anybody reading it in 1917 could have seen what Lenin's essential position was on the national oppression of U.S. Blacks.
But it did not have this effect on anybody because nobody else read this pamphlet in 1917 or many years after that. As the SWP reading list neglects to mention, Lenin started this pamphlet in January 1917 but never finished it; the Russian revolution broke out a few weeks later, and his new tasks prevented completion of the pamphlet. So no one else saw it at the time, and in fact it was not published, even in its unfinished form, until 1935, 11 years after his death.
This means that nobody in the Comintern “under Lenin” could possibly have been influenced or educated by the contents of “Statistics and Sociology.” It shows what Lenin thought, but not what the Comintern thought.
Now we come to the third and last Lenin citation on the reading list—the “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” which Lenin wrote for the Comintern's second congress in 1920. Thesis 11 said, in part:
It is also necessary ... that all Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies. [12]
The reading list says, correctly, that in that passage “Blacks are again characterized by Lenin as an oppressed nation.” And since Lenin's theses were written for a Comintern congress, a reader might conclude that the Comintern shared Lenin's view, especially since the reading list has nothing to say about this.
But such a conclusion would be altogether wrong. After discussing Lenin's draft theses at the congress, the delegates amended them, and the reference to Ireland and the American Negroes was deleted from the final draft, which now says:
It is also necessary ... to give direct support to the revolutionary movements in dependent nations and those deprived of their rights, through the Communist Parties of the countries in questions. [13]
Why this deletion was made the delegates were not told and we do not know. Perhaps it was because some delegates were opposed to including U.S. Blacks among dependent nations and nations deprived of their rights. John Reed (see the fourth item on the SWP reading list) was not speaking for himself alone when he stressed the class aspects of the struggle over its national aspects; and nobody at the congress got up to rebut his one-sided position.
We don't know why the deletion was made and it's not too important, except for one thing: not only at the second congress but at all the other congresses held in Lenin's lifetime (the third and fourth), the Comintern failed to endorse Lenin's position that U.S. Blacks are an oppressed nation or nationality.
That position was never adopted by the Comintern until 1928, four years after Lenin died, when the Comintern was being strangled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Until then, the Comintern and the CP in this country rejected the right of self-determination for U.S. Blacks and wrongly counterposed class struggle to national struggle, instead of dialectically combining them.
The fifth item on the reading list says that the Comintern's fourth congress in 1922 adopted “The Black Question,” a resolution that “took up the struggle of Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.” It took them up all right but its main emphasis was on class and democratic demands (“for the racial equality of blacks and whites, for equal wages and equal social and political rights,” campaigns to force the unions to admit Blacks, etc.). There was nothing in the resolution about the national oppression of U.S. Blacks or anything else that John Reed would have objected to.
For what I have written above I may be accused of hostility to the Comintern. There wouldn't be an iota of truth in such a charge. The Comintern in Lenin's time was the most revolutionary organization the world had ever seen. It blazed many of the paths we are following now and will follow until capitalism is banished from this globe.
Its greatest contribution to the U.S. Black struggle was not in charting a correct or complete program for it but in reeducating U.S. and other communists to “shake off their unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.” [14] Its “harsh” and “insistent” work along this line was by itself sufficient cause for us to remember the Comintern in Lenin's time with the highest respect and appreciation.
But the Comintern had weak sides as well as strong ones. It was fallible and it made mistakes. Alongside some of its most inspiring achievements, it unconsciously carried over some harmful notions and practices inherited from the Second International; or it sometimes reacted to opportunism with corrections that were warped by ultraleftism.
This may come as a shock to SWP members who have been disoriented by the Barnes group's recent campaign to set the Comintern and its documents on a pedestal, and to “justify” its current revisions and theoretical retrogressions with poorly read and poorly assimilated citations from Comintern documents of Lenin's time.
The first four congresses of the Comintern are foundation stones of the Fourth International and the SWP. We could not exist, we could not be what we are, without the theoretical and political tools we inherited from them. But because the Comintern was not infallible, because many things in the world have changed since Lenin's time, we cannot find all the answers to today's problems in those documents, and must learn to use the method they used rather than swallow every formulation they contain.
I am not an authority on Comintern literature, but what I have read of its treatment of the Black struggle, the trade unions, and women's liberation convinces me that while most of this literature was valid and progressive at that time, it also contains false starts and errors that can do us big damage today if we do not read it critically—the way Lenin encouraged us to do, the way the Barnes group discourages us from doing.
The SWP reading list does not summarize or explain its sixth and last item, Trotsky's 1923 “Letter to Claude McKay,” a Black intellectual who had been an observer at the fourth congress. In it Trotsky said that revolutionary work among Blacks “is not to be carried out in a spirit of Negro chauvinism, which would then merely form a counterpart of white chauvinism—but in a spirit of solidarity of all exploited without consideration of color.” [15]
Perhaps it was included to show that in 1923 Trotsky had not yet recognized the national aspects of the Black struggle. If that was the reason, it should simultaneously have been noted that in this respect Trotsky was acting in accord with the Comintern line of that time.
In 1928 the now Stalinized Comintern changed its position on U.S. Blacks and pronounced them an oppressed nation, but they did it in a typically bureaucratic and ultimatistic way that made a caricature of Lenin's position.
After that, Trotsky stopped “carrying on” the previous Comintern line, but he also rejected the new Comintern caricature, and began to mobilize support for Lenin's policy, which was different from both the original Comintern position and the distortion introduced in 1928.
Trotsky didn't merely continue the Comintern's work in the 1930s—he revived Lenin's policy on U.S. Blacks and helped to make it part of the program of the SWP and the FI, which it had never been in either the Leninist Comintern or the Stalinized Comintern.
I maintain that it is necessary to recognize this fact, not in order to defend Trotsky's personal stature, but because the full value and richness of the SWP's combined revolution policy get lost or downgraded if you think it is only a continuation of the Comintern's policy.
Trotsky added new things, and after him the SWP did too. Jack Barnes, in the days before he lost confidence in the future of the SWP except as part of the Castroist current, was not afraid to give credit publicly to Trotsky for adding to Lenin. In a political report to the SWP National Committee in February 1970, Barnes said:
What Trotsky began grappling with, what he saw ... in the Black struggles in the United States was a national struggle with characteristics that Lenin had not dealt with....
Trotsky—in his discussions with his American comrades...—stressed the lessons learned from the Bolsheviks on the national question, but also added some things that were new ... [16]
9. New International, Fall 1983, p. 58.
10. Collected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 24-5 and 89.
11.Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 275-6.
12.Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 148.
13. The Second Congress of the Communist International, New Park Publications, 1977, Vol. 1, p.180.
14. James P. Cannon, quoted in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, pp. 10-11.
15. Reprinted in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, p. 81.
16. Towards an American Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1971, pp. 198-9.
by the Editorial Board, Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, December 1984
Larry Stewart, of Newark, New Jersey, and a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, died of cancer on November 16 at the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York. He was sixty-three years old, and had been actively engaged in building the revolutionary Marxist, labor, and Black movements since he was eighteen.
His death marks a real loss for those movements. His sober judgment and advice, his rich experience under all kinds of conditions, and his militant example will be sadly missed at a time when the workers and their allies need leadership more than ever before.
Larry Stewart was born to a poor Black working-class family in Milford, Connecticut, and spent part of his youth in foster and orphan homes. His formal education had to stop at high school for economic reasons. In 1939 he joined the Socialist Workers Party in New Haven, after which he moved to Newark because it was easier to find a factory job there. He remained in Newark for the rest of his life except during World War II, when he became a merchant seaman before being drafted into the army.
Among the jobs he held in the following years were steel worker, laborer, electrical worker, and truck driver. He belonged at different times to both CIO, AFL, and independent unions, including the United Steelworkers, United Electrical Workers, and Teamsters. He also experienced plenty of unemployment when the economy turned down after the war, and was on strike several times.
In 1941 he was a leading activist in the Newark contingent of the March on Washington Movement, an all-Black group that fought against racism in industry and the armed forces. After the war he was active in the NAACP and local committees against police brutality, and he defended the Black community against repression during the so-called Newark “riot” of 1967. He also tried to help build the National Black Independent Political Party in New Jersey when it was organized in 1981.
Although Stewart was not a national leader of the SWP, his party had high esteem for his many contributions to party building. It valued his best proletarian traits—his steadfastness, his personification of the party's revolutionary continuity, his modesty, and his sense of proportion. He served several times on the executive committee of the Newark branch and as its delegate to national conventions. He ran for Congress and other local posts on the SWP ticket in New Jersey, represented the party in other campaigns, and, when no one else would do it, wrote articles he thought were needed in the party press.
In 1976 the delegates to the SWP's national convention elected him to the four-member Control Commission, which investigates charges of violations of party discipline. At that time the tradition still existed that only the most responsible, fair, and independent-minded members in the party should be put on the Control Commission. He was reelected to this post at the 1977 convention, and served on it for another two years. He did this job as he did everything else—with concern for the interests of both his party and his comrades, including those who had made mistakes.
Stewart was an enthusiastic supporter of the party's decision in 1978 to send most of its members into industry, but he became troubled by the mechanical and schematic way in which it was implemented. By the time of the 1981 convention he felt that the party leadership was going off-course in its attitudes to the Castroist current in Cuba. He later found himself in sympathy with the positions taken by the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the National Committee.
Shortly after retiring from his job with a physical disability he suffered a heart attack in 1983. He was on a leave of absence from the Newark branch, but that didn't save him from the axe of the political purge in January 1984, when he was expelled, without a trial he could attend, on fraudulent charges that he was a “splitter” and “secret factionalist.”
Stewart then helped to organize the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and became a member of the editorial board of its journal, the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
We send condolences to Vera Stewart, his wife, and Paul, his son. We will never forget him and the cause to which he devoted most of his life. His example is a source of strength to us who knew him personally. We commend it to others who share his revolutionary proletarian goals.
The following are remarks delivered at the memorial meeting held for Larry Stewart in Maplewood, New Jersey, in December 1984. They were published in the January/February 1985 issue of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
On behalf of Vera and Paul Stewart and Joe Carroll I would like to welcome you here today and thank you for coming.
As you know, a funeral service for Larry was held nearly a month ago. It may seem odd that we are holding this gathering today in addition. But our purpose is quite different. This is a political meeting. We are here to say “thank you” to Larry for the forty-five years he gave to the workers' movement, to recall some of the things we learned from him, and, most importantly, to inspire those who remain to continue the work to which he gave over two-thirds of his life. Joe Hill's last words, “Don't waste time mourning. Organize,” have become something of a cliche in radical circles over the years, but that's really the spirit in which this meeting is being held.
Most of the speakers here today knew Larry Stewart for many years. By comparison to them I did not. In 1975 I was asked by the national office of the Socialist Workers Party to be part of the team sent from New York to reestablish its Newark branch, which had been disbanded quite a few years earlier. Larry had remained in Newark as an at-large member of the party, and of course became a member of the branch as soon as it was chartered by the Political Committee. I first met Larry at that time.
