The Test Jim [Robertson] Didn’t Pass

[First printed in Bulletin of the External Tendency of the iSt No. 4, May 1985. Copied from http://www.bolshevik.org/ETB/ETB4/ETB4.htm ]

Sycophancy is encouraged in the SL not through flattering speeches about the “genius” or the “infallibility” of Robertson and the rest of the leadership. It is encouraged by promoting a psychology of deference, occasionally reinforced by overt intimidation. Why must one defer to New York’s judgement on even the most trifling of matters? Because the central leadership is a repository of great political experience and capacity. Because they have “passed far more tests” than anyone else in the organization. Because to defy their “authority” is tantamount either to rejecting the political tradition which they “embody” or failing to understand the organizational question.

The central leadership (and Robertson in particular) is the guardian of the Trotskyist program. No one else has earned the right to be the Guardian of The Program. No one else has passed The Test. It’s my party, says Robertson; and he’s right. I am not unsympathetic to J.R. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world that can help him, but I think his psychology is pretty transparent. He’s a big fish in a small pond, a victim of small-group megalomania.

The disproportion between the tasks of the SL and its actual resources got to him a long time ago. The Trotskyist program must be preserved, he reasoned; it is the “last, best hope” for humanity. And who, in our time, has done more to preserve it than anyone else? Unquestionably, it has been Jim. He fought the SWP leadership; he fought Wohlforth; he fought Healy; he fought impressionism, revisionism, bureaucratism, liquidationism like no one else. And against great odds he managed to construct a real, if fragile, international tendency which has managed to preserve the Trotskyist programmatic heritage. The point is: that accomplishment is the justification for the peculiar form of bureaucratization which the SL has undergone. It is a bureaucracy based not on the preservation of privileges (although there are privileges involved); it is a bureaucracy based on a megalomaniacal psychology geared to the preservation of the Trotskyist program. Paradoxical, maybe; but I think it’s the case.

But Jim did fail to pass one test. He didn’t, and probably couldn’t, construct a revolutionary internal regime. The internal regime is unhealthy. The authority invested in Jim and his closest associates is absurd and dangerous. It is not enough to have a formally correct program; one needs a revolutionary party capable of producing real cadres. Jim never rose to this challenge, because of his excessive preoccupation with formal programmatic integrity and political homogeneity. The right balance was not struck. He certainly didn’t even try to strike the balance that Lenin achieved in the Bolshevik party, that Trotsky achieved in the Fourth International, and that Cannon achieved in the SWP. And I think that the reason is plain, and has even been alluded to by J.R. himself. Lenin, Trotsky and Cannon’s organizations all ultimately degenerated. So it was up to J.R. to come up with a new formula (a new balance between democracy and centralism, between program and organization) which would ensure, above all, the integrity of the program. If the SL is evincing programmatic wobbles now, it is the consequence of our failure — the failure of those of us who ate shit out of deference and an acute awareness of our own fallibility — to say what had to be said while we were still members. I hope the ET has the courage to do it now.

— a former leading member of the iSt, January 1984

Appendix: A Bureaucrats Confession

“WHEN YOU SIT IN YOUR ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES IT’S TOO EASY TO BELIEVE THAT YOUR WHOLE MEMBERSHIP IS JUST A BIG BAG OF SHIT THAT THE CENTRAL LEADERSHIP IS DRAGGING BEHIND IT, AND THAT IF THE CENTRAL LEADERSHIP MAKES A SERIOUS POLITICAL MISTAKE, THERE ARE WITHIN YOUR ORGANIZATION NO RESTORATIVE FORCES.”

-Public Speech by Jim Robertson, January 29, 1977

http://archive.org/download/WhatTheSpartacistLeagueReallyStandForASelfExposureByJamesRobertson/Goat_Fucker-WhattheSLReallyStandsFor.pdf

Maurice Thorez: The Making of a Stalinist

by John Sharpe

REVIEW: Maurice Thorez, vie secrete et vie publique by Philippe Robrieux

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #85, 14 November 1975]

Joseph Stalin climbed to the summit of the Comintern over a mountain of strangled revolutions and massacred proletarians. Maurice Thorez rose to the top of the French Communist Party by utter prostration before the counterrevolutionary policies of that “great organizer of defeats.” Early in his career Thorez demonstrated the gutlessness and pliability demanded by the Comintern in the period of its Stalinization. His moment of glory came in the period immediately following World War II, when he personally led the CP’s all-out offensive against the militancy of the French working class, thereby putting a tottering French capitalist system on its feet again.

Thorez rose to prominence in the CP during the early 1920’s. Despite having been closely identified with Stalin, which became a political liability after 1953, Thorez lasted through the period of “de-Stalinization” and remained at the helm of the CP until shortly prior to his death in 1964. In the course of these forty years, only once did Thorez wage a determined fight against his Kremlin mentors: his battle against de-Stalinization and the “Khrushchev revelations.”

The French CP under Thorez faithfully followed every twist and turn of Kremlin policy: from the sectarian “third period” to the popular-front romance with the bourgeoisie; from the Hitler-Stalin pact to the nauseating French chauvinism of “to each his Kraut” after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disarming of the working class which allowed De Gaulle to re-establish bourgeois control after the war; from the post-war “battle of production” during which strikes were declared “the arm of the trusts” to the senseless street confrontations (Ridgeway demonstration) of the 1950’s.

The undoubted high point of Thorez’s public political career was his participation, as one of the CP ministers of De Gaulle’s post-war government, in the restabilization of French capitalism. In France and throughout Western Europe, only the Stalinist and social-democratic parties in which the masses of the working people placed their confidence, could beat back the militancy and revolutionary aspirations of the advanced workers. Thorez personally intervened as the spearhead of the CP’s strikebreaking campaign. In July 1945 he addressed 2,000 striking pro-Communist miners and declared:

“In the name of the Central Committee, in the name of the entire Party, in the name of all the workers. I say to you: The eyes of all France are upon you’. All of France awaits a new and great effort from you… The least defiance on your part would assist the campaigns of the enemies of the people against you yourselves, against the working class, against the nationalizations, against democracy, against France.. I am certain that the call of our Party will be heeded. I am certain that we will win the battle of production as we won the battle of the Liberation.”

Debunking Stalinist “History”

Thorez’s career illustrates the evolution of a Communist militant into a cynical Stalinist hack loyal above all to the preservation of his position as chief of a reformist workers party. Philippe Robrieux’s informative biography (Paris: Fayard, 1975) provides a revealing look at the internal mechanisms of a Stalinist party as it seeks to balance between maintaining the loyalty of its working-class base and upholding the line dictated by the bureaucracy of the Russian degenerated workers state.

Philippe Robrieux was the General Secretary of the CP’s student organization in 1959-60 when he was caught up in and eliminated in the Casanova-Servin affair, the last of the Stalinist purges directed by Thorez. Casanova and Servin were popular long-time leaders, sympathetic to the Italian CP and Khrushchev’s “reforms,” who wanted a certain “liberalization” in the CP, and in particular a more militant policy against the Algerian war. Robrieux’s “crime” was to have criticized Thorez at a Central Committee meeting on the basis of parallel positions. He subsequently “had his eyes opened” by Pierre Broue, of the ostensibly Trotskyist OCI. Due to his former position and personal contacts with one-time members of the CP’s leading committees, Robrieux is in a position to detail the functioning of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine.

The book strips away the layers of prettification which official CP sources apply to even small matters. One indicative anecdote is the story of Thorez’s 1929 arrest. For years Thorez was portrayed as a heroic victim of base treachery; the real chain of events was not even hinted at until after Thorez’s death. In June 1929 Thorez, subject to arrest since 1927 for his anti-militarist articles, attended a clandestine meeting of the Central Committee at a chateau on the outskirts of Paris. Because of the danger of a police raid, careful escape preparations had been made in advance for the three “illegals” – Thorez, Ferrat and Duclos. But when the cops arrived, Thorez lost his head. The other two followed instructions and successfully effected their escape according to plan; Thorez was found cowering in the darkness. having locked himself in a closet.

He was duly arrested. The CP — as part of a “third-period” policy of refusing to legitimize bourgeois authority – had a policy that comrades were to stay in jail rather than pay their fines. It was up to the Political Bureau to decide if a comrade’s usefulness on the outside justified an exception to this procedure. But in April 1930 Thorez unilaterally secured his release by paying the required sum. (Since he had refused to follow the CP’s accepted procedure that functionaries were not entitled to draw their salaries while in prison, it would appear that Thorez even used party money to violate party policy!)

A more important falsification concerns Thorez’s wartime history. Thorez was in the army when in late September 1939, as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Comintern proclaimed the new policy of ” revolutionary defeatism.” With breathtaking suddenness, opposition to thc imperialist war replaced the old line of “anti-fascism.” The CP began to make hasty preparations to preserve its apparatus, which had been swallowed up by the mobilization of the armed forces. It instructed its leaders to desert. Thorez wanted to remain “with the masses” to defend France against Hitler’s Germany, but on Dimitrov’s insistence he dutifully deserted on October 4, only a month after he had enthusiastically answered the mobilization to defend the French fatherland.

On 25 November Thorez was sentenced in his absence to six years imprisonment; on 17 February 1940 he was deprived of his French citizenship. He made his way to Moscow, where he seems to have been kept on a rather tight leash; he completely disappeared from the public eye until his signature appeared on the May 1943 proclamation by which Stalin dissolved the Comintern in order to reassure the Soviet Union’s nervous imperialist allies.

“Revolutionary defeatism” had been only an episode in the line of the French CP. As soon as Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the CPs of every country rushed to align themselves with the imperialist “democracies,” glorifying this turn in an orgy of sickening patriotic fervor. This made Thorez’s Comintern-ordered desertion an embarrassing encumbrance, and so the CP concocted the tale that as late as 1943 Thorez was still hiding in France, hoping to pass him off as some kind of underground resistance hero. After the “liberation” of Paris an amnesty was declared for deserters, but it required considerable haggling between De Gaulle and Moscow before the French government would agree to restore Thorez’s citizenship.

Thorez vs. De-Stalinization

A cowardly bureaucrat, the only time in his long career that Thorez fought a sustained political battle was during his ten-year struggle against de-Stalinization, from 1953 to his death. After Khrushchev’s revelations at the 1956 Twentieth Congress, Thorez linked up with the pro-Stalin bloc led by Molotov and Kaganovich in Russia and internationally by the Chinese. Robrieux is certainly correct when he observes that. whereas the Russians could point to historical scapegoats (e.g.. Stalin, Beria). Thorez as the “First Stalinist of France” would have had to take responsibility for the role he himself had played in inner-party purges (the Barbe-Celor affair in 1931, the Marty-Tillon affair in 1952) and in enforcing the class-collaborationist policies of the Kremlin which time after time sold out potentially revolutionary opportunities for the French proletariat.

Robrieux captures what must have been Thorez’s reasoning – and, with appropriate modifications, that of countless other Stalinist bureaucrats when he writes:

“To admit the truth of Khrushchev’s diatribe was to admit at the verv least that the USSR was far from socialism and that, in a certain sense, everything had to be done over. Then too, didn’t Khrushchev go so far as to insinuate that Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev were not guilty of the crimes of which they were accused? Would he go so far as to rehabilitate them? Then we would have to go back to the years of our youth and turn back to the old masters: Souvarine, Monatte and all the other comrades, slandered, dragged through the mire, crushed, expelled, on whom he had spit, and say to them: you were right!”

In February 1956, therefore, Thorez suppressed Khrushchev’s secret report. When that had become impossible, he systematically attempted to cushion its impact, for example by criticizing Stalin’s “errors” but refusing to let the CP press use the terms of Khrushchev’s report, which referred to Stalin’s “crimes.” As late as November 1956, Thorez publicly stated that “Stalinism did not exist.” Robrieux quotes Thorez’s remark to a trusted Italian collaborator that Khrushchev had “dirtied a splendid, shining, heroic past.”

Forced to pay lip-service to deStalinization, the Thorez regime continued in force, although without some of the more grotesque excesses of the Stalin era. In 1960-61, when the impulse for an Italian-style “liberalization” reared its ugly head in Thorez’s personal fiefdom, the Central Committee, he was more than ready to purge Casanova and Servin, whom he held responsible.

Robrieux himself seems to feed illusions in the de-Stalinizers, both Khrushchev and the French “reformers,” as honest men unfortunately hemmed in and limited by the pro-Stalin forces. This is also the central flaw in the book’s presentation of Thorez’s long Stalinist career. Thorez is presented as an “honest militant” with healthy political instincts, drawn into the Stalinist apparatus due to lack of character. Robrieux refuses to characterize Thorez as a full-blown Stalinist until after World War II and refers to him as “cynical” only after 1956.

Lessons in Betrayal

The detailed description of the manner in which Stalin and his agents accustomed Thorez to betrayal in carefully increasing doses is no doubt accurate: it gives weight to the Russian poet Bebel’s 1937 observation, quoted by Robrieux, that “Stalin doesn’t like spotless biographies.” Many Communists paralleled Thorez’s evolution from a weak, inexperienced and confused militant into a hardened Stalinist. In that sense, Thorez’s biography is the history writ large of countless others. But the key to Thorez’s later evolution into the embodiment of French Stalinism is his first capitulation, which was qualitative. In late 1923, as Secretary of the CP in Pas de Calais, an important mining region in the north of France, Thorez supported Trotsky’s views on the struggle in the Russian party, as presented in the theoretical journal of the French CP, then edited by Boris Souvarine. In the spring of 1924 Thorez, then an alternate member of the Central Committee, indicated his willingness to sign the opposition statement. He personally contributed money for the publication in France of Trotsky’s “New Course.” At first Thorez thought he could swing a majority of the Executive Committee of Pas de Calais, but on 25 May 1924 the pro-troika (Stalin) majority motion was passed without opposition. Unable to endure the prospect of isolation in a tiny minority, Thorez took refuge in an abstention.

After this decisive capitulation Thorez hardened rapidly as a rightist element; in fact, he was aligned more with Zinoviev and then Bukharin than with Stalin in the 1925-29 period. His rapid rise in the French party from 1924 on (he was elevated to the Political Bureau in mid-1926) was due largely to his willingness to turn on his former allies–a trait which, combined with his undoubted organilational talents, made him particularly useful to the emerging Kremlin bureaucracy. Whatever hesitations he may subsequently have had, he had already demonstrated to Stalin’s Comintern representatives that he could be counted on to capitulate and could be used as a token “oppositionist” to lend credence to the bureaucracy’s “good faith.” In short, Thorez owed his ascension to his malleability – that is, to his lack of principle.

In the framework of a meticulous empirical account of the career of Maurice Thorez, Robrieux has presented an objectively devastating indictment of Stalinist class treason. As the personification of the French CP, Thorez personally played a heavy role in breaking the 1936 general strike, which swept the country in a wave of militancy punctuated by countless factory occupations, it was in this context that Thorez on 11 June 1936 made his most famous remark. “It ·is necessary to know how to end a strike.” It is perhaps this sentence which best sums up Thorez’s “contribution” to the working-class movement.

National Committee of the SWP

The Capitalist Witch-Hunt – And How to Fight It

[Reprinted in Fourth International, Vol.11 No.2, March-April 1950,. Copied fromhttp://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol11/no02/swpnc.html ] 

(Note: The following resolution was unanimously adopted by the February 1950 Plenum of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.)

Since the close of the war for “the four freedoms” the American people have been subjected to unparalleled attacks upon their democratic rights. These attacks testify to the ever-sharpening conflict between the monopolist masters of the United States and the interests of the great majority. Determined at all costs to maintain their privileges, powers and profits against the unsatisfied demands of the masses for peace, security, equality and liberty, the representatives of Big Business are compelled to deprive the people of their hard-won rights, destroy democratic institutions and head toward transforming the nation into a police state.

These capitalist-inspired assaults upon civil rights directly threaten the very existence of democracy and the labor movement in the United States. They provide daily proof that the American people cannot preserve, enjoy or enhance their freedoms unless they replace the dictatorship of the plutocracy with their own Workers and Farmers government.

The witch-hunt was planned and initiated by the highest agencies of the capitalist regime. It was unleashed in connection with the cold war under the pretext of eliminating the Stalinists as agents of a foreign power. This maneuver was facilitated by the fact that the Communist Party is so widely discredited, distrusted and detested as an apologist and tool of the counter-revolutionary Kremlin oligarchy.

But subsequent developments have unmistakably shown that the hue-and-cry against the CP was a prelude and cover for an all-out offensive against the basic rights of the entire American people. By now the thought-control system issuing from Washington has invaded almost every important department of American activity and affected the lives and liberties of the most diverse categories of citizens.

Public and private workers alike, teachers and students, scientists and writers, clergymen and lawyers, unemployed and foreign-born have already been caught in the widening net of the witch-hunt.

Totalitarian Methods Used

The witch-hunters resort to a wide variety of reactionary methods and totalitarian techniques. They have instituted purges for opinion, political blacklists and frameup trials. They have done away with traditional safeguards of legal procedure by introducing the practices of conviction without hearings or trial; acceptance of the doctrine of “guilt by association”; presumption of guilt in the absence of proved innocence; and punishment of attorneys for the defense. They have developed the FBI into a far-flung secret political police, relying on stool-pigeons and paid informers.

They have pressed every branch of the government into their service. The administration conducts its purge by usurping unconstitutional powers by decree. Congress enacts anti-labor legislation like the Taft-Hartley Law and subsidizes odious investigating bodies like the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The courts levy fines and issue injunctions against labor organizations like the miners. Posing as champions of “law and order,” the Attorney-General and FBI do not hesitate to flout the law by wiretapping, perjury, etc.

The two principal weapons of the witch-hunters have been Truman’s loyalty program and the Smith “Gag” Act. The first proscribes organizations solely because of their views and penalizes their members and supporters by arbitrary administrative action. Organizations are placed on the Attorney-General’s blacklist without notification, hearings, or specification of charges. There is no precedent in American history for such an official political blacklist which is borrowed from the “thought-control” arsenal of totalitarian states.

The government purge with its subversive blacklist has provided the inspiration, model and sanction for the entire campaign against civil rights.

The Smith “Gag” Act, first invoked in 1941 to imprison the 18 Trotskyists, has now been employed to stage a political trial and convict 11 leaders of the Communist Party. The upholding of the Stalinist convictions by the higher courts would considerably promote the government’s aim to outlaw and suppress all minority political parties to its left.

The Aim – War and Fascism

All these measures serve to pave the way for still harsher legal and extra-legal moves against the rights and liberties of the American people. The monopolists and militarists are deliberately working with a twofold end in view.

