‘I Liked Gerry Healy…’

The Robertson School of Party Building

First printed in 1917 No.1 (Winter 1986). Copied from http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no1/no01wrp.pdf ]

 The dust is just beginning to settle after the biggest (and dirtiest) explosion in recent memory among the international pretenders to Trotskyism: the spectacular rupture of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Gerry Healy, ‘‘founder-leader’’ of the WRP, and Michael Banda, his long-time majordomo, had a rather nasty public falling out late last October. Banda got the bulk of the membership, the real estate and the printing plant; Healy kept the Redgraves (movie stars Vanessa and brother Corin) and with them what’s left of the WRP’s main ‘‘industrial’’ fraction—in Actor’s Equity. They even split the satellites; the Americans opted for the mutineers, while the Greeks and Spaniards stayed on with the infallible leader.

The whole business began last July when Banda and Aileen Jennings, Healy’s personal secretary and ‘‘close personal companion,’’ initiated a palace coup with allegations that Healy’s sexual activities with 26 female party members represented a potential security risk for the organization. (This in itself is richly ironic as Healy has been for years one of the world’s foremost practitioners of a bogus ‘‘security’’ fetishism as a means for smearing his political opponents.) Healy reportedly acquiesced and proffered his resignation from the group’s active leadership, officially on the grounds of his long service and failing health.

He spent the first few weeks of his ‘‘retirement’’ lining up a majority of the WRP’s Political Committee for a counterattack. Banda appealed to the Central Committee (where he apparently still had a secure majority) and immediately expelled Healy. He followed this up by publishing a lurid account of Healy’s allegedly abusive sexual exploits, and other bureaucratic misdeeds, in Newsline, the WRP’s ex-daily. Healy’s supporters regrouped and soon came out with their own Newsline which announced Banda’s expulsion from Healy’s WRP. As the polemic heated up both sides accused the other of ‘‘revisionism’’ and traded accusations of ‘‘subjective idealism,’’ ‘‘pragmatism’’ and various other epithets from the lexicon of obscurantist pseudo-dialectics which have long been a WRP speciality. But there was really only one issue: who was to rule the roost at the WRP’s Clapham headquarters.

Banda’s spectacular revelations of Healy’s sexual malfeasance received considerable play from Fleet Street and seems to have sparked interest in the goings-on in the WRP among many who don’t normally pay much attention to such things. Sales of Newsline are reported to have tripled during the height of the mud-slinging. More surprisingly, a WRP candidate for president of the powerful Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers polled a whopping 15,000 votes during the week the scandal broke. Brian Behan, brother of the Irish author Brendan, and a former leading member of Healy’s outfit who left in the early 1960s, wryly asked ‘‘What healthy Englishman would not want to join Healy’s party, given its open attitude to promiscuity? I have been trying to contact him all week’’ (Sunday Times, 10 November 1985).

The WRP split can only be a good thing for the revolutionary movement in Britain and everywhere else the Healyites operate. Banda’s widely-publicized admission of that organization’s long-standing practice of physical attacks on its critics, both internal and external, and its prostitution on behalf of Libya’s Muammar el Qaddafi and various other reactionary Middle East bonapartists can only hasten the necessary and long-overdue disappearance of both wings of this foul and repulsive gang of cynics.

SL: Healyism Sui Generis

The deep split in the Healyites has naturally been commented on by most of the world’s ostensible Trotskyist tendencies. But none have paid so much attention as the American-based Spartacist League (SL) which rushed out a special 64-page issue of their English-language theoretical journal devoted to the subject. There are several reasons for this attention. The Spartacist grouping originated in the early 1960s as the left opposition within the rightward-moving Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., and looked to Healy’s Socialist Labour League (SLL—forerunner of the WRP) as its international leadership. Healy early on (in 1962) gave his American supporters a taste of his ‘‘hard’’ organizational tactics when he split the tendency over the majority’s refusal to perjure themselves at his command. Four years later, at the infamous ‘‘London Conference,’’ the SL and the Healyites finally parted ways when SL leader James Robertson refused once again to submit to Healy’s outrageously bureaucratic notions of ‘‘discipline’’ in his international.

So that is part of the reason that the SL has shown such intense interest in the wreck of the Healyites. But there is another, more compelling, reason for Robertson to treat the split in the WRP leadership so extensively. And that is to try to establish as much distance as possible between his style of political leadership and that of his one-time mentor. A wide spectrum of former cadres of Robertson’s group have remarked that the template of the abominable organizational practices attributed to the WRP in the pages of Spartacist fits the SL itself rather closely.

The Healy organization has long been infamous for its maintenance of ‘‘discipline’’ internally by means of beating up critics and opponents. This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge. We do note however that inside that organization intimations of such appetites are increasingly common. In a letter written after his resignation a former member of Robertson’s British satellite noted the tendency to view opponents as class enemies:

‘‘According to your National Treasurer [two former members] have ‘gone over to the bourgeoisie.’ Is this the position of the organisation? It would seem so. I believe your latest paranoid delusion consists of a ‘quitters clique’ hell-bent on the destruction of the SL/B [Spartacist League/Britain]. The idea that people disillusioned with the SL/B treadmill are active enemies of the organisation and therefore, by sleight-of-hand sectarian logic, agents of the bourgeoisie is both ludicrous and dangerous. Perhaps you could explain why Len told [a former member] to remember what the Provos do to ‘people like him.’ Or why Ed felt moved to tell [another member] that ‘if we were in [another country] we would beat you up.’ Off-the-cuff remarks in the heat of the moment? Maybe. But then all measures are in principle permissible against the class enemy, are they not? And what is meant concretely by ‘going over to the bourgeoisie’?’’

If the members, ex-members or leftist opponents of the SL are in fact ‘‘racists,’’ ‘‘fascists,’’ ‘‘Nazi-lovers,’’ ‘‘scabs’’ and/or ‘‘COINTELPRO [FBI]-type’’ provocateurs (slanders which the SL has been hurling with increasing frequency against its perceived enemies, including ourselves, in recent years) then the question of what measures are permissible in doing battle with them is indeed only a ‘‘tactical question.’’ The SL came into existence as a separate and distinct grouping from the Healyites largely in opposition to the corrupt tactics of the SLL leadership. It has subsequently undergone a long evolution back to many of the very techniques which it once abjured. Today the SL stands as a qualitatively identical formation to the SLL of the late 1960s. It is worth noting that the iSt’s ‘‘discovery’’ that its ranks were riddled with racists, fascists and individuals with sinister connections to the police has been made only fairly recently. This is one of the decisive proofs of the SL leadership’s final descent into political gangsterism.

Internal Life in the SL and WRP

One of the superficial distinctions which can be made between the SL and the Healyites is the function of the lider maximo. Whereas Healy has been prominently featured in the literature and public activity of the WRP for years, Robertson’s status as the SL’s idiosyncratic guru is mostly for internal consumption. Nonetheless the fundamentals of the ‘‘party question’’ have been the same in both groups for years. In both organizations all authority derives from the paramount leader, and devotion to the caliph is the most important political question.

Robertson refined and improved on Healy’s techniques for suppressing internal dissent. In the SL it has been 18 years since the last faction fight. Joseph Seymour, Robertson’s ‘‘above-the-battle intellectual,’’ undertook in 1978 to offer a ‘‘Marxist’’ explanation for this peculiar phenomenon. According to Seymour, the arid factional life inside the SL ‘‘is conditioned by the absence of objective circumstances which required major changes or breakthroughs in political line or unanticipated organizational turns…’’ It is now almost eight years since this was written and still nothing in the real world has had enough impact to produce any internal dissent in the SL. Just as Healy attempted to break Robertson in London in 1966, anyone who is thought capable of developing into a factional opponent in the SL is broken and/or otherwise disposed of long before they come up with any differences.

Unlike the Spartacist League, Healy’s group has had a continuing series of political oppositions, some of which have at least been allowed to go through the motions of submitting documents and offering counterposed reports at party conferences. In 1971 the Blick-Jenkins grouping exited into the Labour Party when their international co-thinkers—Healy’s erstwhile partners in the Organisation Communiste Internationale—broke relations with the SLL. (In the 6 December 1985 issue of the New Statesman Robin Blick recounted how he ‘‘was punched and had his head banged against a wall’’ on that occasion.) In 1974 Allan Thornett led more than a hundred people out of the WRP to found the centrist Workers Socialist League. Five years later a small factional opposition, led by Royston Bull, a former staff writer for Newsline, left the WRP. Bull, by his own account, had managed to survive for some four years as an occasional oppositionist before finally deciding to jump ship.

Bull’s description of the internal regime of the WRP bears a striking resemblance to the SL today:

 ‘‘a marked failing of the WRP is its inability to build up a stable and growing cadre of workers or youth to lead any section of the mass movement.

 ‘‘The endless categorical instructionalism from the leadership creates inflexible doctrinaires who are unable to sense or react to changes in the mass movement. Since the mainspring of a WRP cadre’s existence is his reliance on the centre for instructions, the very impulse that gives a revolutionary cadre life, his dialectical party practice in the workers movement, involving making decisions on his own, correcting mistakes, leading struggles etc., is totally absent. This lifeless bureaucratic relationship between the party and its cadres strangles any chance of real growth and recruitment among workers and youth.’’

—‘‘The Workers Party and the struggle to re-establish Bolshevik traditions,’’ October 1981

A former Spartacist, not presently associated with the Bolshevik Tendency, made some remarkably similar observations about life in Robertson’s group:

 ‘‘It is not accidental that the whole…membership is permeated by fear (of the leadership) and exhibits massive political confusion. The state of the membership reflects the rampant paranoia of the leadership. Unable to lay down any concrete perspective…the leadership increasingly turns its energies towards the ‘internal sorting out process’…

 ‘‘The membership is kept in a state of forcible ignorance. Deprived of education, formal or informal, run off its feet on an overloaded schedule (in large part servicing the cumbersome administration of the organization) the members are exhorted to accept the paper program of the SL (whether they understand it or not) or face denunciation. Do you realize….that virtually nobody discusses politics outside the formal meetings? Are you aware that much of the membership don’t even read a daily paper let alone the [ostensibly revolutionary opponent] press?’’

In a speech reprinted in the November 1985 issue of Young Spartacus, SL spokesman Ed Clarkson chastises the members of the Spartacus Youth League (the SL’s youth group) for ‘‘insecurity based on ignorance.’’ Clarkson marvels at the fact that ‘‘what we tend to get in struggles in the youth are confessionals and denunciations, as opposed to clarifying fights.’’ Well, as they say in the computer biz: ‘‘garbage in, garbage out.’’ Clarkson proceeds to lecture the youth that:

 ‘‘If you’re to develop in the way Lenin proposes, it requires on the level of the individual some capacity for self-assertion, which used to be the hallmark of youth, but which seems to have strangely disappeared in the past decade or so. That means you’re supposed to act like you think you know what you’re doing. In fact to be even rather arrogant in that regard, and maybe we’ll have some good fights then.’’

But the youth have seen too many ‘‘good fights’’ SL-style to want to be on the receiving end of one. The reason that the internal life of the Spartacus Youth League is one of ‘‘confessionals and denunciations’’ is because that is all they have learned. These days ‘‘fights’’ in Robertson’s group are conducted along the lines of Chinese Red Guard ‘‘criticism/self-criticism’’ sessions—leadership initiated denunciations followed by confessions.

‘Servile Hacks Devoid of Revolutionary Capacity’

The Spartacist account of the internal life of the WRP notes that it too consists chiefly of ‘‘confessionals and denunciations’’:

 ‘‘There was the systematic destruction of cadres: abusing them and then holding them up to scorn as weaklings, breaking down their self-respect by extorting false confessions, using their loyalty to the professed ideals of socialism to make them complicit in crimes against their comrades and the comrades of other groups.’’

The Healyites have no monopoly on such techniques for destroying the moral fibre of cadres. Here is an eye-witness account of a typical bit of ‘‘party-building’’ in Robertson’s British affiliate in the fall of 1982:

 ‘‘ the SL/B, according to the international leadership, ‘was in pretty good shape.’ This characterisation held good right up to the August 1982 national educational. Then a few weeks later all hell let loose. The SL/B leadership it turned out was guilty of racism. From a healthy section to racism in a few weeks—this should make even the most dull-witted observer a little suspicious!

 ‘‘ An enormous international delegation was flown in to ‘find out’ what was going on in Britain….The power structure is to be broken, a new and very different CC is to be elected. Except that the old leadership is left intact with the addition of a few of the more abusive elements from the lower ranks. And David [the former leader] is reduced to an emotional wreck. I don’t think I will ever forget the IEC [International Executive Committee] meeting that preceded the plenum. David got up to speak on the round. He stood at the front a pathetic figure, his movements strangely mechanical as he desperately tried to get a few words out of his mouth. The eerie silence was only broken by the sound of several leading IEC members swapping jokes and guffawing. When the laughter had subsided and all attention was focused on David, unable to speak he burst into tears and ran back towards his seat. As he passed down the aisle someone shouted out ‘write us a letter.’ ‘David…is in very poor emotional shape’ pronounced Jim Robertson. No doubt indifference to such events is the hallmark of a real SL/B ‘Bolshevik’….Preservation of cadre, don’t make me laugh.’’

The international leadership has conducted similar ‘‘fights’’ in most of the rest of the nominally independent sections of the international organization. This doesn’t prevent Spartacist from waxing indignant over the bureaucratic centralism which prevailed in Healy’s ‘‘international,’’ nor from drawing the abstractly correct lessons from the history of the Comintern:

‘‘The importance of the right of national sections, within the framework of a unitary international program, to make their own tactical decisions and select their own leaderships is demonstrated by the degeneration of the Communist International under Stalin, reducing national leaderships to incompetent, Kremlin-servile hacks devoid of revolutionary capacity.’’

The validity of this observation is demonstrated in the case of the iSt by the New York-centric activity of the dozen or so stagnating foreign locals of the SL/US (aka the ‘‘international Spartacist tendency’’). Perhaps the most striking example of this occurred in Britain during the weeks of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict with Argentina in 1983, when the SL/B busied itself building a forum to discuss the situation in the New York transit union! When a former member suggested that the forum should be postponed in favor of one dealing with the imperialist military adventure going on in the South Atlantic, he was told that to do so would be ‘‘parochial’’!

Zig zags and Lurches

One distinguishing feature of the Healyite political bandits is their capacity for abrupt and disjointed political lurches. This pattern has become characteristic of the SL as well. In 1981, for example, after launching a recruitment drive on three bottom-line programmatic points (one of which was that ‘‘picket lines mean don’t cross’’), the SL leadership announced that the group’s ‘‘internal’’ position on the life-and-death struggle between the American air traffic controllers (PATCO) and the Reagan administration was ‘‘fly, fly, fly.’’ Those who objected to this policy were hounded out of the group in short order. Flying during the strike became a means of demonstrating ‘‘loyalty to the party’’ and many comrades even booked flights for trips which they would ordinarily have made by car.

In July 1984 the SL’s ‘‘uniquely correct’’ leadership announced the danger of an imminent fascist/Reaganite coup d’etat aimed at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco—and volunteered to send a dozen defense guards to prevent it! Ten months later, after winning an out-of-court settlement on the FBI’s description of the Spartacist League, Workers Vanguard announced that all SL members would forthwith be issued with signed membership cards indicating the date they joined. Hardly an appropriate policy for a period in which the suppression of bourgeois democracy is an immediate danger.

A few months later Robertson had his cadres dress up in witches’ hats, pigs’ faces and Nazi regalia and run around a San Francisco campus as ‘‘Xandra’s Red Avengers’’ to block a supposed plot by campus student council bureaucrats (and the FBI). All such turns are inevitably greeted in the Spartacist organization with a show of unanimous enthusiasm by those who wish to remain in the group. The membership has come to accept that social reality is whatever Robertson says it is.

Arbitrary and erratic pronunciamentos are characteristic of charismatic cults, including political ones. In an article in the 17 June 1983 issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement several years ago, Roy Wallis observed that in an attempt to forestall threats ‘‘to their free and untramelled authority’’ lideres maximos of various sorts frequently introduce:

‘‘unpredictable changes and demands [on their followers]. These may take various forms—frequent change of environment, removing ties to stable external sources of support; undermining stable ties between pairs and groups within the movement, for example by breaking down exclusive sexual ties between members; undermining relationships of authority (other than those directly with the charismatic leader) which might compete for the loyalty of followers; introduction of new beliefs and practices which provide an opportunity for followers to display their commitment, or lack of it, to whatever issues from the leader’s mouth….

 ‘‘The ‘half-hearted’ can be provoked into declaring themselves by constantly imposing new demands leading either to protest and exclusion for disloyalty, or to defection. Such periodic disruptions of routine produce among members who survive the change a sense of liberation, of new freedom, a sense of excitement and thus often of renewed enthusiasm and zeal, and, most important, of enhanced commitment to the leader….

‘‘The process thus tends to become self-reinforcing, leading towards and opening up ever darker recesses of the leader’s id, releasing ever deeper primal desires, as the constraints upon their indulgence are removed. Undermining institutional structures and patterns not only constitutes change and eliminates the constraints upon further change, it also creates ambiguitites and conflicts of policy and practice which leave the members without clear guidelines to action. Only by constantly watching the leader, subordinating themselves totally to his inspiration of the moment and being willing to humble themselves for their failure to follow that inspiration closely enough, can they remain among the favoured.’’

Sexual Abuse and Sexual Manipulation

Sex is always a good way to sell papers and the British gutter press has had a field day with the ‘‘Reds in bed’’ angle to the WRP split. ‘‘Randy Red Supremo Grabbed My Wife’’ and ‘‘Our Sex Nightmares By Red Gerry Girls’’ were typical of the headlines in the tabloid press. The fact that 73-year-old Healy had sex with 26 (or for that matter 260) female WRPers would in itself be no crime, Banda’s prurient caterwauling about ‘‘revolutionary morality’’ notwithstanding. One British journalist pointed out that even if Healy had twice as many partners as Banda asserts, this would have been ‘‘little more than two a year, which for Casanova would be a quiet night in,’’ Sunday Times, 10 November 1985). Banda’s decision to go to the bourgeois press with his salacious tales of Healy’s sex-life, which theTimes characterized as ‘‘a highly unusual breach of Trotskyist etiquette’’ (2 November 1985) suggests that the ‘‘new’’ WRP stands firmly in the squalid tradition of the old. More importantly the Banda WRP seems to have kept its charges deliberately vague—combining revolting puritanical denunciation of Healy’s alleged marital infidelities (‘‘systematic debauchery’’) with allegations of coercion and ‘‘sexual assault.’’ Banda’s claim that ‘‘he had known Mr. Healy for 35 years but had only recently found out about the alleged misconduct’’ (Times, 30 October 1985) has to be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

The question of the consensual sexual activities of members of any organization is not per se a political question, but a private matter between the individuals involved. Nonetheless, as Sean Matgamna pointed out in his piece on the WRP split in Socialist Organiser (reprinted in Workers Vanguard, 15 November 1985), ‘‘It is as certain as anything is that in that organisation [the WRP] sexual exploitation, and where necessary harassment, intimidation, or worse, would be part of the great leader’s way of life.’’ For those who live in a micro-social milieu in which it is impossible to disagree with the infallible leader without risking excommunication, where reality can only be interpreted by reference to his ‘‘uniquely correct’’ pronouncements, the question of consensuality is at least open to abuse. Women who capture the leader’s fancy, but don’t reciprocate his attentions, are liable to be subjected to considerable pressure, subtle and not-so-subtle. In the SL the leadership has on occasion ‘‘politically’’ characterized such individuals as ‘‘cold bitches.’’ In the bourgeois workplace this kind of thing is called ‘‘sexual harassment.’’ It is a disgusting, but hardly surprising, aspect of life in political obedience cults.

Like so much else in the diseased SL the question of ‘‘consensuality’’ is subject to interpretation depending on who is doing what to whom. A few years ago a visiting leader of Robertson’s British franchise who was touring the States had the bad judgement to make advances to several female companions of the SL leadership, including Robertson’s wife. This ‘‘crime’’ was breathlessly retailed as evidence of his complete degeneracy in the ensuing campaign to get rid of him. In the SL there is no greater crime than lese majeste, consensual or not.

The Susanna Martin Choir

Banda’s claim to have known nothing of Healy’s extra-marital activities is obviously as hypocritical as his declamations about ‘‘socialist morality.’’ Would-be Bandas in the SL Political Bureau won’t be able to make such claims. The existence of Robertson’s claque of female sexual groupies is no secret. They even have a name: ‘‘the Susanna Martin Choir.’’ (Susanna Martin was an early American witch.) Dressed in black, and carrying candles, they performed before the delegates at the SL’s 1983 National Conference. Workers Vanguard mentioned the performance of this ‘‘informal interest association’’ in its report on the conference (18 November 1983). Besides being weird and cultish such activities are reminiscent of the goings-on at bourgeois political conventions where the delegates, having little influence on the political direction of their party, amuse themselves with hoopla. In the SL such ‘‘informal interest associations’’ are the exclusive prerogative of the charismatic leader. Other members have been excoriated as ‘‘cliquists’’ for having people over to dinner, or socializing informally without inviting the leadership, or even for talking to each other on the phone ‘‘behind the back of the party.’’ The flip side of Robertson’s ‘‘Susanna Martin Choir’’ is that second-level (male) leaders in the group have periodically been charged with ‘‘sexually manipulating’’ female members. Typically this involves ‘‘discovering’’ that the individual in question, who has invariably been unwise enough to have fallen into the ‘‘bad books,’’ had been sleeping with some woman in the group to whom he was not married. In one case we know of, ‘‘sexual manipulation’’ was alleged without any evidence that the Seventh Commandment had even been transgressed. When the accused inquired how this charge could be made when he denied it, and all his purported victims denied it, he was informed that this was the worstkind of manipulation—it had been done so skillfully that, even under considerable party pressure, the victims themselves couldn’t see what had happened! Such is the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the ‘‘richly democratic’’ internal life of the Spartacist tendency. Sexual manipulation, like everything else in the SL, means exactly what the leadership wants it to mean.

The Money Question

One of the questions touched on in the dispute in the WRP was money. In the case of the Healyites it centrally involves the totally corrupt practice of ‘‘hiring on’’ as publicists for various Middle East dictators, a practice which took the WRP out of the workers movement years ago. Matgamna cites reports in the bourgeois press ‘‘that militants from Iraq who came to the WRP school were later turned over to the Iraqi regime, which killed them. Banda is quoted as saying that the motive was to get ‘bags of money.’’’ There is another angle to the financial question as it relates to the Healy regime besides where the money came from. That is, who spent how much for what and to whom they were accountable. The London Times reported on 30 October 1985 that ‘‘Mr. Banda’s supporters…were yesterday said to be guilty of precipitating a financial crisis in the party by fabricating the accounts.’’ Banda is alleged to have charged that Healy kept a 20,000 pound slush fund and to have purchased a 15,000 pound BMW for himself out of WRP money. The Spartacist article observes that ‘‘Our own experience also demonstrates that Healy has always been fixated on money.’’ Et tu, J.R.?

The money question in a highly bureaucratized organization is inevitably a particularly sensitive one. The leadership jealously guards its monopoly on the purse strings and is usually extremely adverse to any suggestion that it render an accounting to the ranks. Anyone naive or impertinent enough to ask either Healy or Robertson to see the books would quickly learn that a) it is impossible for reasons of ‘‘security,’’ and b) such a question implies a lack of trust in the leadership, i.e., an ‘‘anti-party attitude’’ (which is usually terminal).

In the special interview with Robertson on the 1966 London Conference one of his toady interlocutors asks ‘‘When did you develop the slogan, ‘However Healy does it, do the opposite’?’’ This is indeed a bitter joke for those who have experienced first hand ‘‘anti-Healyism’’ SL-style. Robertson responds with a fulsome advertisement for his wonderfully compassionate regime. He contrasts the Healyite technique of doubling the workload on exhausted comrades with his own approach in such a situation: ‘‘Well, comrades, take some vacations now. Go and skin dive, or go to Portugal, or do something. Pay as much of your own way as you can, and perhaps the party treasury can assist you.’’ With the SL’s extortionate pledge schedule most SL members can barely afford to run a car and keep clothes on their backs, let alone go on vacations. For those who, in the eyes of the leadership, are ‘‘doing well,’’ it is a different matter. They may indeed get a holiday in Portugal courtesy of the party treasury. Robertson at last report kept a personal five-figure slush fund for just such contingencies. He has occasionally been known to dip into the party treasury to purchase expensive presents for his female friends.

Those who are ‘‘doing well’’ often get taken out to dinner. Some top leaders (like Robertson) even get expensive Manhattan lofts built for them with party funds and party labor. Comrades who can’t afford to attend party functions or mobilizations are sometimes encouraged to take out loans. Those who are smiled on by the leadership can later have these written off. Others pay cash.

The SL’s financial structure is designed to reduce the entire membership to penury. This generates substantial revenues for the party treasury and also tends to reinforce the membership’s desire to ingratiate themselves with the leadership with a system of petty material rewards. Those on the party payroll are doubly dependent on remaining in the good graces of the leadership; punishment for running afoul of ‘‘the party’’ (i.e., J.R.) can range from a cut in their already paltry salary to being fired on the spot.

SL/WRP: The Regime Question as a Political Question

One of the new political points introduced in the Spartacist special on the WRP is an attempt to account for the fact that the degeneration of the SLL from ‘‘orthodox Trotskyism’’ to political banditry was first evidenced in its bureaucratic internal practices. This is a point of considerable importance to the SL leadership which has maintained as an article of faith the following neat syllogistic ‘‘defense’’ of its own internally bureaucratic practices: a) the superstructure or regime of a political organization is derived from its political program, and therefore b) a group with a revolutionary program cannot by definition be bureaucratic. According to the SL tops the regime question is not an independent ‘‘political’’ question and anyone who raises organizational criticisms without having a fully counterposed ‘‘political’’ program is an unprincipled Abernite wrecker.

Yet there was always a disparity between this position and the conclusions which the SL drew from its experience with Healy at the 1966 London Conference: ‘‘the Healy-Banda machine subordinates real political issues of agreement and disagreement to the exigencies of organizational issues and personal prestige politics. That organizational tendency is itself a political issue of the first order’’ (Spartacist, June-July 1966).

The SL leadership attempts to resolve this contradiction in its special issue on the Healyites with the brazen assertion that the Healy organization was never a revolutionary grouping—although for ten years it was the foremost international exponent of authentic Trotskyism.

Robertson announces rather flippantly in his interview in Spartacist: ‘‘insofar as I encountered the Healy organization, there was nothing top to bottom that I found appetizing, in accordance with my understanding of a communist organization. And the Healyites did indeed march to a different drummer.’’ Later Robertson offers his personal assessment of the SLL’s lider maximo: ‘‘Let’s be clear: I liked Gerry Healy, I got on very well with him, we saw eye to eye on all kinds of questions, gossip, nuances, tactics, like a couple of fairly hard-bitten communists who’d been through some mills.’’ Apparently Robertson still likes Gerry Healy. In his 17 November 1985 letter of condolence to ‘‘Gerry,’’ Robertson asserts: ‘‘I find no pleasure in your present pass….I am sorry for you, if you didn’t help kill those 21 Iraqi Communists. And if you didn’t, I wish you well.’’ Robertson’s affection for Healy is rooted in the professional identification of one caudillo with another—after all they were both in the same business, even if ‘‘Gerry’’ did overdo it a bit now and again. Unlike Robertson we certainly don’t wish Healy well whether or not the murder of the Iraqi leftists should also be ‘‘credited’’ to his account. It’s hard to imagine that the victims of what the Spartacistarticle refers to elsewhere as ‘‘hideous physical violence against members and of concrete, bloody crimes against the international working class’’ do so either.

Spartacist begs the question of how the Healyites went from a group which could produce the 1961 ‘‘World Prospect for Socialism’’ (a document which Robertson in his interview describes as ‘‘the clearest and most pristine expression of the program of international Trotskyism that we’ve seen in a long time’’ to a political bandit cult. The explanation which is offered is hardly convincing:

 ‘‘We were put off track by their literary side for several years because of Healy’s success in winning over significant sections of the trade-union and educational apparatus of the British CP to an ostensibly Trotskyist position. They wrote very powerfully. And it took a little while for Gerry to work through that and use it up, and to create some kind of nasty, shabby, deepening and evolving cult.’’

How was it that Healy was able to win over several hundred sophisticated Communist Party cadres to ‘‘ostensible’’ Trotskyism? And how were these ‘‘ostensible’’ Trotskyists able to produce ‘‘perhaps the best restatement of the Trotskyist purpose in English since the death of Trotsky’’ (SL preface to the second edition of ‘‘What is Revolutionary Leadership?’’, 1970)? If it was all a fraud and a facade from the beginning then why did it take a while to ‘‘work through’’ them and ‘‘create’’ a cult?

The answer is that the program of a revolutionary organization is the totality of its practice in the world—not just its formal written propaganda. This necessarily includes the internal organizational mechanism which shapes the group’s response to developments in the class struggle, i.e., the ‘‘regime question.’’ The characterization of the Spartacist League circa 1982 which we made in our founding declaration could be applied with equal validity to the Healyites of the mid-1960s. It too was ‘‘an organization with a deep contradiction between a coherent, rational, Marxist world-view and program and an increasingly abusive (and irrational) internal regime. And the process through which this contradiction [would] be resolved [was] incomplete.’’ In neither the SL of the early 1980s nor the Healyites two decades earlier was the group’s internal regime an automatic product of its formally correct program. In both cases it was in contradiction to the organization’s declared politics.

As we noted in ‘‘The Road to Jimstown’’ in the final issue of the Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt (No. 4): ‘‘Bureaucratism is ultimately counterposed to the revolutionary program and must eventually express itself politically. But formal programmatic departures need not necessarily precede bureaucratic degeneration.’’ Today the SL has departed systematically and repeatedly from the Trotskyist orthodoxy which it once upheld, just as Healy did in the late 1960s. ‘‘Hailing’’ the pro-Vietnamese Cambodian Stalinists as ‘‘Real Communists’’; ‘‘fly, fly, fly’’-ing throughout the PATCO strike; slandering opponents and critics as ‘‘Nazi-lovers’’ and police agents; calling for saving the colonial gendarmes of U.S. imperialism—these and other departures from Trotskyism, all of which occurred without significant internal resistance, were first prepared by the atrophy of internal democracy in the group and the consequent loss of capacity for correction through internal political struggle.

What Robertson et al seek to deny with their assertion that Healy’s was never a revolutionary group is the living connection between the ‘‘regime question’’ and the paper program which an organization purports to represent. But the history of the SL—just as that of the SLL/WRP before it—proves just the opposite.

Like the WRP, the SL’s:

 ‘‘…posture of ‘Trotskyism,’ utterly fraudulent though it is, is not without meaning for many members. And [Robertson]’s organization has frequently done a competent job in exposing the reformist scum and centrist confusionists who people the [international] left; hence, the [SL] is widely seen as the ‘hard Trotskyists,’ the alternative to class-collaborationist betrayal.’’

—Spartacist, Winter 1985-86

But the Spartacist tendency today is only the latest in a long line of once-revolutionary organizations which, under the pressures of isolation and failure, were transformed into something entirely different than what they originated as. Like the Healy group from which it broke some twenty years ago, the SL stands as an example that the degeneration of small revolutionary propaganda groups can sometimes take a strange and unpredictable course. Just as the SL carried forward the struggle to reforge the Fourth International, despite Healy’s attempted wrecking job at the 1966 London Conference, so today the Bolshevik Tendency intends to ensure that the continuity of authentic Trotskyism, including the contributions of the Robertson group, survives that organization’s transformation into a political bandit obedience cult

The Road to Jimstown

Originally published May 1985

In November 1984, cadres of the Spartacist League/U.S. (SL) donned witches’ hats, false noses, pigs’ faces and Nazi regalia and paraded around San Francisco State University (S.F. State) as the “Red Avengers of the Underground SYL.” With this the SL leadership announced to the left, to their own ranks and to whoever else was interested that the gradual molecular transformation of their organization into an obedience cult (a process which had been underway for some years) had reached the point of no return. Meanwhile, on the docks on the other side of town, the Spartacist League was doing its best to wreck an 11-day boycott of South African cargo–the most important political strike by any section of the American proletariat in decades (see articles elsewhere in this issue.) These two events came as the culmination of a long series of political departures from Trotskyism. Taken together they demonstrate that, while remaining formally “orthodox” on a wide range of historically derived political questions, in the real world the SL’s break from its revolutionary past is qualitatively complete.

The SL today is not what it began as–nor are those who lived through its evolution. Much of the past half-dozen years has been spent methodically grinding up the organization’s cadres–getting rid of many and attempting to morally break those who remain. The few trade-union fractions which ever acquired any roots have been largely dismantled in the process. The product of this internal wrecking operation is a membership that is pretty demoralized and pretty passive. So, when the “turn” to the costume shop was announced, there was little overt opposition–if little enthusiasm-from the cadre.

The peculiar emphasis of much of the “Red Avengers” material on clitorectomies, castrations, wet dreams and who is going to “fuck” who, reminds us of the propaganda of Lynn Marcus’s–now ultra-rightist–National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) of a decade ago. (After his wife left him for a young “Trotskyist” in England, Marcus devoted most of an issue of his theoretical magazine to considering the impotence of Trotskyism.) The SL today is not so far gone as the NCLC of the mid-1970s, but then the SL had a lot further to fall. The revolting “jokes” about the “business end” of a female shark and the references to black feminist opponents as fascists and female doberman pinschers in heat certainly recall the NCLC “polemics” and suggest a similar pathology.

Because of its heavily petty-bourgeois composition, its isolation from the organized working class and its socially marginal character, the left in America has historically been subject to idiosyncratic manifestations of various sorts. The SL is not the first, nor for a left which spawned Tim Wohlforth’s Workers League (WL) and the NCLC, the worst. But it is the most important. The Spartacist League was not just one left grouping among many–it was the crystallization of the left-wing opposition to the political destruction by Pabloite revisionism of the revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP)–a party built by James P. Cannon and trained by Leon Trotsky to carry forward Bolshevism amid the destruction of the Communist International by the syphilis of Stalinism.

Even before it was expelled from the SWP, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), the SL’s progenitor, underwent a split. Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL) and erstwhile mentor of the RT, ordered his followers to sign their names to a lie. A majority of the group, led by James Robertson, refused to do so. They broke from almost half their tendency at the cost of substantially reducing their chances of winning over a section of the SWP cadre because telling the truth was more important. It was an honorable beginning.

For two decades the Spartacist League defended the essential programmatic positions of Leninism–often in isolation. On many occasions, the “sterile orthodoxy” of the SL was powerfully vindicated by events. In the heyday of black nationalism in the U.S., the SL fought for a perspective of revolutionary integration. When Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular came to power in Chile in 1970, Spartacist warned that it would end in a bloodbath. More recently, the SL stood alone on the left in opposing Khomeini and his mullahs before they came to power in Iran, in defending the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and in intransigent hostility to the capitalist-restorationist clerical reactionaries of Poland’s Solidarnosc. So what went wrong?

The Early 1970s–High Tide

By the late 1960s virtually all of the founding cadres of the RT had departed and Jim Robertson was left alone at the top. The cadres who remained in the organization, particularly after the departure of Dave Cunningham et al in 1972, were products of the radicalization of the 1960s, and had pretty much been shaped by Robertson. The SL had become “Jim’s group,” or at least a group in which Robertson’s authority and experience vastly outweighed everyone else’s. Unlike Trotsky in the Fourth International or Cannon in the SWP, he came to like it that way.

There were seeds of the present authoritarian regime in the SL for a long time. But there were also seeds of a great many other potential developments. The disintegration of the New Left in the early 1970s opened up a period of explosive growth, both qualitative and quantitative, for the SL. In three years the organization tripled in size. Many of those who joined in this period were mature people with substantial prior political experience. The Communist Working Collective of Los Angeles, for example, insisted on the SL’s commitment to establishing a regular press, trade-union fractions and a black base as conditions of fusion.

The founding of Workers Vanguard (WV) in 1971 was a key part of the process referred to as the “transformation” of the SL. The previously loose membership norms were tightened up; the functioning of the national center was professionalized; and most importantly perhaps, the SL began a systematic intervention into the proletariat. There was considerable political openness in the group in those days and, while there were no factional lineups, there were instructive debates on a variety of questions, some of which found their way into the internal bulletins. In this period the Robertson regime was manifestly pushing the work of the group forward, winning dozens of new cadres to Trotskyism and was essentially correct programmatically on all the decisive questions which it confronted.

The centralization of the Spartacist League initially represented a significant step forward from the organizational amorphousness of the 1960s. It enabled the SL to become an effective fighting propaganda group and a real factor in the American left for the first time. Massive membership transfers, at first occasioned by the organization’s industrial turn, also provided an opportunity for the central leadership to shape and control the composition of each local. Particular care was taken in putting together the local leaderships. In and of itself, this procedure was not bureaucratic-it was part of the leadership’s mandate for setting up new locals. However, it established a precedent which quickly became a norm. Key figures in locals were regularly transferred, co-opted and demoted at the center’s suggestion. Before long the selection of local (and later international) leaderships had effectively become New York’s prerogative.

And even at the top, the democratic aspect of “democratic centralism” in the SL atrophied considerably through the 1970s. At the height of the transformation, in the two years preceding the departure of the Cunningham grouping in 1972, the political bureau (PB–the body which is supposed to constitute the day-to-day political leadership of the group) met 39 times, or once every two and a half weeks. Ten years later, over the same period of time, it met on the average only once every two months. Leaving aside the contents of the meetings, which in themselves reflect the depoliticization of the internal life of the SL, this signifies that the function of the SL’s elected leadership is simply to ratify the decisions of the real leadership–Robertson and whoever he chooses to “consult.”

Tightening the Screws

In the mid-1970s, while things were slowing down domestically, the SL began to invest a lot of resources, both human and material, in building toeholds internationally. By 1978 there were potentially viable groups with some real accumulation of cadres in Britain, Germany, and to a lesser extent, in France. The French were handicapped by the existence of sizable ostensible Trotskyist centrist competitors, but the German and especially the British groups seemed to have rather large opportunities on the horizon.

However, back in the U.S., things were pretty stagnant. The membership was contracting and there were no prospects of big breakthroughs by the trade-union fractions. In an article on a national gathering of SL trade unionists, WV reported that:

“Speaking at the opening plenary session, SL National Chairman James Robertson frankly addressed the `crisis of expectations’ of this layer of comrades, idealistic formerly young people shaped centrally by the radicalization of the Vietnam war era, whose experience in politics conveyed no gut-level awareness of the ebbs and flows of class struggle.”

“The `crisis of expectations’ had tended to weigh most heavily on the SL’s most vulnerable and submerged elements, our trade unionists.”
–WV No. 144, 11 February 1977

A companion piece noted that: “the SL’s practice of recruitment on a sound political basis and setting realistic organizational goals has enabled it to survive the present period without a major faction fight, split, or hemorrhaging of the cadre.” But this was clearly what was worrying the leadership–they believed that the SL possessed all the essential ingredients for a factional eruption of some sort. The answer? Tighten the screws.

In a piece written just after he was terminated as leader of the Workers League in 1974, Tim Wohlforth described democratic centralism a la Healy:

“Open discussion and political struggle was discouraged by Comrade Healy’s tendency to push every discussion to the most extreme point and to seek to break the person who disagreed with Comrade Healy.”
–“The Workers League and the International Committee”

This is roughly how things worked in the SL as well, on those rare occasions when someone would venture to disagree with comrade Robertson. For example, in early 1978, SL Political Bureau member Liz Gordon suggested in a WV editorial board meeting that a draft article which Robertson had co-authored was perhaps a bit “unbalanced” on the woman question. She also had the temerity to request that Robertson not interrupt her while she was speaking (a practice which denotes pecking order in the SL–Robertson routinely interrupts everyone and no one interrupts him). Robertson, who wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted on anything, went into a frenzy. He accused Gordon of being a liar and mentally ill, spat on the floor and stormed out of the room. This was followed by threats of a split–i.e., a purge of his critics. At a subsequent International Executive Committee meeting, with members flown in from the overseas sections, Gordon and others who had shared her criticism were duly trashed as an example to any others who might contemplate such lese majeste in future. The whole incident was considered so “educational” that it was printed up as part of an internal bulletin.

The Clone Purge and the “Second Transformation”

If Robertson did no more than humiliate and threaten to get rid of the cadres who produced WV, he felt fewer inhibitions in dealing with the editorial staff of Young Spartacus (YSp), the youth paper. Six months after the WV blowup, Robertson launched a purge of the young male writers of YSp (dubbed “clones”) whom he perceived as a potential base for someone’s faction somewhere down the line. The clone purge began the “second transformation” of the SL. In many ways nothing had changed–the group had been more or less run by Jim’s fiat for years. Yet this abusive and destructive purge did represent something new. For one thing, the leadership openly admitted it was “subpolitical.” More importantly, the clone hunt was deliberately intended to destroy and drive out an entire layer of talented young cadres. This was a significant new development. Before long, the treatment dished out to the “clones” was used on other elements of the cadre. Initially those hardest hit were the trade unionists. The common denominator of those who got the chop was that they were thought capable of becoming oppositionists at some future date.

The ranks were suddenly found to be full of “shits,” “pigs … .. male chauvinists” and “sexual manipulators.” “Proof” for these accusations was manufactured by going around the membership and collecting bits of conversations, casual remarks, or even impressions of people’s attitudes–anything which could be cobbled together into some kind of “case” against the designated targets. When no “evidence” was discovered, it was invented. Usually the leadership managed to get rid of whomever it wanted without having to resort to disciplinary proceedings. Only for exceptionally “hard cases,” like Fred Riker, who was falsely accused of cheating on his pledge and then tried in absentia, was it necessary to manufacture formal charges as a pretext for expulsion.

WV’s coverage of the concurrent purging and bloodletting in Jack Barnes’s Socialist Workers Party had all the freshness and immediacy that comes with intimate familiarity with the subject matter. One wag observed that the articles had the quality of a message in a fortune cookie reading: “Help, I’m trapped in a Chinese cookie factory.” Many former SLers were struck by how closely the lurid projections of life in “Barnestown” corresponded to the reality of “Jimstown.” The following account of the Barnes clique’s preparations for getting rid of the SWP old guard provides a perfect description of how purges are set up in the SL. They:

“had to be preceded by a good deal of sinister and conspiratorial lining-up activity…. Approaches have to have been made to individuals, probably to anybody that was anybody…. Those who didn’t pick up the cues and failed to smile and sneer in the right places would simply have been placed on a secret enemies list earmarked for later disposition.”

“In between: the slimy cliquist operation, feeling out the cadres, lining up those that were ready, marking out the others for the ax when the time was ripe.”
–WV No. 353, 27 April 1984

This same article criticizes Barnes for the “selective `reregistration’ ” of the SWP membership in 1983. It doesn’t mention that the SL has used similar procedures in its own internal purges. The difference is that Barnes is more straightforward. In the SL, reregistration occurs under the guise of setting up a pro-party faction; those who aren’t allowed to join are driven out of the organization, whereupon the “faction” is dissolved.

Obedience Training in the SL

Most of the techniques employed in the purges in the SL didn’t have to be improvised–the nightmarish internal meetings had long been a feature of life in the group. What was different was their intent and, consequently, the voltage. For the first time the “fights” were aimed at politically eliminating the cadres targeted, not just bringing them to heel. Thus the SL, which had long operated at the Healyite margin of what could be considered “democratic centralism,” propelled itself outside the parameters of Leninist practice altogether and set off on the road to Jimstown.

Cannon once remarked that if you get a few people in a room for long enough, they can talk themselves into practically anything. That observation increasingly guided the leadership as the SL’s internal political life atrophied and its degeneration proceeded in the late 1970s. The “fights” became outright psychological gang-bangs. Among Maoists, this technique was known as “criticism/self-criticism.”

Here’s how it works in the SL. A meeting is called where the designated comrade is called to account for mistakes which he allegedly committed. Each item on the bill of particulars is grossly exaggerated and extrapolated; perfidious motivations (political and/or personal) are attributed. Incidental personal criticisms of the individual’s mannerisms, lifestyle or demeanor are thrown in for good measure. Those leading the attack typically do a good deal of histrionic screaming and posturing in order to create the proper emotionally-charged atmosphere. The assembled membership is expected to provide the chorus: repeating and embellishing on the accusations. (A reluctance to participate is punishable by being made the next point on the agenda.) Attempts by the accused to agree with the substance of the charges are initially dismissed as disingenuous and insincere, unless the hapless “star” of the proceedings is prepared to exceed all the others in vilifying himself. There is no beating the rap. If you can prove that some of the allegations are false, new ones are quickly invented. Or you are charged with using “lawyer’s arguments” and attempting to obscure the overall picture by quibbling over “details.” In some cases, the refusal of individuals involved to “come clean with the party” (i.e, confess to the charges) is itself taken as evidence of an anti-leadership attitude. After all, if you don’t agree with the charges, then you must think the campaign against you is a bureaucratic atrocity!

Round after round, meeting after meeting, the “fight” continues until the object of the exercise gives up and hands in his resignation or confesses in what is deemed a suitably abject and contrite manner. Breaking down and crying is usually taken as evidence of sincerity, especially in men. The “fight” is then concluded with the unanimous passage of some harshly condemnatory motion. Anyone fortunate enough to be deemed worthy of one last chance can expect to spend at least the next few months as a pariah. Eventually there is a new victim and, with luck, the previous target can gradually recoup his status as a regular member. But the “lesson” is not quickly forgotten.

The leadership’s shock therapy techniques are deliberately intended to break the personal and political self-confidence of those subjected to them. Usually the “fights” are aimed at potential “troublemakers”–the idiots and yes-men can usually be integrated without difficulty. The choice posed: to crawl or to leave the group (known as opting for a “biological existence”) is only a difficult one for those who take the politics seriously.

These practices create enormous pressures within the organization. They have proved remarkably effective in shaping and molding (i.e., atomizing and intimidating) the SL membership. This in turn promotes among many a desire to ingratiate themselves with the leadership, a constant need to be assured that they are “doing well” and an acute sensitivity to subtle hints on how to do so.

The Poisoned Internal Life of the SL

Stalin is reported to have told the Lovestoneites in Moscow in 1929 that “When you get back to America, nobody will stay with you except your wives.” Robertson is more ambitious. Frequently in the course of SL purges, extraordinary efforts are directed at splitting couples and getting one to testify against the other. Conversely, those who refuse to split up with soon-to-be ex-comrades know that they will not long survive them in the organization. In one case, a woman who turned on her mate at the party’s suggestion won a gold chervonets. (The chervonets, or “golden dog biscuit,” is the SL equivalent of the Order of Stalin. It is awarded by Robertson to any member whose actions have particularly pleased him.)

The purges in the SL gave a lot of little people the chance to vent their frustrations and “get even” for petty grievances (real or imagined) against the victims. Some joined in with a mixed sense of fear and excitement, glad not to be on the receiving end and anxious to demonstrate their regime-loyalty. The most debased elements acquired new skills–interpretive accusation and cavalier disregard for the truth. They became masters of the art of the shrill and hysterical denunciation, and eagerly strained to be first on the round to jump on the back of each new victim. More experienced and decent people didn’t really believe much of it but kept their eye on the “big picture” and tried not to get their hands any dirtier than necessary. They suppressed their qualms and tried to focus on whatever grains of truth they could find in the indictments. Besides, they told themselves, the SL is the only revolutionary party in the world and this just isn’t worth going out over.

Among the casualties of the “second transformation” was the record of honesty long maintained by the Spartacist press. Today the poisoned internal life of the organization is reflected in Workers Vanguard’s brazen and cynical willingness to lie, just like Challenge, the Bulletin or the Daily World.

The shriekers and screamers who compose an ever-larger proportion of the SL/SYL have similarly learned to evaluate truth and falsehood in the light of the “party question” (i.e., “it’s alright as long as we do it because we know that we’re revolutionary”). Once widely regarded by the reformist and centrist left as honest, serious and “orthodox,” the SL today is perceived with equal justice as dishonest, nasty and nutty.

“Integrating” the International

The recomposition of the membership quickly extended outside the SL to its satellite sections. Here Robertson faced special problems. The European cadres regrouped by the SL tended to be highly political and generally possessed considerable experience as left-oppositionists in their former organizations. They were hardly predisposed to the commandism of the Spartacist “international.” Moreover, as many of these comrades had spent years working together, they couldn’t necessarily be counted on to carry out any and every instruction from New York. They had been won to the formal politics of the Spartacist tendency but had not been “integrated” organizationally.

For a time Robertson sought to solve this problem by personally homogenizing his international. To this end, he had an “International Secretariat” seat created for himself on the central committees of both the German and British groups, all the while retaining his post as National Chairman of the SL/U.S. Eventually the jet lag proved too much, so he opted for a series of brutal and pseudo-political purges, which eliminated the bulk of the experienced cadres and ensured that each section had a leadership in which reliable hand raisers predominated. This “solved” the problem of political differences arising in the overseas franchises.

Today the international Spartacist tendency is an “international” built around obedience to a single individual. It holds congresses about as frequently as Stalin’s Comintern. There is no discipline for the privileged leadership of the American section (which doubles as the international leadership), while complete obedience is demanded from all the others, down to the most trivial organizational details.

By the late 1970s the initial enthusiasm for “building the international” had worn off and the SL adopted a new motto: “charity begins at home.” The tap was turned off and the organization’s funds were poured into a new project–“the building” which, if nothing else, represents security for someone in his dotage.

Robertsonism vs. Cannonism

Robertson has always made much of his claim to represent the continuity of Cannonism in the contemporary American left. To the extent that the SL adhered to the Trotskyist program, there was a substantial basis for such a claim. But Robertson always meant more particularly that he represented Cannon’s organizational techniques, and in that he does Cannon a real injustice. Cannon was a serious factionalist. He fought hard and, on occasion, was doubtless guilty of bending a few sticks a little too far. But his organizational techniques were not those of Robertson and life in the SWP was a far different experience than in the SL. This is evident by even a casual reading of the SWP internal documents and can be confirmed by talking to SWP old-timers or reading their correspondence. From the formation of the Communist League of America in 1928 through the 1940 split with the Shachtmanites to the purge of the RT in 1963, Cannon’s organization had a vibrant internal life. There were many tendencies, several factions as well as a great number of political disputes within the organization which never assumed organized form. Oehler, Goldman-Morrow, Johnson-Forest, Cochran-Clarke, Vern-Ryan, Marcy and others all felt free to make harsh and blunt criticisms of the leadership. In many cases, they did so for years. In Cannon’s party, differences were not suppressed as in the SL, but fought out politically. In some cases this led to splits, in others not. Cannon ran a firm but democratic regime which recognized that internal political struggle was inevitable and even necessary and which treated its minorities loyally. Jim Cannon could live with a little dissent. In his party, up to the expulsion of the RT, you had to do something to get driven out.

Robertson adopted the conception which Cannon advanced in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party that organizational differences frequently mask latent political differences, but with a convenient corollary from Healy–that organizational grievances in the absence of formal “political” differences are only raised by anti-party wreckers looking to form rotten blocs. This handy formula boils down to the proposition that the organizational question is not a political question–particularly when it involves criticism of the leadership. Consequently it is an unprincipled question to fight over and those who make such criticisms deserve to be smashed. Within the SL, the argument that the organizational question is not a political question has functioned as the leadership’s license to abuse the membership.

Cannon knew that building a real movement meant there would inevitably be all kinds of shadings of difference. He didn’t go after them unless they had begun to express themselves in a counterposed program. It wasn’t that Cannon never thought of doing things Robertson’s way–he chose not to.

“It is perfectly possible for slick leaders to write ten constitutions guaranteeing freedom of criticism in a party and then create an atmosphere of moral terrorization whereby a young or inexperienced comrade doesn’t want to open his mouth for fear he will be made a fool of, or sat on, or accused of some political deviation he doesn’t have in his mind at all.”
–The SWP in World War II, page 329

Robertson set up precisely this kind of operation. Initially it was designed to cheat history by short-circuiting the factional losses which usually result from sharp political struggle in a revolutionary organization. Resolving to avoid such losses in his operation, Robertson spent a great deal of time–particularly after discovering in 1972 that a whole section of the SL leadership was disaffected and discussing mutiny–sniffing out potential opponents and hitting them before they could do any damage.

The Organizational Question as a Political Question

Such techniques have a price. They not only affect the quality of political life in the group, but also tend to develop a momentum of their own. Tomorrow’s dissident learns from the experience of today’s, and thus any expression of political difference tends to become increasingly covert. Ultimately in the SL the “shortcut” became its opposite as the very techniques which were designed to prevent costly splits, minimize cadre loss and safeguard the organization’s programmatic integrity ended up in a massive hemorrhaging of the membership.

The increasingly bureaucratic and eventually anti-political internal life of the SL (it is now seventeen years since the last faction fight) was both the first form of its departure from Leninism and the framework within which all of the subsequent revisionist departures have taken place. An organization with formally correct politics run by a leadership centrally concerned with maintaining its own absolute authority and willing to resort to abusive, anti-democratic internal practices to do so, is a deeply contradictory formation. Over time the tension between the mask and the face must inevitably express itself in programmatic revisions falling outside the organizational question because democratic centralism in a Leninist organization is not a desirable option but an indispensable necessity. The Spartacist League today, crippled by years of suppression of any and all dissident opinion, has lost the capacity to correct the errors of the leadership as it begins to attack the programmatic foundations of the movement.

The development of a rigid, authoritarian style of leadership in a communist organization reveals both a fundamental lack of confidence in the membership and, ultimately, in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. One long-time Spartacist cadre recently wrote us: “I recall Robertson once telling me his ideal organization consisted of a cool, flexible leadership which could make turns and `do deals’ and a `foam-flecked’ (his words) rank and file.” This is of a piece with Robertson’s aphorism that “good Catholics make good communists,” i.e., they are familiar with the doctrine of leadership infallibility. The SL’s National Chairman, who has been heard to scream “I SHOULD BE THE RULER OF THE WORLD” while raging around the headquarters, has a somewhat lower estimate of the capacities of his followers. At a public meeting in New York in 1978, he remarked that he was often inclined to think of the membership as “a big bag of shit.” The ranks are encouraged to think of themselves in similar terms. The notion that “deep down I’m really a rotten, anti-party element who fears the anti-Soviet war drive and doesn’t sell enough papers” is constantly inculcated in every SLer, and the further outside of Robertson’s coterie, the more this is driven home.

Of course, in a historical sense, it is anomalous to have a tiny bureaucratic leftist organization with no necessary relation to the society within which it exists. This always provided the Healyites with a convenient axiomatic “proof” that their organization couldn’t be bureaucratic. Workers Vanguard (31 January 1975) noted:

“Wohlforth always dismissed the Spartacist tendency’s allegations about the grossly bureaucratic practices of the Healy/Wohlforth regimes with smug demands that we demonstrate upon what materially privileged stratum the WL regime is based.”

In the first (internal) polemic against the ET, SL leader Al Nelson responded to our charge of bureaucratism in the SL as follows:

“Ours is not a bureaucratic party. Bureaucratism, in a Marxist sense, arises when new policies and program representing alien class forces contradict the program and traditions of the revolutionary party. In order to impose such policies on the party, the leadership is compelled to suppress party democracy, to form the line through by bureaucratic coercion, and to concentrate all power in the party apparatus.”
–SL Internal Discussion Bulletin No. 40, page 63

How closely Nelson’s argument parallels Wohlforth’s. Both insist that bureaucratic practices within tiny socialist groupings must reflect some alien class force. Very neat and tidy. No room for the development of mini-personality cults or small group megalomania. But life is more complex–which is why we have the Posadases, the Healys and the Robertsons (not to mention the Marcuses).

Nelson also takes up the tricky problem of the Healyite regime of the mid-1960s:

“There is always a consonance between program and party regime. `But how to explain Healy circa 1966…’ shout the ETs, claiming to have found the exceptions that break the rule. In 1967, one year after our expulsion from the London IC conference, the Healyites came out for political support to Mao and the Red Guards…”

This really isn’t much of an explanation. The SLL’s revisionism in 1967 hardly accounts for the nature of its regime a year earlier. Healy’s 1962 demand that every member of the RT perjure himself as a condition for remaining in the SLL’s international faction is irrefutable evidence that there need not always be a consonance between formal program and party regime. Even within the iSt, the leadership has occasionally claimed to have discovered abusive and/or bureaucratic regimes which nonetheless functioned for years without overt programmatic manifestations. Bureaucratism is ultimately counterposed to the revolutionary program and must eventually express itself politically. But formal programmatic departures need not necessarily precede bureaucratic degeneration as the SL itself recognized in its contemporary comment on the 1966 IC expulsion:

“the Healy-Banda machine subordinates real political issues of agreement and disagreement to the exigencies of organizational issues and personal prestige politics. That organizational tendency is itself a political issue of the first order.”
–Spartacist No. 6, 1966

The Intervention of the External Tendency

The External Tendency was formed in 1982 by former members of the iSt. As we stated in our founding document, the SL was then an organization in contradiction:

“The critical aspect of the current stage of development of the iSt is that it is an organization with a deep contradiction between a coherent, rational, Marxist worldview and program and an increasingly abusive (and irrational) internal regime. And the process through which this contradiction will be resolved is incomplete.”

We projected a course of work to generate a political struggle within the iSt to restore the organization to revolutionary health, and held open the possibility that the group–or at least a significant portion of it–would be salvageable. We were well aware that the SL was at that point highly bureaucratic and had many cultish features, but we also recognized that at least externally it still represented a fair approximation of a Trotskyist propaganda group.

We hammered away at the SL every time it strayed from its Trotskyist heritage, whether it was ignoring the PATCO picket lines, carrying the flags of the Salvadoran popular front, designating its supporters the “Yuri Andropov Brigade” or dismantling its trade-union fractions. In each case, the SL leadership adamantly defended its mistakes as a matter of prestige and dared the membership to line up with us.

Many of the SL’s critics, noting the adulation of Yuri Andropov in WV, concluded that the organization had become definitively Stalinophilic. Yet when the Soviets justifiably terminated the KAL 007 spy-flight in September 1983, the SL’s immediate reaction was to drop the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. Workers Vanguard proclaimed that if the Soviets had known that there were civilian passengers on board then “despite the potential military damage of such an apparent spying mission,” shooting it down would have been “worse than a barbaric atrocity.” This cowardly flinch was far closer to State Department socialism than Stalinophilia and illustrated that in breaking with its revolutionary past, the SL had become profoundly unstable politically. Such erratic programmatic gyrations in response to immediately perceived interests are characteristic of political banditry–a peculiar and particularly cynical form of centrism.

WV’s cowardly reaction to the demolition of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 provided another graphic demonstration of the extent of the erosion of revolutionary will at the top of the SL/US. The reflex response of any decent socialist to the fate of the Marines in Lebanon should have been “so what, they had no business being there in the first place.” Instead of siding with the victims of imperialist intervention, the SL leadership raised the social-patriotic call to save the surviving Marines. With this it was becoming clear that what was at issue in the political battle between the ET and the SL leadership was not how best to apply the Trotskyist program, but the program itself.

The SL responded to the political pressure from the ET with a torrent of slander and abuse. Al Nelson set the tone in his internal polemic vilifying ETers as: “Liars, traitors, apologists for racism and genocide, petty bureaucrats, anti-Soviet popfrontists and wreckers.” The ranks were instructed to respond to us with “fanatical hatred” and individual members were encouraged to outdo one another in mudslinging. When our critique of “Marines Alive” struck a responsive chord in a section of the membership, the SL leadership responded with an ugly provocation. At a mass Greyhound picket in San Francisco in December 1983, several SLers loudly accused our supporters of being “Nazi-lovers” and “scabs” in a blatant attempt to incite militants in the crowd to attack them. When that didn’t work, two well-known SL supporters started elbowing one of our people.

In an attempt to reach those members who were uncomfortable with the leadership’s clear movement away from Trotskyism, we formally applied to rejoin the iSt as a tendency. This challenge to the SL’s fiction of a democratic internal life posed a difficult problem for Robertson et al. They didn’t want to appear politically afraid of a small group of former members and yet they had not spent the previous five years purging any and all potential critics in order to turn around and permit a disciplined oppositional tendency to rejoin. So they began to escalate the slander campaign with filthy insinuations that our protest of their behavior in San Francisco was derived somehow from COINTELPRO and that we therefore had some shadowy connection to the FBI.

The purpose of such slander in the left, whether practiced by Stalinists, Healyites or Robertsonites, is always the same–to discredit one’s opponents without having to answer them politically. It also has the effect of “locking in” those members who participate. Every time someone engages in slander or violence against an opponent, he is much more closely to the degenerate leaders who ordered it. Even when people break with such an organization, most feel themselves so deeply compromised by their own participation in such practices that they tend to leave politics entirely. This was always an important technique in cohering the Workers League and historically prevented all but a tiny handful from ever crossing over to the SL.

The Spartacist League as a Potemkin Village

The Spartacist League is increasingly coming to resemble a fake-revolutionary potemkin village. Events in the “big world” are of less and less interest. What really matters is that the dues base remains intact. This is reflected in a press which is often full of “in-house” news about SL activities and events, coverage of which is carried to absurd lengths. The SL has come to take great pride in its abstention from many of the important mobilizations by the rest of the left. In 1982 they boycotted a significant anti-Nazi demonstration initiated by the black community in Oroville, California. They also boycotted the massive 1983 anti-Cruise demonstrations in Canada. Last summer when a thousand protesters gathered to demonstrate against Jerry Falwell and the sinister Moral Majority in San Francisco during the week of the Democratic Convention, the SL refused to participate. Spartacist contingents have also been conspicuously absent from most of the recent demonstrations against U.S. intervention in Central America.

It is not stupidity or laziness that keeps the SL out of such demonstrations–this policy is a necessary concomitant to running a potemkin village. What would new recruits (who are joining what they are assured is the one and only legitimate group on the left) think if the SL participated in joint actions with other organizations, all of which are supposed to be involved in a murky, cop-infested “Big Lie” plot against “the party”?

The “second transformation” of the SL has also involved withdrawal from the trade unions. This began with the 1980 removal of leading spokespersons from phone and longshore/warehouse (the two unions in which SL-supported caucuses had won recognition as the chief opposition to the bureaucrats). In 1983 all the SL-supported stewards in the phone union resigned their posts citing first one pretext and then another. Meanwhile the organization has pulled out of auto and has nothing left in steel.

What union work remains is characterized by wild swings between left-posturing sectarianism and craven opportunism. The SL brazenly attempted to wreck the 11-day ILWU boycott of South African cargo this past November in San Francisco simply because ET supporters played a key role in organizing it. In a page taken straight from “Healy at Liege,” secondary tactical questions were elevated to “principles” in a cynical effort to provide a “left” cover for the SL’s attempts to derail the whole action.

In local elections in New York transit in 1983, it was a different story. The “leftism” was put on the back burner as SL supporters offered a no-contest agreement to Arnold Cherry, a black business unionist who WV openly admitted was no better than the incumbent. So we had the spectacle of SL trade-union supporters doing exactly what they had always chastised the opportunist fake-left for doing—trying to hitch a ride on the coattails of a popular out-of-office bureaucrat.

Gimmicks and Maneuvers

Instead of struggling for political hegemony within the left and the union movement, the SL leadership has sought to substitute a series of maneuvers and gimmicks, each of which is supposed to result in a spectacular breakthrough in the near future. When one fails to produce the projected result, then it’s on to the next, in the time-honored tradition of all fakers.

The first time the SL resorted to a “get-rich quick” scheme was in 1979 when Robertson himself announced the objectively unrealizable “200 recruitment” drive, launched in the wake of the clone purge. In 1981 there was another failed recruitment campaign, this one in the context of the “Anti-Imperialist Contingents.” This time there were short-term successes but the gains were quickly frittered away.

In November 1982 the SL pulled out all the stops and mobilized several thousand black workers and youth in a successful anti-Klan demonstration in Washington D.C. This was the climax of three years of anti-fascist mobilizations spearheaded by the SL. On the basis of the D.C. rally, the leadership decided that black recruitment was an easy shortcut to success. While continuing to rip up the trade-union fractions, the leadership announced a “turn” toward black work–at least in the pages of WV. In practice the black turn consisted mostly of announcing the creation of phantom front-groups (the “Labor/Black Struggle Leagues”–LBSLs) and then sitting back and waiting for them to fill up with members. Yet even with dues set at 25 cents a month, there were no takers for the LBSLs. The “70 percent black party” projected at the 1983 National Conference remains overwhelmingly white.

With the LBSLs stillborn, the leadership made a mini-turn toward strike chasing in the spring of 1984. The SL membership was sent out on a summer sub-drive to find isolated union militants in outlying areas who, it was hoped, would read a few issues of WV and then flood into the SL to take lessons on how to play “hardball.” This too turned out to be a flop. Effective strike-support work requires a solid trade-union base. Strike chasing cannot substitute for the long and difficult struggle to forge a revolutionary leadership in the mass organizations of the proletariat.

The gimmicks and the get-rich-quick schemes, the cynicism and the slander, are indicative of a profound political demoralization at the top of the SL. Like most of the rest of his political generation, Robertson was deeply marked by the period of defeats for the left in the 1950s. In a candid moment, he made the following observation:

“…my weakness comes from the fact that I have in some ways never transcended the first ten years of my political experience, in a little group in the midst of the witchhunt, where everything was contained in oral discussion, so I never developed the habit of writing. Even if this were not true, I can’t leave an unambiguous political estate; [I] am a product of the witchhunt, and [that] is a weakness I carry with me … I have a pretty deep political caution [I] treasure Lessons of October highly therefore, [I] am left with the feeling you can’t win, after year after year of people leaving the movement. In my experience this is normal. I try to fight it.”
–Expanded Political Bureau Minutes, 25 June 1972

For a long time Robertson did “fight it” but today the prospects of seeing a breakthrough in his lifetime must seem more remote than ever. He is burned out as a revolutionary. But he still has a couple of hundred followers, an established press, an extremely comfortable lifestyle and some valuable real estate–all held together by a political history which means less and less to him. Might as well enjoy things before he checks out.

Robertson has opted for the considerable pleasures of being a big fish in his own little pond. He is free to indulge his fancy as he chooses–playing Hugh Hefner one day and Robert the Bruce or “the Godfather” the next. And when he says put on the false noses, those SLers who “understand the party question” (the cynical euphemism for unquestioning obedience to the leadership), put them on without a murmur of protest.

Slipping Down the Vertical Axis

When plotting political tendencies, it is traditional to situate them on a left/right axis. Yet for the strange political effluvia generated by the North American left, one almost needs another axis–a vertical axis of correspondence to social reality. On this latter scale, the SL has moved at least as far down as it has moved to the right on the horizontal. Leftist groupings which move to the right usually do so because it seems “smart”–at least in the short run. But much of what the SL has been up to lately is not smart by any criterion–it is just plain weird.

WV’s predictions of impending fascism in the U.S. last July (with the Democratic Party convention providing Reagan’s “Reichstag fire” pretext) and the bizarre offer of a dozen SL defense guards to avert this “threat” were both so patently absurd that no one, including the SL cadre, really believed them. Thoughtful regime loyalists tried to explain their leadership’s Chicken Little scenario as a maneuver. In a sense they were right. But such “maneuvers” have a political logic. The SL’s offer to act as security guards for Mondale, like the flinch on the defense of Soviet airspace in the midst of the KAL 007 furor and the social-patriotic call to save the Marines in Beirut, was intended to indicate to the bourgeois state that, despite its hard-communist posturing, the SL is at bottom merely a harmless sect.

A few short months after the Reaganite “coup” lunacy, the leadership had its cadres running around San Francisco State dressed up as pigs, witches and Nazis in response to another “plot”–this one supposedly cooked up by the FBI and the S.F. State student council and aimed at the SYL.

SL Over the Brink

The bounds within which Robertson historically had to operate have been progressively stretched to the point where there is no longer any effective control on him within the organization. Yet the cult of Robertson the Great Man/genius-leader is peculiar in that it is not manifested in the public activity of the group (apart from the occasional bizarre and idiotic “angular” position). The analogy of which he is personally fond, is that of East Germany where everything is done by the book and a facade of collective leadership is maintained, as opposed to North Korea where the Divine Succession is literally written into the constitution. Robertson has definitely been taking the organization Korea-wards in recent years. The phrase “the party” has come to mean “Robertson.” But so far no one says this out loud inside the SL.

The SL can no longer be viewed as some sort of errant revolutionary organization with a bureaucratic regime. Rather it is the political equivalent of the pre-Qaddafi Healyites of the late 1960s; cynical former Trotskyist political bandits held together by obedience to an authoritarian lider maximo. Of course, history never repeats itself exactly, and while the Healyites’ route to political oblivion is probably the closest model for what is happening to the SL, it doesn’t correspond to it on every level. Healy never had his senior cadres dress up in witches hats. Nor did he publicly indulge in the psycho-sexual babble so typical of North American cults. The misogynist blather of the Red Avenger communiques is more reminiscent of the deranged rantings of Lynn Marcus’s NCLC.

The “clitorectomy/castration” propaganda of the Red Avengers would seem to signal a move by the leadership to close the gap between its formal political line and some of the more cultish features of the SL’s internal life. For several years Robertson has had his own little coven of sexual groupies with its own bizarre initiation rituals. They made a semi-official debut internally when, dressed in black and carrying candles, they appeared as “the Susanna Martin Choir” at a social held during the 1983 SL National Conference. (Susanna Martin was an early American witch.) In the report of the conference which appeared in WV (No. 342, 18 November 1983), it was noted that the choir’s “performance was received with wild and overwhelming acclaim.” What wasn’t reported is that running such an “informal interest association,” as WV coyly referred to it, is Robertson’s exclusive prerogative in the SL. Nor did WV mention that being one of Jim’s groupies confers great “informal” authority within the group.

In the old days one of the stories oft recounted in the SL to illustrate the limitless bureaucratism and all-round unpleasantness of life in the Workers League was how Wohlforth had once expelled several of his members because he had been made to sleep on a couch when visiting their branch. Today in the iSt comrades in European locals visited by Robertson sometimes have to spend several days hunting for a luxury hotel with a room large enough to accommodate two double beds. No one dares suggest that Jim spend a night on the couch!

The Struggle for Trotskyist Continuity

The SL is still able to present a facade of Trotskyist orthodoxy in its press when it wants to. Yet this is not so surprising–Healy’s SLL was characterized by a gruesome Caligula-style internal regime for years and yet retained the ability to produce fairly decent high-Trotskyist polemics for ceremonial occasions. Revolutionary theory has come to play essentially the same role in the iSt–a dogma which abstractly justifies the existence of the organization, but which bears increasingly little relation to its real activity.

One criterion for judging the health of an ostensibly communist organization is its ability to reproduce revolutionary cadres. The Spartacist League today is an organization which can only produce cynics. Subservience to authority is substituted for political consciousness in the membership who literally do not know what idiocy or betrayal they will be required to endorse next. All that those trained in the new school of Spartacism can really be sure of is that Trotskyism is whatever the leadership says it is. And it might be exactly the opposite tomorrow. What counts is doing what you’re told.