He had not been idle during the years when there was no Newark branch, and he had quite a lot to report to the new branch when we got started. The branch was established to begin to take advantage of new opportunities opening up for the party in the working class and in the Black community, and Larry had been doing exactly that at the Nu-Car Carriers terminal in Port Newark, where he worked. He was working with a number of Black drivers, campaigning for Black rights and union democracy on the job. Their approach was to try to make the Brotherhood of Teamsters more responsive to its members' needs and more attentive to the special concerns of its Black members, while remaining completely loyal to the union. Let me tell anyone who isn't sure—Larry Stewart was one of the strongest believers in trade unionism I ever met. He believed that the unions—not just the Teamsters, but all the unions—needed a lot of changing, but that without the unions working people had nothing to defend their rights and standard of living.
One of the first decisions the new branch made was to nominate Larry Stewart as the 1976 SWP candidate for the House of Representatives in the Tenth District. I served as his campaign treasurer. We saw his campaign as a way to bring the Nu-Car drivers closer to the party and to help them make the connection between the work they were doing as Blacks and trade unionists with the whole political situation. Furthermore, we didn't think it was right that a city composed primarily of Black and Hispanic workers should be represented in Congress by a white lawyer, Peter Rodino. Rodino had gained a false reputation during the Watergate hearings as a campaigner for civil liberties and “clean government,” and he was the most prominent New Jersey politician on the national scene. What an opportunity for the party, the chance to run a Black trade unionist against Peter Rodino!
However, we found out that Larry Stewart was a whole lot more than simply a “Black trade unionist.” He not only knew what was wrong in capitalist society, not only had some good ideas about how to fix what was wrong in capitalist society, but he could explain what was wrong and what should be done to fix it in language that people could understand. And let me tell you, when Larry Stewart spoke, his audience paid attention. His speeches weren't a lot of slogans strung together, nor were they classroom lectures on political science. They were explanations of scientific socialist theory illustrated by the experiences of the drivers of Teamsters Local 560.
One of our campaign events in the summer of 1976 was a Sunday afternoon backyard social at the home of Ford and Betty Sheppard. Some of you will remember that. It was scheduled so that the Nu-Car drivers could attend and meet the comrades of the SWP, talk about politics, and have a good time. In the course of the afternoon, Larry found himself in a conversation with some of the drivers on the sun porch, and he started making a few points. And a few more. And a few more. The next thing any of us knew the whole room became hushed, sort of like that E.F. Hutton commercial on TV—“When E.F. Hutton talks, everybody listens.” Larry had gotten into a stem-winding socialist speech—no prepared text, no notes or anything—but let me tell you a lot of prepared speeches don't compare to that one. I never heard Eugene V. Debs or other pioneer socialists speak, but I was thinking it must have been like this. He wasn't taking examples from the newspapers or from TV or from books—though there's nothing wrong with that. He was illustrating his points with examples from workers' lives.
We talk a lot about the working people, and their interests and concerns. Larry never forgot that's two words. He never forgot that the “people” part is just as important, and that we're not talking about statistical or philosophical concepts. We're talking about people who have many different concerns. Larry's approach was to talk to people on that basis, and to be known not only as a socialist, with particular ideas, but as a person, too, and he wanted to work with others as people, and not just as workers, Blacks, or whatever. He spoke to the concerns that people have, not simply about how much money they earned or the conditions on the job, but also other things: What are your concerns for your children? What are your concerns for your children's future? What is it like to drive a dangerously substandard truck?
Larry was not a young man even then, and he knew that his energy level was not that of a 26-year-old. He was completely conscious of the need to educate and develop a new generation of revolutionary leaders, and I must admit that I did not appreciate this side of Larry until quite recently. I won't discuss the political disagreements which led me to resign from the SWP in 1979; I will only say that in the last half-year of Larry's life I got a lot of new insights from discussions I had with him, about how to do political work in the working class, the importance of the continuity of the revolutionary party, and the enduring foundation that Marxist theory represents as opposed to trends of the moment. And make no mistake: though Larry had been expelled from the SWP he had not given up in his campaign for reinstatement. I asked him if he thought there was anything to gain by this, and this was his response: he said, even if he and those who thought as he did could convince no one it was a matter of principle not to give up on the SWP. Even if a new party at some point had to be built, it could not be built except on a solid programmatic foundation, which could only come from a thorough discussion and debate on the political issues facing the SWP. He never at any time considered the SWP anything but the revolutionary workers' party of the United States. As an educator, Larry will be sorely missed indeed. He had a lot left to give us.
I want to thank everyone for coming here today, for remembering Larry Stewart. I hope that we can go out of here and continue the work for a better society that Larry Stewart fought so long and so hard to achieve.
In early 1984 the Fourth Internationalist Tendency was formed in response to a call, reproduced here, that was signed by Naomi Allen, George Breitman, and George Saunders.
Allen and Saunders—who joined the SWP as student radicals in the 1960s—had worked closely with Breitman at Pathfinder Press, especially in the preparation of the writings of Leon Trotsky. Among other accomplishments, Allen was responsible for editing the three-volume collection of Trotsky's writings of 1923-29, Challenge of the Left Opposition. Saunders has an international reputation as one of the foremost translators of writings by Soviet dissidents.
After the first wave of expulsions in the spring and summer of 1983, an organization of those driven out of the SWP was formed: Socialist Action. There were immediate conflicts, however, over the question of how the new group should relate to the SWP, whether energies should be focused on the political struggle against “Barnesism” or the effort to quickly build a new party to replace the SWP There were also sharp differences regarding the level of centralization appropriate in the new organization, how disagreements should be handled, etc. By the end of 1983, Frank Lovell and Steve Bloom left SA and joined together with some of the new expellees to form the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. The founding platform of the FIT and other relevant material can be found in Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rebuilding the Revolutionary Party.
Unfortunately, the SWP leadership felt sufficiently insecure that it established a policy banning the expelled members from SWP forums and bookstores—as recounted in the letter by Dorothea Breitman, who had been in the Trotskyist movement since the mid-1930s when she joined the Spartacus Youth League. Her poignant letter highlights the FIT commitment to taking seriously the need to reach out to members of the SWP who were mistakenly following the Barnes leadership. Another letter in this section is from Tom Barrett, who joined the Young Socialist Alliance in the late 1960s, then—like many others—left the SWP “for personal reasons” in the late 1970s. His conclusion, finally, was that there had been underlying political reasons for his resignation and that there were important political reasons for rejoining the Trotskyist movement—this time as a member of the FIT.
New York, N.Y
January 17, 1984
To: United Secretariat, Fourth International
Dear Comrades:
(1) The IEC's May 1982 meeting opened a written pre-World Congress discussion in which members as well as leaders of the sections and fraternal parties could participate (IIDB, Volume XVIII, #3, June 1982). A month later, at the initiative of Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell of the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the National Committee, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) informed the party leadership that they were “announcing the formation of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in order to be able to participate collectively in the international discussion and to advance our views on disputed international questions in an organized and responsible way. In accord with the norms of democratic centralism, we intend to consult in the preparation of documents for the International Internal Discussion Bulletin.” The same statement briefly listed the political basis for the collaboration of the eighteen as an ideological tendency (already published documents on Cuba, Leninism, Iran, and Poland) and asked the SWP leadership to circulate the statement of the eighteen to the branches for the information of the SWP membership.
(2) The Political Bureau of the SWP responded by denying the right of the eighteen to participate as a tendency in the pre-World Congress discussion: “We instruct you to cease and desist from any further organized tendency activity of any kind. Any violation of this instruction is incompatible with membership in the SWP.” The Political Bureau's prohibition was approved by the NC plenum of August 1982, a decision that was appealed by Comrades Bloom and Lovell to the United Secretariat.
(3) The October 1982 meeting of the United Secretariat strongly criticized the SWP's ban on the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, saying, “The right of the eighteen comrades to collectively draw up written documents, on issues included in their platform, in order to submit them to the international discussion, is in line with our statutes, norms, and traditions and should therefore be protected.” It urged the SWP leadership to reverse its decision. But at the December 1982 NC plenum, the SWP majority rejected this request.
(4) As a result, the eighteen—who wished to remain in the SWP—had no alternative but to comply with the prohibition. The FIT never had a single meeting and did not produce any document other than its original brief statement. But the SWP central leadership—through its majority caucus—had no intention of erasing and desisting from its efforts to prevent the eighteen, and other comrades who disagreed with the new political views being introduced by the leadership, from playing any significant role in the international discussion. Starting in the fall of 1982, only a few months after the “cease and desist” orders, and almost immediately after the United Secretariat's action on the rights of the eighteen, the majority caucus began to eliminate these comrades from the party (along with many others having, or suspected of having, oppositional views) on trumped-up organizational pretexts. Between November 1982 and the end of August 1983, half of the eighteen were expelled or forced out:
* Anne Teesdale Zukowski—expelled for answering a question by a nonparty YSA member;
* Dianne Feeley—expelled for organizing an International Women's Day event, allegedly “behind the back of the party”;
* David Walsh—resigned after being denied a leave of absence for medical reasons;
* Paul Le Blanc—expelled for statements made at an SWP branch meeting;
* Les Evans—expelled for alleged “inactivity” and “financial boycott”;
* Larry Cooperman—expelled for alleged “unauthorized discussions” with a non-party YSA member;
* Elias Ramirez—expelled for allegedly “endangering the security of the party” when he applied for a transfer to another branch and asked a question at his branch meeting about the Hector Marroquin defense;
* Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell—suspended from the NC and from the party for allegedly refusing to answer questions about the dissolution of the Opposition Bloc in the NC.
The SWP leadership claims that these nine comrades were driven out of the party because of their “actions,” “violations of discipline,” “breach of norms,” etc. This is strictly to provide a rationalization for the purge policy which can be accepted by members of the SWP and of our world movement who either are too inexperienced to understand what is really happening, or else are willing to close their eyes to it. Any objective observer can see that these nine comrades were targeted because they had signed the statement of the eighteen—i.e., because of their political ideas.
(5) Now it can be reported that the other nine signers of the original FIT statement have also been expelled in the Christmas-New Year's purge of December 1983—January 1984. None of these nine was allowed to attend the “trial” that expelled them. One of the nine, Evelyn Sell—a minority delegate to the California state convention—was expelled for “disloyally” not having taken the floor to repudiate remarks of other minority delegates. She was not allowed even the right to attend her trial or make a statement to it. Another Californian, Asher Harer, was expelled when he “disloyally” failed to repudiate the minority delegates' refusal to repudiate each other. Six other signers of the June 1982 statement, all in cities quite remote from California—Naomi Allen, Alan Benjamin, George Breitman, Joanna Misnik, Rita Shaw, Jean Tussey—were expelled for “disloyally” failing to repudiate actions of the minority members in California—about which they had little or no knowledge or information. George Saunders was expelled for “non-collaboration” with Political Committee representatives when he “disloyally” was unable to meet with them at the time they set to interrogate him about California.
In June 1982 we were all warned, on pain of expulsion, not to engage in “any organized tendency activity of any kind.” A year and a half later, after being prohibited from any collaboration with other comrades, we have been held responsible for actions not committed by us, and over which we had no control. We and the other victims of the SWP leadership's purge were not expelled because of “disloyal” actions or inactions. We were singled out for victimization because of our political views and our desire for a genuine discussion of the new line adopted and applied by the SWP leadership since the 1981 convention—without membership discussion or consent.
(6) We, signers of the 1982 statement and victims of the recent purge on the Fast Coast, therefore announce that we are now constituting the long-prohibited Fourth Internationalist Tendency—as a national group of expelled SWP members who seek to influence and participate collectively in the pre- World Congress discussion authorized by the IEC and in the inner-party discussion that will precede the next SWP convention, and who cannot now do so inside the SWP.