First, they are perfecting plans to impose a totalitarian military dictatorship in the event of war. The drive of American imperialism toward world domination and its preparations for war against the Soviet Union require regimentation of American labor, militarization of the country, and the suppression of tendencies and voices critical of imperialist policies and practices.

Second, the witch-hunters are provoking mass hysteria against “reds” and against labor to create a political and psychological climate in which the most vicious ultra-reactionary ideals, forces and activities can operate with impunity. A series of incidents over the past year indicates how the atmosphere generated by the witch-hunt encourages and incites mob violence against blacklisted groups, Negroes, Jews and union leaders. Most spectacular were the attacks on two Robeson concerts near Peekskill where the local press, police and officials collaborated with hoodlums and legionnaires to beat up hundreds of people peacefully exercising their right to assembly.

The North witnessed an attack upon a white union organizer in Chicago who had invited Negro fellow unionists to his home; the South saw a reign of terror in Groveland, Florida, where the entire Negro community was driven out in fear of their lives.

This atmosphere has contributed to the renewal of murderous attempts on labor leaders, including the shooting of Victor Reuther, the placing of dynamite in the UAW headquarters in Detroit, the assassination of ILGWU organizer William Lurye in New York, etc.

The ultimate aim of the capitalist forces behind the witch-hunt is to stamp out all organized opposition to their autocratic rule. This means, above all, to cripple and crush the mighty labor organizations. The anti-union provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act are interwoven with its anti-communist clauses. The destruction of the unions cannot be decisively effected without eventual resort to fascism. Taft-Hartleyism, red-baiting, political blacklisting, thought-control, the instigation and protection of mob violence, race-hate are typical pre-fascist phenomena. They serve warning that the present witch-hunt is ploughing the ground and sowing the seeds for the future sprouting of outright fascist movements in the United States.

Role of the Union Bureaucracy

Only in the light of these circumstances is it possible to gauge the real role of the top union leaders and the full measure of their betrayal of the cause of democratic rights. Organized labor leagued with the Negro people and other minority groups can summon more than enough power and pressure to halt the onslaught of reaction. But the union officialdom has been unwilling and unable to mobilize these forces in a mighty protest movement.

The union bureaucrats cannot combat the enemies of civil rights because they support the main foreign and domestic policies which have produced the witch-hunt as well as the Truman administration which is its prime author and promoter. Moreover, they have themselves become indispensable cogs in the witch-hunting apparatus.

With rare exceptions, the union leaders either enthusiastically endorse the prosecution of the CP under the Smith Act or take a non-committal attitude toward it. Although formally on record against the Truman purge of government employees, they do not offer any vigorous opposition to its operations. They do not even put up a principled fight against the penetration of the purge system into private industry through political blacklisting, restricting and firings of union members in the plants.

Because of their commitment to State Department policy and tolerance of Truman’s purge they are compelled to make one concession after another to the witch-hunters. Their resistance is actually reduced to occasional ineffective, halfhearted complaints against the most flagrant abuses and worst excesses of the drive against civil rights.

Far from heading a mass movement against the witch-hunters, the AFL and CIO officialdom is busy carrying out parallel purges of their opponents within the unions. Here the concern of the union bureaucracy for self-preservation meshes into the “cold-war” plans of US imperialism and its political executives. The union leaders seek to cover up for their lack of fighting spirit against labor’s foes and the failure of their policies to improve the workers’ condition by an orgy of red-baiting, not simply against the Stalinists, but against Trotskyists and other militants. They hope to forestall and stamp out all criticism in the ranks by a wild hue-and-cry against the “Commies,” by penalties, intimidation and expulsions of union members and their spokesmen.

The AFL leadership has long been notorious for red-baiting. The new factor is the involvement of the CIO and the unrestrained participation of its top officials in the anti-red crusade. This came to a climax in the 1949 National CIO Convention where the Murray machine voted itself unprecedented centralized authority over all CIO affiliates; established discriminatory political conditions for full membership rights by barring “communists” from CIO national offices; ousted the the United Electrical Workers and moved to expel other Stalinist-controlled unions.

The purge begun against the Stalinists is being extended to other individuals and groups disagreeing with the Murray machine or the anti-democratic actions bound up with its “CIO National Policy.” The crudest application of this purge is taking place in the National Maritime Union where Curran’s machine has instituted loyalty pledges, resorted to large-scale expulsions, trampled on the elementary rights of the members and even called in the cops to suppress the majority opposition in New York. Similar, purges and unconstitutional expulsions have occurred in the AFL maritime unions, the SUP on the West Coast and the SIU on the East Coast.

The bureaucrats are abusing their complete control of the union apparatus, the hiring hall and the closed-shop, not only to deprive critical union members of their democratic rights, but also of their jobs.

Thus the struggle to maintain democracy inside the trade unions against the bureaucracy is directly linked with the struggle against the witch-hunters on a national scale.

Treachery of the Stalinist Leaders

Although the main target of the anti-red drive, the Stalinist leaders have followed a no less perfidious policy in the field of civil rights’ than have the AFL and CIO officialdom. In 1941 the CP applauded the prosecution of the 18 Trotskyists in Minneapolis under the Smith Act which provided the precedent for their own trial and conviction in 1949. This conduct in turn has given union officials a precedent and plausible pretext for turning their backs upon Stalinist victims of the witch-hunt. Where the Stalinists have sought support beyond their own circles they have found themselves confronted with their rotten record of civil rights, and especially their denial of support to the Trotskyists.

The apologists for the totalitarian rule and countless crimes of the Kremlin find it difficult to come forward as exponents of democracy either in foreign affairs or in the trade unions. The Stalinist controlled unions are notorious for their lack of democracy, bureaucratic practices, and suppression of free speech.

Even now while under severe repression, the Stalinist leaders continue their criminal behavior, although it harms their own defense and enormously discredits them before public opinion. They try to sabotage aid for James Kutcher and oppose a presidential pardon and restoration of civil rights to the 18 Trotskyists. They demonstrated at the national Bill of Rights Conference in New York in July 1949 that they preferred to blow up a promising united-front defense movement rather than support any demand for civil rights to their political opponents.

The American agents of the Kremlin have amply shown that they cherish as little regard for the elementary duty of class solidarity and united action against the witch-hunt as the union leaders who follow the line of the State Department. Their symmetrical policies of denying support to political opponents reinforce each other, helps the forces of repression, and weakens the fight against them.

Growing Resistance to the Witch-Hunt

The American people have a firm attachment to democratic principles and glorious traditions of fighting for them. Over the past year there have been multiplying signs of resentment against the witch-hunters and a growing resistance to their attacks on civil; rights.

The disclosures in connection with the Coplon trial that J. Edgar Hoover’s secret political police was operating a huge network of paid informers and stoolpigeons, invading the private lives of many citizens and breaking the law by widespread wiretapping have called forth protests from prominent public figures, metropolitan newspapers, and even US Senators.

Numerous leading educators, learned societies and professional groups have criticized the encroachments on academic freedom arising from loyalty tests, red-hunts, and the drive for ideological conformity. Presidents and faculties of universities in California, Illinois, New York and elsewhere have vigorously spoken out for free thought and free expression in the face of attempts to saddle their institutions with loyalty tests. This opposition stopped the textbook-burning plans of the House Un-American Committee.

The National Conference of the NAACP took a strong stand against the entire witch-hunt as an instrument of racial as well as political discrimination. The National Civil Rights Mobilization conference at Washington this January grew out of the distrust and impatience of the Negro people at the failure to enact civil rights legislation.

Among the most encouraging manifestations of the determination to combat the loyalty purge has been the broad range of backing behind James Kutcher’s case. Outstanding representatives of almost every section of the American people menaced by the thought-controllers have come forward to support his campaign, including hundreds of national, state and local unions.

The volume of protest has become so loud and the alarm among many of his liberal supporters so acute that Truman has had to issue soothing hypocritical assurances that the “hysteria” his administration fosters will soon die out.

“Critical” Supporters and Opponents

Two different attitudes toward the witch-hunt can be observed among the liberals. On the right, the Social Democrats inspired by the New Leader philosophy and other Trumanites have eagerly participated in the anti-communist campaign, although now and then deprecating certain “excesses” of its overzealous executors. These elements prefer a purge limited for the present to the Stalinists.

But the direct agents of the monopolists and militarists pay no heed to such reservations but take advantage of the red-scare and cold war propaganda to proceed against all opponents of their policies. They are even using the Hiss verdict to smear highly placed figures in the witch-hunting administration itself as dupes or tools of the “reds.”

Against these collaborators with the witch-hunters stands another group of more militant and consistent liberals, a number of them associated with the Wallace movement, who are genuinely concerned over the drive toward a police-state and have proved willing to defend the rights of all victims of the repression, regardless of their political ideas or affiliations. It was these non-Stalinist liberals and Wallaceites who opposed the Stalinists and joined with SWP representatves at the national Bill of Rights Conference and elsewhere to uphold the principled position of defending civil rights for all.

Moreover, numerous members, unionists and sympathizers of the CP have balked against accepting the shameful and suicidal Stalinist line.

All these forces rising to resist the imposition of thought control upon America provide the basis for building a powerful united front mass movement dedicated to the preservation and extension of civil liberties.

Capitalism, Stalinism and Democracy

Pointing to Stalinism as the horrible example, the propagandists of Big Business assert that socialism means slavery and that maintenance of the so-called “free-enterprise” capitalist system is the sole guarantee for preserving liberty in America. They are guilty of a double lie. First of all, the capitalist rulers and their henchmen who are carrying on the witch-hunt are the chief enemies of civil liberties and labor’s rights today in the United States.

In the second place, Stalinism is not only anti-democratic but anti-socialist to the core. Stalinist totalitarianism flows from the irreconcilable hostility of the Soviet bureaucracy and its agents to the program and advocates of socialism.

The real situation is quite different. From the standpoints of both democracy and socialism, there are many bonds of identity between imperialism and Stalinism. Despite their different social bases, the destruction of democracy, either through the witch-hunts of the capitalists or the police-state methods of the Stalinists, have a common source in the concern for the perpetuation of the powers and interests of privileged groupings and their fear of the masses. That is why the imperialists and Stalinists can so often and easily join hands and align themselves against the interests of the people.

On the other hand, a movement which defends the welfare of the people and has no interests separate or apart from them, has no reason either to fear the masses or hesitate to submit everything to their judgment and decision. The struggle for emancipation from capitalist domination and all forms of servitude can be most easily and effectively conducted under conditions of the greatest freedom for the masses. That is why, while recognizing the inherent limitations of freedom under capitalist rule and in class society, revolutionary socialists have always demanded the widest possible democracy and have everywhere been in the forefront of all struggles for the defense and extension of the liberties of the people.

Today the intensified reactionary offensive against civil rights and the free functioning of the trade unions makes the struggle against the capitalist witch-hunters the urgent task of every worker and every individual concerned with the advancement of American society.

Unconditional Defense of All Victims

The cardinal rule of this struggle must be the unconditional defense of all victims of reactionary repression and united opposition to every restriction upon democratic rights. “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Toleration or support to the infringement of the rights of any group or individual emboldens the witch-hunters and opens the way for further assaults upon others.

The Stalinists have provided a memorable lesson of the dangers arising from violating working class democracy and the principle of class solidarity. They began by breaking up meetings of political opponents; then refused to defend their opponents against persecution; and finally called upon capitalist authorities, including the FBI, to act against their opponents. These disreputable deeds have not only boomeranged against them but inflicted great damage in the entire field of labor defense by nullifying unity of action and handing the union bureaucracy an excuse for a parallel line of conduct.

Despite our irreconcilable differences, despite the crimes committed against our movement and the interests of labor by the Stalinists, we Trotskyists have invariably supported Stalinist victims of repression and called upon the rest of the working class to do the same. We follow this policy, not out of agreement with the Stalinists or in remission of their crimes, but solely because of our unwavering adherence to the principle of class solidarity.

SWP Champions Solidarity Policy

Our party has become the banner-bearer and outstanding practitioner of this policy in the United States. We have consistently come to the aid of all victims of reaction, not only here but abroad. We have defended conscientious objectors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Puerto Rican Nationalists, foreign-born workers, Anarchists, liberal clergymen, teachers, scientists, writers and magazines threatened by censorship, civil service employees and many others. We have initiated and participated in many significant struggles to protect persecuted minorities like the Negroes, Mexicans and Jews, as in the Fontana, California case, the Hickman defense in Chicago, the Freeport case in New York, In Minneapolis, Los Angeles and elsewhere we have taken the lead in mobilizing labor and its allies to defend themselves against the threatened fascist violence of Gerald L.K. Smith.

In Detroit and other industrial centers our members and sympathizers helped set in motion imposing union protest demonstrations against the Taft-Hartley Law. Within the unions the Trotskyists have been steadfast fighters against any restrictions upon internal democracy and the rights of the membership, whether they emanated from the official bureaucracy or the Stalinists.

Notably around the Minneapolis Trial and the Kutcher case we have participated in and supported powerful national movements against the Smith Gag Act and Truman’s loyalty purge.

This proud record has attracted many militants toward our party and won it a growing reputation as a sincere and principled defender of democratic rights.

Liberals, labor officials and the Stalinists often call upon the government and its agencies for action against ultra-reactionary elements. Jewish groups, for example, request the Post Office Department to ban anti-Semitic literature from the mails. Defaming the Trotskyists as agents of fascism, the Stalinists during the war demanded the suppression of The Militant, etc.

No Dependence on Capitalist State

The working class and the minorities must vigorously oppose every transgression upon their civil and constitutional rights, from whatever quarter they come, and utilize every safeguard provided by law. But they cannot entrust the protection of their liberties to the capitalist regime or expect the powers-that-be to stop or eradicate the menace of fascism.

First, the government itself today spearheads the assault upon the people’s rights. The President orders the loyalty purge; Congress passes anti-labor legislation; the courts levy fines and issue injunctions against the unions. Second, the capitalist parties work hand in glove with white supremacists in the South and the Big Business enemies of labor in the North who are behind the witch-hunt.

Third, the authorities have time and again demonstrated by their action and inaction their lack of interest in punishing or removing the perpetrators of violence against the Negroes, the unions and the liberties of the people. Neither the Federal or State governments convict any lynchers in the South. Nor have the officials displayed much zeal in uncovering the murderous assailants of Carlo Tresca, William Lurye, the Reuthers, and other labor figures.

Government Shields Fascist Elements

On the contrary, the capitalist state apparatus screens and shields fascist forces and collaborates closely with them. In Peekskill the local authorities and police connived in the attacks by the mobsters and hoodlums; Governor Dewey’s investigators whitewashed their role; and the entire paid press tried to unload responsibility for the violence upon the “reds.”

Even when, under pressure, government officials pretend to move against mobsters and Ku Kluxers, they only make theatrical gestures to appease outraged public opinion without actually punishing the real criminals. For every slight tap the capitalist agencies offer the right, they deliver a hundred harsh blows, against the left. This has been illustrated by the Smith Act. While the 30 Fascists indicted under this Act in wartime were left off scot-free, the Trotskyists and Stalinists were convicted and given heavy jail sentences.

The same procedure has been followed in the loyalty purge. While the Attorney-General’s blacklist includes a few fascist groups, in practice it is almost entirely applied against members of leftist organizations. The US Department of Defense has given away the whole game by omitting the Ku Klux Klan, Silver Shirts and similar fascist outfits from its own subversive list applied to draftees.

“Under conditions of a capitalist regime,” Trotsky once wrote, “all curtailment of political rights and freedoms, no matter against whom they may be originally directed, in the end inevitably fall with all their weight on the working class – especially on its most advanced elements.”

How to Fight Fascism

Class-conscious workers should not fall into the trap of demanding infringements of anyone’s civil rights, including those of the fascists. At the same time they should recognize the real situation and make it plain to others. The civil rights of fascist elements are not being threatened; the authorities are in league with them. They are in no danger of persecution or need of defense. They are not the victims but the sponsors and beneficiaries of the current repressions.

The menace of fascism does not arise from their propaganda but from their gangsterism, their mob attacks upon advanced workers, Negroes, and labor organizations. With tacit acquiescence of the authorities, the fascists operate as extra-legal agencies of repression against the institutions and freedoms of the working class and minorities. Consequently, the real situation is that the labor organizations and minorities are obliged to act in self-defense to protect themselves against reactionary violence.

The history of Italy and Germany conclusively proves the folly and futility of relying upon the capitalist government, its police, or its parties in the fight against the fascists. The masses can safeguard their rights, their lives and their organizations only by mobilizing the full strength of their own forces in the most vigorous united and independent defensive actions against the race-bigots, anti-Semites, union-busters and mobsters who threaten them.

Organized labor has the ability as well as the duty to assume the leadership in this struggle. The trade unions are not only the chief bulwarks of democracy and, the centers of proletarian power; they are likewise the main target of the capitalist authors of the witch-hunt whose ultimate objective is the destruction of the labor movement. The anti-labor campaign and anti-red hysteria are inseparable aspects of the monopolist drive toward the establishment of a police state in this country. Thus the defense of civil liberties is a life-and-death matter for American labor.

Without full democracy and freedom of expression inside the unions, they cannot effectively fulfill their tasks of defending the welfare of the workers and leading the struggle against reaction. Thus the fight for union democracy is directly interlinked with the general struggle for civil liberties.

Program and Perspective

The objective of our party is the creation of a broad nationwide defense movement, composed of all forces menaced by repression and devoted to the defense of all victims of reaction. Such a movement would revive on a higher level the spirit of class solidarity characterizing the pre-World War I Socialist and labor movements.

It is both possible and necessary to join together extensive forces on a national and local scale in common defense actions around specific issues and cases, as the experience in the Kutcher case and the demonstrations against Gerald Smith indicate. The militants should be on the alert to propose and initiate such united front actions, participate in them with all available resources, guide them along correct lines and imbue them with the maximum strength.

The Truman administration and its liberal spokesmen spread the illusion that the present wave of repression is the result of a temporary hysteria which will soon run its course and automatically exhaust itself. The workers should not permit themselves to be duped by this deliberate lie.

The trends toward thought-control and the police state spring from the most profound and urgent needs of the monopolist and militarist rulers of US capitalism. Washington has organized and carried forward the loyalty purge and its associated prosecutions in the most planned and methodical manner. The witch-hunters do not intend to relax their persecutions but to intensify and extend them, if they can get away with it.

The repressive measures are not an episodic phase or transitory phenomenon but a permanent feature of decaying capitalism. The only way to stop the witch-hunters and their assaults is to create and set into motion a mighty mass opposition to them and to carry through the struggle againsl capitalist reaction to its logical conclusion in the establishment of a Workers’ and Farmers’ government, genuinely representing the people’s interests.