Many members of the Spartacist League have been badly damaged by their experiences under the Robertson regime and many are finished as revolutionists. Too many lies. Too much groveling. But there are others who embody the contradiction between the SL’s past and its present. Some of these comrades are doubtless hanging on in anticipation of a future faction fight which will produce a healthy split. But there is no inevitability of any such development. It never happened in Pierre Lambert’s Organisation Communiste Internationaliste nor in Healy’s SLL.

For a long time the SL led a kind of Dorian Gray existence. The face which was presented to the world in the pages of Workers Vanguard remained healthy, vigorous and clean, while the diseased and scabrous reality was only apparent to those on the inside. In that sense, the increasingly overt departure of the Spartacist League from its revolutionary past is a good thing as it tends to resolve the SL’s claim to represent the organizational continuity of Trotskyism. Yet we do not gloat over the self-destruction of the SL. It can only embitter and demoralize the decent people who remain within the group. More importantly, the SL’s activity discredits anti-revisionist Trotskyism in the eyes of leftists, workers, students, black militants and others who are exposed to it.

The great tragedy of the Spartacist League is that after two decades of swimming against the stream, its central leadership has ended up regarding revolutionary politics as just another cynical shell game. We respect the enormous political contribution which Robertson and his lieutenants have made in keeping alive the flame of revolutionary Marxism in our time. However under the pressure of isolation and failure, these same individuals have been transformed into an obstacle to the creation of a genuine Bolshevik vanguard.

The degeneration of the once-revolutionary SL leadership is by no means a unique historical event.

“On the basis of a long historical experience, it can be written down as a law that revolutionary cadres, who revolt against their social environment and organize parties to lead a revolution, can–if the revolution is too long delayed– themselves degenerate under the continuing influence and pressures of this same environment….

“But this same historical experience also shows that there are exceptions to this law too. The exceptions are the Marxists who remain Marxists, the revolutionaries who remain faithful to the banner. The basic ideas of Marxism, upon which alone a revolutionary party can be constructed, are continuous in their application and have been for a hundred years. The ideas of Marxism, which create revolutionary parties, are stronger than the parties they create, and never fail to survive their downfall. They never fail to find representatives in the old organizations to lead the work of reconstruction.
–James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, pages 29-30

As the Spartacist League decomposes into Yuri Andropov Brigades, Susanna Martin Choirs, Fritz Mondale Defense Squads and Red Avengers in its plunge toward political irrelevance, it is left to the External Tendency to struggle to ensure that the heritage which the SL carried forward from Cannon’s SWP is not lost. The critical task which we face in the next period is to regroup the cadres necessary to rebuild the nucleus of an authentically Bolshevik organization in North America and internationally, an organization that will be worthy of the heroic tradition of Cannon, Trotsky and Lenin.

Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

Solidarnosc: A Man’s World

[First Printed in Spartacist Britain #37, November 1981]

A CGT woman worker asks Lech Walesa in Paris why he tells women to stay at home and not struggle for their rights. Wales a replies that he has been misinterpreted — he was only speaking for Polish women!

Heaven help the Polish women Walesa speaks for. Since the time of the utopian socialist Fourier, socialists have accepted as an axiom that the status of women in society is a determining measure of how progressive that society is. And the attitude to women of the reactionary Catholic-nationalists who run Solidarnosc provides a good measure of what sort of ‘democracy’ they have in mind. A recent article in the Times (21 October) by Rachel Cullen — who expresses general sympathy with the counterrevolutionary Solidarnosc — is quite revealing on that count.

Entitled ‘Solidarity: what a pity it does not include the women of Poland’, the article points out that the top leadership of Solidarnosc consists of one president, two deputy presidents, a presidium of ten and a council of 100 — and not one woman is to be found among them. Anna Walentynowicz, the Gdansk welder whose sacking sparked the August 1980 strike was once a leading member of the council. Then a union-convened court accused her of being ‘too radical’. Walentynowicz was certainly a rabidly anticommunist Catholic nationalist, but that hardly distinguished her from the rest of the Solidarnosc leadership. What did distinguish her was that she was a woman. ‘She was still ,to be found working for the union’, writes Cullen, ‘though now in the kitchens …. The story is the same in other sections of the union: women who had been active in the underground movements began with a voice in the new union but almost all have now lost their positions of power.’ The only woman in a position of power in Solidarnosc is the Black Virgin of Czestochowa!

Even at the base sexual chauvinism is endemic. In one Roclaw factory which is three quarters women, only six out of 66 candidates for Solidarnosc’s plant delegation were women.

Abortion on medical and social grounds was legalised in Poland in 1947. The Family Rights Act of 1949 gave women the right for the first time to divorce and to take a job without their husbands’ consent. Inevitably the Catholic Church bitterly attacked these gains and the Stalinist bureaucracy undermined them by capitulating to reaction with the old crap about ‘the socialist family’, a vital prop of ‘socialism in one country’. But these gains still exist and must be defended against Solidarnosc’s programme of ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’. Only socialised property relations can lay the basis for women’s liberation and a proletarian political revolution would stand foursquare on defending and extending those gains into the full social and political liberation of women that Stalinism prevents. Solidarnosc, behind the banners of the Black Virgin of Czestochowa, the crowned eagle of Pilsudski and with the blessing of the pope, has set its face on reversing them.

RESIGNATION FROM THE SL/U.S.

 

by Howard H.

 

[Reprinted in SL/US Internal Bulletin, August 1983]

 

5 Sept., 1981 Oakland

 

Keith D.–District Organizer

Spartacist League–Bay Area

 

I am resigning from the Spartacist League, U.S. and from my post on the Central Control Commission. I have considered this action carefully since last Sunday’s District Conference and have concluded that it is impossible for me to remain within and under the disci­pline of the organization.

 

Statements made by the District Organizer and the T-2 fraction organizer make it probable that in the future I will be prevented from working weekends; a punitive action which would create an insol­uble conflict between my personal obligations and the demands of the organization.

 

If I were to attempt to remain within the S.L. the tensions deriving from my distrust of and contempt for the central leadership and the expected ongoing campaign to destroy and discredit me politi­cally will inevitably result in a confused, unclear confrontation over secondary questions.

 

I would have preferred to remain in the organization and attempt to open a fight over the real question of the defensive regime, the increasingly cult-like internal life of the organization, and the consequences of these trends in the work of the S.L.

 

For about a year I have been moving toward the conclusion that distortions in the leadership of sections, locals, and fractions have developed and matured–at least in part from an internal life charac­terized by a defensive, hierarchical regime combined with a person­alistic, Jesuitical method of internal argument and discussion. This process is advanced to the point where the S.L./S.Y.L. membership is increasingly composed of “true believers” or cynics. I suspect that the incidents of political and tactical incompetence in the S.L. are connected with this deterioration of internal life. I think the cen­tral leadership has consciously and cynically concluded that the mem­bership of the S.L. is too weak politically and personally to allow even the slightest disagreement with the leadership. There is an implied arithmetical equation: disagreement with the leadership equals hostility to the leadership equals disloyalty equals betrayal. Carried further, these trends will see the S.L. come to resemble less a principled, proletarian combat organization than a theocratic, hierarchical, political cult.

 

I remain in political agreement with the S.L. and will continue to politically support the program as expressed in the public life of the S.L. and the public work of its supporters and members. If as I fear, the deterioration of,the S.L.’s internal life leads at some time in the future to a departure from Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism in the direction of centrism or sectarianism, I will inform the S.L. of my differences and whether I feel it necessary to publicly disagree on those positions or actions.

 

I am retaining my notes on the T-2 El Salvador discussion and my notes around the PATCO strike discussions. I have destroyed (as I usually do after the passage of time) all other notes on internal discussion or reports. All questions leading up to and arising out of the events surrounding my resignation will not be revealed to non- S.L./S.Y.L. members. Although it will handicap me in my intention to continue to study and analyze the question of the internal life of the S.L., I will return the internal documents.

 

On Lisa S. I tried to defend Lisa against what appeared as a vicious, personalist attack on her to discourage her from fighting on a political question and to drive her out of the S.Y.L. In my zeal to protect her I over-reacted and did not do a very good job of pro­tecting her political/organizational rights from unprincipled organi­zational methods. I don’t think it would have been possible, no matter what I did, to protect Lisa from what the youth leadership with the probable encouragement of the S.L. district leadership was trying to do to her. As a result of my anxiety to offer what limited protection and defense I thought she had, I failed to act with suffi­cient care procedurally. Consequently, the real issues around Lisa’s motion and the S.Y.L. district meeting’s motion were obscured. This lack of care made me vulnerable to the lies, distortions, and demagoguery employed at the 29 August district meeting.

 

I will pay up all outstanding financial obligations to the S.L. as soon as possible.

 

s/H. -Bay Area S.L.

Oakland Local

 

[Full member SL/U.S.; member CCC until 31 August 1981 when CCC began poll for im­mediate suspension from post (quit before vote complete).]

Will the Real Political Bandits Please Stand Up?

Truth or Consequences

[First printed in 1917 #8, Summer 1980. Copied from http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no8/no08nrth.html ]

The following is a letter to Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/US, responding to an article slandering the Bolshevik Tendency.

16 December 1989 Comrades:

In replying to a Workers Vanguard (WV) polemic against the Workers League for its conduct in the Mark Curtis case, the 14 July 1989 Bulletin repeats several charges leveled against the Spartacist League by the Bolshevik Tendency. In your rejoinder (’’Why Should Anyone Believe David North?,’’ WV, 13 October 1989) you seize upon this opportunity to lump the BT with the Workers League (WL), citing the Bulletin article as evidence of our supposed shared anti-Sovietism, hostility to the black working class, bloodthirstiness, appetite for provocation and ‘‘petty criminal mentality.’’ Our attitude toward the Workers League has long been a matter of public record. We regard this unsavory gaggle of Gerry Healy’s erstwhile American acolytes as one of the most perfidious examples of small-group psychosis and political banditry in the recent history of the U.S. left—exceeding even your own. Having considered all the available evidence, we concluded that Iowa SWP activist Mark Curtis was indeed the victim of a police frame-up. We endorsed his defense campaign a year and a half ago. The WL’s attempt to bolster the prosecutor’s case is one more episode in its decades-long, pathological crusade to destroy the SWP by any and every unprincipled means, including slander, cop-baiting and complicity with the capitalist courts.

Yet nothing prevents even the most unscrupulous political operators from deploying the truth against opponents when it suits their purposes. How many times during the 1930s did the social-democratic and bourgeois press make use of Trotsky’s writings to discredit the Soviet Union? And how many times did the Stalinists offer these citations from Trotsky in the bourgeois press as proof of his ‘‘hatred of Soviet Russia’’ and complicity with the imperialist powers? You now employ this same Stalinist technique of guilt by involuntary association against the Bolshevik Tendency because the WL, which is not particularly selective about the means it uses to discredit opponents, has found in our literature certain facts more damning to the Spartacist League than any lies it could invent. We will no more be deterred from publishing the truth about your organization because it can be cited by rightists, reformists or political bandits than Trotsky was from telling the truth about Stalinism because it could be used by the bourgeoisie for its own counterrevolutionary aims.

Your reply to the WL refers to the ‘‘Bolshevik Tendency’s grotesque slanders of the Spartacist League,’’ while studiously avoiding mention of exactly what ‘‘slanders’’ you refer to, let alone attempting to deny them. Indeed, the only specific charge which you take up is from an article in 1917 (not cited in the WL polemic) which compares the internal regimes of Gerry Healy and James Robertson (’’The Robertson School of Party Building,’’ 1917 No. 1). In this piece we noted that whereas Healy routinely had internal opponents beaten up, ‘‘This is something which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge.’’ You wax indignant because we also noted that ‘‘intimations of such appetites are increasingly common’’ among your leadership, but you refrain from commenting on the examples of such impulses which we quoted from a former leading member of the Spartacist League/Britain. He asked: ‘‘Perhaps you could explain why Len told [a former member] to remember what the Provos do to ‘people like him.’ Or why Ed felt moved to tell [another member] that ‘if we were in [another country] we would beat you up.’’’ Reasonable people can only interpret remarks of this sort as intimating an appetite for the kind of violations of workers democracy which gave the Healyites such a deservedly bad name.

Your reply to the Northites is designed to give your readers the impression that the BT only makes vague insinuations about the SL. One would never suspect from your article that we have made a number of specific, concrete allegations concerning violations of Trotskyist principle, democratic centralism and proletarian morality on the part of your National Chairman, James Robertson, and his sycophantic clique. Several of these highly specific charges are repeated in the WL polemic. Yet you deliberately choose to ignore them. If these more specific accusations were false, you could justly indict us not only for making insinuations, but (what is far worse), for concocting outright lies about your organization. But such an indictment would necessarily involve answering our charges directly—something you are not prepared to do for one very compelling reason: they are true.

In recent years, the SL leadership has found it necessary to give its members multiple choice tests in order to upgrade their general knowledge. To enhance public knowledge about the Spartacist League, we invite you to take the following ‘‘true or false’’ test, consisting of the specific allegations from our journal, 1917, which were picked up by the Bulletin (14 July 1989):

1. ‘‘In 1984, the Workers Vanguard carried a black-bordered death notice for Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief who played a major role in the butchering of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, claiming he ‘made no overt betrayals on behalf of imperialism.’’’

2.’’Some Spartacist members who participated in a 1982 anti-Klan demonstration in Washington, DC billed themselves as the ‘Yuri Andropov Brigade.’’’

We are certain that even you would have no difficulty answering ‘‘true’’ to the above two questions, since the answers can be verified by consulting the appropriate back issues of Workers Vanguard. Publicly unacknowledged to date, however, are the following allegations contained in the Bulletin concerning the internal life of the SL:

3. ‘‘…the leadership has posted photographs of General Jaruzelski in the national office.’’

4. ‘‘Spartacist founder James Robertson had a six-figure summer home built [we said ‘‘bought’’—BT] for himself on a marina in the San Francisco Bay Area, financed by a special one-time assessment on the membership. ‘Although the house is technically the property of the organization, it is clearly intended for the personal use of Robertson….’’’

5. ‘‘‘Adjoining his private office in the group’s New York headquarters is a plush-carpeted playroom specifically designed for the nocturnal escapades that occupy an ever-increasing share of the National Chairman’s attention.’’’

6. ‘‘‘Robertson has also had a hot tub installed in his extensive two-storied Manhattan apartment’.’’

Like many other present and former SL members, we have personal knowledge that the answer to all the above questions is ‘‘true.’’ We predict that you will not print this letter in its entirety. To do so would mean confirming or denying the above charges in print; to do either would be equally damaging to the reputation of the SL leadership. To deny them would contradict the direct experience of every SL member and sympathizer who saw the picture of Jaruzelski (clearly on display for months in the maintenance department of your New York headquarters), who contributed to Robertson’s house, who spent many hours constructing the playroom and installing the hot tub. A direct denial would expose your leadership as cynical, unmitigated liars in the eyes of all these members and sympathizers.

If, on the other hand, you were to confirm these allegations, and say that, as head of a supposedly Marxist organization, Robertson is fully entitled to enjoy a materially privileged lifestyle at your members’ expense, and that Jaruzelski deserves a place of honor on your walls, you would forever forfeit any claim to be taken seriously as a Trotskyist organization, and reveal yourselves to the world as the degenerate personality cult you have become. It would then be highly improbable that any rational human being would ever want to support or join the Spartacist League.

You therefore resort to the only dodge available to a culprit on the spot: to divert attention from the accusations by sowing confusion and defaming the accuser. An ordinary gangster might attempt to impugn the reputation of a witness against him by calling the latter a rapist or a drug addict; you respond to the testimony of the Bolshevik Tendency with a battery of epithets specifically designed to discredit us in the eyes of leftists and Trotskyists: anti-Soviet renegades, trade-union bureaucrats, racists, agent-provocateurs, etc. And just in case these specifically leftist terms of opprobrium do not have the desired effect, a few more ordinary accusations—e.g., ‘‘petty criminal’’—are thrown in for good measure. These tactics—all in the worst traditions of Gerry Healy and David North—should prompt the more thoughtful readers of Workers Vanguard to ask themselves: ‘‘Why should anyone believe James Robertson?’’

Yours for workers democracy,

Jim Cullen (SL Member 1981-86)

Dave Eastman (SL Member 1972-86)

for the Bolshevik Tendency

A Workers Poland Yes! The Pope’s Poland No!

[Originally published by the then revolutionary Spartacist League, in Spartacist n. 30, Autumn 1980. Transcribed by Revolutionary Regroupment from the scan available at marxists.org]

Everyone predicted it was coming. A restive, combative working class, peasant strikes, massive foreign debt, chronic and widespread food shortages, a powerful and increasingly assertive Catholic church, the burgeoning of social-democratic and clerical-nationalist oppositional groupings. Ali the elements were there. Poland in the late ‘70s was locked in a deepening crisis heading toward explosion, an explosion which could bring either proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy or capitalist counterrevolution led by Pope Wojtyla’s church.

And when it carne it gripped world attention for two solid weeks. The Baltic coast general strike was the most powerful mobilization of the power of the working class since France May 1968. But was it a mobilization/or the working class? That is the decisive question.

There is now a settlement on paper. The bureaucracy has agreed to allow “new, self-governing trade unions” with the pledge that these recognize “the leading role” of the Communist party and do not engage in political activities. Insofar as the settlement enhances the Polish workers’ power to struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy, revolutionaries can support the strike and its outcome. But only a blind man could fail to see the gross influence of the Catholic church and also pro-Western sentiments among the striking workers. If the settlement strengthens the working class organizationally, it also strengthens the forces of reaction.

The Gdansk settlement cannot last. No Stalinist bureaucracy – a parasitic caste which must monopolize political power to preserve itself – can tolerate independent working-class opposition. And in Poland today the notion of such unions “staying out of politics” is plain ridiculous. The situation in Poland is one of cold dual power. On top of this, further clashes must come as the regime, massively in debt to Western financial institutions, cannot concede the enormous “free lunch” the workers are demanding. The big money wage increases will either fuel runaway inflation or even more severe shortages. Furthermore, the Kremlin has made disapproving noises about the settlement, and Soviet military intervention cannot be ruled out. The end of the Baltic general strike was only the beginning of the crisis of Stalinist Poland.

 

Workers Democracy or Clerical-Nationalist Reaction?

Certainly the workers are reacting against bureaucratic mismanagement, privilege and abuse. The Polish workers’ grievances are real and they are just. The firing of an old militant, Anna Walentynwicz, a few months before her retirement, which reportedly sparked the Lenin Shipyard takeover in Gdansk, should infuriate every honest worker. The existence of special shops exclusive to party members and cops is an abomination, a rejection of the most basic principles of socialism.

What of the workers’ positive allegiances and general political outlook? Early in the strike there were reports of singing the Internationale, which indicates some element of socialist consciousness. But while the imperialist media always plays up any support for anti-communist ideology in the Soviet bloc, there is no question that to a great degree the Baltic workers and their principal leaders identify with the powerful Catholic church opposition. It is not just the external signs –the daily singing of the national hymn, “Oh  God, Who Has Defended Poland,” the hundreds of strikers kneeling for mass, the ubiquitous pictures of Wojtyla-John Paul II, Lech Walesa tossing out pictures .of the Virgin Mary. The outside advisers to the strike committee consisted of prominent figures in the Catholic ZNAKgroup and these continue to advise the “new, self-governing unions.”

Even more ominous was the strike committee’s demand for “access by all religious groups [read Catholic church] tithe mass media.” This is an anti-democratic demand which would legitimize the church in its present role as the recognized opposition to the Stalinist regime. In effect the Baltic shipbuilders are asking for a state church in deformed workers state.

But that church is not loyal to the workers state. Far from it! The Polish Catholic church (virulently anti Semitic) has been a bastion of reaction even within the framework of world Catholicism. Especially since 1976 the Polish church has become increasingly open and assertive in its anti-Communism. Early last year the Wall Street Journal (2 January 1979) observed: “Thus, the priest hood has become in effect an opposition party.”

This article also pointed out that the cardinal of Krakow was especially responsible for the greater oppositional stance of the church. A few months earlier this Polish prelate had become the first non-Italian successor to the throne of St. Peter in four centuries. Karol Wojtyla is dangerous reactionary working hand in glove with U.S. imperialism (especially his fellow countryman Zbigniew Brzezinski) to roll back “atheistic Communism,” beginning in his homeland. As we wrote when this Polish anti Communist was made pope: “ … lie now stands at the head of many millions of practicing Catholics in East Europe, tremendous force for counterrevolution” (“The President’s Pope?” WV No. 217, 30 October 1978).

The Polish episcopate, fearing both Russian military intervention and its inability to control workers’ uprising, took a cautious tack during the Baltic general strike. But whatever the hierarchy’s present tactical calculations, in power vacuum the church, well-organized with a mass base, will be a potent agency for social counterrevolution.

Poland presents the most combative working class in the Soviet bloc, with a history of struggling for independent organizations going back to the mid-l 950s. It is also the one country in Eastern Europe with a mass, potentially counterrevolutionary mobilization around the Catholic church. Thus, unlike Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakian 1968, the alternatives in the present Polish crisis are not limited to proletarian political revolution or Stalinist destabilization. At the same time, it is not Afghanistan where the Soviet Red Army is playing a progressive role in crushing an imperialist-backed, clerical-reactionary uprising. In a sense Poland stands somewhere between Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan.

 

Trotskyism and “Free Trade Unions”

The Baltic strike committee’s main demand and gain was “free trade unions.” This particular slogan, pushed for years by the CIA-backed Radio Free Europe, has acquired definite anti-Communist and pro-Western connotation. Remember the 1921 Kronstadt mutiny’s call for “free soviets” – free from Communists, that is.

An integral part of the Trotskyist program for proletarian political revolution in the degenerated/ deformed workers states is the struggle for trade unions independent of bureaucratic control. Trade unions and the right to strike would be necessary even in a democratically governed workers state to guard against abuses and mistakes by administrators and managers. But it is far from clear that the “free trade unions” long envisioned by the dissidents would be free from the influence of pro-Catholic, pro-NATO elements who represent a mortal danger to the working class.

In any case, in the highly politicized situation in Poland today the “new, self-governing” trade unions cannot and will not limit themselves to questions of wage rates, working conditions, job security, etc. They will either be drawn into the powerful orbit of the Catholic church or have to oppose it in the name of socialist principle.

And in determining that outcome the presence of revolutionary vanguard party would be critical. A central task for a Trotskyist organization in Poland would be to raise in these unions a series of demands that will split the clerical-nationalist forces from among the workers and separate them out. These unions must defend the socialized means of production and proletarian state power against Western imperialism. In Poland today the elementary democratic demand of the separation of church and state is a dividing line between the struggle for workers democracy and the deadly threat of capitalist restoration.

The nucleus of a Leninist-Trotskyist opposition in Poland would have nothing to do with the present dissident groups. It would denounce the social-democratic Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR) for helping tie the workers to imperialism, the pope and Pilsudskiite anti Soviet nationalists. But among the rebellious workers there must be elements that are fed up with the bureaucracy and look back to the traditions of Polish Marxism, while having no truck with bogus “democracy” in priests’ cassocks. It is among this layer above all that revolutionaries must struggle to win the cadres to build a genuinely communist proletarian party, capable of opening the road to socialism by ousting the bureaucratic caste which falsely rules in the workers’ name.

 

Break the Imperialist Economic Stranglehold!

The abandonment of agricultural collectivization in1956 has played no small role in contributing to Poland’s present economic and political crisis. lt has saddled the country with a backward, smallholding rural economy grossly inefficient even by East European standards. And the strength of the Polish church is based on the social weight of the rural petty bourgeoisie. Today over a third of the labor force still toils in the fields, while 80 percent of farmland is privately owned. Only by eliminating their hideous poverty and rural isolation can the hold of religious obscurantism on the masses be broken. An immediate, key task for a revolutionary workers government in Poland is to promote the collectivization of agriculture.

Responding to the violent strikes/protests over food price increases in 1970-71, the new Gierek regime promised huge wage increases for the workers, higher procurement prices and state pensions for the peasants plus the rapid modernization of Polish industry. This “economic miracle”(a term actually used in official propaganda) was to be achieved through massive loans from the West and also the Soviet Union.

In an immediate sense this economic maneuver, aimed at transforming Poland into something like an East European Japan, was derailed by the 1974-75 world depression which sharply contracted the country’s export markets. At deeper level, Gierek’s economic gamble failed because the Stalinist regime is incapable of mobilizing the enthusiasm and sense of sacrifice of the Polish working people. This incompetence is endemic in a bureaucracy, more due to a lack of an effective feedback than to material privilege.

In 1978 over 50 percent of Poland’s hard currency earnings were absorbed by debt service, in 1979 over 80percent and today over 90 percent. Poland has avoided becoming the world’s biggest bankrupt only by agreeing to austerity programs imposed by its imperialist creditors. At the same time, the Russian leadership, fearing a popular explosion if the Polish masses are pushed too hard, is paying a good part of Warsaw’s foreign debt. In one sense Poland has become the intermediary through which Western finance capital sucks surplus out of the Soviet workers and peasants (whose living standards are substantially lower than those of the Poles).

While the Polish Stalinist regime’s economic mismanagement is today glaring, the historical superiority of collectivized property and centralized planning, even when saddled with a parasitic bureaucracy, remains indisputable. Between 1950 and 1976 the advanced capitalist economies grew at an average annual rate of 4.4 percent, the backward capitalist economies at 5 percent and the centrally planned East European economies 7.7 percent (Scientific American, September 1980).

The Polish workers must not pay for the gross mismanagement of the Gierek regime nor should they have any confidence in the bureaucracy’s “economic reforms.” Egalitarian and rational economic planning is possible only under a government based on democratically-elected workers councils (soviets). As a revolutionary, transitional step toward that, Polish workers must struggle against the bureaucracy for control over production, prices, distribution and foreign trade.

A revolutionary workers government in Poland would cancel the foreign debt. Well, it might export comrade Edward Gierek to West Germany where he can work off his a Socialist United States of Europe!

For the Revolutionary Utility of the Polish and Russian Workers!

Ali organized forces in Polish political life – the Stalinist bureaucracy, the church and all wings of the dissident movement-each in their own way inculcate hostility to Russia as the enemy of the Polish people. A hallmark for a revolutionary party in Poland is a positive orientation to the Russian working class. And this is not simply a question of abstract internationalism, it is a matter of life and death.

Illusions about the good will of the Western capitalist powers common in East Europe do not extend to the Soviet Union. Having lost 20 million fighting Nazi Germany, the Soviet people understand that NATO’s nuclear arsenal is targeted at them. The Soviet masses also know that the imperialist powers’ war against their country, hot and cold, began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

The Soviet working people fear the transformation of East Europe into hostile, imperialist-allied states extending NATO to their own border. The Kremlin bureaucrats exploit this legitimate fear to crush popular unrest and democratic aspirations in East Europe, as in Czechoslovakiain 1968. There were numerous reports that Soviet soldiers were shaken when on occupying Prague they encountered not a bloody fascistic counterrevolution, as they had been told, but protests by Communist workers and left-wing students.

Revolutionary Polish workers cannot hope to appeal to Soviet soldiers unless they assure them that they will defend that part of the world against imperialist attack. And a proletarian political revolution in Poland must extend itself to the Soviet Union or, one way or another, it will be crushed.

• For trade unions independent of bureaucratic control and based on a program of defending socialized property!
• For the strict separation of church and state! Fight clerical-nationalist reaction! Guard against capitalist restorations!
• Promote the collectivization of agriculture!
• For workers control of production, prices, distribution and foreign trade!
• For proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy – For a government based on democratically-elected workers councils (soviets)!
• Break the imperialist economic stranglehold – Cancel the foreign debt! Toward international socialist economic planning!
• For military defense of the USSR against imperialism! For the revolutionary unity of the Polish and Soviet working classes!
• For a Trotskyist Party in Poland, section of a reborn Fourth International!

Workers Government:

Dictatorship of the Proletariat or NDP in Power?

[Reprinted from Spartacist Canada Aug./Sept. 1979]

Picture for a moment New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Ed Broadbent kneeling before the Governor General, former NDP Manitoba premier Ed Schreyer, preparing.to be sworn in as prime minister. To connect this image with the seizure of state power by the working class is ludicrous. Yet during the past federal elections the fake-Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) proclaimed that “the road forward to a workers government” began with:

“stepping up the CL-C campaign to support NDP candidates, with the goal of electing a majority of NDP members. In Quebec, the unions could begin the task of building a mass labor party. —Socialist Voice, 21 May

The truth is that the election of a pack of career­ist social democrats to Parliament Hill has nothing to do with the fight for a workers government. But the miserable opportunists of the RWL deliberately try to equate the two in order to rationalize their “strategy” of promoting the NDP within the work­ing class. In this they follow the lead of the trade-union tops who have long advocated a “fight at the ballot box,” as a diversion from a fight on the pick­et lines.

THE WORKERS GOVERNMENT SLOGAN AND THE FOURTH CONGRESS OF THE COMINTERN

For. Leninists the call for a workers government is a call for a government based directly on organs of proletarian power (soviets, factory committees, trade unions), led by the revolutionary vanguard party and committed to the expropriation of the capitalist class. In short, it is a popularization for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In a presentation to the Spartacist League/Britain last winter Joseph Seymour, Central Committee member of the Spartacist League/U. S. , explained  the motivation for introducing the workers govern­ment slogan into the propaganda of the Communist International at its Fourth Congress in 1922:

“It was an attempt to address the following real and important contradiction. Many social-demo­cratic workers wanted their own party to carry out a socialist programme, were open to a co­alition government with the Communists and were even willing to establish such a government on the basis of proletarian organs of power, not parliamentarism. In other words, many social-democratic workers accepted the essential pro­grammatic cqre of the dictatorship of the prole­tariat, while retaining illusions in their ~paders and distrusting` the ,C*tnmunistX -At th-64,joarni I time, the socW—democratic, leaders Wet , 6 – -de­monstrated counterrevolutionaries who in a revo­lutionary situation would sabotage proletarian state power and pave the way for bourgeois reaction.

—Spartacist Britain May 1979

The discussion of the workers government at the Fourth Congress was conditioned by the disastrous experience of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March-August 1919. Throughout the brief history of the Hungarian Soviet government, which was composed of a social-democratic majority and a communist minority, the social democrats system­atically worked to undermine proletarian power and prepared the way for the victory of the counter­revolution.

Especially in light of the Hungarian experience, Zinoviev, who wrote the resolution on the “work­ers government, ” correctly wanted to express the position that the social democrats could not and would not defend the dictatorship of the proletariat. However he did so by constructing a confusing terminological schema of “workers governments”:

“1. Liberal workers’ governments, such as there was in Australia; this is also possible in England in the near future.

2.Social-democratic workers’ governments (Germany).

3. A. government of workers and the poorer peasants. This is possible in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.

4. Workers’ governments in which communists participate.

5. Genuine proletarian workers’ governments, which in their pure form can be created only by the communist party. “

–Jane Degras, ed. , The Communist Interna­tional 1919-1943 Documents, vol. 1: 1919-19ZZ, (1956)

The first two were seen as phony workers governments. The third and fourth were considered weak or transitory workers governments because the social democrats would not defend them. In his summary remarks at the congress, Zinoviev cat­egorically stated: “Yes, dear friends, in order to erect a workers government one must first over­throw and vanquish the bourgeoisie. ” By Zinoviev’s criteria, the RWL is struggling for a phony “work­ers government.

Zinoviev’s famous list of “workers governments” has been seized on by virtually every ex-Trotsky­ist revisionist who wants to abandon the fundamen­tal principles of the Leninist party and the dicta­torship of the proletariat. Joseph Hansen used the label to justify political support to the Cuban Castroite regime. Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo characterized Ben Bella’s Algeria as a “workers and farmers government. ” There was plenty of ambiguity in the discussion on the work­ers government slogan at the Fourth Comintern Congress. But it was just that–and-not the anti-Leninist program for a “workers government” that is neither bourgeois nor proletarian in its class character. All the participants in the dis­cussion categorically denied that the workers gov­ernment slogan was a call for the capitalists’ social-democratic lackeys to assume the task of administering the bourgeois state on behalf of the bosses.

During a revolutionary upsurge when the question of proletarian power is posed, but the proletariat still remains under the leadership of reformist and centrist parties, the “workers government” slogan can be concretized as a demand upon these parties. But this is precisely a demand that these parties break with class collaborationism and parliamen­tarianism and govern on the basis of organs of proletarian power. In Russia between February and October 1917, the Bolsheviks several times called on the Mensheviks and other-fake-socialists to dump their capitalist coalition partners in the Provisional Government and to take power in their own names on the basis of the soviets which they controlled. In 1934 in Spain it was imperative to call on the Caballero wing of the Spanish Socialist Party to form a workers (Soviet) government when it was leading an armed insurrection against the bourgeois government. But to call on the wretched, right-wing social democrats of the NDP to form a “workers government” in Canada in 1979 is a par­liamentarian cretinist caricature of that revolu­tionary slogan.

Perhaps the RWL revisionists think that workers in Saskatchewan already have “their own” govern­ment — led by NDP Commissar Allan Blakeney. Like every other social- democratic government this “workers government” serves the bosses by smash­ing strikes, slashing wages and cutting social services. Against the RWL’s social-democratic perversion of the Leninist Comintern’s slogan of the workers government, the Trotskyist League up­holds the model of the Bolshevik-led Soviet Republic.

THE RWL AND THE WORKERS GOVERNMENT

The slogan of the workers government has recent­.ly come into vogue within the United Secretariat (USec), the international coalition of fake-Trotsky­ists to which the RWL is affiliated. In line with its “turn to the class”–one hundred and thirty years after Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto — the reformist American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has adopted the call for a “workers government” as another of its pseudo-orthodox trimmings. The SWP has rediscovered that the Russian Revolution is the “classical model”–a model which it claims has its most contemporary expression in the Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini and his reactionary muslim clergy. For the members of Ernest Mandel’s centrist ex-International Majority Tendency (IMT), who in the heady days of guerrilla warfare were the foremost champions of “armed struggle” as the “only road, ” the popular front has supplanted the vicarious Guevarism of yesteryear as the road to a “workers government.

Keeping up with the latest political fashion in the USec, the RWL has also adopted the workers gov­ernment slogan. Naturally there are differences within the RWL over the application of the slogan (as there are over everything else). Louis Paquette, representing a tendency in sympathy with the SWP wing of the USec, submitted a document to the RWL’s last convention which baldly stated that “the workers government is not the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Report on Governmental Perspectives and Our Strategy). Paquette stands on the ex-League for Socialist Action (LSA) tradition of abject subser­vience to the NDP codified in such slogans as “Build the NDP” and “Win the NDP to Socialism. “

In the pre-convention discussion a small minority of Mandelites led by ex-Groupe Marxiste Re”volu­tionnaire (GMR) honcho, M. Lafitte, scored Paquette for a position which “could potentially constitute a revision of the Marxist theory of the state. ” Lafitte oh-so-politely (“excuse me in advance if, at times, I polemicize against formulations which Paquette has since modified”) chides Paquette for substitut­ing electoralism for socialist revolution and elimi­nating the need for proletarian organs of power as the basis upon which the proletariat can become the ruling class. Lafitte goes on to say that for the RWL and its predecessor, the LSA:

“… the question of a workers government within the Canadian state has always since 1951 been raised in relation to our electoral policy and to our governmental slogans within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and without taking Quebec into account… “

–“On the Concept of a ‘Workers Government”‘

What Lafitte is referring to here is the 1951 liquida­tion of the Canadian Trotskyists into the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor of the NDP. To the LSA’s capitulation to the NDP, Lafitte counterposes the European Pabloist tradition of capitulating to Stalinism as well as social democ­racy and upholds Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam as models of “workers governments”.

However Lafitte’s real difference with Paquette is the latter’s challenge to Lafitte’s long-held Quebec Bundism: the necessity for the “indepen­dence” of the struggle of the Quebec working class. For Lafitte, the class struggle  is limited by the boundaries of “La Belle Province”:

“Paquette takes the fatal step. He proposes a strategic framework for the revolution in the Canadian state in which the formation of a single workers’ government is necessary to the creation of two workers’ states, one in Quebec, the other in Canada. “

It is all very well to oppose a common struggle to put the NDP and a few Quebec labor bureaucrats onto the government benches in the House of Com­mons. But the nationalist Lafitte opposes it for the wrong reason–because it violates the sacred “independence” of the Quebec working class from the rest of the North American proletariat.

Neither of the RWL’s two founding English-Canadian components, the reformist LSA or the right-centrist Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG), ever had much use for the workers government demand. The LSA favored the call “For an NDP Government. ” The RMG, which originated as a left split from the LSA in 1973, initially recoiled from the LSA’s grovelling before the NDP. Yet in its 1974 federal election campaign the RMG explic­itly rejected the workers government slogan on the grounds that it would either be confused with an NDP government or it would be interpreted as the dictatorship of the proletariat (and thereby alienate the ex-New Leftists the RMG sought to attract).

The much-heralded fusion of the LSA and RMG (and the RMG’s sister group in Quebec, the GMR) to form the RWL did little to resolve their conflict­ing opportunist appetites. The “unity” between the LSA .and. RMG/GMR was achieved largely by paper­ing over factional differences. While the ex-RMGers accepted the LSA’s NDP loyalism in English Canada, they remained committed to petty-bourgeois nation­alism in Quebec. Thus when the RWL had to con­cretize its governmental slogan in time for the federal elections last May all the old factional hos­tilities reappeared. In the end the conflict between Quebecois nationalist and social-democratic appe­tites in the RWL was “resolved” by calling fortwo“workers governments “–one for each faction! The RWL’s election propaganda featured two contradic­tory governmental slogans: “For a Workers Repub­lic of Quebec–For a unitary Workers Government” (of NDP hacks and Quebec labor bureaucrats).

Thus each faction gets its own slogan and each its own national turf. The ex-RMG/GMRers can push “Independence and Socialism” for Quebec while the ex-LSAers campaign for votes to the English chau­vinist NDP in English Canada. With the transfer ­of the RWL’s national headquarters (and several leaders of the ex-RMG) to Montreal this fall, English Canada is abandoned to NDP loyalists of the ex-LSA.. Whereas the RWL has yet to win self-determination for Quebec, perhaps the warring factions and cliques within the RWL may accomplish their own “independence.”

British centrists search for halfway house

A workers government without revolution?

[Reprinted from Spartacist Britain #11, May 1979]

The following article discusses the positions of two centrist organisations, the Inter­national-Communist League and Workers Power, on the ‘workers government’ slogan. It is based on a presentation given to a Spartacist League national educational in London last December by comrade Joseph Seymour of the SL/US Central Committee.

Various centrist groups, currently among them the British International-Communist League (I-CL) and Workers Power group, have sought to exploit the confusions around the ‘workers government’ slogan at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 in order to con­struct a halfway house between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the administration of the bourgeois state by reformists. These groups insist that a workers government is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but can only be an intermediate form between a bourgeois and proletarian  state. Thus Workers Power leader Stuart King writes in his article ‘The Workers’ Government: Problems in the Application of a Slogan 1917-1977′:

‘Such a government could only be a temporary phenomenon, giving rise as it must to a civil war with the forces of the bourgeoisie. Although such a government was not the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Comintern allowed for the possibility of Communists entering such a gov­ernment under certain strictly laid down condi­tions….’ (Workers Power no 5, autumn 1977)

A few years ago the I-CL was in a short-lived international bloc with an Austrian group, the Internationale Kommunistische Liga, and repro­duced favourably an IKL document which similarly presented the workers government as a stage on the road to the proletarian dictatorship:

‘The workers’ government is not the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is to the same degree and in the same way as the slogan of workers’ control is the same as socialism.’ (‘A Bold Tactical Compromise’, International Communist no 7., March 1978)

While the various centrist groups differ among themselves as to what a workers government signifies, they all insist that it is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this they follow the well-beaten path of the ‘big time’ centrists of the United Secretariat (USec). In a mid-1960s introduction to Leon Trotsky’s Tran­sitional Programme, USec gnome Pierre Frank bragged about how he and his revisionist friends had enriched Marxism:

‘… the key piece in the program is precisely the culminating slogan of the whole chain — the slogan for a workers’ and farmers’ government or for a workers’ government. Here again the Fourth International has both revived and enriched the teachings of the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International by using the slogan as a transitional governmental formula corres­ponding to the organizational conditions and consciousness of the masses at a given moment, and not as a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ (International Socialist Review,May-June 1967, emphasis in original)

Far from ‘enriching’ the teachings of the early Comintern, Frank thoroughly distorts them, and stands in flat opposition to the position of Trotsky’s Fourth International. During the 1930s Trotsky insisted that the ‘workers government’ was a popular synonym for proletarian state power:

‘The important thing is that we ourselves under­stand and make the others understand that the farmers, the exploited farmers, cannot be saved from utter ruin, degradation, demoralization, except by a Workers and Farmers Government, and that this is nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat, that this is the only possible form of a Workers and Farmers Government.’ (‘Conversation on the Slogan “Workers and Farmers Government”‘, Writings1938-39 [first edition])

The confusions at the Fourth Congress which centrist groups exploit arose because the Com­intern launched a new slogan with two different, though not contradictory, purposes. The ‘workers government’ was to be used as a popularisation for the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which many social-democratic workers falsely identified with the dictatorial rule of a communist minority. It was also to be used as part of a united front offensive against the mass social-democratic parties, centrally in Germany and France, demanding that these parties break with the bourgeoisie and establish a workers government in alliance with the Communists.

The dual purpose of the ‘workers government’ slogan was expressed in the first paragraph of the Comintern resolution on the question. The first sentence states:

‘The slogan of a workers’ government (or a work­ers’ and peasants’ government) can be used prac­tically everywhere as a general propaganda slo­gan.’ (Jane Degras, ed, The Communist Interna­tional 1919-1943 Documents, vol I: 1919-1922 [1956])

In his report Zinoviev rightly noted that in the United States, for example, the ‘workers, government’ can be used for general socialist propaganda, but could not be posed as a demand upon a mass reformist party, which didn’t (and still doesn’t) exist:

‘Of course, even to-day in the United States good propaganda work can be done with the slogan of the Labour Government. We can explain to the workers. “If you want to free yourselves, you must take power into your own hands.” But we cannot say, in view of the present relationships of power in the United States, that the watch­word of the Labour Government is applicable to an existing fight between two parties….’ (Fourth Congress of the Communist International [1923])

Having indicated the general propagandistic use of the ‘workers government’ slogan, the Comintern resolution went on to emphasise the tactical applicability of the slogan in countries where the bourgeois order is highly unstable and mass reformist workers parties are contenders for power:

‘But as a topical political slogan it is of the greatest importance in those countries where bourgeois society is particularly unstable, where the relation of forces between the workers’ parties and the bourgeoisie is such that the decision of the question, who shall form the government, becomes one of immediate practical necessity. In these countries the slo­gan of a workers’ government follows inevitably from the entire united front tactic.’ (Degras, op cit,emphasis in original)

The confusions surrounding the ‘workers government’ slogan derive from its second usage, as a united front tactic in the struggle for proletarian state power. One can identify three areas of confusion. One, can a workers govern­ment take a parliamentary form or must it be based directly upon the organs of proletarian power (soviets, factory committees, trade unions)? Two, could a soviet government under social democratic leadership represent the dictatorship of the proletariat or does the proletarian dictatorship require a government of communists? And three, is the demand upon a mass reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and establish a workers government to be made at all times in all countries or is it rather to be raised only in exceptional circumstances?

Workers government, dual power and parliamentarism

To address the first question, we do not call for a workers government based upon the bourgeois state, and therefore within a parliamen­tary framework. A reformist parliamentary government, even in a revolutionary crisis when it is actively supported by factory councils, workers militias etc, is not a workers govern­ment. When we concretise the ‘workers govern­ment’ slogan as a demand upon a reformist party, .we call for that party to take power on the basis ofproletarian organs.

Unfortunately, the Comintern theses do not address the question of the organisational basis of the workers government. Moreover, in the discussion a number of the delegates, among them Karl Radek, sharply demarcated a ‘workers government’ from a soviet government and from the dictatorship of the proletariat:

‘… if we keep alive the consciousness of the masses that a Workers’ Government is an empty shell unless it has workers behind it forging their weapons and forming their factory councils to compel it to hold on the right track and make no compromise to the Right, making that government a starting point for the struggle for the Proletarian Dictatorship, such a Workers’ Government will eventually make room for a Soviet Government. (Fourth Congress of the Communist International)

The implication here is of a parliamentary government actively supported by the mass workers organisations.

Radek’s interpretation of the ‘workers government’ slogan was implicitly opposed by the Polish delegate Michalkowski, who criticised the entire discussion for ‘too much empty specu­lation’. He pointed out that the slogan of a ‘workers government’ was first used by the Bolsheviks between February and October 1917 in association with the demand ‘All power to the soviets’. Thus, the slogan of the ‘workers government’ was a call upon the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who enjoyed a temporary majority, to break with the bourgeoisie and establish a soviet government.

Michalkowski then went on to generalise about, the use of the ‘workers government’ slogan:

‘When there is another revolutionary wave, when again the working masses pour into the streets, when workers councils are formed again, based upon our historic experience we shall in all probability again come forward with this slogan and call for: Governmental power into the hands of the workers councils’…. It can well come about that there is a great revolutionary movement at a moment when we have not yet con­quered the majority of the working class. The revolution comes — that is the most probable eventuality — at a moment when, through the revolutionary ferment, through the revolution itself, we will capture the majority much faster than at present. If in all probability we then come forward again with the same slogan, it will essentially be the same slogan that the [Comintern] Executive has already attempted to formulate in this or that fashion. It will essentially be the same government, but based on the mass movement. And if in this question the Executive has up to now been unable to find the correct form of the slogan, this in my opinion comes from our confusing two different things, from wanting to pose a slogan while simultaneously attempting to give it a form which we cannot at all do, because the form will be dependent upon the revolutionary conditions, in which it might well find a broader base than is now the case.’ (Protokoll des IV. Weltkongress der Kommunistischen Internationale (1972], our translation)

We agree with Michalkowski as against Radek and insist a workers government must be based upon the organs of proletarian dual power, although it is not possible to project the specific form of these organs in advance. Radek’s interpretation of the rather vague Comintern resolution opens the door to parlia­mentarist opportunism and revision of the Leninist position on the class nature of the state.

Workers government and proletarian dictatorship

Perhaps the most intractable source of con­fusion is the relation of the workers government as a united front tactic to the dictatorship of the proletariat. As previously indicated the Comintern also used the ‘workers government’ formulation as a propagandistic popularisation for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Prior to the Fourth Congress, Leninists had restored, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ to pride of place in the living Marxist vocabulary. Why then in 1922 did the Comintern adopt a softer, more popular synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat? The answer to this  question goes a long way towards resolving the confusions around the ‘workers government’ slogan.

In 1921 the Russian Communist regime outlawed the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were engaging in counterrevolutionary agitation and conspiracy. The leaders of European social democracy made the defence of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries a cause celebre in their campaign against Bolshevism and claimed that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ really stood for the tyrannical rule of the Communist Party. Social-democratic workers identified ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ in general with the existing situation in Soviet Russia where the Communists exercised a monopoly of political power.

The adoption of the ‘workers government’ slogan at the Fourth Comintern Congress, in both its general propagandistic and tactical uses was designed as a counter-offensive against social democracy. It was an attempt to address the following real and important contradiction. Many social-democratic workers wanted their own party to carry out a socialist programme, were open to a coalition government with the Communists and were even willing to establish such a government on the basis of proletarian organs of power, not parliamentarism. In other words, many social-democratic workers accepted the essential pro­grammatic core of the dictatorship of the proletariat, while retaining illusions in their leaders and distrusting the Communists. At the same time, the social-democratic leaders were demonstrated counterrevolutionaries who in a revolutionary situation would sabotage prolet­arian state power and pave the way for bourgeois reaction.

For the participants of the Fourth Comintern Congress a soviet government under social-democratic leadership was not just an abstract theoretical possibility, but a bitter historical experience — the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March-August 1919. The discussion around the workers government was conditioned by the fate­ful experience of the Hungarian Soviet govern­ment, composed of a social-democratic majority and a Communist minority.

The military defeat and disintegration of the Hapsburg empire effectively shattered the bourgeois order in Hungary. The social-democratic­ led labour movement, centrally the trade unions, remained the only real source of political authority in the country. At first the social democrats formed a coalition government with a handful of liberals around Count Michael Karolyi and persecuted the fledgling Communist Party of Bela Kun. However, the continuing radicalisation of the masses and the attempt by the victorious Entente powers to dismember Hungary, a multi­national state, caused the social-democratic leaders to do a sharp tactical about-face. In March 1919 they released Bela Kun from prison, formed a coalition with the Communists and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet,Republic as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This tactical turn was made to forestall the radicalisation of the workers, arrest the growth of the Communist Party and also to secure Soviet Russian military support to preserve greater Hungary against the Entente.

Throughout the brief history of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the social democrats system­atically worked against the Communists and pre­pared the way for the victory of the counter­revolution. They secretly negotiated with the Entente to liquidate the Soviet regime. In the last phase of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the social-democratic leaders even plotted an armed coup against their Communist coalition partners, but were not able to execute it.

Especially in the light of the Hungarian ex­perience, Zinoviev, who wrote the resolution on the ‘workers government’, correctly wanted to express the position that the social democrats could not and would not defend the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, he did so by con­structing a confusing terminological schema of a spectrum of ‘workers governments’:

‘1. Liberal workers’ governments, such as there was in Australia; this is also possible in England in the near future.

2. Social-democratic workers’ governments (Germany).

3. A government of workers and the poorer peasants. This is possible in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.

4. Workers’ governments in which communists participate.

5. Genuine proletarian workers’ governments, which in their pure form can be created only by the communist, party.,’ (Degras, op cit)

The first two were seen as phoney workers governments. The third and fourth were con­sidered weak or transitory workers governments because the social democrats would not defend them. Zinoviev defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as a strong workers government led by communists: ‘The complete dictatorship of the proletariat is represented only by the real workers’ government (the fifth on the above list) which consists of communists’ Ibid).

As a broad historical generalisation, the above statement is correct. Only a government led by the communist vanguard can defend the dictatorship of the proletariat, centrally through its international extension. Thus, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR sabotages proletarian state power, strengthens capitalist imperialism and fosters restorationist forces internally.

However, as a definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Zinoviev’s statement is misformulated and has proven historically inad­equate. The proletarian dictatorship is cen­trally defined by the expropriation of the bour­geoisie as a class, not the party composition of the government. The Comintern rightly regarded the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic as the dictatorship of the proletariat, despite its treacherous and ultimately counterrevolutionary social-democratic leadership. Interestingly, in 1928 after Stalin had consolidated his rule, he revised the Comintern position on the Hungarian Soviet Republic, denying it had represented proletarian state power. This revision expressed the Stalinist dogma that the dictatorship of the proletariat is synonymous with a ‘Communist’ party state.

From another angle the post-World War II ex­pansion of Stalinist rule also illuminates the inadequacy of Zinoviev’s formulation on the re­lationship between the proletarian dictatorship and communist vanguard. Of course, no one in 1922 could have foreseen the overthrow of capi­talism by petty-bourgeois military-bonapartist formations as in China, Vietnam and Cuba. How­ever, post-1949 China and post-1960 Cuba are deformed expressions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But they certainly are not govern­ments of communist parties nor even of reformist parties based on proletarian organs of power, ie workers governments.

Zinoviev’s famous list of 57 varieties of workers governments and Radek’s rightist commen­tary on the Fourth Comintern Congress theses have been seized on by virtually every ex-Trotskyist revisionist who wants to abandon the fundamental principles of the Leninist party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Tony Cliff baptised the post-World War II Labour Cabinet a ‘workers government’ and Joseph Hansen used the label to justify political support to the Cuban Castroite regime. But while there was plenty of ambiguity on the workers government slogan at the Fourth Comintern Congress, it was just that — and not the anti-Leninist programme for a ‘workers government’ that is neither bourgeois nor proletarian in its class character.

Zinoviev repeatedly contradicted himself on the question of whether or not the workers government was the same thing as the dictator­ship of the proletariat. At a meeting of the enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922, he said: ‘The workers government is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is a pseudonym for the soviet government.’ Then at the Fourth Congress in November 1922 he in effect said with his five-fold typology: sometimes it is, and some­times it isn’t. But in January 1924 he came back to his original position (with-a totally disin­genuous explanation for his wavering): ‘The workers’ government is either really nothing but a pseudonym for the dictatorship [of the prolet­ariat] or it is simply a social democratic opposition’ (quoted in Helmut Gruber, ed, International Communism in the Era of Lenin (1967]). Even in his Fourth Congress summary remarks, Zinoviev says: ‘Yes, dear friends, in order to erect a workers government one must first over­throw and vanquish the bourgeoisie.’ .

So all the centrists who try to cover them­selves with Comintern orthodoxy and the auth­ority of Zinoviev in arguing for a ‘neither-nor’ workers government might as well throw in the towel. Their claim is utterly and demonstrably fraudulent. If at the Fourth Congress Zinoviev misformulated the dictatorship of the prolet­ariat as only a government of communists it was in order to deny that the parties of Friedrich Ebert, Albert Thomas and Ramsay MacDonald had revolutionary potential. Those centrist groups today who want to separate the ‘workers govern­ment’ slogan from.the dictatorship-of the pro­letariat have exactly the  opposite motive from that of the Comintern leader. They want to minimise the distance between the communist vanguard and reformist parties by projecting a stagist conception of proletarian revolution.

Workers government and the united front tactic

The centrists’ misuse of the ‘workers govern­ment’ slogan is associated with the notion of the strategic united front, the policy of con­tinually demanding that the reformist leaders of’ the labour movement carry out the socialist programme. Thus, Stuart King of the Workers Power group writes:

‘the workers government slogan remains a tactic of central importance for revolutionaries in the present period because of the strength of reformism in the working class movement. It is not a simple slogan to be raised or dropped as appropriate. It is a difficult complex of tac­tics aimed at the problem of winning the mass organisations of the working class away from the reformist leaders in the-procees of win­ning state power for,the working class. As such it performs a central part, it is in fact “the crowning piece”, of the United Front tactic; it is the method by which revolutionaries counter-pose their programme and strategy, in strug­gle, to those offered by the reformists.’ (Workers Power no 5, our emphasis)

We reject any notion of the united front tactic as continual-political collaboration with the reformists (ie sworn opponents of revolu­tion) ‘in the process of winning state power for the working class’. A united front is a conjunc­tural agreement for common action. As we wrote several years ago in response to the French Organisation Communists Internationalists, the best-known proponent of the strategic united front:

‘The united front is nothing more than a means, a tactic, by which the revolutionary party, i.e. its program and authority, can in times of crisis mobilize and then win over masses (at that time supporters of other parties) by means of concrete demands for common action made to the reformist organizations. Any other inter­pretation must base itself on a supposed latent revolutionary vanguard capacity within the reformist or Stalinist parties themselves….’ (‘Letter to the OCRFI and OCI’, Spartacist no 22, winter 1973-74, emphasis in original)

At the Fourth Comintern Congress the associ­ation of the ‘workers government’ slogan with the united front wasconjunctural and confined to certain countries. If this is not so clear in the resolution itself, Zinoviev’s report pre­sents the relation of the ‘workers government’ slogan to the united front tactic quite well:

‘The tactics of the united front are almost universally applicable. It would be hard to find a country where the working class has attained notable proportion but where the tactics of the united front have not yet been inaugurated….”By no means can the same thing be said of the watchword of the Labour Govern­ment. This latter is far less universally applicable, and its significance is compara­tively restricted. It can only be adopted in those countries where the relationships of power render its adoption opportune, where the problem of power, the problem of government, both on the parliamentary and on the extra-parliamentary field has come to the fore.’ (Fourth Congress of the Communist International)

(When Zinoviev spoke of the ‘universal appli­cability’ of the united front tactic, he was talking about communist parties which were size­able relative to–the social democrats. There­fore.workers supporting social democracy might well be attracted to the communists’ united front proposals, because the latter had the forces to affect the outcome of joint struggles. For revolutionary propaganda organisations, united front overtures to mass reformist parties are generally not applicable.)

Stuart King’s statement that the workers government is always and everywhere ‘the crowning piece’ of the united front tactic is in a sense exactly wrong. The purpose of the united front and related tactics of the communist van­guard is to win over the base of the mass reformist parties before a revolutionary crisis erupts. If a revolutionary situation occurs and the reformists have leadership of the potential organs of dual power (factory committees, strike committees, workers militias) , this means that the communist vanguard has not succeeded in the prior period. If such a situation does arise, we do not throw up our hands in despair, but adapt our tactics and slogans accordingly. However, to define a workers government as-one led by reform­ists implies a defeatist attitude towards politi­cal struggle against social democracy and Stalin­ism in the present.

The same demand depending on the circum­stances can either destroy illusions in the re­formist leaderships or create them. To call upon the Largo Caballero wing of the Spanish-Social­ist Party in 1934, when it was engaged in an insurrection against the right-wing bourgeois government, to establish a workers (soviet) government is not only correct but imperative. To call upon James Callaghan’s Labour Party to fight for a workers government would be obscene and ludicrous. Would-be revolutionaries who, in normal bourgeois-democratic conditions, call upon the established reformist leaders to fight for proletarian state power foster illusions where none such exist and rightfully discredit themselves in the eyes of advanced workers.

During a major crisis when the normal con­ditions of bourgeois rule are disrupted, we are prepared to concretise the ‘workers government’ slogan as a propagandistic demand on the mass social-democratic or Stalinist parties. But this is precisely a demand that these parties break from parliamentarism and govern on the basis of organs of proletarian power. For example, during the 1974 British ‘winter crisis’, when the miners struck against the Tory government, we raised the demand of a Labour Party/Trades Union Congress government. The inclusion of the TUC indicated that the government we called for would be based o the organizations of the working class rather than the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeois democracy.

We of the Spartacist League/US developed our position on the workers government in good part through political struggle against the Healy/ Wohlforth Workers League, which continually cam­paigned for the violently anti-communist and racist Meanyite bureaucracy of the trade unions to form a labour party. The more advanced American workers, especially blacks, hate George Meany, who, except on a few narrow economic issues, stands to the right of Democratic Party liberals. Tell a black American steel worker to break with the Kennedys and fight to make George Meany build a labour party and he’ll think you’re some kind of strange right-winger

To summarise, we use the ‘workers government’ formulation in general as a propagandistic popu­larisation for the dictatorship of the prolet­ariat. Therefore we identify a workers govern­ment in general with a communist leadership, not an episodic, unstable coalition dominated by reformists. It is a historical possibility that a revolutionary upheaval might place reformists in power on the basis of proletarian organisations (Hungary 1919), but we do not call for a soviet government led by class traitors as a program­matic norm! Our programmatic model of a workers government is the Russian Soviet Republic of October 1917 not the Hungarian Soviet Republic of March 1919.

Trotsky’s Transitional Programme

Our use of the ‘workers government’ slogan conforms to Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Pro­gramme rather than to Zinoviev’s 1922 Comintern resolution, which is vague, confusing and highly conjunctural in purpose. Trotsky’s presentation of the ‘workers government’ slogan has a very different weighting from that of the Fourth Con­gress resolution with its conjunctural emphasis on the united front offensive, especially in Germany.

For Trotsky the question of a workers govern­ment of or with the old reformist parties was an exceptional historical possibility and not at all the essential meaning of the slogan:

‘Is the creation of such a government by the traditional workers’ organizations possible? Past experience shows, as has already been sta­ted, that this is to say the least highly im­probable. However, one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under.the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties including the Stalinists may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case one thing is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere at some time becomes a reality and the “workers’ and farmers’ government” in the above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on.the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.’

What Trotsky is referring to here is the situation if in mid-1917 the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had expelled the ten capitalist ministers from the provisional government. This could only have been a fleeting episode before all effective power was in the hands of the soviets.

Having dismissed the perennial centrist proj­ect for a workers government of the old reform­ist parties as a most remote historical possi­bility, Trotsky then goes on to emphasise the value of the slogan as a popular expressioin for proletarian state power:

‘The agitation around the slogan of a workers’-farmers’ government preserves under all condit­ions a tremendous educational value. And not ac­cidentally. This generalized slogan proceeds en­tirely along the line of the political develop­ment of our epoch…. Each of the transitional demands should, therefore, lead to one and the same political conclusion: the workers need to treat; all traditional parties of the bour­geoisie in order, jointly with the farmers, to establish their own power’.

It is highly revealing that in his lengthy article on the ‘workers government’ slogan, Stuart,King omits any mention of the 1938 Tran­sitional Programme, the basic statement of Trotskyism. He limits his quotes from Trotsky on the ‘workers government’ to the 1922-23 period as if this was Trotsky’s last word on the sub­ject. This dishonest methodology is similar to considering Trotsky’s theory of permanent revol­ution solely based on his pre-1917 writings. Furthermore, King deliberately distorts Trotsky in 1922-23 by trying to present him as an apolo­gist for a ‘strategic united front’.

The document on the workers government by the Austrian IKL does deal with the Transitional Programme, but only by falsifying its meaning. Here is the IKL’s interpretation of the passage about the ‘traditional workers’ organisations’ cited above:

‘It must be seen as extremely improbable that the reformists or centrists could be forced to break with the bourgeoisie without coming under the pressure of a mass revolutionary party. Only the situation of a massive fight-back by the working class that in parts already bases itself on the revolutionary programme, of the united front of these workers with other sections of the class, could establish the preconditions for a transitional government.’ (‘A Bold Tactical Compromise’)

So according to the IKL, given the right pressure by a mass revolutionary party (maybe in the back of the neck), it ceases to be ‘highly improbable’ that the reformists will establish a workers government and perhaps even becomes probable. Trotsky clearly stated that it was ‘highly improbable’ that the established reform­ist parties would create a workers government at all, pressure or no pressure from a mass revol­utionary party. In opposition to centrism, Trotsky’s programme was not to pressure the re­formist parties into establishing a workers government, but to win over their base — pre­cisely in order to establish a workers govern­ment.

As against various centrist groups, Trotsky did not centrally define a workers government as a united-front ‘transitional’ government with the old reformist parties. We, as Trotskyists, take as our model of a workers government the Bolshevik-led Russian Soviet Republic of 1917.

Portrait of a Healyite Scab/Spy

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #231 11 May 1979. Copied from http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/07/portrait-of-healyite-as-scabspy-11-may.html ]

At the May 6 SL picket of the Workers League (WL) slanderers in Oakland, two Healyite goons roamed about seeking confrontations. One of these thugs was already known to us, one “Tim Nichols.”

Who is “Tim Nichols”? He says he dropped out from Princeton, one of the great universities for dumb bourgeois children, and that his father is a CIA intelligence officer. “Tim Nichols” claims the political history of a drifter: after allegedly participating in actions in defense of the Panthers in the 1970 New Left milieu, and in various SWP front groups in 1971, he is known to have joined the Healyite organization in 1972.

He was WL’s Oakland organizer in 1974, and claims to have left the WL during the Wohlforth Purge, but the WL’s San Jose organizer claims that “Nichols” was asked to resign in 1975 because he had committed racially provocative acts in the black community.

In 1977 “Tim Nichols” came around the Spartacist League intent on joining. But the SL did not take the bait. An SL member who was “Nichols’” roommate during the time they were both in the WL raised questions about him: “Nichols” had come straight from an SWP feminist front to join the anti-women’s liberation WL; he was full of questions about international travel; he got a job in the carpenters union by threatening to scab if they refused.

“Nichols’” subsequent conduct as a self-professed SL supporter certainly justified the suspicions about him – that he was irrational, possibly a cop, perhaps a WL penetration agent or maybe all three at once.

We drove “Tim Nichols” away from the SL after a reprehensible incident of crossing the class line, smacking of a provocation. The facts are these. During the 1977 Handyman warehouse strike in Northern California, a picketer was brutally killed. The ILWU in response organized a boycott of Handyman. This boycott was in effect when, in August of 1977, in flagrant disregard for elementary labor solidarity, “Tim Nichols” patronized a Handyman establishment. Since “Nichols” was accompanying a member of the SL on a sale of our press at the time this atrocity took place, the question was strongly posed that “Nichols” – in addition to exposing his own “socialist” pretensions – might be attempting to associate our party with his scabbing.

The SL reacted swiftly. On 21 August 1977 the Berkeley/Oakland SL passed the following motion:

“Whereas Tim N. acted with gross and cynical irresponsibility while on a sale in violating an organized boycott, there by endangering the political reputation of the organization and its trade-union friends, and furthermore that he appears to be erratic and unstable as evidenced by several recent incidents and a perusal of his political history, therefore we do not consider Tim N. a suitible candidate for membership in the common movement… comrades are instructed to keep him at arms length from the organization.”

Now “Tim Nichols” has surfaced as a prominent West Coast goon for the “security” obsessed WL. This provocateur/scab has again found his proper home – if indeed he ever left it. Whoever was running the operation that sent this man up against the SL should take note: if you hope to penetrate the Spartacist League, such low-grade material can’t fool our party.

___________________________________________

Workers Vanguard No. 232 (25 May 1979)

Correction: In our last issue (WV No. 231, 11 May) “Portrait of a Healyite as Scab/Spy” we attributed to the Workers League (WL) San Jose, California organzier the report that “Tim Nichols” had been asked to resign from the WL in 1975 for committing racially provocative acts. The article should have referred to the former WL San Jose organizer as the source of this statement.

Enough of opportunism, adventurism, Bundism—

For a Trotskyist perspective in Turkey

[WSL’s Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 12, February 1978. Originally posted online athttp://www.bolshevik.org/Pamphlets/Kurds/kurd_a.html]

The following document was signed by two members of the Trotskyist Faction of the British Workers Socialist League (WSL) which fused with the London Spartacist Group in March 1978. This document originally appeared in the WSL’sPre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 12, February 1978, and was reprinted in Spartacist Britain (SpB) No. 1, April 1978.

“This is not a ‘perspectives document’ since perspectives for the work cannot be drawn up in the abstract in London but must be developed in the context of the living struggles in Turkey.”

—Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, p. 1

“By these few words, the international character of socialism as a scientific doctrine and as a revolutionary movement is completely refuted. If socialists (communists) of one country are incapable, incompetent, and consequently have no right to decide the vital questions of the struggle of socialists (communists) in other countries, the proletarian International loses all rights and possibilities of existence.”

—Trotsky, Writings 1933-34, p. 33

The work carried out by the comrades in Turkey is based on their experiences in working with the WSL in Britain. The WSL leadership has inspired and “guided” the work in Turkey; consequently this must be seen as a test of the WSL’s politics and programme. This hostility to the struggle for programmatic clarity coupled with a familiar posture of doing “mass work” [has] led to what must be called the crisis of the Turkish work. We seek to provide the political basis for a complete reorientation of this work while recognising that this cannot be accomplished without a radical reorientation of the WSL itself. We agree when the leadership says that “The problems of this work are the problems of the WSL” (Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, p. 1).

On the History of the Turkish Work

The WSL’s Turkish work was first developed when some comrades went to Turkey, where they had discussions with the leadership of the sympathising group of the United Secretariat there—the KOZ. The comrades then met four people in Istanbul who were linked to a small group of people who were close to the KOZ (Turkish Mandelites) and managed to have several meetings to discuss politics with these people. At this point Comrade H. intervened and suggested that the four people whom we met at first should begin to work with us. Contact with KOZ sympathisers was then dropped. What made this break very destructive and sectarian was that it was not made on the basis of political differences—even the people who were eventually recruited were not won to our political positions. And since no attempt was made to recruit these comrades politically, some have subsequently become demoralised and have left the group.

With the breaking off of contact with the KOZ sympathisers, the leadership then took up “mass work” as the main orientation of the group. This was in reality a liquidation of potential cadres into a series of stupid and adventuristic actions. One of the first of these actions is described in the leadership’s document as follows: “… we agreed [to] a joint one-day mobilisation around the polling stations, so we would fight along with the workers to defend democratic right” (p. 8). But what was this “mobilisation”? And how many workers were we fighting “along with”? In a letter written on 7 June ‘77 Comrade H. answers these questions:

“Though it was late, some comrades from this group and us organised a meeting and elected a committee to mobilise 20 comrades for defence of the polls and against violence. Some [special defence measures were] involved in the mobilisation. Though it was very weak it was useful for some youth comrades. But because of lack of practice inside the factories, the defence had not been really fought as a workers defence.”

It should be noted that with this isolated activity we managed to bypass completely the mobilisation of DISK, the main trade-union federation, to defend the polls.

Another example of WSL “mass work” in Turkey is described in the document produced by the leadership:

“When the comrades got jobs in another small factory, we were able to lead (!) another (!) unionisation fight. Again we fought the DISK bureaucracy, and we won the support of the workers we previously organised, who helped with pickets and money-raising. But the strike was isolated, was broken, and all the strikers were sacked. Though the battle was lost, our comrades were developed and new contacts won.”

—Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, p. 9) [our emphasis—SpB]

We told these very young workers at a small factory that they should strike for union recognition. We had very little understanding of the Turkish trade-union movement and we had no means of giving a lead to such a strike beyond our experience with the WSL in Britain. We were totally ill-prepared to give even good trade-union leadership to back up our advice to these workers.

Besides the idiotic gloating over our small organisational gains at the expense of workers being sacked, we blamed the workers for the failure of the strike! In a letter to Comrade F., Comrade H. wrote:

“The biggest reason for this [the defeat of the strike] is not because we are wrong and because of our method of work but it is because the laws are against us, even in such a struggle, and that a very small group of workers do not have the power to change these laws. The other mistake made which is not our mistake is that it was the workers’ militancy, it was their going out early…. The struggle is defeated but as the method of the Transitional Programme signifies, we gained, first, the development of our own comrades, and, second, we had the opportunity to develop a couple of militant workers there!”

—23 Aug. ‘77 [our translation and our emphasis—SpB]

So the crisis of leadership is not the problem when we are involved: we blame the workers for their defeats.

But the dizziness with success has not lasted long. Posing the crisis of the Turkish group as disagreements on centralisation, and “secret visits” by an ex-comrade, the leadership’s document states that these things:

“… had political effects on one comrade in Istanbul and on a few comrades in Ankara. The comrade in Istanbul resigned from the group.

“At the last meeting we had in Ankara, comrades agreed to act again as a centralised group. But since then we have not received detailed information about the situation in Ankara.”

—Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, p. 9

The truth is that, by failing to make political clarification the most important job for our Turkish comrades, the WSL has wasted its opportunities in Turkey. The WSL Turkish group is in a mess, and it is doubtful if its membership supports the WSL anymore. The crisis of the Turkish group and the demoralisation expressed by the above statement are linked to two causes: first, the cliquish (non-programmatic) basis on which the group has been built and, secondly, the stupid adventurism which could only discredit us in the eyes of any serious militants.

For a Trotskyist Propaganda Orientation

The only way in which the basis for a real Trotskyist party can be established is through abandoning all pretences of already acting as a mass party and concentrating on recruiting and training cadres who will form a future leadership. This task, primarily one of propaganda for Trotskyism, also involves an orientation towards discussion, debate and polemics against other supposedly “revolutionary” groups—most importantly the false “Trotskyists” of the KOZ, which is approximately 20 times as large as we are. Not only are there many subjective revolutionaries in this organisation who can be won to genuine Trotskyism, but its very existence makes it additionally an important obstacle to the formation and growth of a revolutionary organisation. The struggle against the KOZ can also play a part in the struggle to smash the Pabloite revisionists internationally. To a lesser extent we must orient our propaganda work to the various other “Marxist” formations—Maoist, Guevarist, “anti-Stalinists” (especially in the Revolutionary Youth where many elements are interested in Trotskyism). Any other strategy—like the leadership’s “mass work”—can only amount to a liquidation of the fight for a revolutionary leadership in Turkey.