(7) Our platform includes all of the points in the one announced by the eighteen in June 1982. In addition to positions explained in the specific documents listed then, we also believe that only the SWP membership can have the last word concerning the direction the party should take. That word remains to be spoken. The SWP represents an unbroken heritage of more than five decades of revolutionary Marxism in this country. It will require a decisive test of the party ranks before anyone can correctly conclude that this heritage has been effectively destroyed by the anti-Leninist policies and revisionism of the current leadership. We remain, as we have always been, loyal to the SWP. We will continue to try to build the party, and convince the party membership of the need to return to the historical program of revolutionary Marxism, which is being abandoned by the present leadership. We demand the reinstatement of all members purged from the SWP for their political views since the 1981 convention, and we will appeal our expulsions both collectively and individually. We plan to announce other planks in our tendency platform after consultation with other comrades throughout the country.
(8) Not all of the eighteen who signed the June 1982 statement will agree with the perspective we have outlined here for the FIT today. Only those whose names appear below take responsibility for this call. We urge all expelled comrades who want to vigorously pursue this program to join us now—whether or not they signed the 1982 statement. A full list of those who do will be forwarded later.
(9) In October 1983, the United Secretariat urged the SWP leadership “to immediately and collectively reintegrate the expelled comrades.” It also recognized that the comrades expelled from the SWP “will have no choice but to organize collectively,” and pledged to “maintain relations with these comrades.” We now call on the United Secretariat, in implementing this motion, to include the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and its members among the expelled members whom the SWP is urged to reinstate and to provide us with all the opportunities and facilities for participation in the pre-World Congress discussion that other tendencies, members, and supporters of the FI are entitled to.
Comradely,
/s/Naomi Allen
/s/George Breitman
/s/George Saunders
New York, NY
February 25, 1984
Manhattan Branch, SWP
and N.Y-N.J. District Committee, SWP
Dear Comrades:
I write to you in indignation and sorrow to tell you that I was excluded from the Militant Labor Forum at 79 Leonard St. on Thursday night, February 23.
On February 10 I had attended the forum to hear Bill Gottlieb's talk on the Soviet economy. Some party members greeted me; others pretended they did not see me. I sat through the forum. Nothing I did could possibly be construed as disruptive. I did not even ask for the floor during the discussion period.
When I left the hall, I was approached by NC member Dick McBride, who said, “Dorothy, we want you to tell your people that starting next week you will be excluded from attending our forums because of the provocative actions of Socialist Action. Next time we'll have a defense guard to prevent your entering. OK?” I said it certainly was not OK to be barred from a public meeting. I might have added: “Why should you exclude anyone who does not act improperly from the forum?”
Furthermore, as I told McBride, I am not a member of Socialist Action, am not responsible for or to it. I think its members have the same right as other political tendencies to attend public forums so long as they act in an orderly and nondisruptive way (and as far as I know they have never acted in any other way at forums). But why should I, a non-member, be discriminated against on the basis of what they do or don't do? (I am a member of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, a group of comrades expelled from the SWP who are seeking their reinstatement, and I am a supporter of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.)
On Thursday, February 23, I returned to the forum to verify McBride's to me unbelievable statement that those expelled from the SWP would now not even be allowed to attend public forums. This time I was actually barred from going into the forum and was threatened with physical action to remove me if I didn't leave on my own.
In fifty years in our movement I can remember only one other personal episode as distressing as this. That occurred at a Stalinist meeting in Newark where we were trying to distribute our literature, and their people assaulted us, grabbing our leaflets and tearing them up. This was in 1937, and I did not feel sorrow then—only indignation and disbelief.
My sorrow now is for the fifty years I have spent building a revolutionary socialist movement to challenge bureaucratic organizational methods, only to find them being used by my own party!
Even more grievous for me is the fact that you are hurting the party by this new policy. When word gets around that you are excluding people from public meetings, not because of their conduct but because of their political positions, the prestige of the party will be damaged in the eyes of all workers sympathetic to proletarian democracy. Groups that refuse to politically answer their opponents and rely on organizational measures to avoid giving such answers tend to become discredited, and that is what your new policy will end in accomplishing.
Throughout its 55-year history our party's policy and practice on public meetings has been to admit members of any and all tendencies that came to our public functions to discuss and not to disrupt, whether they were Stalinists, Social Democrats, anarchists, nationalists, pacifists, reformists, ultraleftists, etc. After the Shachtmanite split in 1940, the same policy was extended to them. After the Cochranite split in 1953, the same policy was continued. Why is it being changed now to exclude former members who have appealed their expulsions and want to be in the party on the same basis as other members?
Our party always wanted to discuss with the Stalinists. They were the ones who tore up our leaflets, beat us up, threw our members out of their public meetings, and tried to justify this on the false ground that we were enemies of the working class. But the real reason was they were afraid to allow discussion between us and their members. What is your reason for wanting to quarantine party members from all contact with us?
I urge you: in the interests of the party above everything else, draw back from these anti-Leninist, anti-Trotskyist methods. The party's enemies are the imperialists, the bourgeoisie, the reformists, those who keep the workers tied to the Democratic Party. Its enemies do not include those of us who consider the SWP the only revolutionary party in this country, and want to be members of it, and ask only that they have the right to discuss their views inside the party in accord with the party's traditional rules. Don't turn your back on fellow revolutionaries or try to prejudice party members against them.
Pull back from methods our enemies have used against our party. Restore the norms established by Cannon that have been our norms for decades. Don't be so afraid of discussing political ideas with people who disagree with you or don't agree with you completely. Know who your friends and enemies are—or you will never be able to assume leadership of the working-class vanguard. Rescind or reverse the new policy on attendance at forums, and do it right away, before the prestige of the party is further damaged unnecessarily.
Comradely,
/s/Dorothea Breitman
by Tom Barrett
Originally published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, October 1985.
The leadership of the Socialist Workers Party claims that an overwhelming majority of its membership supports its current course. Formally, that is true. However, like many things that the SWP leadership says, it is a half-truth: it leaves out a great deal. Probably the most important thing it leaves out is that the majority of the party which approved the 1975 resolution “Prospects for Socialism in America” is no longer in the party. Comrades leave for different reasons, and, as Jim Cannon said, there are always two reasons for everything—a good reason and a real reason.
The SWP accumulated a great deal of political capital in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s: the Young Socialist Alliance actually doubled in size during the 1968-69 period, and after the disintegration of the Students for a Democratic Society it became the most powerful organization of radical youth in the United States. Hundreds of activists from the campuses, from the antiwar movement, from women's liberation and other areas joined the Trotskyist movement, were educated in revolutionary Marxism, and were developing into strong proletarian leaders. Most of them have been lost. The SWP had developed so much authority in the mass movement by the early 1970s that the Boston NAACP turned to it for leadership when school desegregation came under attack in that city in 1974. Nothing like that authority exists today. That political capital, on which no price tag could ever be placed, has simply been squandered. It didn't have to happen; indeed, there were a few lonely voices, including mine, raising questions, doubts, and then, later, warnings. But it did happen, and the party leadership has shown no sign of learning from its errors and returning to a party-building, rather than a party-destroying, course of action.
The most universal descriptive word I have heard used by former members for the party's policy right now is “suicidal.” That assessment, which is more or less accurate, faces all of us who used to belong to the party with a question: can the party be saved? That, in turn, poses the question, should the party be saved? Those are the questions we ask ourselves first, but they are not the questions which we really should address. What we should ask instead is, should a revolutionary party be built, and how? When the question is posed in those terms it becomes clear to me that the answer is: yes, a revolutionary party must be built, and it must be built on the Marxist foundation that the SWP has developed over the past fifty-plus years. Whatever one's assessment of the SWP's chances of survival, however possible or impossible one sees reversing the party's suicidal course, the thing to be done now is to work for just that. That is why I decided to join the one organization which has made that its reason for existence—the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.
The party convention of August 1985 marks the tenth anniversary of “Prospects for Socialism in America,” the resolution which stepped back and looked at the class struggle in broad historical terms, and called on the party to turn to the working class. There were clear danger signals for the party in both the preconvention discussion and in the convention itself. I remember them well.
The Political Committee submitted the resolution as the “most important document the party has discussed since the American Theses of 1946.” It took note of the end of the post-World War II boom and the first worldwide recession in over thirty years. It called attention to the loss of trust by broad sections of the American population in its government, especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It pointed to opportunities for the SWP to build the party by participating in the organized labor movement, opportunities which had not existed since the great strike wave of 1946. The resolution did not explain what to do to take advantage of those opportunities, and it was understood that there were no magic formulas—branches would have to assess the class struggle in their cities and use their Marxist-educated heads to figure out the best ways to build the party.
Little attention, however, was paid to the fundamental ideas of “Prospects for Socialism” in either the writtcn preconvention discussion or in the discussion at the party convention itself. In the discussion under the Political Report not a single delegate addressed the actual resolution. Everyone wanted to reply to Comrade Milton Alvin [Genecin], who had raised objections to the party's support for preferential treatment of minorities and women during layoffs, and to the abolition of advisory membership on the National Committee. I became concerned, though I kept my doubts to myself. Here was the most important resolution since 1946, and none of the delegates were addressing it. Could it be, I wondered, that the party ranks were not ready?
The 1975 convention called on the party to make a turn, towards the working class and the new opportunities for party building there. The projections made in the Tasks and Perspectives Report were sensible: the establishment of new branches in a number of important industrial cities (I went to Newark to help carry out this decision), an opening up of direct recruitment to the SWP, capitalizing on new opportunities in the Black struggle, etc. Who could have predicted that it was only the first of several turns, each one called “The Turn,” each one more destructive than the last?
By the 1976 convention the second turn was in full swing; the rubric was “community branches.” It began with large, established branches dividing into two or more in different areas of their cities—and in some cities it was not a bad idea. The three New York City branches had grown large and unwieldy, and the decision to establish branches in areas where we had not had branches for a long time—such as Queens or the Bronx—or where we had special opportunities—such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan—was based on party-building considerations. Other large branches—Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago—also divided. However, by the spring of 1976 things had changed. It was no longer large branches dividing, but all branches dividing, and the consideration was not particular party-building tasks which would be aided by division, but “driving forward the turn.” So, “Prospects for Socialism” was no longer considered “The Turn.” Now, the turn was “community branches.” The community branch turn lasted about a year. It had disastrous results for branch functioning and dealt the YSA a blow from which it has yet to recover.
Ask any SWP member when the turn was launched: the usual response will be the spring of 1978. In fact, by 1976 there had been two turns. By 1977 “Steel” was the word on everyone's lips, and not without reason, for the campaign of Ed Sadlowski for president of the United Steelworkers and the organization of “Steelworkers Fightback,” a large rank-and-file movement, were exciting, important developments in the class struggle. The party was right to orient to it, and the party was right to encourage members who could do so to get jobs in steel plants and become active in the USWA. However, the party again went beyond considerations of party-building opportunities. Comrades were pressured into getting jobs in USWA plants regardless of the political opportunities. No thought was given to the relative importance of steel in each individual city; less thought was given to what political opportunities would continue to exist after the Sadlowski campaign was over. When that time came people were taken out of steel as quickly as they were put in.