James P. Cannon Memorial Meeting

by Jim Robertson

27 August 1974

[First printed in Spartacist #38-39, Summer 1986]

We have had a bittersweet response to Jim Cannon for a long time, and so when he died we had a false-but real feeling of loss. The loss took place a long time ago, but it was still incorporated in the living body of the man that is no more. I don’t have any thesis to propound tonight but I will argue that he does belong to us, not to the SWP.  And he obviously knew pretty well long before he died, not that he belonged to us, but that he did not belong to the SWP.

What I want to present to you tonight is what the historians call oral history. I was told these things by senior comrades of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Workers Party (WP) who were in a position to know directly the various observations, anecdotes and characterizations. There is an inevitable slippage in the absence of documentation. But I believe it to be true. I believe it to be true not only in general, but precisely.

There is always a problem of generations in their understanding. I was raised in the WP (at the age of most of you) with the proposition that Jim Cannon was a supreme c1iquist, the meanest tiger in the bureaucratic jungle (and the phrase “bureaucratic jungle” is a standard phrase from the Shachtmanite movement). Then I joined the SWP and found that it was inconceivable from every aspect that Cannon could have been a c1iquist. He was a hard and lonely man. And I wondered why.

Here’s an anecdote. Bill Farrell, who was the organizer in San Francisco during the Shachtman fight, had occasion as a seaman to do an important courier mission. He came thousands of miles under a very difficult period, walked into comrade Cannon’s office and said: Here’s the stuff. Cannon said: All right, thank you, go. No backslapping, no glass of whiskey. no nothing. Cannon was an aloof man.

Art Sharon, who was the first SWP member of the United Secretariat, a very senior guy, always used to say, “James Perfidious Cannon.” And Sharon was a hard Cannonite! He was an old bosun turned construction site chief.

And I wondered why. You’ll find a clue in some of Cannon’s writings. The Cannon faction in the Communist Party (CP) was not the Cannon faction, it was not the Cannon/Shachtman faction; it was the Cannon/ Dunne faction. Dunne (William Dunne, Bill Dunne) stood a little less in stature than Cannon but was a strong independent leader, a figure of the American CP in the 1920s. They were very close collaborators: Cannon being the political leader, Dunne being the trade unionist. They were very close personally. Bill and Margaret Dunne and Jim and Rose Cannon shared an apartment in New York (they call them “communes” today I think but the reason was the same: cheap rent). They were very close. There were also a lot of other Dunne boys, about five of them. But Bill Dunne had the misfortune to be on Comintern assignment in Outer Mongolia when the Trotskyist split came in the United States. So he stayed with the CP. That was Cannon’s last best friend so far as I know. He didn’t have any other friends after that; he became personally entirely family-oriented.

Cannon had been through a lot of political battles already. As I trust all of you know, he’d been an ardent young Wobbly-looked to Vincent St. John-in the best revolutionary syndicalist section of the IWW. Then he went through all the factional brawls in the CP and wasn’t destroyed. I just don’t think he made any more friends after that. I think he probably felt that political friendships were too impermanent, and he stuck with his family.

The idea of this guy as a cliquist is absurd! In fact, the human dimension of the founding cadre of American Trotskyism was added by Martin Abern. Martin Abern was not a cliquist in the way that we know the word “cliquist.” He happened to be a very warm, sympathetic human being, an effective organizer, and deeply repelled by the cold, aloof Cannon. You want some of the testimony? The SWP’s Education/or Socialists series published “The Abern Clique” in which Joseph Hansen, a young Abernite, recounts how he was won over by this cold, aloof, impersonal James P. Cannon on the basis of the issues. I think that Cannon, out of personal hurt, bent the stick the other way and genuinely was not accessible in understanding the personal side of politics, the personal needs of comrades. So those needs, which we all carry, tended to become the monopoly of the Abern/ Shachtman group. The warmth and geniality of the Abern/Shachtman group were not artificial; they actually did service a part of the needs of the membership. This in turn assisted in laying the basis for a certain dual power situation in the American Trotskyist movement for ten years.

So why do we talk about Cannon’? Comrade Cannon for a number of decades in his prime evidently had “merely” one capacity, which has been sneered at, in a fundamental article by Shachtman which I’ll get to later, and extravagantly by all kinds of mice like Tim Wohlforth and every sort of wiseacre (Wohlforth by his own modest admission is the first American Marxist). All that comrade Cannon could do-and it was not a personal capacity but was evolved out of his times and out of his battles-was to be the successful strategist and leader of a proletarian revolution in North America! That was what he was. That was his strength and that’s why we memoriaiize him now.

I don’t know much about his early history. Let me talk a bit about his wife. Rose Karsner was a very strong individual and seems to fit the stereotype of the hidden history of women. You will hardly find a documentary track of her record. She was a pretty tough cookie and played a major role: there was obviously always a significant political collaborative relationship between Rose Karsner and Jim Cannon. It was manifestly there.

Near the end I saw it myself. It was the last time I ever saw Cannon, and Rose had come in from listening to that horrible woman who wrote something about how Shakespeare was a Marxist: Annette Rubenstein. Rubenstein was on tour and Rose drew the assignment to go. She came back while I was sitting there talking with old Jim. She walked in, a sprightly little creature, kind of like a sparrow, and said “Garbage! Disgusting! Stalinist!” Just laid it all over the old man.

They did not come together when they were young. Rose Karsner had been David Karsner’s wife. He was an early biographer of Debs. They had had at least one child. She came to work in the International Labor Defense (ILD) that Cannon was running, and rapidly became assistant director. I do know that when Cannon was out of town she reported to the PolCom on behalf of the ILD.

About Cannon’s kids. One of them died quite miserably and tragically. This is a piece of party history that will sound very strange in terms of the SWP of today-like an act of idiot adventurism. Those who say that the SWP during the period of the Second World War was not trying to be internationalist ought to think on this. The SWP knew that the Russian political revolution was very important.

We had many party seamen in those days; some went on the Murmansk run. Comrade Bill is old enough to know what that meant-whole convoys were dispersed and you lasted 30 seconds in the water. Take a look at that book Maritime by Frederick J. Lang (Frank Lovell) and you’ll see how many seaman comrades were lost in the war. One of them was Cannon’s kid [son-in-law Edward Parker].

I knew a party comrade [Barney Cohen] (he was in the U.S. Navy) out ofthe Boston branch. Murmansk convoys were made up on the East Coast, final assembly was in Boston. Then they would make the bigjump, around North Cape (where they’d die) and then to Murmansk in north Russia. Finally the branch insurrected as the convoy was assembling-they went in and pulled all of the party comrades off that convoy (which of course was shot to pieces). That insurrection taught the party leadership something: that this was a mechanical thing that was using up the party members.

I want to talk about a couple of myths or rumors about Cannon. They say he drank … (I got an awful lot of this in the Shachtmanite organization, believe me.) Well he drank all right. But he wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a drunkard. He’d go off the wagon once in a while on a big bender. Rose used to track him all across the country. She was really worried when he left town. He’d make promises; she’d try to monitor him. She exercised a lot of control and tried to suppress it. I don’t know about the earlier drinking, but one of the last bouts he ever had (and he quit long before he died) was I think in about 1955. He hit San Francisco on one of the last tours he ever made. They had stashed him in a hotel but the old boy got loose, and he laid one on. They found him, and the organizer (a nice woman, Francis James, a Weissite) was really angry. They started pouring coffee into him, denouncing him, saying they were going to phone New York and have his ass before the National Committee. How could he do such a thing? Well, they got him pretty sobered up (they thought) and brought him into the meeting. The SWP had little affectations in those days, so they had Nora Roberts and a couple of other little girls running around collecting money from the audience. Cannon gave what was apparently a magnificent speech, and the baskets of money came forward. And he started taking the money and throwing the bills all over the stage!

Rose found out about it, of course, and I think that was the last time he ever broke loose on tour. Seriously. And you see what I mean about anecdotes. This story is testified to by four or five comrades that were present at that incident, but it’s still oral history. It really happened (that’s why I’m taking the trouble to tell it to you) but I don’t think one can put this in an obituary. I guess Cannon was under a lot of pressure and that this was a safety valve.

By the way, Rose was a militant socialist feminist of the 1910s and 1920s. “Feminist” meant something else then among other things was that marriage was an abomination: it was bowing down and putting on chains before a man and before the state. So Rose would never marry, and she and Cannon were never married until they got very old and were told that if they were to get Social Security in retirement they’d have to get married. They were in their sixties when they went through the legal ceremony-and then, to her utter disgust-they found out that an affidavit instead of this odious act would have done it! But I have to regretfully report to you that they died as man and wife.

The main source-virtually the only source that I know of-for all anti-Cannon material comes out of an article that Max Shachtman wrote in the January-February 1954 issue of New International (“25 Years of American Trotskyism”- Part I of a two-part appraisal). In order to set Cannon up for the attack, Shachtman had to acknowledge as a precondition that Cannon was the finest communist politician ever produced in this country. Having explained the importance of the target, Max then went to work on demolishing the target. And everything that Wohlforth and others have written against Cannon is drawn straight out of that article! Nobody wants to acknowledge that, because the author and the circumstances aren’t too creditable.

Shachtman only wrote part one, carrying the story through 1940, and we waited for a long time but he never could write part two. The reason was that it was already pretty late and he was getting ready to liquidate the International Socialist League (ISL) and to acknowledge that there was no systematic and principled basis for a centrism that stood between the revolutionary Marxism of Trotsky and the social democracy. He’d arrived at that conclusion, so he just could not write a history going beyond 1940. But he tried to do the job on Cannon-did a pretty good job, too, everybody has borrowed from it.

But there is a problem here and I want to talk about it a little bit. Most of life is contradictory and equivocal. It’s not written in black and white but in shades of grey-which at the same time possess qualitative decisiveness. And it’s that combination-that everything is in shades of grey and at the same time behind the shades of grey lie fundamental truth and falsity-which is one of the hardest things in historical interpretation. It is necessary to grasp this in order to arrive at the answer of what to do today.

It is unfortunate that there are not many more of the historical materials of Russian Menshevism available, so that the comrades could be treated to just how plausible, how often correct, how sensible, the Mensheviks were (on many occasions) as against the Bolsheviks. What we have handed down to us instead is a version of “revealed truth” as from the Bible: Lenin said such and such, Martov said such and such; obviously Lenin was right and Martov was wrong. That is the fundamental truth. But if you had been there then, comrades, it would not have been so obvious, and over particulars Martov would have been right! And Trotsky, then a Menshevik, would have been right on certain key political questions too. That is the problem of historical interpretation: it is not a religious act, to find an essential purity which because it is essential must therefore be total. If the comrades learn nothing else from their reading and their study, they should learn that. Because when faction fights break out around us, there’s going to be so much truth on both sides that if you resort to either accepting secondary grounds as your basic determinant of action, or, if you resort to the ultimate philistinism: “Well, there’s truth on both sides, and where there’s smoke there’s fire”-then you had better give up and start trying to sell used cars.

So there’s a problem with contradictory, equivocal phenomena, and Cannon was contradictory. Cannon had an abiding failure. He became the principal individual authority responsible for the world Trotskyist movement in August 1940 and basically didn’t do anything about it (though the SWP was internationalist and willing to commit energy, lives). I think the reason was pretty simple: Cannon felt he was not good enough to be a world leader of the Marxist movement, and he was right.

He had just come back from France. We secured a particularly rare internal SWP bulletin containing Cannon’s report on his trip to France in 1939. The trip, it is clear, was a catastrophe. Cannon didn’t know French; the French leaders ignored him. He saw that the situation was going utterly to hell. He had at his fingertips a mass of experience in how to function-nobody would listen. Cannon spent six months in France while Shachtman, Burnham and Abern were doing the job back home. The trip was a failure: Cannon found that he could not work internationally. That was in 1939-then came the big fight in ’40.

And then suddenly he was supposed to be the principal political leader. moreover under conditions in which the world, as a result of the Second World War, was desperately segmented. So he backed away from the role, temporized during the war. As soon as Michel Pablo, Pierre Frank and Ernest Mandel came along and claimed they knew how to do it-claimed they had the language capacity, the knowledge, the science, the savoir-faire (poor old Jim; he’s just an ex-train worker from the Midwest) Cannon said all right, these guys will do it. They don’t have any experience; they don’t know anything; they’re arrogant. (There’s a phrase that the fancy sociologists in colleges like to use-and when I had to fight Shachtmanite right-wingers I learned plenty of these sociological jargon/ mystification words-called “hubris.” And among other qualities good and bad, Pablo sure had hubris!)

So Cannon backed off, and we’re stuck with the job. He stuck us with it doubly. Because he was a lot better than we are-and when I say “he” I mean not only Cannon personally but the immediate working crew that made up the “Cannon regime” (horrible word: for 20 years every Shachtmanite thrilled with horror at the image of the jackbooted, anti-intellectual, vicious Cannon regime).

Well there was a Cannon regime, and they were doing the best they could. But they didn’t accept the international challenge, and yet it is an obligation. Yes, if you know that you don’t know anything, go patiently, quietly, perseveringly; struggle with the greatest patience and attention for international collaborators. We have to go that way, not back off and wait in national isolation for somebody else to come forward and say, “I can do it,” and then we say, “all right; we’ll give you our authority.” We have to persist; we have to intervene.

That was Cannon’s abiding failure. And then he did it to us a second time, in the 1952-53 period. The party got all geared up in 1945-46: it was growing like crazy; it survived the Smith Act convictions; recruited a thousand workers, black and white-the first black Trotskyist cadre hundreds of white steel workers, auto workers both black and white. And so they said, “Whoopee,” and Cannon wrote The Coming American Revolution. It was an affirmation of the power of the proletariat, but already it had faults-I’ll give you three right off the bat: it ignored racial divisiveness; it ignored the existence of the Communist Party; and it ignored the rest of the world outside the United States! Allowing only for these three criticisms, it was really great. Really. That’s called an equivocal position. Ardent SWPers sworn to protect their heritage no matter what will say it was a perfect set of theses; if you run into somebody who says Cannon never did nothing right they’ll say it was an abomination.

It had a strength: it was an affirmation of the power of the proletariat in America. That stands out, like a beacon. At the same time it was badly politically flawed, and the reaction which would have come anyhow was perhaps intensified by the weaknesses in the document. “Cannon promised us this and that, and now we’re losing all our members and we’re getting cynical; we’ve got to find a shortcut, and besides the Stalinists do exist”-you got the phenomenon of American Pabloism, which is not exactly the same thing as European Pabloism.

Cannon was a good faction fighter. I recommend to you comrades to go and read either Theodore Draper’s American Communism and Soviet Russia or Cannon’s The First Ten Years of American Communism on the faction Cannon put together in 1923-1924. He got six thousand Finnish farmers, two internecine warring factions of the Jewish Federation, more mutually hostile trade unionists, disgruntled elements in the other factions-and he put it all together and made it go. Well, he did the same thing in 1952-53, and it was a catastrophic mistake. The Cochranites attacked on two fronts: they attacked Trotskyism as a political program and they attacked the existence of an independent SWP organization. We had about a hundred young comrades under Murry and Myra Weiss, mainly in Los Angeles, in the party at the time. And they still had some spunk and steam. So the Cannon/Weiss faction was formed of those who wanted to defend the party program. Go and read what Murry Weiss wrote in the I’-‘filitant in the summer of 1953 on the East German uprising: Hurray, the proletariat raises its fist. The need now is for a Leninist party to consummate the political revolution and lay the foundation for the revolution against capitalist imperialism! Very good, very correct. You can also read what the Cochranites had to say: Hurray, the Russian bureaucracy is liberalizing itself. In the same paper, sometimes on facing pages.

But the Cochranites also proposed to liquidate the independent party organization, which meant to attack the wages and pensions of Farrell Dobbs, Tom Kerry, Hansen, and a bunch of other fellows who were perfectly content to let the European Pabloites do anything they wanted, or to pursue any pOlitical line in this country, as long as it was going to be pursued from the organizational framework of the SWP. (And this isn’t just a venal question of needing operations which the party would pay for, pensions and the like. The organization was their whole life.) They had become politically blunted but were not prepared to organizationally liquidate.

So the political revisionism and organizational liquidationism of the American Pabloites brought together in response a common faction, which was a bloc inside the SWP, of Cannon and Dobbs. The deal was made to get rid of the Cochranites and restore the prior peace in the party. That was wrong. Cannon said at the end of the fight that he had feared he might have to start all over again with a hundred kids. Oh how I wish he had started again with just the Cannon/Weiss faction; he would have done our job for us. (The Weissites of course were destroyed in the course of the ensuing clique wars.) So that’s the second thing Cannon did to us.

It took Dobbs 25 years to get rid of Cannon! It wasn’t until 1965 that finally they got the old man off the National Committee-kicked him upstairs to emeritus (consultative) status. Then with the greatest of satisfaction Dobbs called Carl Feingold into his office-Carl Feingold (currently of the International Socialists) being the personal representative and spy of old Jim and in the center-and said: Carl, you’re a member of the National Committee and the Political Committee; get out of here, I never want to see you again-because Cannon was off the Committee.

But by then Dobbs was a very shaky old man; he aged faster than Jim did. I traveled a bit with Dobbs in 1960 and he’d gone grey in the face; he was tired, exhausted, couldn’t cut it. But that goes into the later history of the SWP and how they finally ended up with Barnes (having tried some of the more feeble-minded party leaders of my acquaintance in the middle of the 1960s).

So Dobbs never got satisfaction-he never really got to be the party leader. For 25 years they kept him in the wings; Cannon would keep going out to L.A. saying: This is it; I give up; I understand, younger men must take over-and then something would happen and Cannon would get on the phone again. So I don’t think Dobbs had a very happy life.

Dobbs was never a political leader. That raises an interesting point, by the way, about the kind of leader that Cannon was. He was a political leader not a trade unionist. If you read the Shachtman stuff you’ll think he was a trade unionist; he wasn’t. He was the communist political leader that the party trade unionists had confidence in and looked to-so long as they wanted, themselves, to be communists. That was the core of his link with the Dunne boys and the rest of that gang in Minneapolis, and Tom Kerry, and the ones that were deep into the Sailors Union of the Pacific out on the West Coast, and Bert Cochran and the gang that was working in the UA W. Trade unionists-those were the ones. And they trusted him; they looked to Cannon because they thought he was trying to build a workers party. (And they weren’t too sure about Max-he made too many jokes.)