In the early days of the formation of the International Left Opposition, Trotsky projected exactly this course:

“Our strength at the given stage lies in a correct … revolutionary prognosis. These qualities we must present first of all to the proletarian vanguard. We act in the first place as propagandists. We are too weak to attempt to give answers to all questions, to intervene in all the specific conflicts, to formulate everywhere and in all places the slogans and the replies of the Left Opposition. The chase after such universality, with our weakness and the inexperience of many comrades, will often lead to too-hasty conclusions, to imprudent slogans, to wrong solutions. By false steps in particulars we will be the ones to compromise ourselves by preventing the workers from appreciating the fundamental qualities of the Left Opposition. I do not want in any way to say by this that we must stand aside from the real struggle of the working class. Nothing of the sort. The advanced workers can test the revolutionary advantages of the Left Opposition only by living experiences, but one must learn to select the most vital, the most burning, and the most principled questions and on these questions engage in combat without dispersing oneself in trifles and details. It is in this, it appears to me, that the fundamental role of the Left Opposition now lies.”

—Trotsky, Writings 1930-31, p. 297

The United Front Slogan in Turkey

One of the most serious political errors in the Turkish work has been the entirely false and incorrect usage of the “united front” slogan. For revolutionaries the united front is a tactic which is useful in uniting the workers of various political tendencies for certain limited and concrete common actions (against the fascists for example) while at the same time providing an opportunity to expose the treachery and inconsistencies of the reformists and centrists to their followers.

Centrists attempt to use the slogan of the “united front” to cover their own capitulation to the reformists—or as some kind of magical short cut to mass influence. They try to present common blocs for propaganda with the reformists (or other centrists) as an alternative to or a first stage of building a revolutionary party. The Leninist formula for a united front is to “march separately—strike together” but the centrists always want to march together with the reformists under a common banner. This is exactly the strategy proposed by the leadership of the Turkish comrades of the WSL inEnternasyonal No. 5 (Sept.-Oct.-Nov. 1977).

“Such a [United] Front will approach the economic and political questions of the workers and labourers and be an alternative for power. The question is reduced to the establishment of a political and organisationally powerful combination where other wide labouring sections and members of the petty-bourgeoisie could have faith ….”

Or again in Enternasyonal No. 3 (July 1977): “The struggle should be advanced to establish the United Front with a socialist programme.” Such a proposal—for a strategic united front with the reformist and centrist traitors for socialism—is in reality an opportunist proposal to liquidate the revolutionary vanguard.

One of the results of the confusion introduced by the leadership over the question of the united front is that comrades logically wonder whether the revolutionary party could have united actions in which the mass-based bourgeois RPP might participate, without forming a popular front. If we were to accept the leadership’s definition of a united front as a strategic front—a coalition with a common programme—the involvement of the RPP would make it a popular front. However, if we accept Lenin and Trotsky’s definition of a united front as a temporary agreement for limited common actions within which the revolutionaries keep full freedom of criticism, it is clear that united actions at which the RPP appears do not constitute popular-front betrayals.

The Struggle Against Fascism

Today in Turkey, the existence and growth of the fascists pose a serious danger to the proletariat. The National Action Party freely uses its youth organisation to attack workers’ organisations and individual militants. While we have at present only very limited forces in Turkey, it is necessary for us to advance a correct political programme for crushing the fascists. Our group is not capable of creating an independent defence organisation. The task is to fight to create such a body within the trade unions. While this policy is counterposed to the absurd and potentially disastrous adventurism connected with the defending of the polling stations by our group, it is likewise counterposed to the opportunist call for a strategic united front of the existing workers’ organisations.

Trotsky’s call for the CP to form a united front with the SPD in Germany cannot be separated from the Left Opposition’s self-characterisation of itself as a faction of the Comintern. Therefore we do not call for a united front of the existing workers’ organisations as an answer to the fascist threat. Such a strategy amounts to telling the workers to place their faith in a bloc of the Stalinist and social-democratic class-collaborationists. Trotskyists must never teach the workers to rely on the unity of the reformists—rather one of the reasons that we call on the reformists to engage in united-front actions (with us) is so that we can better expose their treachery and cowardice to their base. In a historical sense the working class in Turkey as everywhere else is faced with two alternatives: socialism or barbarism (which might well take the form of fascism). The threat of fascism cannot be removed except through the victory of the socialist revolution—and that requires the leadership of a Trotskyist vanguard party.

The Question of the Labour Party in Turkey

Unlike Britain and other Western European countries, there are today no mass reformist workers’ parties in Turkey. Both the Turkish Labour Party (TIP) and the pro-Moscow Turkish Communist Party (TKP) are very small organisations (not much bigger than Tony Cliff’s SWP) with only a limited base in the unions. The party which does have a mass base in the unions (the RPP) is an out-and-out bourgeois party.

Thus a key task for revolutionaries in Turkey is to struggle to break the workers from the RPP and for the creation of a mass workers’ party as a means of building the class independence of the workers from the bourgeoisie. When we raise the call for such a party we must be clear that we are calling for a workers’ party based on a revolutionary programme—the Transitional Programme. We have no interest in fighting for a Turkish version of Britain’s reformist Labour Party. This is clearly Trotsky’s position in his discussions on the programme for a Labour Party in the United States: “We must say to the Stalinists, Lovestonites, etc., ‘We are in favour of a revolutionary party. You are doing everything to make it reformist!’ But we always point to our program. And we propose our program of transitional demands.” (“How to Fight for a Labor Party in the US,” The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, p. 124)

Only in two early issues of Socialist Press has the WSL called for building a Labour Party in Turkey, but in its Turkish language material the WSL’s Turkish group has never raised this slogan. Instead the policy of the leadership has been to offer support to the tiny ultra-reformist Turkish Labour Party (TIP). At the time of the last elections the TIP tried desperately to make an electoral bloc with the much larger bourgeois RPP. Only when the RPP refused the offer did the TIP stand candidates, and then they ran on a programme of class collaborationism—to try to force the RPP to form a popular front with the TIP and other small parties of the left. Despite the clear popular frontist basis of the TIP campaign our group shamelessly called for workers to vote for these traitors and even raised the opportunist and ridiculous call for the class-collaborationist TIP to fight for a revolutionary programme! The reformist “tactic” (which amounts to trying to build illusions among the masses about the TIP) is clearly copied from the WSL’s call to “Make the Lefts Fight”, and the WSL’s call for votes to Labour despite its coalition with the Liberals.

We call for a break from capitulation to the tiny group of class-collaborationist social-democrats in the TIP and for taking up the call for the political independence of the Turkish workers—for a Labour Party based on the Transitional Programme in Turkey!

For the Leninist Position on the National Question

Leninists uphold the basic democratic principle of the equality of nations and therefore recognise the right of all nations to self-determination—i.e., the right of all nations to set up their own political state. We do not put forward this policy to strengthen the reactionary ideology of nationalism among the proletariat but to weaken it, and hence strengthen proletarian unity across national lines. Whether or not we call for the right of self-determination in a particular situation depends on a variety of factors. As Lenin notes in The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up:

“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected.”

    —Collected Works, Vol. 22

In the following passage Lenin summed up the Bolshevik approach to national oppression and our hostility, to nationalism:

“The awakening of the masses from feudal lethargy, and their struggle against all national oppression, for the sovereignty of the people, of the nation are progressive. Hence, it is the Marxists’ bounden duty to stand for the most resolute and consistent democratism on all aspects of the national question. The task is largely a negative one. But this is the limit the proletariat can go in supporting nationalism, for beyond that begins the ‘positive’ activity of the bourgeoisie striving to fortify nationalism.

“To throw off the feudal yoke, all national oppression, and all privileges enjoyed by any particular nation or language, is the imperative duty of the proletariat as a democratic force, and is certainly in the interests of the proletarian class struggle, which is obscured and retarded by bickering on the national question. But to go beyond these strictly limited and definite historical limits in helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie. There is a border-line here, which is often very slight and which the Bundists and Ukrainian nationalist-socialists completely lose sight of.”

—Critical Remarks on the National Question, pp. 22-23

For the Right of Self-Determination

of the Kurdish People

The Kurdish people are an oppressed national minority who are divided among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Soviet Union. The largest portion of the Kurds (about one quarter) live in Turkey. A correct position on the Kurdish question is central to the orientation of a revolutionary group in most of the countries in which the Kurdish people now reside.

Although there have been numerous uprisings by sections of the Kurdish people against various oppressors over the past century, what the Kurds as a people desire is by no means definitely determined. The various struggles of the Kurds over the past century give no clear indication as to whether they desire simple equality or regional autonomy within a given state or independence.

The best known recent struggle of the nationalist Kurdish Democratic Party has been for regional autonomy within the state of Iraq. In a situation such as this where there is national oppression but in which the desire of the nationally oppressed people has not expressed itself clearly, we can only advance a solution which undermines national divisions among the proletariat of the region, i.e., the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination. This demand is negative—no forced solutions to the Kurdish question by the ruling bourgeoisies of the region—and leaves open the question of what the Kurds will decide—equal rights, regional autonomy or independence.

In taking up the Kurdish question in Turkey it is vital that Trotskyists ruthlessly expose the national chauvinist position of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP). In its attempts to tail the bourgeois RPP, the TKP essentially denies the right of the Kurds to self-determination and supports the “right” of the Turkish bourgeoisie to continue to oppress the Kurds who live within the present frontiers of Turkey. The WSL leadership’s position on the Kurdish question rejects the national chauvinism of the Stalinist TKP only to take up a nationalist programme.

The position of the leadership of the WSL Turkish group is unashamedly Bundist: “The political task of Trotskyists in Kurdistan must consist of the fight for an independent party and [of the] fight to gain and preserve working-class political independence from the bourgeois nationalists.” While the vanguard party in Turkey may have special organisations for work among the Kurds, these will only reflect a division of labour within the party. This division of labour is simply to carry out the organisation and mobilisation of the Kurdish masses. We stand with Lenin against the segregation into separate parties of proletarians of different nations living within the borders of a single-state power:

“The Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers must work together, and, as long as they live in a single state, act in the closest organisational unity, and concert, towards a common or international culture of the proletarian movement, displaying absolute tolerance on the question of the language in which propaganda is conducted, and in the purely local or purely national details of that propaganda. This is the imperative demand of Marxism. All advocacy of segregation of the workers of one nation from those of another, all attacks upon Marxist ‘assimilation,’… is bourgeois nationalism, against which it is essential to wage a ruthless struggle.”

—Critical Remarks on the National Question, pp. 20-21

The leadership’s document projects a programme for work among the Kurds which is a two-stage conception:

“Such a programme will focus on democratic demands (national independence, a constituent assembly, the right to speak Kurdish, etc.) but must also point to the permanent character of the revolution.” [our emphasis—SpB]

This was even more clearly spelt out at the London aggregate on Turkey on Dec. 11 when Comrade H. stated that: “The task before the Kurdish nation is not to unite with the Turkish proletariat but to achieve its national unity first.” At the aggregate Comrade H. was just repeating what was said by him at a conference on Kurdistan held in London in November. We do not accept permanent revolution as an afterthought for internal documents while the real activity of the organisation focuses only on democratic demands. In the words of the Transitional Programme:

“Democratic slogans, transitional demands, and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another. The Chinese proletariat had barely begun to organize trade unions before it had to provide for soviets. In this sense, the present program is completely applicable to colonial and semicolonial countries, at least to those where the proletariat has become capable of carrying on independent politics.”

—p. 137

To argue that the Kurdish proletariat has not become capable of carrying on independent politics (as a class) would be to ignore the important potential which was shown by the post-World War II struggles of the Kirkuk oil workers.

Finally, we stand for the Leninist slogan of the right of the Kurds to self-determination and against the capitulation to nationalism which is embodied in the leadership’s call for an independent Kurdistan. Lenin deals in particular with the question of advocating secession:

“The demand for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ reply to the question of secession in the case of every nation may seem a very ‘practical’ one. In reality it is absurd—it is metaphysical in theory, while in practice it leads to subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie’s policy. The bourgeoisie always places its national demands in the forefront, and does so in categorical fashion. With the proletariat, however, these demands are subordinated to the interests of the class struggle. Theoretically you cannot say in advance whether the bourgeois-democratic revolution will end in a given nation seceding from another nation, or in its equality with the latter; in either case, the important thing for the proletariat is to ensure the development of its class. For the bourgeoisie it is important to hamper this development by pushing the aims of its ‘own’ nation before those of the proletariat. That is why the proletariat confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything at the expense of another nation.”

—The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, pp. 53-54

The National Question in Cyprus

While Cyprus is not part of Turkey, the sizeable Turkish population and the involvement of the Turkish state in the affairs of Cyprus make Cyprus a key question for Turkish revolutionaries. Up until 1974, the Turkish population of Cyprus was nationally oppressed by the Greek population—since the invasion by the Turkish army, the Greeks have been in the more oppressed position. Because the two populations have been thoroughly intermingled on this small island it is clear that the reality of “self-determination” for either people can only come at the expense of the other and thus “self-determination” is not applicable. We call therefore for the withdrawal of all foreign troops (whether Turk, Greek, UN, NATO or any other) and for the unity of Greek and Turkish working peoples of Cyprus to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ state under the leadership of a Trotskyist party. Only through a united workers’ revolution can national oppression be ended in Cyprus in a fashion which is just for both peoples.

The Importance of the Workers’ States

Because of’ Turkey’s strategic location, the question of the attitude of revolutionaries to the workers’ states is extremely important. The glaring omission of any mention of these questions in the leadership’s document is an indication of their inability to understand the tasks facing Turkish revolutionaries. We stand for political revolution in the workers’ states and for their unconditional defence against imperialist attack.

For Leninist Democratic Centralism

The internal organisational form of our Turkish group is far removed from democratic centralism. Rather it is cliquism in the form of a rigid centralism. In Britain Comrade H. the “General Secretary” of the Turkish Group, and Comrade I. act as a disciplined unit with the Executive Committee against the other comrades. This ridiculously rigid centralism reached its highest point in Turkey. In Istanbul, there was an area committee of three and a membership of two who were not on the area committee. In Ankara, formerly there were two area committee members and one comrade who was not on the area committee. The political consequence of this mode of organisation is that the membership has no participation in the discussion of the group—and therefore has its political education stunted. Real discussion takes place only in the “leading body”—the rest of the membership is simply presented with decisions which it must accept or launch a fight against the leadership.

The bureaucratic methods of the leadership cannot be separated from the way that members are recruited to our group in Turkey—not on the basis of agreement with the WSL’s political line but simply on an agreement to participate in the group’s activities and to accept the discipline of the group. We stand for the Leninist form of democratic centralism—the membership must be involved in discussing and forming the political line, and after a decision is democratically arrived at it must be carried out loyally by all comrades. Only in this way is it possible to correct the errors of the leadership and educate the members.

Leninist discipline is not just an agreement of vaguely sympathetic individuals to work together. James P. Cannon, the father of American Trotskyism, said the following:

 “It isn’t a question of 50 percent democracy and 50 percent centralism. Democracy must have the dominant role in normal times. In times of action, intense activity, crisis, … and swings of the party such as we took toward proletarianization after the split, and so forth, centralism must have the upper hand, as it had in the last few years.

“Now the Leninist method and form of organization flows from the program, the tasks and the aim that is set for the party, in complete harmony, a completely harmonious conception.”

  

—The Socialist Workers Party in World War II, p. 352 [emphasis ours]

For a Democratic-Centralist International Tendency! For the Re-Creation of the Fourth International!

While the beginning of the Turkish leadership’s document pays homage to the need to belong to a principled international movement, it is against being part of a democratic-centralist international tendency: “…. we propose to establish ‘Enternasyonal’ groups on a centralised basis in each area, as a preliminary step towards a Turkish Trotskyist party, autonomous of, though in political alliance with, the WSL.” (p. 10) We oppose the setting up of more groups like the Greek CIL or American SL(DC) with which the WSL can “ally” without taking any interest in or political responsibility for. This kind of “internationalism” is the loose federated “internationalism” of the centrist London Bureau of the 1930’s or of the United Secretariat today—it has nothing to do with [the] Bolshevik internationalism of the Left Opposition. We stand for the organising of a Leninist democratic-centralist international tendency which will struggle for the re-creation of the Fourth International. Such an international tendency cannot be a series of politically allied but organisationally autonomous groups but must function as the embryo of the world party of socialist revolution—the Fourth International.

The establishment of a democratic-centralist international revolutionary tendency is not simply an organisation question—it is primarily a political one. The revolutionary international, and all of its sections, must steadfastly uphold the basic programmatic positions of the Transitional Programme: opposition to all forms of class collaborationism; recognition of the validity of the strategy of Permanent Revolution; and a determination to lead a political revolution against the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats in the deformed and degenerated workers’ states combined with a policy of unconditional military defence of these states against imperialism. Before the WSL can undertake any principled revolutionary work in Turkey (or anywhere else) there must be a complete programmatic re-alignment of the movement in accordance with the positions presented in this document and the document “In Defence of the Revolutionary Programme” for which we hereby declare our support.

Forward to a Turkish Trotskyist Party, Section Of A Re-Created Fourth International, World Party Of Socialist Revolution!

E. (Turkish Group; Hackney Branch)

F. (Turkish Group; Hackney Branch)

28 January 1978

(We acknowledge help in preparing this document from Comrade Jim Saunders.)

One Fifth of WSL Walks Out, Fuses with the iSt

The Rebirth of British Trotskyism

[reprinted from Workers Vanguard, No. 200, 7 April 1978. Originally posted online athttp://www.bolshevik.org/history/Other/Rebirth%20of%20British%20Trotskyism.html]

LONDON—When 24 supporters of the Trotskyist Faction (TF) walked out of the Workers Socialist League (WSL) at the WSL’s 18-19 February second annual conference they left declaring their opposition to the central leadership’s “Pabloite attachment to the Labour Party, their capitulationist attitude to nationalism, and in particular Irish nationalism, their all-pervading economism and minimalism and their parochialism” (“Statement of the Trotskyist Faction,” WV No. 194, 24 February). Its aim, said the TF, was to struggle for a British section of a recreated Fourth International. The first step toward this goal was the rapid merger of forces with the London Spartacist Group (LSG), at a conference over the 4-5 March weekend, to form the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B) as a sympathising organisation of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt).

This fusion is one of the largest and most important in the 15-year history of the Spartacist tendency. The new organisation already has close on 50 members and a presence both in London and the Midlands. By its comprehensive Leninist programme and clear internationalist perspectives the SL/B is exercising a strong attraction on remaining dissident elements inside the WSL. The same will soon prove true as well toward the numerous small centrist organisations, which will find in the Spartacist League a solidly programmatically based unity—in striking contrast to the short-lived, politically promiscuous unnatural couplings which pass for fusions in the highly fragmented British Trotskyoid milieu.

The factional struggle in the WSL and the fusion with the TF also vindicate in a powerful manner the iSt’s policy of revolutionary regroupment. Recognising that many valuable militants are presently to be found in various pseudo-revolutionary organisations, we have fought to regroup the best of these potential cadres for the nucleus of an international vanguard party. It was essentially a process of splits and fusions, both in the U.S. and internationally, that enabled the Spartacist League/U.S. to break out of the national isolation imposed by our expulsion from Gerry Healy’s 1966 International Committee (IC) conference. But for the WSL leadership around Alan Thornett any polemical combat within the left is “petty-bourgeois”; consequently the WSL has been unable to develop any coherent perspective for international work at all.

The goal of our regroupment policy has always been to decisively split the cadre of centrist organisations, in the first instance the Pabloist pretenders to Trotskyism who are the principal obstacle to reforging the Fourth International. This is exactly what has happened in the WSL. Just over four years ago Workers Vanguard sent a reporter to cover the British miners strike. At that time the Spartacist tendency had just made its first isolated recruits in Europe. Only at the end of 1975 were we able to establish a Spartacist group in London, and it took nearly two years of dogged propagandistic activity to achieve the break-through represented by the fusion with the Trotskyist Faction. But today sections of the iSt outside the U.S. make up over one-third of the total membership of the tendency internationally.

Bob Pennington, a leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG—British affiliate of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International [USec]), remarked last autumn that those who proclaim themselves Trotskyists will have to choose between two “mainstreams,” the USec and the iSt. By this he undoubtedly meant to suggest that the “re-united” USec would be “where the action is.” But the WSL split and subsequent formation of the SL/B, establishing the iSt as a direct organisational competitor with the USec on the British terrain, has certainly given no comfort to Pennington et a1. It indicates that there are those on the British “far left” who have had enough of chasing after whatever is popular and want to get on with the business of constructing a democratic-centralist, authentically Trotskyist International.

As for the workerist WSL, in its main reply to the TF documents the Thornett group initially referred to the oppositionists as “a small part of our movement.” From the tone of their subsequent public comments it is evident that they were surprised that nearly two dozen members took the step of walking out of the Workers Socialist League. The WSL will not easily recover from the loss of two National Committee members, three members of the Socialist Press editorial board, three out of four members of its Irish Commission, and several regional and local organisers. With the loss of one fifth of its active membership, the WSL reverts back to its original regional limitations—the celebrated car fraction at British Leyland’s Cowley plant in Oxford, the London grouping and a handful of shaky members in Yorkshire.

Moreover, Thornett’s response to the challenge presented by the Trotskyist Faction was positively pathetic, both before and after the split. Perhaps sensing that he is at his weakest debating politics, Thornett simply waved his Cowley credentials as a talisman to ward off all attacks. In his hour-and-a-half opening remarks to the WSL conference he attended only briefly to the programmatic issues which were about to rip 20 percent of the participants away from him. His allegation that the TF members were only interested in “exciting politics” was hardly an indictment in view of the WSL’s apolitical glorification of the “daily grind.” And the failure of the majority to present any political perspective certainly contributed to the fact that a relatively large number of the TF supporters were younger rank-and-filers. Rarely has a centrist leadership presided over the coming apart of its organisation so meekly.

The WSL from Womb to…

Prior to the split of the Trotskyist Faction the WSL was already an organisation in deep trouble, its haphazard “international work” come to naught and its domestic prospects cloudy at best. As the TF stated in its founding document:

“The WSL is in chaos. It has no clear idea of its tasks or direction.…

“This situation has a political origin—to put it bluntly the movement as yet lacks any programmatic basis for existence as a distinct political tendency. Every political tendency from Trotskyism to reformism is represented on the NC [National Committee] and among the membership.”

—”In Defence of the Revolutionary Programme” (INDORP), [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 8, February 1978

Yet only three years ago Healy’s expulsion of the Thornett grouping from his Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) made a big splash among ostensible Trotskyists throughout the world. Thornett’s orthodox-sounding defence of the Transitional Programme, his well-publicised industrial militancy and opposition to Healy’s sectarian practices promised to be an attractive combination. What brought about his demise?

In the mid-1960’s a large part of the leadership of the shop stewards committee at the Cowley assembly plant (then Morris Motors), including Alan Thornett who had been a Communist Party trade unionist, were personally recruited by Gerry Healy to the Socialist Labour League (SLL—predecessor of the WRP). “The Cowley Fraction” was Healy’s pride and joy and the major vehicle for the expression of his deformed brand of Trotskyism in the labour movement. But the first time Thornett crossed his godfather, Healy responded with vicious Mafia tactics, including physical intimidation.

The Thornett group, including the Cowley fraction was summarily expelled in December 1974 and a few months later became the core of the Workers Socialist League. The iSt assessed the split tentatively at the time:

 “At present the WSL is most clearly defined negatively…. While its future programmatic course is not definitely predictable, the WSL’s failure to develop the internal struggle against Healy much beyond the democracy issue, and its rejection of Healyite ‘ultra-leftism’ while maintaining some of the most rightist-revisionist aspects of the SLL/WRP, would seem to define the WSL as a split to the right from a badly deformed and characteristically English-centered version of fake ‘Trotskyism’.”

—”After Healy, What? WSL Adrift.” WV No. 69, 23 May 1975

The Trotskyist Faction, writing three years later, confirms this diagnosis: “The WSL’s break from Healyite maximalism was, in the final analysis, a break towards economism and minimalism” (INDORP).

While still inside the WRP, Thornett’s opposition (centred in Oxford) had linked up with another dissident clot in London at whose head stood Alan Clinton. Clinton was noteworthy for his rightist grumblings at the WRP’s decision to stand candidates against Labour during the 1974 general elections, while Thornett was more interested in resurrecting the transitional demand of workers control of production. The politically heterogeneous lash-up between Clinton and Thornett was an early expression of indifference to programme which in the WSL was later to harden into purposeful confusionism.

The combination of the glamour of an influential, although localised, industrial fraction and its claim to defend orthodox Trotskyism attracted to the WSL in its early period a series of leftward moving groups. The most importaint source for these regroupments came from former members of Tony Cliff’s International Socialists (I.S.—now Socialist Workers Party [SWP]) who were breaking from the I.S.’ social-democratic workerism in the direction of Trotskyism. The majority of these elements—out of which was to crystalise the core of the later Trotskyist Faction—passed briefly through the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG).

The RCG at its formation in mid-1974 had also declaimed loudly on the importance of programme. The initial components of this group originated in the Revolutionary Opposition, expelled from the I.S. in 1973, and had seen at first hand the consequences of a mindless worship of spontaneity which produced an organization whose net caught everything and held nothing. They were joined in the first months of 1975 by nine members of the heterogeneous Left Opposition (also formerly of the I.S.), which had split in four directions in December 1974. Iconoclastically dismissing all past struggles to construct the Fourth International, the RCG under its guru David Yaffe was principally an academic debating society organised as study groups to write a new programme.

Lacking a shared programme yet requiring a minimum of common activity, the RCG was easy prey for a trio of supporters of the American SWP who elaborated a regimen of single-issue campaigns on women, on Ireland, solidarity work with Chile and subsequently South Africa. In reaction against this reformist single-issuism and attracted by Thornett’s credentials as a workers leader, roughly a third of the RCG left to join the WSL in 1975.

Even Alan Thornett, whose political horizons do not generally extend far beyond the shop floor at Cowley, recognised the importance of the recruitment of this layer of cadres, which enabled the WSL to establish branches in Birmingham and Coventry in the West Midlands and in Liverpool. Speaking at a WSL Midlands Aggregate meeting in 1976 Thornett accurately termed this recruitment “the biggest gain the WSL has ever made.” This would seem to fly in the face of Thornett’s denigration of any orientation toward other left groups, except that the WSL leadership did almost nothing to achieve this regroupment.

…the London Spartacist Group

In late 1975 the iSt established in London a small group of experienced cadres, thus fulfilling a long-held aspiration to begin systematic work in Britain. In addition to its intrinsic strategic importance, the presence of Healy’s SLL/WRP makes Britain one of the centres of ostensibly orthodox Trotskyist groupings. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s the SLL’s theoretical journal, Labour Review, had begun to elaborate the struggle against Pabloist liquidationism which the American SWP had grievously neglected after the 1953 split in the Fourth International and which it was abandoning altogether by capitulating to the popularity of Castroism.

The SLL’s 1960 document, “World Prospects for Socialism,” moreover, was seen by the Revolutionary Tendency (RT—forerunner of the SL/U.S.) of the SWP as an articulation of its own anti-Pabloist views. The RT and later the Spartacist group sought to make common cause with Healy, but were blocked by the little despot’s insistence on squelching the slightest dissent (as Thornett was to discover years later). Following our bureaucratic expulsion at the 1966 London conference of the IC, Britain remained sealed off to the Spartacist tendency for some time.

Beginning in 1975 the London Spartacist Group set out to systematically probe and polemicise with the myriad of groups and grouplets which populate the asteroid belt to the left of the centrist Pabloist IMG and the left-reformist “state capitalist” I.S./SWP. The LSG’s fight for political clarity and authentic Leninism frequently upset the cosy chuminess of the British Trotskyoid left. Many were shocked to hear a group which refused to succumb to the charms of the left Labourite “club,” to embrace the green nationalism of the IRA or to go along with the charade of phony “mass work” which are common denominators in the intensely parochial and workerist “far left.”

There were plenty of evidences of crisis in the left-of-the-Communist Party “family.” The I.S. had been declining visibly from the time of the general election in February 1974 and suffered a haemorrhaging of cadre in 1975. The WRP had gone off the rails altogether, spending most of its efforts in slandering Joe Hansen (of the American SWP) and more recently in praising Libya’s fanatical Muslim dictator Qaddafi. The IMG could never decide how many factions it had, oscillating up towards five, nor whether it would be super-Mandelite or a bridge to the Hansenites.

Among the smaller groups the RCG was on the road to becoming a cult, which is currently tailing after the geriatric Moscow-loyal Stalinists. Sean Matgamna’s Workers Fight (ejected from the Cliffites in 1971) had just joined with the Workers Power group (a 1975 vintage I.S. expulsion) to form the International-Communist League (I-CL), while covering up differences on the Russian question (Workers Power is state capitalist), the Labour Party and Ireland. The Workers Fight/Workers Power marriage of convenience came apart shortly before its first anniversary, having discovered unbridgeable disagreements over… Ireland and the Labour Party.

The WSL was in many respects the most serious of the split-offs from the “far-left” Big Three (SWP, IMG and WRP). The harsh contradiction between its claims to Trotskyist orthodoxy and its economist practice clearly labeled the WSL as a group heading for an explosion. And it was initially open to political discussion with other avowed anti-Pabloists. Its October 1975 document, “Fourth International—Problems and Tasks,” sought to reevaluate the history of the post-war Trotskyist movement and to serve as a basis for discussions with other tendencies, “especially those expelled from the IC” (published in the “Trotskyism Today” supplements to Socialist Press Nos. 21-23).

The iSt responded to this invitation with a letter (dated 17 June 1976) pointing to the WSL’s softness toward social democracy and focusing on our analysis of the formation of the deformed workers states (particularly the methodologically key case of Cuba), as well as reviewing our relations with Healy’s IC. The letter also attacked the workerist view that the degeneration of the IC or any tendency could simply be ascribed to its petty-bourgeois composition. Although this was the only reply to the WSL’s offer of discussions, the iSt letter was not circulated even to the NC for over a year.

However, the aggressive propaganda work of the LSG made it impossible to simply seal off the WSL against Spartacism. The first fruit of these efforts was an amendment from the Liverpool branch to the international resolution at the WSL’s first annual conference in December 1976. Although flawed by its attachment to WSL workerism and hence hostile to the iSt’s regroupment perspective, it nonetheless demanded recognition of the principled approach to the Cuban Revolution taken by the Revolutionary Tendency in the American SWP. This was clearly counter-posed to the Thornett leadership’s position that there had existed only two views on Cuba: the Pabloists’ enthusing for Castro and Healy’s myopic denial that a revolution had taken place at all.

The leadership urged the conference delegates to reject the amendment, not because it was wrong (in fact they claimed to agree with it), but to prevent the resolution from turning into a book. But when the membership voted to include this amendment, the only successful motion against the platform during the proceedings, Thornett and his lieutenants simply buried it, so that the resolution as amended never saw the light of day. Although this issue had no immediate consequence, it was indicative of the WSL leaders’ frenzied reaction to anything smacking of Spartacism.

The CDLM and the Lib-Lab Coalition

However, the real catalyst for the amorphous left-wing opposition which was to result in the Trotskyist Faction was the WSL’s intervention in the British class struggle. A challenge to the Thornett leadership took shape around objections to the WSL-created Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement (CDLM) and to its failure to place the government question at the centre of WSL trade-union work. This failure was particularly glaring after the formation of the Labour Party’s parliamentary coalition with the Liberals in March 1977.

In response to the reappearance of this British version of the popular front for the first time since World War II, the international Spartacist tendency called for “a policy of conditional non-support to Labour in upcoming elections unless and until they repudiate coalitionism” (“Break the Liberal/Labour Coalition in Britain,” WV No. 152, 8 April 1977). But even though Callaghan & Co. had suppressed even the organisational independence of the Labour Party by openly tying it to the bourgeois Liberals—with, moreover, the acquiescence of every single “left” MP [member of parliament] from Tony Benn and Michael Foot on down—the Workers Socialist League simply concluded that the “lefts” “should have demanded and themselves set up a new leadership based on socialist policies” (Socialist Press, 25 March 1977).

Within the Workers Socialist League there was dissatisfaction with the persistently apolitical character of the WSL’s trade-union work. A first document, “The WSL and the Governmental Crisis” ([WSL] Internal Bulletin No. 19, 25 May 1977), submitted by Green, Kellett and Piercey, attempted to programmatically generalise the objections:

 “Although the toolroom strike objectively challenged the Social Contract and posed the removal of the anti-working class Labour Government, the consciousness of the leadership thrown up in the struggle, the subjective factor, did not correspond to those objective tasks.… Although the WSL alone recognised that the toolroom strike precipitated a major governmental crisis, Socialist Press failed to make the question of government a central programmatic issue during the strike.”

At this time Green-Kellett-Piercey had not decisively broken from the WSL’s accommodation to Labourism, and were searching to render the perennial Thornett slogan, “Make the Lefts Fight,” revolutionary. They called on the WSL to “place demands on the lefts to support the [toolroom] strike against the Social Contract and remove the right wing [of the parliamentary Labour Party].”

The Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement, founded in 1976, was an uninspired imitation of the WRP/SLL’s All Trades Union Alliance. In practice it turned out to be nothing but a forum for tedious recounting of shop-floor struggles. As it became clear that the rank and file would not flock to the CDLM simply because it put “democracy” in its name, it soon turned into an arena for mutual accommodation between the WSL and other left groups (specifically the IMG and I-CL). Most importantly, the platform of this pan-union propaganda bloc—like Alan Thornett’s campaign for president of the Transport and General Workers Union—did not seek to break the mass of British workers from their Labourite traditions and consciousness.

The CDLM programme comes down to opposition to wage controls and spending cuts and calls for more democracy in the unions. It even limits the call for nationalisation to those firms threatened with bankruptcy or large-scale redundancies. It does not contain any demand for the expropriation of all capitalist industry, thus placing the CDLM to the right of the maximum programme of the Labour Party on this question. There is no mention of opposition to the presence of the British imperialist army in Northern Ireland or to the Labour “left’s” chauvinist call for import controls, much less of the need for a revolutionary workers government.

Describing the reformist CDLM, an LSG leaflet noted that it embodied the central weakness of the British left: “… glorification of spontaneous ‘rank and file’ trade union militancy and… political capitulation to British social democracy” (“CDLM: WSL’s ‘Short Cut’ to Nowhere,” 27 March 1977). A parallel criticism was raised in the Green-Kellett-Piercey document:

“Our failure to make the question of programme and government central was not confined to the pages of Socialist Press. It was evident at the CDLM recall conference….

 “Although a special resolution was passed by the conference on the Lib-Lab coalition, the vital political question facing the conference on government was relegated almost to a side issue, discussed separately from the wages struggle and the fight for leadership in the trade unions….”

The LSG leaflet also attacked the WSL’s justification for its adaptation to shop-floor militancy: “For a small grouping, like the WSL, to decide to ‘shake off propagandism’ in order to proceed directly to ‘conquering the masses’ is profoundly anti-Leninist. A revolutionary organisation only acquires the ability to lead whole sections of the proletariat as it assembles a cadre trained through hard principled struggle for communist politics” (“CDLM: WSL’s ‘Short Cut’ to Nowhere”).

The Green-Kellett-Piercey document touched on the WSL’s policy of shunning polemical combat with centrist groups, although the criticism was largely empirical and put in the mildest terms: “We also showed political weakness in not taking up the IMG adequately at the conference… their argument that the CDLM shouldn’t (politically) counterpose itself to the Stalinists’ ‘diversionary’ initiatives was part of their left cover for Stalinism. The difference between us and the Pabloites was not that they had differences of where and how to fight for programme…; but they are not prepared to fight at all for programme.” Neither, it turned out, was the Thornett leadership, which responded:

 “We are told by the comrades that we did not take up the IMG adequately at the conference. That we should have made a clear statement on their role as a left cover for the Stalinists. Such a course of action would have been a disaster. It would have been certain to drive the IMG out of the CDLM.”

—”Reply to ‘The WSL and the Governmental Crisis’,” by Alan Thornett, [WSL] Internal Bulletin No. 21

Workers Government and “Make the Lefts Fight”

The French municipal elections and Irish general elections, which both took place in the spring of 1977, renewed the debate inside the WSL on the question of popular frontism, in particular on the question of votes to the workers parties of a popular front. At the WSL’s summer school in July this issue was debated both at the session on Ireland and at the National Committee meeting. It was indicative of the scant importance given to such “abstract” subjects prior to this time that even Socialist Press editor John Lister, backed by Alan Thornett, could consider it a rightist notion that any self-proclaimed revolutionary would even consider voting for the workers parties of a popular front.

At the NC meeting spokesmen for the opposing positions—Steve Murray for voting for workers parties in a popular front and Mark Hyde and Jim Short against—were directed to submit documents defending their respective positions. Without waiting for the resolution of the debate, however, Socialist Press went into print on 17 August declaring that it would continue to call for votes to Labour until such time as there were actually joint Lib-Lab slates. And as the faction fight developed, for the first time drawing hard lines on programmatic questions in the WSL, Thornett, Lister & Co. became far more cautious in toying around with positions which had been branded “Spartacist.”

In the course of the discussions over the question of voting for candidates of a popular front, some individuals switched positions and the battle lines began to be drawn. A document, “The Coalition, ‘Make the Lefts Fight’ and the Workers’ Government Slogan” ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 2, January 1978), was written during late autumn by Green, Holford, Kellett, Murray, Quigley and Short which called for a position of “no vote for the candidates of workers’ parties (like the Labour Party) which are in a Popular Front combination” (Thesis 2 of the conclusion). On the question of the slogan of a workers government the document took the position of Trotsky, who spelt this out in discussions with leaders of the then-revolutionary American SWP: “…the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the only possible form of a workers’ and farmers’ government.” Thus point 7 of the conclusion states:

 “The WSL advances the slogan of ‘a workers’ government’ as a pseudonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its essential content—a government that rules in the interests of the working class and bases itself, not on the bourgeois state, but on the independent organisations of the working class—remains, whether or not it is advocated as a propaganda or an agitational slogan.”

Concerning the question of voting for popular front candidates the document states forcefully that this is no tactical or technical matter. This question is today the dividing line between those who give “critical” support to the popular front, seeking to place it in power, and the Bolshevik policy of proletarian opposition to coalitionism. But this is far from a passive or abstentionist position. The authors of the document wrote:

“…We call for the unions nationally to withdraw union sponsorship from all MPs who support the coalition….

 “We must develop a fight in local Labour Party constituencies for the removal of sitting MPs and the selection of candidates who stand on a revolutionary programme opposed to the coalition.… In bye-elections at present we can give no support to LP candidates who defend the coalition and will have to consider critically supporting in some cases centrist or revisionist candidates if they make opposition to the coalition and wage control central to their platform.”

—”The Coalition, ‘Make the Lefts Fight’ and the Workers Government Slogan”

Whereas in the past the WSL had not taken a clear position on the question of voting for popular front candidates, its capitulation to social democracy was clearly expressed in the standing demand to “make the lefts fight,” the alpha and omega of Thornett’s policy toward the Labour Party. This policy came under sharp attack in the oppositionists’ document:

 “The present unity of Heffer, Benn, Foot, Healey, and Callaghan in jointly defending the coalition reveals theessential programmatic agreement between the ‘left’ and right.…

“…we should in no way create a false distinction between them and their right-wing bed fellows when the ‘lefts’ are in no way distinguishing themselves from the right wing by their actions…. To place demands exclusively on the ‘lefts’ when they are unified with the right wing in opposing the struggles in the working class developing on the two decisive issues of wage control and the coalition, means that the WSL argues that the ‘lefts’ do fundamentally differ from the right-wing. When the ‘lefts’ have made no break from the right, not even verbally allied themselves with the wages struggles, the demand that they ‘kick out’ Healey, Callaghan et al acts in practice to strengthen illusions both in the ‘lefts’ as an alternative leadership and in reformism.

 “This present orientation of the movement, summed up in the slogan ‘Make the Lefts Fight’, elevates the tactic of the united front and critical support into a strategic orientation.

 “The League places these demands on the lefts because it makes its starting point a preconceived desire to secure unity with the left against the right, and from an ahistorical perspective that the task is to take the working class through a fresh stage of reformist betrayal.” [emphasis in original]

    —Ibid.

The Formation of the Trotskyist Faction

Around the time of the WSL 1977 summer school, some of the emerging oppositionists began to realise that fidelity to Trotskyism required a full scale programmatic combat against Thornett’s workerism. In a letter dated 13 July 1977, Green wrote to Holford:

“I have been re-reading some of the Spartacist’s material over the last couple of days, including some of their basic documents (declaration of principles, intervention at the 66 IC conference), their letter to the OCI and their letter to the [Spanish] LCE, and the founding document of their French section, the Ligue Trotskyste de France. What has struck me is the absolute consistency with which they have fought for their positions since the early 1960’s, and through the period subsequent to their foundation they have been able to build in a real way both in American andinternationally on the basis of democratic centralism.

 “Politically they seem to me to represent the only revolutionary current in existence. They have understood the revisions of Pabloism and the complementary errors of the IC in a very complete way, have analysed and fought all the petty bourgeois radicalism that has been prevalent since the late 60’s (feminism, New Leftism, guerillaism) and in a complementary fashion have stood out against the capitulation of the so-called Trotskyists of the USFI (both wings) to Popular Frontism and to the widespread economism that has afflicted the left since the working class began to break out into struggle in a big way over the last decade. This political independence and consistency has been reflected in a very precise and conscious understanding of the tasks that face small groups of revolutionaries in the present conditions, summed up in their formulation of the fighting propaganda group. The value of their positions has been apparent again and again in facing the problems that actually confront the WSL (syndicalist approach, obscuring of the need for a new revolutionary party opposed to the Labour Party, misuse of resources, neglect of the left groups and the lack of a consistent political line which is clearly before the membership as it carries out its work, question of inner party democracy and leadership). I have come to the conclusion that their approach to the Labour Party has the virtue of at least according with the real situation in the working class, and the fact that the Labour Party is losing support very rapidly—they see work directed at the LP as having the purpose of splitting and winning advanced workers through grappling with the turns in the objective situation and the manoeuvres of the reformists, while maintaining clearly the necessity for a Trotskyist party in front of the working class. On the trade unions their idea of the trade union caucus seems to provide the possibility of a genuine growthand the serious training of a new leadership without liquidation or opportunism, which the CDLM to me represents. Again on Ireland they have seriously confronted the problems presented by the particular form which the national question takes (not a new position incidentally, and indicative of their ability to confront major theoretical questions concretely and in relation to the world political situation).

 “I saw…at Grunwicks on Monday. They asked me if I had any questions on their politics or things I couldn’t understand. I was in the uncomfortable position of having to say that I could quite see the logic of their positions…. This was the only formulation that I could come up with to actually forestall a discussion over points which I agreed with any way. That made me realise that I have a responsibility to face up to their existence and my essential agreement with them. From now on I intend to fight for their politics inside the WSL.”

As the document on “The Coalition, ‘Make the Lefts Fight’ and the Workers Government Slogan” went through successive drafts over two months, the discussions within what had been an amorphous left wing of the WSL showed a growing political differentiation. By the time the jointly written document was submitted it was apparent that the signatories were on the verge of a parting of political paths. The majority (represented by Green, Holford, Quigley and Short) were coming to the conception that, while it was conceivable that much of the WSL membership and even a section of the leadership could possibly be won to the revolutionary programme, this could only be done through the process of insurrecting against the WSL’s Healyite-derived practice and tradition, which had to be destroyed.

Murray and Kellett, however, pulled back sharply and went on to play a dishonourable role as a left cover for the WSL leadership, sharing many of the programmatic positions of the Trotskyist Faction but subordinating these to their desire not to break with Thornett. This political differentiation was extremely important because it ruptured the personal ties between the ex-I.S./RCGers, establishing unambiguously that programme comes first. Within a short period after this break with the Murray clot the TF had produced its comprehensive political statement, “In Defense of the Revolutionary Programme.”

INDORP provided for the first time what the WSL had lacked from the beginning, a coherent Trotskyist programme and perspective. It took up many of the questions raised by the iSt letter of June 1976 (Cuba, history of the IC, trade-union policy, “make the lefts fight”) and other key issues facing a revolutionary vanguard in Britain, notably the Irish question (see more below). It also drew a sharply critical balance sheet of the WSL’s incompetent and opportunistic international work:

 “Unable to build an anti-revisionist, democratic centralist international tendency on the basis of a clear programmatic attitude to the basic tasks of revolutionaries in this epoch and the decisive issues of the class struggle internationally (opposition to popular frontism, defence of the deformed workers’ states, political struggle against nationalism and the necessity to re-create the Fourth International), the central leadership has led the WSL into a world of rotten blocs, cover-ups, diplomacy and intrigue—masquerading as the fight to ‘reconstruct’ the Fourth International.”

In the WSL, “international work” is mainly an extra-curricular activity, and at least some of its international connections have been made without directives by the NC by one comrade who uses his holidays to make political contacts outside this tight little island. Mostly the WSL should just be embarrassed by its international “co-thinkers,” the contemptible Socialist League (Democratic-Centralist) [SL(DC)] of the U.S. (referred to in INDORP as “lower-than-reformist wretches who stand in the tradition of one Albert Weisbord against Cannon and Trotsky”) and the Pabloist Greek Communist International League (CIL), which last year was engaged in “unity” manoeuvres with the local USec section.

However, the WSL is not content with such small fry and is quietly stalking the big game of “the world Trotskyist movement.” With his reputation and history, Thornett reasons, he should be able to reach an accommodation with Mandel & Co. or someone in the big time. Currently the WSL is entertaining leading representatives of the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). (Thornett’s documents inside the WRP contain sections which closely parallel the OCI conception of a strategic united front.)

While the WSL is not attracted by the total liquidation into the Labour Party of the Blick-Jenkins (British pro-OCI) group—since this would eliminate the independent cheerleading squad to hail Thornett’s work at Cowley—their natural resting place in the ostensibly Trotskyist milieu would most likely be as part of an ex-IC conglomeration within the USec, centring on the American SWP. Confirmation of appetites in this direction can be seen in the Socialist Press (8 March) article on the recent French legislative elections, which replicates the OCI position of calling for votes to the Communist and Socialist Parties (part of the popular front Union of the Left) not only on the decisive second round of voting but on the first round as well.

A contribution to the pre-conference discussion by the WSL leadership purported to offer its orientation to “the world Trotskyist movement.” The document, entitled “The Poisoned Well” [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 1, January 1978), presents a version of the degeneration of the Fourth International heavily flavoured by the WSL’s workerist perspective. But the key, as the TF pointed out, is that:

 “The entire thrust of the document ‘The Poisoned Well’ despite the promised amendments is to attempt to straighten out what the leadership sees as ‘methodological’ weaknesses of the thoroughly reformist American SWP so as to better equip it for the fight against the centrist ex-International Majority Tendency wing [of the USec]. If agreement can be reached on the uncontentious theses at the end of the document then the ‘reunification’ (sic) discussions can begin. The EC [Executive Committee] of the WSL is taking the organisation down the road to liquidation into the United Secretariat.” [emphasis in original]

—”In Defence of the Revolutionary Programme”

At the February conference the WSL central leadership tried to claim that the most egregiously capitulationist references to the SWP and the USec were “slips of the pen,” and submitted amendments to sanitise their document. Alan Holford of the TF dismissed this by pointing out that four single-spaced pages of amendments hardly constituted “slips.” In the debate Socialist Press editor Lister said that while he was not opposed in principle to characterising the USec as centrist, to say so in writing would preclude an invitation to the USec congress, thereby rendering the WSL’s prospects “very small.” Some prospects!

The WSL’s attitude towards the Pabloist United Secretariat was accurately captured by Holford in a quote from Tristram Shandy which he included in his presentation as minority reporter: “Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm nor so vague as not to be understood.”

A Class Line vs. Left Republicanism on Ireland

One of the consequences of the blinkered Cowley-centred economism of the Thornett leadership was that for the first three years of its existence the WSL has not had a position on the Irish question—of crucial importance for any organisation with pretensions of providing revolutionary leadership to the workers of the British Isles. In order to plug this rather embarrassing gap in its programme, the leadership established an Irish Commission which was charged with developing a position for the WSL. In the course of the political struggle within the WSL three members of this four-man commission came to agreement on a class-struggle programme for Ireland paralleling the unique position of the iSt. This was presented as the Trotskyist Faction document “No Capitulation to Nationalism: For a Proletarian Perspective in Ireland!” ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 13, February 1978).

In recoiling from the anti-sectarian, proletarian position of the Spartacist tendency, the WSL wholeheartedly embraced the kind of pseudo-socialist “Republican” position on Ireland common to most of the British fake-Trotskyist groupings. The Thornett leadership’s document attempted to step around the difficult problem posed by the existence of the separate Protestant people (who comprise 60 percent of the population of the six counties of Northern Ireland and a quarter of the population of the island as a whole) by simply ignoring it and putting forward a call for “self-determination for the Irish people as a whole.”

The TF document pointed out that such a call “is meaningless precisely because there is no sense in which we can speak of the [Irish] people as a whole,” and challenged the vicarious green nationalists of the WSL leadership to “face up to the implications of such a programme. It is in effect a call for the forcible unification of the whole island by the Irish bourgeoisie irrespective of the wishes of the Protestant community,” a move which “could only precipitate a bloody communal conflict offering nothing for the proletariat.” The majority document clearly confirmed the WSL’s alignment with mainstream petty-bourgeois Irish Republicanism:

 “We do not argue as such for a united capitalist Ireland. But it must be clear that were such an unlikely development brought about in the course of struggle it would represent an historically progressive development.” [emphasis in original]

—Outlines of a Programme for Ireland,” ibid.

The Trotskyist Faction document rejected the leadership’s open support to Catholic Irish nationalism, stating that:

 “We are AGAINST THE FORCED UNIFICATION OF IRELAND UNDER BOURGEOIS RULE.” Instead it raised the algebraic call for an Irish workers republic as part of a socialist federation of the British Isles. The TF stated clearly that the struggle to unite the Protestant and Catholic working people across sectarian lines must be premised on inflexible opposition to the continuing oppression of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, and also on a fight for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Ireland. However, the TF document added:

 “… the removal of the troops, unless a class-conscious proletariat led by a revolutionary party is able to intervene, may well be the occasion for enormous sectarian slaughter (as occurred in India after independence) but as Marxists we must reject out of hand the reformist proposition that imperialist troops can ever be a fundamental guarantee against barbarism. The continuation of British imperialism’s military occupation of the north is even more inimical to the prospect for socialism than the slaughter which might follow its departure.”

    —”For a Proletarian Perspective in Ireland!”

In the debate on Ireland at the conference one Thornett supporter after another rose to speak in defence of the majority’s sketchy but clearly Catholic nationalist document, yet felt it necessary to preface their remarks by admitting they knew little about Ireland. In contrast, the position of the Trotskyist Faction, drawing on the considerable collective experience of its members in the struggle in Ireland, was presented by Paul Lannigan, a former member of the Irish National Committee of Healy’s SLL from 1968 to 1970. Lannigan, who had first-hand experience in recruiting Protestant shop stewards in Derry to the SLL, opposed the leadership’s “socialist” green nationalism, which effectively denies the possibility of revolutionaries being able to win Protestant workers to an anti-sectarian socialist programme.

Mass Work Fakery, Menshevism and Bundism in Turkey

With the exception of its loose ties to the Greek CIL and the American SL(DC), the WSL’s only work outside Britain has taken place in Turkey. Beginning with a few Turkish members recruited from the WRP, the WSL recruited a handful of raw militants and established two small branches in Turkey. In every respect the Turkish work was a criminal fiasco as a minuscule grouping of politically uneducated militants attempted to translate the WSL’s “mass work” approach from chummy England into the harsh reality of Turkish society where labour and leftist militants are regularly set upon and often murdered by fascist thugs.

The Trotskyist Faction recruited two members of the WSL’s Turkish group in London who recounted the bitter experience of a strike (for union recognition) sparked by the Turkish WSLers: “We were totally ill-prepared to give even good trade union leadership to back up our advice to these workers” (“Enough of Opportunism, Adventurism, Bundism: For a Trotskyist Perspective in Turkey,” [WSL] Pre-Conferenee Discussion Bulletin No. 12, February 1978). The WSL leadership wasn’t taken aback. True, the majority document admitted, “…the strike was isolated, was broken, and all the strikers were sacked.” However, “Though the battle was lost, our comrades were developed and new contacts won” ([WSL] PreConference Discussion Bulletin No. 6, February 1978)!

Having experienced the dead end posed by the WSL’s economist activism, these two militants came to fundamental agreement with the Trotskyist Faction’s insistence on the centrality of programmatic clarity and the struggle to educate and recruit cadre as key to building the revolutionary party. Thus the TF Turkish document attacked the leadership’s Bundist approach to the national question as applied to the Kurds (a national minority presently divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the USSR). According to the WSL majority the Kurds must achieve “national unity first,” i.e., the establishment of a bourgeois Kurdistan; consequently Kurdish workers living in Turkey must be organised into a separate Kurdish party. Recognising the Kurds’ right to self-determination, the TF document attacked this Bundist organisational norm and Menshevik two-stage strategy.

On the thorny Cyprus question the faction took a clear internationalist position:

 “Up until 1974, the Turkish population of Cyprus was nationally oppressed by the Greek population—since the invasion by the Turkish army, the Greeks have been in the more oppressed position. Because the two populations have been thoroughly intermingled on this small island it is clear that the reality of ‘self-determination’ for either people can only come at the expense of the other and thus ‘self-determination’ is not applicable. We call therefore for the withdrawal of all foreign troops (whether Turk, Greek, UN, NATO, or any other) and for the unity of Greek and Turkish working peoples of Cyprus to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers state under the leadership of a Trotskyist party.”

    —”Enough of Opportunism, Adventurism, Bundism….

  

Thornett “Counterattacks”

For the longest time the Thornett leadership sought to ignore the international Spartacist tendency. After a year’s procrastination, the WSL’s sometime resident literary dilettante, Alan Westoby, finally produced a draft reply to the June 1976 iSt letter. This work was so blatantly unserious that the WSL NC rejected it in summer 1977. Since Westoby had left the organisation to pursue his “theoretical” activity, the job of drafting a new reply was commissioned out to someone else—whose work was rejected for being too soft on the iSt. Finally leadership loyalists like John Lister and Tony Richardson produced their own reply—with a little help from their friends in the Murray clique. This shoddy document laconically remarks in the introduction: “In compiling this material we have drawn on notes supplied by cdes. Steve Murray and Julia Kellett, though neither comrade has seen the completed document.”

(Having rejected the Trotskyist Faction’s comprehensive political critique of the hardened right-centrist Thornett leadership, the Murray group slid into ignominious disarray at the national conference, with faction members splitting their votes and one even voting for a TF document. With a chronology reminiscent of the career of the vile Tim [“I was a hatchet man for Healy and Hansen”] Wohlforth, Murray’s fence-straddling and unprincipled bloc with Thornett earned him only the political contempt of some of his own factional partners [and no doubt of the Thornett supporters as well].)

The Lister-Richardson-Murray “reply” is a broken record stuck on the single refrain that the iSt is “sectarian” because we recognise that “a currently embryonic party organisation must necessarily constitute itself in the form of a ‘fighting propaganda group’” and we frankly state that the character of our trade-union work must be “exemplary,” rejecting the workerist notion of intervening in every daily struggle of the masses. “What type of forces will such a stand attract?” the Thornett group asks rhetorically, answering: “Talkers, debaters, and those disillusioned with struggle for leadership within workers’ organisations…” ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 5, February 1978). At another point they wax indignant: “Your refusal to fight to recruit workers… means that your role is reduced to that of political vultures, preying on other tendencies on the left.”

This absurd charge—reminiscent of Wohlforth at his nadir, when sputtering for lack of anything to say he would charge that Spartacists “hate the workers”—is consummate dishonesty coming from authors who are not unfamiliar withWorkers Vanguard. But at least the Thornett supporters make clear what it is they object to: the authors complain that the London Spartacist Group interventions in WSL public meetings “seem determined to cut across any dialogue with [workers who attend these meetings] and drive them away from the WSL, turning every meeting into a debate on the most abstract level.”

And just what are these “abstract” topics of debate? The same points that were the axis of the TF faction fight: the need to break from Labourism and illusions in the Labour “lefts”; the need for a proletarian strategy in Ireland, to draw the class line against popular frontism. This is too “abstract” for the Thornett group because they seek to recruit politically raw workers at their present level of consciousness, i.e., militant trade unionism. We, however, aspire to recruit workers who despise the IMG’s line of Menshevik “unity” or the SWP’s refusal to defend the gains of the October Revolution.

The authors of the leadership “reply” to the iSt get carried away with their self-righteous rhetoric about how the Spartacists would be repelled by the “action of thousands and millions of workers mobilised in practical struggles around its [the Transitional Programme’s] demands.” We are anxiously waiting to hear how the WSL has managed to mobilise these “thousands and millions of workers” around even its reformist minimum program for the unions. In fact, at the conference Thornett admitted that the WSL had been unable to play much of a role in the firemen’s strike because the much larger Cliffite SWP stood in the way. What the WSL did not do in this situation is polemicise against the SWP. As for trade-union implantation, the WSL has no significant fraction outside Cowley. This compares to the SL/U.S. which gives political support to active groups of class-struggle unionists among dock workers and warehousemen, steel workers, car workers, phone workers and seamen.

The one issue which seems to have stung the WSL central leadership into something resembling a political defence is the question of voting for popular front candidates and the nature of a workers government. John Lister’s document, “What the Fourth Congress of the Comintern Really Decided” ([WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 3, February 1978), is really just an attempt to institutionalise the confusion sown by Zinoviev and Radek in that discussion. If the WSL really wants to say that it considers a Labour Party cabinet resting on a majority in Parliament to be a “workers government”—this is one of Zinoviev’s five variants—they are free to do so. We would only remind them of the company they are travelling in. One Pierre Frank, in a commemorative article on the Transitional Programme(International Socialist Review, May-June 1967), congratulated the Pabloist United Secretariat in having “revived and enriched” the concept of workers government to mean something other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. As for the Spartacist tendency, it stands on the “unrevised” programme of Trotsky’s Fourth International, which states:

 “This formula, ‘workers’ and farmers’ government’, first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the October Revolution. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat….

 “When the Comintern of the epigones tried to revive the formula buried by history of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, it gave to the formula of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ a completely different, purely ‘democratic’, i.e., bourgeois content, counterposing it to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik-Leninists resolutely rejected the slogan of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ in the bourgeois-democratic version.”

—The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International

A slightly more serious attempt to deal with the question was made by Clinton, Hyde and White (a trio whose opening shots in the political struggle in the WSL were their arguments that the police deserved a “sliding scale of wages”). Their document (“Strategy and Tactics—A Reply to Our Petty Bourgeois Critics,” [WSL] Pre-Conference Discussion Bulletin No. 10, February 1978) prints pages of citations to argue that Trotsky in the 1930’s did not take an explicit position against voting for the workers parties in a popular front.What these scholastic “theoreticians” ignore is that Trotsky faced situations in France and Spain which were pre-revolutionary, with parliamentary and electoral tactics quite secondary in the context of massive factory occupations and direct military struggle with the fascists. In France Trotsky urgently and repeatedly called for the formation of committees of action (in the context of a strike wave) as the vehicle for breaking the workers from the popular front and splitting the reformist parties.

Our snide academics don’t mention this, nor does the WSL present any programmatic axis for struggle against the reformist parties and against bourgeois coalitionism. On the contrary it makes a ritual denunciation of the Lib-Lab coalition…and then promises to vote for Labour anyway. If ever there were a case of sterile propagandism, this is it. The French Pabloists were consistent, at least, in refusing to characterise the Union of the Left as a popular front; should they do so, said the Mandelites, “This would lead logically to abstention in the [1977] municipal elections” (quoted in International, Summer 1977).

The WSL’s own policy—refusing to vote for coalitionist candidates only if joint Liberal-Labour slates are presented—is a purely juridical conception of the bloc, which implicitly or explicitly denies the essential fact: that the popular front is abourgeois political formation. The left oppositionist document on the workers government slogan answered this subterfuge in advance with a quotation from Trotsky:

 “The question of questions at present is the People’s Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical manoeuvre so as to be able to practice their little business in the shadow of the People’s Front. In reality the People’s Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism….”

 —”Letter to the RSAP,” Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36

The heart of the Clinton-Hyde-White document is unadulterated class baiting: e.g., “They appeal to tired petty bourgeois members who prefer academic debate to the class struggle.…” Etc. What drives these three (who, by the way, are themselves teachers) into a frenzy is the Trotskyist Faction’s rejection of the guilty workerism which passes for politics in the WSL. Attempting to be condescending, they only articulate their own philistinism. Moreover, when they finally get around to justifying their all-purpose slogan “make the lefts fight,” their mystical glorification of the “daily grind” spells itself out in the language of frank opportunism:

“Until such time as significant sections of workers look to alternative revolutionary leaders, we must take the workers through the experience of trying and testing the alternatives that exist.”

—”Strategy and Tactics…”

Just as revolutionaries begin with the objective needs of the proletariat rather than its present consciousness in formulating their program, we do not “take” the proletariat through the experience of reformism. If they have not yet broken from the Stalinist and social-democratic misleaders we must indeed accompany them through the experience of exposing these betrayers. But the WSL does indeed mean to take British workers through a new experience of reformism—first the Callaghans and Healeys, then the Foots and Benns, and then…

Results and Prospects

In describing the loss of 20 percent of its active membership as “A Step Forward” (Socialist Press, 22 February), the Workers Socialist League declares its firm intent to continue in its ostrich-like position. As a result of the split by the Trotskyist Faction it has been reduced to a national network of supporters of Alan Thornett’s activities at the Cowley Leyland plant (reverently dubbed “The Factory” by the WSL leadership). The loss of a sizeable number of younger comrades has clearly stung them, as has the departure of a layer of experienced cadres; and the haemorrhaging of the WSL has not stopped yet.

For the international Spartacist tendency, the fusion with the comrades of the TF greatly increases the authority of our Trotskyist programme, in Britain and internationally. In Britain today there is one—and only one—organisation which intransigently fights coalitionism, opposes all brands of nationalism and is part of a democratic centralist international tendency: the Spartacist League.

One parting reply to the WSL’s embarrassingly empty class baiting: we do not wish to begrudge Alan Thornett his unstinting dedication to defending the interests of the Cowley workers as he perceives them. Under the proper leadership of a disciplined Trotskyist party such mass leaders can perform a crucial role in preparing the working class for revolutionary struggle. But such a party will be far different from the support apparatus for one or a group of trade unionists (the most degenerated example of the latter being the Ceylonese “section” of the USec, which is nothing more than an appendage of a conservative white collar union run by the corrupt Bala Tampoe). It must be a party whose Marxist programme is formulated and tested through the kind of political struggle which the WSL has systematically avoided, whether in the factories, in mass demonstrations, public meetings or the party itself.

Yes, the WSL conference was indeed a step forward—for Trotskyism and the international Spartacist tendency. It was a savage blow, however, to the pretensions of the parochial workerists from the South Midlands of little England.

Pitched Battles Against Police-State Regression:

Student Struggles Engulf Brazil

[First printed in Young Spartacus #56, July/August 1977]

June 25-In a continent known for the unbridled savagery of its many military dictatorships, the Brazilian regime of “president” Ernesto Geisel has earned- a reputation for its wanton recourse to police-state terror.

Long the darling of imperialist investors and their academic braintrusters, the ruling camarilla of army generals is notorious throughout Latin America for its brutal repression and the systematic torture and “disappearance” of political opponents of the Brazilian regime. But in recent weeks the Brazilian gorilas have been confronted with an eruption of popular discontent that has shaken their ironheel “law and order.”

For the first time since 1968, a major upsurge of student protest against the military regime has sparked a series of courageous confrontations with the brutal armed forces of the state. Despite vicious beatings at the hands of the police and mass arrests, student strikes have continued to defy the authorities, demanding the release of political prisoners and the granting of full democratic rights-most notably, freedom of assembly and speech.

First Tremors of Protest

The first tremors of the current upheaval occurred On March 30, when students staged a demonstration in the industrial center of Sao Paulo. In response to a government announcement of a 40 percent reduction in the Universidade de Sao Paulo budget, widespread layoffs among faculty and campus workers and a price rise in the university restaurants, students took to the streets and distributed an “open letter, ” which in part declared,

“Our struggle is not ours alone; it is that of the whole population, of all who struggle against a hard life, for better wages, for more schools, for university restaurants, for the freedom to demonstrate” ,”

-reprinted in Informations Ouvrieres, 2 June 1977

Although this protest remained geographically isolated and politically limited to campus-parochial concerns, it nonetheless represented a tentative step toward a broader mobilization against the Geisel regime.

On April 28 the current wave of protest began when police seized eight students and workers (apparently members of a left-wing organization) as they were distributing leaflets calling for a “Day of Struggle” on May Day. Protests quickly escalated after students and trade-union oppositionists from the Sao Paulo metalworkers issued leaflets demanding the release of the imprisoned leftists.

To the dismay of Geisel, May 5 brought 10,000 students (supported by the metalworkers) into the streets of Sao Paolo in what was the largest protest rally since 1968. The demonstration- which electrified the entire spectrum of Brazilian political life – witnessed the issuing of a second “Open Letter to the Brazilian People,” which in a more political fashion demanded “that the authorities respect the freedom to demonstrate and the right of expression and organization of all oppressed sectors of the population” (quoted in Intercontinental Press, 13 June).

The open defiance of the authorities exhibited in Sao Paulo on May 5 intersected the pervasive disgruntlement of Brazilian working people with the continued arbitrariness and repression of the regime. Under the impact of the collapse of the “Brazilian miracle” (which impressionistic bourgeois economists such as Walt Rostow had taken as proof of the “take-off stage” in anti-Marxist theories of industrial development) rifts have become apparent even within the ruling bonapartist cabal. Increasingly isolated, Geisel was forced to dissolve Congress in April, and he has come under increased pressure from the fake-opposition Movimiento Democratico Braileiro (MDB) and from renewed stirrings of discontent among junior officers in the military.

Strike activity broadened, and by the May 19 “National Day of Struggle” at least ten campuses were shut down. Demonstrations spread to 16 cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasilia (where the entire student population of 15,800 struck).

Police around the country assaulted protesters with what eyewitnesses termed the most vicious repression since 1968. 77,000 police and troops were placed on alert in Sao Paulo as an estimated 8,000 students rallied at the University medical school. As the police closed in to arrest demonstrators, they beat reporters who had – despite a government ban – covered the earlier protests.

National Student Meeting

In the aftermath of the “National Day of Struggle,” “May 1 Amnesty Committees” began to spread across Brazil as students sought to create national bodies to press their struggle for democratic rights. In Sao Paulo freely elected Student Central Directorates were created. In the words of the student organizers, these bodies “are free because we do not abide by the laws imposed by the authorities that do not permit direct, free elections and that restrict our freedom to demonstrate and organize.” Over 16,000 of the 30,000 Sao Paulo students participated in the Central Directorate elections.

Meanwhile, an attempt was made to revive the National Student Union, the banned organization which led Brazilian student protest during the 1960’s. A call was issued for a student “National Meeting” on June 4 in Belo Horizonte – the capital of the industrial state of Minas Gerais with the aim of electing a delegated leadership body on a nationwide scale.

Police repression once again intensified as the government tried to halt the protests by arresting known strike leaders. In Rio de Janeiro 30 students suspected of being delegates to the Meeting were rounded up, interrogated and released only after it was too late to travel to Belo Horizonte. In Sao Paulo, the police were unable to round up the delegates, but according to the newsweekly Veja (8 June), “the Sao Paulo police have in their hands the names of a good number of the delegates to the Meeting – the score will be settled upon their return to Sao Paulo.” When the Meeting was staged as planned, the police attacked and arrested over 800 students en masse; 98 are to stand trial under the draconian National Security Law.

“SWAT”- Brazilian Style

The stage was set for a major confrontation on the second “National Day of Struggle” called by student leaders for June 15.

Activity centered in Sao Paulo, where 32,000 police were mobilized – 2,000 occupying a central square where a demonstration had been called for the evening rush hour. The head of “public security,” Colonel Erasmo Dias, arrived on the spot and took the opportunity to display his new anti-demonstrator “novelties” to the assembled press: a “flash-light” which projects a high-intensity beam capable of blinding demonstrators for several minutes, pocketsize tear gas cannisters (which he “playfully” set off among the reporters and a display of M-16 rifles (very popular among the Brazilian military after the introduction of the American television series “SWAT”). Wildly waving his favorite 9-millimeter Browning revolver, top-cop Dias blustered, “Nobody’s going to get through here” (quoted inVeja, 22 June).

Despite the police vigilance, a daring group of students managed to hold a brief rally in the square. Avoiding police scrutiny, approximately 50 students (in a square which regularly holds 500,000 during the evening rush hour) began to chant “freedom, freedom.” As it turned out, the chanting was a cue. Dias and his stormtroopers gaped in stunned amazement as the square suddenly became alive with chanting demonstrators. What appeared to be mere passers-by and shoppers turned out to be student protestors awaiting the cue to emerge from bus queues and cafes.

As the police gave chase with trained dogs and began savagely beating protestors with clubs and belts, onlookers cheered the’ students, and the streets were flooded with confetti thrown from overhead balconies. Even neighborhood storeowners solidarized with the students; Sao Paulo movie theaters opened their doors free the next day in a gesture of solidarity.

As we go to press, the strikes continue. Ten universities are completely shut down either by student protest or administration retaliation. Meetings of the Universidade de Brasilia student body continue to vote unanimously to remain on strike – and the rector closed the school for the entire period through the July recess. (Moreover, a Third Student National Meeting had been scheduled for Sao Paulo on June 21.)

Down with Geisel!

Despite the manifest courage of the student radicals, the campus centered protests lack any strategy for the revolutionary overthrow of the Geisel dictatorship. Banners proclaiming “Workers and Students Unite” appear at demonstrations, but far more prevalent is the moralistic slogan, “To be silent is to be complicit” (the Brazilian equivalent of the New Left dictum, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”). The “Open Letters” to the Brazilian people were followed by an open letter to Rosalynn Carter during her stopover in Brazil – replete with appeals for the enforcement of “human rights” in Brazil. To top it off, the Economist (28 May) carried a photograph of students blindfolding a bust of John Kennedy in order to “shield his eyes” from the police onslaught – as if Kennedy had not been responsible for training torturers in Latin America and lending a helping hand to tin-pot tyrants and military dictators through his so-called” Alliance for Progress.”