At the time each turn was launched, wildly optimistic projections were made about how the party would grow, how it would become integrated into the political life of the working class and the oppressed minorities. When no immediate results were forthcoming, a mood of demoralization and cynicism began to grow and the party began to shrink. I was part of the early stage of this wave of resignations. In the fall of 1977 I met with the branch organizer and said, “I think the party is entering a crisis. Our work is not getting results, but we're not learning from it.” The organizer dismissed my warnings with the assurance that the party leadership was making the necessary adjustments and that I was just feeling tired and demoralized. (It should be mentioned that the organizer I spoke with resigned from the party in late 1979.)
“Personal reasons.” “The nature of the period.” “Every group on the left is losing people.” These are the excuses which have been given in the party. I became inactive in the spring of 1978 and resigned (with a push from the Newark organizer) in 1979 for “personal reasons.” But in reality they were not “personal reasons” but political reasons—for how could the party expect to recruit from the working class when it could not hold on to its own basic cadre, the comrades who were, in reality, the party's backbone? The SWP had moved from party building to a course of action which I called at that time “suicidal.”
The demoralization felt by the party leadership over the results of four years of the turn had its inevitable impact on the political program when the leadership was unable to face the fact that its assessment of the post-1975 period and what to do about it had been fundamentally in error. Instead, it concluded that the Trotskyist program itself was in error and began systematically to drop it. There is a need to defend this program to which hundreds of revolutionary activists were recruited. The Bulletin in Defense of Marxism exists for that very reason.
Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983 convinced me to return to political activity; I turned first to the SWP. I thought if anything was being done the SWP would be doing it.
I contacted the party in October; I heard nothing again until March 1984, when I received an invitation to a meeting of “Active Supporters” in Jersey City. The meeting was to discuss the 1984 presidential campaign and the recent “split,” resulting in the formation of Socialist Action. I attended that meeting in the hope that the party had learned from its mistakes and was returning to a party-building policy. I was soon to be disappointed.
In my first discussion with party representatives I was given thoroughly false information on the “split”; I was not informed that the SWP leadership had openly rejected the theory of permanent revolution and that the minority had not left the party voluntarily but had been expelled. I was told that the “split” had nothing to do with disagreements on how to orient to the working class, that George Breitman called for “political revolution in Cuba,” that the minority “counterposed Poland to Central America,” that the opposition had split along geographical and personality lines.
My initial response was to give the reporters the benefit of the doubt and to accept their assertions. However, though I expressed basic agreement with the party majority against what I had been told were the positions of the opposition, I expressed the opinion that the “split” was politically unjustified and that steps should be taken immediately to reunify the party. I also did the one thing that should be a reflex action for any Leninist—I contacted the opposition to get its side of the story.
While I was reading the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism for the first time I had something of an idea how Jim Cannon must have felt reading Trotsky's “Draft Criticism” in Moscow in 1928. Yes, the party crisis was real—it had nothing to do with “personal problems” on my part or the part of the hundreds of other people who had left the party. The FIT was saying what I had been saying in 1977 and 1978.
But a nagging question remained, what to do about it? The FIT had answers all right, something I had never been able to come up with in the previous seven-plus years, but were the FIT's answers the right ones? There was obviously some disagreement, for the opposition had itself split on this question. Socialist Action set out to build an organization parallel to the SWP; the FIT chose to focus its attention on reforming the SWP. Having years of experience with the party leadership and how it subtly yet effectively stifled free thought within the ranks, I was skeptical that the FIT could accomplish much by orienting to the SWP membership.
It was Larry Stewart who explained to me what the FIT's orientation to the SWP meant. Stewart argued that even if the FIT were unable to win one person from the SWP it was a matter of principle to fight for the SWP's reform. The revolutionary Marxist heritage of the SWP is our heritage, and we will not give up on the party without a struggle. The ranks of the SWP still are the vanguard of the working class, and there is no hope for reaching the working masses by going around the most advanced. Furthermore, he said, if we had to build a new party we could not do it without the programmatic foundation of this ideological battle. Stewart's arguments ultimately convinced me to join the FIT.
It is perfectly understandable that an embittered former SWP member will have doubts about her or his entire political life. Was the degeneration of the SWP inevitable? Does Stalinism necessarily flow from Leninism? Is Trotskyism hopelessly sectarian? Is socialist revolution possible? I have asked myself all these questions and more, and some questions remain unanswered. It is entirely natural that the sorting-out process take some time and that some individuals need more time than others. I needed several years.
One conclusion to which I have come is that my years in the SWP were valuable ones. I received a political education—both from books and from life—which no other organization could give, and that organization accomplished a great deal in those years. Those achievements—the SWP's role in helping the Vietnamese defeat U.S. imperialism, in clarifying the experience of the youth radicalization, in helping to win reproductive rights for women, and in exposing the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies as the repressive instruments they are—can never be taken away from the party. I am proud to have been an SWP member during those years.
The FIT stands on the foundation of the SWP, and its mission is to return the SWP to the party-building orientation it once had. Today more opportunities for building the revolutionary party exist than at any time in the past five years. The Black masses of South Africa are rising to what may be the final confrontation with white supremacist rule. U.S. imperialism is threatening war against the Nicaraguan revolution. Industrial workers are not sharing in the Reagan “recovery.” And yet the SWP continues to isolate itself. The FIT has taken on a dual task—or rather, a single task with two aspects: we are fighting to return the SWP to revolutionary Marxism, through patient explanation, in publications, in international debates, and we are intervening in the class struggle, attempting to show in action what the Trotskyist program means. This single task is building the revolutionary party. To the hundreds of former party members who still believe in socialist revolution I make this appeal: fight for the program to which you were recruited! Join the FIT!
After the 1983-84 expulsions from the SWP, there remained in the organization a scattering of individuals who continued to hold critical or dissenting views. One of these was Howard Packer (1917-1984), who had been a member of the SWP and a leader of the Chicago branch for forty years; while not part of any organized opposition, he continued to argue in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution in what little internal discussion was still allowed in the party. This was his final political struggle as he was dying of cancer. Another veteran militant, Eileen Gersh of Philadelphia, attempted to organize a tendency around Leninist-Trotskyist perspectives for the 1984 SWP national convention. She also appealed for the readmission of the expelled comrades to “make sure that we have the fullest possible theoretical debate”—the harsh response by Jack Barnes to this being a topic discussed in an article by George Breitman in this section. Gersh was expelled at the SWP convention because she was seen talking to Frank Lovell, who went to the convention site in order to hand out FIT materials. A retired teacher, she moved back to her native England where she was able to rejoin the Trotskyist movement.
Over the following years the SWP and YSA continued to suffer from a “slow bleed” of members—many feeling disoriented and demoralized, leaving for alleged “personal reasons”; but periodically some would express political disagreements as they left, and sometimes party life would be punctuated by fresh expulsions over new disagreements. And all who had passed through this organization in which great hopes and energies had been invested, for many years to come, would feel compelled to evaluate their experience. Why did the party undergo this dramatic change, and what had it all meant? Was the problem inherent in the prior mode of operation developed by American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, or Trotskyism as such, or in Leninist tradition? If none of these things, then what was the explanation for what happened to the SWP?
The items in this section are three relatively early contributions to this evaluation process. George Breitman's “A Far Cry from the Bolsheviks” (originally published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, July 1984) examines Jack Barnes's attempt to make a case that his organizational practices are grounded in the historic norms of the SWP and of the Bolsheviks and finds that it doesn't hold up. Evelyn Sell, a Trotskyist militant since 1948, and a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, argues in “The Radicalization and the Socialist Workers Party” (from Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, June 1984) that the nature of the 1960s radicalization and of the new political layer that was recruited to Trotskyism—a layer from which the Barnes leadership arose-provides some important clues on how and why the degeneration took place. “Reflections on the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S.” was originally published by Paul Le Blanc in an FIT internal bulletin in 1989, and is based on a presentation he gave two years earlier. Developing Sell's insights further, this last contribution also suggests some of the positive qualities and potential in the pre-1979 SWP, and it seeks to provide a balanced assessment of the fragmented U.S. Trotskyist movement in the late 1980s.
When the SWP preconvention discussion opened in May, after a year's delay, it provided the first opportunity for rank-and-file members to comment on the new political line of the central leadership team headed by Jack Barnes, and the actions of that team in expelling all known or suspected oppositionists from the party. One member, Eileen G. [Gersh] of Philadelphia, submitted an article which appears in the first issue of the SWP Discussion Bulletin. It is entitled “For 'A Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing',” and true to its title it raises strong political objections to the programmatic revisions of the central leadership team and the organizational reprisals which it has taken against its opponents in the party.
At the end of her article, Comrade G. makes the following three proposals: (1) to readmit the expelled comrades to “make sure that we have the fullest possible theoretical debate,” (2) to open a written discussion on democratic norms in the SWP and revolutionary parties in general, and (3) to form a tendency to fight for the positions put forward in her document.
Upon receiving this article for publication, the central leadership team sprang into action. At a meeting of the Political Committee Jack Barnes was assigned to draft a reply, which was sent to Comrade G. as a letter, dated May 21, 1984. The letter was then made available to the entire party as part of an “Information Bulletin.” This bulletin appeared in the branches simultaneously with the document containing Comrade G.'s original article.
Such an expeditious reply would ordinarily be commendable. It is only correct and proper, after all, for a serious revolutionary leadership to respond to questions and objections about their political course raised by rank-and-file members of the party. There is one problem, however. The PC's response to Comrade G. did not discuss any of the political questions she raised. Instead, the Barnes letter is an attack on her for proposing the formation of a tendency during the preconvention period—supposedly in an incorrect manner.
In order to accomplish this, Barnes presents and defends a narrow, schematic, and factional notion of what a tendency is in a revolutionary party, excluding any other possible uses of the term than the one he presents. His polemic against Comrade G. on this question has broad implications for the future functioning of the SWP, since it represents a further step on the path of transforming the party into a monolithic organization, where any serious challenge to the present leadership and its policies will be impossible. Let's look at what he has to say:
A tendency in the preconvention discussion period is a current of thought shared by comrades who agree, or tend to agree, on a specific document or platform in the Discussion Bulletin on line questions to be decided by the convention, as against other and conflicting documents or platforms before the party.
Barnes goes on to explain that similar tendencies defending specific points of view exist at all times during the life of a revolutionary party, and do not arise only during preconvention discussion.
The only thing that changes during a preconvention discussion period is that such trends of thought from time to time become evident around counterposed political lines that are registered in resolutions before the party as a whole in the Discussion Bulletin ...
Barnes then draws the following conclusions about the organization of tendencies:
A tendency in the party preconvention discussion has no structure. There is nothing adherents of a tendency need do aside from arguing their individual point of view in the branch preconvention sessions and in the Discussion Bulletin. No organization is needed for that.
A faction, according to Barnes, is different from a tendency in that it does have a structure.
A faction's structure is derived from its purpose. A faction is justified only if its initiators believe that the party's current elected leadership has demonstrated that it is incapable of learning from the test of experience in the class struggle and correcting mistakes, or that the leadership functions in such a way as to make impossible, in the party's elected leadership committees, a democratic discussion and resolution of disputed points by majority vote ... A faction seeks to convince the membership that a new leadership is required.