In that connection, one of the particularly malicious things that Shachtman did to Cannon in that article was to suggest that part of being a trade unionist, as everybody knows, is to be an idiot, a goon and inarticulate. Suggesting that Cannon was “just” a trade unionist was a way of saying that Cannon couldn’t think or write; you’ll find a big section about how Cannon never wrote anything. But Cannon was a very good journalist. They made a kind of prize collection which you should read; it’s called Notebook of an Agitator, and if you want to see the kind of stuff that Workers Vanguard ought to be trying to get, that stuff is it. It’s very clear. It’s the hardest thing in the world, comrades, to write correctly and simply, because to write correctly tends to involve complex sentences with complex words. Cannon was also, in his polemical material, an extremely precise and effective political writer-very powerful. He tried to retain a popular quality about his writing.

But if I had to describe Cannon as anything, he was in his life, until he became a very old man, a Leninist. Leninism meant something precious for him. To us it is “received doctrine” and that’s what I was attacking a little bit: there’s a weakness in received doctrine, namely it’s just received doctrine. But comrade Cannon had struggled with all the problems that Leninism answered. As a young man he was a syndicalist and he had to fight the questions of maximalism/ minimalism, possibilism/ impossibilism, parliamentarianism/ anti-parliamentarianism-all these questions. For him, “Left- Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder was a revelation, because it showed him how you could be both right and smart at the same time. Leninism bridged that gap.

When Cannon embraced Leninism it was as a brand new thing: out of the peculiar alchemy of the combined developments in tsarist Russia there came this doctrine that answered the impasses of the workers movement in the west. That was the contemporary meaning of Leninism for that generation. Cannon had been a syndicalist and not a parliamentarian. I think it was Trotsky who said that when we founded the communist movement the best we got came from the syndicalists. Because you see, there was a choice: the social democrats would rather be smart than right, and the syndicalists would rather have been right than smart. There’s a gut question there, and the Communist International got more mileage out of those who came over from the syndicalist movement than from the social democracy.

If Cannon was a cold aloof guy he was also obviously fundamentally very sentimental. Have you read what Cannon has written on Martin Abern? Cannon said: Martin Abern has spent ten years struggling against the Cannon regime. But they’d also had a long time together in the 1920s. In 1949 Martin Abern died and Cannon turned up drunk and crying at his funeral. Cannon came because he’d known him for too many decades. Marty Abern was not a bad man, and he was not a calculating cliquist. I really don’t see that, and you won’t either if you read the material. I think he tended to put personal relations above political ones and to be deeply committed to personal relations. Of course, that makes the most terrible, desperate, effective kind of cliquist-you know, the one who really btdieves in it, who’s not just a cynical maneuverer, but who really subordinates political to personal considerations.

Now if there’s anything that has been a significant historical acquisition for the Spartacist League it is getting the Communist League of America (CLA) bulletins for the first five years. It had been for a long time clear to me that I could never try to finish the history of American Trotskyism without looking into the Cannon vs. Shachtman fight of the early 1930s-the first big wracking fight. Even the documents that are now available to you all, namely Trotsky’s letters that appear in the Collected Works series, that they’re now bringing out, were completely unknown when I was a young comrade. Now we’ve got the bulletins If you read that stuff, in an inchoate way, without a clear programmatic basis, it was a prefiguring, an anticipation, of the 1940 fight. They fought like hell, and Trotsky said: Stop it! You’re killing yourselves; it’s not clear what is going on. Then what happened was Shachtman went over. Just Shachtman. The Shachtmanite faction remained in opposition: Glotzer (Gates), Abern, the youth. And there was a dual power situation, but so long as the ShachtmanjCannon regime held, Shachtman was able to neutralize his ex-supporters. There was another deal that was made too: The hardest of the Cannonites was Hugo Oehler. He didn’t buy the deal and went out. So the party ran under conditions which I cannot imagine how Cannon put up with, the tension of always buying time, of always dickering, of always negotiating. Fina\1y in 1939 the fundamental programmatic issues, under the pressure of the war and antiCommunism, seized each faction. And it blew up. It was stunning to find out that the American Trotskyist movement in the 1930s-in a sense, at the top-never real1y existed. It was always an uneasy truce.

That’s why one should go and read documents. Not just mindlessly. but in order to answer the questions which more broad historical considerations should raise.

One likes to make one’s personal reminiscences too. This was the finest communist that America has produced, and he died. I had four contacts with him. He sent me a letter one time. It was the only letter he ever sent a member of the YSA.

By the way, there’s a point: our faction in the SWP were never soreheads. We liked the party leadership fine. Tom Kerry, Farrell Dobbs, Joe Hansen, Jim Cannon, George Weissman, the rest of the gang-there were a lot of things wrong; we were pretty clear-eyed about them. But there were a lot of things right about them too. Our faction worked in the SWP. We made a political choice and we knew what it meant. Wohlforth didn’t make it in the SWP, you better know that. They didn’t like him, didn’t trust him.

So I got this letter from Cannon. It was a nice letter. It asked me to bring his personal greetings to a professor at Brown University, a historian of the American Federation of Labor, who he said did something much more important in his youth: he was a fine Wobbly and we worked together and I wonder if you would tell him. give him my personal greetings. I thought that was a very nice commission.

Got to know Cannon pretty well in 1958 I guess. The SWP was giving me the red carpet treatment. It was nice to get the red carpet treatment. So there was a West Coast summer camp and by “accident” we shared common quarters with Jim and Rose Cannon. So I had a long chance to talk with the old man. And it was good. He thought he was going blind then. He had cataracts and was about to have an operation which they might botch. So he was furiously, desperately sitting there with his pipe and strong tea (because he was on the wagon by then) reading. for what he thought might be the last time in his life. What book? The Revolution ‘Betrayed. He was trying to commit it to memory, the whole book. I liked him. I don’t think he liked me. He thought I was a wise-ass smart student. But I liked him.

And then just after we had a YSA Convention up in Detroit over New Year’s, we came back driving and we went out to the desert to see Cannon to make a personal report. He already had the “real” report from that little rat, Feingold, who was at the Convention too. We got to see Cannon in the desert and that was very useful, because in the WP/ISL we had always heard the myth: Cannon’s stepchildren are very rich and Cannon lives out in the Southern California desert in a marble palace. Alas, he lived in a little bitty motel room. And the reason he lived out in the desert was, his wife had a case of arrested TB and had to have a very dry, warm ,climate. There they were cooped up in the winter period under these extremely meager, crowded conditions. So if you ever run into the myth of Cannon’s marble palace-I was there. We’re living better right now.

And the last time I ever saw him, we were in opposition and it was a kind of formal meeting. I was coming through on tour in L.A. for the youth org. At the same time I knew my throat had been cut, Cannon knew my throat had been cut; only Wohlforth didn’t know that his throat had been cut. So I went and made the formal meeting with comrade Cannon. We agreed mutually without saying anything not to talk about the active political questions. And I sat around and had three or four hours with him, chatting. (That’s when Rose came in halfway through, having gone to see this awful Annette Rubenstein.) Just for what it’s worth, those are my personal reminiscences of comrade Cannon, and they have no bearing on the politics and the main course of his career because I only knew him at the very end.

I said that I thought he didn’t like the SWP very much and here’s the reason why. In 1965 I had a talk with the Seattle leadership of the SWP-the Fraserites-who had just been thrown out or quit, and they mentioned that Cannon had broken loose in the West Coast summer camp and before two hundred people he denounced black nationalism in favor of class unity. Now, he did it from the right. It wasn’t very good. At that point some members of the SWP were playing with-it sounds so funny today something called the “Triple Revolution”: poverty’s been abolished, war’s been abolished, racism’s been abolished by new technology. Now there’s been this triple revolution, what are we going to do next? Doesn’t that sound absurd today? But it’s a fancy idea and Cannon was kind of drawn into it.

But he was also violently an anti-nationalist of all sorts. Go and look in his The First Ten Years of American Communism, his article called “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement” and you’ll see that he thought there was only one thing: a proletarian revolution. And so the combination of his quietism as a very old man and his fundamental instinct for a class solution … he blew up and denounced the party line in front of two hundred people. Jack Barnes, coming through Seattle, said: Well, we may have to take disciplinary action against Jim Cannon. He can’t get away with this sort of thing. But by then he was truly quite old; there was no question of any other kind of struggle. The SWP was what he had to cling to, and he chose to ride it down to the end. At the same time he was old, he was feeble, and his wife had died-and she meant a lot to him. So I think probably Cannon was glad to die. There wasn’t much left for him. He was used up.

So there you have it. And the problem is that the story is a pretty common human story-namely, that he went from being a revolutionist to being an acquiescent supporter, lending his authority to a party that had become counterrevolutionary (and that’s the meaning of the SWP). And that’s kind of sad. Yet in balance it is our task, not to ignore the last ten years, but to pay a great deal of attention to the first fifty years too.

I’ll give you an example. George Plekhanov was the founder of Russian Marxism, a brilliant propagandist not theoretician, he wasn’t that good-but a brilliant propagandist. He wrote the books that trained the generation of Lenin. He tried several times to go over from Menshevism to Bolshevism, and kept falling back. He played a despicable role in the First World War in defense of tsarism. At the end he died in 1919 and he never lifted a finger against the Russian Revolution. He said: The Russian workers have made a terrible mistake but it is their choice and I will not oppose them on behalf of the bourgeoisie. A contradictory figure. But anybody who thinks that we should erase a George Plekhanov, or a Jim Cannon, from the heritage of Marxism only has a Wohlforthite theological conception (not even a real one: see, there is theology, which represents simply fundamental oversimplification). It’s a falsification as well as a theological viewpoint. And that’s all really that I have to say. I suppose it comes down to this: that when finally life was extinguished in the old man’s body, I felt a little bit more an orphan.

James Cannon

The decision to join the Trotskyist camp in 1928

May 27, 1959

This is a letter sent to Theodore Draper, a historian of the American communist movement.

The entire series of letters sent from Cannon to Draper has been published under the title “The first ten years of American communism” by Lyle Stuart Inc, in 1962. It was later reprinted by Pathfinder Press. It was originally posted on http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1959djtc.htm

It seems to me that I have already written myself out on “The Birth of American Trotskyism”-in which I played the central role because I just happened to be standing there at the time and there was no one else to do it. I couldn’t add much to what I have already written in the History of American Trotskyism, in my letters to you, and in the big article – “The Degeneration of the Communist Party-and the New Beginning” in the Fall, 1954 issue of Fourth International. That’s my case. If I were to write about it again I could only repeat what I have already said.

You’ll find a better and fuller exposition there than I could write again today. I have the faculty, which for me is a happy one, of pushing things to the back of my mind once I have written them out. In order to write a fresh report on the origin of American Trotskyism, I would have to force myself back into a semi-coma, recalling and reliving the struggle of 31 years ago. That is too much for me to undertake again.

* * *

The only thing I left out of my extensive writing about that period, which I try to leave out of all my writing, was the special element of personal motivation for my action-which cynics would never believe and research workers never find in the files and cross-indexes. That is the compulsion of conscience when one is confronted by an obligation which, in given circumstances, is his alone to accept or to evade.

In the summer of 1928 in Moscow, in addition to the theoretical and political revelation that came to me when I read Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Program of the Comintern, there was another consideration that hit me where I live. That was the fact that Trotsky had been expelled and deported to far-away Alma Ata; that his friends and supporters had been slandered and expelled and imprisoned; and that the whole damned thing was a frame-up!

Had I set out as a boy to fight for justice for Moyer and Haywood in order to betray the cause of justice when it was put squarely up to me in a case of transcendent importance to the whole future of the human race? A copy-book moralist could easily answer that question by saying: “Of course not. The rule is plain. You do what you have to do, even if it costs you your head.” But it wasn’t so simple for me in the summer of 1928. I was not a copybook moralist. I was a party politician and factionalist who had learned how to cut corners. I knew that at the time, and the self-knowledge made me uneasy.

I had been gradually settling down into an assured position as a party official with an office and staff, a position that I could easily maintain-as long as I kept within definite limits and rules which I knew all about, and conducted myself with the facility and skill which had become almost second nature to me in the long drawn-out factional fights.

I knew that. And I knew something else that I never told anybody about, but which I had to tell myself for the first time in Moscow in the summer of 1928. The foot-loose Wobbly rebel that I used to be had imperceptibly begun to fit comfortably into a swivel chair, protecting himself in his seat by small maneuvers and evasions, and even permitting himself a certain conceit about his adroit accommodation to this shabby game. I saw myself for the first time then as another person, as a revolutionist who was on the road to becoming a bureaucrat. The image was hideous, and I turned away from it in disgust.

I never deceived myself for a moment about the most probable consequences of my decision to support Trotsky in the summer of 1928. I knew it was going to cost me my head and also my swivel chair, but I thought: What the hell-better men than I have risked their heads and their swivel chairs for truth and justice. Trotsky and his associates were doing it at that very moment in the exile camps and prisons of the Soviet Union. It was no more than right that one man, however limited his qualifications, should remember what he started out in his youth to fight for, and speak out for their cause and try to make the world hear, or at least to let the exiled and imprisoned Russian Oppositionists know that they had found a new friend and supporter.

In the History of American Trotskyism, p.61 I wrote:

“The movement which then began in America brought repercussions throughout the entire world; overnight the whole picture, the whole perspective of the struggle changed. Trotskyism, officially pronounced dead, was resurrected on the international arena and inspired with new hope, new enthusiasm, new energy. Denunciations against us were carried in the American press of the party and reprinted throughout the whole world, including the Moscow Pravda. Russian Oppositionists in prison and exile, where sooner or later copies of Pravda reached them, were notified of our action, our revolt in America. In the darkest hour of the Opposition’s struggle, they learned that fresh reinforcements had taken the field across the ocean in the United States, which by virtue of the power and weight of the country itself, gave importance and weight to the things done by the American communists.

“Leon Trotsky, as I remarked, was isolated in the little Asiatic village of Alma Ata. The world movement outside Russia] was in decline, leaderless, suppressed, isolated, practically non-existent. With this inspiring news of a new detachment in far-away America, the little papers and bulletins of the Opposition groups flared into life again. Most inspiring of all to us was the assurance that our hard-pressed Russian comrades had heard our voice. I have always thought of this as one of the most gratifying aspects of the historic fight we undertook in 1928-that the news of our fight reached the Russian comrades in all corners of the prisons and exile camps, inspiring them with new hope and new energy to persevere in the struggle.”

In Moscow, in the summer of 1928, I foresaw such a possible consequence of my decision and action. And I thought that that alone would justify it, regardless of what else might follow. Many things have changed since then, but that conviction has never changed.

Militant Longshoreman

No. 21,   June 1, 1987

IBU—ILWU STRIKE AGAINST CROWLEY AT CRITICAL STAGE

CROWLEY ATTACKS LONGSHORE JOB JURISDICTION

As the Inland Boatmen’s Strike against Crowley Maritime goes into the fourth month with the ranks solid, Crowley has begun to perform longshore work with scabs. Saturday, May 19, Crowley worked a barge with commercial cargo for Alaska at the non-union Seaways terminal in Seattle using a company called MEGA to do the stevedoring. The IBU picketed Seaways but the barge got loaded. When we shut down the port and ran off the scabs in Redwood City, Crowley was effectively put out of the lucrative Hawaiian barge trade. One of the three barges we stopped was worked under a court order in Portland in April, but the other two barges remained tied up at Redwood City. Encouraged by the failure of the IBU and longshore division to stop the Seaways scab operations Crowley took those two barges from Redwood City last Thursday. They are headed north, probably to Seaways in Seattle or some other industrial dock.

Meanwhile Crowley is moving in the courts and before the NLRB to challenge the right of IBU to picket their operations and to challenge the right of longshoremen to refuse to scab on the IBU.

International Tries to Defuse Strike

Picketing of oil barges was ordered stopped over a month ago. When the San Francisco Region IBU members picketed in Long Beach to stop Crowley’s bunkering and oil barge operations Rubio lied to the longshoremen and clerks, telling them that there was a blanket injunction against the IBU in Los Angeles, He then ordered locals 13 and 64 to go through IBU picket lines! It didn’t work. Clerks and longshoremen walked off two ships. Since then Crowley’s L.A.bunkering operations have been stopped cold.

The International has been begging top Crowley officials to offer, any kind of a take-away, union-busting contract which they can then force on the union. There are indications that Herman is even willing to abandon the 153 Masters, Mates A Pilots who have been honoring the IBU picket lines against Crowley in the Puget Sound area. The International apparently believes that the only way to get Crowley to abandon their union-busting campaign is to act like reasonable gentlemen, to pull down picket lines and allow Crowley to make money with scabs. In early April the International allowed over 150 vans with Crowley cargo to go Hawaii on US Lines ships. Crowley has a 10% in US Lines. The San Francisco IBU strike committee and ranks weren’t even informed that the vans had been “cleared”.

When the IBU members protested this sabotage of their strike the International began to to completely take over running the strike. In a trick that has “Herman” written all over it, the IBU called an election (within four days!) for a coastwise “Strike Director’, with the power to overrule any decision of the rank and file or elected strike committee. San Francisco elected strike committee members and militants were warned that if they put their criticism of the leadership on paper they would be brought up on charges. Longshore and clerk locals were told by the International to talk only to the top IBU leadership and to take a “hands off” attitude toward the strike.

The IBU Strike Is Our Strike

The “Journal of Commerce” recently had a long article describing how Crowley successfully broke the ILA longshoremen in three East Coast ports and that he is building more docks and facilities to take away even more work from the ILA. A Crowley promotional document issued in May describes how the company is in stevedoring business on the West Coast. When the Hyundai-controlled Pittsburgh steel plant finishes putting up those  container cranes, we can expect Crowley to take over the stevedoring there — not just to handle steel products – but general stevedoring, Crowley recently bought two ships, manned by $40 a day CMU seamen, which are on their way to the West. Coast

The very existence of our union is at stake. If Crowley is not stopped now other non–PMA companies will go into business taking our work away. PMA will demand major concessions from us so that they can compete with non-union sub-standard stevedoring companies.

The only way to defeat Crowley’s union busting is to escalate the strike, to shut down all Crowley operations on the West Coast. The IBU rank and file will have to insurrect, to take back control of their own strike, and to stop Crowley’s 450 oil barges at Richmond, Martinez, and Pittsburgh. Only mass pickets can stop the cops from smashing picket lines. That means we’ll have to shut down all West Coast ports where Crowley is operating and bring all men out to defend the IBU picket lines. We must get support of other workers from organized labor on the picket lines to defend our unions against court orders and police attacks. The militant action of Boatmen and waterfront ILWU members in running the scabs off the dock in Redwood City sent a wave of hope and enthusiasm through the Bay Area labor movement. Workers who have seen their strikes broken or who have been forced by their timid leaders to accept major take-aways are waiting for someone to resurrect the tactics of union solidarity/mass pickets to stop scabbing and to defeat court and police strike breaking.