Furthermore, student demonstrators have on several occasions not only joined forces with the MDB – which in itself is not incorrect – but expressed illusions in the MDB’s democratic pretenses. With the growing fissures in the military government, everyone in Brazil is paying lip service to “democratic” populist demagogy – from Geisel on down. When Geisel last spring arbitrarily altered the Brazilian constitution in such a way that appointment of state governors was firmly in the hands of his lackeys, he dashed the hopes of the MDB politicians who had expected to come to power in several states at the next election. Consequently, the MDB was driven into a mock “opposition” to Geisel. The MDB’s ultra-democratic utterances have gone so far as to call for “a Constituent Assembly [that] will be the synthesis of the struggle for democratic legality and the restoration of juridical dignity to the country” (Jornal do Brasil, 19 June).

But, its pseudo-democratic rhetoric aside, the MDB can be counted on to oppose the students the moment their struggles were to pose a serious challenge to the regime. The MDB was formed in 1965 by the military junta to provide a tame “electoral opposition” to the military’s captive National Renovating Alliance (ARENA). The MDB, which included formations such as the bourgeois “Labor” Party of former military strongman Getulio Vargas, has been complicit in the murderous activities of the Brazilian dictatorship throughout its thirteen-year reign of terror. Students must not rely upon any section of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to oppose continued military terror. The military seized power in 1964 to prevent former president Goulart from carrying through his proposal to implement the most minimal land reform (far less “reform” than was enacted by bourgeois governments in Italy and Guatemala in the post-World War II period), and to grant restricted democratic rights for soldiers and non-commissioned officers. The fear of arousing the masses’ was so intense among all sections of the bourgeoisie that there was no significant opposition to the coup -despite the knowledge that the military government would monopolize political power in its hands. Thus, even at the height of its “opposition,” MDB parliamentary leaders took pains to denounce the student demonstrations in June (Veja, 22 June).

In the epoch of capitalist decay, the tendency for bonapartist regimes generally based upon the military mounts in countries where imperialist domination and modern industry often stand alongside near – feudal land conditions. The “democratic” populist pretensions of junior officers and domesticated house oppositions are nothing but the demagogy of would be petty bonapartes out of power. These are the “oppositionists” who stood by and watched while the Brazilian generals have done for a period of thirteen years what the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance has done for the last few: murder, torture and ruthless oppress.

For a Workers and Peasants Government in Brazil!

In the context of uneven and combined development in Brazil, what began as student protests has flourished and intersected a reservoir of generalized hatred for the dictatorship: “The “Brazilian miracle” has fizzled and in its wake remains the same mass poverty, police terror and imperialist plunder. The modern skyscrapers and technologically advanced factories coexist with sprawling shantytowns and the abject misery of plantation-worker peonage. This provides dramatic proof that in the epoch of imperialism, so long as the bourgeoisie holds state power, backward countries such as Brazil can neither reach the level of imperialist industrial development nor qualitatively raise the standard of living of the working masses. At the same time, a working-class centered revolutionary upsurge against the military rulers would clearly elicit mass popular support – including large sectors of the urban petty bourgeoisie.

Nowhere is this clearer, and nowhere is it more important to lay the basis for united actions between the working class and radicalized students than in Sao Paulo – the classic boom town of Brazil. In this modern industrial center there are as yet no sewage or sanitary facilities for many of its 11 million inhabitants. The average worker-whose subsistence ages are quickly eroded by the 44 percent annual rate of inflation spends six hours a day simply traveling to and from work. Unemployment, which is endemic among the unskilled masses, has been sharply rising among the skilled with 5,500 auto-workers as well as electrical and construction workers recently thrown on the street.

The social emancipation of the hideously oppressed and impoverished Brazilian masses awaits the seizure of power by the proletariat and the formation of a workers and peasants government. The student protests of today must be linked to the strategic power of the proletariat in the industrial zones of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.

The urban and rural masses must be mobilized around a revolutionary program which includes democratic demands including – for the immediate freedom of all victims of right-wing repression; for full trade-union rights; for a sweeping agrarian revolution; for freedom of political association, press and speech; and for a genuine constituent assembly based upon universal suffrage. The struggle for democratic freedoms, the overthrow of the Brazilian generals and the expropriation of the rapacious imperialists demand above all else the building of a Brazilian Trotskyist party, section of a reforged Fourth International.

Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East

[First printed in Women and Revolution #12, Summer 1976. Copied from http://www.icl-fi.org/english/womendrev/oldsite/BOL-EAST.HTM]

The triumph of the October Revolution in 1917, which dramatically, transformed the lives of Russian women, wrought even greater transformations in the lives of the women inhabiting the Central Asian regions which had been colonized by tsarist Russia. But in these feudal or pre-feudal generally Islamic cultures, where the lot of women was frequently inferior to that of the livestock, change came more slowly.

The status of women varied, of course, from culture to culture and within cultures, depending on social class and the nature of the, productive process. But from the mouth of the Volga through the Caucasus and Turkestan, from Iran and Afghanistan to Mongolia and northward to Siberia virtual enslavement was the rule, although restrictions were of necessity less strictly applied to women of the poorer classes—nomads and peasant women—whose labor was essential. A certain level of trade and industry and a settled way of life in the cities was a prerequisite for the luxury of strict enforcement of Islamic law.

It was not only the formal prescriptions of the Koran, but also local customs codified in the religious common law (theShariat) and the civil law (the Adats), which determined the situation of Islamic women. The few partial reforms expressed in the Koran–the forbidding of female infanticide, the restriction of polygamy, the recognition of limited property and inheritance rights for women–were generally nullified by local Shariats and Adats.

The practically universal institution of kalym or bride price in itself illustrates the Muslim conception of marriage as a purely commercial contract having nothing to do with emotional bonds or personal commitments. In some areas the bride’s presence was not even required at the wedding. The purchase price of the female commodity had already been negotiated between the families of the bride and groom, and the wedding was merely a ceremony at which the transaction was notarized. The marriage contract was subject to dissolution by the husband at any time, and polygamy and child marriage were quite common. Children too physically immature for marital relations were subjected to the “horrible operation”—they were ripped open by a midwife to make consummation possible.

Kalym bound a woman, often from childhood, to the husband who satisfied her father’s price. If she ran away, she could be pursued as a criminal and punished by her husband or his clan. A runaway wife might be punished by having her legs broken or by other barbaric tortures. For a woman so much as suspected of infidelity, the appropriate punishment was branding on the genitals with a hot iron.

For the poor, marriage by capture often replaced payment of kalym. Once she was seized, carried off and raped, the woman had no choice but to remain with her abductor, since she had been disgraced and no other man would have her. Even widowhood brought no freedom, because a wife for whom kalym had been paid was the property of the husband’s family or clan and was bequeathed to his brother. Suicide by fire was the only alternative according to the laws of Islam. However, access to heaven was dependent on the will of the husband, and if cheated out of kalym by a wife’s suicide, he was unlikely to invite her to enter into paradise.

Rules demanding the veiling and seclusion of women had been introduced into Islamic law with the conversion of the Persian aristocracy in 641 A.D. In many parts of Central Asia the veil required was not simply the yashmuk, covering the mouth, but the paranja, which covers the whole face and body without openings for sight or breath. For centuries many women have lived thus shrouded and imprisoned in their ichkaris (segregated living quarters). A Yakutsklegend depicts a model daughter of Islam. Her living body is set before guests who proceed to cutoff pieces to eat. The girl not only bears this torment in silence but tries to smile pleasingly.

The triumph of Russian imperialism in the 1880’s brought few advances in social organization or technology in the Muslim East. The wretched Russian peasantry lived like royalty in comparison with the primitive peoples of this area.

The tsarist government forced the agricultural villages to switch at this time from food crops to cotton, and railroads were built to transport this product to Russian textile plants. Following the railroad workers were women who did not wear veils—Russian prostitutes. For a long time they were the only models available to the Muslim nomads and peasants of the “liberation” which Russian capitalism had bestowed upon women.

The October Revolution Transforms Central Asia

With the victory of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks turned toward Central Asia in the hope of developing its vast and desperately needed natural resources. The flow of these resources to the West was threatened, however, by the fact that Central Asia was from the beginning a haven for every sort of counterrevolutionary tendency and for the retreating White armies. Bourgeois consolidation anywhere in this area would have provided a base for the imperialist powers to launch an anti-Soviet attack.

The extension of the proletarian revolution to Central Asia, moreover, could become the example of socialist development in an economically backward area which would undermine the resistance of burgeoning nationalism in the East and inspire the toilers of other underdeveloped regions the world over.

But immense economic and cultural leaps were required to integrate Soviet Central Asia into a society revolutionized by the Bolsheviks in power. Trotsky called the area “the most backward of the backward,” still living a “prehistoric existence.” Indeed, the journey eastward from Moscow across Central Asia was a trip backward through the centuries of human development.

The Bolsheviks viewed the extreme oppression of women as an indicator of the primitive level of the whole society, but their approach was based on materialism, not moralism. They understood that the fact that women were veiled and caged, bought and sold, was but the surface of the problem. Kalym was not some sinister plot against womankind, but an institution which was central to the organization of production, integrally connected to land and water rights. Payment of kalyin, often by the whole clan over a long period of time, committed those involved to an elaborate system of debts, duties and loyalties which ultimately led to participation in the private army of the localbeys (landowners and wholesale merchants). All commitments were thus backed up with the threat of feuds and blood vengeance.

These kinship and tribal loyalties were obstacles to social progress because they obscured class relations and held back the expropriation and redistribution of land and other property. Poor peasants who stood to gain by the equalization of wealth, hid the property of their rich relatives threatened with expropriation. Blood vengeance enforced vows of silence, and Soviet authority was undermined by conspiracies that served only the old oppressors.

Civil War

The Bolsheviks hoped that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain, but this necessitated a great deal of preparation, for the Muslim institutions, oppressive as they were, served real social functions and could not be simply abolished. Like the bourgeois family, they had to be replaced.

Lenin warned against prematurely confronting respected native institutions, even when these clearly violated communist principle and Soviet law. Instead, he proposed to use Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine them while simultaneously demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions, a policy which had worked well against the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.

Extending this practice to Central Asia, the Soviet government waged a campaign to build the authority, of the Soviet legal system and civil courts as an alternative to the traditional Muslim kadi courts and legal codes. Although the kadicourts were permitted to function, their powers were circumscribed in that they were forbidden to handle political cases or any cases in which both parties to the dispute had not agreed to use the kadi rather than the parallel Soviet court system. As the Soviet courts became more accepted, criminal cases were eliminated from the kadis’ sphere. Next, the government invited dissatisfied parties to appeal the kadis’ decisions to a Soviet court. In this manner the Soviets earned the reputation of being partisans of the oppressed, while the kadis were exposed as defenders of the status quo. Eventually the kadis were forbidden to enforce any Muslim law which contradicted Soviet law. Two Soviet representatives, including one member of Zhenotdel—the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women—were assigned to witness all kadi proceedings and to approve their decisions. Finally, when the wafks (endowment properties), which had supported the kadis, were expropriated and redistributed among the peasantry, the kadisdisappeared completely.

This non-confrontationist policy in no way implied capitulation to backward, repressive institutions. It was made clear that there could be no reconciliation between communism and the Koran. Although “Red Mullahs,” attracted by the Bolshevik program of self-determination and land to the tiller, suggested to their followers that Islam was socialism and vice versa, the Bolsheviks insisted that Soviet and Muslim law could never be reconciled precisely on the grounds that the most basic rights of women would be sacrificed.

The bloody civil war that pitted the Bolshevik state against imperialist-supported counterrevolutionary forces devastated the young workers state and threatened its very survival. During this period, when the Bolsheviks’ capacity to intervene in Central Asia was crippled, the crude tactics employed by their ostensibly socialist opponents fueled anti-Soviet sentiment.

In Tashkent, the railroad center of Central Asia, the governing Soviet was made up of Russian emigrés, many of them railroad workers, led by Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. In an orgy of Russian chauvinism and self-indulgence foreshadowing the policies of Stalinism to come, they expropriated the holdings of the most respected Islamic institutions and stood the slogan “self-determination of the toiling masses” on its head to justify the exclusion from the soviet of native intellectuals and sympathetic mullahs, whom they labeled “non-proletarian elements.” At the same time, they collaborated with former White officers. When the Tashkent Soviet began arbitrarily requisitioning food from the peasants during the worst grain shortages of the civil war, Lenin intervened to stop this. But the seeds of anti-Soviet rebellion had been sown.

The Basmachis, tribal and traditionalist elements (mainly Uzbek and Tadzhik), who were avowed enemies of the Bolsheviks, served as a pole of attraction for the most sordid conglomeration of forces dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. When Enver Pasha of Turkey, who came to the region as an emissary from Moscow, deserted to the Basmachis, supplying the leadership and authority necessary to unify the warring beys into a viable army of fanatical Muslim terrorists, civil war in Central Asia began in earnest. Soon thousands of Muslims joined these forces in the hills.

Few Central Asian women took the side of the Bolsheviks during the civil war and few of these survived. The heroism of those few who dared defy family, law and the word of the prophet was unsurpassed. One such woman was Tsainet Khesmitova, who ran away from her aged husband while still a child and served as a spy for the Red Army. Her husband’s hired assassins eventually caught her, cut out her tongue and left her beaten body buried neck deep in the desert to die. She was rescued by a Red Army unit but was so mutilated that she was forced to live out her life in a Moscow institution for Bolsheviks incapable of work.

Another was Umu Kussum Amerkhanova, the first woman activist of Daghestan, who repeatedly escaped from the death sentences which the White Army and her own countrymen sought to impose on her. Wearing men’s clothes, she led Red troops at the Daghestan front until the end of the war and survived to continue the work of transforming the role of women in Central Asia.

Lifting the Veil of Oppression

Bolshevik ability to intervene effectively in Central Asia began with the end of the civil war and the transition from the emergency policies of war communism to the stabilization carried out with the institution of the NEP (New Economic Policy). The Turkestan Commission was set up under the leadership of M. Frunze, a talented military commander, and G. Safarov, a leading Bolshevik of Central Asian origins.

The detested emigrés were recalled to Russia, and the land they had confiscated was distributed to the Muslim toilers. With food requisitions replaced by the tax-in-kind, and government allocations of seed and food reserves, the Basmachi revolt came to an end. But the peasants’ experience with chauvinist Menshevik policies was not forgotten. Resistance would continue to flare up in the future when agricultural tensions were again exacerbated.

The end of the war signaled the initiation of systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women. In the absence of native activists, it was the most dedicated and courageous members of Zhenotdel who donned the paranja in order to meet with Muslim women and explain the new Soviet laws and programs which were to change their lives. This was an extremely dangerous assignment, as any violation of a local taboo enraged husbands, fathers and brothers to murder. In fact, the discovery of numerous dismembered bodies of Zhenotdel organizers finally compelled the Soviet government to reinstate the death penalty for explicitly “anti-feminist” murder as a counterrevolutionary crime, although non-political murder (even murder committed in vengeance against wives) received a standard sentence of five to ten years’ imprisonment.

Zhenotdel activists organized “Red Yertas” (tents), “Red Boats” and “Red Corners,” depending on the terrain. They attracted local women by offering instruction in hygiene and crafts, by providing entertainment and a place to socialize and by distributing scarce consumer goods. Although the clubs were at first concerned primarily with publicizing and explaining the new laws, they later became centers for culture and education and waged a remarkably successful campaign to liquidate illiteracy.

At the 13th Party Congress in 1924 an offensive was launched in Central Asia which was designed to bring women into production and political life. Funds were allocated from central and local budgets for assemblies of women’s delegates and for associations to combat kalym and polygamy. Plans were also made to form producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives and to establish literary and hygiene circles and medical dispensaries.

The implementation of these measures continued to depend on the initiative of a handful of Zhenotdel activists, for so deeply ingrained were the old values that often even Central Asian Communists could not conceive of substantial changes in the status of women, and the women themselves often failed to report crimes against them to the courts. The response of local party branches to the new measures ranged from open hostility and sabotage to passive incomprehension.

The party locals in Daghestan, for instance, interpreted the law abolishing kalym as an instruction to lower bride prices. In some areas the party instituted fair price regulations: a young, pretty girl from a well-to-do family might cost 300 rubles while a pockmarked widow was to be priced the same as a hornless cow.

By 1924 Zhenotdel organizations had entrenched themselves in many areas, and because of their influence and the changes in material conditions, Central Asian women began for the first time to vote. This advance was facilitated by the fact that the official summons each of them received from the party to appear at the polls was regarded as a valid reason for them to go out in public, thereby saving their husbands from ridicule.

Once at meetings, women were persuaded to run for office on the party platform. At the same time, legal reforms and land redistribution gave them rights under the law, and through producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives they were able to acquire seed, tools and training, making it possible for them to support themselves. These alternatives to economic dependency in marriage in conjunction with the publicizing of divorce laws resulted in a marked increase in divorce, initiated especially by child brides and second and third wives.

Stalinization

Had a balanced approach of training and education complemented this liberalizing agitation, these new divorcees could well have become enthusiastic pioneers of agricultural collectives and proletarian reinforcements for industrialization. Their example would have been followed by married women as well, with the incentive of increased family income working to neutralize the hostility of their husbands. But at the January 1924 Party Conference, which preceded the 13th Party Congress, the leadership, program and methods of the party changed decisively.

The degeneration of the revolution after 1923 expressed through the theory of “socialism in one country” and implemented through the strangling of workers democracy in the Soviet Union, permeated and deformed all sectors of the government.

In an ominous prelude to the policies of the “third period,” such as the forced collectivization of agriculture, the legal offensive against traditional practices in Central Asia was stepped up until the divorce rate assumed epidemic proportions. Although local party branches protested the pace of the offensive and warned that it had become “demoralizing to all concerned and a threat to continued Soviet rule,” Zhenotdel continued its one-sided agitation for women to initiate divorce, until the Red Yertas, clubs and hospitals were filled with far more divorcees than they could possibly handle. Under the impact of masses of women whom they could not support, these organizations in desperation simply dissolved. In some cases, they were transformed into brothels.

In 1927 the offensive was narrowed still further to a single-issue campaign against seclusion and the veil known asKhudshum. First, party meetings were held at which husbands unveiled their wives. Then on 8 March 1927, in celebration of International Woman’s Day, mass meetings were held at which thousands of frenzied participants, chanting “Down with the paranja!” tore off their veils, which were drenched in paraffin and burned. Poems were recited and plays with names such as “Away with the Veil,” and “Never Again Kalym” were performed. Zhenotdel agitators led marches of unveiled women through the streets, instigating the forced desegregation of public quarters and sanctified religious sites. Protected by soldiers, bands of poor women roamed the streets, tearing veils off wealthier women, hunting for hidden food and pointing out those who still clung to traditional practices which had now been declared crimes (such as conspiring to arrange a marriage for exchange of kalym).

The Khudshum appeared to be a success on March 8, but on March 9 hundreds of unveiled women were massacred by their kinsmen, and this reaction, fanned by Muslim clergy, who interpreted recent earthquakes as Allah’s punishment for the unveilings, grew in strength. Remnants of the Basmachi rebels reorganized themselves into Tash Kuran (secret, counterrevolutionary organizations) which flourished as a result of their pledge to preserveNarkh (local customs and values).

Women suing for divorce became the targets of murderous vigilante squads, and lynchings of party cadre annihilated the ranks of the Zhenotdel. The massive terror unleashed against the recently unveiled women—which ranged from spitting and laughing at them to gang rape and murder—forced most of them to take up the veil again soon after repudiating it.

The party was forced to mobilize the militia, then the Komsomols and finally the general party membership and the Red Army to protect the women, but it refused to alter its suicidal policies. The debacle of international Woman’s Day was repeated in 1928 and 1929 with the same disastrous consequences, exacting an extremely high toll on party cadre. Lacking Zhenotdel leadership those clubs which had survived the legal offensive now disappeared.

By 1929 Central Asia was caught up in the general resistance of peasant peoples throughout the Soviet Union to the forced collectivization of agriculture dictated by Moscow. Significant social advancement for most Muslim women in Central Asia was deferred. Not for another decade, when the productive capacity of the planned economy had developed sufficiently to provide jobs, education, medical care and social services on a scale wide enough to undercut primitive Islamic traditions, did they begin to make substantial gains.

The Russian Revolution created the objective preconditions for the liberation of women. But the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy was accompanied by a general reversal of significant gains for women throughout Soviet society. Thus the oppressive family structure which the Bolsheviks under Lenin had struggled to replace with the socialization of household labor was now renovated as an economic institution by the increasingly isolated regime which realized that the family provided services which the degenerated workers state could not. In defense of the family, abortions were illegalized, divorces were made much less accessible and women were encouraged through government subsidies and “Mother Heroine” medals to bear as many children as possible. In 1934, as if to sanction its physical liquidation in Central Asia at the hands of Tash Kuran terror, the Soviet government liquidated Zhenotdel organizationally as well.

International Women’s Day:

A Proletarian Holiday

[Originally published in Women and Revolution #8, Spring 1976]

Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 — International Women’s Day — is a worker’s holiday. Originating in 1908 among female needle trades workers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans “for an eight hour day,” “for the end of child labor” and “equal suffrage for women,” it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.

International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and the program for emancipation.

The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women’s Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put’ Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women’s liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and it’s first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women’s Day, 1914 (see “How the Bolsheviks Organized Working Women: History of the the Journal Rabotnitsa,” Women and Revolution No. 4, Fall 1973).

Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long awaited day, the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa – with one exception- as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women’s Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova –Lenin’s sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest, single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democracy and in the international working women’s movement wrote:

“Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women’s Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women’s Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and America.”

–Quoted in A. Artiukhina, “Proidennyi Put,” Zhenschina v revoliutsii

By far the most important celebration ever of International Women’s Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers — a strike which signaled the end of the 300 year old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented

“The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day.”

As the positions of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women’s Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother’s Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.

But International Women’s Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of it’s history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women’s Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:

“That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common conditions, which is struggle and their common goal…. Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal– such is the solution of the ‘woman’ question among workers.”

Today the Bolshevik program for the full emnacipation of women is carried forward by the Spartacist League. We are proud to publicize the real history of International Women’s Day, a part of our revolutionary heritage, and we will celebrate it with public forums around the country presenting the Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and the program and strategy to smash it.

As we deepen our influence in the working class, we look forward to celebrating future International Women’s Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday — general strikes, insurrections, revolution!

Forward to a Women’s Section of the Reborn Fourth International!

For Women’s Liberation through International Proletarian Revolution!

Links to other International Women’s Day statements

V.I. Lenin’s statements
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/mar/04.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/04.htm

Alexandra Kollontai’s statements
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/works/womday.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/womens-day.htm

International Bolshevik Tendency’s 1998 statement
http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no21/No21islm.pdf

[First printed in Workers Vanguard # 125, 17 September, 1976]

4 September 1976

To the Editor:

Your recent article entitled “American Imperialism Rattles Sabre in Korea” (WV No. 123, 3 September 1976) exposed the anti-proletarian character of the Stalinist bureaucracy in North Korea, in particular citing the monstrous cult of Kim II Sung and the complete political disfranchisement of the working masses. Kim & Co. have sought to buttress their oligarchic regime through authoritarian regimentation and leader-cultism, requiring the workers and peasants to attend daily “study sessions” devoted simply to extolling (in the words of a typical Stalinist tract) “the wise leadership of Comrade Kim II-sung, a great revolutionary leader, a brilliant Marxist-Leninist, an ever-victorious steel-like general. and a kind, paternal leader of the people who devotes himself to the utmost for them.”

It also should be noted that the Kim clique has backed up its voluntarist exhortations with unlimited terror and repression aimed at eliminating all opposition to the bureaucracy. During 1956-59, after a decade of trumpeting the “victory of socialism” in North Korea, Kim II Sung launched a “collective guidance campaign” to suppress all suspected “disloyal elements.” Virtually the entire population of North Korea was subjected to police interrogation, and thousands were imprisoned in labor camps after kangaroo-court “trials.”

Moreover, the reactionary policies of the Pyongyang regime do not stop at the 38th parallel. During 1965-70, when Washington set its sights on an all-out military victory in Indochina, the Pyongyang bureaucracy was not presented with any opportunity to angle for “detente” with U. S. imperialism and its South Korean puppet. But by 1972, following the U.S.-China rapprochement and on the eve of the Paris “peace” accords on Indochina, the North Korean Stalinists negotiated a “detente” communique with South Korea which called for “peaceful reunification of the fatherland as soon as possible.” This diplomatic overture legitimized the 40,000 “neutral” U. S. imperialist troops then stationed in South Korea as well as the South Korean troops in Vietnam (equal in number to the U.S. forces there at that time).

Equally criminal has been the “detente” Pyongyang has proferred Japan, which still entertains imperialist ambitions to conquer all of Korea. During the Korean war, the mass organizations of the Koreans in Japan were mobilized by the Japanese Communist Party in struggles against U.S. imperialist aggression and the capitalist-landlord regime in Seoul. But after the Korean War, when Pyongyang began to seek “detente” with Japan, the Korean mass organizations in Japan were instructed by North Korean Stalinists to cease all “subversive” activities and propaganda. Thus, Kim II Sung tamed one of the most combative sectors of the working-class movement in Japan and set back the struggle against capitalism in the imperialist citadel of Asia.

Likewise, North Korea has pursued “peaceful coexistence” with the Suharto regime in Indonesia, which came to power over the corpses of at least 500,000 Communist workers and peasants in the bloody coup of 1965. In 1972 Pyongyang dispatched an ambassador to Jakarta who hailed “the success of the Indonesian people in consolidating their independence and national economic progress” (quoted in Far Eastern Economic Review, 11 March 1972).

Most recently, the North Korean Stalinists demonstrated their willingness to collaborate with imperialism against the interests of the international proletariat by sending at least 100 military advisors to Zaire last year to replace the Chinese agents training troops of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). At that time, when the civil war in neighboring Angola had already become internationalized, the anti-communist, tribalist FNLA forces were fighting alongside the South African army and Portuguese colons to massacre the Russian backed/Cuban-led Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and “every communist in Angola.”

The role of the North Korean Stalinists in courting the Indonesian butchers, and in training the henchmen of the Pentagon and Pretoria in Angola, should disabuse “critical Maoists” of illusions in the “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” pretensions of the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy. As WV stressed, the revolutionary gains represented by the collectivist property forms of the North Korean deformed workers state can be protected and the road to socialist development opened only through workers political revolution to topple the Stalinist bureaucracy, establish soviet democracy and extend the revolution internationally.

Comradely,
Charles O’Brien

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #125, 17 September 1976]

The Workers World Party (WWP) and its more substantial youth auxiliary, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), have long trumpeted the North Korean Stalinist bureaucracy as the most intransigent and militant fighter in the so-called “global class war” against U.S. imperialism. But last month, when the confrontation between North Korea and the U.S. occupation forces propping up the Pak Jung Hi (Park) regime in Seoul reached another flash point at Panmunjom. WWP/YAWF suddenly forgot the “global class war” along the 38th parallel and parroted its Stalinist mentors’ prattle about “peaceful reunification” of Korea!

In his article on the Panmunjom skirmish (Workers World,  27 August) WWP/YAWF leader Sam Marcy begs the U.S. imperialists to abide by the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and recognize the democratic will of the world community on Korea:

“Little has been said in the US about the Colombo conference of non-aligned nations. All 86 voted to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Korea. Eighty-six! Together with the Soviet Union and China, that’s the bulk of humanity.

“Here in this Bicentennial year no document has been quoted more frequently than the Declaration of Independence. which calls for a ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind.’ Well, here we have the overwhelming majority of the human race demanding the withdrawal of the US military from Korea.”

Tailing the North Korean bureaucracy the WWP/YAWF is reduced to “demanding” that the U.S. imperialists, who dropped the atom bomb on Japan and carpet-bombed Vietnam, observe a “democratic” foreign policy in line with the views of Thomas Jefferson!

Ever since its inception as a political tendency the Marcyites have used the “global class war” dogma to justify capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracies and assorted “progressive” nationalist formations in the “Third World,” arguing that these forces have been pitted against the imperialist camp since the Korean War in an inexorable and epochal struggle. However, the Stalinist bureaucracies, from Russia to China to North Korea, are not committed to “global class war” but rather to global class collaboration — “peaceful coexistence” and “detente.” Thus, the USSR and China both advocate “peaceful reunification” of Korea to appease the U.S. imperialists, while each seeks to bloc with the imperialists against the other.

The “global class war” thesis was first formulated by Marcy during the Korean War of 1950-53 as an impressionistic reaction to the Cold War policy of “containment” of the then seemingly monolithic Sino-Soviet states. Marcyism represented a pro-Stalinist tendency, most despicably revealed by its open support to the Russian suppression of the workers uprising against Stalinism in Hungary in 1956.

Following in the footsteps of the “iron-willed” Kim II Sung, the WWP/YAWF can offer nothing more than peaceful reunification … of both sides of the “global class war.” As against these Stalinoid cheerleaders, the Spartacist League insists that it is not the counterrevolutionary bureaucracies but only the proletariat led by the Trotskyist party of world socialist revolution that can open the road to the communist future of humanity.

• American troops out! For military defense of the North Korean deformed workers state against U.S. imperialism and its South Korean puppets!
• For revolutionary reunification of Korea through social revolution in the South and political revolution in the North!

[First published in Workers Vanguard #125, 17 September 1976]

The bloody clash last month at Panmunjom between North Korean border guards and U.S. imperialist “peace-keeping” occupation forces provoked images of the 1950-53 Korean War and called forth a post-Vietnam “not again” reaction from many bourgeois liberals.

Always sensitive to the shifting moods of the left-liberal political milieu, Workers’ Power, the phony “mass press” of the social-democratic International Socialists (I.S.), resorted to the most shameless pacifism as a cover for its refusal to draw the class line in Korea. In its article entitled “The Deadly Game in Korea” (Workers’ Power, 30 August 1976), the I.S. bemoans the Panmunjom border clash and the many other “incidents” as “games of ‘chicken'” played by U.S. imperialism and so-called “Stalinist imperialism”:

“This time. there were some soldiers killed. It will happen again … Those in the so-called ‘demilitarized zone’ know they are dead ducks if the shooting war explodes again …. They [the Korean people] were slaughtered by the millions [during the Korean War of 1950-53] …. “

Here the I.S. rivals the liberal pacifism of the People’s Party of Dr. Spock or the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, wringing its hands in horror over the fate of the soldiers (U .S. imperialist troops included) “if the shooting war explodes again.” With this claptrap the I.S. seeks to obscure the class issues posed in any Korean conflict, “forgetting” even to call for a social revolution in South Korea!

While the I.S. does demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, these inveterate social democrats fail to indicate on which side they stand in the clashes which threaten “a shooting war.” As a political tendency the I.S. is characterized by its refusal to defend the bureaucratically deformed/degenerated workers states from imperialist attack, rationalizing this objective capitUlation to U.S. imperialism with its “theory” of “Stalinist imperialism.” Thus, at the time of the Korean War, the “Third Camp” tendency led by Max Shachtman (which later spawned the I.S.) called for the defeat of both sides, but nevertheless asserted that Stalinism was more reactionary than “democratic” U.S. imperialism. Declared the Shachtmanites:

“The so-called Northern government is not a government of the Korean people and in no way represents its interests…   the victory of its arms would mean nothing but the extension of the slave power of Stalinism over the whole territory of Korea, and therefore a disastrous blow to the people of Korea and the cause of democracy and socialism everywhere.”

New International, July-August 1950

Adapting to the present climate of “detente” the I.S. “puts popularity in command” and often tones down its “Third Camp” Stalinophobia in order to tail “Third World” nationalists in vogue. (Aping the cheerleaders of the MPLA the I.S. “forgot” to condemn the “imperialist invasion” of Angola by the “imperialist” USSR and Cuba.)

Unlike the I.S., revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the revolutionary gains represented by the collectivized property relations in North Korea (and the other degenerated/deformed workers states), while calling for a social revolution in South Korea and a political revolution in North Korea to smash the Stalinist bureaucracy and establish soviet democracy. While today indulging in blubbering pacifism, the I.S. upholds a political line which has already taken one generation of “Third Camp socialists” into the bosom of State Department socialism as drummer boys for Wall Street.

From Trotskyism to Reformism

Origins of Canadian Pabloism

By Arnold Michaels and Murray Smith

[First printed in Spartacist Canada #4, February 1976]

Until recently, the reformist League for Socialist Action (LSA), the “official” section of the international rotten bloc known as the “United” Secretariat, was the only visible ostensibly Trotskyist organization in Canada. Today, there are at least six organizations in this country which claim continuity with the Trotskyist tradition. An understanding of the reasons for this proliferation of revisionist pseudo-Trotskyist tendencies must proceed from an historical analysis of the degeneration of Trotsky’s Fourth International (FI) in the post- WWIl period. The Spartacist League of the United States (SL/US) undertook such an analysis in “Genesis or Pabloism” (Spartacist, Fall 1972). The unique characteristics of Pabloist degeneration within the Canadian movement have yet to be fully explored. in particular its liquidationist orientation toward the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). This policy had its roots in the late 1930’s but did not become definitive until over a decade later.

The degeneration of the FI was politically codified in the documents of the Third World Congress in 1951 which carried the line of liquidationism propounded by Michel Pablo. Under the impact of extreme isolation and unexpected developments (in particlilar the’ post-war Stalinist expansion into Eastern Europe and the Chinese and Yugoslav Revolutions), the international leadership, headed by Pablo, developed an objectivist perspective on the development of world revolution, a perspective which effectively obviated the role of the Trotskyist vanguard and the class-conscious proletariat in the revolutionary process. Progralnrnatically, Pablo’s view took the form of a liquidationist or adaptationist “orientation” toward the existing reformist workers parties. the Communists and the social democrats. According to Pablo’s schema, these parties could, under the pressure of the masses and the impact or objective developments (such as a new world war), transform themselves into “adequate instruments” for the revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat.

Believing that the Western Communist Parties (CP’s) and even centrist currents developing within the social-democratic parties could follow in the steps of the Yugoslav and Chinese CP’s in “roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation, ” the Pabloist current redefined the role of Trotskyists as one of pressuring the proletariat’s existing leaderships to the left. The Pabloists remained inattentive to the exceptional conditions under which the Yugoslav and Chinese Stalinists were able to lead essentially petty-bourgeois mass movements in the destruction of the bourgeois state (conditions including the extreme decay and decadence of the bourgeoisie in those countries, pressures from world imperialism and the absence or extreme weakness of a revolutionary vanguard) and failed to draw the necessary programmatic conclusion that the deformed workers states issuing from these revolutions required proletarian political revolutions under Trotskyist leadership to oust the ruling bureaucracies in order to set them on the road to socialism.

The liquidationist adaptation to Stalinism was thus accompanied by an increasingly soft line toward all of the bureaucratically-deformed workers states, with the Pabloists effectively abandoning the program of political revolution in any of these states. This is the meaning of Pablo’s hypothesis that the future promised “centuries of deformed workers states, ” a projection which revealed both a fundamental pessimism concerning the capacity of the working class as a revolutionary force and of the Trotskyist movement to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and a completely non-Marxist understanding of the unstable nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

WEAKNESSES OF THE ANTI-PABLO FACTION

While Pablo was successful in winning a few adherents in the Canadian section of the FI, the section’s

majority supported the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in its belated opposition to Pablo in 1953. The SWP, together with the Healy tendency of the British section and the LambertBleibtreu group of the French, formed the central core of the anti-Pablo opposition in the Fl. All of these organizations, however, evinced serious tendencies toward parochialism and their struggle against Pablo was consequently flawed by their failure to wage it on an international scale, and not merely against Pablo’s supporters in their own countries.

The struggle was also flawed theoretically inasmuch as their critique of the Pabloist line relied too heavily on a reassertion of Trotskyist orthodoxy on the question of Stalinism, overlooking for the most part the methodological. programmatic and strategic premises underlying the Pabloist perspective which were to survive even after the Pabloists had made a partial rectification of their “Stalinophile excesses. ” Thus the Pabloist perspective of “deep entry” (entrism “sui generis”-entry “of a unique type”) into the CP’s was denounced, but its application in relation to the social democracy was largely overlooked.

By fighting the Pabloists primarily on the terrain of anti-Stalinism, the SWP was able to win the support of groups which were in other respects politically closer to the Pabloists on the question of entrism. The Canadian section majority falls squarely into this category (as does the Moreno tendency in Argentina and the Healy tendency in Britain, at least in the early 1950′ s).

As late as 1954, SWP leader Murry Weiss could write of the Canadian section:

“I am convinced that Pabloism, that is real Pabloism, has taken a deep hold in the whole organization up there. They don’t fully realize it. They think they are all united in the work in the CCF. And they are, but on a Pabloite line I’m afraid. They have become infected with with this terrible disease of thinking that everything can be solved with fancy endless maneuver’s in the CCF, with ‘deep’ entry conceptions.”

– –International Cornmittee Documents, Vol. 3, Education for Socialists series

Despite this assessment, there is no evidence that the SWP attempted to wage a serious political struggle with the Canadians over the CCF line.

Canadian Pabloism, taking the form of a liquidationist deep-entry perspective toward the CCF, fully appeared only in 1951, but it had been nurtured by a series of previous errors in relation to the CCF, beginning in the late 1930’s. These earlier errors, which were understood as such by the International, can be attributed to the extreme historic weakness of the Canadian section’s leadership.

Despite the presence of some highly talented cadres like Maurice Spector and Jack Macdonald, both of whom had been central leaders of the Canadian CP, the Canadian Trotskyist movement (first as the Toronto branch of the Communist League of America and later as the Workers Party of Canada–WPC) was heavily reliant on the American section from its inception in 1928. An authentically revolutionary organization of great promise and with an impressive scope of activity in the 1930’s (though with only 250 members, the group was over-extended), the WPC was never able to congeal an authoritative leadership, due in part to the perennial instability of both Macdonald and Spector.

As part of the International Communist League’s (ICL) tactical orientation toward temporary shallow entry into the leftward-moving social democracies in order to win the left wings to Trotskyism, the WPC in 1936 began an entry into the CCF in British Columbia and in 1937 in Ontario.

The CCl was characterized later by the Canadian Trotskyists as “a petty-bourgeois Social Democratic party with some trade union support but deriving it’s main strength from the agrarian regions and from middle class elements in urban centers” (SWP International Information Bulletin, September 1946). While in terms of social base the early CCF resembled a two-class party like the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (FLP), it differed in one important respect: program. While the FLP had a bourgeois-populist program, the CCF adopted a petty-bourgeois “socialist” rhetoric and program, and was correctly characterized as a social-demorcatic party. Thus it was principled to conceive of an entry into the CCF of the type carried out during the “French turn” period. (For a fuller social-historical analysis of the CCF, see “Canada’s New Democratic Party: Right- Wing Social Democracy” parts 1 and 2 Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the SL/US 15 and 29 March 1974.)

A heated dispute over the question of entry into the CCF split the WPC into pro- and anti-entry facations. The pro-entry faction won a small majority but cornprised little of the party’s central leadership. Spector, in fact, had made a bloc with A.J. Muste and Martin Abern in the Workers Party/U, S. to oppose entry into Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party (SP). Macdonald also faded from the leadership of the WPC following this tactical turn.

The entry tactic was seen by Trotsky and the international leadership as a short-term raiding operation on the social democracy in order to intersect developing left currents. The most spectacular success for the tactic was registered in the U.S, where the American Trotskyists were not only able to win over a large number of SP youth and trade unionists, but also to effectively destroy the social-democratic obstacle. The American Trotskyists were significantly strengthened following the split from the SP.

In Canada however, the entry was a failure. resulting in the ruination of the section. By late 1937, the ICL (forerunner of the FI) had to step in to re-establish the section after its partial disintegration. The reorganization of a much smaller group took pIace at a convention of the American Trotskyists in January 1938, although a split from the CCF was not carried out at this time.

Failure of this entry (which the section had attempted to carry out on a principled basis) can be traced to three main inter-related factors.

First, the organization had suffered a significant degree of decomposition even prior to the entry, namely, the splitting away of a large part of the organization, including key cadre, who had opposed the entry tactic. Secondly. the group’s leadership was, particularly following this split. extremely weak and inexperienced and was unable to give firm guidance in the execution of this intricate maneuver. And finally, the left wing of the CCF proved, following the onset of the entry, to be more ephemeral than it had appeared in 1936. In 1938 the FI instructed the Canadian comrades, organized by then as the Socialist Policy Group in the CCF, to carry out a “complete programmatic and political fight at or around the national fall convention of the CCF with a perspective of completing the experience within this declining reformist organization and re-establishing the Canadian section of the Fourth International” (Documents of the Fourth International). This directive was not followed; the British Columbia comrades remained in the CCF while the Ontario comrades were expelled (finding their way back in short order, however).

The subsequent formation of the Socialist Workers League (SWL)in 1938 did not signify a complete break with the entrist perspective. Despite the directives of the International, an important part of the SWL’s work was in or even on behalfof the CCF. For example, the SWL participated in the organization of factory clubs for the CCF during WWII.

The fact that the entry was continued past 1938, against the FI’ s directives and at a time when the CCF was in decline, reflected a shift in orientation. The tactic of entry with a short-term perspective was being displaced by a permanent “semi-entrist” policy with no clear-cut objectives, contravening the FI’s instruction to “create a thorough line of demarcation between the reformists, centrists and themselves” (Documents of theFourth International).

These tendencies were accentuated during the war years both in reaction to government repression of the left and also due in no small measure to the failure of the SWP to maintain close surveillance on the work in Canada. As a strong section of the Fourth International in geographic proximity, it had a special responsibility for the Canadian section. But the SWP was succumbing to isolationism: “The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization” (“Genesis of Pabloism”).

The growing adaptation to social democracy was clearly revealed in the first issue of Labour Challenge (1 June 1945) in an article entitled “VOTE CCF’ which inferred that the CCF in power would be a “labour government,” a necessary stage on the path to socialism. The demand for a CCF government was, in fact, the focus of the overall program presented by Labour Challenge.

The CCF in 1946 was still a petty-bourgeois social-democratic party (with a working-class base which had grown since the late thirties) and it would have been conceivable, from the standpoint of Marxist principle, to give it critical electoral support. However, in 1946 the CCF stood on a record of wartime social chauvinism, having made a turn away from an anti-conscription position early in the war toward a stance favoring conscription.

In addition to this, it was very federated on the provincial level with farmers (who had moved considerably rightward since the radical “socialist” rhetoric of the thirties) as its overwhelming mainstay in certain areas. Thus, while it might have been correct to give critical support to the CCF in certain areas at certain times, it was a political mistake to call for a CCF vote on the national level in this period.

THE “WORKERS GOVERNMENT” SLOGAN

But the Canadian group’s “mistake” went beyond this. To begin with, its support to the CCF was not critical from the Leninist standpoint, but tended toward a stages theory of the road to socialism. Rather than conceiving of putting the CCF in power so that it would expose the falsity of its promises to the working class, the Canadian group saw a CCF government as a progressive step toward socialism, not as an obstacle that would have to be removed before genuine workers power could be achieved.

Trotskyists understand the “workers government” slogan as an algebraic formulation for the dictatorship of the proletariat. In departing from this transitional conception of the slogan, the by then centrist SWL took a basically reformist position on the role of the CCF in the struggle for socialism. The SWL was not consistent in this attitude; in fact, it tended in the forties to move from right to left to right on the question, ending finally with a hardened rightist orientation toward the social democracy.

One example of the rightist, strategic-entry policy in 1945 was the work of one SWL member who was so successful in integrating himself into the CCF that he won election to Parliament as a CCF candidate. This having been accomplished, the SWP prepared to send one of its leaders, George Clarke, to Ottawa to write the man’s speeches. But this ill-conceived venture soon fell apart when the new Member of Parliament dropped out of the SWL.

THE RWP 1946 LEFT TURN

With the formation under Ross and Murray Dowson’s leadership of the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP), the Canadian section made a brief left turn, empirically abandoning its tailing of the CCF. The impetus for the turn was the militant post-war strike wave of 1945-46.

In RWP propaganda. the slogan. “For a CCF Government,” was correctly replaced with “For a Workers and Farmers Government. ” The RWP boldly embarked on its own municipal election campaigns in 1947 and ’48, not as a milk-sop surrogate for the CCF’s failure to run. but in order to advance a revolutionary program. The 1948 RWP campaign for mayor in Toronto was endorsed by two important United Auto Workers locals and received 20 percent of the vote under the slogan, “Vote DOWSON. Vote for a Labour Mayor, Vote for the TROTSKYIST Candidate.” Eight years after the FI had urged a break from the CCF, it was finally made: “The hardened opportunist leadership of the CCF… excludes any possibility of converting the CCF into an instrument of social revolution” (Labour Challenge, mid-October, 1946).

But the old errors had never been analyzed from a Marxist standpoint and the RWP was not politically prepared for the growing anti-communism of the cold-war period which followed the ’45-46 strike wave. The old orientation began to creep back, with Dowson re-embracing the erroneous line he had put forward in 1942: “Political action of the Canadian workers has taken a reformist detour. Today’s expression of working-class independent political action is the CCF” (RWP Internal Bulletin, 1942).

PABLO ENCOURAGES PERMANENT ENTRY INTO CCF

The international leadership was no longer capable of correctipg the Canadian section’s errors, having undergone a serious disorientation and then degeneration following the war. In fact. Pablo’s new international line encouraged the exploration of the deepest depths of the “CCF orientation”. In a 1950 letter the International Secretariat advised the Canadian section that the CCF entry it was preparing would be “something of a long duration” (quoted in Ross Dowson, CCF: Our Tasks and Perspectives). This instruction anticipated the line that Pablo would advance at the Tenth Plenum of the International Executive Committee in 1952. In countries where the hegemonic political tendency in the workers movement was social democracy. Pablo declared that the task was to enter the social-democratic parties ” …in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility which exists of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions, develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the massses and of the objective revolutionary process in their respective countries” (International Secretariat Documents, Vol. I, Education for Socialists series).

The general guidelines for these political entries, as outlined at the Austrian Commission of the Third World Congress in 1951, were directly counterposed to the Leninist-Trotskyist position on the question: “A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions… ” (quoted in “Genesis of Pabloism “). In periods of both full and partial entry over the last 25 years, Dowson and his heirs have never deviated from these guidelines in their CCF /NDP work.

While a 1951 RWP document which effectively heralded the dissolution of the RWP into the CCF noted that the CCF had no left wing, was declining, had a defunct youth movement and was moving rapidly to the right, the entry was made nonetheless. By the time the former RWPers were expelled from the CCF in 1955 (with the British Columbia section remaining inside), the group had defined itself completely as a left appendage of the CCF.

PABLO’S UNRECONSTRUCTED OFFSPRING

Today Ross Dowson, having departed from the LSA in early 1974 to form the Socialist League, accuses his ex-comrades of abandoning the historical position of Canadian ostensible Trotskyists toward the CCF/NDP in favor of a species of “ultra-left sectarianism. ” But while Dowson (with his long-term deep entry into the social democracy with a non-split perspective) has merely carried the historical practice of the LSA and its predecessors further along toward its logical conclusion in outright programmatic and organizational liquidation, the LSA orientation remains fundamentally no different.

As they have for over 20 years, the LSA affirms that its attitude toward the NDP is one of “unconditional” fraternal support. Although for the past two-and-a-half years, less of the LSA’s actual practice has taken place within the NDP than has been the historical norm, this is for purely conjunctural reasons stemming from the split during 1973-74 of most of the organization’s entrist fraction to either Dowson’s outfit or the centrist Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG). In fact, as it moves closer to achieving unity with the Canadian adherents of the so-called “Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International” (an invitee to the LSA’ s last national convention, whose sole practice in English Canada is subterranean NDP work), the LSA is coming to place noticeably more emphasis on its work inside (and on behalf of) the social democracy.

For its part, the RMG (the central core of whose leadership came from an inchoate left-reformist caucus in the Ontario NDP known as the Red Circle) has not since the early days of its independent existence exhibited the classic orientation of Canadian Pabloism toward deep entry in the NDP. (The early days or the RMG were marked by NDP fraction work which did not differ qualitatively from that of the LSA).

Yet this fact does not reflect any break in the direction of Trotskyism. The RMG, in common with its European mentors in the “United” Secretariat majority of Ernest Mandel. Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan (all of whom trained under Pablo during the 1950’s and early 1960’s), has embraced the more “militant” orientation of mainstream international Pabloism today–adaptation toward the spontaneous movements of various socially peripheral sectors which comprise a so-called “broad vanguard” presumably able to politically lead struggles in its own name. Thus rather than programmatically liquidate into the social democracy, the Pabloists of the RMG prefer at this juncture to programmatically liquidate into various petty bourgeois/sectoralist/reformist “indepent mass movements” of women, blacks, gays, immigrants and natives.

What all Pablo’s latterday, unreconstructed offspring have in common is an explicit refusal to fight for the revolutionary Transitional Program in the course of their day-to-day work, and a rejection of the centrality of the class-conscious proletariat and its Leninist vanguard in the struggle for socialist revolution. The Spartacist tendency had its origins as a faction in the American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960′ s which waged a struggle for these principles against the SWP’s rapid flight toward unprincipled reunification with the European Pabloists in 1963. Today the international Spartacist tendency, of which the Trotskyist League of Canada is a sympathizing section, carries forward this struggle to reforge the Fourth International on the program and principles of revolutionary Marxism.

A Talk on the Labor Party Question

by Jim Robertson

[Reprinted in Young Communist Bulletin #3 “On the United Front”, 1976]

Note: The following is a slightly edited version of com­rade Jim Robertson’s “Talk on the Labor Party Question,” delivered at an internal youth educational in Boston on 5 November 1972.

This report is intended to be a presentation of a series of interlocked home truths and a comment on the search for deviations, of which in a hardened way we seem to have discovered only two. Its origins are that in the West Coast Labor Day Pre-Conference Discussion the issue of the Labor Party quite thoroughly dominated the discussion. A great deal of uncertainty, confusion and a very considerable spread of opinion on the Labor Party question presented themselves there, and we had to thrash them out.

At this point the slogan which I have been defending and want to defend here is the slogan “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Workers Party based on the trade unions.” Another slogan which was debated and which presents an aspect of rank and file-ism, of syndicalism, would be the slogan “For a Labor Party without bureaucrats.” Now that slogan lacks the contradictory tension of a struggle and suggests simply rank and file-ism and possibly, by implication, the development of an organized mass workers party counterposed to the trade unions: perhaps the political equivalent of the red unions of the CP’s third period.

I gather that on the Coast there is perhaps a comrade who objects to the first part of the slogan, “Dump the bureau­crats,” and just wants to have a slogan “For a Labor Party based on the trade unions.” In New York there is a comrade who just wants to have the slogan “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Communist Party.”

There is a great deal of confusion. The confusion centers along two separate axes. and that’s why there’s a great deal of confusion, or rather, complicated confusion. Furthermore, in the last debate in New York, I spent all my time on the decisions of the Third and Fourth Congresses. I’m going to evade that this time and simply point out that the Labor Party slogan is the current American version of the issue of the united front. It’s posed in the absence of a massive political expression of reformism or Stalinism in the United States; rather, with the organization of industrial unions with a deeply committed pro-capitalist trade-union bureauc­racy, it is toward them that the issue of proletarian unity and the process of communist triumph in struggle is centered on the Labor Party question. The axes are twofold….

There are two axes of confusion over the Labor Party. One is the importance of realizing that this is a propagan­distic demand for us today which has no relationship to what will happen in the future. That is, today, the Workers League to the contrary notwithstanding, the idiots who think that Meany who does not like Negroes, homosexuals or abortion laws is therefore building a Labor Party in order to carry out these anti-capitalist demands—it’s nonsense. There has to be a sense of proportion, which the Communist Party originally lost in 1924.

In the first place, the Labor Party is not the issue for propaganda; the workers government is. Now, we stumbled into this. If you read the early issues of Workers’ Action, you will find out that the final, triumphant, ultimate statement of position in the Workers’ Action program was for a Labor Party. Uh-uh. We are for a workers government, in the unions, in the plants and in our general education and approaching students with the conception of proletarian power. The dic­tatorship of the proletariat is a formulation which suffers certain problems. A popular-understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the workers are going to be put into concentration camps, like in Russia. If you talk of some kind of socialism, you get an image of happy Sweden main­taining its high alcoholism and suicide rates through victo­riously staying out of two world wars. [Laughter] But what should be clear in every way, over every kind of issue, is that the working people need their own government.

But—how do you get a government? That implies a polit­ical party of the working people—a class party. And it is as a subordinate element of the achievement of a workers government, which is an algebraic expression, as the saying goes, for the concrete realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that they require a workers or a Labor Party, which in its concrete, arithmetical expression is a revolu­tionary Labor Party: a Bolshevik party.

That’s a propaganda presentation.

Now what’s really going to happen in this country? Who knows?… Only Lynn Marcus. [Laughter] I’ll give you some variants.

One is: We have an unpolitical, extremely combative working class, with a bureaucracy that at present and without the aid of a thousand YSAers, is incapable at any serious level of struggle of controlling this class. Part of the residue of the enormous class struggles in Europe is the presence of an extremely sophisticated, able, political bureaucracy in depth. Can you imagine the capacity of a George Meany to cope with an American general strike the way that the CP did in France in ’68? It’s impossible. Which is where Jack Barnes and his gang think they’ve got their opening.

So it’s entirely possible now—as indicated in the funda­mental premises of the Transformation Memo—now that American hegemony has been lost, reducing the United States to merely the most powerful (but very effective) of the capitalist/imperialists, and with the fundamental pre­conditions for severe social crisis laid down on the planet, that the American working class may be impelled into massive political actions without a party, without a revo­lutionary party, without any party at all, and overwhelm the bureaucracy. That will be in the best case a fruitful catastrophe, rather akin to the Paris Commune and the 1905 Revolution. It is not something, therefore, that we work for. But as a smaller propagandistic group, we’ll do our job. If it comes to that, if we are unable to have the capacity as revolutionists to place ourselves at the head of insurgent masses, we will fight anyhow, even if we have to go through an experience as the Spartakusbund did in 1918/1919. The next time around it will be different, then.

That’s a possibility—that’s if the motion at the base in the class accelerates.

It is possible to go to the other extreme –given an orderly, stretched-out intensification of social crisis, the capacity of the growing communist movement to keep ahead of devel­opments, a thing which had begun to suggest itself classically in 1934 in this country when three ostensibly communist organizations led three city-wide general strikes (in Toledo, San Francisco and in Minneapolis): the possibility that the communist party could simply grow in linear fashion.

The other possibility would be the realization of a Labor Party either of a revolutionary or of a reformist character. That is, under the accumulated mounting pressures of social struggle, the bureaucracy begins to be torn asunder through the pressure from below, from developing class antago­nisms, and it becomes stretched. With a successful commu­nist agitation at the same time, the Labor Party could be formed in what will be a very convulsive act.

What is behind so much of the conceptual garbage that the Workers League puts out is that the Labor Party is an easy thing. (By the way, there’s a book by Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labor Party, which is useful for guidelines.) If you study the history of the achievement of political class consciousness by any proletariat, you’ll see that it is a convulsive, historically monumental act—sometimes com­pressed, sometimes stretched out—but always enormous in character, even if the outcome after the dust begins to settle is the restabilization of a pro-capitalist bureaucracy. The impact of ripping the mass of the working people away from capitalism—so that the assertion is: we need a society in which the working people govern, the productive property is nationalized—is enormous, and on top of this is laid the reformist and Stalinist labor skates. That will be a convul­sive period in American history, substantially larger than that of the sit-down period from ’35 to ’37.

But what will happen bears no particular relationship to our present advocacy, which is a way to pose the question of working people becoming the government developing the political instrument to achieve this, to link up that objec­tive fundamental need with the present consciousness of the bulk of trade-union-conscious American workers. The attempts to telescope with “what ifs,” as though there is a particular relationship, a linear connection, between what we say today and what will happen in mass motion is the source of a great deal of confusion and error.

I left open the question of the outcome, of the character of the Labor Party in the third case. In the Bay Area somebody said, “Ah, but how can there be a revolutionary Labor Party? Obviously by definition it’s reformist.” And immediately there came to mind the examples of the transformations of the Italian and French mass Socialist Parties into Communist Parties and, more engagingly, because of the similarity in name and origins, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Majority) is commonly taken to be a revolutionary Labor Party. But that depends on the relationship of forces in the development between the revolutionists and the ref­ormists who associate themselves with such an insurgent move on the political plane—approximately the same way that John L. Lewis and a section of the AFL bureaucracy did with the CIO industrial organizing in 1935.

So that’s one kind of confusion.

The other axis of confusion is over the question of why advocate a Labor Party and what is the relationship between the advocacy of a Labor Party and its political character? Will it represent the general historic interests of the prole­tariat, i.e., be a revolutionary Labor Party, or will it represent special, partial, narrow, limited, aristocratic, chauvinist and nationalist appetites within the proletariat, i.e., be a reformist Labor Party? And therefore, why advocate a Labor Party at all since it seems to have a kaleidoscopic character?

There is, of course, a perfectly good circumstance in which our present propagandist and limitedly agitational advocacy of a Labor Party would be abandoned. And that is if we began to see that a communist party began to be recognized by advanced sections of the proletariat, not even very large ones but significant layers, and had the capacity to struggle in a linear way, by bootstrap operation, to be­come the authentic and literal vanguard of the class. At that juncture we would probably see a section of the bureaucracy form a Labor Party very fast in an attempt to head this off. The progressive wing of the bureaucracy would counterpose the development of a Labor Party. And necessarily, from its birth, its essential purpose would be that of an anti­communist Labor Party. We would fight such a thing in every way. We would try to united-front it to death, we would denounce it to death, we would raid it to death, we would do everything we could to smash it in the egg at every step.

But that is a far cry from the present situation. It is literally not possible by qualitative orders of magnitude—not just one, but qualitative orders of magnitude—to advance at this juncture the Spartacist League as the answer to the felt mass problems of the proletariat. But those felt mass problems exist. And what does exist in a mass way is the trade-union movement. Therefore one can point out (and should!) that the trade-union movement, the economic organ­ization of a section of the working class, has the responsi­bility to offer the political as well as the economic answers to the plight of the working people. And so it is an address made to that one institution that exists in the United States—the organized labor movement.

Now I’ve got a couple of other points to make in this connection. To go back to the workers government slogan, which is the purpose of the Labor Party agitation, we should be clear what is meant by a workers government. It is noth­ing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. There have appeared some speculations or projections, either in a hypo­thetical way or at one point as an ephemeral possibility in history, that a workers government is not simply a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Interestingly enough, in the formulations of the Fourth Congress of the Commu­nist International, where there was a vagueness and an abstraction about the projection of the conditions under which a workers government would be achieved, both Hal Draper and Joe Hansen zeroed in on that material—as they did on a phrase in the Transitional Program—in order to “prove” that from the British Labour Party government of 1945 to Ben Bella in Algeria to Fidel Castro’s Cuban gov­ernment—all were workers governments.

The concrete possibilities that Trotsky posed in the Tran­sitional Program were roughly of the following formulation: It is conceivable that under mass revolutionary pressure reformist elements might go much further in the direction of a workers government than they ever conceived they would at the outset. That was a “what if” question, a generalization on the following condition that took place in the Russian Revolution between February and October: The slogan of the Bolsheviks addressed to the Provisional Gov­ernment—which was a coalition government of Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, the minuscule Trudoviks of Kerensky and the Cadet Party, that is, the Constitutional Democrats, the effective liberal bourgeois party—was the slogan “Down with the ten capitalist ministers, form a government purely of the workers parties,” coupled of course with the social and political and economic demands that the Bolsheviks were raising. Posed in a “what if” way, the question is, what if under mass pressure the Cadets had been thrown out of the government? You would have a murky period at that point, something not very stable, in the context of what already is inherently a historical episode of a dual power situation between a bourgeois govern­ment and the existence of organized nationwide soviets. What that would represent is not a workers government separate and apart from the dictatorship of the proletariat, but an episode immediately on the way. But of course the centrists make much out of non-viable episodes possible in the histories of revolutions in order to try to construct a sort of third camp between the dictatorship of the prole­tariat and the administration of a bourgeois state by the reformists.

Now another question’s been raised, just lately; a useful question has been posed by comrade Seymour’s article on the Labor Party, I think. because it’s not a clear-cut case and it shows some problems in actual application. And that’s the experience of the Communist Party in 1923-24 with the Farmer-Labor Party and the Federated Farmer-Labor Party and the general issue of the possibility of a bloc between the communists and. as Cannon put it, the progressive sec­tion of the labor movement. You know, apparently it is never too late to learn something, because after 25 years, while reading Seymour’s piece, it suddenly occurred to me, Farmer-Labor Party — wait a minute, that’s a two-class party, we’re opposed to a two class party, what the hell are we doing in a two class party situation? “One step forward….” Furthermore. the thing has got to be reformist because what kind of interests of both workers and farmers could be contained wiithin a common program? The farmers produce their commoditles, they sell them themselves, they’re inter­ested in high prices, squeezing out the middlemen, getting to the export market directly, all this kind of stuff is the economic program of the farmers. Sometimes of course farmers can be pretty restless and make a lot of trouble. But those interests of the workers that you could possibly put together could only be extremely narrow, the circum­scribed interest, of the American working class, even if you just sat down and aid. “Let’s cook up a Farmer-Labor Party.” Necessarily it would have to be episodic and limited in a reformist way because there are a lot of antagonisms between petty – and not so petty-bourgeois producers, which is what farmer are. and the proletariat.

And that’s the key to what was wrong in 1924 with the Communist bloc with the Chicago Federation of Labor. From the outset it was preordained that the struggle was going to be for a reformist Labor Party, i.e., throwing in the farmers to boot. And it was on that basis that a bloc was constructed then: that the Communists would simulate a reformist party hoping to maneuver on the inside, courtesy of brother Pepper. It’s on that basis and probably from that experience that Shachtman wrote his excellent article in 1935, where he asked. “Who needs a second-class, fake, reformist, hidden Communist Party?”

Now we, for our part, should have no reason to be opposed to a bloc with a section of the labor movement, including the labor officialdom, providing that bloc goes in the direc­tion we want it to go. But looking back to 1923, on what basis for heaven’s sake is this Chicago Federation of Labor going to give us what we want? That is, an agreement to struggle for a Labor Party together in the first place, and in the second place to struggle with each other over the character of its program and its cadres. On that basis we’ll make a bloc with people. If Meany says, “I’m for a Labor Party—you guys are for a Labor Party,” fine, we’ll all go and organize for a Labor Party and we’ll fight like hell to determine its program.

Yeah, we’d accept such a bloc and we’d fight—we’d seek such a bloc. The problem with a bloc is the nice old phrase of Bismarck that every alliance consists of two compo­nents—the horse and the rider. [Laughter] So that I do not know how we would realize the bloc because I’m afraid our projected horse would bolt. And the Communist Party clearly was doing the donkey work-or proposing simulat­ing doing the donkey work for the trade-union official­dom—except that they also wanted organizational control by the Communists plus a reformist program. This is not in aid of anything, and that’s the basic reason why they got such a mess out of it.

So that in reviewing the historical experience we ain’t ever for a Farmer-Labor Party—we oppose it. But a Farmer-Labor Party—it’s not going to happen in America. An inter­esting point that James Burnham made in 1938: He said, “Comrades, the Transitional Program says that we should be for a workers and farmers government in the United States.” But he observed already then, I believe, that there were more dentists than farmers in the United States, and therefore why not a workers and dentists government? [Laughter] Comrade Gordon waxes irate with me because I find the formula of a workers and “x” government very useful while on national tour. You know, there’s a workers and students government if you’re speaking on a carnpus, you go out to the military base, it’s a workers and soldiers government, you know. And you gradually move through all sections of the population. I suppose in Berkeley a few years ago it would have been a workers and women’s gov­ernment. The final achievement is one that boggled myown mind. The Argentine Pabloists came out a few years ago for a workers and peoples government. [Laughter[

Well, we’re for a workers and “x” government, all right; the problem with motley America is that “x” stands for a wide variety. But behind that is a truism: that the dictatorship of the proletariat will be centrally, but not simply or purely, proletarian. There is a wide layer of oppressed sections in American society—racially, ethnically, socially oppressed, ranging from old people to Latins, blacks, students, soldiers. This is quite real, it’s quite true, although a workers and peoples government is not exactly the formulation that one wants. But it senses something that’s particularly important: If one says a labor movement or a Labor Party right now, there is very good reason to see it right now in the most encrusted, aristocratic, racist, chauvinist, George Meany­like fashion. It’s extremely important and one of the reasons for the formulation “Dump the bureaucrats! For a Workers Party!” There’s no difference in conception between a “Workers Party based on the trade unions” and a “Labor-Party based on the trade unions,” except that the terminology projects a somewhat different conception.

Letter from the iSt to the WSL

international Spartacist tendency

BCM Box 4272

London WC1V 6XX

17 June 1976

Workers Socialist League London

Dear Comrades,

We have carefully studied your document “Fourth International Problems and Tasks”. Many of the particular and general points and conclusions in the document appear to parallel positions we have reached and fought for, in some cases as much as fifteen years ago during the period of our emergence as a distinct tendency within the Socialist Workers Party. Rather than reiterating these points; we would like to focus on a few matters dealt with in your document which in our opinion are both important and the focus of unclarities or possible differences.

The document correctly sees the evaluation of post-war Stalinism and the emergence of new states such as those in Eastern.Europe, China, and Cuba as a central axis of the disorientation and destruction of the Fourth International. Not only the political liquidationism of the Pabloites but also the initial shortcomings and eventual degeneration of the “anti-revisionists” of 1951-1953 was accompanied by an inability to correctly analyse these phenomena and a concomitant failure to uphold the revolutionary Trotskyist programme.

However, while the document shows a proper concern for the question of Stalinism, it does this to the exclusion of an analysis of social democracy. Thus while you refer to “the main counterrevolutionary force within the world workers movement — Stalinism” and state that the struggle for Trotskyism is “first and foremost, a struggle against Stalinism and its influence”, there is virtually no analysis of the role of social democracy. This weakness shows in several ways. In the treatment of the Chilean coup, for instance, the defeat is attributed simply to “the popular front demagogy of the Stalinists”. It is correct to denounce the Stalinist betrayals of the Chilean CP, but it is crucial as well to expose Allende and his social-democratic Socialist Party, which within the spectrum of the popular front generally stood to the left of the Communist Party. It was the prostration of the two mass reformist parties before the class enemy, expressed through the vehicle of the popular-front Unidad Popular government, which paved the way for the bloody coup.

Your document also discusses Pablo’s “attempt to liquidate the cadres of the FI into the Stalinist parties”. In fact, however, though the liquidationist theories of “entrism sui generis” were developed largely in relation to Pablo’s capitulationist analysis of Stalinism, the entries were often carried out as well into social-democratic parties (in Canada, Belgium, Chile, Australia) and radical nationalist parties (Indonesia, India and the classic example — Algeria, where Pablo personally played a direct role with the Algerian FLK in the destruction of nascent centres of independent proletarian power).  Presently the continuation of this method is shown in the USec majority’s tailing of the Vietnamese Stalinists, and guerrillaist groups like the Chilean MIR, nationalist formations like the Angolan MPLA, and left social democrats (the Labour “lefts” in Britain, the PSU in France). Particularly in Britain, which lacks a mass Stalinist party and where it is the social-democratic Labour Party and the pervasive traditions of parliamentary cretinism associated with it which stand as strategic obstacles to proletarian revolution, the omission of social democracy is glaring. Taken together with your slogan of “Make the Lefts Fight” and calls such as that “The Labour Party must be forced to return to its Manifesto” (leaflet distributed at the Conference on Women and the Cuts, 28 February 1976) this suggests an inability to pose a clear programmatic alternative to the Labour Party. What is indicated is a general softness towards social democracy, in particular in Britain an unwillingness to break from and confront the influence and strength of the Labour Party reformists.

A second aspect of your discussion of Stalinism is unclear to us; that is the question of political revolution in the deformed workers states.  You write of the “first forms of the political revolution” appearing in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and elsewhere of the political revolution in Berlin, Budapest, Prague and China.  We believe that it is essential to examine carefully any oppositional movements within the deformed workers states. Frequently ostensible Trotskyists have embraced any oppositional movement or individual.  A graphic example of this was the uncritical treatment of Solzhenitsyn in the Healyite press when he was first exiled; though he had not yet made his most overt anti -Soviet and anti-communist statements, it was already quite clear that he was the purveyor of the most reactionary ideas and an “anti-Stalinist” from a rightist direction.  The proletarian uprisings in Berlin and Budapest were certainly struggles that Trotskyists would seek to join and lead towards political revolution.  In the case of Czechoslovakia, we recognised that the “liberal” Dubcek wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy was in a number of respects to the right of the pro-Soviet elements, and more oriented to concessions to Western capitalism.  While condemning the Soviet invasion, we noted that the relaxation of political controls by Dubcek was a concession in order to “liberalise” the economy by increasing the product extracted from the Czech workers.  And in China, we analysed the Cultural Revolution as essentially an intra-bureaucratic struggle. To justify its disgusting tailism of the Mao wing, the Healy/Wohlforth tendency fulsomely applauded Mao’s mobilisation of Chinese youth, conveniently failing to notice that the Liu wing was able at times to mobilise significant sections of the industrial proletariat.  Obviously the tactics that a Trotskyist group would apply in such a situation would be varied and complex, but the essential point is that there was no justification for any form of political support to either side and our fundamental strategy would be to seek to mobilise the workers independently of either wing to oust the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy as a whole.

The major point with regard to Stalinism in your document concerns the explanation of the emergence of deformed workers states in East Europe and China and the nature of the Cuban revolution.  The failure to understand this question is illustrated in the history of both the SWP and the SLL/WRP. Firstl the SWP opposed Pablo’s liquidationism in 1951-1953, later “reunifying” on the basis of its own adoption of the same Pabloite methodology with regard to Cuba. Then Healy attempted, to oppose the SWP’s liquidationism over Cuba, but was unable to come up with any analytical alternative except the absurd position that Cuba is capitalist, while at the same time pursuing a line of the most crass capitulation towards the Vietnamese Stalinists (a question ignored by your document) fully rivalling that of the USec.

Our tendency was first formed in a struggle against the SWP leadership’s turn to Castroism (as well as other questions). The position reached by the Revolutionary Tendency in its anti-Wohlforth/Healy majority and since further developed by the international Spartacist tendency surmounts the methodological difficulties of the “anti-revisionists”, difficulties flowing from premises shared with the Pabloites. In this struggle Wohlforth did make a contribution, as the documents written by him in our Marxist Bulletin Number 8 show. His preliminary Cuba documents constituted a useful literary undertaking, in sharp contrast to later attempts to make himself a reputation as a “theoretician” — most notably his pretentious updating of Mandel’s theory of “structural assimilation” which if it was inadequate when originally set forth becomes in the period of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions totally farcical.

As we note in the “Addition to the Preface of MB8”, Wohlforth’s theory of structural assimilation collapses with its inability to incorporate Cuba in its schema;

“Wohlforth’s ‘theory’ boils down to the following: first, absorption of adjacent states into the Russian degenerated workers state; second, social transformation of the newly acquired region; third and finally, its release as a separate deformed workers state — all because of a ‘defensive expansionist’ drive by the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy in response to the urgent threat from capitalist imperialism. Wohlforth explained North Vietnam’s becoming a deformed workers state by his own version of the ‘domino theory’; first China was absorbed by Russia and regurgitated, then North Vietnam likewise by China.