The conclusion Barnes draws from this exposition is that only in the event of the formation of a faction, dedicated to a change of leadership for the party, can rank-and-file members of the party collaborate with each other in thinking through and preparing political positions to present to the party. Members of a common tendency may not do so. This is the key idea which the Political Committee is attempting to impose through its letter to Eileen G.:
Any platform [of a tendency] is “worked out” before the party as a whole, in the Discussion Bulletin. Supporters of an ideological tendency in the preconvention discussion communicate with each other in the same fashion and through the same mechanism as they communicate to every other member: by submitting articles to the Discussion Bulletin and taking the floor in the branch discussion ...
This is worth stressing, so that no one gets the mistaken idea that you are inviting comrades from around the country who read and are inclined to agree with your contribution to get in touch with you, to begin meeting among themselves, or to start circulating drafts of an as-yet-undecided platform outside the Discussion Bulletin now open for all party members to present their views and proposals.
The conclusion in these last paragraphs is a further attempt to restrict the elementary right of members of the revolutionary party to discuss politics with one another, and to think collectively in working out a correct political line. This is a right which has always been taken for granted in our movement, but is now under a severe attack from the central leadership team. The attempts by that team to restrict individual members from collaborating and discussing political ideas are completely at odds with the past practice in the SWP, with Bolshevik tradition, and with the basic Leninist conception of an independent and self-reliant membership as the essential backbone of the revolutionary party.
Some of what Barnes says about the functioning of tendencies in this letter is correct if we limit ourselves to a simple ideological tendency. This does not require any structure. Even here, however, there is no reason why those with similar ideas cannot collaborate in order to present them to the party in as clear and precise a fashion as possible. Such collaboration, far from being in contradiction to Leninist functioning, is in the best interests of the party as a whole—since it increases the political clarity of the overall debate. Anyone who has been in the party for previous discussions is aware of articles in the bulletin by more than one comrade (even occasionally from different cities) who have obviously engaged in just such a process of consultation among themselves before sharing their ideas with the party as a whole. For some reason the SWP has functioned and prospered for many years in violation of this basic norm now discovered by the central leadership team.
The most serious problem with Barnes's exposition, however, is its rigid definition of the term “tendency” to refer only to such an unstructured ideological tendency, and his sharp distinction between this and an organized faction with the goal of replacing the leadership. In fact, internal groupings in a revolutionary party can be many and varied in form. Why can't a group of comrades who do not believe a change of leadership is required to correct a false line, also think simultaneously that an organized fight is required? In such situations it is perfectly proper to form a structured ideological tendency, which could meet to consider the best way to present its viewpoint and intervene in the discussion. Many examples of such structured tendencies from recent party discussions could be cited. Yet again, for some unexplained reason, the PC has never in the past seen the need to object to the procedures followed by comrades in forming them.
The words “faction” and “tendency” have never had rigid meanings for us in the past. For Lenin, Trotsky, and other revolutionary Marxists they have been pretty much interchangeable. In recent years the SWP tradition has made a distinction between formations that call for a change of leadership (faction) and those that call simply for a change of line (tendency). At times in the past these terms have distinguished between organized and unorganized groupings. But in trying to fuse these two quite different distinctions into a single definition Barnes develops a rigid schema which is hostile to our real traditions. A truly Bolshevik organizational practice, in contrast, is characterized not by rigid rules and definitions, but by the flexible and creative application of organizational procedures to specific political circumstances and needs.
The central leadership team's latest notions are also in contradiction with the practices of the Russian Bolshevik party before its degeneration. Although many examples could be cited, this fact should be obvious from a single event which everyone who has the slightest familiarity with Bolshevik history knows about: the banning of tendencies and factions in the party as a temporary emergency measure in 1921, after the Kronstadt uprising. How could the Bolsheviks have banned tendencies if these were nothing more than unorganized groupings of members who took the same position on a given question? The Bolsheviks were well aware that thought processes could not be outlawed. Clearly what the Bolsheviks banned was any organized internal grouping in the party, and this could be either a tendency or a faction.
The consequences of following Barnes's proscriptions would be the further stifling of internal life for rank-and-file members of the party. The burden imposed on an individual of having to work out the details of a coherent counter-political perspective in the event of major disagreements—without even being able to consult other party members—will certainly inhibit any but the most audacious people. And apparently, this would also be necessary if somebody wants to call for a faction, since until the faction was actually formed and its membership established, if we follow Barnes's logic, members could only communicate with one another through the discussion bulletin. Therefore, it is clear, a rank-and-file member wishing to initiate a faction must work out the entire initial program on his or her own. There isn't a single member of the PC or NC who would consent to work out a political line for the party under similar circumstances.
Of course, the loser in all this is the party itself, which will be denied the real benefits of a preconvention discussion—the working out of its political line through a process that really taps the collective experience and understanding of the entire membership. Such a process requires the widest discussion of all political questions by every member of the party. Such discussions will inevitably give rise to temporary internal groupings of all sorts, and these should be welcomed and encouraged by a revolutionary leadership, instead of having organizational obstacles erected against them at every turn. Such internal groupings are a sign of vitality in a healthy party.
There is also an unstated implication in Barnes's letter that a tendency in the party must have a broad alternative platform to that of the leadership. But it should be obvious that tendencies can form, and have often done so, around a single question, or an otherwise limited program. In that connection, Barnes's assertion that Eileen G.'s article did not provide adequate basis for a tendency call is clearly false, since her proposal for a democratic discussion including all of those who have been expelled is a more than adequate basis for a tendency in the party.
Those who are familiar with the present crisis of the SWP will know that there is good reason for the central leadership team's choosing the present moment to “clarify” its new norms regarding tendencies in the preconvention discussion. In addition to being one more step in the process of strangling internal democracy in the party—developing a set of rules and regulations which are designed to make it impossible for rank-and-file members to discuss political questions with each other or raise disagreements with the leadership—it is a continuation of the leadership's effort to avoid the political questions by citing another so-called threat to our norms.
It is a sorry performance. A rank-and-file member raises a series of vital political issues in a contribution to the preconvention bulletin. The leadership responds once again not with a political discussion, but with a letter on the “organization question.” The central leadership team finds sufficient time to complain at length that Eileen G. calls for a tendency without presenting a positive political program; but the central leadership team (whose draft political resolution has not been printed for members at the halfway point of the preconvention discussion) obviously has a lot of trouble finding the time to present a positive political program of its own—though they have far more resources and a greater political responsibility to do so than Eileen G. It is a sad irony indeed that all of this is done in the name of defending Bolshevik organizational norms.
The Socialist Workers Party was able to grow and to expand its influence during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s based on its understanding of and response to the radicalization taking place. The party and the Young Socialist Alliance entered the decade of the '70s confident of continued expansion in size and increased importance in the movements fighting for social changes. The radicalization continued and exists today—but the SWP did not achieve what it expected (and since it gave political leadership to the YSA, the youth organization was similarly affected).
What happened? Why? To begin to answer those questions, it's helpful to compare what was projected with what actually took place in U.S. society and around the world.
In his political report to the SWP National Committee in February 1970, Jack Barnes pointed out:
The central purpose of this report is to look at one single proposition that's come out of the discussions in the Political Committee: we believe that today we have our first opportunity to become the very center of the radical movement in this country. The evolution of the radicalization since the convention [in 1969- E.S.] has convinced us of this more firmly than ever.... The basic perspective for the 1970s is one of broadening mass struggles and growing class polarizations in American society as the radicalization deepens. [page 179, Towards an American Socialist Revolution]
The leadership of a revolutionary socialist party has an elementary responsibility to look ahead in this way in order to organize its political work. Marxists understand that all such projections must undergo the test of events. Errors of judgment can be quickly remedied by utilizing the self-correcting mechanisms built into a Leninist party: full discussion and input from the entire membership followed by democratic decision making based on honest review of the facts, sober evaluation of how perspectives matched up with reality, and consideration of all opinions.
The developments in the months following the February plenum confirmed the optimistic assessment approved by the National Committee. In his talk to the 1970 Socialist Activists and Educational Conference, Barry Sheppard described the international roots of the radicalization and detailed the rise and development of this process in the U.S. (Towards an American Socialist Revolution)
In her talk on the student movement and the rebellion of women, Mary-Alice Waters stated:
When we say that we have entered a period of radicalization, we're saying that we believe a process has been set into motion that cannot be halted arbitrarily, nor without a major social convulsion. [Emphasis in original—E.S.] It is now clear that before this radicalization ends the question of power, the question of which class will rule society, will be posed in this country. [pages 68-69, ibid.]
Jack Barnes explained:
... there will be no reversal of this radicalization before the working masses of this country have had a chance to take power away from the American capitalist rulers. There will be ebbs and flows in the struggle; there will be class polarizations; there will be partial defeats and partial victories. There will be all sorts of stages, some rapid, others drawn out, as the ruling class uses different methods, up to and including the attempt to use fascism to try to prevent the workers from winning power. But the important thing for us to see is that this radicalization will not be reversed until we have had our chance. [Emphasis in original—E.S. page 108, ibid.]
Barnes pointed out “that the space of time in which a radicalization can become a revolutionization can be very short.” (page 108, ibid.)
Although cautionary phrases like “ebbs and flows” were sprinkled through reports and educational talks during the next few years, the benefit of hindsight allows us to see that these central leaders thought the radicalization would get bigger and better, wider and deeper, grander and greater, and move into a prerevolutionary situation in the U.S. with the SWP in the forefront of the masses. These key leaders served both as the voices for and the trainers of the radicalized youth joining the YSA and the SWP.
The radicalization did continue, but it took unexpected forms and stretched out over a longer period than anticipated. It became more diffused, variegated, and fragmented. The situation changed dramatically with the end of the war in Vietnam and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The antiwar movement had been the main focus of SWP and YSA activities for almost ten years. The movement had set the rhythm and routine of political life, had determined methods of functioning. Expectations about the other movements were not fulfilled by the course of events. The Black ghetto rebellions did not erupt in city after city as forecast. The radicalized youth were no longer on the campuses waging free speech fights and exploding in protest actions. Women, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans did not advance along the paths laid out in reports and resolutions. The strength of U.S. imperialism and the role of the Democratic and Republican parties did not decrease drastically as foreseen. The influence of the Communist Party and the social democrats did not dwindle away to almost nothing as predicted. The SWP did not become “the very center of the radical movement in this country.”
“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked poet Langston Hughes. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?” What happens to a political dream deferred? In the case of the central leaders of the SWP, the dream took wing like a moth and flew from one bright light to another, getting burned but refusing to treat the injury, and continuing to flutter from flame to flame.
In 1975 a shift was proposed away from the movements which had proved so disappointing and toward the working class. This was the “turn”—not to be confused with the “turn within the turn” in 1978. Prospects for Socialism in America contains a new evaluation of the situation in the U.S. and the call to proletarianize the party; the following quotations come from that source.