The first line of defense of our own jobs starts on the IBU picket lines. Every Crowley scab operation must be stopped, beginning with Seaways. This is the most severe task our union has faced since the 1948 strike. If we don’t stop Crowley now our jobs will disappear, our pensions will be undermined, and the wages and conditions for the few remaining PMA jobs will be forced down to non-union levels.

Sixtieth Birthday Speech

by James P. Cannon

[Transcribed from wire recording. Los Angelos, California March 4 1950. Reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator]           

As you know, my sixtieth birthday, which also rounds out my 40 years of activity in the movement, was already celebrated at a dinner in New York, That was three weeks ago, but f haven’t grown  a day older since then. Time has stood still for me during these three weeks because I was waiting for this second celebration in Los Angeles. I maintained that my sixtieth birthday was not official until it was celebrated here. As you know, I am partial to Los Angeles. Perhaps that is because the Los Angeles comrades have always been partial to me, and have always given me the benefit of their most generous judgment. I like that friendly indulgence; and as a matter of fact, I need it.

In these 40 years of struggle people have been talking about me ever since I started, and most of what was said–at least what I heard —was harsh and critical. Those who might have had other opinions Were not so articulate. I never complained about the brickbats tossed in my direction, and perhaps some people thought I was indifferent to the opinions of others. But that wasn’t the reason. I had simply learned to recognize hostile criticism as an occupational hazard of the political struggle. If you can’t take it you are licked before you start. I learned from Engels that when you go into revolutionary politics you should put on an old pair of pants. And I learned from Marx that you must not let people get you down with pinpricks. So I dressed for battle and developed a tough hide.

But still, I must tell you—although you won’t believe me—that when I used to hear people denouncing me and criticizing me, I was hurt and bewildered, for I am by nature friendly and peace-loving. I felt something like Eddie Waitkus, the star first-baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies, who was in the news the other day. He had an unfortunate experience with a deranged woman who was a total stranger to him. She lost her head, and for no reason at all, broke into his hotel room and shot him. They took Eddie to the hospital for an operation, and when he came out of the anesthesia they told him what had happened. His only comment was a question: “Why did she want to go and shoot a nice guy like me?” That is what f have thought all these years about my critics and opponents. They have been shooting the wrong guy all the time.

On the occasion of the celebration in New York, I received letters and telegrams from friends and comrades throughout the country. In several of them there was a recurrent note somewhat as follows: “Celebrating your 40 years in the movement, we expect you to give 40 more.” That sounds like a large order, but if, as it is said, longevity is determined by heredity, things might possibly work out that way. I come from a long-lived ancestry. All four of my grandparents lived into their eighties. Two of my aunts lived to be nearly 90. My father lived to be 89. It may be that I still have a long way to go. But I am not making any long-range commitments tonight.

Now I must frankly tell you that I have appreciated in the highest degree the joint celebration—this prolonged birthday—in New York and in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t go for the idea that I should stand in the corner and pretend not to know what was being prepared. I was the biggest promoter of the affair in New York.

I was assigned to be chairman of a public meeting where Vincent Dunne was the speaker, about a week before the birthday celebration. The New York organizer was in a dither as to how to announce my birthday celebration, with me as the chairman of the meeting. He thought it would be too delicate a matter for me to announce myself. When I called him up the afternoon of the meeting and asked him for last instructions about announcements, he said: “You don’t have to say anything about the dinner; that will he taken care of by someone else.”

I said, “Well, if I am chairman of the meeting, I might as well announce it”.

He said, “Would you?”

I said “Damn right I will. I’ve been waiting 60 years for this birthday!”

And I used the occasion of Vincent Dunne’s lecture to invite everybody down to the birthday party, and to make it very clear that I was as much in favor of it as anybody. I made only one proviso: I said, I want it to be a real party of friends and comrades, and I don’t want any enemies of our movement coming around telling me what a good fellow I am. I don’t want any Farleys or Baruchs or anybody else who has been opposed to the things I’ve fought for, coming around to give me some hypocritical personal compliments. I would feel dishonored if those whom I’ve fought against all my life came around to pay tribute to me on my sixtieth birthday.

I have enjoyed it here tonight, as I did in New York because there have been no formal compliments, no hypocritical praise – just, maybe, a little exaggeration. I understand that, and I don’t take it to heart. Flattery means falsehood, deceit. I take all the kind words you have said, rather, as what we Irish call the blarney. The blarney is not falsehood, it is the truth exaggerated and embellished to make it sound better. We always feel that under the husk of exaggeration there is a grain of truth and sincerity in the compliments, and we love the blarney.

After 40 years of experience, of ups and downs and battles and denunciations, criticisms and hardships and rewards – it is nice to sit down at the end of 40 years and hear the friendly words of comrades. Somebody once said: “The sweetest music a man ever heard is the applause of his fellows.” And if one can be sure, as I am tonight, that the applause is sincerely meant and freely given, it is doubly sweet.

I also like the fact that this drawn-out celebration, beginning in New York and ending here tonight, has not been isolated and separated from our life and our work, In New York it was simply one of the features of the plenum of our National Committee. We had already been meeting a whole day. We held the celebration in the evening, and then we went back the next morning into another session  of the plenum to deal with the problems of today and tomorrow, and not merely to confine ourselves to reminiscences.

I don’t want to do that here tonight: but still I think I might be justified to make a brief review or, more correctly, a summary of these 60 years. Rose and I are the same age, with only a few weeks difference, and we have both been in the movement all our lives. This gathering marks her 60 years of life and 40 years of socialist activity too. In all the years we have been together, we never paid much attention to birthdays. The years went by. We were busy and had no time. I don’t even remember celebrating birthdays in our house as a rule. Not from year to year at any rate. But when we reached the age of 60, it occurred to both of us, as it has probably occurred to others who have reached that age, to take a little time out to think what has happened, and to make a sort of appraisal of the 60 years.

Speaking for myself, and making a bow to the acquisitive society we live in, I will begin with point one: What have you accumulated’? Well, even there it’s not so bad. I have a new suit of clothes which was given to me by a friend as a birthday present. I have my weekly allowance from Rose in my pocket. That’s more than I had to start with, and it’s as much as I ever had. So I feel that in the matter of accumulation, if I haven’t gained much ground I haven’t lost any. That’s a satisfactory inventory.

The second point I ask myself: What have you accomplished? There, I can tell you that I have perhaps made a more objective judgment than you have. I am one man who took seriously the injunction of the Greek philosophers: Man, know thyself. And if I don’t know myself, I’ve come as close to it as a man can. Because I know myself, I don’t claim great accomplishments. I am well aware of all the negligences and all the faults. I can’t, in good conscience, stand up and say that I did the best I knew; I only – did the best I could. That’s quite a difference. I only did the best I could, falling short of the best I knew, because I am human and therefore fallible and frail, prone to error and even to folly, like all others. In summing up the answer to that question — what have you accomplished? — I can only say honestly: I did the best I could.

Then I come to the third point of my self-examination: Has your life been consistent with your youth? For me that has always been the most decisive criterion, for one’s youth is the gauge to measure by. Youth is the age of wisdom, when our ideals seem to be, as they really are in fact, more important than anything else in the world. Youth is the age of virtue, or more correctly, the age of courage, which is the first virtue. Every man’s younger self is his better self.

The struggle for socialism, with all its hazards and penalties, has always been comparatively easy for me, throughout the entire 40 years, because my youth was always with me. My youth was like another person who never forsook me, not even in the darkest hours. It was then that he was always most vividly present as a friend, easygoing and indulgent as a friend should be, with a benign indifference to my faults and my follies which disturbed other people so much. The faults and follies never disturbed my younger self, and I liked that, because I like to have a little leeway in my personal life.

I never promised anybody to be perfect. I only promised to be myself and to be true to myself — that is, to my better self, to my youth. That in itself was a pretty big undertaking, easier to promise than to perform. And this seemed to be the view of my younger self, who followed me everywhere I went. He insisted on that, but on nothing more. He consistently checked me up on that. He was a friend, as I said, but also a censor and a judge — sometimes looking over my shoulder, sometimes looking me straight in the eye, but always confronting me with the one imperious command: Remember, I am your youth, don’t betray me!

As long as I didn’t do that—-and I never did –I felt sure, with never a doubt, that I was on the right road, even though it put me in the minority, and more often than not in the minority of the minority. That wasn’t my fault. I have been in the minority, not because I don’t like crowds, not because I am sectarian by nature, but because I couldn’t agree with the majority. I couldn’t agree with things as they are. I was in favor of things as they ought to be and will be.

That is what put me in the minority and out of step with the others. I found the explanation of that in the writings of Thoreau, and the justification for it too. Thoreau wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Have 40 Years of activity, of struggle, of life, resulted in defeat or victory? That is a fair question to put on such an occasion as this. And I say the answer depends on how you measure defeat end victory. Our goal is the socialist society, and it is clear that that goal has not yet been attained. But in my youth, when I became a socialist, I associated the ideal of socialism with my own way of life. I decided to be a socialist and to live as a socialist, insofar as physical restrictions would permit, even within the capitalist society. And having that philosophy, I have felt that every little thing [ contributed from day to day to the struggle for the socialist goal of the future, was a vindication of my own life that day, and that every day was a victory. If one has that conception of socialism, and lives by it, he does not need to wait for the final victory of socialism. He has his own share of socialism as he goes along.

The prophet Joel, prophesying great things for his people. said: “Your young men shall see visions.” In my own youth I saw the vision of a new world, and I have never lost it. I came out of Rosedale, Kansas 40 years ago looking for truth and justice. I’m still looking, and I won’t give one percent discount.

I have always agreed with Emerson, who said: “He who has seen the vision of a better future is already a citizen of that future.” I take that literally. That was always true in my case. And that was all the reward I needed for anything done or given to the movement. I never found it possible, nor did I ever even think of renouncing my citizenship in the socialist future of humanity. And here with you tonight, in the midst of friends and comrades, I feel like a privileged citizen of the good society of the free and equal, of that future which Jack London so beautifully described as “the golden future when there will he no servants, naught but the service of love,”

It is very rarely, and only on the most exceptional occasions, that we revolutionists dare toy permit ourselves to express such sentiments, or even to utter such words. In the society which we have been fated to live in, a society divided into classes, deception and hypocrisy rule supreme. The noblest and most fraternal sentiments, which inspire the better selves of the great majority of the people in their relations with each other, are perverted for opposite uses and exploited for the selfish aims of’ a few.

The most beautiful and holy words that people have articulated to express their deepest feelings and their highest aspirations, have been so prostituted by misuse that they have lost their original values, like coins worn smooth from too much handling. All this perversion of sentiment and prostitution of language makes us cautious and reserved in expressing ourselves, lest we too sound like the hypocrites and the vulgarians who are so glib and free with the use of words which mean nothing to them.

But on this occasion, here among comrades, I will disregard that fear and tell you what I really think and feel, what I have always thought and felt since I became a socialist 40 years ago. I believe in people and in their unlimited capacity for improvement and progress through co-operation and solidarity. I believe in freedom, equality and the brotherhood of man. That is what we really mean when we say socialism. I believe in the power of fraternity and the love of comrades in the struggle for socialism. Walt Whitman said: “I will build great cities with the love of comrades.” I would go farther and say: We will build a great new world.

It is not illogical or inconsistent for us soldiers of the revolution to pause in the midst of our labors and our battles, as we do tonight, to rest and relax, to take it easy and have a good time. We are soldiers, that is true and therefore we must be Spartans. We must be able to endure hardship and privation, but we should never inflict it upon ourseIves. Soldiers and Spartans, yes but not aescetics. For socialism, the philosophy of the good life and the life more abundant, is alien to all asceticism. Socialism, if you stop to think about it, is the doctrine of the good time coming and “the great gettin’ up morning! “

That is how I have thought about it: and it was my good luck that this conception fitted so neatly with my own personal temperament. I just made a small amendment: if socialism means a good time for everybody in the future, why not have a good time in the struggle for socialism? I was always in favor of that. It wasn’t always possible. There were some tough times. Forty years of fighting for socialism was not all beer and skittles, as the British would say. But by and large, taking the good with the bad, I had a good time for 40 years and I really have no right to ask for sympathy. I had a good time, and perhaps that is one reason why I lasted longer than some of the others.

And finally, just by patience, the greatest achievement of all became mine. Just by having patience and waiting around I reached my sixtieth birthday, which formally ends tonight, and tomorrow morning I will be entering the first day of my sixty-first year. The question then naturally poses itself: What next? Rose and I have to answer that question, as we have answered every important question for 26 years, together.

When we were 40 we took stock of the situation at that time. That was when we had been expelled from the Communist Party for defending the program of Trotsky, and had to start all over again. We were 40—that’s older than 20—a little tired. We realized that revolution is rather a young people’s occupation, like athletics. But we had to recognize that the movement depended upon us more than ever then, and that we had to make an exception of ourselves. So we said: Well, we’ll give 10 more years to the party; after that perhaps they won’t need us so much.

Those 10 years passed so quickly, we didn’t have a chance to count them. Then we were 50. That was the time of the biggest fight for the existence of the party, in 1940, the fight with the petty-bourgeois opposition. Right in the middle of that fight we celebrated our fiftieth birthday, and we had to admit that we were still needed. There was nothing for us to do but agree to give 10 more years.

Those 10 years went by, busy, active years. We didn’t have much time to think about getting old. We were always on the go, both of us, and before we knew what had happened, we reached 60. So here we are, and where do we go from here?

Everybody, I suppose, gives to the movement what he can. It takes all kinds of contributions from all kinds of people to keep the movement going. All we ever had to give was our time, our years. So we sat down, on the eve of our sixtieth birthday, to consider one more donation. We thought: The party is growing, and growing up, and the demands upon us are not as heavy as they used to be. The young recruits of former times have become veterans. A great cadre of leaders has developed. They can do many things that we had to do in the past. We are by no means as much needed as we were 10 and 20 years aoo. But still, we thought, we might be useful if we’re there to help a little. So we decided: All right, we’ll give the party another 10 years. And then we’ll see.

Round Three: 400,000 Metal Workers Struck

Labor Shakes Generals’ Brazil

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #256, 16, May 1980]

What was potentially the most explosive strike in a decade and a half of military rule in Brazil was broken April 12 as tens of thousands of metal workers in the Sao Paulo region returned to work. Their leaders are still in jail and 40,000 face loss of their jobs after 41 days on strike against “multinational” giants such as Ford, Chrysler, Volkswagen and Volvo. The battle began April I when 400,000 walked out in the most industrialized state in the country demanding a 15 percent wage hike. Seeing the danger to the generals’ rule it was the third round in as many years of mass strikes against the dictatorship – from the beginning the military responded with a heavy hand: helicopters buzzing strike meetings, armored personnel carriers patrolling the streets, strike leaders arrested. And the police repression took its toll: first the outlying sections of the state went back, then one by one the industrial suburbs of Sao Paulo, finally leaving the metal workers’ fortress of Sao Bernardo isolated.

The threat to the authoritarian regime of Joao Figueiredo was evident: the fall of Portuguese strongman Caetano in 1975 and the subsequent working-class radicalization in Lisbon are still fresh in everyone’s mind. So even before workers downed their tools, divisions arose in the Brazilian ruling class on how to handle this strike. Though metal workers were scheduled to receive only a 1.9 percent increase under government wage policy, the employers offered 5 percent off the bat and a regional labor arbitration board ordered 7 percent. The board also refused to declare the strike illegal. But on April 19 police raided the homes of union leaders and arrested Luis Inacio da Silva; the country’s foremost labor leader, as well as 16 others. Two thousand demonstrators gathered to protest the arrest of da Silva, popularly known as “Lula,” and were clubbed to the ground by army troops in riot gear.

This brutality did not break the strikers’ will- 40,000 gathered in the soccer stadium to proclaim that the struggle would go forward: “No one works until Lula is free!” they chanted. On May Day, after a month on strike, thousands of workers defied a government ban to hold a march beginning at Sao Bernardo’s main church. And on May 5, when they again voted to continue the walkout, police violently attacked, leaving 53 strikers wounded. When the stadiums were cordoned off to prevent strike meetings, Sao Paulo’s archbishop Arns announced that the churches would be available for union rallies. Thereupon President Figueiredo charged the paulista cardinal with inciting the strike. When the bishops issued a call for a new “social pact,” Figueiredo declared the episcopal conference no longer authorized to speak for the Brazilian church. As for business interests, a vice president of Ford Motor Co. told the press that the dispute could be easily settled if the government would only stay out of it.

Sympathy for the strike extended far beyond the working class. Brazil’s fabled “economic miracle” is clearly over, and the disenchantment has spread to the middle classes and sectors of the bourgeoisie. For more than a decade the military dictatorship maintained itself in power by brutally repressing the workers and guaranteeing superprofits to the capitalists. As economic difficulties deepened, the regime tried to avoid an explosion by a series of political pseudo-reforms and by curbing the feared “esquadras da muerte” (death squads). But appeasement hasn’t worked. For the last three years the country has erupted again and again in broad strike waves in direct defiance of the government. Brazil’s several million-strong proletariat is seething and is likely to produce in the near future a labor revolt of vast proportions which will shake the continent. What it lacks is a revolutionary leadership that can transform the fight to bring down the dictatorship into a struggle against the capitalist order.

“EconomIc Miracle” Goes Up In Smoke

The present regime originated in the overthrow of President Joao Goulart on 1 April 1964 and the installation of a U.S.-backed military junta. The “March Revolution” took place with American naval and air force units standing by if needed, and was supported by virtually the entire Brazilian bourgeoisie. It was supposed to save the country from communism, corruption and 81 percent inflation. At first the new regime aimed at dismantling state controls and protectionist legislation inherited from 30 years of populist governments. This was the first application by a Latin American dictatorship of the right-wing economic policies of the “Chicago School” which later became notorious as advisers for Pinochet’s program of mass starvation in Chile. Brazilian planning minister Roberto Campos was so pro-American that he was derisively referred to as “Bob Fields.” But economic growth in 1964-67 was barely more than in the crisis years under Goulart when businessmen were carrying out an investment boycott.

Then in the next decade Brazil’s economy suddenly “took off” at a rate that surpassed that of every other “underdeveloped” capitalist country except those based on oil. From 1968 to 1977 the Brazilian gross national product, adjusted for inflation, grew steadily by 10 percent a year. This was supposed to be the “free world’s” sterling success story, confirming imperialist bourgeois economists’ theories from CIA Keynesian W.W. Rostow to the generals’ monetarist Milton Friedman. But the economics of the Brazil “miracle” were far from untrammeled “free enterprise” – Finance Minister Delfim Neto’s policies were more accurately described as military technocratic state control. And the main source of financing for the boom was a massive influx of imperialist investment, increasing by 25 percent a year since 1970. Consequently “multinational” corporations not only totally control the auto and pharmaceutical industries but also dominate traditional sectors of Brazilian capital such as textiles, beverages and machinery (Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1979).