“But looking at his map Wohlforth noticed that Cuba is rather distant from Russia and an island to boot. Thus was Wohlforth left holding the position which the Workers League more or less shamefacedly advances today — that the Cuban state led by Fidel Castro is capitalist.”

While the WSL appears to recognise some of the limitations of Wohlforth’s document and to be particularly concerned with finding an explanation of the events in Cuba, hitherto you seem to have approached this as a matter of developing Wohlforth’s “theory. At a superficial level this theory may appear to fit the East European states, but it does not explain the victories by peasant guerrilla armies in China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia led by native Stalinists acting at crucial junctures against the orders of Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. The suggestion in your document that Wohlforth underestimates the extra-territorial power of the great powers seems to be an attempt to explain Cuba by reference to some sort of indirect influence or latent threat emanating from the USSR allowing the native Stalinists to carry out “structural assimilation”. But neither Mandel’s original theory nor this simplification can explain how and why deformed workers states were created, in particular the internal mechanisms of their creation.

We do not date the existence of deformed workers states in China and East Europe from the time of the actual expropriations per se. In East Europe the Red Army was the effective state power despite the existence of the trappings of bourgeois democracy and even monarchy. That army, the state power of the degenerated workers state, had ultimately either to defend proletarian property forms or (as it did in Austria and in Northern Iran) withdraw leaving capitalism intact. In China, the capitalist state power was overthrown in 1949, and though the Chinese Stalinists tried to have “New Democracy” they were compelled to complete the expropriation of the capitalists or face destruction at the hands of resurgent capitalism. The question of what property forms the victorious Castroist guerrillas in Cuba would defend was not resolved until late I960 with the expropriation of the major industries, and only after an internal struggle in the guerrilla force, under the pressure of the intransigent hostility of US imperialism to the new regime. The essential difference between our approach and that shared by the Pabloites and the SLL/WRP is that we recognise that what was created was a deformed workers state, in which there were never any genuine organs of proletarian democracy and in which a bureaucratic caste (in the case of Cuba initially enjoying immense popular support for its ouster of the hated Batista dictatorship) held political power. Thus from their inception these states were controlled by a bureaucratic caste which stands in the way of the advance to socialism, and must inevitably betray the international proletarian revolution. Within them, the task of Trotskyists is the same as for those in the Soviet Union; to prepare and lead the political revolution, to sweep away the bureaucracy and institute workers democracy based on Soviets.

The consideration that led us to characterise Healy as an “inverted Pabloite” is this: the Pabloites see the social transformation and draw the conclusion that there is no longer any need for the working class to be mobilised behind a revolutionary programme — either non-proletarian forces or non-revolutionary leaderships compelled by the objective “dynamic” can make proletarian revolution. On the other hand Healy and the like see the absence of a vanguard party and conscious mobilisation of the working class and refuse to acknowledge that there could have been a social revolution (not surprisingly, to our knowledge, the Healy tendency has never tried to explain how China became a deformed workers state). What “both conceptions share is the refusal to grasp the qualitative distinction — marked by the call for political revolution — between a workers state and a deformed workers state. Instead they see a kind of “sliding scale” of workers states ranging from very bad (Stalin’s Russia) through to those with a few “bureaucratic deformations” (at times China, Cuba and Vietnam).

History does not give any prizes for “definite attempts”. The inability to resolve this question, as the comrades of the WSL recognise, has had disastrous results. Inability to achieve Marxist clarity would pose for the WSL a path following that already taken by Healy. A useful illustration of the problem is your treatment (in Socialist Press number 19, 15 October, 1975) of the WRP’s series on Vietnam, You correctly denounce. the WRP’s capitulation to Stalinism, “but you cannot go beyond that.  A contrast with this is the article in Australasian Spartacist, number 24, (October 1975) dealing with the same Healyite series:

“John’s basic argument is simple — merely the ‘inverted Pabloism’ of Cuba turned right side up!  The social revolution in Indochina, occurred under the undoubted hegemony of the Stalinist Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP). Like the Pabloists on both Cuba and Vietnam, Healyism makes absolute the premise that a capitalist state can only be smashed by a revolutionary leadership, in order to draw from that Aristotelean premise the opportunist ‘only possible’ conclusion — the Vietnamese Stalinists cannot be Stalinists, they must be a revolutionary leadership!  But analysing and changing the real world requires the science of dialectical materialism, not a worship of the accomplished fact and the application of logical syllogisms.  In Indochina, as in Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, etc. the military victories of the guerrilla forces occurred in exceptional circumstances of the disintegration of the national bourgeoisie and its state apparatus and decisive limitations on the ability of imperialism to intervene at crucial moments.  But the crucial characteristic of all these revolutions was the absence of any intervention by the working class acting consciously in its own interests.  Such an intervention would have polarised the Stalinist and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, driving their misleaders into the camp of the ruling class.  In Vietnam it was the political disintegration of the national bourgeoisie, the hostility of imperialism, the pressure from their peasant base and the need to consolidate their own rule that forced the Stalinists to collectivise the economy and join the “socialist” camp.  It was the absence of a conscious working class led by a Trotskyist party that allowed them the necessary independence to do so and that ensured that the resulting workers state would be burdened by a parasitic bureaucracy from birth.”

(“IC grovels before Vietnamese Stalinists — Healy’s Pabloism exposed”, Australasian Spartacist, number 24, October 1975)

These issues bear heavily on the general historical evaluation of Healy, the SLL/WRP and the International Committee.  In 1971, for example, we wrote:

“The Healy grouping, whose revolutionary competence was seriously called into question from the beginning by Healy’s own tarnished political history, represented politically a reflexive reaction against Pabloism which never broke from its essential theoretical method.  The Healy position accepts the revisionist analysis of the implications of the Cuban Revolution, concluding that the only way to avoid its abjectly liquidationist conclusions is to deny that any anti-capitalist social transformation took place in Cuba (a political absurdity which the USec constantly invokes to discredit all its opponents on its left). “Healy’s analysis of Stalinism follows the method which is the very crux of Pabloism: the choosing of one or another fundamentally defective nationalist or Stalinist current to ‘critically’support’ on the grounds of the implicit rejection as irrelevant of principled Trotskyist politics posing an independent proletarian line.  Thus the Healyites supported the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the ‘Cultural Revolution’ intra-bureaucratic fight and purge, enthused ever the petty-bourgeois rationalists of the ‘Arab Revolution’ and abstained for years from the unpopular task of denouncing Ho Chi Minh and the NLF for their repeated Stalinist sellouts.” (“World Trotskyism Rearms,” Spartacist, April-May 1971)

From your document it is not clear how you view the history of the lnterniational Committee.  On one hand you have correctly noted Healy’s inability to deal with the Pabloite analysis of Stalinism, the shortcomings of the fight led by Cannon against Pablo, the absence of democratic centralism in the International Committee.  At the same time your analysis in other places appears to suggest that the SLL/WRP only degenerated around 1973. You yourselves remark on the way in which Healy has attempted to obscure the real history of his activity, and clearly any understanding of the IC’s history must involve a considerable and careful examination of documents that hitherto (and we would argue quite deliberately) were not made available to members of the IC, We view Healy’s degeneration as expressed in a series of programmatic positions that the IC developed in 1967 and subsequently.  Prior to this, despite a series of organisational atrocities perpetrated against us by Healy and important political differences (e.g. Cuba) there existed sufficient political agreement for the Healyite and Spartacist tendencies to have belonged to a common international tendency, had Healy’s cynical sectarianism not destroyed the chance of principled collaboration.

For our part, there were in the early 1960’s during the period of collaboration and discussion with the SLL (and still remain) areas of “Healy’s own tarnished political history” about which we lack detailed information (for example his conduct inside the Labour Party in the early 1950’s). Nevertheless in a number of respects your account of the history appears to fall within the framework of Healy’s interpretation of events. In particular this relates to the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP, and the dispute of its majority with Healy/Wohlforth.  This is apparent in your discussion of the Cuba question.  Your document claims that the SLL did not see their position as final, and you rebuke the IC for failure to discuss the issue.  Our experience, however, indicates that the failure to discuss the question goes far beyond simply underestimating its significance.  The IC has systematically avoided discussing the issue, but when forced to, at least in Australia and the USA, has strongly defended the line that Cuba is capitalist.  After Healy and Wohlforth contrived to split the Revolutionary Tendency in late 1962, Wohlforth replied to our proposal for reunification of the two groups, centring his objections on the differing analyses of the Cuban revolution, and strongly defending the position that Cuba remained capitalist.  This is hardly the posture of one who believes that the question was not resolved and ought to be one for discussion. (See Marxist Bulletin 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”)

We have extensively documented the history of the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP, as well as the split in it and our subsequent relations with Wohlforth/Healy.  The WSL comrades should carefully study these disputes, the documents of which (like, we understand, the documents of your struggle in the WRP) were never made available to the IC membership in Britain, USA or elsewhere by the Healy leadership. In the second part of your document you refer to the period “After the pro-International Committee tendency in the SWP, headed by Wohlforth and Robertson, had been expelled, and was acting independently” . In fact the RT had previously been split in 1962 as a result of the bureaucratic manoeuvres of Healy and Wohlforth, and a Stalinist-type ultimatum by Healy himself. The majority of the RT was expelled, before the Wohlforth/Phillips group, purely on the basis of having opinions contrary to the SWP leadership. One pretense for the expulsions was extracts from internal RT documents, which Wohlforth had selectively leaked to the SWP leadership, purportedly showing that the RT majority had a split perspective. This early work in support of the no longer revolutionary SWP leadership against its Trotskyist opposition was just one of the many services Wohlforth provided. The SWP leadership has been able to use the Workers League’s opportunist flip-flops and capitulations as an example to harden their membership against left criticism, for example by pointing to Wohlforth/Healy’s gross insensitivity to women’s and black oppression in order to justify support to feminism and black nationalism. His well publicised return to the fold of the SWP, now a brazenly reformist organisation upholding “free speech for fascists”, demanding the US imperialist army be sent to Boston and defending the reactionary mobilisation headed by the Socialist Party in Portugal last year is only the latest example.

The details of the Healy/Wohlforth manoeuvres and gyrations at the time can be found in the documents contained in our Marxist Bulletin series. Two other examples will suffice here. First you refer to the IC’s struggle against the betrayal of the LSSP and Wohlforth’s insistence on a discussion of the question. For years the Healyites have used the LSSP’s betrayal to expose the USec which covered for the LSSP leadership right up to the last moment. However, Healy himself is tarred with the same brush. In August I960 James Robertson wrote to the SWP Political Committee criticising the failure to publicly condemn the LSSP over its entry into a Popular Front electoral pact. At that time Healy was urging “caution” and was against publishing any criticism (See Workers Vanguard number 3, December 1971). In the same issue of Workers Vanguard you can find evidence of Healy’s hypocrisy in another matter, the dispute with the OCI over the Lora FOR.

Your document expresses an inability to understand why Spartacist was at the 1966 conference. Now while Healy’s exact intentions may be obscure, our attitude has been publicly stated both at the time and since. The spokesman for the Spartacist delegation at the conference stated

“…we feel we have the responsibility to present to you our specific views where they are both relevant and distinctive, without adapting or modifying them for the sake of a false unanimity which would do us all a disservice, since we have, in our opinion some valuable Insights to offer.

“We are present at this Conference on the basis of our fundamenial agreement with the lnternational Resolution of the IC; moreover the report of Comrade Slaughter was for us solidly communist, unified throughout by revolutionary determination.”

(Spartacist Statement to International Conference, Spartacist,  June-July 1966)

We believed (arnd still do) that at that time on the basis of the published dcouments and  of discussions with Healy himself (in Montreal prior to the conference) there was a principled basis for our presence at the conference. After our unjustified and bureaucratic expulsion (in which the WSL comrades may see many parallels to their own expulsion from the WRP), we stated:

“The current wrecking campaign being pushed in the columns of the ACFI Bulletin and elsewhere represents a 180 degree turn away from the principled fusion line advanced by Healy at the October 1965 Montreal conference. Then Healy insisted, with our full concurrence, that the three-year-long unjustified (and unprincipled) division between Spartacist and ACFI must be brought promptly to an end; ACFI-Spartacist fusion, he then insisted, was an absolute pre-condition to building the Trotskyist movement in the U.S. “Now, in the wake of the April London I.C. Conference (reported in this issue) Healy, without offering any serious political pretext for his actions has diverted the energies of the I.C. away from building an international to conducting a campaign of petty internecine warfare against those with whon, up to April, he proposed to unify. By his own criteria of last October, Healy has set out to wreck the revolutionary movement in the United States…..

“We firmly believe that real politics shapes the direction of organisations far more decisively than organisational and personal issues. At the same time the latter interact with and are therefore a part of real politics. It is from that that we draw the lessons of the April Conference and define our tasks flowing from it.

“We draw appropriate political conclusions from the organisational wrecking practices of Healy and Wohlforth. However, we do not close the door to them, much less to all those forces within the I.C. who are their victims. Yet, from Healy and Wohlforth, in particular, we will need evidence of an inner-revolution before collaboration would be possible. So long as they remain on their present bankrupt course, we are locked in an implacable struggle to cleanse the revolutionary movement of their poisonous influence.” (“Reunification Smashed”, Spartacist number 6, June-July 1966)

Several years later we wrote:

“We consider that organizational forms should correspond to political realities. We strongly opposed the break by the SLL, (“IC”) with us in 1962 because of its apparently mainly organizational character. Only after the very sharp rupture at the 1966 London Conference, and especially in the several years following when the SLL piled up a series of major political differences with us; were we able to appreciate that the SLL’s desire in 1962 to make a rapprochement to the SWP when (to which we were; willing to acquiesce but not agree with) was an expression  of a fundamental political difference.” (“Letter to the OCRIFI and the OCI” Spartacist number 2, Winter 1973-74)

Your analysis of the split in the WRP seems to be based on an overly simplified explanation of the WRP’ s difficulties and the present economic conjuncture, and of the relation between the correct programme and links to the working class. Thus your document contains passages like the following:

“It is not by chance that the nature and method of the Transitional Programme has been thrown into question within the International Committee. The forces driving or the discussion and factional struggle are material ones. They are those of the international working class and other oppressed classes on the offensive in Europe, in the Middle East, in Indochina, in the United States itself — in fact in every continent of the globe.”

“It is the world-wide offensive of the workers which forms the material basis of the discussion and splits.”

“The offensive of the working class is the essential and specific element for understanding the split in the WRP.”

“This struggle was only possible because the WRP opposition was based on experienced roots, narrow but none the less real and tempered, within the organised working class. And the WSL in breaking from the WRP, expresses the practical and theoretical offensive of the international working class.”

If the comrades are simply suggesting that the current economic crisis and destabilisation of the global imperialist order offers greater opportunities for revolutionary organisations to grow and affect events on an historic scale, and that the attempt to do real work in the class revealed the SLL/WRP’s inability to actually carry the revolutionary programme in struggle within the mass organisations of the working class, then we would not want to object. The evocation of the final “Crisis” of capitalism in which the working class is inexorably surging forward has been used by the IC to justify the most gross opportunism, even explicitly repudiating the necessity of the Transitional Programme on the grounds that today the simplest demand of the working class takes on an automatic revolutionary content. In fact, without the successful intervention of the Leninist vanguard there will be no “final” crisis of capitalism unless it is a barbaric nuclear holocaust. We would note as well that at least in Britain and the USA, the disarray of both the IC and other ostensibly revolutionary organisations can be more readily related to the present quiescence of the working class, and a concomitant “crisis of expectations” in many of these organisations. (For a fuller critique of Healy’s analysis of the “Crisis” see “Healy/Wohlforth and the Crisis”, Workers Vanguard number 26, 3 August 1973)

The other aspect of oversimplification is the way in which you link your opposition to your “experienced roots” in the working class, and see the WSL as expressing the “practical and theoretical offensive of the international working class”. Certainly an organisation which does not develop roots in the working class will inevitably degenerate, but to argue that an organisation can be protected from revisionism simply because it has roots in the working class is wrong. Thus at the 1966 IC Conference we stated our disagreement “with Voix Ouvriere’s view that Pabloism can be explained simply by reference to the petty-bourgeois composition of the F.I., any more than one could explain the specific nature of a disease by reference solely to the weakened body in which particular microbes had settled.” (”Spartacist Statement to International Conference”) As Trotsky noted in In Defence of Marxism the trade unions are the culture medium for every sort of opportunist deviation, and there are always enormous pressures on the trade-union members of a Bolshevik organisation. In developing our work within the organised working class we have struggled against the workerist conception that sees

‘”communist consciousness as a function of the social composition of the party. Workers are viewed as the proletarian conscience of the party. In reality the communist vanguard creates itself by breaking its recruits from the dominant social and political attitudes of whatever section of society they are part of, including the proletariat…. The communist vanguard maintains itself through constant struggle against the enormous social and ideological pressures that bourgeois society bears down on it in all areas of party work, particularly against the backward prejudices in the working class and particularly in periods of rising class militancy when the party is seeking to expand its influence in the unions„”(“Trade Union Memorandum”, adopted by the Third SL(US) National Conference, 25 November 1972, Marxist Bulletin number 9. part iii)

In the implementation of our perspective for work in the trade unions (in which we have had real, if still modest successes)

“The key organizational form for intervention in the unions is the caucus, the nucleus of an alternative, revolutionary union leadership, uniting members of the vanguard with those union activists who agree with that section of the party program for the labor movement. We strive to build our caucus in as political a way as possible. The growth of our caucus will not be primarily through the recruitment of politically backward militants drawn to us because of our leadership in local struggles. Rather, the caucus will grow through political struggle with other left and militant union formations leading to a process of splits and fusions. Thus we project our caucuses growing in a manner similar to, although not identical with, the party. However, the establishment of our cadre as recognized militants with real constituencies is the essential building block and core of our caucus. Without such a base of reputable militants, our caucus actions would be either empty rhetoric or tail-ending forces much stronger than ourselves. The caucus program is a program to lead mass struggles. In general, caucus recruits should be of a significantly higher political level than that defined simply by the caucus program.” (ibid)

In the context of these serious concerns and disagreements, we are in general agreement with the main thrust of the seven points which you lay out as forming the “basis for initial discussions between ourselves and other tendencies, especially those expelled from the IC”. As well we would generally agree with the additional four points made in the concluding section of the document. We would like however to clarify our view of the process through which the Fourth International can again exist. This is particularly necessary in the light of references in your document to the “world Trotskyist movement”, your statement that the “contlnuity of this struggle runs through the Trotskyist movement”, and your call for the “reconstruction” and “rebuilding” of the Fourth International. We are not clear exactly what you mean by these terms. Our slogan “For the Rebirth of the Fourth International” implies that a very fundamental process must be gone through, that it is not possible to fit together the existing rotted bits and pieces, perhaps with a little chipping here and there in order to put the edifice together again. [See “Letter to the OCRFI and the OCI” ). Your document correctly notes the practical meaning of the OCl’s call to “reconstruct” with regard to its dealings with the SWP.

In any discussion on the struggle for a reforged Fourth International, central attention must be focussed on the programmatic stance that revolutionists ought to adopt with respect to significant events in the recent international class struggle. Trotsky, in his struggle to build the International Left Opposition and later the Fourth International, sought to regroup revolutionists through political- struggle and clarification centred around the evaluation of certain events. Thus at various points the attitude that would-be revolutionaries adopted to the 1925-29 Chinese revolution, the struggle against fascism in Germany and the Spanish civil war were used as test cases for sorting out and regrouping the authentic Leninist cadre. Similarly today, we would seek such axes for discussion in issues such as Chile, the national question in the Middle East, the Vietnamese revolution, the tasks of revolutionists in Portugal, and such burning issues of the class struggle as arise in particular-countries.

In our opinion your evaluation of the roots of revisionism and of your own history as a tendency emerging from the Healy group must proceed to a consideration, barely undertaken in “Fourth International — Problems and Tasks”, of the main programmatic disputes involved in the fragmentation of the IC. In particular, we note that the present document undertakes no real assessment of some of the main questions which were disputed by the IC’s main components, the SLL and the OCI — for instance the role of the Bolivian POR and the question of the 1967 Near East war. With regard to the latter, it appears that the WSL may share the “Arab Revolution” line of the Healyites and Pabloites. In any case the crucial issues of popular frontism and the national question would be proper subjects for discussion between us.

We are sending copies of the articles and documents referred to in this reply. We look forward to receiving your answer to this letter and your suggestion as to what form further discussion might take.

Fraternally,

David Strachan

for the international Spartacist tendency

Soviet Women: A Stalinist Apology

[First Printed in Women & Revolution #10, Winter, 1975-76]

A careful look at the status of Soviet women sheds much light on the evolution of the Soviet state. The revolutionary Soviet government under Lenin took immediate steps to alleviate the oppression of women. Divorce was made free and easily accessible; discrimination agains, children born out of wedlock was eliminated; free communal daycare centers were established; equal pay for equal work was decreed; abortion was made legal, free and available, on demand; and thousands of schools were opened to women for the first time on the basis of preferential admissions.

One of the fundamental aims of the Bolsheviks was to increasingly supplant and transcend the nuclear family as an economic institution through the socialization of the housework traditionally done on a private basis by women. They understood that the family was a prison for women, condemning them to ignorance through isolation from society and limiting their horizons to endless years of housework drudgery. After the civil war, one of the very first major campaigns waged by the government was for the construction of adequate child care facilities.

After the consolidation of power by a bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin, women lost a great many of the advances which they had achieved through the Revolution. Stalin’s policies, aimed at extinguishing all traces of genuinely revolutionary sentiment which might pose a threat to the regime, decreed the restoration of a more traditional relationship between the sexes (i.e., women playing a subservient role), particularly within the family, which was then proclaimed to be the basic unit of Soviet society.

Soviet Women, a new book by William M. Mandel, is essentially an apology for these policies. While the existing sexual inequality in the USSR is admitted, it is ascribed to the legacy of tsarism or the inevitable errors of a peasant people. Mandel also subscribes to the official Stalinist line that the goal of communists is not to replace the oppressive nuclear family, as advocated by Marx and Lenin, but only to mitigate its worst abuses.

It is undeniable that Soviet women enjoy a great many opportunities and advantages unknown to women in other parts of the world. The USSR provides free child care facilities for 10,000,000, pre-school children and free medical care. Women are guaranteed 112 days pre- and post-natal maternity leave at.full pay and a year in which to return to their jobs without loss of seniority. Men and women are allowed sick leave to care for sick children. Women’s wages in the Soviet Union average 87 percent of men’s (as qpposed to 59 percent in the United States), and rent is set at five percent of a worker’s income. Nor are these advances limited to urban areas; among peasant women, where illiteracy was virtually universal until well after the Revolution, there are more college and high school educated women than men!

Moreover, Mandel demonstrates conclusively that Soviet women have been drawn out of the home and into productive work. They constitute 51 percent of the workforce, and, unlike their American counterparts, who are barred from a great many skilled and semi-skilled trades, Soviet women drive trains, fly planes; run massive hydroelectric power plants, plan the development of natural resources, unload ships, do theoretical work in mathematics and science and generally participate in every branch of industry and government. (“My pride in being an American was deeply hurt,” reports Mandel, “when I found that the share of U.S. women in the leading professions is just about the lowest in the entire world.”)

Those like the Maoists and “third-camp socialists”, who argue that the Soviet Union is a “social imperialist” or capitalist state would do well to reflect on these figures, for, while they certainly do not demonstrate full equality in the workforce, they do indicate advances which could only have been achieved in a society which has eliminated private, ownership of the means of production and instituted a planned economy. Full employment, the plowing back of social profits into the massive construction of day care and school facilities and the actual enforcement of equal pay for equal work cannot be achieved in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism surplus value is reinvested only where it returns a profit; a reserve army of the unemployed (historically composed largely of women) is required to drive down wages, and the cost of labor is minimized by shifting the entire burden of child rearing onto the worker’s family, specifically onto the mother. .

Latter-day Stalin devotees maintain that capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union after 1956 and that the gains of Soviet women pre-date this period. But it should be noted that there is a distinct upward curve in educational and occupational equality for Soviet women under 30 and that the greatest advances by women in the countryside haye been made in the past 10 years. (Mandel provides valuable, comparative statistics on Chinese development which debunk the Maoist myth that China has outstripped the Soviet Union in alleviating the oppression of women. While Chinese women are in a far better position than the women of capitalist countries of the region, such as India, China; lacking full employment, cannot begin to integrate women into the workforce on a level comparable to that of the USSR. Furthermore, maternity leaves are only half as long as in the Soviet Union when they are available at all, and abortions are not easily accessible.)

Stalin’s Legacy

Mandel admits to the relative absence of Soviet women in high decision making positions in government, management and the Communist Party. His explanation for this is that the progress of Soviet women has been obstructed.by the cultural heritage of tsarism. ln a shorter essay, “Soviet Women in the Work Force,” which contains the fundamental theses set forth in Soviet Women, he put it most succinctly; “…women have advanced in the Soviet labor force and professions in approximately direct proportion to the elimination of handicaps inherited by the Soviet regime and …a principal basis for residual differences in the status of men and women is the time lag in this regard.”

While Marxists recognize that a fledgling workers state is built on foundations heavily marked by the traditions of the bourgeois society from which it has just emerged, they also recognize that human consciousness can intervene to lessen the effect of those traditions. Mandel’s objectivist formulation serves to obscure the fact that sexual inequalities in the Soviet Union are as much a legacy of Stalin as of Nicholas. It was Stalin’s policies which for 20 years decreed that woman’s primary role was that of childbearer.

Mandel is too knowledgeable to simply omit all reference to Stalinist policy, and his personal repugnance for some of the worst atrocities of the regime leads him to voice occasional criticisms of it. Nonetheless, an ex-Stalinist himself, he has never broken from Stalinism’s fundamental premises. He believes that the bureaucracy’s policies were, in fact, justified:

“Because of the frank hostility of every other government to the USSR in the 1930’s, and Hitler’s publicly announced intention long before the war, to seize great parts of the Soviet Union and make it a colony, the Soviet Union became like a city under siege. Every individual’s life was subject to control in what was believed to be the interests of the survival of the whole.”

 Mandel’s real political sympathies come through most clearly in an earlier passage where he observes:

 “…there is a peculiar myth, political rather than scholarly in origin, that holds that Lenin’s brief lifetime after 1917 was a period of progress, followed by reactlon under Stalin. The fact is that Lenin died in 1924; and Trotsky, who had been second in prominence, was thereafter in a powerless minority. It was the first decade of Stalin’s Ieadership (1924-34) that witnessed both the flourishing of films and literature, and the kinds of legislation and experiments in living that many young Western radicals and cultural figures look upon with nostalgia.”

While Communist Party leader Gus Hall or the Maoists of the October League may look upon this period with nostalgia, 1929-36 was the period of the most brutal repression. Virtually every sector of Soviet society was devastated by purges in which some 500,000 people were killed (including virtually the entire original leadership of the Bolshevik party) and 5,000,000 were put into forced labor camps. Most of those who had participated in the brief flowering of Soviet art were put to death, Forced collectivization was so brutal and destructive that its effects are still felt in Soviet agriculture, contributing to the continually low levels of production. Mandel’s book, which is so chockfull of statistics, conveniently omits mention of any of these atrocities!

This period of Stalinist reaction marked a decisive step backward for women. As the revolutionary tide ebbed in Europe, the Soviet Union was left isolated and poverty stricken. This was fertile ground for the growth of a bureaucracy bolstered by its authority as the defender of Soviet borders and by its control of the scarce commodities available to the Soviet people. Anxlous to protect its privileged position, this bureaucracy set out to destroy all vestiges of Soviet power which could challenge its authority. It appealed for support to the most conservative prejudices of the urban and peasant masses. The family, that purveyor of the traditional ideas of subservience and respect for authority, was one of its central instruments.

An all out offensive was undertaken to reconstitute the family structure based on female subordination. In 1934 the Women’s Section of the party was abolished and all mass women’s organizations were dissolved. Mandel claims that these organizations disappeared because “at that time, women had gained the confidene to stand up for themselves in mixed organizations and to function in them, and had in practice attained essential equality in employment and education, that is, outside the home.” In his haste to justify Stalinist policy, he forgets the resolution passed in 1930 by the Central Committee of the CP which he had quoted earlier, noting ”’extreme indecisiveness by local party bodies regarding the promotion of women to leading posts involving independent authority, and in some cases absolutely open bigotry on the part of certain party organizations and members.”

Hard on the heels of the dissolution of the Women’s Section and mass organizations came the illegalization of abortion and the virtual impossibility of obtaining a divorce, combined with a propaganda offensive which Mandel admits “resulted in a sanctification of ‘till death do us part’ that any church would envy.” In 1941 a law was passed relieving men of any responsibility for children born out of wedlock. In 1944, co-education was abolished, ensuring that women would get second best in terms of available schools, teachers and facilities. This decree was similar to the “separate but equal” decisions of the U.S. courts which followed the period of reaction in the South after abandonment of Reconstruction. Mandel’s response to these defeats is: ” … to me, the marvel of that period is that despite the steps backward the mass-scale advance of women was not fundamentally affected, as the subsequent years have shown.”

Nothing could be further from the truth! The inequality existing today can be traced directly to the policies of this period. Twenty years of illegalized abortion, the sanctification of marriage and motherhood and the abolition of co-education could not but reinforce the traditional attitude that women are indeed inferior. More important, while women were never driven from the workforce, the emphasis on child rearing and the limitations placed on women’s education robbed them of the skills which would facilitate genuine equality of opportunity. Rather than advancing as old handicaps were overcome, women, were forced to retreat as old prejudices were deliberately rehabilitated.

Soviet Women in the Post-Stalin Period

The question must be posed of why barriers to abortion, divorce and co-education were lowered in 1955. While Mandel never deals with the question directly, his answer can be found in another of his essays, “Soviet Marxism and Social Science”; “The USSR can today claim to be the first major socialist state to have emerged from the stage of internal terror (dictatorship of the proletariat, plus the unneeded massacres in its name).” Essentially he believes that the bureaucracy is self-reforming and that ‘socialism’ has been attained through simple economic growth. (He ignores Lenin’s dictum that even in the lower stage of communism the state will begin to wither away as the masses assume more and more of the simple administrative duties of government.).

The real explanation for the restitution of women’s civil rights in 1955 is bureaucratic self-preservation. By 1955 the Soviet bureaucray was faced with a serious problem. Its economy was still staggering from the impact of the war. Attempts to rebuild the economy by simply abusing Eastern European allies had already led to the German uprising in 1953 to be followed by uprisings in Hungary and Poland in 1956. To head off the rising tide of internal dissent which began to boil with Stalin’s death, the domestic economy had to be rationalized.

Women were the major untapped source of skilled labor power. Ever since the war mobilization they had constituted a near majority of the workforce. The most productive generations of men had been severely decimated during and immediately after the war. To provide women with the skills necessary for them to hold responsible positions in industry, they had to be admitted to institutes with high standards; i.e:, coeducation had to be restored. To encourage them to leave the household and devote the time and energy necessary to acquire these new skills, childbearing had to be de-emphasized. Since Soviet contraceptives at that time were still notoriously poor, abortion was a necessary back up for birth control. The assertion of women’s right to control their bodies led naturally to the belief that it was also their right to contract and dissolve marriages at will, and since a higher divorce rate led to greater mobility in the labor force, divorce became more acceptable. So when faced with the need to rationalize economic production, the bureaucracy was compelled to draw heavily upon women to provide the skilled labor necessary to advance national interests.

But the very limited reforms undertaken in the post-Stalin era were not accompanied by a return to the Marxist position on the necessity of replacing the nuclear family. Mandel readily admits that while over 85 percent of Soviet women are engaged in productive work outside the home, they are still basically bound by the family and, continue to be responsible for housework and childcare. The bureaucacy meanwhile cotinues to gorify motherhood by awarding medals to women bearing large numbers of children.

Current Soviet policy aims explicitly at reforming, not replacing, the family. The emphasis is on developing part-time jobs for women so that they will have time to do housework. Secondarily, there is some effort to prevail upon men to help out in the home and some effort to expand the distribution of consumer products and services.

Prospects for laying the economic basis for the socialization of housework — assuming that the bureaucracy would permit its implementation — are crippled by bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy. Despite the benefits of centralized planning, soviet economic growth has for years been under 7.5 percent annually. This slow growth combined with the devastation of Soviet productive capacity by World War II has meant, for instance, that it was only five years ago that every rural Soviet cottage finally received electricity. Mandel estimates that it will be another 10. years before refrigerators, washing machines and vacuums will be standard items in worker and peasant homes.

Meanwhile; even Soviet sources admit that among the peasantry “conditions of household culture similar to those of the past and the economic need to preserve the personial garden farm are the basis for preservation in the family of elements of the old social inequality of the sexes and the traditional division of everyday kinds of work into male and female.” (Mandel’s emphasis).

In a country where 43 percent of the population is still rural and many workers are only one generation removed from the land, the impact of this should not be underestimated. Mandel himself notes that the level of abortion is very high among peasant women because most of them are still ignorant of modern birth control techniques. The vast social pressure from the old peasant families against any form of birth control contributes directly to this ignorance.

The Soviet bureaucracy continues to be the major obstacle to the emancipation of the Soviet woman, as it is for the emancipation of the Soviet working masses as a whole. Soviet foreign policy, by guaranteeing capitalist rule in the West through a strategy of class collaboration (recently exemplified by the treacherous popular fronts advanced in Chile and Portugal), sabotages the international proletarian revolution and subsequently defers the day when the workers of the advanced countries can provide the products needed by the Soviet Union and more backward countries for the mechanization and socialization of housework.

Politically disfranchised as is the entire Soviet working class; Soviet women are particularly vulnerable to reversals in government policy, which may lead again to the abolition of legal abortion, co-education or easily accessible divorce. While the use of terror in the Soviet Union has become less blatant, it should be remembered that many of the reforms of the Khrushchev era disappeared entirely for several year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In fact, the Czech events demonstrate clearly the bureaucracy’s continued willingness to use armed force if necessary to preserve itself.

For Soviet women, the Trotskyist road of political revolution in the degenerated Soviet workers state is the only guarantor of their real liberation. Only through the direct democratic control of government by the working class can women be fully assured of their rights; .particularly control over their own bodies. Through the liberation of the productive forces which would occur with the destruction of the bureaucracy, together with advances in the world revolution aided by a policy of genuine, internationalism, major steps could be taken toward the socialization of housework which would free women once and for all from the grip of the nuclear family. Only when the nuclear family has been replaced will the basis be laid for socialist relations between the sexes, Then:

“In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women, we shall see the rise of the free union fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers State; equal in their rights and In their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family there will arise a great universal family of workers… Such will be the relation between men and women in the communist society of tomorrow,”

Alexandra Kollontay, “Communism and the Family”

The Private Life of Islam: A Review

[First printed in Women & Revolution #10, Winter 1975-76]

Young, Ian.
Private Life of Islam: A Young Doctor’s Harrowing Account of a Season in an Algerian Maternity Hospital.
New York: Liveright, 1974.

Algerian masses’ successful war of national liberation against French colonialism was for the early New Left a living symbol of the revolutionary potential of the “Third World.” Along with the overturn of capitalism in Cuba, the self-proclaimed construction of “socialism” in Ben Bella’s Algeria focused the vicarious “anti-imperialist” energies of the radicals of the 1960’s, as the Spanish Civil. War had embodied the “anti-fascist” anti-sentiments of an earlier generation.

Unlike the social revolutions which established deformed workers*states in Cuba and later in Indochi­na, the Algerian war for national independence stopped short of any fundamental transformation of the class nature of Algeria. At a tremendous human cost, the mainly peasant Algerian liberation fighters drove the French from their country but did not destroy capitalism, instead replacing the colonial rule of French capital by the domination of a native bourgeoisie which remains tied to imperialism through the world market.

American New Leftists uncritically solidarized with the struggle to build “socialism” in post-revolutionary Algeria. They viewed the Ben Bella regime as unequivo­clly progressive and considered it axiomatic that the defeat of imperialism would open the road to socia emancipation. Rejecting the Leninist view that only a socialist revolution under the leadership of a proletari­an revolutionary party can accomplish the liberation of all the oppressed, the New Leftists envisaged many “vanguard” layers—the colonial masses, American blacks, women, youth—each of whose struggles would automatically advance the aims of the other oppressed strata.

The reality of the grinding oppression of women in post-revolutionary Algeria explodes this myth. Neither the Ben Bella regime nor the less leftist Boumediene government which succeeded it significantly altered the subserviant position of women in Algerian society. “Socialist” Algeria has shown itself completely incapable of completing even elementary democratic tasks, instead finding itself compelled to buttress the Muslim religion and and the authoritarian family structure as essential props of bourgeois rule.

The Private Life of Islam demonstrates the reactionary role of religion and the family in perpetuat­ing the degraded condition of Algerian women. The book is a young British doctor’s account of his training in an Algerian maternity hospital, a place where women are mutilated and killed as often as helped. The hospital is run “like an obstetrics book turned upside down, every do a don’t, every never an always.” The incompetence of the hospital staff is matched only by its sadism.

The staff has no time for the fear, pain or even hygiene of its patients. Beds, sheets and patients are covered with food, blood, excrement. Those infants who survive delivery are wrapped in rags and left unchanged and unwashed until they leave. No medical histories are charted,.and examinations are cursory or skipped entirely. Curettage is routinely performed without anesthetic, although bottles of it sit unused on  shelves. If a slip of the hand punctures the womb, it is removed—with curses for the extra work.

The foreign doctors excuse their criminal neglect of medical standards and ordinary human decency by reference to the attitude ‘of Algerian men themselves toward the patients. In incident after incident, terrified and suffering women are mocked, insulted., struck and most often simply ignored by male relatives and the hospital staff. Ian Youing sums up one young husband’s attitude toward his wife’s confinement as “a trip to the vet.” Still filled with moralistic ideals, Young guiltily waits for one of the patients to reproach him with a look or a word for his complicity, bul the women submissively accept the pain and brutalization as their lot.

The deprecatory attitude toward women emerges clearly in one bit of dialogue between members of the hospital staff:

“‘It’ll be born dead at this rate.’ Fatma says to the girl: ‘if you don’t push harder next time, it’ll be a little girl.’ And to me, Djamila says: ‘A dead baby, or a little girl—it’s kif­kif, it’s the same thing’.”

In another incident, a young girl who has become pregnant after being raped faces a choice between returning to her village, where she will be killed by her father to avenge the family’s dishonor, or going to prison for the “crime” of bearing an illegitimate child. Occasionally a woman informed of her pregnancy timorously asks for an abortion, but most respond with despairing resignation.

Ian Young is indignant and ashamed. Blaming the foreign doctors, he seeks government aid to institute hospital reforms. He goes to see a bureaucrat described as a real “revolutionary.” He initially flatters and conciliates the English doctor but he reveals his true attitude by boasting of how he put a doctor’s wife who is a nurse, back in “her place” by telling her: “Medicine comes before women, Madame. Show some respect ­for your husband.” Young gradually comes to understand that the hospital is the product of the society which, supports it: “These men were the unhappy executors, working in blood, excrement and death, of the most respected attitudes in Algeria.”

“Muslim Socialism”

“We prefer the woman who gives birth to a pilot, to the woman who becomes a pilot herself.”

–Mouloud Kassim, Member of the Revolutionary Council

Algerian rhetoric concerning women’s liberation and socialism notwithstanding, the government upholds Islam. Some Muslim reformists, citing the Koran’s injunctions against burying female infants in the sand and noting the vagueness of the passages used to justify the enforced seclusion of women and the wearing of the veil, claim that true Islam provides equality between the sexes. But the Koran makes itself abundantly clear on its attitude toward women:

“Men are superior to women on account of the qualities which God hath fitted the one above the other and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful during the husband’s absence, because. God hath of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is high, Great!”

The “equality” of Islam is the equality of apartheid. That is how Algerian women lived before and during the French occupation and that is how they continue to live today—covered up, locked up, uneducated and sold in marriage to strangers, often as children. Seclusion may be vague in the letter of Koranic law, but, it is wholly in keeping with its spirit. The religious teachings of Islam, like the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, depict women as excessively sensual and morally inferior, needing the guidance of men to protect them from their own weaknesses.

The French made use of the Islamic degradation of women to justify denying democratic rights, particularly suffrage, to Muslims. The Algerian reacted with increased Muslim orthodoxy, praising their women as the perpetuators of their true culture against French influence. Due to their seclusion, Algerian women were indeed less affected by French influence than were Algerian men, although the French made a special effort to reach them. During the struggle for national liberation, the French initiated public pro-French unveilings of Muslim women and organized a Feminine Solidarity Movement which offe­red them medical care, legal aid, gifts and education, in an attempt to draw them out of their isolation and into the service of French imperialism.

The FLN (National Liberation Front) responded with the slogan “For a free Algeria, not a free French woman!” Rather than raising a genuinely socialist program for women, thus releasing them from the bondage of Islam as well as from French imperialism, the Algerian nationalists took the veil as their symbol! They placed the oppression of women on the pedestal of revolution.

The popular film “Battle of Algiers” dramatizes the heroic role of women in the struggle, but it was expediency not ideology which integrated the FLN, and this equality of the barricades was short-lived.,

On the eve of independence the Algerian masses had before them the possibility of sweeping away their own feudal elite along with French domination and of advancing their struggle past the attainment of bourgeois democracy and on to the construction of a socialist society. The petty-bourgeois leadership of the FLN, however, did everything in its power to avert such an outcome and ensure the future of Algerian capitalism  At Evian the FLN pledged economic cooperation with French imperialism  in exchange for technical and financial aid, a pledge which made the completion of even democratic tasks impossible. Respect for French landholdings meant that only deserted land could be distributed. The promised agrarian revolution necessary to feed the cities’. war-swollen population was put off year after year while French industrialists continued to suck oil out of the Sahara.

For women the mass unemployment and food shortage which followed the war meant starvation and mass prostitution. Even child prostitution was common.

The constitution proclaimed Islam the national religion and the family the basic unit of Algerian society. Men, since they were automatically considered the heads of households, were given preference in employment. Polygamy was only moderately restricted. Forced marriage was forbidden by law, but for most women, with no possibility of employment, the only practical alternative to marriage was suicide.

The Algerian revolution did achieve national liberation from the yoke of French imperialism, but it did not free the urban and peasant masses from poverty and exploitation, nor from the savage social oppression which is rooted in the fabric of capitalist class rule. In the era of imperialist decay, there is no room for independent capitalist development of the underdeveloped countries; the weak “national bourgeoisie” cannot break from even the most reactionary and feudalist elements of its class and is consequently propelled into the arms of foreign imperialism. Far from building “socialism,” countries such as Algeria cannot even address the democratic tasks formerly associated with bourgeois revolutions. It remains for the revolutionary proletarian party, which must also be a “tribune of the people,” to lift the veil of women’s oppression in Algeria.

Maoism and the Family

[First printed in Women & Revolution #7, Autumn 1974]

Although the “socialist”-feminists, who constitute most of what remains of the women’s liberation movement today, cannot bring themselves to support the elementary Leninist concept of a vanguard party to lead an international proletarian revolution, they have found less difficulty in flaunting their “socialism” by supporting Maoism — generally unserious or “marshmallow Maoism. But recently some of the “harder” Maoist groupings are finding it easier to make organizational gains among feminists as well. Most successful of all is the right-Maoist October League (OL), which has shown the greatest capacity for opportunist adaptation, a capacity which has assisted it in outstripping the equally right wing but somewhat less flexible Revolutionary Union (RU) in this arena.

What is the appeal of Maoism for feminists? Above all, it reflects the continuation of a current in the New Left from which the radical women’s liberation movement emerged, a current of liberalism and idealism which sought to effect social change not through class struggle but through moral persuasion. Thus, the RYM faction of SDS, from which both the OL and the’ RU are descended, appealed to whites to give up their “white skin privilege” and to men to give up male supremacy. Correct consciousness, according to this view, was sufficient to end the historic sexual and racial divisions fostered by capitalism within the working class.

New Left Maoism’ initially featured a “Third Worldist” outlook, which downplayed the role of the working class and looked instead to various oppressed groups such as the peasantry of underdeveloped countries as the key to revolutionary leadership. While Maoism continues to reject the centrality of the working class to this day, workerism — the glorification of existing working-class consciousness — is becoming increasingly popular, and the more farsighted of the Maoist organizations have been quick to discern this trend and adapt to it. Thus the “socialist”- feminists, who are only now turning to workerism in large numbers, can look for Ieadership to the OL and the RU which made this turn earlier.

Reinforcing the new popularity of Maoism among feminists is also the appeal of China itself, where women who were surely among the most oppressed on earth have been afforded many new opportunities as a result of scial revolution.

But despite this attempt at peaceful coexistence between Maoists and feminists, there are serious unresolved differences between them. That these differences have often remained suppressed is due largely to the dishonest approach of the Maoists, who take pains to conceal their politics. The most outstanding of these differences centers on the question of the family, a question on which Maoists hold a position which is at odds both with feminism and with socialism.

Maoists Defend the Family

While most feminists recognize that the family, which isolates women from society and confines them to a lifetime of what Lenin described as “the most stultifying, the most difficult work which women could do… utterly inconsequential, containing no .elements that can aid in women’s development” is the principal institution for the oppression of women, Maoists of all tendencies defend the family as “the fighting unit for socialism .. ” This reactionary position, which originated with Stalin, has nothing whatsoever in common with Marxism-Leninism, which seeks to free women from the endless drudgery and isolation imposed upon them by the family structure by creating alternative institutions which would perform collectively the work now performed privately by women in the family.

Despite their supposedly sharp differences on the woman question, both the OL and the RU engage the glorification of the bourgeois family unit. The OL asserts that “for the working class and other progressive forces in society today, children are not a ‘burden’… ” The RU concurs and adds that in spite of all its admittedly negative features, the nuclear family, should not be criticized because:

“ … for many working people, the family provides one of life’s few bright spots. Despite the many difficulties of raising children under capitalism, including financial hardships and real fears for their health and safety, the proletariat loves its children and does all it can to enable them to ‘have a better life than I did.’”

Revolution, March 1974

These sentimental portraits are clearly at variance with the reality of most family relationships in capitalist society where, as the Russian Bolshevik Party correctly pointed out, “it is the street which brings up the children of the proletariat.” Furthermore, the focus on, “‘my” children and “my” children’s future which the RU applauds, denotes not class consciousness but a proprietary relationship which is a barrier to class consciousness. It is precisely this exclusive concern with protecting the interests of one’s own immediate family which persuades workers to avoid the risks of class struggle and which makes housewives especially vulnerable to reactionary ideologies.

Marx and Engels had harsh words for those who peddled “bourgeois claptrap about the family, and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child”, and the ‘Soviet Republic under Lenin struggled to expand the very definition of the word “family” to embrace the whole of society so that one would speak ,no longer of “my” children” or “your” children, but only “our” children — all the children of the workers state. As Bolshevik Commisar Alexandra Kollontai wrote:

“The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family. In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women, we shall see the rise of the free union, fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers’ State, equal in their rights and in their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family, there will arise a great universal family of workers, in which all the workers, men and women, will be above all workers, comrades. Such will be the relation between men and women in the communist society of tomorrow.”

Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family”

The Communist Manifesto makes it clear that the family must be replaced as the economic and legal unit of society if women are to be free to develop their full social potential, and this is as strikingly correct today as it was over a hundred years ago. Surely the OL and the RU are aware or the Marxist-Leninist position on this question. How then can these groups, which claim to be Marxist-Leninist, continue to peddle this “bourgeois claptrap”?

Why Maoists Must Deviate From Marxism

There are two fundamental reasons why Maoists must deviate from Marxism. First as Stalinists and in particular as defenders of the Chinese bureaucracy, they are forced to defend a society in which the family unit remains the basic economic unit. The Chinese Revolution was led not by a Leninist party at the head of the Chinese working class but by a Stalinist, petty bourgeois party at the head of a peasant based army. Because of exceptional historical circumstances, this petty-bourgeois leadership was able to overturn capitalism in China and to establish a deformed workers state, i.e. a state not qualitatively different from that which issued out of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Trotskyists therefore call for the unconditional military defense of the gains of the Chinese Revolution —  particularly nationalized property — against imperialist attack. At the same time, however, we call for a political revolution led by the Chinese working class to overthrow the ruling caste which undermines those gains and seeks to sell them out.

As in all degenerated and deformed workers states (including the Soviet Union, Cuba, North, Vietnam and Yugoslavia) women have been granted formal equality in many areas but have remained enslaved by domestic labor within the family. The key to any understanding of the interrelationship between the deformed workers state and the family lies precisely in the fact that the bourgeoisie has been smashed and the means of production nationalized, the working class has been politically expropriated.  The state is administered by a bureaucratic caste which, in order to maintain its undemocratic rule, must, among other things, rely upon and foster the nuclear family as one more, point for reinforcing respect for authority.

The maintenance of the family also represents a capitulation to the peasantry. Unlike the working class, for whom the family plays no necessary economic role, the class interests of the peasantry are essentially limited to consolidating the private ownership of small plots of land and this requires the maintenance of the family structure. It is precisely for this reason that the working class and only the working class will lead the struggle for women’s emancipation.

The second and equally significant reason why Maoists must deviate from Marxism on the question of the family is that Maoists, despite all their rhetoric about revolution being the main trend in the world today, the future being bright and so on, have absolutely no confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. And lacking this confidence, they have no real interest in raising the consciousness of the working class, but only in tailing its existing backward consciousness. Why put forward revolutionary ideas such as the replacement of the family when such ideas may “turn people off”? Someday it may be possible to slowly introduce these ideas — but not now.

The Trotskyist alternative is not, of course, to raise the slogan “Smash the family!” This would be absurd for, as Trotsky, pointed out, “the family cannot be abolished, it has to be replaced” and there is nothing to replace it under capitalism. But without a correct analysis of the role of the family in class society, we cannot even begin to understand the dynamic of women’s oppression. It Is precisely this analysis, however, which Maoists cannot undertake, for its conclusions would expose their revolutionary pretensions as a sham.

The OL therefore avoids all discussion of the family as a source of women’s oppression and insists instead that it is “wage slavery’ which lies’ at the basis of women’s oppression,” but since women’s oppression predates capitalism by several thousand years, this cannot be a very convincing explanation, even to the members of the OL.

The RU is more orthodox in a way, first presenting its version of Engels analysis of the family as an oppressive institution which originated with class society, and only then going on to revise it on the grounds of the greater importance of the family unit to the working class today and the coziness, warmth and love, supposedly abounding in the contemporary proletarian home.

Even more orthodox in its approach is the Communist Labor Party (CLP), a Maoist organization which descends from the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist- Leninist Vanguard Party in the USA (POC), the first pro-Stalin opposition within the Communist Party. The CLP presents Engels’ analysis in a more or less recognizable form, but draws from it no programmatic conclusions. While the CLP would like to avoid revising Engels, it cannot put forward the revolutionary implications of its book learning without threatening the very ground on which it stands. Thus in “Proletarian’ Morality” (Proletariat, Spring 1974) we find:

“The heart of the question that the comrades are asking is this. Is it anti-communist to have sexual relations with other than husband or wife, is it anticommunist to have sexual relations before marriage?”

To which CLP leader Nelson Perry discreetly replies “These questions are too personal for us to comment on.” The odor of puritanism, which Perry himself describes as “Catholic morality smeared over with Marxist phrases,” is very’ strong.

“Homosexual Relationships Require so Much Time”

As defenders of the bourgeois family, Stalinists generally feel called upon to denounce all those whose sexual preferences are other than monogamous and heterosexual. The OL tends to ignore the subject of sexual repression altogether. Michael Klonsky, leader of the OL, explained at a panel discussion in San Diego this summer why this question had not been taken up by his organization, saying that he didn’t see why so much fuss was being made about something that only took a few minutes a day.  The October League did not, however, draw back from assisting in the exclusion of a group of lesbian members of the Chicago Women’s Union from a trip to China.

The RU has been more outspoken in defense of “stable monogamous relationships between men and women.” A recent internal position paper on the subject, in which the RU attempts to soften its line, it is explained that while gays can be anti-imperialist (i.e. members of RU, front groups); ‘they cannot be communists’, (i.e., members of the RU):

“To be a Communist, we must accept and welcome struggle in all facets of our lives, personal as well as political. We cannot struggle with male supremacy in the factory and not struggle at home. We feel that the best way to struggle out such contradictions in our personal lives is in stable monogamous relationships between men and women based on mutual love and respect. Because homosexuals do not carry the struggle between men and women into their most intimate relationships they are not prepared, in principle, for the arduous task of class transformation. “

It would have been more honest (although equally disgusting) of the RU to simply admit, as the Workers League does, that it takes this reactionary position because, it conforms to backward attitudes prevalent in the working class. On the question of homosexuality as on the question of the family, the opportunist RU is guided above all by its determination not to “turn people off”.

Certainly there are reactionary currents in the “gay liberation movement,” but the RU’s condemnation of homosexuality as a disease to which people are driven by the “mire and muck of bourgeois decadence” (as if homosexuality had come into existence only with the decay of capitalism), is so backward and untenable that even the bourgeois American Psychiatric Association last year abandoned this position. The RU caps its garbled arguments by the assertion that homosexuality is incompatible with communism because “homosexual relationships require so much time.” One can only speculate upon the RU’s ideal of a meaningful heterosexual relationship. Presumably, as the OL’s Klonsky suggests, it should optimally take up “only a few minutes a day.”

This puritanical morality on the part of American Maoists is entirely consistent with the attitudes encouraged and even legislated by the Chinese bureaucracy. Visitors to China, who often differ on many questions of social life there, uniformly report that the Chinese suppress all premarital sex. Helen Snow, who as Nym Wales earned a reputation as an uncritical publicist for the Maoist regime, reports that:

“Any romantic attachment that goes the distance, outside the marriage bed, is actually a statutory offense, worth six months  in jail for the overeager young man…”

Helen Snow, Women in Modern China

This one report alone should stick in the throats of those American apologists for New China who never tire of crying: “Chinese Women Liberated!”

Chinese Women Unliberated!

The new opportunities afforded Chinese women are not insignificant. While we put forward our critical analysis of the Maoist regime, the Spartacist League firmly rejects the view advanced by some social democrats and feminists that the Chinese Revolution offered women little worth defending. The revolution has, among other things, given women legal equality, freedom of choice in marriage, greater access to contraception and abortion, a greater role in social production and political life and, for some, child care centers, dining halls and schools. It is indisputable that the lives of Chinese women, who in prerevolutionary were barely recognized as human beings,  have been radically transformed and that Chinese women are less oppressed in many ways than are women in bourgeois democracies.

But while we note such gains and therefore call for the unconditional military, defense of China against imperialist attack, we are also aware that China has not achieved socialism — a historical stage marked, among other things, by the withering away of the state — and that the Chinese bureaucracy sabotages those measures leading toward the emancipation of women which could be undertaken by the dictatorship of the proletariat in even a poor and underdeveloped healthy workers state. Chinese women, therefore, continue to be specially oppressed. Some indications of this oppression are the following:

1. The family continues to be the primary economic unit of society, and women continue to be primarily responsible for housework and child care. As the OL’s Eileen Klehr writes in “Women Hold Up Half the Sky”:

“I remember a woman factory worker who told me that all her housework was done by her children because both parents worked. This is good education for the future generation when household work will no longer be considered ‘women’s department’ but will be shared more equally between men and women.”

Instead of socializing the drudgery performed by women in the family, as the Bolsheviks attempted to do, the Chinese bureaucrats content themselves with appealing to the husbands of a future generation to share it “more equally.” (They are no doubt gratified to learn that President Ford makes his own breakfast.)

2. Swings in public policy since 1949 have resulted in sharp changes regarding contraception and abortion. Access to contraception and abortion is, not viewed as the right of all women, but as a privilege to be proffered or rescinded according to the political requirements of the bureaucracy at any given time.

3. Divorce may be granted only if both parties request it, and even then the court still attempts reconciliation and has the power to deny the divorce if it is deemed not to be in the best interests of the People’s Republic.

4. Puritanical attitudes toward sex prevail, and pre-marital sex is classified as a crime. There exists, as Trotsky put it when describing the Soviet Union under Stalin, “the philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”

5. Jobs are still noticeably sex-typed; and there is unequal pay for equal work, especially in the rural communes. Also, the shortage of capital mean that there are not enough industrial jobs for all who would like them, and this especially affects women’s participation in’ production.

6. Women’s participation in politics is still limited to the lower echelons of the government and the Chinese Communist Party, with few exceptions. Women comprise about 10 percent of the party and about the same percentage of its Central Committee. In 1969  two women were named to the Political Bureau although not to the Standing Committee; which is the real power. The two women were Yeh Chun, wife of Liu Shao-Chi and Chiang Ching, wife of Mao. When Lin. Piao was disposed of in September 197;, Yeh Chun was removed.

7. The facilities to socialize housework are still lacking. Child care in the countryside is inadequate, communal dining facilities are unattractive and collectivization of household tasks is not encouraged. It is, of course, true that the productive forces in China are not adequate to accomplish all this even if it were governmental policy, but, as Trotsky noted about the Soviet Union:

“Instead of openly saying, ‘We have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren will realize this aim,’ the leaders are forcing people to glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism.”

Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed

Maoists are willing enough to acknowledge that Soviet women are not liberated, despite the enormous gains of the October Revolution, many of which were subsequently reversed. But because of the Maoist position that the Soviet Union became capitalist and “social imperialist” sometime after the death of Stalin in 1953, any Maoist account of how this reversal occurred must be a masterpiece of distortion and omission.

Thus the Revolutionary Union, in “Soviet Women–  Their Victory and Temporary Defeat” (Red Papers 3) explains that “a small band of traitors” managed to take over the Soviet Union within 10 years of the death of Joseph Stalin and at that point “the tremendous gains made by women, and by the whole working class, began to crumble.” Can the RU explain why, then, abortion, which was legalized under Lenin, was abolished in 1936, despite popular opinion to the contrary (and reinstituted after the death of Stalin)? Why co-education was abolished by the Stalinist bureaucracy? Why women’s section of the Communist Party was liquidated? Why divorces were made increasingly difficult and expensive throughout the 1930’s, until in July 1944, the fee for a divorce was set at a level which placed it out of the reach economically, of the average worker?

Of course, since these dates are embarrassing to Stalinists, they are often ignored. The entire Maoist/Stalinist worldview would be threatened by recognizing that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began not in the 1950’s but in the 1920’s. Yet the facts are indisputable.

What Is the “Maoist” Position, Chairman Mao?

We have concerned ourselves so far with what the Maoists have in common, but it should not be assumed that there is general agreement among these groups on the Woman question. There is not. In fact, it was on the woman question that the Guardian’s unity–mongering forums of 1973 fell apart.

The OL, which has capitulated to petty-bourgeois feminism, insists that the RU does not see the radical women’s movement as a “positive progressive thing.” The RU denies this charge which is potentially devastating to the satisfaction of its opportunist appetites, and calls for a class analysis of the women’s movement. But despite the RU’s leftist rhetoric, its workerism and its refusal to fight for revolutionary leadership in the working class expose it as a liberal rather than a revolutionary organization.

A serious difference among Maoist groups centers on support for the Equal Rights AineildmEmt (ERA). (For a discussion of why the Spartacist League supports the ERA, see Women and Revolution No. 4, Fall 1973.)  The RU militantly opposes the ERA on the grounds that it would abolish protective legislation, but its arguments are contradictory. To be consistent, the RU would have to demand repeal of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 since this has been much more responsible for the repeal of protective legislation for women than the ERA would be. The point, of course, is to fight for the extension of protective legislation, not to seek defensively to maintain the status quo which is, in any event, under attack. The weakness of the RU on this question may have been behind its vicious physical attack on members, the Militant Action Caucus of the Communication Workers of America who were carrying signs in support of the ERA at a San Francisco demonstration this June. But while the RU does not hesitate to attack proponents of the ERA, it raised quite a hypocritical hue and cry about the refusal of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, including members of the OL, to allow the RU to criticize the ERA in a leaflet at an international Women’s Day march.

Like the RU, the Communist Labor Party initially opposed the ERA, declaring it to be a “fascist plot.” But recently the CLP has done “self-criticism” and following a short announcement of its “mistake, “an about-face of sorts was executed in the August issue of Peoples Tribune. In an exceptional display of political cowardice, the CLP refused to take a position for or against the ERA, stating only that it would engage in work “around the ERA”. But whether this work will support the ERA or attack it is anyone’s guess.

Regarding the question of orientation to the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), differences similar to the ones above also emerge. The OL went whole-hog into CLUW, taking up many bureaucratic posts and submerging any independent presence. Their sharpest criticisms have been leveled at the Spartacist League for raising a class-struggle program in CLUW, with milder criticisms of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, which stand slightly to the right of the OL in this arena.

Having fought for the bureaucrats and against the communists in CLUW, the OL is now slowly “discovering” that CLUW is dominated by the trade-union bureaucracy, a fact pointed out by the Spartacist League more than six months ago. The recent disaffection of many of these bureaucrats has put the OL in a temporarily stronger position within CLUW, temporary because CLUW is not likely to be a viable organization. (See’ “CLUW: Dead End for Working Women”, W&R No. 6, Summer 1974.) .

The RU has for the most part ignored CLUW and criticized the OL for trying to push the unions to the left. The RU’s recent turn is away from trade unions altogether because while the RU is reluctant to capitulate to the trade-union bureaucrats, it is even more reluctant to fight them. However, when RU supporters came to the first Los Angeles CLUW meeting in July, they voted with the OL (and the SWP, IS and CP) to prevent political discussion ,by voting down a motion raised by a member of the Militant Caucus of AFSCME 2070 in favor of democratic debate and resolutions.

The OL, the RU and the CLP have all amply demonstrated their fundamental reformism. The polemics among them may be sharp, but none is fighting for revolutionary principles. All, too, would be quick to subordinate any struggle to the interests of the Chinese bureaucracy if it would gain them the coveted status of “official” Maoist party in the U.S. So while the Spartacist League carries forward the struggle for women’s liberation through socialist revolution, the Maoists persist in their attempts to make the family the fighting unit for reformism and puritanism.

Revolutionary Union On Homosexuals:

Malicious Maoist Bigotry

[First printed in Young Spartacus #26, November 1974. We are appending a 1992 IBT statement on the Revolutionary Communist Party, which the RU renamed itself.]

A scandalously revealing document entitled “Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union On Homosexuality and Gay Liberation” is presently circulating somewhat selectively within the left. Consistent with their trade-union economism and shameless adaptation to backwardness in the working class, the Revolutionary Union (RU) in this document follows through its capitulation on the struggle against the special oppression of women by embracing and promoting the most swinish prejudices against homosexuals as “Marxism-Leninism.” The document is to inform and assure pejudiced workers and lumpens that “homosexuals cannot be Comunists”, that is, belong to communist organizations, which of course means the RU. To the extent that the RU philistines provide some semblance of a political justification for this anticommunist position the document cannot be ignored.

Although the sexual phenomenon of homosexuality has existed in the most diverse cultures and social systems, the RU document begins by claiming homosexuality to be a response of alienated, anxiety-ridden escapist individuals, “particularly the petty bourgeoisie,” to “the pressures of capitalist society” and “the intensification of the contradictions brought about by decaying imperialism. ” Thus, it is the capitalist “system that drives them to homosexuality.” For these Maoists homosexuality is a disease of capitalist society, like “exotic religious sects, mysticism, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, sex orgies, trotskyism, etc.,” and those who choose homosexuality as a sexual preference are “like all people caught in the mire and muck of bourgeois decadence.” We have come to expect from an organization unable to politically defeat our program such unprincipled verbal violence as the defamatory association of Trotskyism with drugs, mysticism, and so on.We only demand that the RU come out and openly state what they so nauseatingly imply: that homosexuals are “perverts.”

In order to be “at one” with even the most backward workers, these “communists” willingly accept prevailing bourgeois morality and “deal concretely with homosexual relationships as they exist in our [!] society today.” From this perspective homosexuals “are in relationships which necessarily place them outside the mainstream of our society and thus puts enormous strains upon the relationships.” But, “concretely,” inter-racial relationships also are “outside the mainstream” of this racist society and certainly involve “enormous strains.” Will the RU dare to label these couples deviants? If homosexuals are anti-social deviants because they show an “unwillingness to struggle with the opposite sex in very important relationships,” then marriage between people of the same race surely must be an impermissable capitulation to racism.

From the social ostracism and persecution of homosexuals, the RU concludes that “therefore such relationships can be only individual solutions to the contradictions of imperialism.” Here is where these “dialectically” – endowed Mao-Thinkers clumsily attempt to attribute a class basis to an historically manifested expression of one form of human sexuality:

“In posing an individual solution to the contradictions of monopoly capitalism, homosexuality is an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, and must be clearly distinguished from proletarian ideology.”

While certain petty-bourgeois radicals in the Gay Liberation movement may pose some utopian cultural-sexual “liberation,” homosexuality per se is objectively no more “individualist” than heterosexuality. The bourgeois state hounds homosexuals because their sexual choice rejects the sacred nuclear family upon which class societies have evolved and flaunts many of the ingrained norms of bourgeois propriety and morality which have been developed to justify it. While certainly not the threat to the existence of capitalist society claimed by some Gay Ltberation politicos, homosexuality, like many other expressions of non-conforming social behavior, is an irritant. Marx and Engels realized that the nuclear family constituted the primary unit of socialization in capitalist society and called for the socialization of child rearing and domestic work and the integration of women into the work force, so that the social and economic constraints on human relations might be removed.

Unlike Marx and Engels, the RU believes that the social unit corresponding to “proletarian ideology” is -the nuclear family! The document states:

“We feel that the best way to struggle out such contradictions in our personal lives is in stable monogamous relationships between men and women based on mutual love and respect… In reality, gay liberation is antiworking-class and counterrevolutionary. Its attacks on the family would rob poor and working class people of the most viable social unit for their revolutionary struggle against the imperialist system.”

Like the Communist Party and Progressive Labor, who long ago proclaimed the family to be “a fighting unit for socialism,” the RU excoriates homosexuals for the same reason the bourgeoisie treats them as pariahs.

Under Lenin and Trotsky the Soviet Union annulled all laws discriminating against homosexuals and women and made real inroads into liberating women and children from the prison of the family. These gains were among the first to be wiped out by the emergence of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy, which based itself upon the political expropriation of the working class. The bureaucracy climbed to power in part by mobilizing the most backward masses, still under the influence of Great Russian chauvinism, antisemitism, male supremicism and anti-homosexual prejudice, against the remnants of the politically conscious vanguard. The Stalinist bureaucracy, having turned its back on proletarian internationalism, bent all social relations to building “socialism in one country.” The family was enshrined over the ashes of the important, liberating social measures of the October Revolution. The reactionary policy of the Stalinist regimes, from China to Cuba, on the homosexual question flows from the state maintenance of the family.

Based on its Stalinist “two-stage” theory of revolution (which means no revolution), the RU concedes that while homosexuals can never be communists, some may lift themselves far enough out of their “selfishness, self-indulgence and decadence” to be “anti-imperialist fighters.” Apparently homosexuals who wish to dedicate their lives to the struggle against capitalism should be grateful for being granted the same status as the Shah of Iran, Bandaranaike of Ceylon and NATO!

These “anti-imperialists” presumably would be permitted to join the RU’s “anti-imperialist” student front group, the Revolutionary Student Brigade (formerly the Attica Brigade) and function in the petty-bourgeois radical movement, where homosexuality is less covert and even somewhat fashionable. Clearly the viciously anti-homosexual position is for the workers, since the RU does “not feel that the Attica Brigade has to take a stand on this question.”

The program for socialist revolution does not take any position on the value of any particular sexual orientation. We are opposed to all forms of discrimination and persecution of homosexuals as well as all laws which curtail the democratic right of privacy and sexual freedom for consenting adults. We have only disgust for the position that homosexuals are incapable of coming to communist consciousness and functioning as cadres in a communist organization.

On this anti-homosexual bigotry and political sanctification of the family and monogamy the RU stands closer to Puritanism than Marxism.

---

Homophobia Aside:

Defend The RCP!

[First printed in 1917 West #1, Spring 1992]

July of 1991 the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Demonstrations Committee decided it would no longer defend the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) because of that Maoist group’s reactionary position on homosexuality. The decision does not forbid individual NLG lawyers from defending RCP members nor will the NLG screen RCP members when they are involved in demonstrations in coalitions with other groups. However the NLG Demonstrations Committee as an organization will not provide lawyers or legal observers for events sponsored solely by the RCP.

The BT strongly condemns the homophobia of the RCP, which maintains that homosexuality is fostered and perpetuated by capitalist decay and that after the proletarian revolution a struggle would be waged to eliminate homosexuality. This position is inherited from that great butcher of revolutions, Josef Stalin, who termed homosexuality “bourgeois decadence” and whose consolidation of power in the Soviet Union in the 1920s laid the basis for the debacle which is now unfolding in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Homophobia is totally contrary to the spirit of Bolshevism, which stands for the broadest possible human liberation.

Nevertheless we disagree with the decision of the NLG Demonstrations Committee. The RCP is a part of the workers movement and therefore must be defended when necessary in spite of its bad position, for any refusal to defend any part of the workers movement against the bourgeois state eventually weakens everyone involved in the fight against oppression. We call for nonsectarian defense of left, workers and oppressed groups in the tradition of the International Labor Defense which was established by James Cannon and the then revolutionary Communist Party in the 1920s. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Toward a Communist Women’s Movement!

[First printed in Women and Revolution #4, Fall 1973]

It has been more than a year since the last issue of Women and Revolution was published. Beginning with this present issue, W&R resumes publication, at a projected initial frequency of three issues a year, under the direction of the Commission for Work Among Women of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. This transformation ofW&R into an organ of the Spartacist League is the product of several factors: the consolidation of W&R supporters around the Trotskyist program of the SL, the stagnation of the, feminist-dominated petty-bourgeois women’s liberation milieu and the continuing transformation of the SL itself into the nucleus of the vanguard party.

Over the course of the past few years, the Spartacist League has been engaged in an internal discussion over the perspectives and scope of our intervention around the woman question, a discussion which culminated in the adoption of several documents at our Third National Conference held in November 1972. This discussion focussed on a reassment of the mechanisms for continued SL action on this question in the light of a critical review of the origins and evolution of our work.

The Fight Against Feminism

The radical women’s movement– as distinct from purely liberal, petty-bourgeois feminist organizations, such as the National Organization of Women (N.O. W.)– emerged as an outgrowth of 1960’s New Leftism. The reality of women’s oppression under capitalism predictably produced an elemental resentment and sporadic outbursts of resistance, but in the absence of a strong, proletarian pole of attraction and a principled revolutionary leadership, this partial consciousness could not generate a revolutionary program for women’s emancipation. Inevitably it was channelled by bourgeois ideology into utopian and reformist dead ends and made prey to isolation and demoralization.

As revolutionists, we were compelled to intervene in the women’s liberation movement both because we sought to honor our obligation to be what Lenin termed “a tribune of the people”– an organization responsive to the real needs of all the oppressed– and because this work was strategically important both in order to develop revolutionary class consciousness, among the mass of oppressed women and in order to raise the general level of consciousness in the class itself on this issue.