Jack Barnes's report to the May 1975 plenum of the SWP National Committee noted: “We are at the beginning of the radicalization of the American working class.” (page 82) In his summary remarks, Barnes defined the proletarianization of the party: “We're not talking about a narrow `union orientation.' We say we are at the beginning of the radicalization of the working class. [Emphasis in original—E.S.] ... We are convinced we can recruit over the coming period more workers, more Black fighters, more Puerto Ricans, more Chicanos, more women, more young people.” (page 115)
Barry Sheppard's plenum report was entitled “To the Working Class!” He described “the beginning of a new stage in the development of political consciousness in the working class.” (page 222) “Our general perspective as we move into this period is that we're going to have smaller branches—we'll be dividing larger branches more, and we'll be building new branches in more cities around the country.” (page 239) He predicted increased recruitment of workers directly to the party in contrast to the fact that over “the last fifteen years the majority of recruitment to the party has been from members of the YSA.” (page 241)
Mary-Alice Waters's report on the political resolution, given to the national convention in August, was entitled “Toward a Mass Socialist Movement.” She proclaimed that
we have entered upon a new historical experience that is going to be for our generation the equivalent of the great social crisis of the 1930s.
The forms of the convulsions are not going to duplicate those of the Great Depression. But the duration and the scope of the coming social crisis and the revolutionary perspectives inherent in them are going to be comparable. [page 121]
In her concluding remarks, she stated, “Our direction is outward into the mass movement, for more members, for growing numbers of branches, and for smaller branches to carry out this orientation.” (page 136)
The convention enthusiastically approved the new orientation and plans. The membership was reinspired by the new direction and proposals. The branches divided and redivided; new branches were established; some quick results were achieved.
Once again, however, things didn't turn out as expected. This was finally openly admitted two and a half years later. At the same time, it was announced that corrections had been made and another new orientation was proposed: the turn within the turn—what current party members call simply “the turn.”
Barnes told the February 1978 plenum it was necessary to “subordinate everything else to immediately organizing to get a large majority of the membership of the Socialist Workers Party into industry and the industrial trade unions....” (page 52, “Leading the Party into Industry,” The Changing Face of U.S. Politics)
Barnes assured the plenum:
The party is going to be transformed. We will have a different milieu for our campaigns, and we will recruit. This will strengthen every part of the party's work ... We know historically, we know as sure as we are sitting here, that the kind of crisis that we are now in—the economic crisis and the offensive of the ruling class—has always produced in this country an explosive radicalizing motion in the American working lass. It is going to happen again. [pages 85-86, ibid.]
After the discussion on his report, Barnes admitted in his summary:
Remember the “looking in your own backyard” theme? We were slightly off base the way we implemented that. We took things that were real—a childcare struggle in this or that place, the community struggle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Boston struggle—and we drew real lessons from them. But we drew some wrong conclusions, too. For instance, we anticipated a wave of Bostons. We didn't have any more of that kind of struggle. It hasn't happened. We haven't had any more struggles just like the one in District One. This was responsible for some of the one-sided views on building “community branches.” And we've had to make some corrections.
We overprojected our rate of growth. And primarily because of that we overdivided ourselves; some of our branches became too small. We've had to change that with some reconsolidation. We made some misjudgments and false starts. And we made the corrections and adjustments and moved forward. We gained valuable experience in the process and better prepared ourselves for the tasks we now face. [page 88, ibid.]
Mary-Alice Waters's report to the plenum echoed the same themes: it didn't happen as we expected; things are going to be better than ever with our new orientation. She pointed out:
Comrades probably noticed from the recruitment figures we distributed that the rate of recruitment has slowed down over the last six months. It is about half what it was in 1976. There has also been a slight increase of the number of comrades dropping out ... We are almost exactly the same size at this plenum as we were at the convention—one or two short of 1,700, of which 132 are provisional members. [1977 membership was the peak; SWP membership went down from then through the present.—E.S.]
There is no reason to think that our growth has leveled off for an extended period, though. I think our current figures represent a process of readjustment ... The decisions we are making at this plenum are going to increase our ability to recruit and integrate new members ... We can all be more certain of our ability to build the party that is needed to lead the American revolution. [page 40, Party Organizer, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 1978]
Once again, things didn't turn out as figured. Problems in carrying out the new orientation and in relating to the actual radicalization process were not honestly confronted and resolved. Instead, ever more dazzling visions were presented. For example, Barnes's political report to the December 1978 plenum was entitled, “American Politics Today: the Working Class Moves to Center Stage.” In 1979 the YSA abandoned its campus orientation and also made the turn to industry.
The promised results still did not materialize. Frustrated at home, unable to find any strategy to reverse their losses, and increasingly isolated from the ongoing radicalization, the central leaders of the SWP made another turn in 1980-81: to the inspiring revolutions in the Caribbean and Central America.
This didn't work out either. More turns within turns within turns within turns. The SWP is now drastically reduced in size. It has lost influence in the movements fighting for political, economic, and social changes. The party and YSA are not relating to the radicalization in the U.S. and the world today.
It is still possible for the SWP to change its present course and become a vital part of the process taking place. In order to do that, it's necessary to review and evaluate and learn from the series of mistakes made in recent years. By doing that honestly and thoroughly, the party can achieve the political clarification needed to answer the question, “What is to be done?”
One of the highest priorities of the Trotskyist movement in the United States and beyond is to understand the meaning of the Socialist Workers Party's crisis and rejection of the traditional program of the Fourth International in the 1980s. The present contribution to that process is based on an outline for a talk I gave in Europe to comrades in the autumn of 1987. I have revised and updated it slightly. It is not meant as a full-scale evaluation of the SWP's recent history, but as a contribution to the collective task of developing such an evaluation, in preparation for the upcoming World Congress of the Fourth International.
The rich history and traditions of American Trotskyism have been indicated in my historical sketch Trotskyism in America, the First Fifty Years, which I assume comrades have read or will read. This was a current which had deep roots in the early Socialist, Communist, and labor-radical movements of the United States, with a seemingly unbroken continuity stretching from 1928 onward. More than this, it represented one of the strongest components of the Fourth International, especially due to the extended close collaboration of its leading cadre with Leon Trotsky, plus their own rich experience in the indigenous class struggle. The truth of all this underscores the necessity of understanding what happened.
Essential to understanding what happened, I believe, is the fact that—despite the appearance of unbroken continuity from the 1920s through the 1970s—a serious weakening of continuity took place in U.S. Trotskyism during the 1950s. This was, of course, the period of Cold War anticommunist repression, combined with a relative conservatization of the U.S. working class due to the economic boom which U.S. capitalism enjoyed during these years. The historic leader of the SWP, James P. Cannon, referred in 1954 to “eleven years of unchanged prosperity,” saying that while for revolutionary Marxists this was merely “an episode,” for many others it seemed to prove the long-term viability of capitalism.
How does it impress the ordinary worker? All he knows is that for eleven years he has been working more or less steadily and enjoying better wages and living conditions than he knew before. Do you mean to say that has not had a conservatizing effect on his psychology? I don't think you read it correctly if you say it hasn't.
The result was a “long detour” in which the SWP was—more than ever in the history of American Trotskyism—largely cut off from its working-class base. The new generation of Trotskyists recruited in the 1960s and '70s constituted a different composition and experience from that of earlier generations. Theories, norms, concepts, and policies will mean one thing to an educated worker who is a veteran of militant labor struggles, but such things may be understood in a quite different way to a college student who has grown up and continues to live in a period in which militant labor struggles can for the most part be encountered only in history books and memories of older comrades. This did not obliterate the earlier cadres and traditions, but it did introduce a serious weakening of continuity. A crisis building up during the 1970s caused the continuity to snap at this weak point. To phrase it differently, by the early 1980s the pressure of external events combined with internal weaknesses (including this weakened continuity) to bring about a partial, but major and quite dramatic, break in the continuity of American Trotskyism.
It would be wrong to let this notion of “weakened continuity” blind us to the immense successes of the SWP in the period of the 1960s and '70s. One indication of this was simply the growth of the party's membership as well as that of its youth group the Young Socialist Alliance. The movement grew from roughly 200 to roughly 2,000.
Unlike many of the other left-wing groups which also grew in this period, the Trotskyists had a high level of organization, efficiency, and professionalism in their political work and in their party-building norms and organizational institutions. This was symbolized in the creation of an extremely impressive national office and printshop, and in general an infrastructure that would be able to serve an organization of 100,000.
The publications included the numerous books and pamphlets of high quality produced by Pathfinder Press; the weekly newspaper the Militant which attracted a sizeable readership among activists and radicals; an increasingly interesting monthly political magazine, the International Socialist Review; and the weekly magazine of news and analysis edited by Joseph Hansen, Intercontinental Press, which was unequaled in its high quality and has yet to be surpassed. In addition to this, there were the publications of the YSA and, even more impressive, the production of internal documents for SWP preconvention discussions and for internal discussions in the Fourth International.
In a growing number of cities there were SWP branches, which supported local meeting halls, bookstores, forum series, sales of the Militant and other SWP and YSA publications, and a very broad range of political work. Significant attention was given to socialist education, and also to socialist electoral campaigns. Even political opponents of the SWP grudgingly admired much of the organization's work.
Especially important was the role of the SWP and YSA in building the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Trotskyists shifted from the status of pariahs to that of leadership in the majority wing of the antiwar movement. This is because they offered a consistent and correct orientation: (1) political independence from bourgeois parties; (2) seeking to win broad sectors of the population to the antiwar struggle (with special attention given to labor, to GIs, to oppressed racial and national groups); (3) the demand for immediate, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Indochina, and for the selfdetermination of the Vietnamese; (4) working to build a nonexclusionary united front characterized by open discussion and democratic decision making; (5) a commitment to mass action (especially peaceful, legal mass demonstrations); (6) a single-issue focus which related the war to other issues—through special contingents, leaflets, speakers, etc.—but required agreement on a single demand: U.S. Out of Vietnam Now. The movement built through this orientation helped substantially to end the war.
There was also the early positive relationship of the SWP to the rise of Black nationalism, and also its support for Puerto Rican nationalism and Chicano nationalism, and the party's historic and ongoing involvement in antiracist struggles. All of this meant that U.S. Trotskyists were able to offer substantial theoretical and practical contributions to the liberation struggles of oppressed national and racial groups—which made the SWP a pole of attraction for some activists from the African-American and Hispanic communities. Another central liberation movement was that generated by the new wave of feminism, in which the SWP and YSA played a positive role, bringing theoretical perspectives, ideas on strategy and tactics, plus immense energy and commitment. The party was active in the abortion rights struggle, the fight for affirmative action, and the Equal Rights Amendment, in efforts to organize women in trade unions and to make trade unions responsive to the needs of women workers.
The SWP was also in the forefront in the defense of civil liberties and human rights. In countless situations it conducted free speech fights, standing up to repression and organizing a broad defense against it. The SWP also played a key role in the formation of the U.S. Committee for Justice to Latin American Political Prisoners (USIA), which helped to publicize the plight—and in some cases to save the lives—of many Latin American revolutionaries and activists. Nor was the party sectarian when it came to the rights of other radicals in the United States. Among the most dramatic cases were the defense of NAACP maverick Robert F. Williams in the early 1960s and, in the late 1970s, the brutally victimized Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. There was also the historic case against systematic harassment of and spying on the SWP by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies, resulting in the great victory won by the Political Rights Defense Fund.
Through its publications, its educational efforts, and its expansive political work, the SWP of the 1960s and '70s was a powerful force for the preservation of the revolutionary Marxist and American Trotskyist traditions and for the dissemination of that tradition's perspectives in the United States and beyond. On the other hand, the developments of the 1980s compel us to go beyond this positive assessment. In spite of all these impressive achievements, the SWP—from the Trotskyist standpoint of its own origins—“went bad.” An historical materialist explanation cannot begin to look for the reasons in realities after 1979. Rather, we must turn a more critical eye to precisely the period we have just been examining.