The fundamental basis of the business boom was super-exploitation of a working class prevented from defending itself by the soldiers’ bayonets. From 1964 to 1974, real wages fell by 30 percent, a drastic cut in living standards. Today the legal minimum wage purchases only half what it did in 1959; and while the share of income of the poorest 50 percent of the population fell from 18 to 12 percent during 1960-77, the richest 5 percent increased its slice from 28 to 39 percent (Economist, 4 August 1979). But the capitalist economy can go only so far through continual immiseration of the working class. The soaring population of the favelas (shantytowns) provides a reservoir of cheap labor but not much of an internal market. And even though finance wizard Delfim Neto has now been brought back, inflation in the last 12 months has risen to 83 percent, exceeding the worst year under Goulart. As a result sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie are demanding fundamental changes in economic policy, and some would not greatly mind if the metal workers actually win their strike.

Labor Revolt

Driving down real wages after the 1964 coup was accomplished by heavy suppression of the union movement already tied hand-and-foot to the state through the paternalist structure established by Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (New State) in the 1940s. Modeled on Mussolini’s “Labor Charter,” the vertical syndicates had no right to strike or to collective bargaining; all disputes were submitted to government labor tribunals. As under the similar Peronist regime in Argentina, leftists were ruthlessly purged from the unions and replaced by government henchmen (pelegos). The unions were financed by a compulsory dues checkoff kept in state coffers, and their officers paid directly by the labor ministry; the government had the right to disband any labor organization or remove its leaders without redress. Crowning this corporatist structure was Vargas’ Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) to politically tie the workers to the populist regime.

After the initial crackdown following the 1964 coup the military soon had the unions in hand by placing their own pelegos in the top spots. The generals also added new legal aids to management, such as the practice of rotatividade (“labor turnover”) whereby a company could dismiss its entire workforce by pleading economic difficulties and replace it with new labor at lower wages. Leaderless, stripped of all rights and starving, the Brazilian working class managed to survive these early years only by working 60-70 hours a week and sending women and children into the factories. But the rapid industrialization has produced a result that is potentially lethal for the dictatorship: a burgeoning proletariat. And the greatest growth has been in new mass production industries such as auto, where the workforce is not cowed by a long tradition of government tutelage. Thus in the last decade a loose movement has come together known collectively as the oposicao sindical (OS trade-union opposition), led by a new layer of militants opposed to the grip of the pelegos on the unions.

The OS has been centered on metal workers in the Sao Paulo regime, particularly the so-called ABC industrial belt (the suburbs of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo and Sao Caetano), and this combative sector is where the series of powerful strikes has exploded recently. The first wave took place in late 1977, after student protests had broken out in nearly every major Brazilian city earlier in the year (see “Student Struggles Engulf Brazil,” Young Spartacus No. 56, July/August 1977). The metal workers were demanding a 34 percent wage increase, and by early 1978 tens of thousands’ were on strike in Sao Paulo and the ABC, South America’s largest industrial center. The government was unable to suppress the auto workers, and as late as August of that year fresh strikes were occurring at a rate of three per day.

Fearing the consequences of a wholesale crackdown against students, strikers and bourgeois liberals, then president Ernesto Geisel inaugurated a series of paper reforms in his last months in office. But this only whetted the workers’ appetites, and when Figueiredo was inaugurated in April 1979 he was immediately faced with a strike by 215,000 metal workers demanding a 70 percent wage increase. The nine-day old administration called in the police to seize union headquarters so government officials could oust union leaders, particularly Lula, who had gained national prominence as the head of the 1977-78 strikes. However, when the regime reached an “agreement” with its pelegos, it was torn up by militant strike leader Bendito Marchio, president of the Santo Andre metal workers union. The government did manage to impose a 4 day “cooling-off” period, and on May 12 the government was able to negotiate a “compromise agreement.” The metal workers didn’t win their wage demands; however, the government announced that Lula and other union leaders were reinstated.

Figueiredo’s flunkies crowed that “social peace” had been reestablished in the ABC, but this was only a lull in the biggest strike wave since the 1964 military coup. Two days later 200,000 public employees and teachers in Sao Paulo state walked off their jobs, and as strikers became increasingly militant, the army and military police retreated to the barracks. In mid-July the government proposed a new wage policy of moderate quarterly wage increases, but the workers didn’t buy it. A few days later construction workers in Belo Horizonte voted to strike immediately for a 110 percent wage increase. Under Lula’s leadership, the construction workers won a victory August 3 when the labor tribunal doubled the minimum wage even though the strike had been declared illegal. Strikes mushroomed all over Brazil. Truck drivers set up roadblocks in some regions, and on October 16 one hundred people were injured in clashes between security guards and construction workers in the steel center of Volta Redonda.

While the American and European media have played down the recurring strikes in Brazil, the business press is increasingly concerned. Business Week (17 March) summarized: “In 1979, Brazilian unions mounted nearly 300 strikes, a fundamental social change in a country where 15 years of government repression of workers and unions had made work stoppages a rarity…. For the first time since the military revolution of 1964, corporations operating in Brazil must learn to live with officially sanctioned collective bargaining – but the resulting strains on Brazil’s economy could bring a revival of the repressive measures.” And the Economist (26 April) asked, “Can They Shut Lula Up?”:

“Power in Brazil still remains firmly centralised in the government’s hands. But an attempt to destroy Lula … could backfire. With little or no ideology to back them up, successive army-led governments have relied on economic progress to seduce the middle and working classes. Now, as inflation bites deeper and unemployment grows, a bid to punish a very popular man could work out badly.”

“Abertura”-Face-Lift for the Dictatorship

The imperialist press tries to present the unraveling of Brazil’s military dictatorship as a plan by the country’s rulers to “open” the regime to civilian influence. Business Week writes: “In a surprising turnabout, Brazil’s leaders are releasing some of the restraints on organized labor as a necessary step in their effort to establish a political democracy [!]. … The political liberalization process -called abertura – is a concomitant of economic reforms that are being undertaken to make Brazil a modern industrial nation.”

Talk of abertura by the military dictatorship is nothing but sucker bait for gullible liberals, and hardly qualifies presidents Figueiredo and Geisel as “democracy-leaning officers,” as the Economist would have it. It has been going on since the late ’60s when the government allowed the formation of two “parties,” the pro-regime ARENA (National Renovating Alliance) and the kept “opposition” MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement). Meanwhile, under Institutional Act No.5 decreed in 1968, the president was permitted to suspend Congress at will, issue new laws, dismiss officials and suspend anyone’s political rights for ten years. Newspapers were censored and banned; government critics were imprisoned and exiled; leftists were beaten, tortured, murdered. An urban guerrilla movement which arose in the late ’60s was broken up by the army using the most brutal terror methods available.

Proposals for extensive “liberalization” really only began with the student and labor agitation of 1977-78. In June 1978 Geisel announced a reform package including abolition of Institutional Act No.5, of the death penalty, life imprisonment and political banishment. As he was preparing to leave office the next March Geisel declared an end to political imprisonment, torture, censorship and the president’s absolute power over Congress and the courts. (Of course, he could still do all of the above by simply declaring a state of emergency.) His successor Figueiredo was the former chief of the secret service who had engineered the notorious death squads. One of Figueiredo’s more famous sayings was that “I prefer the smell of horses to the smell of the people.” But by Brazilian army standards he qualified as a “dove.” In addition to treating the 1979 strike wave gingerly, Figueiredo declared a general amnesty for political exiles (hoping that this might disrupt the loose opposition coalition around the MDB). All but 200 political prisoners were released and 5,000 exiles were expected to return.

The amnesty ploy didn’t work. The battle horses of 15 years ago awakened little enthusiasm in the Brazilian masses, and certainly they were of no use in derailing the strike movements. Former PTB leader Leonel Brizola, the millionaire rancher and populist governor of Rio Grande do Sul state who had distributed arms to the population to quell an army uprising against Goulart in 1961, arrived in September virtually unnoticed. While Brizola hinted at conciliation with the government, another populist leader, Miguel Arraes (former governor of Pernambuco), had made a name as a critic of the regime and drew a crowd of 60,000 on his return. However, he called on the opposition to remain united around the MDB at a time when even the middle classes were fed up with phony oppositionists who had played by the junta’s rules, doing nothing to threaten the generals’ rule even though they had twice won its fraudulent elections. There was an aura of expectation around the return of the Communist Party (PCB) leader, 81-year-old Luiz Carlos Prestes, but the Moscow-line PCB called for maintaining the “unity of the MDB “the regime’s safety valve!

The Labor Party Movement

Meanwhile, the Communist Party is in the process of splitting. After PCB leaders returned from Europe, a “Eurocommunist” wing led by Jose Salles (who had been exiled in France) took command and on several occasions publicly disavowed statements to the press by general secretary Prestes, finally declaring he was no longer authorized to speak for the party. Salles gained notoriety by calling for a “constituent assembly with Joao [Figueiredo]” – going along with the government’s plans for yet another phony legislative cover to military rule. But with the Brazilian working class ever more directly challenging the regime, Prestes responded at the beginning of April in a “Letter to the Communists” declaring PCB policy “out of touch with the realities of the workers and people’s movement today” (O Trabalho, 8-14 April). Prestes denounced the present party leadership as opportunist, careerist and unprincipled.

The present situation in Brazil recalls similar moments in the decomposition phase of bonapartist regimes from Portugal to Peru. The local CP works out a modus vivendi with the dictatorship (as in Batista’s Cuba) and as it comes apart the Stalinists find themselves outflanked on the left by sizable sectors of the workers movement. In Peru this led to a split in the party in 1978 as CP labor leaders sought to break from the Morales Bermudezjunta and its increasingly hated austerity policies. In Portugal during the last years of the Caetano / Salazar regime the CP worked only in the vertical syndicates, so that it was bypassed in 1974-75 by the combative “workers commissions” which had sprung up in the Lisbon industrial belt. In Brazil also the PCB has refused to work outside the corporatist unions, and in the mass metal workers strikes they have sided with pro-government pelegos against the dominant oposicao sindical.

Meanwhile the strike movement has been accompanied by a burgeoning movement to form a labor party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) led by Lula and other OS activists. In launching the PT last January, Jose Ibrahim, leader of the 1978 metal workers strike, said that it would be “a party of the workers, not a party for the workers.” With the Stalinists still trying to tie the workers to the carcass of the MDB (now called the “PMDB”) and the heirs of the Vargas tradition vainly trying to resuscitate their phony “Brazilian Labor Party,” the apparently enthusiastic response to the labor party movement among the combative unions indicates a welcome break from decades of corporatist populism. But what is the political orientation of the new PT? Does it put forward a program capable of mobilizing the working class to successfully wage the revolutionary struggles facing it? What is its policy toward the dictatorship?

The new party’s inaugural manifesto talks only of “a more profound democracy,” “social and economic equality,” and a “free multiparty regime.” It doesn’t even call for “Down with the dictatorship”!The document concludes, “The PT intends to arrive in the government and at the head of the state in order to carry out a democratic policy” (Movimiento, 14-20 January). At best this is a right-wing brand of social democracy, a rather insipid brew especially for Brazilian conditions. It expresses the fact that the mass strike movement and the nascent PT are led by a group of syndicalist militants with limited political perspectives. (As recently as last June at a meeting of opposition forces Lula had opposed the formation of a workers party.) Their views approximate the Russian “Economists” at the turn of the century, who only wanted to “lend the economic struggle a political character.”

But despite the reformist perspectives of the PT leaders, in the context of the present working-class turmoil in Brazil a broad labor party movement could escape their control and assume explosive proportions. Already, some of the bureaucrats originally associated with the PT project have been pushed out (On the other hand, a number of former MDB legislators have hitched their carts to the rising PT star.) What, then, should be the attitude of proletarian revolutionaries toward such a contradictory labor party movement? The Stalinists, of course, from the pro-Moscow PCB to the pro-Albanian PCdoB and various smaller groups, have simply turned a cold shoulder, since their goal is some kind of popular front alliance with capitalist forces.

Among ostensible Trotskyists, who claim to stand for working-class independence from the bourgeoisie, the response has been varied. The Convergencia Socialista, a group associated internationally with Nahuel Moreno’s Bolshevik Faction, appears more interested in tailing after the populist holdovers. When Miguel Arraes landed in Recife, they were there with a banner reading, “The People Are With Arraes” – this for the man who led the repression against the radical peasant leagues of 1963-64 (remember Juliao?)! The Organizacao Socialista Internacionalista (OSI), tied internationally to Pierre Lambert’s French OCI, is promoting a left-social-democratic policy of pressuring the Lula/Ibrahim leadership of the PT. During the metal workers strike they simply called on the PT to “assume its place” in the leadership.

But the core of the OSl’s policy is its call for “Down with the dictatorship! For a constituent assembly!” Not once in recent issues of the paper O Trabalho, close to the OSI, do they call for a workers and peasants government. Their program is unambiguously stagist: bourgeois democracy now – it’s too early for socialism. This places the OSI only marginally to the left of the PT leadership itself and certainly doesn’t prepare the militant sectors of the Brazilian working class for the tasks ahead. A genuine Trotskyist leadership would have called from the very beginning of the metal workers’ struggle for concretely preparing a general strike; the OSI raised this only after four weeks, and then in the vaguest terms. And while calling for a revolutionary constituent assembly as part of their program for sweeping away the murderous dictatorship, Bolsheviks would warn that unless a workers and peasants government is established, resting not on bourgeois parliamentarianism but organs of proletarian power, what faces Brazilian workers is the prospect of “democratic counterrevolution.”

The cycle of militant strikes and the labor party movement point to an early demise for the generals’ rule. Compared to other recent upsurges in marginal sectors of Latin America (Nicaragua, EI Salvador), the coming battle in Brazil will be labor-centered – in a country of 120 million, with the largest industrial proletariat in the backward capitalist countries. The revolutionary possibilities are manifest and the need for a Trotskyist party to lead the struggle could not be clearer. This will be built not by watering down the communist program to the syndicalist/social-democratic consciousness of the present leaders, but by fighting for the full Transitional Program and for the rebirth of the Fourth International

Correction: The article “Labor Shakes Generals’ Brazil” refers to the Brazilian industrial proletariat as the largest in the backward capitalist countries; however. India, at least. exceeds Brazil on this score. [Correction first printed in Workers Vanguard #258, 13 June, 1980]

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 in Veja, 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.

The Bolivian Revolution and the Fight Against Revisionism

by Sam Ryan

First printed in the Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin, October 1954],Republished in and scanned from the LRP publication “Bolivia: The Revolution the ‘Fourth International Betrayed.”

“For Pablo the historical mission of the Fourth International has lost all meaning. The ‘objective revolutionary process’ under the aegis of the Kremlin, aliied with the masses, is taking it’s place very well indeed. That is why he is mercilessly bent upon liquidating the Trotskyist forces, under the pretext of integrating them into the ‘mass movement of the masses as it exists.’

“The salvation of the Fourth International imperatively demands the immediate eviction of the liquidationist leadership. A democratic discussion must then be opened within the world-wide Trotskyist movement on all the problems left suspended, befogged, or falsified by the Pablist leadership during three years. Within this framework, it will be indispensible for the health of the International that the greatest self-criticism be carried through on all phases and causes of the development of the Pablist gangrene.

“… these ideas and this liquidationist tactic were subsequently extended to the reformist parties and to all mass organizations under petty bourgeois leadership (the Bolivian MNR, the Peronist movement in Argentina, the Ibanist in Chile, etc…) (From International Committee Bulletin No. 1)

This article is intended as a contribution to the discussion on the “development of the Pablist gangrene.”‘ At the same time it is also intended as a contribution to the struggle against Pabloism. In my opinion such a discussion, long overdue, is an indispensable part of the struggle and must not be postponed any longer; that one of the major victories of Pabloism is precisely the fact that problems of major theoretical and practical importance have been “left suspended, befogged, or falsified”. The “greatest criticism,” which is indeed necessary, will show that Pablo s greatest help in betraying Marxism came in the silence and the acquiescence of the “orthodox Trotskyists.” One of the crimes of revisionism during the past two years is the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution.

That the Bolivian revolution has indeed been betrayed should be plain for all to see. Last November the Bolivian Trotskyist party, the POR, was publishing a weekly newspaper, Lucha Obrera. For a working-class party in a tiny, backward country with a high rate of illiteracy this was a tremendous achievement, an indication of powerful mass support. In December Lucha Obrera was suppressed by the government, with hardly any resistance. There has been no struggle since then important enough to be reported in the paper here. This fact is itself a very significant piece of news.

Marxism is a science. That is to say, its generalizations are not god-given imperatives but the distillation of past events. And the distinguishing characteristic of all science is not simply that it yields true generalizations (more correctly, approximations of the truth) but that it yields generalizations which can be tested in terms of material reality. To fail to examine any important event in its relation to Marxist theory is to turn Marxism into a dogma, with truths that are given once for all. And once Marxism is turned into a dogma, it is both useless and unnecessary for the solution of practical problems.

What events, above all others, demand investigation by Marxists? If Marxism be regarded not as a contemplative exercise but as a guide to action, the answer springs to mind immediately. Revolution is the supreme test of theory. Revolution strips away all pretense, lays bare the real class character of all parties, all programs. No brand of revisionism can pose as Marxism in time of revolution; no Marxist can ignore a revolution. It is only logical to expect that close attention should be paid to the Bolivian revolution, for more than one reason. Not only is it a test of theory and practice, especially in view of the fact that a Trotskyist party is playing an important role; it takes place under the very walls of the bastion of world reaction.

But the Bolivian revolution is now more than two years old, and there has been no discussion on this important event. Only two discussion articles have appeared, both by the present writer. And, though both articles were sharply critical, they have elicited no reply. Even the news from Bolivia has been very meager. Pablo, the advocate of a centralized international, has not even conducted a decent letter-box!

What a crushing answer Pablo would have had to the charges of revisionism! “Can revisionists pursue a revolutionary policy in the very course of a revolution?” But Pablo chose not to make this reply, and this is a clear mark of his revisionism. Revisionists prefer to act rather than explain; the longer they can keep silent the longer they can mislead revolutionists. And Pablo was left in peace to do his work of betrayal.