The SL’s earliest systematic involvement in this arena took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, where SL supporters along with others initiated the formation of the Socialist Workshop, a socialist women’s liberation group which intervened, in the amorphous women’s movement to struggle for explicitly political, anti-personalist perspective based on the recognition of the working class as the central force for socialist revolution. On the basis of this involvement, as well as other more fragmentary work taking place on the initiative of other SL branches, the 1969 Central Committee Plenum established work around the woman question as a real although subordinate priority for the organization as a whole.

Spartacist members and others drawn around SL program initiated local groups in several cities, and the first issue of the national newspaper Women and Revolution appeared in early 1971. Its “Manifesto” stated: “Our liberation and the liberation of the working class go hand in hand. We shall not separate ourselves from the mainstream of the revolutionary movement but shall make our struggle an integral part of it.” W&R activists intervened to fight for the transitional program in such organizations as Bread and Roses and Oakland Women’s Liberation. In New York, participation in the “Working Women’s Organizing Committee” (initiated by the International Socialists) was discontinued after the WWOC (which in its patronizing desire to avoid “alienating” anyone consistly shirked any discussion of program) codified its irrelevance to the struggles of working women by refusing to take any position on the union organizing taking place in the WWOC’s chosen target of activity, the telephone company.

W&R supporters also intervened in conferences and demonstrations of the SWP-initiated movement to legalize abortion; W&R demanded “Free Abortion on Demand,” an end to support for capitalist politicians like Chisholm and Abzug, a break from “single-issue” campaigns and the adoption of a full working-class program and an end to the exclusion of men from the movement.

W&R fully expected an “unsisterly” response to its explicit anti-feminism from the bulk of the petty bourgeois women’s movement. Yet at the same time we found that many of the more serious women’s liberation activists were drawn toward W&R on the basis of its uncompromising programmatic perspective. From out of the amorphous women’s movement came individual recruits and, in addition, W&R intersected several local study groups and feminist collectives which polarized and split along the lines of the fundamental political alternatives posed by W&R supporters. Through their study of the woman question, and often through reassessing their own experiences in attempting to organize working-class women, these groupings began to take sides on basic questions: feminism vs. Marxism, Maoism vs. Trotskyism, “serve-the-people” spontaneity vs. the vanguard party.

Comintern Positions Rediscovered

It was at this point that the Spartacist League found itself compelled to rediscover concretely the work of the Leninist Communist International on the woman question, which centered on the building of transitional organizations– women’s sections affiliated with the revolutionary proletarian parties.

The question of special communist work among women had been a controversial one in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as early as 1896. Klara Zetkin’s position in favor of such work was adopted by the party, and a party section for work among women was established to direct it. Within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) there was, beginning around 1905, a similar debate, in which Alexandra Kollontai was one of the leading proponents of special work among women on the German model. Special work among women was carried out by the Bolshevik party which published the journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman) under the direction of its Central Committee and which established Genotdel (The Department for Work Among Women) after the seizure of state power in 1917.

Within the Second International no special section responsible for directing work among women had ever been established. Lenin found the lack of such an international body intolerable:

“The first proletarian dictatorship is truly paving the way for the complete social equality of women. It eradicates more prejudice than volumes- of feminist literature. However, in spite of all this, we do not yet have an international Communist women’s movement and we must have one without fail. We must immediately set about starting it. Without such a movement, the work of our International and of its parties is incomplete and never will be complete….”

-Klara Zetkin, Recollections of Lenin, 1920

The Third International set itself the task of extending internationally and codifying the work begun by the German and Russian parties. On its initiative, the First Conference of Communist Women was held in 1920. This conference established an International Secretariat for Work Among Women with permanent representation on the Executive Committee of the International. The Comintern also made mandatory the establishment of special administrative and organizational bodies for work among women within all party committees. Thus, while decisively rejecting the notion of an autonomous women’s movement, the Comintern in its first four congresses specifically demanded a special division of labor within the communist parties for the direction of work among women.

Comintern work among women degenerated qualitatively as part of the general process of Stalinization, and the positions on the woman question which the first four congresses had clarified were virtually forgotten. Thus these crucial struggles became inaccessible to the working class for decades. It was only in the course of the SL’s extended internal discussion on work among women that we were compelled to rediscover many of these positions.

Women and Revolution Affiliates With the SL

While the first W&R groups which the Spartacist League initiated were based on the SL’s program for women’s emancipation as an integral part of the struggle of the working class for socialist revolution and were linked to the SL through their most conscious cadre, they were not yet functioning as a disciplined part of the common Spartacist tendency. Predictably, many of the militants they recruited recognized the need to become full communists and to become involved in the work of the Spartacist League as disciplined supporters. In the course of this common work the SL realized the need to make the W&R groups a part of the common Spartacist tendency and enable disciplined W&R supporters to participate in the work and internal life of the SL. It was proposed therefore that local W&R groups organizationally affiliate with the SL. The impetus for this step came from the SL, but mainly as the formalization of an accomplished fact.

By the time of the opening of the SL’s pre-conference discussion period in preparation, for the Third National Conference, the New York and Boston W&R groups had voted to become supporters of the SL on the local level and were participating in the discussion process. Elements from the Oakland and New Orleans women’s groups had already joined the SL or its youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), and many had been implanted in industrial work, under the direction of the SL Trade Union Commission. The work around W&R, demonstrating the SL’s principled approach on the woman question, had been instrumental in the fusion between the RCY and the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, a component of which had been heavily involved in the women’s movement, Earlier, the woman question had been one of the focal points of the SL’s oppositional intervention into Progressive Labor-dominated SDS, which had won to the SL dozens of ex-New Lefters and individuals from PL’s periphery and had laid the basis for the formathe RCY.

The virtual disintegration of the petty-bourgeois women’s movement in the early 1970’s played a crucial role in convincing serious militant women that Trotskyism was the only way forward. It also precipitated a reassessment of perspectives for W&R. The women’s movement was virtually ceasing to exist as an arena for intervention, but a diffuse conscious of the reality of female oppression had trickled down to broad social layers, and its effects were becoming more apparent, especially within the labor movement itself.

In a document drafted for the SL Political Bureau and adopted by the Third National Conference, tactical guidelines for our work among women were set forth. While keeping in mind the current priorities and resources of the SL, we adopted as our goal a general strategy based on that of the Communist International in its revolutionary period, the creation of a transitional women’s organization affiliated with the proletarian vanguard party ;

“The organizational experience of the SL in this work has tended strongly toward the conclusion that the women’s’ circles must be brought under the discipline of the party so that the non-SL comrades involved can participate fully in the debates and decisions!of the movement and be represented on its leading bodies. In our experience in the women’s arena we were forced pragmatically to rediscover the position of the Communist International, which strongly opposed the initiation of women’s organizations not organizationally linked to the proletarian vanguard, not only when the revolutionary organization is a mass party in which case ‘independence’ would in fact constitute counterposition to the revolutionary party-but also when the vanguard is weak and struggling to increase its contact with and influence among the masses. Our strategic perspective should be the development of a women’s section of the SL….”

The National Conference decided to establish a Commission for Work Among Women responsible to the SL Central Committee. This commission will oversee SL work among women, centering on the regular publication of W&R. It will also work in close coordination with the other leading bodies of the SL, especially with the Trade Union Commission, since the struggle for the fullest possible integration of women into the organized labor force and against the divisive effects of male chauvinism in the working class occupies a central place in the work of both bodies.

W&R will feature articles on the women’s movement in the U.S. and abroad, the history of the communist women’s movement, the role of the family and women in the work force, as well as articles on topical issues and book reviews. The aim of the journal is the crystallization of a readership committed to the establishment of a communist women’s movement, looking toward the creation of a Spartacist League section for work among women dedicated to the struggle for the emancipation of women through international proletarian revolution.

Related Link
Dale Reissner: 1942-1994
International Bolshevik Tendency’s biographical obituary for the original editor of Women and Revolution.
http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no14dale.pdf

Women and the Permanent Revolution

[First Printed in Workers Vanguard No. 17, March 1973]

For Marxists the emancipation of women from their special oppression is a precise gauge of the degree to which a society has been purged of social oppression as a whole. This interrelationship was first formulated by the utopian socialist Fourier:

“The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women towards freedom, because in the relations of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of women.is the natural measure of general emancipation.”

– Theorie des Quatre Mouvements

Fourier was paraphrased by Marx in The Holy Family (1845):

“The relation of man to woman, is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him.”

In a blunter and more succinct fashion, Marx repeated the same point 23 years later in a letter to Kugelmann: “social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, (the ugly ones included).”

Monogamous Family Emerges

One of the ironies of history is that the origin of the special oppression of women is rooted in one of the earliest social advances-the development of human technology beyond the day-to-day struggle for bare subsistence characteristic of hunting and gathering societies. With the introduction of cattle breeding, metal working, weaving and, lastly, agriculture, human labor power became capable of producing a substantial social surplus. Under the impact of these technological developments, the institution under which labor power is reproduced, the family, underwent a profound transformation. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology, the propagation of the species engendered the first division of labor between man and woman. Because of women’s procreative functions, the lot of childbearing, child rearing and general domestic tasks fell to them. The household was the general sphere of woman’s activity. However, the development of technology, domestication of animals (including other humans, usually war prisoners or slaves) and the land, and the development of tools took place in the general sphere of man’s activity, and it was he that appropriated the concomitant expansion in social wealth. Thus, the advent of private property and the need to transfer this property through inheritance gave rise to the patriarchal law of inheritance and law of descent. The monogamous family was developed to ensure the paternity of the children, with the incumbent seclusion of the wife to ensure her fidelity. Seclusion meant an exclusion from public life and social production.

“Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.”

-Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

Prior to the growth of private property and the monogamous family, arms, like tools and property, were held in common. However, with the development of private ownership in the means of production and procreation, and the polarization of society into economic classes, weapons became monopolized by bodies of men separated from the rest of society. These armed bodies of men constituted the essence of the state. While appearing to stand above classes, the state is in reality the instrument whereby the dominant economic class in each epoch maintains its hegemony. The ancient state was the state of the slaveowners for holding down the slaves, the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern, “democratic” state is the instrument of the capitalist class to maintain its dominance and ability to exploit labor.

In each epoch the family, like the state, has been principally an institution for perpetuating the dominant property form and the dominant economic class. For the slave, serf and wage slave-i.e., for those social classes without property to inherit or defend-the social institutions of inheritance and defense, the family and the gendarme, are principally institutions of subjugation.

Limitations of Bourgeois Progressivism

With the advent of industrial capitalism, the family entered a state of relative dissolution. In order to drive down wages, capitalism sought to lower the cost of producing and reproducing labor power through drawing the entire family into the labor process. This meant breaking down the guild structure, at first through “piecing out” work to individual families, and then by concentrating them into industrial sites and company towns. In countries with belated capitalist development, such as tsarist Russia, guilds and the development of home industry were skipped, and serfs drawn directly into large, bleak company towns.

The return of women to social production provides the precondition to their social emancipation, but under capitalism it meant the further enslavement and degradation of women, as they were forced to take on wage slavery in addition to their domestic slavery. Unable and unwilling to provide social substitutes for the economic role of the family, however, the capitalists encouraged women to return to the domicile and kitchen with consciously generated propaganda in favor of the family and religion. Thus capitalism expanded the productive forces and laid the technological basis for the socialization of domestic work and the replacement of the family as an economic unit, but was and is unable to accomplish this replacement, just as it laid the basis for the international socialization of the means of production, but still cannot eliminate national boundaries.

Capitalism depends for its survival on the traditional, archaic social institutions of class rule: private property, the monogamous family and the nation-state. As the productive forces generated by capitalism increase, they strain against the bounds set up by the social institutions upon which the system depends, and the capitalist class becomes more vi rulent in trying to shore .up and reinforce institutions which become increasingly more reactionary. The capitalist- backed trend of women out of the plants and back to the domicile reached its zenith in the Nazi campaign for woman’s enslavement to “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,”” children, kitchen, church.”

The bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, which cleared away feudal institutions from the path of capitalist development, replaced social relations based on obligations and privileges with those based on contractual equality, and thus had a profound effect on the family. Equality of rights between the sexes was given expression by the bourgeois revolution’s most radical ideological advocates, especially in regard to the ownership and inheritance of property. But even in the realm of formal legality, the bourgeoisie was frightened by the consequences of its own revolution and immediately dug into the medieval past for archaic institutions with which to stabilize its rule. Thus, the French Revolution was followed by a further political counterrevolution, a Thermidor in which the agents of the bourgeois revolution, the rural poor and the urban sans-culottes, were disinherited. Thermidor in terms of the family and the special oppression of women was provided by the Code Napoleon, which made women the property of their husbands, requiring a woman to obtain her husband’s permission in order, for example, to obtain a passport, make a will or sign a contract.

In a similar fashion the equality of nations proclaimed by the bourgeois revolution was subordinated to the drive of the industrially advanced nations to subjugate less developed nations in the struggle for markets and raw materials. The interrelationship between the subordination of the equality of the sexes and the equality of nations is graphically demonstrated by French imperialism. When Napoleon III thought that a higher birthrate was essential to provide workers and soldiers for expanding the French Empire, he appealed to Rome and won from the Pope a redefinition of when life begins from the traditional Catholic view that it begins when the fetus can survive outside of the womb, to the present immediatelyfollowing- conception view. This transformed abortion from a venial into a mortal sin, and on this basis Napoleon III drew up the restrictive abortion law which France has today.

Women Under Decaying Capitalism

Thus the bourgeoisie was never consistently democratic, even when the democratic tasks necessary to consolidating its class rule were on the agenda. In the epoch of imperialism, the imperialist countries have a further direct interest in suppressing the democratic and national aspirations of the colonial and semicolonial masses. Had the imperialist powers in China supported the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion (in which armed women’s brigades played an important part), a modern Protestant nation might have emerged there in the last century. Instead they backed the Manchus, upon whom they were already dependent to ensure stability. The road to imperialist subjection lay through bolstering the most reactionary and repressive aspects of semi-feudal society combined with the penetration of that society by the most advanced capitalist technique.

The inability of the “national bourgeoisies” of these colonial countries to shatter the feudal past and carry through a bourgeois-democratic revolution was conclusively demonstrated in the course of the last century. The national bourgeoisie, generally recruited straight from the old nobility, and dependent on relics of the feudal past for its survival (e.g., latifundia in South America), developed as the dependent broker for imperialism. The native bourgeois classes in the colonial world were unable to separate themselves from the entanglement with imperialist domination for fear of setting off forces-principally the anti-capitalist struggle of the workers, in alliance with the peasantry-which would sweep them from power as well.

Analyzing the tasks of a revolution in tsarist Russia and their means of accomplishment, Trotsky formulated the theory of the permanent revolution. He concluded not only that proletarian leadership would be required to accomplish the basic bourgeois-democratic goals of the revolution-since the bourgeoisie was unable to take a revolutionary path against the autocracy-but also that the proletariat would have to place its own, socialist goals immediately on the agenda if the revolution were to be successful. In order to uproot feudal autocracy and colonial domination, the working class would have to uproot the bourgeois order which had grown up within, and now propped up, these institutions.

The question of women’s emancipation in the Third World continues to demonstrate the truth of Trotsky’s conclusions and the lessons of the Russian Revolution which they anticipated. Equal rights for women is a basic democratic right, avowed by all democracies and accepted as a goal by all “national liberation” movements. Yet the special oppression of women is grounded in the very basis of the property system itself. Just as the anti-colonial struggle which limits its goals to the establishment of an independent state fails to provide real independence from imperialist domination, so the “revolution” which stops short of overturning capitalism has proven unable to uproot women’s oppression.

Bangladesh provides such shocking examples of inhuman imperialist behavior that the complete domination of the “national liberation” struggle against Pakistan by the equally reactionary, rival Indian imperialists is forgotten. Yet this fact absolutely precluded the accomplishment of any democratic tasks by that movement. Among the victims of the struggle over Bangladesh were 200,000 Bengali women who were systematically gang-raped by the West Pakistani army. Marshal Khan’s troops then had the heads of these women shorn, a mark of disgrace in Bengali society. The women were then turned loose, only to be rejected and massacred by their husbands, brothers and fathers as Sheik Rahman, former feminist Indira Gandhi’s faithful seneschal, came to power. The state that emerged behind the bayonets of the Indian army proved no more liberating for the women of Bangladesh than the regime which perpetrated bestial gang rape. The vengeful persecution of the Biharis under the new state is no consolation.

Algerian Independence Little Gain for Women

When “national liberation” does not simply replace one imperialist suzerain for another, as in Bangladesh, but results in a measure of real political independence within the context of continued imperialist economic domination-viz., lgeria-the unimproved condition of women reflects the continued failure to accomplish basic democratic tasks of the revolution for the masses. The Tripoli Program, basic manifesto of the Algerian Revolution, vaguely promised formal equality, but even the law of the new regime codifies sexual inequality for women, many of whom fought in the FLN as both auxiliaries and commandos. For example, the maximum punishment for adultery committed by men is one year-for women, two. And the reality is much worse than the letter of the law expresses-while forced marriage is now illegal, every year even the government is forced to admit that many suicides take place to avoid forced marriages. This could be attributed to the difficulty in overcomiflg tradition, yet the attitude of the Algerian regime is one that is hostile to overcoming tradition. Boumedienne, president of Algeria’s “Revolutionary” Council, said:

“We say ‘no’ to this [Western] type of evolution, for our society is an Islamic and a socialist society. A problem exists here. It involves respect for morality …. For we have seen among several peoples who have been recently liberated, that woman, once free, hastens to think of things which one need not cite here…. The evolution of Algerian woman and the enjoyment of her rights must be in the framework of the morality of our society.”

-8 March 1966

And this speech was given on International Women’s Day! The speech inspired the walkout of a number of women. In “socialist” Algeria, where every student receives religious education, women have been kept out of politics, generally out of higher education, and under the veil as well.

Algerian society has not been without some democratic reforms, even reforms which touch upon the family. But each reform is elaborately justified only after tortuous religious debate and tedious reinterpretation of the Koran.

Modern imperialism has not forgotten its Rudyard Kipling, has not forgotten how to wrap itself in the mantle of a “civilizing mission,” especially regarding the “weaker sex”-as it rapes both the women and the natural resources of the subjugated nations. French imperialists, whose Code Napoleon did not allow a woman to open a bank account or take a job without her husband’s permission until 1966, paraded themselves in Algeria as the defenders and liberators of Muslim womanhood. Perhaps the most ludicrous expression of this pious hypocrisy was the socalled “Battle of the Veils.” After 13 May 1958, when the French colons ransacked the Governor General’s headquarters, bringing down the Fourth Republic, a leading colon woman organized the Feminine Solidarity Movement, which paraded de-veiled Muslim women around to give eulogistic speeches on how good it was to be liberated by the society of liberte, egaIite, fraternite-the complete marriage of feminism and imperialism! In reaction, the veil became a symbol of the resistance to French imperialism, as did the Muslim family, the traditional customs, etc. Thus, not only were centuries-old customs of domestic slavery and oppression not abolished, but the symbols of these very customs were adopted by the “Revolution”! Thus Boumedienne says “no” not to French imperialist hypocrisy-his hatred of which is a sham-but to the basic achievements of the French Revolution.

The most articulate expression of Third World nationalism which, like the Russian Narodniks, reduces “socialism” and “revolution” to feudalistic revivalism, is ,to be found in that darling of the cafe revolutionaries, Frantz Fanon-the official ideologue of the Algerian FLN. While his L’An Cinq de la Revolution Algerienne (translated as A Dying Colonialism) is a testament to the courage and fortitude of the Algerian revolutionary woman-showing how involvement in the FLN revolutionized her social standing-Fanon finds her strength not in the liberating experience of equality imposed by commando life, but in patriarchal Muslim tradition:

“What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation ofthis reciprocal justification. The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.”

Fanon is quite correct when he states that after participating in the national liberation struggle the Algerian woman “could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past.” But for Fanon, as for the Narodniks, the very cultural and social backwardness of the masses is itself a source of their revolutionary capacity. The Narodniks, the supreme petty-bourgeois radical democrats, denied the bourgeois character of the democratic revolution, i.e., agrarian revolution, national independence and democratic rights, which constituted the parameters of their program. For the Narodniks, for Fanon and for the official Algerian regime and its sundry Stalinist-Maoist-Pabloite apologists, such regimes are “socialist” despite their incapacity to carry through even the basic democratic tasks of bourgeois revolution. What emerges is a Third World nationalism, profoundly anti-democratic, feudalistic and in this case Muslim fundamentalist.

Women and the Russian Revolution

If the Algerian experience is the negative confirmation of the permanent revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was both positive and negative confirmation. The Russian Revolution emerged from the cataclysmic experience of world war in a country which, like the colonial countries, combined the latest in capitalist technology-industries that were totally merged with finance capital and as such ultimately controlled by the Bourses of Western Europe-with the most backward medieval institutions. At the same time Russia was the “chattel-house” of nations, itself an imperialist power with expansionist appetites in Asia Minor and the Balkans. Given Russia’s belated bourgeois development, it skipped over that stage which nurtures a strong urban petty bourgeoisie with strong democratic institutions and illusions. When the radicalized female of the intelligentsia entered politics, it was not as a feminist or suffragette, but as a terrorist. According to the reports of the tsarist Minister of Justice, Count Pahlen, of the 620 people summoned before the courts for revolutionary activities during the 1870s 158 were women. The 29-member Central Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Freedom) in 1879 had ten women. One of the members of this group, Sofya Perovskaya, directed the assassination of Alexander II.

The terrorist activity of the radicalized middle-class women was the prelude to the militant class battles of Russia’s working women. Concentrated primarily in textile industries, they were in the vanguard of the strike struggles of the late 1890s. After the turn of the century bourgeois feminists organized “Women’s Political Clubs” in St. Petersburg. In the winter of 1907-08 the Russian Social Democrats organized the “Society for Mutual Help Among Working Women” and issued the publication The Working Woman. When the bourgeois feminists organized the first All-Russian Women’s Congress in 1908 the “social-democratic women were represented by their own separate class group, numbering 45 women. Having passed their own independent resolutions on all questions, the women workers finally walked out of this ‘ladies’ congress” (A. Kollontai, Women Workers Struggle for Their Rights, 1918).

One of the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over whether to organize an independent proletarian women’s group or participate in the bourgeois feminist groups. After the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1912 the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves by continuing to struggle to draw proletarian women into the revolutionary movement. The Bolsheviks resumed publication of The Working Woman in 1914 for International Women’s Day. This holiday, which had originated in 1908 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Rutgers Square) by women in the needle trades, was adopted by the Second International under the leadership of Clara Zetkin in 1911. It was first celebrated in Russia at the instigation of the St. Petersburg textile workers in 1913 and celebrated again in 1914 complete with processional, mass meeting and the first appearance of the red flag in St. Petersburg. The next celebration was in 1917 and marked the opening of the Russian Revolution.

The Stalinists who try to fit the Russian Revolution into their two-stage schema claim that the February Revolution was the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution. While the February Revolution was bourgeois in that it put the bourgeoisie into power, there was very little democracy about it, especially in relation to the emancipation of women. Taking the church and ecclesiastical courts out of the private affairs of marriage and divorce was achieved only later, by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Likewise, it was only after the Bolshevik Revolution that a real effort was made to alleviate the domestic slavery of women through the establishment of nurseries, creches, maternity care, public dining halls and laundries.

The Bolshevik Revolution established another basic tenet of the permanent revolution-the need for proletarian leadership over the peasant movement. While the agrarian revolution was spontaneous, the struggle to summon peasant women to a full public and political life was not. The political mobilization of the peasant women required the courageous and persistent efforts of the Bolshevik party women, many of whom were recruited from the St. Petersburg textile factories which had been in the vanguard of the Russian <;lass struggle for three decades prior to the revolution. Organized in the special Communist Party sections dedicated to drawing in the oppressed women masses behind the revolution, party cadre, often disguised in paranyas and eluchvons (the veiled clothing worn by the women in Muslim territories of the Soviet Union) would carry the message of the revolution to the most backward areas of Russia. In order to reach women in nomadic tribes the CP’s women’s sections would organize Red Yurtas, or large tents which dispensed medical as well as political propaganda. Their efforts culminated in the First All-Russian Conference of Proletarian and Peasant Women in November 1918, attended by 1,700 delegates. One of the participants described the conference as follows:

“In 1918, when the civil war was raging, when we still had to struggle against hunger, cold and unprecedented devastation, when it was still necessary to defeat the enemy on countless fronts, at th is juncture the conference of proletarian and peasant women was summoned. Hundreds of working women, from the remotest factories and villages, had come to Moscow with their complaints, grievances and doubts, with all their cares great and small.”

~F.W. Halle, Women in Soviet Russia (1933)

Thermidor Reverses Gains

But the Soviet Union, an economically backward country to begin with, ravaged by imperialist intervention and civil war, encircled and blockaded by hostile capitalist powers, was unable to provide the economic basis for the construction of socialism; it could only “generalize the want.” Lenin and Trotsky realized that just as the democratic revolution must grow into the socialist revolution if the democratic tasks of the revolution are to be solved, so must socialist revolution grow directly into world revolution. The failure of the revolution to spread led to the seizure of power by the conservative state bureaucracy under Stalin in 1923 which converted the Soviet Union’s isolation from a profound defeat into a rhetorical “victory” with the anti-Marxist, nationalist “socialism in one country” doctrine. As Stalin consolidated power, the new ruling elite also required the revival of the monogamous family as the bulwark of this national “socialism”-just as it was a bulwark of the fascist political counterrevolution in capitalist countries.

The Stalinist political counterrevolution simply ran the film of the revolution backward in the realm of women’s rights. The party women’s sections were liquidated in 1929; homosexuality was made a crime in 1934; abortion, which had been legalized in 1920, was illegalized in 1936; from 1935 through 1944 divorce was made increasingly expensive and complicated; and in 1944 even coeducation was abolished. To accomplish these measures, Stalin relied on the conservatizing influence of the peasantry, which generally was alone in welcoming them.

Of course, at each stage Stalinist apologists could find economic and social reasons for each of Stalin’s counterrevolutionary measures. As Trotsky said in The Revolution Betrayed, “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it. The actual emancipation of women is unrealizable on the basis of ‘generalized want’!” Thus, even the revolutionary government of Lenin and Trotsky had to face horrendous problems, especially in terms of the family and women’s emancipation. For example, in 1922 Lenin’s wife Krupskaya estimated that there were seven million homeless children, while Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, estimated nine million. Adoption had to be illegalized in 1926 to prevent the exploitation of child labor by the peasantry! The chief “accomplishment” of Stalin was to turn difficult conditions into a rationale for entrusting all power to a conservative, counterrevolutionary ruling clique which adapted to the backwardness in order to survive.

Women Under “Third World” Stalinism

In Yugoslavia, China, North Vietnam and Cuba, petty-bourgeois leaderships commanding peasant-based armies succeeded, because of exceptional historical circumstances, in overturning capitalism despite their completely pro-capitalist, “democratic” programs. This fact alone has enabled these countries to play a role free of direct economic and political subservience to imperialism; that is, enabled them to fulfill the basic task of the anti-colonial revolution. But these victories took place as military confrontations which were lost by the imperialist and allied native bourgeois forces despite the best efforts of the “revolutionary” leaderships to sell out the struggle in exchange for a “revolution” safely contained under capitalism (such as did happen in Algeria and most similar situations). The proletariat, a victim of earlier defeats, lacked leadership and failed to playa role as an active contender for power in these revolutions.

As a consequence, what emerged was not proletarian democracy, but regimes as bureaucratically deformed as that which emerged from the degeneration of the revolution in the Soviet Union-i.e., deformed workers states. Within these regimes, once again the emancipation of women is a most accurate gauge of the general emancipation. While women have been granted formal equality, no consistent, concerted effort has been made to liberate them from domestic slavery. While women have increased their access to socially productive roles, they are generally restricted to those areas which are a simple extension of domestic work, such as textiles and nursing. In North Vietnam, after 26 years of war, women are still not permitted to play a combat role in the regular army. And only the exigencies of war have forced the North Vietnamese bureaucracy to establish nurseries and creches. Birth control and abortion are legalized and illegalized at the whim of the bureaucracy.

Politically, women are no more or less disenfranchised than their husbands in the absence of proletarian democracy. In the absence of special party sections for women, there are no special vehicles to train and equip them to enter the party. The recruitment of women is generally done through moral exhortation. Most women are shunted off to the local Women’s Democratic Federation where they can circulate petitions for peace, justice and equality. In China, the Women’s Democratic Federation, which once claimed a membership of 70 million, was headed by Liu Shao-chi’s wife; it was therefore abolished by the Cultural Revolution!

In backward and colonial countries, petty-bourgeois classes oppressed by feudalism and imperialism, particularly the peasantry, are more numerous than the proletariat. In order to come to power, the proletariat must mobilize these classes behind it in the struggle against imperialism and for basic democratic rights. Yet the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary, anti-capitalist force in these countries. In order to overthrow capitalism and begin an unobstructed path toward socialism, the revolution must be made on the proletariat’s terms and with its program. The family as an economic unit enslaving women could then be replaced through socialization of the means of production and reproduction of labor power. But the revolution which rests on the peasantry or on a specious amalgamation of the interests of peasants and workers (that is, on a modified program of a section of the petty bourgeoisie) finds that for the peasantry, the family is the existing economic unit of small-scale agriculture, as opposed to the factories and socialized industries of the workers. Unlike the workers, the class interests of the peasants are based on deepening private ownership of small plots, which means retaining the family structure. But the peasants are incapable of reorganizing society. Their conservatizing influence can only be overcome through the leadership of the workers.

Thus, the interrelationship between the land question and the family is a key to understanding the zigzags of the degenerated and deformed workers states. For industrialization requires a food surplus; a food surplus requires mechanization; mechanization requires industrialization, etc. How to break out of this vicious cycle? The New Economic Policy (NEP), primitive socialist accumulation (the tax in kind), persuasion and example were the methods of Lenin and Trotsky. Bureaucratic fiat, whose parameters are only the precipices of catastrophe, is the method of Stalinism, which veers from Stalin’s “Kulaks, enrich yourselves” and Mao’s New Democracy to forced collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. During the Great Leap Forward and Stalin’s forced collectivization, women were encouraged to participate in social production, and the family tended to be subordinated. But these measures did not correspond to the real tempo of economic development, and no substitutes for the family as an economic unit were developed. Stalinist regimes were thus forced to strengthen the family structure as the only non-revolutionary way out of the chaos they had created and to conciliate the enraged peasantry. The proletariat, precisely the class for whom the family plays no economic role, is destined by history to lead the struggle for women’s’ emancipation.

Women and Permanent Revolution

While class exploitation is the main axis of social struggle, it is not the only form of social oppression. Insensitivity to the special forms of oppression, national, racial and generational as well as sexual, is a form of opportunism. Economism, the ideology of trade-union bureaucrats and their hangers-on like the [then leftist] Labor Committee and the Workers League, thrives on such opportunism. However, refusal to see the interlocked nature of special oppression and the class struggle, to posit roads (e.g., bourgeois feminism) other than the class struggle for dealing with special oppression, is both reactionary and utopian. Because the question of women’s oppression and the family is fundamental to class society, the solution can only be a global uprooting of capitalist property and the preparation for a classless communist society. Only an international proletarian party, conscious of its tasks and mission, can provide the necessary leadership for such an upheaval.

Smash the Reactionary Junta

For Workers Revolution in Chile!

 

[First printed as a Workers Vanguard supplement dated Sept. 13 1973]

 

SEPTEMBER 12-Yesterday’s rightist coup in Chile put a bloody end to the three-year-old Popular Unity government headed by President Salvador Allende. This seizure of power by the military is a serious defeat for the international working class, leading to a naked assault against the workers’ organizations and to the massacre of possibly thousands of proletarian militants. It is not yet clear to what extent the Chilean workers and peasants will forcibly resist the putschists; their heroic will to defend their organizations is not in doubt, but the Allende government consistently refused to arm the workers. It is the duty of all U.S. working – ciass organizations, both trade unions and parties, to launch an immediate, united-front protest against the counterrevolutionary coup. Smash the reactionary junta- For workers revolution in Chile!

 

The events of the last two days tragically confirm the Spartacist League’s warnings that the Chilean working people would pay in blood for the treachery of their leaders. The triumph of bourgeois reaction after three years of the Allende government was no accident! It was prepared by the very nature of the Unidad Popular [UP-Popular Unity] coalition.

 

As the Spartacist League insisted in a leaflet issued on September 4:

 

“The government of the Unidad Popular is not a workers government. It is a coalition of workers and capitalist parties. The presence of the ‘radical’ bourgeoisie and the ‘democratic’ generals is a guarantee that the Allende government will not step beyond the bounds of capitalism. Their presence is a guarantee that the workers and peasants will be left disarmed and atomized in the face of the impending rightist coup. Rather than pressuring Allende… we must instead calI on the workers to break sharply with the bourgeois popular front and the government parties, to fight for a workers and peasants government based on a revolutionary program of expropriation of the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie.”

 

The seductive claims of the dominant workers parties that socialism could be won through elections and parliamentary action and in collaboration with “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie have again proven to be simply the formula for defeat. The so called “Chilean road to socialism” was lauded the world over by pro-Moscow Communist Parties as the model of revolution through peaceful coexistence; and the Chilean capitalists -touted as the most “democratic” bourgeoisie of Latin America, with the most “non-political” military- were supposed to passively acquiesce to the transition to socialism!

 

But only the independent class mobilization of the proletariat to seize state power in its own name can open the road to socialism. A popular front is by its very nature- its alliance with a section of the ruling class- confined within the bounds of capitalism. It can never prepare the way for workers power. It can succeed only in frightening the forces of bourgeois reaction to the point that they undertake a concerted and brutal assault on the workers. in alienating and driving into the arms of the reaction sections of the petty bourgeoisie which would have split if faced with a clear proletarian pole, and in disorienting the workers through class collaborationist illusions so that they cannot mobilize an organized and united self-defense against ‘the rightist reaction. The lesson of Chile today is the lesson of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s: if the workers do not learn in time that popular fronts, parliamentarism and peaceful coexistence lead to defeat, they will pay with their lives.

 

What Was the Popular Unity?

 

The Popular Unity coalition was made up of the dominant workers parties, the reformist Communists and Socialists, together with the Radical Party and left Christian Democrats. Since the 1970 elections both the Radicals and left Christian Democrats have had splits, with pro-UP sections moving leftward and even claiming to support socialism. But the essence of the Popular Unity as a bloc with a section of the bourgeoisie was not changed. The UP government from the beginning rested on a tacit agreement with the dominant bourgeois party, the Christian Democrats, without whose votes Allende could not get a single one of his reforms passed by Congress. More recently as the rightist attack on the government sharpened, the role of chief guarantor of the interests of the bourgeoisie within the government was taken over by the military ministers.

 

The government adopted a policy of appeasing the rightists and increasing repression of the workers. Thus after the “bosses’ work stoppage” by the truck owners and shopkeepers during November 1972. Allende invited the military leaders into the government and promulgated a law which permits unannounced raids by the military in search of arms. This law, though ostensibly directed against both right and left-wing extremists, has in fact been used exclusively against the unions, the occupied factories and the workers parties, while fascist groups such as Patria y Libertad built up sizeable arms stockpiles. Then during May and June the government provoked a copper miners’ strike at the El Teniente mine by attempting to do away with the sliding scale of wages (cost-of-living escalator), and turned machine guns on the workers during the course of the strike (see WV No. 23, 22 June 1973).

 

Popular Front and Parliamentary Cretinism

 

Although the reformists have constantly attempted to portray Chile as the most radical popular-front government in history (compared to Spain 1936-39, France 1934-36 or Chile at different times from 1936 to 1948), the myth is far from reality. Thus in Spain the industrial centers were entirely in the hands of workers militias for much of the period after July 1936 and most of the factories were operated under workers control. In Chile, Allende signed an agreement in 1970 not to permit the formation of workers militias nor to promote officers from outside the graduates of the military academies. thus guaranteeing that the army would remain firmly under the control of the professional military elite. The Spanish workers were armed; for the most part, Chilean workers are not.

 

But a popular front is a popular front. The Spanish workers were defeated by Franco because they did not have a revolutionary leadership which struggled to overthrow capitalism. Instead the workers and peasants were constrained by the Stalinist Communist Party and the Assault Guards to remain within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. In their more honest moments the Stalinists would justify this in terms of not “scaring the bourgeoisie,” but they also had a theory to justify it. While Lenin had made the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” world-famous as the call for a workers revolution, Stalin” discovered” in 1924 that before the stage of soviets there had to come an intermediate “democratic” stage. In essence this was identical to the position of the reformist social democrats, who called for winning power through parliamentary elections as a “step” in the gradual transformation of capitalism. Now in the 1970’s this theory was resurrected by Allende’s UP:

 

“Since the National Congress is based on the people’s vote, there is nothing in its nature which prevents it from changing itself in order to become, in fact, the Parliament of the People. The Chilean Armed Forces ‘and the Carabineros, faithful to their duty and to their tradition of non- intervention in the political process, will support a social organization which corresponds to the will of the people …. ”

-S. Allende, “First Message to Congress,” December 1970

 

Historical experience again disproved this reformist fairy tale yesterday for the nth time!

 

The Chilean CP has throughout lived up to its Stalinist mission of reformist betrayal. Thus, in line with the Stalinists’ call to broaden the Popular Unity to include the Christian Democrats, they also opposed an extensive program of nationalizations. In order to “regularize the economy” CP minister Orlando Mill introduced legislation which would restrict nationalizations to certain specific sectors and return factories occupied by the workers to their “legal” owners!

 

The CP not only oppose’d the formation of workers militias, but Luis Corvalan, secretary-general of the party, rejected any form of arming the workers since such proposals “are equivalent to showing distrust in the army.” (This is, of course, true. And the Stalinists, of course, never show distrust in the bourgeois army. Thus even after yesterday’s coup, the Daily World [12 September] claimed only “a section” of the armed forces were involved, particularly the “traditionally upper middle-class Air Force.” The army no doubt appreciated this “trust,” which facilitated the generals’ reactionary coup.)

 

Shortly before the coup, French CP leader Bernard Fajon returning from Chile held a press conference in order to denounce:

 

“… certain economic theories whichput the accent on the destruction of the old structures ….

 

“The occupation of the factories by the workers… transformed in certain cases into taking possession of companies

not included in the program of nationalizations….

 

” … irresponsible and adventurist positions, such as the leftist slogan of calling on the soldiers to disobey [orders], which facilitates the efforts of officers favorable to a coup d’etat: such as the leftist slogan of exclusive workers control in all factories, tending to line up the engineers and professionals against the working class….

 

“The Communist Party of Chile has led and leads the most consistent struggle against these absolutely crazy views…”

 

-Le Monde, 3 September

 

Meanwhile, as the CP was clamoring to unite with the Christian Democrats and disarm the “ultra-leftists,” calling on the workers to give up the factories to their legal owners, the Soviet Union gave practically nothing in the way of economic aid to Chile. The utter cynicism which lies behind the Stalinists’ calls for “unity of all democratic forces” (i.e., including the Christian Democrats in Chile who just helped prepare a counterrevolutionary coup, and such liberal U.S. Democrats as Lyndon Johnson) can be seen in Angela Davis’ foolish remark at a pro-Allende rally following the coup: “I don’t think it’s a defeat, it’s a setback of course” (New York Times, 12 September). With setbacks like this, what would a real defeat look like? .

 

But the class-collaborationist logic of Stalinism is not limited to the direct followers of Brezhnev and Kosygin. The erstwhile guerrilla warrior Fidel Castro made his support for the bourgeois UP government clear in all of its glory during his visit November 1971 when he called on copper workers at the Chuquicamata mine to moderate their wage demands and work harder. A few months later he again expressed his “antiimperialist” solidarity by inviting Chilean generals to visit Cuba.

 

Preparation of the Coup

 

In order to excuse their own betrayals in Chile the Stalinists are now claiming that the coup is the work of fascists and extreme reactionaries in league with the CIA. There is no doubt that the ultra-right provided leadership of the coup and was in contact with the U.S. government. ITT’s offer of $1 million in 1970 to dump Allende is certainly not unrelated to the “accidental” presence of American navy ships in Chilean waters on the day of the coup.

 

But to hold only the “ultras” and the CIA responsible for the coup is to ignore the bulk of the Chilean bourgeoisie. The CP wants us to believe that only American capitalists will protect their property! In reality, the Chilean capitalists saw the handwriting on the wall as workers committees took over hundreds of factories following the abortive coup on June 29; they were joined by the military general staff after the discovery of leftist cells in the navy in early August. The September 11 coup is their answer. This coup was no fascist plot or the work of a few military “ultras.” It represents the decision by the key sectors of the bourgeoisie to smash the increasingly militant workers movement. Every important section of the Chilean capitalist class, including the “moderate” Christian Democrats and the “constitutionalist” officers, is involved in one way or another.

 

That its real aim is to smash the workers movement was amply proven on the first day of military rule. The fall of the government itself was quickly, almost surgically, accomplished by a classic pronunciamento by the heads of the armed forces and a short bombardment of the presidential palace. The presidential guard surrendered, while Allende either committed suicide or was shot. But during the first day of military rule, more than 1,000 people were killed and more than 100 leaders of workers parties and unions arrested. The generals threatened to blow up any factory which resisted.

 

Their particular concern was the mushrooming workers committees (the “cordones industriales”) in the industrial belts around Santiago. The New York Times (12 September) reported: “In the proclamation by the junta that seized power today, the factory groups were cited as a reason for the revolt.” The day before, an air force commando, had attempted to raid the important Sumar textile factory, looking for arms. The workers, who have occupied the factory, successfully repulsed the soldiers with gunfire and the commando was eventually forced to retreat as reinforcements from surrounding plants arrived (Le Monde, 11 September). The air force had carried out similar raids twice during August, apparently trying to provoke a shootout with the workers. This time they lost and that was perhaps the last straw; it was hIgh time to get rid of Allende. Brought to power in order to control the labor movement, he lost his usefulness as he increasingly proved unable to discipline the workers. And with a flick of its finger, the bourgeoisie toppled him.

 

That the coup was not simply the work of the fascists and ultrareactionaries is shown by several facts. In addition to Admiral Jose Toribia Merino, a’ sympathizer of Patria y Libertad, the junta also includes Army commander General Augusto Pinochet, a leading “constitutionalist.” Moreover, the whole recent chain of events was triggered by the resignation of General Carlos Prats on August 23. General Prats, the leading “constitutionalist” and MInIster of Defense, stepped down In order, as he put It, to preserve the unity of the institution” (the military). He was followed by two other military ministers. These resignations represented a vote of no confidence in the government by all wings of the general staff of the armed forces. From that time on, the coup was simply a question of timing and personnel.

 

Nor was it simply a military matter. The atmosphere for the military takeover was provided by the economic chaos resulting from the truck owners’, shopkeepers’ and professionals’ work stoppage which had continued for more than a· month and a half. This was a clearly political effort designed to bring down the government, as was the similar work stoppage last year. The truck owners’ confederation is closely tied to the National Party, while most of the other professional associations are linked to the Christian Democrats. Both in November and August of this year the CDP, directly called on its professional associations to join the counterrevolutionary action. Thus while its leaders in parliament talked soothingly of waiting until the 1976 elections, the Christian Democratic Party was preparing the coup along with every other sector of the bourgeoisie.

 

The “Revolutionary” Left

 

As the masses of Chilean worker’s and peasants have become progressively disillusioned with the reformist CP and SP they have begun searching for an alternative leadership. Many have joined the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario [MIR-Revolutionary Left Movement], the most important group to the left of the UP. The MIR is a New Left-Castroite group which until 1970 concentrated largely on organizing peasants for land takeovers and guerrilla warfare, After taking an ultra-left line by abstaining from the 1970 election on principle, the MIR suddenly flip-flopped and issued a statement immediately after the election giving Allende critical support. It continued to call for support to the UP in one form or another until the very end: “The Revolutionary Left Movement maintains that although we do not agree with every step of the Popular Unity, that although we have differences with aspects of its policies, this does not signify that we come to a definitive break with the Popular Unity” (Punto Final, 9 November 1971). But it precisely is a “definitive break” that is called for. Here we have a government tied to a section of the bourgeoisie, whose main task is to hold the workers back from revolution -and the MIR gives it critical support! By this act of class betrayal it must take a major responsibility for the coup.

 

Furthermore, the MIR failed to raise as a key demand throughout this period the arming of the workers and the formation of workers militias based on the unions (and cordones industriales). Instead MIR documents speak only in the most general terms of the limits of peaceful reforms and of the need to “accumulate power to crush any seditious attempt or the civil war which the exploiters will attempt” (El Rebelde, 23-30 May). The main activity of the organization has been land and factory takeovers which, however militant they may be, failed to take on the question of the Allende government.

 

ChiIe and the American Left

 

Thus among the major socialist organizations in Chile there is none that called for the replacement of the popular-front regime with a workers government, i.e., called for the working class to break from the bourgeoisie; they instead capitulated to the UP government’s (initial) tremendous popularity among the working masses. In the U.S., of all the ostensibly Trotskyist organizations the only one to take a clear stand against the popular-front UP government from the beginning was the Spartacist League. Immediately after the 1970 elections we wrote:

 

“It is the most elementary duty for revolutionary MarxIsts to irreconcliably oppose the Popular Front in the election and to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any ‘critical support’ to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is ready.”

 

–Spartacist, NovemberDecember 1970

 

By way of contrast, the opportunist Workers League wrote that “the workers must hold Allende to his promises…”(Bulletin, 21 September 1970) while the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party’s initial evaluation of the Allende election(Intercontinental Press, 5 October 1970) amounted to defacto critical support: “…failing to recognize the positive elements in it, condemning it in toto out of some sectarian dogmatism, would mean suicidal isolation.” It would certainly have meant isolation in the early months of the Popular Unity government. But the principled Trotskyist position of unswerving opposition to the popular front was in fact the only alternative to suicide. It was support for Allende that led to the present counterrevolutionaiy coup.

 

A slogan cannot be applied mechanically in all situations. Thus at the time of the June 29 coup and during late August the SL called for “a united front of all workers organizations to smash the rightist-militarist offensive in Chile, while continuing to struggle for the overthrow of the popular front government of ‘socialists’ and generals by proletarian revolution” (“Showdown in Chile,” 4 September). Today, Marxists must struggle to smash the junta by a workers’ uprising. To call for support to the UP is to reaffirm a policy whose suicidal nature is being demonstrated at this very moment: In a similar situation, when faced with the attempt in August 1917 by General Kornilov to overthrow the Kerensky government and crush the revolutionary workers of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks called for a united front of all workers organizations to smash the counterrevolutionary conspirators and even fought alongside the troops of the bourgeois Kerensky government. “Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government,” wrote Lenin:

 

“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary we expose his weakness. There is the difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and must not be forgotten.”

 

-·To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.,” 30 August 1917

 

But of course in the Chilean situation it would be manifestly absurd to call for even military support to the UP government, which has already been smashed.

 

Similarly to calIon all “democrats” to defend civil liberties is to fail to understand the nature of the present coup. The junta will undoubtedly suppress civil liberties, even for the bourgeois parties, for a certain time. But its fundamental job is to crush the workers movement and it, in turn, can only be destroyed by a proletarian offensive.

 

Never have the lines between revolutionary Marxism and opportunism been clearer. They are drawn in blood, the coin in which betrayals are paid.

SWP Uses Watergate Methods Against Trotskyists

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #29, 28 September 1973]

DETROIT~Taking time out from their international faction fight and legal suit against Nixon for his Watergate-type harassment of them, the leadership of the Socialist Workers Partj recently expelled three of its members using evidence gathered with its own (rather inept) brand of “dirty tricks.” Among other things, the SWP had four of its members hiding in the bushes around the Spartacist League summer camp in August and instructed a YSA member to act like a Spartacist sympathizer in the time-honored agent-provocateur manner, The victims, Irene Gorgosz and Michael Milin, both of the Detroit branch, and Gerald Clark of the Oakland-Berkeley branch, were the three signers of the “Declaration of Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency” submitted to the SWP preconvention discussion. The charges brought against these comrades were “collaboration with the Spartacist League” and double recruiting. At the three sham “trials,” the charges against these comrades were patently only pretexts for a political expulsion, exposing the hypocrisy and intriguing of the SWP majority.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (RIT) had stood counterposed to both the International Majority Tendency (IMT) and the SWP majority-led Leninist~Trotskyist Tendency (see WV No. 28, 14 September). The “Declaration” wages a broad attack on the SWP’s deepening immersion in reformism and petty-bourgeois “movements” in the face of an intensifying capitalist crisis and working-class restlessness. At the same time its criticisms of the IMT are fundamental:

“The International Majority Tendency in standing for the petty-bourgeois guerrilla road in the colonial world which even if successful could at best lead to a deformed workers state, and at the expense of a working class centered revolution-has reaped with the PRT-ERP the inevitable consequences: that for such guerrillas, a Mao or a Castro, not a Trotsky, is their legitimate ideological hero and inspirer. In Europe, the IMT’s latest fad is the phrase “new mass vanguard” and the revolution guaranteed within five years. These quick remedies are not one bit superior to the concept of ‘red universities’ as the bastions of revolution, or ‘from the periphery to the center,’ since for many years they lamentably failed to turn Stalinist and reformist bureaucrats into involuntary revolutionaries through the tactic of ‘deep entryism.’ And for the United States, the IMT has been content to endorse the whole past work of the SWP, suggesting only that it might have been given a. somewhat more radical cover.”

–” Declaration of Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency,”

SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 31, No. 22, July 1973

In contrast the RIT stood on the general line of the two documents submitted by Gerald Clark: “The Only Road to Revolution is Through the Proletariat” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vo1.31, No. 1, April 1973) and “A Program for Building a Proletarian Party: In Opposition to the Centrism of the Party Majority” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 14, June 1973). Starting with the premise that the “question of building a mass, proletarian World Party of Socialist Revolution” is the “central task facing revolutionaries throughout the world,” the first document traces the betrayals of both wing of the United Secretariat fight on the questions of Vietnam, Latin America, Cuba, the Middle East and strongly argues for the adoption of the Leninist conception of a democratic-centralist International.

The second document authored by Clark deals with the SWP’s policies regarding students and the “new radicalization, ” nationalism, community control, the chicano and women’s struggles, the antiwar movement and democratic centralism. In each case the document counterposes to the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism a revolutionary proletarian approach to these questions. It emphasizes the critical necessity of the application of the Transitional Program as opposed to adaptation to the present consciousness of the “masses” and demonstrates historically the importance of democratic-centralist functioning in regard to party-building and youth-party relations.

A third important document, “The Fight in the United Secretariat:Reformist Appetite Versus Guerrillaist Centrism” by Michael Milin (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 28) examines the legalistic, class-collaborationist approach of the SWP on the one hand and the capitulation of the IMT to insurrectionary nationalist Stalinism on the other hand. Each side, while seeking to establish for itself orthodox Leninist credentials in contrast with the other, at the same time shrinks from fundamental criticism of the other side for fear of exposing its own past opportunism:

“The central revision of revolutionary Marxism by the international majority is the separation of the class organization of an insurrection from the society emerging from it. A revolutionary workers state, in which the working class democratically governs on the basis of collectivized property, can only be established if the armed forces of the labor movement itself play the dominant role in overthrowing the capitalist state ••••

“For many years, the SWP leadership was not only an ardent advocate of guerrilla war, but engaged in idiot enthusing over the Castro regime and Fidelista movement. The SWP’s selfstyled orthodox turn against guerrillaism is part of its rightward motion in adopting a reformist program acceptable to sections of the liberal bourgeoisie. “

–“The Fight in the United Secretariat”

It was for these politics that the SWP expelled the three RIT comrades.

.

Snakes in the Grass with Binoculars

The trial of Milin and Gorgosz was highlighted by the revelation that the SWP was modelling its intelligence gathering methods on old cowboy-and Indian movies. The charge of “collaboration with an opponent organization” was proven on the basis of Milin’s and Gorgosz’s admitted attendance at certain sessions of last month’s SL summer camp. However their admission was not sufficient, for the Detroit executive committee took the trouble to plant four spies for direct observation on the camp grounds during the entire duration of the camp:

“The method used to “get” these two comrades was the method of Watergate. Surreptitiously sneaking into the woods surrounding the camp, the accusers spied on people whose only crime was that they were there and disagreed with the program of the party majority. Crawling on their bellies ‘for the party,’ comrades Kelly, Bechler, Fruit and Wallace, equipped, one assumes with binoculars and other assorted James Bond do-i t-yourself spying devices, scanned the campsite in the hope of recognizing the ‘disloyal’ elements in the act. I could just imagine the look on comrade Kelly’s face as he spotted not one, but two, three, many ex-SWPers in the crowd: comrades he once collaborated with when they were members of the party. But all that crawling around had its rewards: they spotted two faces they recognized, comrades Milin and Gorgosz. A job well done comrade Kelly! Maybe now they will give you a seat on the National Committee. “

–Clark to SWP Political Committee, 27 August 1973

As an additional reward the SWP might recommend its four intrepid woodsmen for an appropriate Boy Scout merit badge. The Detroit exec had also gone to great lengths to find the exact camp location. While the camp itself was widely publicized and open to a broad range of interested people, the location was given only to those serious about attending. Stating that “it was a source of information [it] might want to use in the future,” the exec refused to reveal how it discovered the location.

This unsavory activity was not the only devious tactic used by the SWP to “expose” the two “disloyal” elements. The two comrades were also charged with double recruiting on evidence provided by a majority agent, YSA member Steve Beumer. Professing to RIT supporters in July and August his intention to quit the YSA and his interest in the SL, this comrade miraculously abandoned his differences, went over to the majority and was accepted into party membership a mere two weeks after the Oberlin SWP convention in early August. In fact it was the party majority that engaged in double recruiting in order to procure an agent to work in its interests!

By the SWP’s bureaucratic anti-Leninist norms, members of the YSA must be treated as members of an opponent group. SWP members function under party discipline within the youth organization. Thus the youth are treated as political infants incapable of making intelligent decisions. While they are privy to internal party discussions (a good percentage of the Oberlin SWP Convention attendance was composed of non-party youth), they are expected to refrain from taking position on the party’s disputes! It was this paternalist, front-group attitude toward the YSA which impelled the party and youth leaderships to rid themselves of the troublemakers in the RIT before the youth preconvention discussion scheduled for this fall.

“Dirty Tricks” versus Principled Political Struggle

This was not the first time that agents provocateurs were used by the SWP /YSA majority in order to create charges sufficient (in their eyes) for the expulsion of a dissident minority. In July of this year three YSAers were expelled for “political solidarity with SL” (see RCY Newsletter Supplement, August 1973). In their case much of the prosecution’s evidence was supplied by a majority agent who, again professing interest in the politicS put forward by the three in branch meetings, encouraged their expressions of sympathy to SL/RCY politics. The method of entrapment, well known to the FBI and narcotics agencies, can do nothing but promote cynicism and suspicion among the SWP /YSA ranks. Apparently SL politics are so threatening to the SWP that it is willing to use all types of “dirty tricks” to root out a suspect.

These tactics, which are used in place of open political struggle, . have led to a fear of all political opposition and an atmosphere where intelligent discussion of opponent tendencies is necessarily reserved for guilty closet meetings. In fact the SWP ranks are treated to precious little “official” analysis of other organizations. Those rare references to other groups are usually superficial characterizations leading, for instance, to the lumping together of the SL and Workers League as “sectarian” or “ultra-left,” a gross distortion of these two groups, whose main similarity at this point is the fact that both were expelled from the SWP in the early sixties. SWP /YSA members find themselves disarmed, then, in the face of opponents; they have only cynicism or nervous half-serious repetitions of vague generalities at their disposal for polemics. It is not surprising, therefore, that exposure to the real politics of the SL or of groupings moving toward the SL, politics which represent the continuity of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, is a serious threat to the reformist leadership of the SWP.

Prosecution Lies Exposed, Defendent Proclaimed GuiIty Anyway

The Gerald Clark case was a manifest bureaucratic contrivance. Clark had been a member of the SWP for four years, a YSA member before that. As organizer of the Hayward, Cal. branch and a delegate to the 1971 SWP convention he was one of the few to vote against the “Youth Radicalization” document. His documents for the 1973 convention were deep-going criticisms of both the SWP majority and the IMT.

One of the SWP’s eagle~eyed spies reported that Clark had attended at least the first four days of the SL summer camp. Clark had little trouble proving to everyone at the trial that he had not attended the camp at all. Its first charge completely discredited, the SWP leadership fell back on its second line of defense-you guessed it, Steve Beumer. At the Oberlin SWP convention, Beumer had approached Clark and the other RITers telling them that he was dissatisfied with the YSA. He asserted that he was interested in knowing more about the SL, at which point Clark mentioned that the SL was holding a summer educatlonal camp. Beumer then tried to get Clark to attend the camp, but the latter wouldn’t consider it!

However, the trial body made it clear that the formal charges were irrelevant. Clark was really being charged withpolitical agreement with the SL and not organizational collaboration. Clark asserted that he was not an agent of the SL and, in fact, disagreed with it on important questions. The two major documents that he submitted to the pre-convention discussion should adequately answer any questions the SWP majority might have about his political beliefs.

These clearly political expulsions were motivated by the SWP’s almost pathological fear of Spartacist politics. They enabled the SWP to rid itself of a known dissident and an irritating left-wing tendency, lest an open political struggle expose the reformism of the SWP leadership

The SWP and the Fourth lnternational, 1946-54:

Genesis of Pabloism

[The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 21, Fall 1972. Copied from http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/archives/oldsite/GENESIS.HTM ]

The American Socialist Workers Party and the European Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960’s in an unprincipled “reunification,” which has now broken down as the American SWP has completed the transition from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The “United Secretariat” which issued out of the 1963 “reunification” teeters on the edge of an open split; the “anti-revisionist” “International Committee” fractured last year. The collapse of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tendency. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth International through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too little and too late, on national terrain while in practice abandoning the world movement.

World War II: U.S. and France

Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth International had believed that decaying capitalism and the rise of fascism removed the possibility, for reformism and therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses. Yet they could not but become increasingly aware that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism and a renewal of confidence in the “democratic” bourgeoisie permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the “Proletarian Military Policy” which called for military training under, trade union control, implicitly posing the utopian idea that U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the existence of a workers state in the U.S., through “controlling” U.S. imperialism’s army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant went even further, in one speech referring to British imperialism’s armed forces as “our Eighth Army.” The German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the theory that fascism had brought about the need for “an intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic revolution.” (“Three Theses,” 19 October 1941)

The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction. One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the working class to the political appetites of the Gaullist wing of the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing the existing level of reformist consciousness among the workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories during the “liberation” of Paris while the working masses were out on the streets. The February 1944 European Conference document which was the basis for a fusion between two French groupings to form the Parti Communiste Internationaliste characterized the two groups:

“Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the ‘nationalism’ of the masses which is only a reactionary expression of their resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie….”

“the CCI…under the pretext of guarding intact the heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the resistance movement of the masses.”

I. SWP ISOLATIONISM

European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism responded in initially different ways to different tasks and problems following World War II. The precarious internationalism of the American SWP, maintained through intimate collaboration with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and illegalization.

Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination during the war, a resident International Executive Committee had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement, however, appears to have been the convening of an “Emergency Conference” of the International, held 19-26 May 1940 “somewhere in the Western Hemisphere,” “on the initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections.” A rump conference attended by less than half of the sections, the “Emergency Conference” was called for the purpose of dealing with the international ramifications of the Shachtman split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the defection of a majority of the resident IEC. The meeting solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International. The conference also adopted a “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution” written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky’s death, however, the resident IEC lapsed into oblivion.

At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in a neutral country in Europe, staffed by qualified SWPers and emigres from other sections, to centralize and directly supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist-occupied countries. But the SWP was content to limit its international activities during the war to the publication in its internal bulletin’s of letters and factional documents from European Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941 inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international political organizations—a law which to this day has never been tested—also gave the SWP a rationalization for down-playing its international responsibilities.

The SWP’s work during the war did evidence an internationalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportunity of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to clandestinely distribute Trotsky’s “Letter to Russian Workers” in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Murmansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in response to such activities that the GPU was directed to activate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony years afterward revealed that Cannon’s telephone was tapped by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP’s Fourth International magazine, one “Michael Cort,” was one of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of the Fourth International was part of the SWP’s internationalist responsibility, and should have been a priority as urgent as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.

The leadership of the SWP came through the war period essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation.

During the later years of the war and the immediate post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the Communist Party’s policies of social patriotism and class peace.

Optimism and Orthodoxy

SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant optimism about the prospects for proletarian revolution. The 1946 SWP Convention and its resolution, “The Coming American Revolution,” projected the indefinite continuation of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily international character of crises and revolutions is recognized, but not the concomitant international character of the vanguard party. The resolution in effect makes excuses for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism: the decisive battles of the world revolution will be fought in the advanced countries where the means of production are highly developed and the proletariat powerful—above all in the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the American revolution and world capitalism will be overthrown. Profound impressionism led the SWP to see the world through the eyes of American capitalism which had emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent capitalist world power.

The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the emergence of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist workers parties in Europe, the expansion of Stalinism in Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of the Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the destruction of capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and China—all these developments posed new theoretical problems for the Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of talented intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split and shortly thereafter deprived of Trotsky’s guidance, could not handle. The SWP’s immediate response was to retreat into a sterile “orthodoxy” stripped of real theoretical content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.

The 1950’s brought a new wave of spontaneous working-class struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they brought the onset of the Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life; the ‘relentless purge of known “reds” and militants’ from the union movement, severing the SWP’s connection with the working-class movement which had taken years to build up; the dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the SWP during the late 1940’s. The objective pressure to become a mere cheering section for European and colonial developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.

II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE

The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement to revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the European organizations combined with the thorough shattering of their continuity to the earlier period. When Trotsky in 1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth International, the European working class, confronted with the decisive choice of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist leadership. The task facing the Fourth Internationalists was clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of fascism and war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party which would stand for proletarian internationalism in the face of the march toward imperialist war and the social chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the conscious vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing defeat for the class and the “terrible disproportion between the tasks and the means.” (“Fighting Against the Stream,” April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was exemplified by the French section, which was repeatedly criticized by Trotsky and whose petty-bourgeois “workerist” deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a special resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.

The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive struggle against fascism and war—and lost. During the course of the war and the Nazi occupations the very rudiments of international, and even national, coordination were destroyed. The International disintegrated into small groups of militants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist, some heroic. The 65 French and German comrades who were shot by the Gestapo in July 1943 because of their revolutionary defeatist fraternization and the building of a Trotskyist cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement fighting against insurmountable odds.

Trotskyist Cadres Decimated

In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the rudiments of organization in Europe. The European Secretariat set up at this meeting in Belgium included exactly one surviving member of the pre-war leadership and largely as a result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo (Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability as a political leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of the International. When in June 1945 a European Executive Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most promising of the young Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W. Held) had been killed at the hands of the Nazis or the GPU. The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken. This tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the imprisonment and eventual execution of Ta Thu-tau and the Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction of the Chinese Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf Klement and Leon Sedov). The Europeans were apparently so starved for experienced leading cadres that Pierre Frank (leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky denounced as “demoralized centrists” in 1935 and expelled in 1938 for refusing to break with the French social-democracy after the “French Turn”) was enabled to become a leader of the post-war French section.

At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of a truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have made a great difference. But the SWP, which should have assumed leadership in the International throughout the war years, was sunk in its own national preoccupations. Cannon noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately built up Pablo’s authority, even going “so far as to soft-pedal a lot of our differences” (June 1953). The urgent responsibility of the SWP, which whatever its deficiencies was the strongest and most experienced Trotskyist organization, was precisely the opposite.

III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED

The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war was to reorient its cadres and reassess the situation of the vanguard and the class in light of previous projections. The Trotskyists’ expectations of tottering West European capitalist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle throughout Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of Nazi state power left a vacuum, had been confirmed. However the reformists, particularly the Stalinist parties, reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous working-class upsurges. Control of the French working class through the CGT passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had controlled the CGT before the war to the French Stalinists. Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of the European working class and the great waves of general strikes, especially in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy, throughout West Europe, the proletariat did not take power and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and solidity.

The Fourth International responded by falling back on sterile orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these struggles had been defeated for the immediate period:

“Under these conditions partial defeats…temporary periods of retreat…do not demoralize the proletariat…. The repeated demonstration by the bourgeoisie of its inability to restabilize an economy and political regime of the slightest stability offers the workers new opportunities to go over to even higher stages of struggle.

“The swelling of the ranks of the traditional organizations in Europe, above all the Stalinist parties…has reached its peak almost everywhere. The phase of decline is beginning.”

(European Executive Committee, April 1946)

Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the German IKD, the SWP’s Goldman-Morrow faction) were correct in noting the over-optimism of such an analysis and in pointing out that the traditional reformist leaderships of the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal of militancy and struggle. Their “solution,” however, was to argue for a limitation of the Trotskyist program to bourgeois-democratic demands, and such measures as critical support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution. Their advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist parties was dismissed out of hand by the majority, which expected the workers to more or less spontaneously regroup under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared the way for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit position of ignoring the reformists’ influence could no longer be maintained.

The Fourth International’s immediate post-war perspective was summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an article called “The First Phase of the European Revolution” (Fourth International, August 1946). The title already implies the outlook: “the revolution” was implicitly redefined as a metaphysical process enduring continuously and progressing inevitably toward victory, rather than a sharp and necessarily time-limited confrontation over the question of state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire subsequent period.

Stalinophobia

The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared by impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalinophobia. In November 1947 Pablo’s International Secretariat wrote that the Soviet Union had become:

“a workers state degenerated to the point where all progressive manifestations of the remains of the October conquest are more and more neutralized by the disastrous effects of the Stalinist dictatorship.”

“What remains of the conquests of October is more and more losing its historic value as a premise for socialist development.”

“…from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-Stalinist governments, which are completely reactionary, we do not demand the expropriation of the bourgeoisie….”

Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a “state capitalist” regime—a position which Natalia Trotsky shortly embraced.

On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East Europe, the Fourth International was united in simple-minded orthodoxy. An extensive discussion of “The Kremlin in Eastern Europe” (Fourth International, November 1946) by E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist tone and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by the Red Army would be deliberately maintained as capitalist states. A polemic against Shachtman by Germain dated 15 November 1946 was still more categorical: the theory of “a degenerated workers state being installed in a country where there has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution.” is dismissed, simply, as “absurd.” And Germain rhetorically queries, “Does [Shachtman] really think that the Stalinist bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half of our continent?” (Fourth International, February 1947)

The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more cynically, by the “International Committee” in later years over the question of Cuba (perplexed? then deny reality!) with the difference that the class character of East Europe, with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held by the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was far more difficult to understand. Empiricists and renegades, of course, had no difficulty in characterizing the East European states:

“Everyone knows that in the countries where the Stalinists have taken power they have proceeded, at one or another rate of speed, to establish exactly the same economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia. Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is rapidly being expropriated, deprived of all its economic power, and in many cases deprived of mortal existence…. Everyone knows that what remnants of capitalism remain in those countries will not even be remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is to establish a social system identical with that of Stalinist Russia,”

(Max Shachtman, “The Congress of the Fourth International,” October 1948 New International)

Excruciating as this ridicule must have, been for them, however, the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their analysis because they could not construct a theory to explain the East Europe transformation without embracing non-revolutionary conclusions.

German, as was typical for him in those years, at least posed the theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of Trotsky’s dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic and counterrevolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man poised between the victorious Russian proletariat and world imperialism. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism to static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it became necessary to answer Germain’s question in the affirmative, and the way was prepared for Pabloist revisionism to leap into the theoretical void.

Fourth International Flirts with Tito

Virtually without exception the Fourth International was disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty years of Stalinist monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps ill-disposed to scrutinize the anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as “comrades” and “left centrists,” and Yugoslavia as “a workers state established by a proletarian revolution.” In one of several “Open Letters” to Tito, the SWP wrote: “The confidence of the masses in it [“your party”] will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.” The Yugoslav revolution posed a new problem (later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese experiences): unlike East Europe, where the social transformations were accomplished by the army of a foreign degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the intervention of the working class or the direction of a Trotskyist party,succeeded in establishing a (deformed) workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoretical problem by dubbing the revolution “proletarian” and the Titoists “left centrists.” (The SWP avoided the question of China by refusing to unambiguously characterize the Maoist regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late as 1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing China as state capitalist, were published in the SWP’s Fourth International.)

Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content. The impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent expression, was that the ability of non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of social overturn robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence. The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state and a deformed workers state—demarcated in blood in the need for political revolution to open the road to socialist development and the extension of the revolution abroad—had been lost.

IV. PABLOISM CONQUERS

The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth International were easy prey for disorientation and impatience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early 1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself, responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth International.

It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep roots in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and disorientation which were the precondition for the revisionist degeneration of the Fourth International not be simply equated with the consolidation and victory of that revisionism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth International in the immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The SWP and the International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a talisman to ward off non-revolutionary conclusions from world events which they could no longer comprehend. History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolutionary Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate theory: Lenin before April 1917 was theoretically unequipped to project a proletarian revolution in a backward country like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial countries.

In January 1951 Pablo ventured into the realm of theory with a document called “Where Are We Going?” Despite whole paragraphs of confused crackpotism and virtually meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure emerges:

“The relation of forces on the international chess-board is now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.

“An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism, an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanced…. This transformation will probably take an entire period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.

“The objective process is in the final analysis the sole determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective order.

“The Communist Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation.”

Pablo’s elevation of the “objective process” to “the sole determining factor” reducing the subjective factor (the consciousness and organization of the vanguard party) to irrelevance, the discussion of “several centuries” of “transition” (later characterized by Pablo’s opponents as “centuries of deformed workers states”) and the suggestion that revolutionary leadership might be provided by the Stalinist parties rather than the Fourth International—the whole analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism emerged.

In another document, “The Coming War,” Pablo put forward his policy of “entrism sui generis” (entrism of its own kind):

“In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass movement, to work and to remain in the masses’ trade unions for example, ‘ruses’ and ‘capitulations’ are not only acceptable but necessary.”

In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective of short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split the working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis as a tactic for building the Trotskyist party. The new entrist policy flowed directly from Pablo’s analysis. Since the asserted shift in the world relationship of forces in favor of the advance of the revolution would compel the Stalinist parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that the Trotskyists should be a part of such parties pursuing essentially a policy of pressuring the Stalinist apparatus.

All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head of the International Secretariat, the resident political body of the Fourth International! But there is little evidence of even alarm, let alone the formation of the international anti-revisionist faction which was required. One long document by Ernest Germain (“Ten Theses”), and perhaps some subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an attempt at orthodoxy on the question of the “transitional period” but no other literary notice was taken of Pablo’s most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.