First of all, there was an organizational failure in the SWP which can be traced to the early 1960s. The issue was that of the leadership selection process. The circumstances were extremely difficult, and the question was quite complex.
The SWP had been through the difficult period of the 1950s, in which the existing membership dwindled and new recruits were very rare; the eventual extinction of the organization seemed conceivable. Then there was a lifegiving youth radicalization, combined with a legitimate concern: could a new leadership be found among the young recruits that would be capable of maintaining and building the organization as a revolutionary force. It would have to be a strong yet flexible leadership—inclined neither to be whirled around by the diverse forces of the new radicalization nor to interpret the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky in dogmatic and sectarian fashion. Steeped in the traditions of American Trotskyism, it would need to have vision, practicality, aggressiveness, energy. While not going off “half-cocked,” it should have the capacity to grow by trying new things, daring to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, ultimately proving itself to be a tempered revolutionary leadership.
At least a key section of the older leadership decided that such a new leadership with such a balance would not come about by chance. The process of its development would have to be facilitated through conscious intervention. It was decided by some of the older leaders that Jack Barnes—an extremely talented and energetic recent recruit—had a greater capacity than any of the other new cadres to develop into the kind of revolutionary leader which circumstances required. He was encouraged to see himself as the future central leader of the SWP and to develop his own team (made up largely of people he knew at Carleton College) in the organization. Those who saw themselves as rivals or who in other ways resisted this development found themselves undermined and pushed aside in the organization. Some of these comrades reacted, in part, by forming political oppositions (in some cases along politically questionable lines), which escalated into factional conflicts which led to their eventual elimination from and Barnes's enhanced stature within the organization.
Among many SWP comrades the several meanings of the word “authority” became blurred together. The revolutionary program, the old leadership, the new leadership, and the party as a whole tended to be identified as all adding up to more or less the same thing. To doubt, disagree with, or openly take issue with the new leadership in any way came to be seen by many as a challenge to the authority of the old leadership, a questioning of the revolutionary program, a moving away from the party. This identification process was consciously furthered by Barnes's inclination to operate very much within the framework—at least verbally—of the American Trotskyist tradition and to assume the stance of its loyal interpreter, guardian, and continuator.
Even among those inclined to accept all of this as sincere and to see it in a positive light, there may have been disturbing premonitions. Barnes's new leadership team seemed to be made up of dedicated and thoughtful young Trotskyists, but it also took on the character of an unofficial permanent leadership faction, with some characteristics of a clique. There were, however, many initial successes in the 1960s and '70s which generated a tendency toward increasingly uncritical acceptance. Such uncritical acceptance, and the blurring together of the new and old leaderships with the notions of program and party, contributed to the erosion of the democratic atmosphere and actual internal democracy which had once characterized the organization. Formally, one could speak one's mind fully—but in fact this could result in political suicide. Even to raise partial disagreements, questions, etc., would often result in one's being seen as a “problem” or as “on the way out.” If one wanted to do good work in the revolutionary party it was far more intelligent always to support the leadership fully, using one's critical mind only to think up the best ways to interpret, explain, and argue for the leadership position. If one felt unable to do this, it was best to be quiet, expressing one's doubts only quietly and privately to the leadership itself. Challenging the Barnes leadership came to be seen as one move away from leaving the party, regardless of what the SWP constitution said.
This erosion of party democracy was one of the obvious organizational preconditions to the SWP's degeneration in the early 1980s. Another precondition was the passing (in some cases the shunting aside) of “old guard” remnants in the leadership. The completion of this process meant the elimination of an important counterweight to the Barnes group. It is worth spending more time on this, looking at the fate of six prestigious “old guard” cadres who had been central leaders in the 1970s. The key central leaders of the SWP after the retirement of James P. Cannon were Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry. Dobbs was perhaps the key architect of the leadership transition to Barnes, and he then retired gracefully and totally from party leadership. Kerry went along with the transition process, then found himself pushed out and “discredited” when he began to fight against Barnes's new course; he was saved from expulsion only because he died too soon. It has been said that another key member of the “old guard,” Joseph Hansen, found himself developing a growing number of disagreements with Barnes (there were clearly some differences on Cuba), but he died at the beginning of 1979, before any open conflicts developed. George Breitman, whose years of illness prevented him from playing as important a leadership role as he otherwise would have in the 1970s, nonetheless found himself “discredited” in party ranks when he began to oppose Barnes, and he was finally expelled. Frank Lovell was pushed out, “discredited” when he began to take issue with Barnes's policies, and finally expelled. There was, finally, George Novack: despite political disagreements (on which he remained silent), he remained loyal to the Barnes leadership, for which he retained a position of “honor” in the SWP, but no political influence.
The organizational failure of the SWP is only part of the problem that must be examined. There was also a political failure.
We have noted that Barnes and his closest cothinkers made a great show, in the 1960s and '70s, of “Trotskyist orthodoxy.” In fact, it would seem that despite this formal orthodoxy there was a quiet pragmatism, a certain disunity of theory and practice which contributed to the SWP's political weakness, both in regard to theory and practice. Whatever creative theorizing “rank-and-file” comrades wished to engage in was often treated as their own private affair by the Barnes leadership, generally ignored unless it was used to challenge that leadership. Increasingly there tended to be a routinism and conformism in regard to Marxist theory among most members, a tendency to accept respectfully what was handed down by “leading comrades.” In regard to the party's practical political work there was also a tendency toward campaign enthusiasm as opposed to critical evaluations. This contributed to the SWP's activity often being based on impressionistic thinking which generated one-sided errors that would be followed by unbalanced overcorrections.
Another political weakness was generated by the 1969-75 faction fight in the Fourth International, despite the correctness of much in the perspective of the Leninist-Trotskyist Faction (with which most SWPers identified). One problem was the development or deepening of a negative attitude (even contempt) toward the Fourth International majority. Related to this was the severe weakening of international collaboration with the FI majority and leadership. Among other things, this contributed to the elimination of another potential counterweight among the SWP membership to the Barnes group and deprived the membership of the invaluable contact with many good comrades around the world. The international currents with which the SWP was aligned in this faction fight—viewed so uncritically by many comrades as paragons of “orthodox Trotskyist” virtue—in some cases later demonstrated a tendency toward extreme sectarianism (for example, the Moreno current). Ultimately this also had a negative impact. Finally, as part of the faction fight, a large number of comrades in the oppositional Internationalist Tendency were expelled from the SWP in a very “clever” and undemocratic way. The party was damaged by the way these dissident comrades were handled (regardless of mistakes which they themselves made), and the manner in which they were thrown out of the SWP created a dangerous precedent.
There were other weaknesses which must be mentioned, including some which arose directly from the successes discussed earlier. The SWP's and YSA's successes of the late 1960s and early 1970s generated an excitement, pride, and confidence among comrades which were understandable and positive, but which had a negative side. There were tendencies toward arrogance and triumphalism which unnecessarily antagonized many who were not in our ranks and which also left us less prepared, more vulnerable than we needed to be in the face of complications and difficulties that were encountered in the coming period.
There was also a failure to move in a timely fashion to reestablish and strengthen the party's roots in the labor movement. Proposals to do so were attacked as “workerist,” but a serious if modest move in that direction might have contributed to additional successes in the late 1960s and early '70s and certainly would have made it easier for the SWP to make a smoother transition in the mid-1970s toward orienting toward the trade unions and the industrial working class. The “turn to industry” proposed in the mid-1970s was a move in the right direction, and yet within two years it was being badly bungled. Viable fractions and good work in teachers, hospital, and social service unions were thrown away, as were some good comrades who were not prepared to become industrial workers. Many of those who went into industry became “grasshoppers” who jumped from one industry to another in pursuit of what the party leaders decided were the “key sectors” in which revolutionaries should locate (from steel to auto to coal to garment, etc.), and they often found that they were so busy “talking socialism to workers” that they never found out what the workers actually thought. When the workers faced actual problems and struggles, the SWP fraction leaders often panicked and concentrated on trying to prevent comrades from getting involved, because it was feared that “mistakes” might be made. The mismanagement of the industrial turn can be traced in part to the lack of experience on the part of the young comrades and their party leaders in trade unions and working-class organizing. Another problem was an overestimation of the speed and depth of working-class radicalization, and the unrealistic expectations which comrades on all levels had of rapid gains.
It was assumed throughout the 1970s successes similar to those experienced in the antiwar movement would be scored in the community struggles, on the campuses, in the women's and antiracist movements, and above all in the working class and the unions. There was a failure to anticipate a downturn of struggles in these arenas, and when that happened the confidence of many comrades took on a somewhat shrill note.
Also unanticipated were such Castroist-influenced revolutions as those taking place in Grenada and Nicaragua—that seemed to be precluded by the LTF “orthodoxy” to which many comrades held during the earlier factional fight in the Fourth International. It seemed as if the orientation which we had fought for so passionately and persuasively in the Fourth International (lecturing other comrades that they mustn't let their Trotskyism be diluted by Castro or Guevara) was being challenged by exciting new realities.
More devastating, however, was the development of the Iranian revolution. A large number of Iranian students and exiles had been won to Trotskyism in the U.S. and received their training in the SWP. They went back amid great excitement and high hopes over the prospects of an Iranian version of the SWP having an opportunity to “show its stuff” n the midst of a real revolution. At first things seemed promising, despite the many inevitable difficulties and mistakes. Before long the serious limitations of our comrades' perspectives and experience collided with harsh realities. It became clear that the SWP leadership's best pupils, and the SWP leadership itself, had little understanding of how to make Trotskyism relevant to this immense revolution.
All of this set the stage in 1980 for the Barnes leadership to begin jettisoning the old orthodoxies (“Trotskyism”) in order to embrace new orthodoxies (“Castroism”). At the same time, the orthodoxy was blended with pragmatism and impressionism as before, except in a more exaggerated fashion.
Part of the problem was an apparent lack of confidence on the part of the Barnes leadership and its followers. One reflection of this was an initial dishonesty about the political shift that they were making, including a denial (which soon proved to be a lie) that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was in any way being questioned. It was also reflected in a growing arrogance and intolerance within the party, a supercentralization (one of the silliest manifestations of this involved branch leaders being in constant telephone contact with the national office), and the elimination of the minimum of democracy within the party.
Related to this lack of confidence was the Barnes leadership's new attitude to the Cuban revolution and Castroism, succumbing to a longtime weakness of other currents in the U.S. left. As James P. Cannon once commented:
What happened to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.
The trajectory of the Communist Party and other left-wing currents, giving up on socialist revolution in the United States as a practical proposition and placing their hopes instead in the revolutions of other countries, fundamentally undercut their capacity to provide a practical revolutionary orientation in U.S. struggles. Striking parallels now appeared in the orientation of the SWP.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the lack of political confidence of the Barnes leadership of the SWP also showed itself in a growing tendency toward sectarianism and abstentionism in regard to the struggles of the various social movements and the trade unions. Certain truisms were stressed: that the realities of the 1980s are qualitatively different from those of the 1960s and '70s; that we cannot mechanically superimpose tactics of the past onto new situations; that only the working class can bring about the basic social changes we seek. Such truisms as these were utilized to explain the party's engagement in political adventures. In one case this involved attempting to take control of the antinuclear movement through banking on heavy and sustained involvement of friendly union leaders, in another case attempting to get the “franchise” from Central American revolutionaries for leading the anti-intervention movement in the U.S., in yet another case accommodating to union bureaucrats in order to facilitate getting union-sponsored buses for worthy demonstrations. In each case the result was a fiasco. At other times the truisms were used to justify the SWP's pulling back from any activities aside from the narrow self-promotion of the party itself, combined with propagandizing for the revolutions of Central America and the Caribbean. In both cases, the SWP leaders and the veteran comrades who followed them were forgetting the invaluable political lessons from the past, including much of their own activist experience in the 1960s and '70s.