That it is Pabloism which is the inspiration for the line of the POR is easy to prove. The POR’s characterization of the MNR and of the MNR government as “petty-bourgeois,” its prognosis of the possibility of the reform of the government, its stubborn refusal to make any criticism of the treacherous and anti-revolutionary line of the labor leaders, and its complete silence on Stalinism — these come not from the arsenal of Marxism but of revisionism.

REVOLUTION BY APPOINTMENT

At its tenth national conference, held in June, 1953, the POR adopted a political resolution which, though full of admirable Trotskyist phrases, contain a few paragraphs which are sufficient to turn the whole document into an exercise in revisionism. This resolution (Etapa Actual de la Revolution Y Tareas del POR [“The Present Stage of the Revolution and the Tasks of the POR”]) ]) has been published in the Mexican publication, ” Que Hacer?” but has not been translated into English.

“The The petty-bourgeois government,” says the resolution (VII:7), “…acquires a transitory and Bonapartist character … Submitting to the powerful pressure of the proletariat as well as of imperialism, it vacillates constantly between the two extremes. From this situation follows the two fold possibility for the development of the present government. If the masses with a new impulse decide the political defeat of the right wing by the left, the possibility is opened that the government will transform  itself to a stage antecedent to the workers and peasants government (se abre la possibilidad de que el gobierno, se transforms en etapa previa del gobierno obrera-campesino). This process would be accompanied by a whole series of measures of a revolutionary character, such as the spread of nationalizations, the agrarian revolution, etc. If the right wing with the aid of imperialism bars the governmental scene to its adversaries, it will have consolidated a petty-bourgeois government in the service of the ‘Rosca’ and of finance capital.”

Two paragraphs further we read:

“The right wing is definitely compromised with landlord and imperialist reaction and therefore we cannot simply disregard the possibility of a future split with the left wing. Complete predominance of this faction would profoundly alter the character of the MNR and permit it to move closer to the POR. Only under such conditions could we speak of a possible coalition government of the POR and the MNR which would be a form of the realization of the formula ‘workers and peasants government,’ which in turn would constitute the transitional stage toward the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

A Bonapartist regime can appear to be only between the classes to people who have forgotten the class nature of the state. All governments have always been, for Marxists, the instruments of the ruling class, incapable of being reformed, in their class nature, by any amount of pressure. Bonapartism is simply a form which a bourgeois or a proletarian regime assumes under certain conditions. The POR was not the first to forget that there can be neither an in-between regime nor the reform of a regime. It was the Third World Congress, with its “intermediate status” of the buffer “countries,” and the IEC with its characterization of the Mao regime in China as neither a bourgeois nor a workers state, but an in-between, a “workers and peasants government”.

A Bonapartist regime is a dictatorial regime, rule by an arbiter. Marxists have never favored this form of rule; they always promote the intervention of the masses in politics. Thus, the Bolsheviks demanded a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage to replace the Bonapartist rule of Kerensky. The demand for democratic elections is one of the foundation-stones in the Trotskyist program for the revolution in backward countries. This slogan is certainly not a “putschist” one; it can be raised by — it is most suitable to — a revolutionary party which is not yet in a position to take power. And raising this demand is certainly not incompatible with giving defense to the government against counter-revolutionary attempts.

Yet nowhere in the whole resolution of the POR is the demand for elections raised! And this despite the fact that the present government was elected five years ago, and a military coup and a revolution have occurred since then. There is no mention, even of the existence of an elected legislature or of the desire to elect a new one. There is no mention of the question of popular elections. The POR is obviously satisfied with the present Bonapartist government; is convinced of its capability of being transformed, step by step, into a workers government.

In the light of the refusal of the POR to demand general elections, what is the significance of the slogan it raises: “Complete control of the State by the left wing of the MNR”? How does it expect this to come about? Naturally, through appointment by the Bonaparte, Paz Estenssoro. This is not a mere deduction. This is actually what the POR proposed. In August, 1953, a cabinet crisis erupted, a division between the right and left wings in the government on the question of division of the landed estates. In a situation like that, with the peasant movement on the upsurge, it is obvious what a Trotskyist party should propose: Resignation of the government, including the president; national elections of a president and a congress; the left wing of the MNR should run independent candidates, including a candidate for president; the POR should give critical support to the campaign of the left wing and raise the slogan: the Left Wing to power.

The POR did not demand general elections; it did not demand that the masses be allowed to settle the disuse within the government. It proposed that the left wing be given “power” by appointment by President Pa.Z Estenssoro.

In No. 43 (August 23rd, 1953) of Lucha Obrera, we read the following touching appeal to the Bonaparte of the Bonapartist government:

“To the revolutionaries, the conduct of the President appears ambiguous and we believe that it indicates the intention to save some right-wing positions undermined by the rising pressure of the masses. Granted that a Chief of State has responsibilities, but he has these before the people. In reality it is the toilers who alone have the right to judge the acts of the government especially since it is the working class which with its sacrifices put him in Power. If these masses, who are the sole support of the President, out of their class instinct, out of distrust of the right wing, appeal and demand that men emerging from their ranks be put into the cabinet, replacing the elements linked to reaction, there would exist no grounds for denying them this right. And if Paz Estenssoro respects his responsibilities before history, he is motivated primarily by a desire to respect the will of the people and carry out the aspirations of the toilers, organizing a cabinet composed exclusively of men of the left of his party. “

Would such a “labor” cabinet make any difference in the character of the government? Not the slightest. It would make no more difference than the “labor” cabinets of the Spanish Loyalist government, or the “labor” cabinet of Kerensky. It would mean as little as a cabinet appointed by Eisenhower or Truman composed not of “nine millionaires and one plumber” but of “ten plumbers.” A “labor cabinet” appointed by Paz Estenssoro would be responsible not to a legislative body elected by universal suffrage, as in England or France, but to a supreme ruler responsible to no one but his class. Such a cabinet would not be the result of a break of the labor leaders with the capitalist class. On the contrary, it would make them the official representatives of this class.

WHAT IS A PETTY-BOURGEOIS PARTY?

It is now possible to see what the POR means by characterizing the MNR .as a “petty-bourgeois” party and the MNR government as a petty-bourgeois government. All the literature of the POR is very consistent in this; the MNR and its government are never called anything but petty-bourgeois. Far from being merely a terminological question (petty-bourgeois means bourgeois, I have been told by a defender of the POR line — orally, of course), this is a formulation that conceals the rejection of Trotskyism in theory and the betrayal of the revolution in practice.

If politics is concentrated economics, then political parties are the expression of economic interests. But the dominant fact in present-day society is the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Political parties, therefore, are, and cannot help but be, expressions of and instruments in the class struggle. They serve the interests of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. This is what gives them their class character. Not their social composition, not the composition of their leadership, but which of the two major classes they serve. This is true in the backward countries as well as in the advanced.

There are parties which Marxists call petty-bourgeois — the social-democratic and labor parties. We use this term by convention; not because these parties serve the interests of the petty bourgeoisie —the petty bourgeoisie has no independent class interests — but because these parties are in a certain sense between the classes. They speak for socialism and the working class but they act for capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeois parties are largely or predominantly proletarian in composition and bourgeois by political character. To prove this it is sufficient to ask whether the class nature of any government has ever been changed by the accession to office of a petty-bourgeois party. The victory of the British Labour Party, for example, did not change the character of the government from bourgeois to petty-bourgeois.

The MNR is not a petty-bourgeois party in this sense. It is not a labor party; it does not claim to represent the working class or advocate socialism. Its program is typical of a bourgeois nationalist party in a backward country. It claims to speak for all the people; it is for peace and prosperity. It is the conception of the POR that since native capital is very weak and very reactionary (bound up with imperialism), and since the MNR is trying to accomplish the bourgeois national revolution but is not a working-class party, therefore it represents the petty bourgeoisie and is a petty-bourgeois party.

To find the precedent for such a conception of a petty-bourgeois party — a party which represents the petty bourgeoisie and fights against the bourgeoisie for the bourgeois revolution — we have to go back to the pre-October Bolshevik writings. This is the conception put forth by Lenin in 1903 as a prognosis for the Russian revolution. The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry, according to Lenin, would be headed by a peasant party and supported, perhaps in the form of a coalition government, by the proletarian party.

In justice to Lenin it must be added that he did not conceive of such a government as an in-between or “petty-bourgeois” government, but as one which would stay within the bounds of capitalism, removing the vestiges of feudalism, building capitalism, and thereby strengthening the capitalist class. This was to be a transitional government, not one of transition to socialism, but of transition from feudalism to the bourgeois democratic republic. Lenin’s April Theses and then the October revolution mark the definitive rejection of the conception of a petty-bourgeois party, a party which is neither proletarian nor bourgeois. Thereafter all Marxists have accepted the theory of Permanent Revolution, put forth by Trotsky in 1903. According to this theory, the government which carries out the bourgeois revolution cannot stay within the bounds of capitalism; it must begin the socialist transformation. But this government cannot be “a government of a peasant or a “petty-bourgeois” party; it must be a government animated by the party of the proletariat.

Stalin betrayed the second Chinese revolution using as a pretext for his Menshevik policies a vulgarization of Lenin’s conception of the Democratic Dictatorship. It is not without significance that Mike Bartell, a leading American Pabloite, defended the line of the POR (orally, of course) by maintaining that Lenin’s theory of the Democratic Dictatorship had not been completely invalidated. Nor that Murray Weiss. in defending the Pabloite position on the in-between character of the Mao government (orally, of course) seized on what he asserted was Lenin’s belief, in 1903, on the possibility of a petty-bourgeois, transitional government. The POR, while claiming to support the theory of Permanent Revolution, believes that a “petty-bourgeois” party can be reformed and its government become a workers and farmers government, “the transitional stage toward the dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

“The zig-zag line between imperialism and the proletariat which characterizes the conduct of the government,” says the POR in its resolution, “does not permit it to plan its actions and causes it to fall into a formless empiricism, suited to giving isolated and improvised answers to problems as they present themselves. Thus the observer discovers that the government policy is characterized by lack of consistency and the thought of the leaders by total absence of coherence and a unified doctrine.”

This is, of course, a characteristic of all petty-bourgeois and bourgeois thought. Is it, then, the chief characteristic of the activities of a “petty- bourgeois” government? No. The activities of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however inconsistent they may appear to themselves and to others, have a consistency which scientists can uncover. They are governed by law just as completely as are the actions of physical bodies or chemical elements, which have no thoughts whatever. Marxists can see the consistency in the seemingly inconsistent actions of the petty-bourgeois politicians. Marxists can see that, however they view themselves, they actually serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.

THE REAL QUESTION OF POWER

The conception that the MNR and its government are petty-bourgeois is the betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. It implies that the MNR and its government are not fundamentally the enemy of the working class, that they may be reformed. Not to warn the working class that this government will smash it when it can is to leave the workers politically disarmed and helpless, a sitting duck whenever the enemy is ready to strike.

How can we know the character of the MNR? First of all, we can study its past, especially when it held state power. The MNR of Paz Estenssoro is the MNR of Villaroel. Estenssoro was Villaroel’s vice-president. Villaroel suppressed the working class, executed protesting students. He was hanged from a lamp-post in an uprising led partly by the Stalinists. The MNR was so exposed as an enemy of the working class that in the 1949 elections Juan Lechin, head of the Miners Federation, refused its nomination for vice-president and instead made an electoral bloc with the POR. This election showed that the MNR, although it got a majority of the votes, was already discredited with the vanguard of the proletariat. The Trotskyist and the Miners Federation each elected four deputies. Then came a three-year military dictatorship, which naturally strengthened democratic illusions among the masses.

Yet during the April 1952 revolution an incident took place which indicated that the MNR did not have the confidence of the working class. The MNR appealed to the workers for support in the uprising.The textile workers demanded as a condition for their support that two trade union leaders be accepted into the new government. The demand was granted and the workers supported the uprising. Guillermo Lora, who gave these details in an interview which was printed in the paper in May 1952, did not say whether the POR supported this demand; but the fact that the POR has never criticized the presence of the labor leaders in the cabinet indicates that it did.

In the course of the uprising the army and police were disarmed. The workers, led by Lechin and the POR, possessed ten thousand rifles and machine-guns, all the arms in the country. What did the government do? It proceeded to reorganize the army and police force and to rearm them with new and more modern weapons. Then it began slowly and cautiously to take steps toward disarming the proletariat. And this is the measure of its bourgeois character.

The state is armed force in the service of the ruling class. To allow the government to rebuild the special bodies of armed men means to put the fate of the revolution in the hands of the bourgeoisie, its mortal enemy. Only by keeping their fate in their own hands, by preventing the rebuilding of the special bodies of armed men, by maintaining the state as the people in arms, can the working class safeguard itself and its revolution. The POR should have warned that those who rebuild the police force and army are preparing civil war against the workers and peasants.

This is not the same as proposing the overthrow of the MNR government. But it is an exposure of its bourgeois character: if the MNR were truly for the workers and peasants, if it were going to carry through the revolution, it had no need of special bodies of armed men, it could base itself on the people in arms. Its “betrayal” (not really a betrayal, since it only acted in accordance with its real class character) dates from the moment it began to reestablish the army and police —that is, from the moment it assumed power. The betrayal of Lechin and the labor leaders dates from their failure to oppose the rebuilding of the bourgeois state.

The POR did not expose the bourgeois nature of the government; it did not criticize the betrayal by the labor leaders. It completely overlooked the question of the rebuilding of the armed forces of the class enemy. In the aforementioned political resolution of the Tenth National Conference there is not one word on this question, not one warning against the rebuilding of the counter-revolutionary army and police force; literally not one word on the military question as the real question of power. The POR obviously believes that questions of power are decided not by armed force but by shifts and maneuvers in the top circles of the government.

The Trotskyist transitional program is totally ignored. And this program was worked out precisely for a revolutionary situation, such as exists in Bolivia. Following this program, the POR should have demanded that the defense of the country and of internal order be entrusted not to special bodies of armed men, but the workers militia, that these be armed by the government with the most modern weapons, including heavy ones, and trained under the control of the workers and peasants organizations; and that the officers be chosen by the workers and peasants. There is no hint of these demands in the political resolution nor in all 1953 issues of Lucha Obrera.

Lucha Obrera cannot, however, completely ignore the military question; and what it says is a damning supplement to its refusal to recognize the transitional program. By August 1953, the government had gone so far as to set up a military academy, to train an officer caste for its counter-revolutionary army. No. 43 of Lucha Obrera (the same issue which carried the touching appeal to the president) protested in an article headed: “Military Academy, Danger to the Revolution.”

“The reactionary right wing,” says the article, “wishes desperately to create an armed force in which it can support itself against the advance of the unions. This is the mission assigned to the reopened military academy which will be a den of counter-revolution for the petty-bourgeois militarists. The only force which can destroy the counter-revolutionary conspiracy is constituted by the armed masses.

“Undoubtedly,” continues the article, “the the Revolution will achieve the building of a regular Army, but this will occur when the workers and peasants organize their own government, without any subterfuge permitting counter-revolutionary infiltration. The class feeling of the toilers should not permit the organization of any military force while the whole power is not in their hands. Only a Workers and Peasants Government can organize a true proletarian and revolutionary military force. In the meantime, it is an inescapable revolutionary duty to strengthen the trade union militias in each factory, each mine, and prepare them for whatever repressions which will utilize as their instrument the military academy.

Here is the opening renunciation of the transitional program, of the proletarian military policy. This is a completely unrealistic and unworkable policy, one which absolutely cannot be carried out by the Party, and is incapable of convincing anyone. We should we not permit the government to organize any military while the whole power is not in our hands? Who and what, then, will defend the country in case Yankee imperialism succeeds in provoking a military attack by one of its satellites? A standing army is absolutely necessary. The trade union militias are not sufficient. No one can be convinced, least of all the revolutionary militants, that there could be no army “in the meantime.” That is why the government is able to win such an easy political victory and build up its army (a counter-revolutionary army) without any opposition. Because a concrete alternative to a counter-revolutionary army cannot be no army, as the POR advocates, but a revolutionary army.

And there is no reason in the world why this alternative has to wait until “all the power is in our hands.” If enough mass pressure can be brought to force the government to build such a revolutionary army (by arming and training the workers under trade union control) then the power will be in our hands. If, as is infinitely more likely, the government resists all such pressure, its counter-revolutionary character is exposed and all the necessity for its overthrow made much more clear. That is what the transitional program is for.

The POR, instead of posing the realistic alternative of the transitional program, is going to wait until “all the power is in our hands,” by appointment of the very president responsible for rebuilding the counter-revolutionary army. This is the policy of watching quietly while the axe is being sharpened and then waiting for it to fall.

INNOCENTS TAKEN UNAWARE

Who, then, is responsible for the betrayal of the revolution? Who is responsible for the fact that the workers and peasants have sunk into apathy. The MNR simply carries out it’s appointed task — to save capitalism in Bolivia. The labor leaders have collaborated fully in saving capitalism. They entered the government at the beginning and have remained in it ever since. They gave silent consent to the rebuilding of the counterevolutionary armed forces and to the suppression of the POR. They allowed the workers’ militia to fall into decay, as was shown in the fascist insurrection of November 9, 1953. The Falange, a comparatively small group led by officers of Paz Estenssoro’s army, was able to sieze Cochabamba, second city of Bolivia and center of the peasant movement, and hold it for six hours before the militias could mobilize in sufficient force to drive them out, The POR has never criticized the labor leaders for entering or remaining in the cabinet. It has never criticized them for their silence on the rebuilding of the counterrevolution. It does not even criticize them for their silence of the suppression of Lucha Obrera.

Guillermo Lora, writing in the March issue of “Que Hacer?”, complains that the MNR is betraying the aspirations of the masses. The betrayal, according to Lora, consists in the fact that the government is holding back the agrarian revolution, is reversing the nationalizations, has unloaded the burden of the economic crisis on the backs of the workers and peasants, has bureaucratized the COB, the trade union center. It is noteworthy that Lora does not even mention the suppression of Lucha Obrera! This, apparently, is as unimportant to him as is the suppression of the Chinese Trotskyists to Pablo and Germain.

Lora is consistent in accusing the MNR of betrayal, since he expected better of it. But who and what made this betrayal possible? Without the support of the labor leaders, Paz Estenssoro could not have succeeded in his counter-revolutionary role. Lora does not mention that the labor leaders remain in the cabinet to this day.

Lora, of course, claims to be superior in perspicacity to the average worker.

“For the bulk of the militants (of the MNR),” he writes, “and for many other people, the year 1954 will be the year of betrayal. We speak of the betrayal by the petty-bourgeois leadership of the aspirations of the masses. For us it will be the year of the verification of our theoretical conclusions on the capability of a petty bourgeois party to carry out revolutionary and anti-imperialist tasks.