Germain Resists

In March 1951 Germain produced “Ten Theses,” which was a veiled attack on “Where Are We Going?” but did not attack Pablo or the document by name. Germain restated the Marxist use of “transitional period” as the period between the victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and the achievement of socialism (the classless society). Without any explicit reference to Pablo’s position, he wrote: “No more than the bourgeoisie will it [Stalinism] survive a war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the revolution.” Germain insisted on thecontradictory Bonapartist character of Stalinism, based on proletarian property forms while safeguarding the privileged position of the bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasized the dual nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by their proletarian base on the one hand and their subservience to the Stalinist bureaucracies in power on the other.

Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to the Pabloist impulse that the destruction of capitalism in Eastern Europe, China and Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist leadership made the Fourth International superfluous. Again, he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one would have thought that the “Ten Theses” simply dropped from the sky as an interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in response to the emergence of a revisionist current completely counterposed to Germain’s thrust. Insisting that a new worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalinism but rather was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:

“It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we ought to be much closer today to the Communist workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental task: to construct new revolutionary parties.…”[our emphasis]

“To be ‘closer to the Stalinist workers’ then signifies at the same time to affirm more than ever our own program and our own Trotskyist policy.”

The “Ten Theses” showed that all wings of the Trotskyist movement were still incapable of grasping the nature of the social transformations which had occurred in Eastern Europe (although the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still considered the process of “structural assimilation” uncompleted (!) and predicted the assimilation of the armies of the East European states into the Soviet army—i.e., that Eastern Europe would simply be incorporated into the Soviet Union. Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern Europe destroyed capitalism but contained within it, even in victory, a decisive bureaucratic obstacle to socialist development; he stressed that the expansion of the USSR’s non-capitalist mode of production “is infinitely less important than the destruction of the living workers’ movement which has preceded it.”

No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to China and, specially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were unable to disassociate the phenomenon of Stalinism from the person of Stalin; the Titoists’ break from the Kremlin obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily pursue qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic policies in safeguarding the interest of its own national bureaucratic regime against the working class. Uneasy about admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses could ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in “Ten Theses” termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events proletarian revolutions and also argued that “under such conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the term.”

Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary model which invalidated “‘pure’ forms and norms” (i.e., the Russian Revolution) Germain—again without referring to Pablo—stressed that they were as a result of exceptional circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to advanced industrial countries. He contrasted “the de facto United Front which today exists between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, which has its objective origin in their being both menaced by imperialism…” with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred in the prediction of an imminent World War III between “the united imperialist front on the one hand and the USSR, the buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on the other” but rather than hailing it, termed it acounterrevolutionary war.

The crux of Germain’s argument was:

“What matters above all in the present period is to give the proletariat an international leadership capable of coordinating its forces and proceeding to the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy, forced to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious proletarian revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!], is socially incapable of accomplishing any such task. Herein lies the historical mission of our movement…. The historical justification for our movement…resides in the incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an incapacity rooted in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.”

With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the past 20 years—the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism reaffirmed most clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban revolution in which petty-bourgeois nationalism at the head of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge with the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the consistently nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese CP in power—it is easy to recognize that “Ten Theses” is flawed in its analysis and predictions. What is much more important, however, is the document’s consistent and deliberate non-factional tone which presaged Germain’s refusal to place himself in the anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced from the determination to fight for a correct line in the Fourth International, Germain’s theoretical defense of the necessity of Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism merely at one remove, the denial of the subjective factor in the revolutionary process.

Third World Congress

The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was held in August-September 1951. The main political report attempted to distinguish between the Communist Parties and “reformist parties” on the grounds that only the former were contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary parties. The opportunist nature of Pablo’s version of an entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the repudiation of the principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split: “The possibilities of important splits in the CPs…are replaced by a leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and file.” There was no recognition of decisive deformations in the East European and Chinese workers states; thus implicitly the Congress posed only a quantitative difference between the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and deformed workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito might “head a regroupment of revolutionary forces independent of capitalism and of the Kremlin…playing a major role in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership.” There was no mention of the perspective of permanent revolution for the colonial countries.

The application of Pablo’s policy of “entrism sui generis” was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:

“The activity of our members in the SP will be governed by the following directives: A. Not to come forward as Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward programmatic and principled questions….”;

No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have any longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.

The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submitted Germain’s “Ten Theses” for a vote (after Germain himself had apparently backed out of doing so) and proposed amendments to the main document. No vote was taken on the “Ten Theses” or the French amendments. The PCI voted against adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the only section to do so.

In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was elaborated along the lines already made clear before and at the Third World Congress:

“We are entering [the Stalinist parties] in order to remain there for a long time banking on the great possibility of seeing these parties, placed under new conditions [“a generally irreversible pre-revolutionary period”], develop centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the radicalization of the masses and of the objective revolutionary processes….”

(Pablo, Report to the 10th Plenum of the International Executive Committee, February 1952)

“Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to ally with the second against the first…. The disintegration of Stalinism within these parties ought not to be understood…as an organizational disintegration…or a public break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal transformation.”

(“The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” International Secretariat, September 1953)

V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS

With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the preliminary conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but in whom the French appear to have placed some degree of confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to the French PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP. Despite a considerable body of mythology to the contrary, both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifested itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromised themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablo’s policies until the suicidal organizational consequences to their sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the responsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every body and every section of the Fourth International and both retreated from the struggle by the foundation of the “International Committee” on the basis of “the principles of orthodox Trotskyism.” The IC from its inception was only a paper international tendency consisting of those groups which had already had splits between pro-Pabloist and orthodox wings.

PCI Fights Pablo

The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership by the International Secretariat (which had installed the Pablo-loyal minority led by Mestre and Frank as the leadership of the French section), continued to claim agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing that Pablo and the IS and IEC were violating its decisions! According to the French, Pabloism “utilizes the confusions and contradictions of the World Congress—where it could not impose itself—in order to assert itself after the World Congress.” (undated “Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert Tendency on the Agreements Concluded at the IEC,” March or April 1952)

An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard on behalf of the PCI majority to Cannon appealed to the SWP. Renard’s letter claimed agreement with the Third World Congress, including its French Commission, and contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress (citing vague platitudes to demonstrate its presumably orthodox thrust) with Pablo’s subsequent actions and line in the IEC and IS. Renard asserted that “Pabloism did not win out at the Third World Congress.” (He wisely did not attempt to explain why his organization voted against the main Congress documents!) The main argument of the letter is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership’s intervention into the French national section.

Cannon’s reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of Stalinophobic opportunism in the union movement (a bloc with progressive anti-communists against the CP) and denied the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.

The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the implications of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against minority theoretician Mestre the majority had written:

“If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic of entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our new tasks: that of a more consistent tendency, not even a left opposition…whose role is to aid Stalinism to overcome its hesitation and to pose under the best conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie…. If Stalinism has changed…[it means that] it no longer reflects the particular interests of a bureaucratic caste whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that it reflects solely…the defense of the workers state. That such a transformation should be produced without the intervention of the Soviet proletariat…but on the contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy itself...would lead us not merely to revise the Transitional Program [but] all the works of Leon Trotsky since 1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International.”

(“First Reflections of Zig Zag,” PCI Internal Bulletin No. 2, February 1952)

But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWP, demonstrated a failure of concrete internationalism when faced with the prospect of all alone carrying through the fight against Pabloism.

On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of two French sections of the Fourth International, thus permitting the PCI majority to carry out its own policies in France. This was in clear violation of the founding statutes of the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the International as a disciplined world body. What was required was an international faction fight over the political line of the Fourth International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to subordinate work in France to the crucial fight for the legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth International. Pablo’s refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the split of the PCI majority.

SWP Enters the Struggle

The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke faction, manifested itself within the American party. In his reply to Renard dated 29 May 1952 Cannon had said:

“We do not see [“any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency”] in the International leadership of the Fourth International nor any sign nor symptom of it. We do not see any revisionism [in the documents]…we consider these documents to be completely Trotskyist…. It is the unanimous opinion of the leading people in the SWP that the authors of these documents have rendered a great service to the movement.”

The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to the Third World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP representative to the International) had burned instead of presenting is quite possibly true but not very significant, in view of Cannon’s declaration of political allegiance to Pablo when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-Pabloist PCI majority.

Against Cochran-Clarke’s advocacy of an orientation toward the CP fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed support to the Pabloist CP entrism tactic in general but insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism, contrasting the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP milieu, lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy third-rate intellectuals.

In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set about forming a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon sought to line up the old party cadre around the question of conciliation to Stalinism and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and Swabeck by drawing an analogy between the need for factional struggle within the party and the struggle within the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told the May 1953 SWP Plenum:

“During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts of the ability of the SWP to survive…. I thought that our 25 year effort…had ended in catastrophic failure, and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick up the pieces and start all over again to build the new cadre of another party on the old foundations.”

(Closing speech, 30 May)

But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the necessary struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen apparatus over the organizationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke line. In return for their support Cannon promised the routinist, conservative Dobbs administration total control of the SWP with no further interference from him (“a new regime in the party”).

The SWP’s response to finding the dispute in the International reflecting itself inside the American section was to deepen its isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism. Cannon’s speech to the SWP majority caucus on 18 May 1953 stated, “We don’t consider ourselves an American branch office of an international business firm that receives orders from the boss” and extolled discussion in which “we work out, if possible [!], a common line.” Cannon denied the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to “a few people in Paris.” He contrasted the Fourth International with Lenin’s Comintern, which had state power and a leadership whose authority was widely recognized, and thus denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be a democratic centralist body.

Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo’s conduct against the French majority, but only over the organizational question in keeping with the proposition that the International leadership should not intervene in the affairs of national sections. He wrote:

“…we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the recent French conflict and split, and at the inconceivable organizational precedent established there. That is why I delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted to help the IS politically, but I didn’t see how I could sanction the organizational steps taken against the majority of an elected leadership. I finally resolved the problem by just ignoring that part of Renard’s letter.”

(“Letter to Tom,” 4 June 1953)

The “Letter to Tom” also reiterated the position that the Third World Congress was not revisionist.

The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI and SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th IEC Plenum took Cannon to task for his concept of the International as a “federative union.” It noted that the SWP had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle and accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China. Seizing on the SWP’s one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen’s defense of an SWP majorityite’s formulation that Stalinism is “counterrevolutionary through and through”—a characterization which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to cloak their liquidation of an independent Trotskyist program with pious reaffirmations of the contradictions of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the property forms established by the October Revolution.

IC Formed

Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously broke publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 the Militant carried “A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World” which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and belatedly solidarized with the “unjustly expelled” PCI majority. The SWP’s previous characterizations of the Third World Congress as “completely Trotskyist” necessitated an attempt in this so-called “Open Letter” to locate the emergence of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed the SWP to present a somewhat unconvincing case leaning heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist French minority from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced “Against Pabloite Revisionism” dated November 1953, which contained a more competent analysis of Pablo’s liquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:

“The conception that a mass Communist Party will take the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the mass…

“The working class is transformed [by Pablo’s theories] into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it which pushes a section of the bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way, the bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of the revolution into an auxiliary motor force of it.”

In 1954 the “International Committee” was formed. It included the French PCI majority, the American SWP (fraternal) and the Healy (Burns) grouping in England. The latter did not play any significant or independent role in the fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war, impelled by the Healy-Lawrence faction’s deep entrist perspective toward the British Labour Party, had been backed by Pablo’s International Secretariat, which recognized two sections in Britain and gave them equal representation on the IEC. Healy was Cannon’s “man” in England and had been consistently supported by the SWP in disputes within the RCP. When the SWP broke from Pablo, the Healy-Lawrence faction split, Healy aligning with the SWP and Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence later went over to Stalinism as did the PCI minority’s Mestre). Despite being part of the new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group continued its arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no weight in the IC bloc until its recruitment of an impressive layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists (most of whom it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made it considerably more substantial in the British left.

The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (émigré) section, which had already undergone a split, and the small Swiss section.

The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins in early 1954 but never met as a real international body, nor was a centralized leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted by the SWP was to boycott the Fourth World Congress, as merely a meeting of Pablo’s faction having no legitimacy as the Fourth International.

The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To cite only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a non-factional position on Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not to split and to attend the Fourth Congress. A hard fight should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive Ceylonese doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard cadre in the struggle. Instead the Ceylonese drifted along with Pablo. Some seven years later, the revolutionary reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of militants throughout the world by the LSSP’s entry into the bourgeois Ceylonese coalition government, precipitating a last-minute split by the international Pabloist leadership. Had a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might have been created then, preventing the association of the name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the LSSP.

Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those groups which had already had their splits over the application of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth International on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.

From Flirtation to Consummation

In 1957 Pablo’s International Secretariat and the SWP flirted with possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe correspondence). The basis at that time was formal orthodoxy—the similarity of line between the IS and SWP in response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively expecting a repetition of Clarke’s 1953 position on the possibility of self-liquidation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, tended to accept the IS’s formally Trotskyist conclusions over Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures came to naught because of the opposition of the British and French IC groups, as well as Cannon’s suspicions that Pablo was maneuvering. The issue was posed in a defective way—simply apparent empirical agreement without an examination of past differences and present motion.

When the question of reunification, consummated in 1963 with the formation of the United Secretariat, came up again, the entire political terrain had shifted. The IS and the SWP found themselves in agreement over Cuba. But the basis was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but the SWP’s abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist revisionism (which the SWP in its class-collaborationist line on the Vietnamese war has now transcended on the path to outright reformism).

The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled “For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement—Statement by the Political Committee of the SWP,” 1 March 1963. The key new line was section 13:

“Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.”

In “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,” 12 June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:

“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism–historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”

Ironically, the SWP’s further rightist evolution leads it to now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other side—the U.Sec.’s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to become the mass party of American reformism.

Spartacist and the Fourth International

In his struggle to found the Fourth International, Trotsky repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary organization on an international basis. Prolonged national isolation within one country must ultimately disorient, deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no matter how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to the fierce pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism generated by the bourgeoisie and its’ ideological agents within the working-class movement. As Trotsky recognized, those who deny the need for a programmatically founded democratic centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the vanguard party itself. The destruction of the Fourth International by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled by organizational fracturing into numerous competing international blocs, necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.

In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced and resisted powerful objective pressures toward abandonment of an internationalist perspective. Cut off from the possibility of disciplined international ties as a result of the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political degeneration of Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the Spartacist League has refused to passively acquiesce to the national isolation forced upon us. We have emphatically rejected the ersatz “internationalism” which achieves its international connections at the price of afederalist non-aggression pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for disciplined international organization. We have sought to develop fraternal ties with groupings in other countries as part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist international tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the embryo of a reborn Fourth International.

The current cracking of the several international “Trotskyist” blocs now provides heightened opportunity for the Spartacist tendency to intervene in the world movement. Our history and program can serve as a guide for currents now in motion towards authentic Trotskyism, because despite involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld our internationalist determination and continued to wage a principled fight against revisionism.

The shattering of the revisionists’ and centrists’ pretensions to international organization—the revelation that the United Secretariat, the International Committee, etc. have been nothing more than federated rotten blocs—combined with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in a context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified deep-seated capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objective opportunity for the crystallization and development of the Spartacist tendency internationally. As the political corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, must be reborn.

FOR THE REBIRTH OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

The “Trotskyism” of the Second International

WAR and the WORKERS LEAGUE

[Reprinted from Workers Vanguard #7, April, 1972. Originally posted online at http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/05/1972-april-war-and-workers-league.html ]  

In the current period of heightened inter-imperialist rivalry, the pressures of war will be reflected in increasing measure in the opportunism of sections of the workers movement which abandon their proclaimed struggle for international revolutionary solidarity of the workers in favor bf support to one section or another of the imperialists struggling for a greater share of plunder. Our task becomes more urgent, therefore, to conduct a relentless exposure of workers’ and radical organizations which now support, openly or backhandedly, bourgeois forces in war.

We analyze here one recent case of egregious betrayal of the working class by an ostensibly revolutionary, even “Trotskyist” organization. That the Workers League, the American section of the “International Committee for the Fourth International” of Tim Wohlforth and Gerry Healy, took its public stand in favor of the military moves of the Indian bourgeois government in the India-Pakistan war, responding to pressure no greater than the current relative popularity of the Indian action, indicates the certainty and depth of their future betrayals in wars of wider proportions and greater consequent pressure to betray to a section of the bourgeoisie. If the unbridled opportunism characteristic of the Worker League/Socialist Labour League combination is not politically expunged from the workers movement in time, revolutionists will write of them in future major wars as Lenin in 1915 characterized the policy of the social chauvinists of the Second International:

“Forty-four years after the Paris Commune, after half a century of the mustering and preparing of mass forces, the revolutionary class of Europe must, at the present moment, when Europe is passing through a catastrophic period, think of how to quickly become the lackey of its national bourgeoisie, how to help it plunder, violate, ruin and conquer other peoples, and how to refrain from launching, on a mass scale, direct revolutionary propaganda and preparation for revolutionary action.”

– Lenin, “Imperialism and Socialism in Italy,” Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 366.

Such was Lenin’s paraphrasing of the Second International’s position. We shall see why his fight for an independent working-class revolutionary policy in bourgeois wars retains burning importance today.

In the article “War, Revolution and Self-Determination” in the January 1972 number of Workers Vanguard, the Spartacist League analyzed the India-Pakistan war and the duty of revolutionists to seek the defeat of both governments and their armies in that war. The SL position flew in the face, as usual, of most of what was being said on the left; its opponents, either directly supported the Indian army (Workers League/ Socialist Labour League) or claimed that behind that army, despite it, with its help or because of it, somehow, was a national liberation struggle instead of its opposite; somehow the invading Indian army with its tanks and planes was being “used” by the Bengali workers and peasants. What remains of the “International Committee” of Tim Wohlforth and Gerry Healy explicitly stated: “We critically support the decision of the Indian bourgeois government to give military and economic aid to Bangla Desh”[Bulletin, 20 December 1971], We distinguished between aid from a bourgeois government and control by that government and noted that the Indian bourgeoisie had obviously taken control of the just Bengali self-determination struggle, and that a “self-determination struggle” under the total military and political control of another nation’s bourgeoisie is something other than it claims to be.

Wohlforth “replied” to our characterization of the IC as “waterboy for the Indian army” in an article “Spartacist Rediscovers Shachtman” in the 17 January 1972 issue of his Bulletin. The title refers to WV’s view that in 1942 the stance of the Workers Party of Max Shachtman on the question of the Chinese “self-determination struggle” was more Leninist than that taken by the Socialist Workers Party led by James P. Cannon.

Spartacist’s “Shachtmanism”

The central thrust of the WL’s “reply” is to smear the SL as “Shachtmanites,” i.e, as anti-Marxist renegades, and thereby cancel out the impact our arguments (on Bangladesh, the WL position on the working-class character of the police, their role in the National Peace Action Coalition [NPAC] as left face of SWP class-collaboration documented inWorkers Action #10, etc.) are having on Wohlforth’s own ranks. He shelves any defense of his indefensible support to the Indian bourgeoisie in favor of slander and label-pasting, hoping thereby to escape the impossible task of answering what we said about his stand. After all, we may be right, but he has the method; and even when correct we are still abstentionist petty-bourgeois empiricist swine.

Wohlforth accuses the SL, together with the SWP, Red Mole, the OCI, etc., of sharing “…the same methodological and class position as the Shachtman group in 1940” [emphasis added], The SWP majority in 1940 characterized the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern grouping as a petty-bourgeois current in flight from the working class and the imperative defense of the Soviet Union, and presumably that is now what the Wohlforthites tell each other the lot of us are.

According to Wohlforth “the direct connection between the present day abstentionists and their Shachtmanite ancestors is Spartacist.” Whatever this may mean metaphysically to Wohlforth, it is the direct reverse of the facts, as anybody outside the Workers League should have the political knowledge to recognize. None of the groups attacked for “abstentionism” (SWP, Red Mole, the OCI, and the SL) trace their political or organizational ancestry to Shachtman’s Workers Party/Independent Socialist League/Young Socialist League; all of them to this day stand formally on the position of the Trotsky-Cannon Majority in the 1939-1940 SWP faction fight; they all maintain formal continuity on the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union and the necessity to defend it against imperialism; all regard the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern break a consequence of petty-bourgeois capitulation to anti-Soviet “democratic” imperialism, All of them How the Pabloists (SWP, Red Mole) and the inverted Pabloists of Healy-Wohlforth’s IC became revisionists had nothing to do with the issues of the 1939-1940 SWP fight, except in the elementary sense of the kinship of all varieties of revisionism and centrism. There is an organization which traces its ancestry to Shachtman – the International Socialists – and they are not mentioned in Wohlforth’s essay on Shachtmanism ! (The IS’ “two wars” position on Bangladesh was criticized in the WV article.)

Wohlforth quotes a section from our above-mentioned article in the January WV (leaving the source unidentified so as to make it tougher to look up) which raised the similarity between the slogan of self-determination for China in the circumstances of World War II and. support for Bengali “self-determination” under conditions of total Indian control of that movement. We referred to Shachtman’s conclusion “that such support was merely backhanded assistance to U.S. imperialism which not only merely assisted, but controlled the Chinese forces,”

Wohlforth’s “answer” avoids the China-India analogy, the question of the U.S. in China in World War II, and the question of Bangladesh independence – which is what our article was about. The section of the article he does quote was aimed not at Wohlforth, but at the more circumspect SWP, whose objective support to India was backhanded. In the section dealing with Wohlforth, titled “Healyite ‘Principles’ Oil the Tanks,” we wrote:

“The SWP ‘merely’ justifies the capitulation of the Bangla Desh leaders to the Indian army; the Healyites openly support the Indian bourgeoisie’s army.”

This characterization was not surmise on our part. We quoted the Bulletin text:

“We [the ‘International Committee’] critically support the decision of the Indian bourgeois government to give military and economic aid to Bangla Desh.”

Since the WV’s view that the IC “has proclaimed itself waterboy for the Indian bourgeoisie’s army,” was based on a literal reading of the very words they wrote in their press, no one should be surprised that Wohlforth does not deal with them. No chance. Why attempt to defend a grotesque betrayal? Wohlforth quotes our reference to Shachtman’s position on China in World War II, and lets fly. WV had said:

“In a polemic with the SWP in 1942 it fell to Max Shachtman’s lot to place the general principle of support to self-determination struggles within a context of Leninist regard for concrete reality. The issue was China. Should socialists support China’s war against Japanese imperialism on the grounds of self-determination for China, or had such support become merely, as Shachtman charged, backhanded assistance to U.S. imperialism which not merely assisted, but controlled the Chinese forces?”

  

He replies:

“Every word of the SL passage is like a textbook example of the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie. First Max Shachtman is abstracted from… Max Shachtman, [Bulletin’s dots]. It just happened to ‘fall’ to Shachtman, who had just committed a criminal split with Trotsky deserting the defense of the Soviet Union under the class pressure of imperialism, to defend Leninist principle! Shachtman himself is broken up into a series of episodes and positions some of which are correct and some incorrect. This in itself represents a complete abandonment of theoretical thought.”

The generous, open-minded reader might be inclined to think that while the argument is admittedly murky and inept, where the Bulletin creates so much smoke there must be fire. The smoke turns out to be but dust as Wohlforth thrashes his straw man.

What Is Shachtmanism?

The character of Shachtmanism and the experience of the Workers Party is indeed fit material for discussion among Marxists. Wohlforth raises it to pose as “defender of Trotsky.” For Wohlforth – in order to lend horror to his label – must assert that the break with the SWP in 1940 over the question of Soviet defensism was an immediate repudiation of all Marxist principles – hereafter the SWP majority would be right on all disputed questions, and the “Shachtmanites” wrong on all of them. To assert anything else would be breaking Shachtman up “into a series of episodes and positions some of which are correct and some incorrect” and a “complete abandonment of theoretical thought.” That this nonsense can be passed off in public without flinching as the embodiment of “Marxist method” is an indictment not of Shachtmanism but the abysmal political miseducation carried on inside the WL. It runs counter to the experience and practice of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; it is a cultist argument attractive to a Stalin-Wohlforth-Catholic mentality but death to Marxists. It effectively denies the Leninist conception of both democratic centralism and the united front; it turns regroupment like that between the Bolsheviks and Trotsky’s Mezhrayontsi in 1917 into capitulation not fusion. It flies in the face of reality in that during the war years there was substantial agreement between the SWP and the WP on the issues they faced, much to the confusion of militant workers and the radical public generally. This led to the two organizations holding unity negotiations in 1946 to consider whether sufficient agreement existed between them to establish a fused party. Further, during the years 1940-46 the Workers Party considered itself, and was considered by European Fourth International sections, as co-thinkers of the Fourth International.

  

Wohlforthian Method: Cultist Cretinism

Wohlforth’s reasoning on what he fancies is “petty bourgeois empiricism” is childish, stupid, and anti-Marxist to the core. On one level, of course we must break Shachtmanism up “into a series of episodes some of which are correct and some incorrect.” Wohlforth claims to be both a Leninist and a Trotskyist. To do so he must either employ the method he labels “empiricism” or simply ignore the intense polemics Lenin and Trotsky waged against each other for years. Obviously in those episodes one or the other, but not both and maybe neither, was correct. Trotsky was won over to Lenin’s conception of the organizational question and Lenin came to accept Trotsky’s stand on the Permanent Revolution and the tasks of the proletariat in the democratic revolution. No intelligent study of the years before the October Revolution can fail to show that Lenin was wrong as against Trotsky on an aspect of their task, and vice versa. We do not claim that either Max Shachtman or J. P. Cannon were ever Marxists of the stature of Lenin or Trotsky. But only a political imbecile, a cultist pseudo-Marxist can ignore the fact that generally healthy Marxist organizations and leaders have been wrong, or took inadequate positions on particular issues for periods of time; and that even groups standing generally to their right occasionally took superior positions on particular issues at a given time. Wohlforth’s denunciations of the SL for noting that Shachtman espoused what we consider a correct position on the Chinese issue shortly after his “criminal split with Trotsky” only shows his dread of critical analysis. What Wohlforth calls “the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie” – i.e. careful investigation into all the issues in a political dispute such as that between the SWP and WP-Lenin considered essential in politics, and remarked that anyone who did not study the issues for himself “can be dismissed with a simple gesture of the hand.”

Was it not Stalin who argued that to separate Trotsky’s critique of bureaucratic degeneration in a workers state afterthe revolution from Trotsky’s centrist-Menshevik position on organizational questions before the revolution constituted an abandonment of Marxism-that Trotsky, wrong earlier on the one question, had to be wrong on the other? Or conversely, was it not Stalin again who argued that to separate Lenin of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” from Lenin the builder of the democratic centralist Bolshevik party constituted the grossest heresy? In point of fact, it “just happened to fall” to Lenin to first abstract Lenin from… Lenin, to refute his “old self” in the April Theses. He had been an “Old Guard” within the Party and the main proponent of a now outmoded theory. Lenin’s new position approximated Trotsky’s correct theory that the dictatorship of the proletariat (in alliance with the peasantry) could be established in Russia without a prior European socialist revolution or a period of workers and peasants democratic dictatorship.

Has Wohlforth utterly forgotten that Trotskyism itself became a system only as a theoretical response to Stalin’s progressive abandonment of the hard conclusions of the October Revolution, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s shedding of his earlier, “episodic” position on the party on the other?

Stalin, like Wohlforth, began with the proposition: The masters of Marxism are infallible and the renegades are wholly bankrupt. The cult Stalin built around Lenin was only preparatory to the one-he built around himself. Stalin accomplished this not solely through the building of statues and the recitation of incantations, but through a theory of the direct coincidence of truth with a single individual’s thought until that individual and not his positions become the ultimate authority. The application of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development to the realm of cognition provides a useful antidote to this Stalinist-Wohlforthite theory.

There is another aspect of Wohlforthian methodology we need to take up for a moment. Wohlforth’s celestial dialectic refuses to descend to the worldly plane. When we acknowledged Shachtman’s role on the Chinese question of 1942, we did so on the basis of his placing “the general principle of support to self-determination struggles within a context of Leninist regard for concrete reality” against Wright of the SWP. It is not because we consider China of 1942 exactly analogous to Bangladesh in 1972 but rather because Shachtman’s methodology was consistently Leninist in those articles.

When we consider the concrete, if you please, criteria of support to Chiang over which Wright and Shachtman argued, it resolves to whether military aid and strategic military subordination through imperialist control of the general staff (General Stillwell’s command) was a sufficient basis to decisively transform Chiang’s anti-Japanese struggle into an appendage of U.S. imperialism. Shachtman thought so; Wright did not.

What Wohlforth has overlooked is that both Shachtman and Wright, the WP and the SWP, agreed that a U.S. army invasion would make the question moot and of course subordination to imperialist arms would be unmistakable.

The physical presence of the Indian army backing up the military command of General Aurora places Wohlforth against Shachtman, Lenin and the SWP! If there were a Dantean Inferno to which Wohlforth were consigned, it would consist of him endlessly fleeing all the figures, revolutionary and centrist alike, who were after this political bandit’s hide.

Shortly after the WP’s repudiation of Soviet defensism and its split from the SWP, James Burnham split with the WP majority to find his place in ultra-right politics thereby lessening the internal pressure for a consistent anti-Marxist generalization. Shachtman and Abern continued to consider themselves Trotskyists until after the end of World War II, and in a few cases – and the question of support to Chiang Kai-Shek’s China during the Pacific War was one of them – the Workers Party was correct as against the SWP. Anyone who reads it will discover that Shachtman’s argument was essentially an “orthodox” gloss on Lenin’s position on Serbia and Poland during World War I, applying the criteria Lenin developed to the new imperialist war.

That the SWP could be wrong on an issue should hardly surprise Wohlforth. In his own pamphlet “The Struggle for Marxism in the United States,” Wohlforth characterizes the period of World War II as one in which “American Radicalism Reasserts Itself,” arguing that the SWP was then slipping into narrow “orthodoxy,” able to “reassert” past positions but not creatively apply Marxist principles to new situations – a polite way of saying that their positions were wrong or inadequate on a number of things. Is it then Wohlforth’s position that no one could be right on those questions?

In the long run, under the enormous pressure of U.S. imperialism, the Shachtmanites, left to their own devices, had to find themselves in the camp of that same imperialism. That happened, but not according to the Workers League’s latest timetable – it took seventeen years from the split in 1940 before the reconciliation of the WP with American social democracy took place. It is not inconceivable that the whole process of the WP’s disintegration could have been reversed had reunification with the SWP taken place before the full pressure of the cold war atmosphere bore down on both organizations. Certainly between the years 1940-46 the WP was no literary exponent of world imperialism, as one would infer from the Bulletin, but rather a left centrist party whose members seriously desired a communist revolution. The disintegration and decay of the WP must be analyzed in the same way as the demise of the revolutionary SWP, as a process by which the SWP moved to a severe deformation as a revolutionary party by 1953, when the principle of internationalism was undercut, to rightward moving centrism as the SWP totally embraced Fidel Castro in 1961, to 1965, when they joined hands as reformists with the liberal imperialists in the anti-war popular front.

To leave the question here would merely invite more WL sneers about “evolutionary method.” The “Shachtmanite” slander is too valuable for Wohlforth to give up voluntarily; it is a time-worn anathema which has allowed him and the SWP to evade answering our charges of betrayal to their ranks. But it is easily exploded.

Wohlforth vs. Wohlforth – Again

In 1962 the forerunners of the Spartacist League and the present Wohlforth grouping were members of an oppositional minority tendency in the SWP. At the behest of Gerry Healy of the English SLL Wohlforth sought control of the tendency, and failing to win a majority, consummated an unprincipled split within its ranks. We have published the documents of this rupture in Marxist Bulletin #3: The Split in the Revolutionary Tendency. The first document in the collection is a letter from James Robertson to Geoffrey White, written a month before the break was carried out, detailing the machinations of Wohlforth in preparing the split. It reads:

“Tim Wohlforth gives every evidence of ardently desiring the Robertson-Ireland wing of the tendency out of the Minority and out of the party, and the sooner the better – as witness his concluding remarks at the last NYC tendency meeting: ‘Robertson’s covertly for a split within a few months. If Jim goes, good riddance!’ And of course there is the ‘break all ties, deepen the breach’ tone and language of his document. Cannon wrote more mildly of Shachtman in 1940, though Tim obviously believes he and I are the exact reincarnations of those two then. So driven is he to create a panic mood of hate to consummate a split of the tendency that to add to the compound picture of a petty bourgeois grouping of the upper West Side’s middle-class 103 St. fleeing the proletarian factory quarters at101 St. that poor old Tim snarls and foams at any decent comrade daring to call the Shachtmanites of 1941 -46 a left-centrist grouping. To cite Tim Wohlforth against Tim Wohlforth, however:

‘We can now get an accurate picture of the political development of the Shachtman tendency. It was born in 1940 as a petty bourgeois opposition with in the Trotskyist movement. It went through a “second split” with the mass exodus of those who rode the opposition bloc out of the movement altogether. It then launched a party and attempted to compete with the SWP to be the Trotskyist party in this country. It contained at this time divergent tendencies which pushed it in different directions. It had within it tendencies which wished a reconciliation with the SWP by building a united Trotskyist party. It had other tendencies which forced it to the right-to a definitive break with Trotskyism in 1946. We can characterize the WP of this period as a left centrist grouping of unstable composition which couldn’t quite decide exactly where it was going. Then following the 1946 WP-SWP unity affair and with the opening of the cold-war witch hunt, it began to move to the right at an accelerated pace, transforming itself from a competing tendency within the Trotskyist movement into a centrist “third camp” tendency which felt itself antagonistic to Trotskyism as well as to reformism. It stayed only for a relatively short time in this centrist limbo as it soon struck out in an open reformist direction, seeking today to become theloyal left wing of the social democracy.’ ” (page 22, What Makes Shachtman Run?, Tim Wohlforth, August, 1957.) 

In 1964 Wohlforth stated the following on the SWP which he now holds up against Shachtman as absolutely right on the China issue:

” … The theoretical sterility of the SWP goes much farther back than that [1940] having its roots in Cannon’s empirical bloc with Trotsky covering the whole period from 1928 to 1940. Cannon and the SWP’s leading cadres never attempted to master the Marxist method. It was Trotsky’s job to develop theory and Cannon’s job to build an organization around his theories. This division of labor broke down with the Shachtman fight in 1940 when a good half of the party was lost to petty bourgeois revisionism and the rest saved largely by Trotsky supplanting the SWP leadership in-the struggle.”

-Tim Wohlforth, letter to Robertson, 12 August 1964 in ACFI “Information Bulletin No. 1” (undated) referring to the SL-ACFI unity negotiations. [our emphasis]

Thus Wohlforth in 1964 considered the American Trotskyists from the time of their founding to be totally lacking in revolutionary capacity and nothing more than organizational hacks in a bloc with Trotsky. The implicit conclusion, of course, is that Wohlforth is this country’s first Marxist! But more important than Wohlforth’s pathetic self-glorification is the logic of his argument, for given his characterization of the SWP surely it is axiomatic that without Trotsky the SWP, if it took any correct positions at all, must have arrived at them by dumb luck or sterile reflexive orthodoxy!

Wohlforth’s twisting of history for petty factional gain is the same now as in 1962. The purpose, like the method, is analogous. A number of leaders of the SWP oppositional grouping which became the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in 1961 had come aver to Trotskyism from Shachtman’s dissolving ISL/YSL, among them Mage, Robertson and Wohlforth. The SWP leadership carried out a slander barrage against all these leaders, who had broken from Shachtmanism, as “unreconstructed Shachtmanites.” The individuals who were to go on to found the SL insisted on a serious evaluation of degeneration and decay of the Shachtmanite organizations, as they were to do with the partly parallel breakdown of the SWP. Wohlforth was then looking for an opening to make common cause with the Dobbs leadership to smash the Robertson-Mage-White grouping. The fraudulent issue of “Shachtmanism” arose, and Wohlforth jumped at the chance to use it, despite the fact that he was one of the central targets of the SWP’s slander! As then, so now: to get the SL, he establishes another bloc with the SWP, reaching across ten years in time, to underwrite his contention that the SWP was right to expel these people, since all the time they were only concealed Shachtmanites! Now as then he continues to offer aid and credence to the SWP Pabloists as their loyal opposition, asking only one thing – get the Spartacist League!

Parenthetically, one can trace a political origin to many of the present and past SL cadres and leaders that is different from that typical of the WL-SWP: namely origins in the CPUSA! Thus Geoff White was a state chairman of the CP and Smith Act indictee; Ed L., a long-time CP trade union cadre; Jim Robertson, a CP youth activist; and then Harry Turner, buried for years in a CP underground cell. These were later joined by Dave Cunningham of the Iowa CP and Marv Treiger from the Los Angeles CP. All these comrades were led to Trotskyism out of the clash between their subjective revolutionary impulses and the realities of Stalinism, i.e. a recapitulation of the road of the original Left Opposition itself.

In 1957 when Wohlforth was struggling to be a Marxist and not a political bandit he characterized rather well the pressures and dynamics which made the WP “a left centrist grouping of unstable composition which couldn’t quite decide where it was going” in the period before its definitive break with Trotskyism in 1946. According to Wohlforth today, his own analysis in 1957 can only be breaking Shachtman up “into a series of episodes, some of which are correct and some incorrect,” which is “a textbook example of the reactionary empirical method of the petty bourgeoisie.” Wohlforth says that in such an approach “Max Shachtman is abstracted from… Max Shachtman”; we can only observe that the above counterpositioning indicates that, by Wohlforth methodology, Wohlforth is dissolved into… Wohlforth. Hegel observed about the reflective nature of philosophy that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”; Wohlforth’s owl flies deaf, drunk and night-blind.

Now, nearly ten years after the split in the RT, Wohlforth brings up the same charges, in the same manner, for an even baser purpose. This time Wohlforth uses the “Shachtmanism” slander to cover his bloc with a section of the Indian bourgeoisie and the Indian army, a bloc which the logic of Marxism and class struggle dictates can only be ultimately directed against the workers and peasants of India and Bangladesh and the revolutionary movement.

Those Little Dots

Wohlforth begins his piece with a quote from Trotsky:

“Throughout all the vacillations and convulsions of the opposition, contradictory though they may be, two general features run like a guiding thread from the pinnacles of theory down to the most trifling political episodes. The first general feature is the absence of a unified conception…. History becomes transformed into a series of improvisations. We have here in the full sense of the term the disintegration of Marxism, the disintegration of theoretical thought, the disintegration of politics into its constituent elements. Empiricism and its foster brother, impressionism, dominate from top to bottom…. Throughout the vacillations and convulsions of the opposition, there is a second general feature intimately bound up with the first, namely, a tendency to refrain from active participation, a tendency to self elimination, to abstentionism, naturally under cover of ultra-radical phrases…. Hot on the trail of ‘concrete’ political tasks in words, the opposition actually places itself outside the historical process.”

One wouldn’t know it from the Bulletin text, but the quote from Trotsky which Wohlforth has adduced against the SL is taken from Trotsky’s “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” included in In Defense of Marxism. More than the source is omitted. By omitting Trotsky’s reference to what positions he was criticizing, Wohlforth’s quote amounts to no better than a forgery of Trotsky’s words. What politics of Burnham’s is Trotsky characterizing? Omitted from Wohlforth’s selection are Trotsky’s references to “Hitler and Stalin in Poland; Stalin and Mannerheim in Finland.” Trotsky is referring to Burnham’s refusal to defend the Soviet state and his hostile attitude toward the dialectic and to the question of the class difference between that state and its bourgeois-imperialist enemies. That is the first point: it was not for refusing military support to a bourgeois state (in any kind of war) that Trotsky and the SWP majority denounced the Burnham-Shachtman-Abern minority. It was for their responsiveness to bourgeois public opinion running against such support to the Soviet Union. See any difference there, Cde. Wohlforth? Or is that hair-splitting over “concrete reality” again?

Wohlforth: Revolutionary Defeatism Equals Abstentionism

Next point: Wohlforth hopes that a smokescreen of quotations from Trotsky written against positions entirely different from the SL’s will convince the reader that a position, clearly stated, against both of two warring bourgeois armies is abstentionism! A really abstentionist organization would have evaded an analysis of the war, or claimed simply that wars are tragic events for the workers. The SL took the position of revolutionary defeatism against both Indian and Pakistani bourgeois governments and their armies. That Wohlforth calls abstentionism. He gets involved, he takes sides – no abstentionist he, no indeed! – he pitched right into the fray on the side of one of the bourgeois robbers! The policy of revolutionary defeatism in a bourgeois war meant something rather different, for Trotsky, than standing “outside the historical process.” Wohlforth doesn’t say so of course, but he has condemned Lenin’s entire policy during World War I as “abstentionist,” and “empiricist” besides, since Lenin was manifestly concerned with “concrete conditions.” Wohlforth’s “anti-abstentionism” is that of the betraying Second International which also took sides – lots of them – bourgeois sides.

Wohlforth: Britain Equals Pakistan

Third point: in case any one of his readers is quick to notice the class distinction between the Soviet state – which was what the 1939-40 debate was about – and the bourgeois Indian state, Wohlforth immediately dishes up another non-sequitur to cloud the issue doubly. At least in this instance his quote does refer to India. Thus the following from Trotsky, again offered without source:

“India is participating in the imperialist war on the side of Great Britain. Does this mean that our attitude toward India – not the Indian Bolsheviks but INDIA – is the same as toward Great Britain? If there exists in this world, in addition to Shachtman and Burnham, only two imperialist camps, then where, permit me to ask, shall we put India? A Marxist will say that despite India’s being an integral part of the British Empire and India’s participating in the imperialist war; despite the perfidious policy of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, our attitude toward India is altogether different from our attitude toward England. We defend India against England.”

That is a good statement of the SL position: it too defends India against England, against the U. S., and the rest. Now where, Cde. Wohlforth, did Trotsky defend an Indian war against Pakistan, or before that state’s existence,against Afghanistan, Burma, Iran or China? You raise the question of wars and the colonial world. Name one instance in Tim Wohlforth which Lenin or Trotsky urged or supported a war by any colony, client state, or imperialist-dominated backward nation against another. By Bolivia against Peru? By Iran against Turkey? Does Wohlforth presume to bend reality (or his despised “concrete conditions”) to fit Trotsky’s position on a fundamentally different issue so far as to assert that Pakistan is imperialist like the U. S. or Britain while India is Pakistan’s colony in rebellion? A war between Britain and India is of course a different matter for Marxists than a war between Britain and Germany, But a war between one tin-pot semi-colonial bourgeoisie and another such bourgeoisie is not different in this respectfrom a war between two great imperialist powers. Neither India nor Pakistan is a colony of the other. To the assertion that East Bengal had a semi-colonial relationship to West Pakistan, against which the Indian army made war, a Marxist would have to reply that Tanganyika was a colony of Hohenzollern Germany; Britain warred against Germany in World War I – did Lenin support Britain against Germany? Or advise the Tanganyikans to invite British control to aid the war against Germany? He supported the right of the Irish to accept German arms – that did not amount to German control of the republican movement. (Because of “concrete reality,” again, Wohlforth.) But Lenin certainly did not urge the Kaiser to send armies to Ireland, which would have meant trading the British yoke for the German, and one cannot conceive of a statement from him, “We Bolsheviks critically support the decision of the Hohenzollern government to send arms to the Irish rebels.” He did not support no matter how critically the unsupportable motives of the German government; he supported the independent and entirely different motives of the Irish rebels, who were so situated that the German “help” was not occupation or control – their struggle remained independent.

In fact Trotsky’s quote above comes down on the opposite side of Wohlforth’s position. Does Trotsky favor the assistance from the subject Indian nation to Britain in its war? He condemns the Indian nationalist leaders for that policy – and he would have condemned the Bengali nationalists’ support to the adventure of conquest by the Indian bourgeoisie.

Fourth point: in the “Conclusions” section of Trotsky’s “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” from which Wohlforth tore a quote, stands a paragraph his supporters would do well to ponder. Wohlforth lumps the SL with Shachtman in alleged disregard for principle, for theory, for veering about according to petty-bourgeois impressionism. Trotsky said:

“The politics of a party has a class character. Without a class analysis of the state, the parties and ideological tendencies, it is impossible to arrive at a correct political orientation. The party must condemn as vulgar opportunism the attempt to determine policies in relation to the USSR from incident to incident and independently of the class nature of the Soviet state.”

The WL owes an explanation of why it is necessary to proceed from the class nature of the Soviet state in determining our attitude toward its military moves, yet we stand condemned as reactionary empiricists when we proceed from the class nature of the Indian state!

Wohlforth as Merlin

The obscurantist, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t character of the “dialectic” developed by Stalin and Mao and adopted by Healy and Wohlforth could not possibly be illustrated more clearly than by the following syllogism, all parts of which are taken directly from his “Spartacist Rediscovers Shachtman.” 1) The IC openly offered “critical support” to the military move of the Indian bourgeois government. 2) The SL urged revolutionary defeatism on both asides. 3) The SL policy is abstentionism, i.e., the SL not take a stand. 4)”Not taking a stand means standing with the bourgeoisie.” 5) Therefore the SL stood with the bourgeoisie.

And so support of the bourgeoisie becomes support of the working class; the call to workers to practice revolutionary defeatism becomes support of the bourgeoisie. Even Kautsky, who had to mislead a more sophisticated audience, never sank to an argument so stupid and patently illogical.

All the lies, all the twisted logic and the distortion of Trotskyist history, theory and tradition, all the slanders about “Shachtmanism” peddled to his supporters, will not be enough to wash the bloody disgrace from Wohlforth’s and Healy’s hands. They deliberately turned a section of the workers movement, raw uneducated would-be communists, into recruiting agents for a bourgeois army. The degenerated Second and Third Internationals sold out for far higher stakes; Healy/Wohlforth’s betrayal will not win them janitors’ jobs, much less cabinet posts.

DRAFT THESES ON PABLOISM, INVERTED PABLOISM, AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

by the Communist Working Collective

[First printed in Marxist Bulletin #10, “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the Development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angelos”]

Pabloism

1. Following World War II, the International Trotskyist movement was thrown into a profound theoretical, political, and organizational crisis. Large numbers of Trotskyist cadre were physically destroyed through the joint efforts of the imperialists and Stalinists. World capitalism underwent a relative stabilization due chiefly to Stalinist and Social-Democratic betrayals of the revolutionary working class upsurge following the cessation of fighting. In addition, Stalinist and petit-bourgeois leaderships were successful in overthrowing capitalism and establishing deformed workers states in Eastern Europe and China. All these factors posed very sharply to the Trotskyist movement the problem of building independent proletarian vanguard parties.

2. The Pabloite revisionist trend emerged as an attempt to make the Trotskyist movement more “effective” by accommodating it to the existing “left” movements in the world. The role of Trotskyists was essentially confined to that of pressure groups upon these formations, integrating themselves into whichever forces seemed to have the most potential and hoping that these groupings, under the influence of the objective march of events and prodding by the Trotskyists, would be forced to adopt a revolutionary orientation. For this reason, Pabloism can be called aliquidationist tendency. Thus, during the 1950’s Michel Pablo and his International Secretariat pursued such policies as liquidation (“deep” entrism) into the’ social-democratic and centrist parties of Western Europe, the national bourgeois and petit-bourgeois formations in the colonial countries, and the ruling Stalinist CP’s of Eastern Europe.

3. Fundamental to the Pabloite world perspective is the theory, borrowed from Stalinism, that the world balance of forces has shifted in favor of socialism, resulting in a “new world reality” in which the tide of revolution is irreversible. For this reason, Pabloism can also be characterized as empiricist. This conception has gone through several variations. Around 1950, Pablo forecasted a Third World War, launched by imperialism to regain the upper hand, which would lead to the final downfall of capitalism and Stalinism. In 1953, the International Secretariat claimed that the isolation of the USSR had ended, eliminating one of the fundamental conditions for the bureaucracy’s existence and leading to the imminent demise of Stalinism. More recently, the Pabloites have declared that the colonial world is the main center of revolution in the world, that the anti-imperialist struggles there are uninterrupted and irresistible, and that therefore the working class can come to power there with a “blunted instrunent” instead of a Leninist proletarian party. Thus the problem of overcoming the crisis of proletarian leadership, the central problem of the world socialist revolution, is avoided, or else left to be resolved by the “objective process” going on in this “new world reality.”

4. Although the Socialist Workers Party had broken with the Pabloites in 1953, by the early 1960’s it became clear that the SWP was moving increasingly toward the revisionist methodology it had once opposed. This regressive trend most openly manifested itself in the SWP majority line on the Cuban revolution: support to Castro’s governmental bureaucracy in the hope that Castroism would be transformed into Trotskyism. On the organizational level, the SWP’s abandonment of a revolutionary proletarian line became definitive with the “Reunification Congress” of 1963, in which “minor” political differences were overlooked in order that the SWP could carry out an unprincipled reunification with the International (USec). In fact, the main political resolution passed at this Congress included all the basic theses upon which Pabloism was based: the change in the world balance of forces, the centrality of the colonial revolution, and the end of the USSR’s isolation.

5. Since the 1963 Congress, it has become obvious that, although Pablo has been discredited, Pabloism the method dominates the entire USec. The European sections have carried the “colonial epicenter” theory to its conclusion and have called for armed struggle based on rural guerilla warfare and entrism into the Castroite organizations of Latin America. At the same time, the SWP has moved sharply to the right, becoming little more than a support group for black nationalism, petit-bourgeois feminism, bourgeois liberal pacifism and the Cuban bureaucracy. (This is true although now the SWP claims that the Cuban revolution has degenerated — implying it was once undeformed.) The main work of the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), is building anti-war demonstrations based on single-issue politics — a plainly reformist and Popular Front approach. Thus all tendencies within USec, from the ultraleftist adventurism of the European parties to the reformism of the U.S. section, adopt the liquidationist and empiricist Pabloite method.

Inverted Pabloism

6. Another international tendency which adapts to the methodology of Pabloism, despite proclamations of representing the only anti-Pabloite international trend, is the International Committee of the Fourth International (lCFl), principally led by the British Socialist Labour League (SLL). The SLL, in its analysis of Cuba, uses the same objectivist premises of Pabloism and in so doing fails to grasp the critical difference between the establishment of a state, led by a Bolshevik-Leninist party, where organs of power are democratically administered by the working class (soviets) and the formation of a workers state which from its very inception is ruled by a Bonapartist bureaucracy. With this method they cannot adopt a correct attitude toward Stalinist and petit-bourgeois leaderships. They are forced, in order to maintain a firm “stand” against the Pabloites’ capitulation to these leaderships, to categorically deny the possibility that, under certain conditions (the most important being timely material support from the Stalinist camp), these leaderships can in fact establish deformed workers states. This position leads them to conclude that Cuba is not a deformed workers state but some form of “statism” (despite the fact that the Castroite leadership of Cuba has expropriated the bourgeoisie, set up monopoly of foreign trade, and established the rudiments of a planned economy. From this it is clear that the methodological approach of the SLL and its followers can be characterized as inverted Pabloism

7. This reaction of the SLL and its co-thinkers to Pabloism ultimately serves to reinforce the Pabloite current, for it cannot effectively deal with Pabloite accommodationis in a theoretical way. In essence both trends equate the deformed workers state with the road to socialism. Pabloism does this explicitly, by its support of Castroism and its one-time veiled support of the Chinese bureaucracy. The inverted Pabloites begin with the same premise, and are forced therefore to deny the fact of a social transformation in order to avoid giving this type of support. A correct Trotskyist appraisal of strategy and tactics toward these bureaucracies must start with the understanding that they are an:obstacle to building socialism, thereby ruling out any possibility of support, however critical, to these leaderships, and removing the basis of the ICFI’s Pablophobia.

The Fourth International

8. With the development of capitalism into imperialism the basic tendency of capitalism to weld all areas of the world regardless of their level of development into a common economic system which dominates and subordinates to itself each of its parts is greatly reinforced. The hegemony of imperialism over world economy tends not only to level out the various stages of development of one area as compared with another, one country as compared with another, but simultaneously increases the differences between them and sets one up against the other — thus greatly aggravating the contradiction betwleen the further development of the world productive forces and the national-state boundaries. This dynamic of imperialism inevitably leads to wars for the conquest and redistribution of markets and to the wholesale destruction of the productive forces on which human culture is based. The continued existence of imperialism thus threatens to plunge mankind into barbarism. It is on this basis, “on the insolvency of the national state, which has turned into a brake upon the development of the productive forces” (Trotsky), that the internationalism of communism ultimately rests.

9. The proletariat is the oniy class capable of destroying international capitalism and constructing a communist society which would forever eliminate all war, exploitation, and social inequality, thereby creating the conditions for the limitless development of human civilization. However, without the leadership of a communist party the: proletariat cannot come to power and establish a genuine workers state in a single country. Further, the international proletarian revolution can only triumph if it is led by a revolutionary communist international, i. e., a world party of the proletariat. This has been completely verified by the experience of the October revolution and by the subsequent defeats the international proletariat suffered at the time when all the necessary conditions for successful world revolution were present except for a revolutionary international which could lead the insurrection. Finally, to attempt to construct a revolutionary party separate from, outside of, or opposed to the struggle to build an international can only mean capitulation to national narrow-mindedness which is inseparably linked with reformism. Thus any communist organization which does not take the fight for the construction of a cornniunist international as its strategic starting point must inevitably degenerate.

10. The Fourth International which was founded by Trotsky in opposition to the degeneration of the stalinist Third International no longer exists. The advent of Pabloism has destroyed the Fourth International to the extent that revolutionary Trotskyism finds its programmatic continuity only in small disunited groupings scattered throughout the world and which for obvious reasons cannot lead significant sections of the working class in struggle. Consequently, the main international focus of revolutionary Trotskyism must be directed toward the conducting of programmatic discussions with these organizations in order to achieve the theoretical clarity necessary for an early regroupment which would result in an international revolutionary tendency which would thus become a pole of attraction around which future and more complete communist regroupment could take place. Only by using this·method is it possible to start the rebuilding of the Fourth International along the lines of the 1938 Transitional Program. .

11. To lay the basis for the complete reconstruction of the Fourth International, it is necessary to decisively defeat Pabloism through ideological confrontation in all arenas of the class struggle. Such a victory over revisionism would carry Marxist theory forward and thus provide the necessary foundation on which genuine international unity based on democratic centralism could be built. As for now, however, it is important to stress that the battle against Pabloismhas not yet been won.

12. Although an international revolutionary ·tendency has not yet been fully crystallized, the process of revolutionary· communist regroupment can and must be started. Sufficient clarity on the basic questions posed by Pabloism has to a large degree been reached thus opening up the possibilities for principled fusion of national and international organizations. It is to this task, to the rebuilding of the Fourth International through a process of revolutionary communist  regroupment, that the· Communist Working Collective is dedicated.

19 August, 1971

Proposal for Workers Vanguard

The following piece of fusion correspondence between the Communist Working Collective and the Spartacist League was reprinted in Marxist Bulletin #10 “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the Development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angelos”]

 

May 14, 1971

 

Dear comrades Jim and Helene,

 

We were very enthused over our discussions of last week. It is clear to us that the Spartacist League is approaching a new period in its existence. This new period is a reflection of the ferment within the proletariat which in turn is a result of the growing political and economic crisis faced by imperialism. We were particularly encouraged by the decision to publish a national newspaper. Such a newspaper is critical if we are to accomplish our tasks of collective organizing and collective propagandizing. We believe that this step will significantly transform the Spartacist League into a force within the working class and will therefore greatly contribute to the formation of a vanguard party within the U.S. and to the rebirth of the 4th International.

 

We have long upheld the view that the role of a central organ is an indispensable component of the Leninist theory of party building. Naturally we consider this a generally valid proposition which must be assessed anew in the concrete circumstances of present-day party building. Prior to your visit we suspended judgement with regard to the tactical advisability of the Spartacist League launching such an organ at the present time.  We were not sure whether there were sufficient forces, whether finances could be met (a not  unimportant consideration), etc. We were sure it was necessary; our discussion with you convinced us it was both possible and timely.

 

We believe the discussion held in L.A. around the paper was a poor one. We feel many of the key issues were clouded over and that we must take up the. question again upon your return trip. Permit me to elaborate.

 

The conception you put forward of a central organ dangerously veers toward a half-way house between a genuineparty organ and an arena paper. What leads us to this conclusion? During the discussion we suggested that the Bulletin provided a model from the standpoint of form and organizational origins. You countered that the Lambertist paper. (Trade Union oriented I believe) provided a better model and that you wouldn’t even want to be in an organization that only put out a paper as is the tendency of the Workers League. Perhaps our example was a poor one and we should have suggested Iskra as a model for then we could have zeroed in on the key issue: Will the paper reflect more truly than before the party’s line in an arena, or, will the paper be a central party organ reflecting all phases of the party’s work? We completely agree that the Workers League tends to narrowly stand outside the class struggle with its “paper,” but that is first and foremost a problem of their line and not that they have a national organ. The approach taken by the Lambertists appears to us as an incorrect one, one that minimizes the significance of therelative weight given to the independent standpoint of the party.

 

The dilemma is concentrated most acutely in the decision to retain the name Workers Action. Unfortunately I stressed aesthetic objections to the title and format and therefore clouded over what was most germane. The real argument for changing the name is to make crystal clear the NEW CHARACTER OF THE NEW ORGAN in such a way that there can be no question of confusion with the old, arena organ. When we place the question in this way, we will be able to avoid tendencies (which are bound to arise) to transform the new organ into one that is partially an arena organ for labor and partially a central organ for the party. It is not enough to say it will be a party organ; we must take steps to ensure it. In this way we will also be able to face clearly and directly the absence of an arena organ for labor while there are such organs for women and youth. We must uphold the idea that we do not need a new “transitional. organ” of a hybrid type, but a party organ which fights for the full transitional program and educates the class around the socialist goal.

 

Last night the CWC voted unanimously to propose to the Spartacist League that the new paper in order to distinguish itself from arenaism and break a fresh path abandon the name Workers Action.

 

We should mention in passing that the continuation of Spartacist as a theoretical journal, or its merger with the new paper into a single organ are both viable alternatives within the framework of this plan. It may also, for legal and/or diplomatic purposes, prove advisable to state “sponsored or endorsed by SL” or some such thing, but this will not affect the questions of substance. Furthermore, it should be stated that these brief remarks hardly exhaust our thinking on the subject and we are prepared if necessary to write a more lengthy paper justifying our position. It is not in our nature to suggest these steps without considering our responsibilities with regard to them. Assuming that all goes well in connection with our joint discussions, our comrades are fully prepared to assist such a paper (and whatever other work is necessary) in every possible way.

 

We have also discussed and have proposals regarding steps toward an early fusion, perhaps September 1, as a realistic date. We should include this topic on our agenda of next week. Let us know when you will arrive.

 

We hope we are beating a dead horse… but then the L.A. discussion did seem inconclusive.

 

On behalf of the CWC [Communist Working Collective]

with comradely greetings,

Marv [Treiger]

 

P.S. You may show this to whomever you please

THE STRIKEBREAKERS GO ON STRIKE…

POLICE MILITANCY vs. LABOR

[First printed in Workers’ Action #8, April-May 1971.]

On the night shift of January 14, New York City patrolmen left their beats to begin a a six day work stoppage; the first such action by the police in the history of the city, The action, unauthorized by the leadership of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), was precipitated by a court ruling effectively barring payment of $2700 in retroactive pay claimed by the PBA as part of a parity arrangement based on a 3 to 3.5 pay ratio of patrolmen to police offcers. During the course of the action PoIice Commissioner Murphy backed up by Mayor Lindsay threatened to call in National Guard to maintain “law and order.” Following their return to work, a subsequent ruling in favor of the PBA claim resulted in a total $3,300  payment in retrocative salaries, bringing base pay of cops up to a whopping $12,150 per year.

The police action has resurrected some serious questions for trade union militants and, significantly, has smoked out some extremly dangerous attitudes within the trade union movement and even among a couple of ostensibly revolutionary organizations regarding the relationship of labor militants to the police action and police in general. What was the real nature of the New York police action? What are “militant policemen”? Are police a part of the working class? How do we define class divisions in society? What are the main features of a capitalist state? Should labor have supported the police action? Is the Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) a “union”? The answers to these questions have assumed critical importance because of the recent intensification of struggles by public employees at all levels. In this situation an incorrect understanding of the police and their social role can have immediate disastrous consequences for the trade union movement. It also calls seriously into question the credibility of any political organization claiming to support workers’ struggles that could be so wrong on such a basic question, one going to the very heart of the life and death struggle between Labor and Capital. In order to understand more clearly the reactionary and anti-labor nature of the recent police action, we should examine two partly parallel developments; the attempts by the Lindsay Administration to seek out a confrontation with the municipal unions in the current collective bargaining and a bit of recent history of the dangerous politicalization of the cops in New York City, and elsewhere.

CITY ANTI-LABOR OFFENSIVE

Lindsay, like a number of other big city mayors, has gone over to the offensive in order to resolve the city’s financial crisis by increasing the tax burden and cutting the living conditions of the working’ people of New York. A major element of this offensive has been a virtual declaration of war on city employees and their unions with threats of pay cuts, payless paydays, “furloughs,” and layoffs, since wages are the single biggest item on the City’s budget. These threats became a reality in November when 500 “provisional” city employees were laid off, the first such layoffs in 35 years since Mayor LaGuardia fired thousands of city workers during the depression of the ‘Thirties, After a series of empty threats and much blustering by Victor Gotbaum, Executive Director of District Council 37 (DC 37) which supposedly reprseneted the workers concerned, no action was taken and the handwriting was on the wall for all City  employees. Around the same time as bargaining began with the firemen, sanitation workers, sodal services workers and others, the City declared that there would be no increase in basic wages, except for minimal cost-of-living increases, Most recently, the layoff of 10,000 substitute and 7, 000 regular teachers was narrowly averted, when the City Comptroller “borrowed” $35 million from next year’s budget,

ECONOMIC CRISIS

Behind all this is more than the usual bargaining period dramatics. A deep economic and social crisis, consisting of increasing widespread unemployment and general economic recession plus the war-based inflation, is affecting the country as a whole and local governments in particular. What this boils down to for New York City is a sharp reduction in revenues from income tax, sales tax, stock transfer tax, etc. As transportation, housing and other living conditions worsen thousands of middle class people and hundreds of businesses are leaving the city, further reducing the tax base. Compounding this are increased costs as thousands of low income workers are driven to welfare because of high unemployment and slashes in Medicaid eligibility, while hundreds of thousands more have their last wage increases eaten up by inflation and increased cost of living, When Lindsay threatened to “cut off” welfare payments to thousands of families, this was a direct attack on poor working people,

Lindsay’s solution to this is simple: cut the wages and jobs of City employees, increase prodoctivty, and tax the hell out of everyone else. But in order to accomplish this, Lindsay must either defeat the unionized city employees or at least neutralize the unions’ responses by persuading the sellout leaders of the unions covering some 360,000 City employees to “cooperate for the common good,” which means joining forces to keep the rank and file under control. But if the carrot (for the labor fakers) doesn’t work the stick is ready too, in the form of a recently enlarged and high-paid police force, as well as troops to be used as announced in “contingency plans” in case of big strikes by city labor. Hanging over the heads of all city workers is the vicious Taylor Law which prohibits strikes by public employees with penalties of unlimited fines and loss of dues checkoff as well as double loss of pay for every day on strike for individual workers,

BUREAUCRATS’ BETRAYAL

The union bureaucrats, instead of organizing a general strike against the Taylor Law, hide behind it to counsel moderation. In a recent issue of DC 37’s Public Employee Press (Jan, 29, 1971), Victor Gotbaum complained that the worst feature of the Taylor Law is that it doesn’t really stop strikes and therefore puts sellout leaders like himself on the spot with “dissident members” when bureaucrats opposed such strikes, causing them to be called “coward” and “chicken. ” But his alternative, however, along with Albert Shanker of the UFT and Theodore Kheel, is a local version of the Taft-Harley Law, which while nominally permitting public employee strikes, would provide for a mandatory 60-day “cooling off’ period, as well as binding arbitration for grievances. In fact these same provisions are contained in a bill now before Congress, HR 17383, drafted by DC 37’s parent organization, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and endorsed by its president Jerry Wurf, which is intended to cover all state and public employees if passed!

It is obvious that despite the attempts at betrayal and compromise by fakers like Gotbaum, there can be no compromIse for the thousands of city workers who face these proposed cuts. The City also knows this and has already launched the attack. In the battles that are certain to follow not only does the question of militant leadership assume critical importance, but also the question of who are allies and who are enemies – which brings us back to the question of the police.

STRIKE WAVE INTENSIFIES

It has been a long time in this country since we have seen large scale clashes between organized labor and capital such as the strike wave that has been building force over the last four years. During the 1950’s, following the strike waves after World War II, whole layers of rank and file leaders and militants were purged from the unions along with the “reds,” in the name of patriotism and anti-communism and as a result there was a sharp break in the continuity of tradition and class consciousness in the working class movement. Under these conditions, and during long periods with very little strike activity the real social role of the police sometimes becomes obscured. Add to this, temporary antagonisms between various strata of the population – white vs. black, workers vs. students, one ethnic group against another or any combination of these – and you have a fairly widespread (and often racist) attitude among many woerkers that the police are their “friends,” A couple of violent strikes tends to sort this out, but in the meantime many workers are content to see the cops get the other “real troublemakers.” For instance, the unity between patriotic New York construction workers and the police against “long-haired” anti-war students witnessed last spring will come to an end when the same construction workers go on strike to protect their wages from Nixon’s attack and their “friends” the police come along to beat their heads and break their strike. But the present pro-police attitudes are also reflected in the opportunist positions of many trade union bureaucrats, especially those in municipal employee unions. Outstanding among these are Victor Gotbaum of New York’s DC 37 and Jerry Wurf of AFSCME.

In the issue of Public Employee Press referred to above, Gotbaum referred to the PBA as a “union,” the police action as a “strike” and a “police labor-management crisis,” as well as congratulating Ed(!) Kiernan as a felllow bureaucrat who “kept cool” in the face of “dissident members.” Much worse than this, however, was an outrageous editorial by Jerry Wurf in the Jan.-Feb. 1971 issue of AFSCME’s Public Employee entitled “Policemen as Public Employees.” It would be bad enough if Wurf had only lumped cops in with other public employees, but he actually tries to evoke sympathy for the “oppressed” police, sheds a tear for them: “Boiling underneath the surface was a deepseated, long-held anger about working conditions, anger about what the patrolmen see as a lack of public appreciation for the role they play and the work they do, anger about a society that has burdened the policeman with responsibilities he has neither the tools nor the experience to handle.” Wurf weeps on, “It is even more reflective of the reasons police in America carry a burning anger that the following kind of situation was repeated…” He then goes on to describe an account of six New York cops being attacked by 40 persons when they attempted to make an arrest. Wurf’s analysis of recent police “militancy” is that it reflects “the frustration of today’s under-30 youth who comprise about 40% of the patrol force in New York City.” The editorial then quotes one of these misunderstood youths, “Being a policeman has nothing to do with it. I’m a working man.” What Wurf’s editorial doesn’t mention is that AFSCME presently has some 10,000 cops, including the guard s at Tennessee State Penitentiary, as members, whose substantial dues undoubtedly are no small factor in his sympathetic attitude. We wonder if it will be some of Wurf’s cops that will enforce the 60-day cooling off period called for in his bill? By any standards of labor tradition this man should be denounced as a class traitor and expelled from his lucrative post.

NOT ONLY UNION BUREAUCRATS

This catering to and reinforcing of the present backward class consciousness of sections of organized workers is not confined to cynical, dues collecting union bureaucrats, however. Two “socialist” organizations who are supposed to understand the role of the police in the present social system have recently carried accounts of the New York police action in their papers that agree with Jerry Wurf and the young cop quoted above that “police are workers too.” The Communist party has long been isolated in the trade union movement for its treacherous support of “progressive” bureaucrats like Reuther and Woodcock against the rank and file, its bootlicking support to liberal capitalist politicians, and its groveling apologies for a bureaucratic, Stalinist perversion of socialism. With these dubious credentials it editorializes in the Jan. 16 issue of the Daily World for a “fighting unity of the working class” to defend the police right to strike for “justified wage demands” as municipal workers. Another article in the same issue stated that “New Yorkers (were left with about one-fourth the regular police protection as thousands of cops today began a wildcat job action.” In New York, being “protected” by the police usually means a beating and subsequent charge of assault. Nonetheless they felt obliged to offer a few criticisms which makes their support even more grotesque, referring to the cops’ “racist currents” and “brutality,” their “beating up of strikers, support of “hardhat” beatings of students, and “John Birch cells in the Police Department,” as a few bad features that prevent the police from “winning allies among the people.” Their answer to it all is “community control” of the police, which used to include demands for more black cops until the Red Squad fuIfilled their demand and sent black cop-informers into the Black Panthers. You can’t “control” the police. The ruling class and the state the police work for has to be dismantled. But more of that later.

THE “WORKERS” LEAGUE

The other organization that thinks the cops are workers is a small allegedly revolutionary group called the Workers’ League that fortunately has no influence in the trade unions (except for supporting’ “lesser-evil” candidates for union office) and very few workers. Nevertheless, their position on the police strike is so incredible it affords us the opportunity to argue some important points.

Their paper, the Bulletin, generally consists of labor articles from the N. Y. Times re-written by their “labor correspondents.” This fake workers’ paper is apparently printed by non-union labor at scab wages, since a union bug is conspicuously absent. Their history on the police question actually pre-dates the recent police action by about eighteen months. At that time a spokesman for “the “Committee for New Leadership” (CNL), a small group in the welfare workers’ Local 371 in New York which is supported in the pages of the Bulletin, attempted to get that union to support the demands of the welfare police for “peace officer” status on the grounds that it was a “labor issue.” The welfare cops, however, had been trying for several years to be allowed to wear guns like the rest of the police. Peace Officer status, while bringing higher pay, would also authorize them to wear guns, which is what they were primarily after. The then president Morgenstern argued against the motion on the grounds that the only people the welfare cops could shoot would be social service staff and welfare recipients and the motion was defeated. The Workers League has now resurrected this position in two articles in the Jan. 25 and Feb. 15 issues of the Bulletin. The first article is entitled, “New York Labor Begins Showdown” and is accompanied by a picture of marching cops described in the caption as “militant policemen.” The general gist of the article is that the action by the police had “triggered a whole fight on the part of the city labor movement” creating a situation “which can only be described as on the verge of civil war.” This presumably refers to the threatened use of National Guards to replace the police if their action continued. (This actually happened in the 1863 draft riots when New York police refused to stop rioting pro-Confederate, pro-slavery Irish immigrants from burning down black orphanages in protest to being drafted in the Union army. The entire police force was fired and replaced by Federal troops. That was another action “by “militant” police.) The article describes a meeting where “rank and file patrolmen, raising the clenched fist salute, shouted ‘Kill Kiernan…” A veteran cop is quoted as referring to them as “nothing but hoodlums.” We agree, and would observe that the Nazis also copied their salute from the German communists. Since the cops were carrying their guns and do often kill people, including each other, this was not a hollow threat, although frankly, we would not grieve the loss of Patrolman Kiernan. This “defiance of their leadership symbolizes a change which is occurring in the labor movement as well” the author claims. The article concludes with a call for a general strike to support the police action: “When the patrolmen went out DeLury (sanitationmen), Maye (firemen) and Gotbaum refused to call out their ranks.” Clearly this article, the first enthusiastic response of the WL to the police action, characterizes the police as abandoning their role as the repressive armed force of the capitalist state, ready to take on the National Guard in pursuit of their alleged working class interests, dragging the rest of city labor behind them. What else does the author mean by “Lindsay and the entire capitalist cIass must very well be asking themselves what they face if those they pay to break strikes are themselves striking, if those who advocate and defend ‘law and order’ now defy it .. ” .