Such political disorientation contributed to a shrinking membership in two ways. There was a growing exodus of experienced cadres from the party, most resigning for alleged “personal reasons.” They had increasingly come to feel that they didn't belong in the organization, but generally were inclined to blame themselves rather than “the party.” There were some, however, who also felt uncomfortable in the organization but wanted to stay and fight to make the organization better; they believed that the party was being mismanaged and disoriented by the Barnes leadership. The central party leaders were aware of this developing challenge. Barnes and his closest cothinkers were—it soon became clear—not about to allow such a democratic discussion and debate over their new course. Committed to split from the beginning, they engineered the expulsions of successive waves of actual and potential dissidents.
At the same time, the Barnes leadership issued a utopian call for a “New International” which would include the revolutionaries of Central America and the Caribbean, led by the Cuban Communist Party, and also including those elements in the Fourth Internationalist movement around the world who were prepared to follow the new SWP line of abandoning the “sterile dogmas” of Trotskyism (such as the theory of permanent revolution). In line with this, the SWP began fostering the development of like-minded currents in various sections of the Fourth International, with the obvious ultimate goal of dissolving or at least undermining and splitting the world Trotskyist movement, in order to facilitate the creation of this “New International.”
It is important to be clear on the objective realities which provided the context for the crisis of the SWP. Other groups on the U.S. left were also experiencing disorientation, crisis, and disintegration. Despite some unevenness, there was an overall decline in the social struggles and movements which had marked the 1960s and early '70s. Most seriously for the SWP, despite some stirrings in the labor movement, there was a delay in the expected proletarian upsurge that was going to bring the working class to “stage center” of American politics. Instead, it was increasingly a period of capitalist offensive, with the bourgeoisie carrying out an economic restructuring which facilitated a successful assault on previous gains of the trade unions and on a wide array of social programs. This was also reflected in a rightward drift of the political mainstream—not of the working class (which had no independent political voice), but of the overwhelming majority of Democratic and Republican party politicians and the bourgeois mass media dominating the political scene.
Despite very real limitations imposed by these realities, the extent of SWP disorientation and crisis was not inevitable.
If the Barnes leadership had been more modest, careful, and responsible, the SWP could have enjoyed a greater stability. It could have maintained a more consistent involvement in such social struggles as existed, enjoying some modest successes on which to build, and maintaining the morale of its cadres. It could therefore have been a pole of attraction for thoughtful activists (especially with the decline of other left-wing groups), enjoying a growing relative influence and some growth in membership size.
If the Barnes leadership had been more honest, more democratic, and less factionalist, it could have maintained party unity while generating a valuable discussion in the SWP and the Fourth International on its new views.
If the SWP had remained true to its best traditions, could it have been in a position to play a political role in the United States which would have helped to alter the political climate significantly? If the organization as it existed at the end of the 1970s—despite its imperfections and limitations—had not entered a devastating political crisis and had, instead, gone on to play a significant role in the anti-intervention movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the feminist and antiracist movements, the anti-arms race movement, and the labor fightback efforts of the 1980s, it seems probable that it could have had a positive effect. The orientation and activities of these movements could have been more effective. Also, the SWP could have stood out as an attractive alternative to the reformist drift which affected many activists.
Instead, there was a fragmentation of the party, the weakening of a valuable tradition, and the dissipation of many years of political and moral capital. There was the demoralization and loss of hundreds of experienced cadres, as well as the mistraining and perhaps fatal miseducation of many newer and potential cadres. Significant opportunities in various struggles in the United States were missed or thrown away. The SWP became transformed into a partial obstacle to the growth of the revolutionary movement in the United States; it also became transformed into a hostile presence within the Fourth International and a threat to its future.
In her recollections of a three-way split in the Sandinista National Liberation Front during the mid-1970s, Dora Maria Tellez commented: “An organization which many of us thought was indestructible and indivisible fell apart right before our eyes.” This was certainly the feeling of many of us in the SWP in the early 1980s. It was a terrible shock to experience the fragmentation of an organization which was the center of our political universe, which had given so much to us, and in which we had invested such confidence and commitment and hope. Given the grandeur of the revolutionary Marxist and American Trotskyist tradition, the political trajectory of the SWP under the Barnes leadership seemed ludicrous. Yet it's worth recalling the admonition of Spinoza which Trotsky quoted, “neither to laugh nor cry, but to understand.” It is necessary to understand in order to act.
This is why it is important for us not simply to recall ways in which the SWP was good before its crisis and degeneration, but especially to reflect on its weaknesses so that we may learn from them as we rebuild the Trotskyist movement in the United States. It is also necessary to look at the fragments in a critical-minded way. The fragments are the SWP, Socialist Action, the Fourth International Caucus of Solidarity, and the FIT. In other writings I have focused on the grave limitations of the first three of these groups. Here I propose to offer a fragmentary view of the fragments, by suggesting the strengths of each.
The Socialist Workers Party is the largest single concentration of revolutionary socialists in the United States. It is still part of the FI movement, and it hasn't crossed the class line. It still has a substantial organization and significant resources. Its publications—the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, New International—can be criticized in many ways, but not for being insubstantial. Pathfinder Press is also a magnificent resource, and it continues to produce some books of special value, including the works of Leon Trotsky, an important series on the early Communist International, and writings from revolutionaries in Central America and the Caribbean. The SWP continues to reach out to radical-minded young workers, students, and others with its publications, its forums and educationals, its political defense work, and its socialist election campaigns (although these seem to be in decline). It also shows an openness to certain revolutionary currents outside of the Fourth International—although tending to be uncritical and adaptationist.
Socialist Action also has a significant concentration of well-organized activists with high morale. It is serious, principled, and democratic (in its own fashion). It is absolutely loyal to the Trotskyist program (although one might raise questions about the way it understands that program). Whatever serious disagreements one might have with it, it seems clear that the organization attempts to carry on in the best traditions of American Trotskyism. It has a very high quality monthly paper, Socialist Action, as well as a large number of popular pamphlets (of varying quality), and it seeks to carry on a very broad socialist education. It has done serious coalition and united-front work, helping to mobilize hundreds and thousands of people in opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, in opposition to South African apartheid and U.S. racism, in support of women's rights, in opposition to the nuclear arms race, and in trade union struggles. Recently it has also played an innovative role in regard to recent events in the USSR and China.
Solidarity is not part of the Fourth Internationalist movement, although it contains an FI Caucus (which barely functions as a distinct entity), but it makes little sense to do anything except discuss Solidarity as a whole. It contains many experienced, serious-minded activists (plus former activists) among whom the level of morale and activity varies. It has an antisectarian bent, with a refreshing openness to others (with a partial, though significant, exception—it is inclined to be contemptuous toward other FI currents in the United States). Perhaps the most impressive contribution of the organization is its involvement in the monthly trade union publication Labor Notes and in the annual conferences sponsored by that publication, and it is clear that there are some serious trade union activists in that organization. Solidarity also produces an attractive bimonthly magazine, Against the Current, which has helped it attract some serious left-wing intellectuals. While in some cities its members appear to do little, in others they have engaged in serious coalition work around various worthwhile struggles. It is an interesting regroupment experiment. If successful from an FI vantage point, it could win substantial new cadres to the Fourth Internationalist movement. If successful from a non-FI vantage point it won't win substantial new cadres to the Fourth International movement and may, instead, help some comrades go beyond their “fixation” on the FI. Whichever way it proves to be successful, important lessons will be learned.
The Fourth Internationalist Tendency contains a substantial number of older SWP veterans plus some younger cadres with high morale. It is committed to political and programmatic clarity as the basis for the unity of the Fourth Internationalist movement in the United States. It is organizationally more modest than the other groups precisely because of its genuine commitment to FT unity in the U.S. Central to its very purpose is the defense, critical-minded retrieval, and creative development of the American Trotskyist tradition and the revolutionary Marxist program of the Fourth International. It has produced a substantial number of books and pamphlets, and it publishes an interesting magazine, Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, which is the only genuine Fourth Internationalist magazine published in the United States. It has also engaged in education efforts of high caliber. Its members engage in broader organizations and struggles when possible and have made modest but serious contributions, particularly to the trade union, anti-intervention, and women's liberation movements.
Many have asked why the fragments expelled from the SWP don't get together. A fundamental reason why they haven't been able to do so is that they each have qualitatively different projects, as does the larger organization from which they came. The SWP wants to “go beyond” Trotskyism in order to build a new Castroist international. SA wants to present itself as the revolutionary vanguard organization, based on its own conception of Leninist-Trotskyist “orthodoxy,” which replaces the SWP. The FI Caucus wants to prioritize the project of regrouping with non-FI socialists in Solidarity to create a new (but not necessarily Trotskyist) organization. The FIT wants to rebuild a U.S. component of the FI movement on the basis of political clarification over recent experience and through the defense and development of the Fourth International's revolutionary Marxist program, and it seeks to involve all the other FI groups in this process. It is difficult to achieve unity among groups which diverge so fundamentally on the question of what to do next.
It's worth considering Trotsky's reflection on the necessity, sometimes, of revolutionaries functioning in different organizations until political clarification is achieved through experience:
Obviously it is extremely desirable to safeguard the unity of the organization. But there are situations, especially in young and weak organizations, in which two groups pull in opposite directions in so obvious a fashion that it paralyzes the life of the organization. What remains to be done? Above all, every possibility of an honest accord must be thoroughly pursued. But if these attempts have no result, there remains only to say to each other: let us try to work separately and in six months or more, we will see which of us is right, and then perhaps we will meet each other seriously on the common path. Such an action is called a split. But at times a split is a lesser evil. An organization that is smaller but more unanimous can have enormous success with a correct policy, while an organization which is torn by internal strife is condemned to rot.
The ideal situation would be for all of those expelled from the SWP (plus new recruits and non-FI members of Solidarity) to be taken back into the SWP with the full reinstitution of democratic centralism. Then the different perspectives could be fully discussed, debated, and tested in a fruitful manner, enhancing the development of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. This ideal solution seems highly unlikely, however. Certainly in the short run nothing like this is going to happen.
The prospects for eventual unity depend on several factors. One involves objective pressures—the impact of world events, and also the extent to which there is an upsurge of the working class and of mass struggles in the United States. But objective pressures won't automatically bring unity, nor should we wait passively for them to “rescue” us. This is why the FIT is committed to working for the process of political clarification and, when possible, collaboration with the other groups (although the others seem far less interested in this than we are). There is also the importance of the Fourth International—in the fight against the SWP leadership's programmatic assault on Trotskyism, in the struggle to clarify and advance the program of the Fourth International, and in the determined effort to facilitate serious collaboration worldwide of those who support that program. All of this can make a substantial contribution to the unification process in the United States.
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