ERSATZ REVOLUTIONARIES

The second article, called, incredibly, “In Defense of the Working Class,” is intended as an authoritative statement of position, written by the General Secretary of the Workers League, Timothy Wohlforth. While more cautious in tone it more systematically lays bare the theoretical bankruptcy of this group of ersatz “revolutionaries.” The key section of Wohlforth’s hypothesis draws a parallel with the general strikes of 1919 where the Boston police also went on “strike”’ and is worth quoting: “The significance of all this is the importance of placing the recent New York police strike within the framework of the general movement of the working class and at the same time seeking to understand what underlies this movement of the class. When the repressive arm of the ruling class itself goes on strike, this is not an isolated phenomenon, but a reflection of a very general, deep and profound movement of the working class.” (our emphasis). A key premise to this conclusion is the same as that stated by our youthful cop and Jerry Wurf above, that cops are workers too: “Are we to see only the side of the police as the repressive arm of the state but at the same time not understand that the police are also employees of that state?” and, “when this repressive arm goes on strike it immediately does express the deepest crisis in capitalism and when the question of bringing another repressive arm of the state to smash the police comes up, then the question of civil war is in the air. ” Later he compares the police “strike” to “the growng insurrectionary situation in the Army”. We are being asked to believe nothing less than what we are witnessing now is the beginning of a civil war between the working class and the capitalists rapidly escalating to a classic situation of dual power, where the workers are ready to challenge the government for state power, but with thepolice being cast in the role of a conscript army, insurrecting and coming over (“for the moment, ” says the author) as the vanguard to the side of the working class! This is such a misreading of the current situation and ignoring of the historical experience of the workers’ movement, it is grotesque! Major metropolitan police have never played such a role. In a general strike or a revolutionary situation the police are always the first to clear out because they know what bastards they are.

ANTI-LABOR ACTION

The truth is just the opposite of the conclusions of the Workers League, the Communist Party, Jerry Wurf and Victor Gotbaum. The police work stoppage was fundamentally an anti-labor action. It was a political strike by a police force that has become dangerously conscious of its social role as the armed defenders of the social system of big business and the “law and order” that protects and maintains the power and privilege of this ruling class. It reflects the general motion of the woring class only in a negative sense, for the motion of the police is the symmetrical, polar opposite of that in the working class and in fact more resembles the recent re-emergence of fascist organizations attacking striking workers in France and Italy, or vigilante bands of police terrorists in Guatemala and other Latin American countries that have been assassinating labor leaders and members of revolutionary workers groups. The New York police are sick and tired of “having one arm tied behind their back” in dealing with militant blacks and Puerto Ricans, anti-war activists, trade union militants, and Lindsay himseif, whom they regard as some kind of “communist.” In short, they and their “employers” are anticipating and preparing for a counter attack against organized labor. The Bulletin article unwittingly admits this very phenomenon when it casually notes, “It should be pointed out that the strike wave of 1919 was shortly followed by a severe witchhunt… ” There are indeed lessons to be learned from 1919 and other turbulent periods of the working class movement, but not the lessons drawn for us by the Workers League. They had better go back to their textbooks on the labor movement, because they have missed the whole point. The police are our enemies, and they are dangerous.

THE PBA’S PAST

The New York cops began to organize in 1963 when the PBA went over from being a paper organization to the “bargaining agent” for all city cops with parallel organizations among transit cops and others. The PBA is not a union – it is basically a right-wing paramilitary political organization with a number of reported overlaps in the John Birch Society and Minutemen-type organizations, with an annual income of $10 million a year from dues and pension contributions. In the last years of the Wagner administration the cops were given an “open season” on Blacks and Puerto Ricans. The phony “Blood Brothers” panic, the 1964 Harlem police riots, the series of “accidental” killings by the cops in 1964-65 (paralleling the current rash of “suicides'” in City jails) were all a part of this. During this period the cops acquired a new consciousness as the City’s armed enforcers of racism – and they liked it! When Lindsay became mayor in 1966 and broke up the old police hierarchy, known as the “Irish mafia,” that controlled the Police Department and later attempted to set up a token Civilian Review Board to play “soft cop” the police organized politically, joining forces with the Conservative Party, the John Birch Society and an assortment of racist and right-wing groups anddefeated that timid proposal. Was that picket line of 10,000 armed, off-duty police around City Hall chanting “Lindsay is a commie” and “No Civilian Review Board” a “militant action” also? The same John J. Cassese that was a key figure in organizing the New York PBA (until he left under the cloud of an alleged embezzling scandal in 1969) Is now attempting to form a national organization of police called the Brotherhood of Police Officers (BPO), a move we regard as extremely dangerous, posing the spectre of a centrally directed political organization. Is that a “union” that these champions of police “militancy” would have the trade unions support when it tries a national strike to protest the refusal of the AFL-CIO to charter it? (The BPO’s first attempt at such a charter was recently scuttled by Jerry Wurf who regarded it simply as an attempted “raid” on AFSCME’s cop members.

EVEN GEORGE MEANY…

Are cops then workers and a part of the labor movement? Even George Meany said “no” to that some years back when the New York PBA first applied for AFL-CIO recognition. Since then he’s moved so far right he sees eye to eye with the cops on most questions. But he has a lot of company these days, and some pretty strange bedfellows at that. Well, how do we figure out who are workers and who aren’t? In a class society like ours the main social divisions are based upon the difference in the relationship of persons to the process of production. The way in which people enter into economic relations with each other for the purpose of production decide the social relations between them, that is, decides which class each person belongs to and the ensuing class relations. This division gives us one class, the capitalists, composed of those who own all the means of production and exchange – factories, mines, mills, railroads, banks – and a class of workers composed of those who own only their mental and physical abiity to work, and who must sell that ability to the capitalists by the hour or week in order to live. This includes public employees who sell their labor power to local, state, or federal governments as postal workers, motormen, clerks, sanitation workers, teachers, welfare workers, etc. There are also a variety of middle classes – small merchants and farmers, professional people, etc. – but the main decisive classes in society are workers and capitalists. Despite Wurf’s and the Workers League’s protests that the police are workers simply because they are salaried employees, ignoring entirely their very special social function, it is obvious that based on the above criteria, cops, as professional strikebreakers, fall entirely outsidethe social relations of the process of production, regardless of their social origins, and so are neither workers, nor part of the working class. While most policemen are generally of working class social origins, they are specifically hired and trained to function as class traitors, and bear a greater resemblance to a mercenary army, de-classed socially and economically. This was easier to see in the company towns of the late 19th century where the police were often hired by the coal mine or factory owners. As late as the early 1940’s, old Henry Ford had his own goon squad to keep the workers in line and breakup unionizing attempts. The mere fact that these scum were paid for their dirty work obviously didn’t make them “workers,” in any scientific class sense of the word. The same goes for Pinkertons, FBI agents, labor spies, informers, etc.

ROLE OF THE POLICE

The police, then, are special bodies of armed men. separated entirely from the rest of the population. These police, and also the Army and National Guard, etc., backed up by a system of prisons, are the backbone, the very essence, of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain through force or threat of force the rule of that class in order to economically exploit the working class. In every important and decisive conflict, the cops are the instrument of that state apparatus and stand on the side of private property and big business, backed up by pro-capitalist laws, judges, courts, and prisons.

In no sense are these bodies of armed men “neutral” in the class struggle, although great efforts are made to convince people that they are. It isn’t often that one sees the class character of the state power of big business operating in its naked form. Where the government is an outright capitalist dictatorship, which ruthlessly suppresses all trade unions and workers political organizations, wiping out representative government and all democratic rights and institutions, as was the case in Nazi Germany, the class character of the system is easily recognizable and unmistakable. But this causes a great deal of trouble for the capitalists and they only resort to naked military rule when the working people are no longer fooled by the sugar coating of law and order” and “peaceful, legal. means” and decide to struggle to run their own society in their own name, directly threatening therefore the social rule of big business. Every strike has all the elements of this life and death struggle with the company having the pickets arrested, hauled into court by the police, charged by the judge with violating some right of private property, and sent off to prison for daring to challenge the rule of the company.

This is why the question of the role of the police, as raised by the New York police action, is of such fundamental importance. It goes to the very heart of the struggle of the working class and does not allow for any mistakes. Labor bureaucrats understand this and constantly strive to obscure the real nature of the system, since it is their job to keep the workers under control. But for us there’s only one conclusion to draw from this issue: the cops are our enemies, and they are dangerous!

The Wohlforthite Ultimatum

[The following exchange between the Communist Working Collective and ther Workers League’s Tim Wohlforth was reprinted by the Spartacist League in Marxist Bulletin #10 “From Maoism to Trotskyism: Documents on the development of the Communist Working Collective of Los Angeles.”]

April 21, 1971

Dear Comrade Wohlforth,

I have enclosed two copies of a letter to a Maoist on the crisis in Maoist strategy and an elaboration of some of Trotsky’s basic ideas. We have made the letter available to the L.A. Branch of the Workers League. We should be interested in your comments and reactions to the letter as well as any ideas you might have for making use of it.

Our group (Communist Working Collective) has definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and, following the 24th, we intend to begin an investigation into the 4th International in a more developed way.

I am also enclosing some copies of a proposal for joint action which we drew up and submitted to a number of local groups. The Liberation Union, a semi-Trotskyist group with no fundamental disagreements with the SWP, begged off a joint meeting for “lack of time”. The Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March agreed to a joint meeting but declined joint action in favor of marching in an “anti-imperialist contingent”.

We have also participated in a number of interventions with the Workers League and we are presently preparing a leaflet of our own for the 24th. We believe the combination of joint theoretical discussions as well as joint practical activities is the best way to determine where we have unity.

Looking forward to an early reply.

With communist greetings,

Marvin Treiger

********

B U L LET I N

weekly organ of the workers league

Sixth Floor, 135 West 14 Street, New York, New York 10011

April 27, 1971

Dear Comrade Treiger,

We have received your letter together with your statement on Trotskyism and Stalinism and your leaflet on April 24th. The statement is a good summary of some of the differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism historically.

However there is no discussion of the Fourth International. Your cover letter states: “Our group (Communist Working Collective) has definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and, following the 24th, we intend to begin an investigation into the 4th International in a more developed way.”

We are completely opposed to the methodological and theoretical position which such a stand reflects. It is not possible to separate out “Stalinism” and “Trotskyism” from the actual development of the Third International and the Fourth International. To do so is to go over to the idealist outlook of Deutscher who abstracts Trotsky the “hero” and his, “ideas” out of and opposed to Trotsky’s actual struggle to construct the Fourth International.

In this respect I urge that you and your group look over Trotsky’s “writings” recently republished by the SWP.

Next both the statement on “Trotskyism” and the leaflet reflect a removal from the strategic expression of Trotskyism, that is Marxism, in this period of international crisis. If, as you state in your leaflet, the ruling class is preparing for civil war, then we, too, must prepare through a battle to construct the Fourth International in the United States around a strategic approach. This is why it is completely wrong of you to call for a demonstration on April 24th which does not mention either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.

Finally we understand that in addition to holding joint discussions and joint actions with the Workers League you are holding at least discussions with Spartacist. This organization is completely hostile to the Fourth International and bears no relationship whatsoever, to Trotskyism.

You cannot have joint discussions or joint actions with us while you at the same time maintain relations of any sort with Spartacist. Wle are sure that a study of the historical development of Trotskyism will make this quite clear to you.

Finally we wish to make clear in any event we are not interested in any kind of “regroupment” or joint actions on the basis of some minimal agreement on so-called “class” issues. You say the Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March declined having joint action with you and we assume also us on April 24th.

In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists. Maoism today means bodies of revolutionaries lining the streets of Dacca and floating down the rivers of Ceylon. We do not understand how you can say you have “consolidated around Trotskyism” while at the same time you seek joint actions with the supporters of the butchers of the Bengalis and even with the Liberation Union which you characterize as “semi-Trotskyist” and then say it has “no fundamental disagreements with the SWP.” Could it be in your confusion you hold that the SWP is “semi–Trotskyist”?

We urge you to take up a serious study of Trotskyism and the development of the Fourth International and make a break with such riff-raff as the above mentioned groups. Then we will be more than happy to hold discussions with you and organize common actions based on the firm principled party grounds of Trotskyism as the continuator of the Leninist Bolshevik heritage.

Make up your mind. You cannot have it both ways.

Yours fraternally,

Tim Wohlforth

for the Political Committee

Workers League

***********

May 18, 1971

Dear Comrade Wohlforth,

We are writing you in reply to the letter we recently received and which, we assume, was discussed by the Political Committee (PC) of the Workers League (WL). We were taken aback by the approach you and the PC took towards our organization. There was hardly a single point you made with which we agreed or felt was historically accurate.

Take for example your evaluation of Comrade Treiger’s methodological approach in his cover letter and in what we will refer to as a “Letter to a Maoist”. Your position that since there was no discussion of the Fourth International in Treiger’s main letter and since, at least in our opinion, we have ” …definitely consolidated around Trotskyism and … intend to begin investigation into the Fourth International in a more developed way”, we ” …separate out ‘Stalinism’ and ‘Trotskyism’ from the actual development of the Third International and the Fourth International”, and therefore “…go over to the idealist outlook of Deutscher who abstracts Trotsky the ‘hero’ and his ‘ideas’ out of and opposed to Trotsky’s actual struggle to construct the Fourth International”. From this, we gather, you implied our methodolological approach will lead us to oppose the Fourth International. Nothing could be more wrong! What your position shows is that you completely misunderstand the nature of Treiger’s “Letter to a Maoist”. Let us explain. True, there was no formal discussion of the Fourth International in “Letter to a Maoist”, whose main purpose was to confront a Maoist organization in San Francisco with the basic truths of Marxism which were distorted for so long by the Stalinists. However, to draw the conclusion you did means to completely miss the spirit if not the letter of Treiger’s document. The entire document is a restatement of the Marxist position of proletarian internationalism, analyzes the bankruptcy of the Maoist international “strategy” and poses the question of why the CCP has never attempted to build a new International to all Maoist organizations. It further shows that the failure of the Chinese to develop a new International is an excellent exposure of their departure from internationalism. This stand of ours can only mean that we see an international party of the working class as absolutely indispensible, without which there can be no proletarian revolution. Moreover, “Letter to a Maoist” in stating: “The ideas embodies in the Transitional Program [which was developed during the first four congresses of the Third International–G.R.] find their historic continuation in the 1934 program of the Fourth International”, clearly indicates that we saw the program of the Fourth International as the theoretical continuation of Leninism. We purposely avoided the question of the Fourth International as it stands today because of our insufficient research at that time. The statement “…we intend to begin an investigation into the Fourth International in a more developed way” only means that there is still much ground to cover before we are soundly familiar with Trotskyist strategy and tactics and with the state of the present International. Nothing else can be read into this position.

Concerning the action on April 24th. We were dismayed by your attempting to avoid the question of our differences on the nature of the rally by implying that we called for our own demonstration, what else could this statement of yours mean? “This is why it is completely wrong for you to call for a demonstration on April 24th which does not mention either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.” And once again. “You say the Maoist October League and the Maoist Long March declined having joint action with you and we assume also us on April 24th.” [my iitalics–G. R.] At no time did we call for a demonstration independent of the WL demonstration. If so, where was this rally of ours? where did it take place? The Bulletin report of the San Francisco events by Jeff Sebastian stated the following “…the Workers League and supporters broke from the march, and… proceeded to the park where an independent meeting “Was held and addressed by Workers League spokesmen and by representatives of the Communist Workers [sic] Collective in Los Angeles.” The Bulletin completeley contradicted this fantastic notion of yours. Our position “las calling for “All out support of the Workers League call for a United Front rally of the working class against the war.” The error we made was that we misunderstood the nature of the WL’ s proposed action. This was mainly due to our misreading of the April 5th B’ulletin editorial. Instead of realizing that it was supposed to be a rally of the WL and its supporters, we thought (also because of the loose usage of “joint action” on the part of some comrades of the WL) that it was intended as a call for a united front working class action against the war. On this point we were totally wrong. However, this does not mean you can simply pass over our differences on the form the rally should take by falsely implying we called our own rally. That just will not do!

With regard to our not mentioning “…either the labor party or the fight for the general strike.” We didn’t have a consolidated collective position at that time (nor, incidentally, do we now) on these specific demands of the Transitional Program. The reason for this is we have not yet evaluated the history of the labor party demand in light of the present US conditions. Thus we don’t know whether it is correct to call for a labor party in opposition to aworkers party or vice versa. Same is true for the general strike call. Under what conditions, circumstances, etc., does one call for a general strike? This is why we didn’t take a position on these demands. However, in no way did our abstention on these questions prevent, us from supporting the rally at which these slogans were raised.

We further object to your position that we cannot have joint discussions or joint actions with the WL while maintaining relations of any sort with Spartacist. Our group is now in the process of thoroughly investigating the present anti-Pabloite Trotskyist organizations and are not about to conclude that Spartacist “…is completely hostile to the Fourth International and bears no relationship whatsoever to Trotskyism” just on your word. We may conclude your analysis of their organization is correct, however we feel, this conclusion must be made on the basis of our own independent investigation. Nevertheless Spartacist has shown a healthy attitude towards encouraging and aiding our investigation (which is more than we can say about your approach). That is why we will continue holding discussions with them. For these reasons we sincerely hope the PC of the WL reconsiders its present organizational position towards our group. If however, the PC decides to keep its present policy, we will still continue to investigate the WL in spite of any roadblock you may throw up in our way.

Further. We oppose the sectarian position you expressed toward the Maoists and other working class tendencies. “In any event we will not have joint actions with Maoists. Maoism today means bodies of revolutionaries lining the streets of Dacca and floating down the rivers of Ceylon. We do not understand how you can say you have ‘consolidated around Trotskyism’ while at the same time you seek joint actions with the supporters of the butchers of the Bengalis and even with the Liberation Union…”. First of all you make a methodological error in seeing these organizations as finished party formations rather than groupings going through tremendous change. The October League and the Long March are based in Los Angeles and have between fifteen to twenty members each. The “semi-Trotskyist” Liberation Union is also a strictly local organization made up of Maoists and “Trotskyists” and has no more than thirty to forty members. Because of the crisis of world capitalism and the capitulation of the Chinese Stalinists to imperialism, many of these groups (as we did) are in fact looking to Trotskyism to lead them out of the Stalinist swamp. Your position would objectively hinder this development. Secondly, refusing to hold joint actions with Maoists on the basis that they support the foreign policy of the Chinese government is absolutely ludicrous. The Stalinists, Pabloites, Social-Democrats, and trade unionists all currently support either the existing Stalinist states or some kind of reactionary capitalist government. Furthermore, all of them have at one time or another either objectively or subjectively supported the annihilation of revolutionary struggles and are thus responsible for the deaths of thousands of revolutionaries. However, does this mean that you categorically refuse to engage in joint actions with any of these types of organizations? We feel the logic of your position must lead to either a sectarian liquidation of the united front reminiscent of Third Period Stalinism or to a series of opportunist zig-zags–now condemning joint action, now pragmatically entering into it.

From your position on our relations with Spartacist and from your approach to joint action with other working class tendencies, we can make the following evaluation of what seems to be your tactical approach. The WL has no intention of engaging in action with any tendency that does not objectively recognize it as the leading Leninist party.How else can your approach toward our organization be explained? What purpose could your “proposal” at the end of the letter possibly serve than to make us immediately acknowledge the leading role of the WL in the U.S. revolution? What other explanation can there be for your bombastic declaration in the April 5th Bulletin editorial “…either McGovern-Hartke or the Workers League…”? Here is a manifestation in practice of the sectarian danger of which we spoke. There is nothing wrong in principle in calling your own rally. But when you do so vaguely speaking of joint action, not building a united front and then counterposing your organization and your few supporters to everyone else, then we can only conclude that this represents nothing but an extreme example of “left-wing” childishness. Such an approach if persisted in can only hinder the development of the WL into a mass Bolshevik-Leninist party.

Finally, we must make it absolutely clear to you that we will not capitulate to your pressure tactics. In no way will we be forced into a position of holding discussions with only the WL on your “principled party grounds” For us to take such a step would mean that we concluded that the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WL were the continuators of Trotskyism in our time. The next step could only be discussions on organizational merger after which fusion would take place. Needless to say, so far there is no basis for us to reach such a conclusion.

In concluding, we hope that for the above stated reasons you consider re-evaluating your methodological approach toward us and towards other working class tendencies in general. Hope to hear from you soon.

With communist greetings,

George Rep

for the Communist Working Collective

What Is Revolutionary Leadership

SECOND EDITION (1970)

Articles originally printed in Labour Review (theoretical journal of the Socialist Labour League of Britain) and republished by the Spartacist League with introductory and supplemental material.]

Building the Bolshevik Party: Some Organizational Aspects Brian Pearce
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/pearce/1960/02/bolsheviks.html

What Is Revolutionary Leadership? Cliff Slaughter
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1960/10/leadership.html

Lenin and Trotsky On Pacifism and Defeatism Brian Pearce
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/pearce/1961/xx/defeatism.html
(Appendix) Learn to Think: A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists by Leon Trotsky
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/05/think.htm

Class, Caste and State in the Soviet Union Tom Kemp
[coming soon]

The Class, the Party and the Leadership Leon Trotsky (included in the second edition)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm

INTRODUCTION

The progress of a social science such as Marxism is by no means always in a forward direction. The history of the Marxist movement on a world scale has almost from the first been characterized by an internal struggle over tendencies to blur Marxism’s revolutionary outlook and conclusions, and to undermine its reliance on the industrial working class. These non-revolutionary tendencies have been generally designated by the word “revisionism.,”

To persons not acquainted with the specialized usages of the Marxist movement, antirevisionism may seem equivalent to a dogmatic defense of articles of faith promulgated in other decades and under other conditions, and a futile if not reactionary exercise in sectarian obscurantism. In reality, however, quite the opposite is the case. Those tendencies grouped under the general name of revisionist represent not new insights in social analysis but rather a return to positions long since rendered untenable by the sharpening theoretical analysis and the increasing historical experience of the socialist movement.

Revisionism cannot be understood, however, as a purely intellectual sin. The constant reappearance of previously discredited notions among socialists is an attribute of Marxism’s character as a social movement, a movement that defines its essential nature in the interplay and conflict of classes and social strata. Its ideology at once guides its adherents in that struggle, and is at the same time molded and developed by the non-ideological phenomena of social reality. The explanation of the endemIc character of revisionist tendencies — ever defeated and ever reappearing –lies in their constant regeneration by non proletarian social forces within bourgeois society. As the decay of that society deepens while its demise is postponed, the tendency toward the generation of revisionism is strengthened.

The Fourth International International of Leon Trotsky was an organized in the 1930’s to supplant the bureaucratically degenerated Third International of the Stalin era. However, revolutionary origins alone could no more protect the Fourth International than its predecessor. By the 1950’s revisionism had gained a major foothold in the Trotskyist camp. With the passage of the American Socialist Workers Party into the revisionist camp in the early 1960’s, the situation in the Fourth International reached the stage of acute crisis.

Generally characteristic of revisionism Is a motion away from reliance on the proletariat in the leadership of the revolution, and a reliance on other strata, usually petty bourgeols, and other methods, either parlimentary or adventurist. Essential to its ideology is an objectivist outlook in social thinking. The making of history is removed from real people and given to abstract social forces. “History, like truth, becomes a person apart, a motaphysical subject of which real human individuals are but the bearers.” (1) The thinking which is being evolved by the new revisionists in the Fourth International uses “the objective unfolding of social forces” to abolish the need for a revolutionary party, for conscious revolutionary leadership, and thus clears the way for reliance on various national bourgoisles and petty bourgeois bureaucratic elements to bring about the now social order.

Grouped chiefly around the International Secretariat and Its successor, the United Secretariat in Paris, this group has as its chief spokesmen such figures as Pierre Frank, Ernest Germain, and until recently, Michel Pablo. In the colonial sphere, this group looks to petty-bourgeois nationalist tendencies such as Ben Bella’s FLN to carry out the social revolution, declaring the colonial working class to be bourgeoisified. The ultimate concrete application of this theory is to be seen in the act of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party which entered a bourgeois government in Ceylon. The belated repudiation of this course by its intellectual authors can not absolve them of the responsibility for the results of their teaching and guidance. The United Secretariat increasingly embraces various forms of the theory of the self- liquidation of the bureaucracies in the Stalinized countries, and now no longer regards China as a deformed workers’ state, i.e., it no longer believes that the Chinese People’s Republic is basically bureaucratic in character. In the metropolitan countries these forces content themselves with the role of ginger groups within various centrist formations.Thus the revisionists carry out a simulataneous political accomodations and organizational capitulations to the national bourgoisie in the colonial countries, to liberalizing sections of the,Soviet bureaucracies and to left-posing political leaders and trade union centrists at home. Since the Trotskyist movement has historically lacked a mass base, this course poses the threat not only of revisionist degeneration but of ultimate total liquidation as well.

The Socialist Workers Party has now definitively embraced these revisionist tenets as the basis for its world view. At home it has eagerly capitulated to the reactionary ideology of black nationalism, thus undercutting its role on the only active front in the U.S.A. Having proclaimed Cuba a workers state without significant deformations, the S.W.P. is unable to bring forward even a blush at Comrade Castro’s endorsement of peaceful coexistence, or more than asotto voce “they had it coming” at the arrest and imprisonment of the entire Cuban Trotskyist leadership. In the crisis over the Kennedy assassination, it crawled before bourgeois public opinion. With political decay has come, inevitably, decay of internal life. For the last year the S.W.P. majority has taken to expelling its left critics from the party.

The four pieces which we now present to an American radical audience are part of the struggle against this revisionist tendency in the world Trotskyist movement. They were published in 1960, 1961, and 1962 in Labour Review, theoretical organ of the Socialist Labour League of Great Britain. With the defection of the S.W.P. to the enemy camp, the burden of the struggle has fallen mainly on this organization. Labour Review, and its successor, the British Fourth International, have been valued weapons for English reading Marxists. Although dealing with such apparently disparate topics as pacifism, the Soviet social order, and the history of the Russian Bolsheviks, the articles illuminate various aspects of one central question, the need for conscious Marxist leaderships organized in a revolutionary party, at the head of the industrial working class. (2) They are a sharp attack on the spontaneous growing-over theories of the revisionists. One need not be In agreement with every detail they contain to find in them understanding and guidance on the central tasks of revolutionists today. It is enough that they are, taken as a whole, an invaluable collective contribution to the current phase of the struggle for revolutionary socialism.

Geoffrey White

Berkeley,
August 1964

(1) Karl Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1956) P. 107.

(2) The revolutionary Marxist program flowing from this aim has been systematically and comprehensively set forth in the international resolution “World Prospect for Socialism.”

Preface to the Second Edition

The re-issuance of this pamphlet, after a long period of unavailability, is indeed a welcome event. These articles on revolutionary leadership are still, as Geoffrey White’s introduction of 1964 described them, “an invaluable collective contribution to the current phase of the struggle for socialism.” The title piece by Cliff Slaughter is perhaps the best restatement of the Trotskyist purpose in English since the death of Trotsky. Furthermore, we have been able to add to the pamphlet Trotsky’s long out-of-print superlative article, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership”, which stands among the most valuable and incisive treatments of the revolutionary vanguard and its relation to the class in Marxist literature.

The unfortunate fact that the movement to which the authors of the original four articles from Labour Review belong, the Healy-Banda Socialist Labor League of Great Britain and its International Committee of the Fourth International, has degenerated considerably from the anti-revisionist position it held earlier requires some explanation. These articles reflect a stage through which the SLL was passing, a stage in which it possessed the formal political program of Trotskyist opposition to the Pabloite revisionism within the Fourth International discussed in White’s introduction, as well as the not inconsiderable talents of Marxist scholarship to be found here. It lacked the fundamental theoretical keys to understanding the origins of Pabloism, however, and its rigid orthodoxy was incapable of answering the questions which gave rise to the revisionism in the first place. Furthermore, the Healy group persisted in such destructive political and tactical errors that its actual program-that is, the sum total of its actions, as opposed to its words—was one of splitting and sabotaging the struggle to rebuild a Trotskyist international movement. Since the period in which this pamphlet was first printed, the SLL’s mistakes and, theoretical incapacities have led to greater and greater contradictions, and finally, in a process not yet complete, to an abandonment of Trotskyism and capitulation to the very Pabloism it supposedly set out to combat.

This history is intimately bound up with the origins and development of the Spartacist League of the U.S. The S.L. grew out of a tendency within the Socialist Workers Party which, in its struggle against the rampaging Pabloism seizing control of the SWP in the early sixties, attempted to align itself with the International Committee on the basis of agreement with the IC’s formal anti-Pabloist stand. This collaboration proved difficult at best, and was ultimately smashed in a grotesque split engineered in truly Stalinist fashion by the Healy clique at an IC international conference in London in 1966.

The Healyites, including Healy’s subservient American mentors, the “Workers League” of Wohlforth & Co., continually attempt to make political capital out of the fact that the SL existed separately from the IC for a long period of substantial political agreement. Wohlforth has just completed a six-part, 24-page series on Spartacist in hisBulletin, which, among many other distortions, outright lies and horrendous slanders much too numerous to go into here, asserts that we of the SL are unable to explain the political basis for the split. Parodying Trotsky, Wohlforth demands that we explain the “social origins” of Healy’s well-documented Comintern-like bureaucratism, which includes physical gangsterism and use of the bourgeois apparatus of repression against other tendencies within the labor movement. Actually, the Spartacist League and its predecessor, the Revolutionary Tendency in the Socialist Workers Party, were cognizant of the errors of Healy—both organizational and political—at least since 1962. Indeed it was the fact that the Spartacist tendency spoke of these errors and sought to correct them within the framework indicated by the principled political agreement with the IC, which made the Healyites seek to drive us from their midst at all costs!

The theoretical problems which had led to the dominance of Pabloism within the Fourth International centered on the expansion of Stalinism after World War II, and, particularly, on the creation of new, anti-capitalist states in Yugoslavia and later in China and finally Cuba, not on the basis of proletarian revolution, but on the basis of independent Stalinist or petty-bourgeois-led movements based primarily on the peasantry. The Pabloist response to these developments involved abandonment of the vanguard party and a working-class perspective (see White’s introduction). The Spartacist tendency felt that the early opposition of the SWP to Pabloism was based on a rigid orthodoxy which failed to solve the problem and left the SWP open to make the same capitulation themselves on the question of Cuba a decade later, and furthermore that the opposition of the IC to Pabloism had much the same character. In his remarks on the political report at the 1966 London conference, Spartacist delegate Robertson said, “Two decisive elements have been common to the whole series of upheavals under Stalinist-type leaderships, as in Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietrinm: 1) a civil war of the peasant-guerrilla  variety, which …if victorious… smashes capitalist property relations… (and) 2) the absence of the working class as a contender for power, in particular, the absence of its revolutionary vanguard: this permits an exceptionally independent role for the petty-bourgois sections of society…” These circumstance do not open the road to socialist development without a further, political revolution,nor do they in any sense deny the need for proletarian revolution or assert an historically independent role for the petty-bourgeoisie: “On the contrary, precisely the petty-bourgeois peasantry under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable could achieve no third road. . Instead all that has come out of China and Cuba was a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counter-revolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the degeneration of October.”

Comrade Robertson then went on to warn of the fundamental nature of the SLL’s mistakes, which prevented them from developing any analysis at all of the origins of the Chinese Revolution, and led them to see Castro’s Cuba as still capitalist: “This is a bad method: at bottom it equates the deformed workers’ state with the road to socialism; it is the Pabloite error turned inside out, and a profound denial of the Trotskyist understanding that the bureaucratic ruling caste is an obstacle which must be overthrown by the workers if they are to move forward.”

One year later, the SLL endorsed the Chinese bureaucracy’s “Cultural Revolution” and Mao’s Red Guards, despite “…some of the extravagant, improbable and Utopian ideas of Mao Tse Tung;… his refusal to repudiate Stalin, his support of the Soviet intervention in Hungary, (and) his acceptance of ‘socialism in a single country‘…”! (SLLNewsletter 14 Jan., 1967, emphasis mine) Healy and Banda (who wrote the article) know that “socialism in a single country” is the very essence of Stalinism, not just “some improbable Idea of Mao’s”. This is a complete abandonment of the Trotskyist program in favor of capitulation to a wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Wohlforth attempts to slide over this by tossing off the horrendous, total lie that the SL gave “support to the Liu faction in China against the Red Guards…” ! (Bulletin, 10 Aug. 1970, emphasis mine) Soon thereafter, the IC adopted the equally unprincipled position of support to the “Arab revolution”, which, somehow, seems to have a consistent outward thrust and to be dominated by pop front alliances with reactionary Arab regimes. Thus a political departure from Trotskyism has been the result of a course which began with the Healy movement’s inability to develop Marxism theoretically in response to new events.

The Spartacist tendency opposed many other mistakes of Healy-Wohlforth. The complete failure of Healy & Co. to comprehend the concept of principled factional struggle led them to substitute opportunist and sectarian gyrations which undermined the international struggle against Pabloism. Thus Healy ordered the split in the tendency in the SWP in 1962—demanding that the majority renounce their views as a precondition for membership in the “Reorganized Minority Tendency”—In order to consummate an unprincipled bloc with the central leadership, which was Pabloist! Wohlforth now admits the unprincipled character of this maneuver when he says, “we considered the current positions of the SWP to be centrist and revisionist and its movement to be back into the petty-bourgeois revisionist Pabloite camp under the pressure of alien class forces.” (Bulletin  22 June 1970) This is the very same position he and Healy demanded the tendency renounce in 1962 as against their assertion that the SWP was still revolutionary I After solidarizing with the Dobbs-Kerry leadership of the SWP by helping to expel the Revolutionary Tendency leaders, Wohlforth-Healy then flip-flopped, engineered their own expulsion from the party and declared that it had never been-revolutionary! (Documentation on the 1962 split may be found in Marxist Bulletin #3, from Spartacist).

Beneath this abominable behavior lay a fundamentally false perspective, which led to worse behavior later and to an eventual excuse for abandonment of any factional struggle against Pabloism in the Fourth International. The Healyites didn’t want a real fight for a Trotskyist international based on struggle, splits and fusions, but instead, having failed In their earlier maneuvers, merely wanted to consumate a split, grab what they could and have a pond of their own to swim in. Hence their righteous proclomations that the IC is the Fourth International, despite its failure to break the Pabloite grip in more than a few countries, and that Pabloism has been smashed, etc. This latter claim, which we fought as being pure illusion and an excuse for abandoning the struggle, now seems somewhat contradictory with Healy’s call recently for joint discussions with the Pabloite Unified Secretariat leading to an international conference!

Recognizing that the struggle is still going on in the Pabloite sections, Healy is now making his attempt to crawl back in typical opportunist fashion, but this time, the principled, Trotskyist political basis for confronting Pabloism is gone. In its place, now standing more fully revealed, is a cravenly opportunist movement which furthermore deals wantonly in financial chicanery, and provocation, violence, and use of capitalist “justice” against its socialist opponents! The Healy-Wohlforth gang is a complete fraud; their avowed Trotskyism is totally foreign to their actual method and now to most of their formal politics as well. It is to be regretted that the potentially serious Marxists we see here have been unable or unwilling either to see this fraud for what it is or to struggle against it. Time is running out for them but, meanwhile, the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International and a Leninist vanguard party in the U.S.  continues — set back, perhaps, but enriched by the experience and moving ahead. We are determined to incorporate the contributions to Marxism which members of the Healy movement were able to make, and, like the lessons of the struggle with the Healyite bandits themselves, put them to good use in the struggle for socialism.

-Chris Kinder

September 1970

Link to Labour Review archive (January 1953- Summer 1963)
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/lr/index.html

The Working Class & The Park

[First printed in Spartacist West #16, 27, June 1969.]

Wikipedia entry on the Poeple’s Park and it’s early history.

There are a large number of people who would have us believe that the turmoil around the campuses is the work of spoiled, irresponsible students and hippies, who should have felt more of the lash from their parents, and who should be punished like children now for every single infraction of “law and order.”

Despite the widespread support for this “law and order” line, fortunately. most people are aware that there are realissues behind the disturbances and that large scale (discontent is not the work of a few malcontented idiots but is a sign of something wrong in society.

A few brief facts about the park issue will make this more understandable. We all know that legal title to the peoples’ park plot belongs to the University of California, but how many know how this came to pass? What is behind this “legal” title? Apparently there is a plan (a much more powerful “plot” than any students or hippies are capable of) on the part of the Board of Regents of U.C. and the Berkeley campus administration to destroy the south campus community. This is a political decision, taken because this mere handful of powerful men – none of whom were ever elected by the people and none of whom can ever be recalled from office – felt that the south campus community is a source of revolutionary activity and therefore a threat to society (which really means a threat to the power of this handful of powerful men and those who appointed them).

This decision was made at a closed meeting of the Board of Regents (all meetings of supposedly “public” bodies should be open to the public!), about which reports have filtered down to the “common” folk who make up the vast majority of the University community! Anyone who doesn’t want to believe this, however, can look at the public record of the reason for the University purchase of the plot which is now peoples’ park: plainly stated, it was to remove undesirable elements! This was accomplished by simply tearing down the buildings that were there; this was done long before the University had any idea of what it wanted to use the land for.

THE UNIVERSITY

Speaking of the University and its plans for the park land, just who is “the University” about which everyone speaks, and who is it who wants the park and who doesn’t? Is the University the Board of Regents? The Board of Regents is a small group of men who are supposed to be administering the University in the name of the people of California. They are appointed by the governor, but they are by no means representative of the people of California. They are very much like the board of directors of a large corporation, and most of their members come from the executives of the largest corporations in the state, such as Bank of America, the Hearst empire (publishing) and Safeway. They run the University in the interests of these large corporations and capitalists who own them, not in the interests of the people.

Back on the campus, the students and faculty are overwhelmingly for the park and against another unnecessary soccer field or any other phony “use” for the land that the chancellor has been able to come up with. The student vote which was held on this issue had a larger turnout than any previous student vote on anything, and the majority in favor of the park was 6 to 1, a greater majority than has ever been attained before for anything. The Berkeley faculty has also voted in favor of the park.

Back to the south campus community: who does it threaten, and why? Clearly there is no threat to the students or faculty, since these groups are for the park and against those who want to destroy this community. Is there then a threat to the south campus cornmunity? Reagan has used a petition signed by about forty people to prove that the local comrnunity doesn’t want the park; however, a survey by the university found 85% of the local residents in favor of the park. The only threat is obviously to the Board of Regents and the capitalist ruling class which they represent. The threat is that the students will stir up too much noise about racism both in the University and in the surrounding community, that they will hold protest demonstrations against the war, that they will refuse to attend classes and other such “dangerous” pressure tactics, and that they will spend too much time aiding strikes of workers in the Bay Area such as in the recent strike of oil workers in Richmond.

WORKERS’ INTERESTS

Working people should take the side of the students and park people in this issue, not because the park is a way to improve the working man’s condition, but because the students’ and park peoples’ enemy is the workers’ enemy, and if this enemy wins this battie, he will have legitimized his tactics and thus will be all the more able to achieve his real aim, which is to move against the working people by attacking the unions and lowering living standards for the sake of improving and maintaining profits.

The policy that the Board of Regents has set for itself does benefit somebody: the landlords who own buildings in the campus community. They are happy because they can charge outrageously high rents for housing which is in shorter and shorter supply as “the University” buys up buildings. The rest of the south campus comnlUnity is threatened with extinction, and this is not just hippies and dope addicts. There are many students, mainly the poorer ones, and small home owners in this community. When were they ever consulted about this “clean up” plan?

Despite the militancy, numbers and revolutionary ferver surrounding the peoples’ park issue, the left has been confused and hesitant, and the leadership effectively passed to liberals. Thus the big Memorial Day march, which could have easily pulled down the fence or a section of it, was dominated by monitors doing the bidding of the cops and flower-power “love thy enemy” theory. Many radicals wondered how this movement, which started so strong and in which a brother was killed, could have been so effectively defused.

CONTRADICTORY ISSUE

A good part of the answer lies in the nature of the original issue. On the one hand, it was very apolitical and consistent with “hippie” thinking to fight the ruling class by simply planting flowers on a vacant lot. On the other hand, the park met a very real need of the south campus community and challenged in the most immediate and direct way the private property upon which capitalist society is based, making it very political and revolutionary at the same time.

The problem is that as a revolutionary tactic it was a hopeless adventure: to win would mean bringing down the whole system right now. On the other hand, since it was a fight over just one plot of land, it was easy to see how some deal could be made by which part or all of the park would be preserved (perhaps by a “small” sacrifice of the spontaneous planning that went into it at first) while the system, including the University’s campaign to buy up south campus property, would remain untouched. It was thus a very real and important struggle of a large community of people, and, superficially at least, very revolutionary, but one which was easily co-opted by the liberals. Much of its power came, of course, simply as a reaction to the murderous brutality of the cops and the national guard occupation.

Some ostensible Marxist-Leninist organizations, like PL and the Workers League, “solved” this complex question for themselves very neatly by simply rejecting the whole thing as a stupid, hippy adventure which could never reach the working class. This sectarian, formalistic position ignores the very real struggle out of which the park issue emerged and the need of Marxists to intervene in such struggles to educate and recruit cadre to build a revolutionary vanguard party. Lenin strongly warned against precisely this kind of spontaneous, adventurous struggle against a well organized and armed system, but he also pointed out the need for Marxists to intervene in all the struggles of the people for the purpose of redirecting and uniting them. We might also point out in passing that the Workers League is in international solidarity with the only tendency in France – the Lambertist O.C.I. – which denounced and pulled out of the student barricade struggles in the Latin Quarter only days before the great general strike of last May.

The approach of the park people to the National Guard was encouraging. It showed that the movement sees that the guardsmen are oppressed working and middle-class individuals who should be won over, and it showed that favorable responses can be obtained. It also showed something else, however, that the movement is in no way powerful enough at this stage to bring about a mass response from the armed forces of the such as would be required in a revolution.

Only a well organized working-class movement would be able to do this. Guardsmen and troops will not throw down their weapons and go over to the people’s side unless they are really convinced that the people are powerful, and that means power to take over the whole society and prevent the old rulers from disciplining them as “traitors.” Only the workers can do this.

GENERAL STRIKE

A general strike would have been the way to accomplish this in the recent Berkeley occupation. The movement should have raised the demand for a general strike, and attempted to convince the workers of their interest in opposing the occupation in ~ way. One way would have been to call a demonstration for a strike at the local labor temple in Oakland. This would focus attention on the do nothing bureaucrats who run the workers’ unions and would have served as a basis for alliance with the growing ranks of militants in the unions who are working to toss these bureaucrats out.

The drastic increase in police power and police repression against the student movement, and most severely against the Black Panthers, is merely a prelude to greater things to come. The workers and the workers organizations are what the ruling c1as s is really after. They are preparing to crush the workers’ attempts to prevent drastic cutbacks in their standards of living, job conditions, etc., which will soon be neces sary for the capitalists. Workers must b~ able to see this before it is too late. They should form defense guards to protect their meetings, unions and picket lines. They should fight to restore their unions to the militant I instruments of struggle that they should be, instead of platforms for wheeler-dealers that they are now. They should also build a party of their own, a Freedom-Labor Party based on the unions and controlled by the rank-and-file. Militant students and park people would do well to heed this same warning, since without a militant workers movement, their interests will remain subordinate to the whim of the capitalist system.

The Fight For Women’s Liberation

[Revolutionary Marxist Caucus position paper presented at the Students for a Democratic Society December 1969 conference. Originally posted at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/910/ysp-womenslib.html ]    

I. SDS and Women’s Liberation

SDS needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women’s liberation. No other radical youth group has yet undertaken this task. The YSA substitutes enthusiastic tail-ending for program; the ISC in their Statement of Principles patronizingly caters to the separatist mood by telling women that socialist revolution won’t solve their problems automatically—as if other sorts of oppression would disappear without the intervention of consciousness!

The existing women’s liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic “class division” in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However, we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only form of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.

The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exist as well —e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women’s oppression. To deny that Marxist revolutionaries must concern themselves with these issues is sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist. It is vital that revolutionaries participate in these struggles. The basis of such participation must be the realization that the class question is decisive and thus any movement which fails to identify itself with the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is doomed to be beset by utopianism, crackpotism, liberal illusions and—ultimately—irrelevance.

The SDS resolution (which was sponsored by the WSA caucus and opposed by us) passed by our June convention (after the walk-out of the RYM [Revolutionary Youth Movement] splitters) did not provide a correct analysis or program. This failure was primarily due to an anti-historical, unMarxist method which resulted in an entirely incorrect position on the family.

II. Oppression and the Family

The June WSA resolution included the following statement: “The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class.”

This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the family in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false consciousness in the working class.

As a pro-working-class student organization, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property-owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hence, the institution of marriage emerges.

Following the method of Engels, examining the oppression of women in class society and the nature of class society itself, we must seek its roots in the primitive division of labor, which resulted in the social division of man and woman, placing the latter in a subordinate position, as class society was born. Subsequently the class divisions transcended the sexual division, and class became the dominant reality of society. To put it another way, Mrs. Rockefeller and her maid both suffer in varying degree from the pervasive oppression of females and have some issues in common, but the maid has more in common with her own husband than with Mrs. Rockefeller.

Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferiority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be “under-achievers”; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal “self-liberation” but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family. As communist revolutionaries, further, these women will lead incomparably richer lives. They will come to understand their own oppression and the origins, the nature and the future of the family. As stated by Engels:

“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other.

“For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, inheritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting…. The position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike whether or not they are, in bourgeois legal jargon, legitimate.”

This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses’ press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic unit with voluntary forms better suited to people’s physical and emotional needs. Since the institution of the family is an integral part of the capitalist system, the struggle for women’s liberation is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.

III. The Family and the Class

The WSA resolution states: “With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labor force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism.

To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans. To quote Marx in Capital:

“The value of labor power was determined not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of the family into the labor market, spreads the value of man’s labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor power.”

Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by the early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.

The bourgeoisie of this period actually devised ideological apologia for female and child labor (see Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class, Chapter 2, “The Working Class Emerges”). The limitation of female and child labor (by, e.g., the Factory Acts in Britain) represented concessions wrested by the working class from capital. The progressive withdrawal of this super-exploited labor from the factory system compelled the capitalists to employ machinery in their stead if they wished to remain in business.

The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possibility of founding the relationship between the sexes on a new economic basis. But, the spontaneous way this employment developed with the rise of capital was, to quote Marx, “a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery” which the advanced sections of the working class fought. The kernel of this contradiction is that under capitalism the family remains—because there is no other socio-economic institution to replace it.

An Institution of Indoctrination

The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumulated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome. For this reason the bourgeoisie learned to pay public obeisance to the ideals of religion and the family whether they personally believed in them or not. When economically necessary, the capitalist class will tolerate and even encourage female and child labor—but without allowing the development of institutions to replace the family. The working woman is not really freed from her role as household slave by obtaining work outside the home; she merely has one responsibility added to another.

Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed—by capitalism, the family as an institutionwas not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and the churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. “The family that prays together stays together”: both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.

Functions of the Family

Women and children left the process of production, not chiefly because the capitalists feared for the nuclear family and forced them out but in large part because under capitalism no substitute for the family is available. The domestic labor performed by the housewife has no exchange value, and the family is socially necessary to maintain the working class. The necessity of the bourgeoisie to concentrate and transfer its wealth via inheritance makes the family an ideological necessity for capitalism. Also, the struggle by the working class to limit the exploitation of women and children necessarily caused production to become more capital-intensive, hence ultimately raising the standard of living of the entire working class while in the long run diminishing the amount of labor needed in production.

In the present period, a period of capitalism in decay, there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Women, because of the domestic role they of necessity (under capitalism) must more or less fulfill, are on the fringes of the reserve army of the working class. When they are needed in production (such as World War II) the capitalists have no compunctions about the sanctity of hearth and home, and will gladly hire them to do “men’s” work and will just as gladly drop them from production when they are no longer needed. (An unemployed male ex-soldiery would be a far greater threat to the bourgeois order than the more docile women unemployed workers.)

The hollow satisfactions of male supremacy within the home oppress both the men and the women and encourage false consciousness (male chauvinism). By way of comparison, segregation is similarly a tool of oppression (the hollow satisfactions of white supremacy in the U.S. encourage whites to oppress blacks) and false consciousness (racism). The working man learns to direct his anger and frustrations against his wife, rather than against the bosses. He is told that he is the boss in his own home (“a man’s home is his castle”). Thus, the family as an economic and social institution is a shackle on the consciousness of the men workers as well as that of women.

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers’ states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.

For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers’ state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers’ democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap Forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.

The survival of most features of bourgeois family life within the non-capitalist world simultaneously reveals something about both the family and the nature of these societies. The bourgeois family is still the family, similar in decisive respects to the family in non-capitalist but not classless (e.g., feudal and slave) societies. The family unit represents a division of social labor far older than capitalism, dating back to the first “class” division of labor, that between man and woman. As such, the family will require more than the abolition of capitalism (in and of itself) before it is superseded entirely by a freer system of relations between men and women, parents and children. Needless to say, the overthrow of the capitalists and their state by the regime of workers’ power is absolutely essential to the liberation of individuals from the narrowness, authoritarianism and sexual inequality inherent in family life. But we should recognize that this task will not be fully accomplished until the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historic mission: until class distinctions and their vestiges have been eradicated from society, i.e., mankind has reached the stage of classless society, communism. The same holds true for other features of class societies in general—aspects not simply peculiar to capitalism, such as the need for a state power over society, the existence of a certain amount of religious superstition, what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life,” etc.

No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers’ states, however, is the fact that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin’s time never glorified the family as an instrument—real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Russian economy and culture permitted, they passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family. All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the Soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abortion, enhanced parental authority, and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism! For reasons which Stalinists find difficult to explain, the Soviet Great Leap Backward in policy regarding women and the family was led by the same parasitic gang who murdered the Old Bolsheviks of all viewpoints, throttled the Spanish revolution and let Hitler take power without firing a shot. Just as Stalin was willing to use Great Russian chauvinism against national minorities, praise the Orthodox Church and foster anti-Semitism, so he found that the backward Russian family created a base for his bureaucratic and authoritarian aims. Even where private property no longer exists, the institution of the family serves—at best—to hinder the development of a socialist society. At worst it provides a base of support in the culture for the parasitic bureaucrats who barter away the gains of the revolution. SDS cannot wish away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it “a unit for fighting the ruling class.” Reactionary institutions serve reactionary ends.

IV. The Working Woman

The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able to use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers—that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, “a woman’s place is in the home,” “a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to.”

The assumption is that the woman’s main role is that of the tender mother; hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed “unnatural” or “unfit.” The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.

Women make up one third of the American labor force, but the wages of the full-time working woman average only 60% of those of the average male working full-time. The non-white working woman, suffering under a double load of exploitation and oppression, must indeed be the most victimized category in American capitalist society. In itself, the lower average income of women workers roughly indicates the degree of their oppression, not their super-exploitation relative to working men. (They might—and do—take home less money because they are concentrated in less productive jobs.) But women, even more than other oppressed groups such as Black male workers, frequently receive less for work identical to that performed by more highly paid men. In addition to suffering oppression and discrimination, working women are super-exploited in the literal and technical sense of the term.

Militancy or Passivity?

In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.

Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn’t “ladylike” or “feminine” to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and must be fought. Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women’s oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women’s liberation has an important role to play in the struggles of the working class. Further, situations sometimes arise where the women—because they are more oppressed by poor working conditions, low wages and speed-up—are more militant than the men. Women are not pale, fragile, helpless creatures; as workers engaged in industrial production, they can wield workers’ power!

V. Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement

The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply imbedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinism as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognize also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women’s liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debate in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.

Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the fact that women’s male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement. Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organization which they believe is indifferent to women’s oppression. It is a fact that a good number of the ersatz, crackpot and separatist tendencies in the existing women’s liberation groups are a reaction to the male chauvinism in the student movement. These groups blur over class lines and stress “individual liberation” and other utopian schemes.

Many of the women who do enter radical politics tend to play supportive roles and are not encouraged to develop politically or exercise leadership. SDS must rid itself of male chauvinism and utilize the full talents of all its members.

VI. SDS and Special Groups

It is not enough to fight individual aspects of women’s oppression within the labor movement and in SDS. Separate women’s liberation groups offer an opportunity to tie together all aspects of women’s oppression in the minds of their members, and hence to suggest a single solution—which is socialism. As Marxists, we recognize that special oppression calls for special defensive and combative organizations of the oppressed. For this reason, SDS should give critical support (determined by program) to Black groups which fight the special oppression of Black people; similarly SDS should support women’s groups which fight on the basis of a Marxist program for the special needs of women.

Armed with a more developed political and economic analysis of society, SDS members should be able to win the more serious groups away from petty-bourgeois amateur therapy sessions, liberalism, female separatism and vicarious anti-male terrorism, to a working-class perspective. Women’s liberation groups are a good arena for winning militant women over to SDS and to socialism.

VII. Program for Women’s Liberation

When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women’s liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political sophistication.

We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands:

For the abolition of family restrictions:

1. Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.

2. Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.

3. Freely available birth control devices and information.

4. Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state. Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.

5. Establishment of free voluntary cafeterias in the factories and other places of work.

6. Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.

7. Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.

To fight the super-exploitation of women workers:

8. Full and equal pay for equal work.

9. Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay (“30 for 40”) to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists’ expense.

To fight male chauvinism:

10. An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.

SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women’s liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally-oriented women’s liberation publication.

Racial Oppression & Working Class Politics

  

[Revolutionary Marxist Caucus position paper presented at the December 1969 PL-SDS Conference. Originally posted online at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/897/ysp-rmc.html ]

It hardly needs saying that increasing black-white conflict is the dominant feature of the current American political scene. The polarization of U.S. society along racial lines has been reflected even within the left, which has become increasingly split between supporters of Black Nationalism and advocates of an oversimplified pro-working-class line, indifferent and sometimes hostile to the Black liberation movement. One effect of the increasing black-white hostility is that any struggle involving Black people is viewed as the same struggle. Everything, from demands for Black Studies departments to integrating the building trades, is seen as part of a larger Black liberation movement, and attitudes toward each particular struggle are determined by general theoretical outlook.

The position of this paper is that Marxists must aggressively fight against the oppression of the Black masses while rejecting Black Nationalist pseudo-solutions. This must be done in ways that are compatible with the over-all goals of socialism. This means making clear and careful distinctions between different demands and struggles of the Black movement and different facets of the race question generally. Our guiding concern must be to link up a pro-working-class political line with demands aimed at fighting the pervasive double oppression of Black workers.

Racism and Racial Oppression

One result of the ghetto uprisings in Watts, Detroit, Newark and elsewhere was that it was no longer possible to deny that Black people were deeply hostile to the state of American society. The liberals argued (e.g., in the Kerner Report) that the oppression of Black people was a result of the racism of the white population, rather than locating the source of oppression and hostility in the working of the economic system and the policies of the ruling class and deliberately obscuring the fact that some whites have qualitatively more social power than others. To blame the oppressed condition of Black people on pervasive racist attitudes is a variant of the classic reactionary argument that social ills stem from a flawed human nature. By placing the blame for racial oppression on the white population en masse, the liberal wing of the ruling class not only deny their own responsibility, but even pose as champions of the Black people against the ignorant and bigoted white workers. In some cases, blaming racist attitudes begs the question. Many liberal capitalist bosses do not believe any of the myths of racial inferiority, yet deliberately pursue oppressive policies aimed at dividing workers along ethnic lines.

The widespread acceptance on the left of the liberal myth that the oppression of Black people results from the racism of the white lower classes has been totally destructive of the left. Its most extreme exponents are, of course, the Weathermen, who regard the white working class as hopelessly corrupted by racism, and, therefore, “the enemy.” However, even those who realize that racism is against the long-term interests of white workers, such as the Worker-Student Alliance caucus, see changing racial attitudes as the key to the problem.

It is essential to make a distinction between those actively responsible for racial oppression and the masses, who passively accept it. An analogy of the relation between national chauvinism and imperialism is useful here. National chauvinism is rampant in the U.S.—look at the recent proliferation of American flag decals. Yet, no one would contend that U.S. counter-revolutionary policy in Viet Nam is the result of the nationalist attitudes of the American workers! National chauvinism helps sustain U.S. imperialism, but is not the cause of it. In a like manner, the racist attitudes of the white working class help sustain the oppression and economic degradation of the Black masses, but do not cause it.

Most white workers are neither active racists nor thorough-going integrationists. Rather, their attitude toward Black people is contradictory and differs according to the context. Many white workers will treat Black workers on the job as equals. Many believe Blacks should have equal rights, yet maintain racist attitudes on social and sexual questions. (A white worker might vote for a Black as union official, yet, as the saying goes, wouldn’t let his daughter marry him.) In general, there are many more white workers who will support the political and economic rights of Blacks and unite with them in struggle than there are who are really free of race prejudice. In addition, the level of racism is affected by the level of class struggle. Involvement in a militant strike action, for example, often combats backward consciousness on many levels.

The Southern Populist movement of the 1890s was the highest point of class struggle reached in the post-Reconstruction South. It not only united poor white and Black farmers around their shared economic interests, it also aggressively fought for the political rights of Black people. Yet, in deference to the white supremacist attitudes of most Southern farmers, the leaders of the Populist movement stressed that they were not in favor of social integration. Thus, by today’s standards, the Populist movement would be considered racist, although it aggressively fought for the political rights of Blacks. Certainly we should make no concessions to racism. But this example shows that fighting racism and fighting racial oppression are not identical.

For a Materialist Approach

The practical conclusion to be drawn from making this distinction between racism and racial oppression is that SDS is more likely to gain the support of white workers if we oppose concrete acts of racial oppression in the name of democratic rights and class solidarity, than if we rant about “fighting racism” as a social attitude (which has a moralistic tone to it—like fighting sin). Again, an analogy with the fight against imperialism is useful. In fighting American imperialism, we make specific demands, such as the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Viet Nam and all other countries. We do not approach this struggle mainly by calling moralistically on the American working class to give up its national chauvinism and solidarize with the international proletariat. To be sure, the demand for immediate withdrawal from Viet Nam implies an attack on patriotic attitudes, just as the demand to integrate a union implies an attack on racist attitudes. But we attack these attitudes at their weakest point, where they come into conflict with other powerful social attitudes.

There is an important tactical reason for using the terminology of fighting racial oppression rather than fighting racism. To announce that we are fighting racism within the working class implies that the rank and file white worker is the target of our hostility. To say we are opposing the double oppression of Black workers puts the responsibility where it belongs—on the capitalists and trade union bureaucrats. Rather than saying we expect the mass of white workers to oppose us, we are calling on white workers, as potential comrades, to fight the oppressors of Black people, who are the oppressors of white workers as well.

Black Rights and Economic Insecurity

Within SDS, the Labor Committee is considered the main exponent of the view that the widespread hostility of white workers to the Black liberation movement stems from a belief that Black equality will be achieved at their economic expense. So far as this view goes it is substantially correct. However, the Labor Committee has drawn a fundamentally wrong conclusion which leads to de facto tolerance for most forms of racial discrimination—namely that equality for Blacks be made conditional on whites not suffering any loss.

Given the insecurity of white workers, it is necessary to combine demands for equal opportunity for Blacks with demands aimed at assuring white workers that the benefits accruing to Blacks will not come at their expense. Thus, in demanding that more Black workers be admitted into skilled jobs, we should also raise demands (such as a shorter work week with no loss in pay) aimed at expanding total employment. However, an end to discrimination should not be made conditional to these broader demands being realized.

Under normal conditions, demands aimed at improving the condition of the working class as a whole are less within the power of the presently constituted labor movement than demands for the upgrading of one section of the class. Socialists have traditionally contended—and rightly—that permanent full employment and a continuously rising standard of living are not possible under capitalism. We can and must raise demands which take the level of consciousness outside the framework of capitalism—transitional demands which workers will accept as necessary but which cannot be achieved under this social system. But it would be a cruel joke on the legitimate aspirations of Black workers involved in struggle for socialists to make struggling for their rights conditional on the acceptance of other demands. If the attack on the economic oppression of Black people is to be postponed until the eradication of economic insecurity on the part of whites, racial oppression would continue to exist until several decades after the victory of the socialist revolution.

Labor Committee Default

In practice, the Labor Committee’s politics have meant toleration of racial oppression while posing ultimatistic solutions to the problem of the limited resources available to the working class under capitalism. A good example of this is the Labor Committee’s opposition to the so-called CCNY solution. After considerable agitation by Blacks, the City University system officials agreed to replace the existing admissions selection—based on academic qualifications—with an ethnic quota system increasing Black admissions. (The city government later rejected the agreement.) The Labor Committee argued that this was no solution to the problem and, correctly, called for open admissions for all working people. So far, so good. However, instead of critically supporting the CCNY solution against the present system, which is both class and race biased, while continuing to agitate for open admissions, the Labor Committee supported the status quo in effect, until the advent of free universal higher education. In other words, according to them the whites might as well have the lion’s share of social services until these services become unlimited.

The Labor Committee’s empathy for white workers worried about losing their jobs to Black militants causes them to blur an important distinction. It is the distinction between firing a white worker to replace him with a Black and eliminating discrimination in hiring. We should almost always oppose firing a white worker to replace him with a Black. On the other hand, we should always oppose discrimination in hiring even if this means (as it will in the building trades) that a larger percentage of the white labor force would be unemployed. The former would exacerbate racial antagonisms; the latter would tend to unite the working class in the fight against unemployment. The underlying principle is that Black workers should be treated as equals. We wouldn’t expect any employed worker to give up his job to an unemployed worker regardless of color. In a like manner, an unemployed Black worker should have the same chance to find a job as a white worker, and vice versa.

If the Labor Committee’s principle that the economic oppression of Blacks can be opposed only provided there is no re-distribution of income against whites is accepted, Blacks are slated to remain on the bottom of American society until socialism. If the desires of white workers must be substantially met before attacking the problem of racial discrimination, the benefits accruing to the Blacks will lag behind those of the class as a whole. In the Labor Committee schema, Blacks are given the role of residual claimants on the social and economic gains of the working class.

Black Rights as Class Demands

The Labor Committee’s belief that racism is simply a result of economic insecurity and will disappear when that insecurity is alleviated is as naive and wrong as the Weathermen’s view of racism as the radical equivalent of original sin. The Machinists and Shipbuilders unions attempted to maintain their white-only policies in shipyards and aircraft plants even in the middle of the World War II employment boom! On the other hand, some unions were established on an integrated basis during the Depression. The widespread racial oppression in the labor movement isn’t going to be eliminated without a political fight in the trade unions. Economic prosperity makes that fight easier to win. It doesn’t make it any less necessary.

The Labor Committee’s propaganda presents the economic effects of racial equality as only negative—namely, that such gains come only at the expense of white workers. It appears the Labor Committee has taken the arguments of racist demagogues too much at face value or that, for all their pretensions to expertise, they know very little about the economic facts of life. The upgrading of Black workers provides a higher floor for general wages and strengthens the competitive position of all workers. From the integration of the Mine Workers in the 1890s, the main factor bringing Black workers into the trade unions has been a desire to eliminate cheap, non-union labor, not moralism. One doesn’t have to be very sophisticated to see the connection between the systematic terrorization of the Black population and the maintenance of the South as a bastion of anti-unionism, low wages, and the runaway shop. If the indirect benefits of Black equality are not as obvious to white workers as the direct losses, part of our job is to make them obvious. Socialists have a responsibility to refute the lies of racist demagogues like [Alabama governor George] Wallace, that Black liberation means white workers will lose “their jobs, their money, and their women.” SDS should present the economic case for combatting racial oppression in the most attractive manner possible.

Black Liberation and Upward Mobility

An important aspect of the oppression of Blacks is the small size of the Black middle class. Not only are Black workers concentrated in lowest paid jobs, but there is a relatively small percentage of Black professionals, administrators and businessmen. Moreover, much of the Black middle class is restricted to the Black communities rather than being integrated into American corporate society.

Given the petty-bourgeois leadership of the Black movement, it is not surprising that many demands of that movement are aimed at increasing the upward mobility of the Black population. In its reaction against bourgeois aspirations in the Black movement, the WSA has made a major error—namely, it has refused to oppose those aspects of racial oppression expressly designed to keep Blacks out of the middle class. It is correct and necessary to denounce expanding the “Black bourgeoisie” as the solution to the problems of the Black masses. However, the WSA has taken the further step of refusing to fight discrimination against Blacks for middle-class positions. (Their position recalls a section of the French Marxists who thought they should be indifferent to the Dreyfus Case of anti-Semitism in the French officer corps. This sectarian disorientation actually facilitated their later collapse into opportunism.) The petty-bourgeois “hustlerist” aspect of the Black movement must be defeated politically, by being rejected by the Black masses. It will not and should not be defeated by erstwhile revolutionaries making a de facto alliance with the most reactionary sections of the ruling class to keep Blacks out of middle-class positions.

There is a parallel between the Labor Committee’s reaction to white workers’ fear of economic integration and the WSA’s approach to bourgeois goals in the Black movement. Both begin with correct premises, but reach conclusions which mean tolerance for certain forms of racial oppression. Thus, the Labor Committee opposes the CCNY solution because they don’t want educational resources redistributed against the white population, while the WSA opposes it because they don’t want more black B.A.s. Of the two positions, the Labor Committee’s is worse because it leads to acceptance of the worst forms of economic exploitation. However, the WSA’s position is also fundamentally sectarian.

The Worse the Better?

The principle of not opposing racial discrimination to the extent equality would strengthen the upward mobility of the Black population is impossible to implement. This is so because any improvement in the condition of the Black masses provides a basis for upward mobility. If the quality of ghetto primary school education is improved, for example, Black youth will be better able to compete for college admission. If Black workers have access to better-paying jobs, more of them will send their children to college.

The WSA’s position on this question is also incorrect at a higher theoretical level. Socialists have usually contended that racial oppression is inherent in capitalist society. The WSA, however, seems to be afraid that the ruling class is going to seriously ameliorate the oppression of Blacks. The whole line of argument has a “the worse, the better” flavor to it—Blacks should be kept down so they’ll be more revolutionary. It is similar to the position one usually associates with the Socialist Labor Party—opposition to reforms for fear that they may work! Coming from people who consider themselves orthodox Leninists, this faith in the ability of reformism to dampen class struggle and change class structure is as surprising as it is false, to say the least.

Moreover, from the standpoint of proletarian socialists, the expansion of the Black middle class would not be an unmitigated disaster. To the extent that the social structure of the Black population resembles that of the white population, class rather than race consciousness will be strengthened among both Black and white workers. The split between those Black Nationalists who consider themselves revolutionary and the “pork chop” Nationalists occurred precisely because the government was successful in co-opting large sections of the Black liberation movement. A Black worker who slaves for a few years under a Black boss is much more likely to see class, not race, as the fundamental division in American society.

The converse is also true. A white worker striking with fellow Black workers against a company which had a significant percentage of Black executive and managerial personnel would develop a more class-conscious attitude toward the Black population. It is precisely the overwhelming concentration of the Black population at the lowest social levels that tends to cause white workers to view Blacks with feelings of fear and contempt. The integration of sections of the ruling class would be paralleled by increased Black-white unity in the working class.

Trade Unions and the State

One of the most difficult problems facing American radicals is the widespread racial discrimination in the trade unions. In dealing with this problem, there is considerable social pressure, particularly on a campus-based group, to follow the lead of the liberals and use government action against discriminatory unions. Thus, most of the California left, including the Independent Socialist Clubs (now called International Socialists [predecessor of the International Socialist Organization]), supported a suit against Harry Bridges’ International Longshore and Warehouse Union under the Civil Rights Act. Likewise, there has been no significant left-wing opposition to the Nixon Administration’s “Philadelphia Plan” for the construction industry [aimed at breaking union hiring halls by setting quotas for minority hiring].

That liberals should look to the state to enforce equal rights in the labor movement is understandable. The fundamental principle of liberalism (and all other forms of capitalist political philosophy) is the supreme authority of the state over all other social institutions. However, Marxists consider the state an instrument of class oppression and regard the labor movement as the legitimate source of all social authority. In calling upon the state to integrate the unions, radicals are calling upon the capitalists to fight their battles for them, in a movement radicals eventually intend (or should intend) to lead against that very state. This is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled. Any increase in state control over the unions, regardless of the ostensible reason, must strengthen capitalism politically and ideologically.

A section of the ruling class realizes that the civil rights issue is an effective way to weaken the unions by turning Black people and middle-class liberals against them. Thus, a recent issue of Fortune magazine—an authoritative organ of the liberal bourgeoisie—contained an attack on the monopolistic abuses of the building trades unions. It concluded with a ten-point program, addressed to construction companies, on how to break the power of the unions. One of the ten points was union de-certification for failing to comply with the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

As the above example shows, ruling-class efforts to control the unions in the name of “public good” are usually a cover for union busting. The Nixon Administration is openly wooing Southern racists and doesn’t even pay lip service to civil rights. The only area of American society where Nixon is pushing civil rights is where unions are the target. This indicates that the motives behind the “Philadelphia Plan” are neither concern for the welfare of Black workers nor response to pressure from below. Rather, the only purpose is to discredit and weaken the labor movement.

When the ruling class seeks to weaken the power of the unions, they do not openly state they’re out to gouge the working class. They look for an attractive-sounding pretext. We are all against organized crime and for internal democracy in the unions. But the Landrum-Griffin Act hasn’t reduced gangsterism in the labor movement. Its principal effect has been to railroad Jimmy Hoffa, a tough and troublesome business unionist. And these laws would be used faster and harder against a communist union leadership than they will ever be used against the Mafia!

Permitting the government to determine the racial policies of unions gives the state a powerful weapon for union busting and influencing the selection of union leadership. And this weapon will not be used in the best interest of the working class. Whatever doubtful immediate gains Black workers get by the government opening up some jobs for them will be more than offset by the losses sustained by the entire working class due to the long-run effects of expanding state control over the labor movement. The only force on which we can rely is an organized, militant, class-conscious rank and file defending the gains of their unions against the bosses, the bureaucrats and the state.

Resolutions

I. In its propaganda and actions, SDS must concentrate on fighting concrete acts and practices of racial oppression, rather than simply opposing racism as a pervasive social attitude.

II. It may at times be necessary to support gains against Black oppression even if they imply short-term economic losses for sections of the white working class. However, our basic propagandistic thrust must be to keep gains for Blacks from being counterposed to white workers’ interests by raising the appropriate demands, and to seek to unite Black and white workers in common struggles.

III. SDS must oppose all forms of racial inequality, including those that are specifically designed to limit the upward mobility of the Black population.

IV. Under all circumstances SDS must oppose the expansion of state control over the labor movement, even when this is done in the name of the rank and file (e.g., fighting corruption, securing racial justice).