The prognosis that the MNR would suppress the working class and its party was not made by the POR, because the POR has never regarded the MNR as a class enemy. The “prediction” of the POR which has, according to Lora, been verified, was completely useless in preparing it or its followers for a struggle against the MNR. Such a struggle, in fact, was characterized by Lora in his interview as “hysteria.”

“One cannot exclude the possibility,” said Lora in his interview, “that the right wing of the government, faced with the sharpening of the struggle against it, will ally itself with imperialism to crush the so-called `Communist’ danger.” ,

In a letter commenting on Lora ‘s interview (Internal Bulletin, June 1952) I wrote as follows:

“One thing does appear clearly: Comrade Lora does not regard this government as an enemy of the working class and of the POR. This formulation is wrong, very wrong! This is an error which, if it actually represents the position of the POR, can have tragic consequences for the very physical existence of the cadres of the Bolivian Trotskyist party. This is the warning the leaders of the POR must give the working class and above all its own supporters: `We must expect with absolute certainty (not merely “not exclude the possibility”) that the government (not merely its right wing) will ally itself with imperialism and try to crush the mass movement and first of a all its vanguard, the POR.'”

In the same letter:

“I think it is incontestable that the present Bolivian government is a bourgeois government (I didn’t dream that anyone would contest it!) whose task and aim are to defend by all means available to it the interests of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism. It will, if it can, harness and disarm the working class, smash its revolutionary vanguard, and rebuild the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which has been shaken and not destroyed by the first phase of the revolution. This government is therefore the deadly enemy of the workers and peasants and of the Marxist party.”

And one more:

“Lechin’s is a treacherous, an undependable friendship. Lechin will capitulate again, and again. He will help disarm the workers. He will help smash the POR, no matter how it may try to placate him. And Lechin’s betrayal will be facilitated if the POR continues to support him.”

It does not take a genius, as can be seen, to make correct and useful predictions. Armed with the Marxist doctrine and the Marxist method, quite ordinary people can see the direction of events and prepare for them with a revolutionary policy. But without the Marxist method, there is no possibility at all of projecting and carrying out a successful policy. Marxism is not the guarantee of victory, but revisionism is the guarantee of defeat.

MAOISM WINS A RECRUIT

Matching the POR’s capitulation to the reformist labor leaders was its pro-Stalinist conciliationism. In this the POR outdoes Pablo. On this question I can do no better than to reproduce portions of a letter that I wrote to Murray Weiss on January 2, 1954 (unanswered, of course):

“I was pleased to see you take cognizance of the ‘counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinists in Bolivia’ in the paper of December 21st. However I find your passing reference entirely inadequate, since it is completely unsupported by any facts. … Do you have such facts, Murray? I, for one, would be very interested in seeing them…. I wonder where you got your facts about the counterrevolutionary role of the Bolivian Stalinists. Certainly not from the Bolivian Trotskyists. As you no doubt know, they never criticize the Bolivian Stalinists, not in public print.

“Look over the issue of the Lucha Obrera, the paper of the POR. In all the issues of 1953 you’ll find just one single reference to the Stalinists. This is an announcement of a split in the Stalinist PIR and the formation of the `Workers and Peasants Communist Party.’ Aside from that there is no other reference to the Stalinists. This fact, so incredible and so glaring, is no doubt known to you. How do you explain it? Has anyone asked the POR for an explanation?

“Even when Lucha Obrera mentions the assassination of Trotsky, it does not say who was responsible or for what reason. (This is No. 43, the same issue I have twice quoted from. The article mentions the assassination and deals with Trotsky’s contributions — led the Russian revolution, built the Red Army, elaborated the theory of Permanent Revolution, and founded the Fourth International. But it manages to omit any mention whatever of the dominating theme of the last seventeen years of his life — the struggle against Stalinism.

“Lucha Obrera carried two article on the fall of Mossadegh — and it did not so much as whisper of the existence of a Stalinist party in Iran, much less denounce its betrayal. ‘The fall of Mossadegh’, says Lucha Obrera, ‘is indubitably a triumph for British imperialism, but it is at the same time the product of a vacillating policy, which attempted to limit the Iranian revolution, turning its back on the aspirations of the masses. And Lucha Obrera means the ‘vacillating policy’ not of the Tudeh Party, which would be bad enough (it does not even hint of the existence of such a party); it means the ‘vacillating policy’ of Mossadegh.

“‘The Pabloite talk about the “inadequacy” of the Stalinist policy during August, of the ‘failure of the Stalinists to project a revolutionary orientation” is false and misleading. It is a question of calculated betrayal.’ So say you in the paper. Isn’t also the POR’s failure to go even as far as Pablo in criticizing, the Iranian and above all the Bolivian Stalinists at least ‘false and misleading’?”

For the sake of accuracy, I must make a reservation to the foregoing. I find that Nos. 38 and 39 of Lucha Obrera are missing from my collection: I cannot therefore say that I have examined all the issues of 1953. Also, I have found one other reference to the Bolivian Stalinists — a reply to their calumnies against the POR, in No. 35 (March 1953). On international Stalinism, there is an article translated from the paper here on the case against the Jewish doctors in No. 34 (February 1953) and a small item on the Berlin strike in No. 40 July), which reported, oddly enough, that one of the demands of the strikers was withdrawal of the Red Army. These reservations do not change the picture of conciliationism to Stalinism.

In No. 36 (April 1953) there is the following panegyric to Mao Tse-tung:

“On the first of March the central Chinese government adopted an electoral law which is fully democratic and allows the revolutionary forces to crush reaction. Full democracy for the exploited and liquidation of all guarantees for the reactionaries, is the spirit of the law.

“The new law establishes that all Chinese (men and women) over 18 ‘With the exception of the counter-revolutionaries’ and former landed proprietors who have not been converted to productive labor, have the right to vote. The illiterate are included and will vote by sign, raising their hands. The Chinese Communist Party and all the other democratic organizations may present their lists, common or separate. The elector will retain the right to vote for candidates on no list.

“The elections will be by proportional representation. One delegate for each 800,000 inhabitant of non-proletarian regions. The proletarians will elect one delegate for each 100,000. Mao Tse-tung explains that the electoral law reflects the leading role of the working class.

“As has been seen, the electoral law is fully democratic for the peasants and proletarians (fundamental forces of the revolution). It concretely establishes that the right to vote cannot be exercised by counter-revolutionaries and old landlords who have not been converted to production. In the China of Mao there is no democracy for the reaction.”

This item appeared at about the same time that the paper here printed the appeal of the International Executive Committee against the persecutions visited on the Chinese Trotskyists. During the rest of the year, until it was suppressed, Lucha Obrera had not one word to say on the subject. It did not even report the news to its readers. And, indeed, why should it care? If the revolution is so well-led by Mao Tse-tung, then are the Trotskyists not truly “fugitives from the revolution”? As one result of the post-war revolutionary events, Maoism has found a place in the Fourth International.

This is no academic question for the POR, for it involves the whole question of the colonial revolution. Maoism is class-collaborationism, the idea of the possibility of a “Peoples Democracy,” which is neither a proletarian nor a bourgeois state, but a transitional government. The POR believes in the same possibility; it believes that the Mao government is such an in-between government. The POR has many nice things to say about the theory of Permanent Revolution. Its actual theory, however, is a caricature of Trotskyism. The theory of Permanent Revolution holds that the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the colonial revolution can be carried out only by a workers state; the POR holds that socialist tasks can be undertaken by a non-proletarian government.

The POR is not alone in this, of course. It finds its inspiration and support in Pabloism, which is one of the names of Maoism.

Could Maoism lead a revolution in Bolivia, as it did in China? While this is not absolutely excluded, it is extremely unlikely, much more unlikely than it was in China. “The revolution advances under the whip of the counter-revolution,” said Marx of the French revolution of 1848; and this empirical observation has turned out to be a general law. Faced with a powerful class enemy, the revolution can be successful only if led by a resolute, fully conscious leadership, that is, the Marxist party; under the tempering blows of the counter-revolution, the leadership will develop, become theoretically and politically hardened, and gain the confidence of the working class.

In China the native ruling class was very weak and very corrupt; deprived of the effective support of imperialism, it could be overthrown by a weak revolution, held back and sabotaged by a bureaucratic and class-collaborationist leadership. Wall Street will not dare allow such an easy victory in any part of its Latin American empire, and it will have much more power, both political and economic, to prevent it than it had in China.

One additional condition is necessary for the success of Maoism; this is the absence of a mass revolutionary Marxist party. For Maoism is not completely revolutionary; while leading the revolution into which it has been forced by the weakness of the class enemy, it deforms the revolution, it expropriates the working class politically.

The victory of Maoism results in a deformed workers state. The political expropriation of the working class can take place in no other way than by the smashing of its class-conscious vanguard and of its Marxist party. Mao left the bulk of this task to Chiang Kai-shek; that is the meaning of what the IEC delicately calls “the lack of coordination” between the workers’ upsurge in 1945-47 and the peasant movement, which the Communist Party halted; that is the meaning of the persecution of the Trotskyists, who are not, as the Pabloites shamelessly and heartlessly quip, “refugees from the revolution,” but rather refugees (if they are lucky) from the counter-revolution — the Stalinist counter-revolution which Mao also represents. Between Maoism and the Marxist party there can be no peaceful coexistence.

Maoism is incompatible with Marxism. That is why Pabloism in Bolivia and everywhere else is the betrayal of Marxism and the liquidation of the party.

MAOISM IN THE INTERNATIONAL

It has been objected (orally, of course) that I have criticized not Pablo but Lora and the POR, and that Lora is now “on our side.” If Lora is indeed on the side of Marxism, this would not invalidate the conclusion that he and the POR were the instrument through which Pablo betrayed the Bolivian revolution. Lora can, of course, repudiate the reformist line he has been following. This would be a great help in rearming the Bolivian revolution, and could only be welcomed. But if Lora is accepted as an orthodox Trotskyist on the basis for being for revolution in the USSR while he is for reformism in Bolivia, then the orthodoxy of the “orthodox Trotskyists” is called into question, and they would share with Pablo the onus of the Bolivian betrayal.

The fight against Pabloist revisionism cannot be confined to the slogans of ‘No capitulation to Stalinism” and “The right of the party to exist.” For the past two years the POR has been organizationally independent while capitulating politically to the bourgeois government. Why? Because the revisionism of the POR is on a more fundamental question: the class nature of the state. And Pabloite revisionism as a whole is also based fundamentally on the rejection of the Marxist position on the class nature of the state.

Before the Third World Congress Comrade Cannon recognized the danger. In 1949 he, together with the majority of the national committee, rejected the position put forward by Cochran and Hansen that the bourgeois states of Eastern Europe had transformed themselves into workers states without revolution.

“If you once begin to play with the idea that the class nature of the state can be changed by manipulations in the top circles,” said Comrade Cannon, you open the door to all kinds of revision of basic theory … It can only be done by revolution which is followed by a fundamental change in property relations.”

This prophecy has been completely fulfilled; yet the prophet prefers to remain without honor for his prophecy. He prefers to fight some of the manifestations of the revisionism he predicted and ignore the foundation on which it rests.

When the Third World Congress adopted the very position which Comrade Cannon had attacked so sharply, he and all his supporters joined in its unanimous endorsement. They accepted the “intermediate status” of the “buffer countries” from 1945 to 1948; they accepted Pablo’s and Cochran’s economist criteria on the class nature of the state; they accepted the idea of a fundamental social transformation and of a change in the class nature of the state without revolution. They weren’t happy with this position; not one article has ever appeared defending or explaining it.

They later also accepted Pablo’s position that there was in China not a workers or a bourgeois state but a transitional, an in-between, a “workers and peasants government.” They never defended this position either — in writing — and defended it orally only when they had to; when they were faced with the attack of the Vern tendency in Los Angeles. Murray Weiss and Myra Tanner showed then that this position could be defended only with the most blatant and open revisionism — such revisionism as they would not dare put on paper. They also accepted Pablo’s betrayal of the Bolivian revolution, also refusing to defend it in writing and consenting to an oral debate — in Los Angeles — only after much hesitation and several changes of mind.

For the last four years the political line of the international movement has been in the hands of Pablo, with the “orthodox Trotskyists” I following docilely behind. They were, as Murray Weiss said, “in the arms of Pablo.”  “The right of the party to exist” and “no conciliation with Stalinism” were nowhere to be found when Pablo and Germain presented their Maoist position on China. They voted for a resolution that declared: ‘By putting itself in matters of doctrine on the plane of Marxism-Leninism, by affirming that its historical aim is the creation of the classless Communist society, by educating its cadres in this spirit, as well as in the spirit of devotion to the USSR, the Chinese CP presents by an large the same characteristics as the other mass Stalinist parties of the colonial and semi-colonial countries.” (Is this why the POR refuses to criticize the Stalinists?)

They accepted the line of “critical support” of the Mao government, even when Germain showed that this really meant solidarity with the Mao government against the Trotskyists. With a brutality worthy of a Stalin, but unprecedented in the Trotskyist movement, Germain declared that the refusal to give support to Mao, put forth in the IEC by Comrade Jacques, was , “counter-revolutionary“. Not one member of the International, or of any party in the movement, raised a voice against this piece of Stalinist brutality. To call Jacques’ position counter-revolutionary signified that the difference over whether to give critical support to Mao was no terminological dispute; it signified solidarity with the secret police against all independent thought, against all Trotskyists. Comrades who emitted shocked gasps at a much more insignificant defection, that of Grace Carlson, took this with equanimity. Not only were there no protests, but this Stalinist position was actually defended by Max Geldman, a leading majority supporter, in a debate. “You have no trust,” said Geldman, “you are suspicious of the IEC.” This was in April, 1953.

Yes, Vern and Ryan, and the comrades supporting their position, did not trust the IEC, led by Pablo and Germain; they were more than suspicious of their revisionist line. And they had much less concrete knowledge than Geldman and the rest of the National Committee were in a position to have. We didn’t know what Peng knew. But Marxism is a better guide to people and events than empiricism or faith. Murray Weiss had faith in Pablo. “How do you know”, he asked in a debate with Dennis Vern in May, 1953, “that the Chinese Communist Party cannot become a Marxist party?”

“I am willing,” replied Comrade Vern, “to stake the whole validity of my position on this: when the pressure of the Korean war lets up, the government, rather, than, as you and Germain say, unfurling the proletarian power, will become even more bureaucratized; it will intensify its repressions against the Trotskyists.”

WHY ARE THEY SILENT?

Now the comrades are indignant at the Pabloite jibe that the Chinese Trotskyists are “fugitives from a revolution.” But indignation is no answer to a political position. The Pabloites are confident; they believe that Maoism is or can become completely revolutionary. What do his opponents say? Nothing. They still formally retain the Pabloite position. All attempts to raise the question are met with stony silence. Comrade Stein made an attempt to approach the question in an internal document of the Majority Caucus, but he was rebuffed and has since kept his peace. The National Committee resolution criticizing Pablo’s line on Stalinism, (“Against Pabloist Revisionism,” FI, Sept.-Oct. 1953) retains Pablo s position on China.

Why have they remained silent? Why do they still remain silent, as the International Committee admits, on problems left suspended, befogged or falsified by the Pabloist leadership during “three year”? Is it because, as we have vapidly been told, they didn’t want to “dignify” the Vern tendency by replying to its criticisms? But the questions on which they hold such a stubborn silence involve the life and death of the movement! Is the tiny Vern group so powerful that it can lock the minds and typewriters of the party leadership on such vital questions?

No. The “orthodox Trotskyists” have a much more important reason for having defaulted to Pablo. While Pablo has taken up and answered important problems as they arose — in an empirical revisionist manner — his opponents have been unable to give any answer to these problems. Both Pablo and his opponents find that they cannot make reality conform with their doctrine; that, in the aphorism used by both Harry Frankel and Max Geldman, “theory is gray and life is green.” Pablo turns his back on doctrine and rivets his eyes in an empirical and impressionistic manner on “the new world reality.” His opponents turn their back on events and maintain their doctrine as revealed dogma.

Stalinism cannot be reformed — says Comrade Cannon in public statements. Then has the Chinese CP, which certainly was Stalinist, been reformed or not? No answer.

The Soviet bureaucracy must be overthrown by revolution. What of the Chinese bureaucracy; is a refusal to give it critical support still counter-revolutionary? No answer.

The class nature of the state, says Comrade Cannon, cannot be changed without revolution. What of the changes that took place in Eastern Europe? When and how were these states transformed from bourgeois to proletarian? On this question, once having voted for Pablo s position, they have neither defended (in writing, that is) nor attacked it.

And they have answered no questions on the Bolivian revolution.

Is it then not possible to face the post-war reality and at the same time maintain and defend the Marxist doctrine? Yes, it is. Both the empiricism of Pablo and the abstentionism of Cannon have their common foundation in the rejection of Marxism on the nature of.the state; and this has its origin in the Russian Question. The belief that the Soviet bureaucracy is completely counter-revolutionary, which is the origin of the errors of both sides, signifies the rejection of Trotskyism on the nature of the Soviet state.

When a working class organization, no matter how bureaucratized, carries on a struggle against the capitalist class, no matter how inadequately, that is a class struggle. If the Soviet state is a workers state, then its struggle against Nazi Germany was a class struggle. A class war is a class struggle on the plane of state power — that is, revolution-war and counter-revolution-war. This thought, which has been hesitatingly and equivocatingly accepted in regard to the Third World War, has been rejected in regard to the Second. Yet this is the only position which can bring all the post-war events, the whole “new reality, into conformity with Marxist theory. With the victory over the Germans the Red Army was left as the only real power — the only state power — in Eastern Europe. That was the revolution, the transfer of power from one class to another. Without this transfer of power, the subsequent economic and social transformations would have been impossible.

This revolution is ignored by the International. The Stalinist bureaucracy was completely counter-revolutionary, it was held, and therefore could not carry out a revolution. The buffer states could not be workers states, concluded the International; they must still be bourgeois states — degenerated bourgeois ‘states, on the road to structural assimilation into the Soviet Union. But the Third World Congress could not ignore the fundamental economic and social transformations that had taken place; there must be workers states. How had they come into being? Bourgeois states on the Road to Structural Assimilation turned out to be states with an “intermediate status,” transitional states, the betrayal of Marxism on the state. The “orthodox Trotskylsts” assented to the theoretical betrayal because they had no way out. And they still hold to their original error, the cause of their abdication to Pablo.

Is the Soviet bureaucracy counter-revolutionary completely and to the core? The “old Trotskysts ” can get no support from Trotsky on this point. They can find only one quotation which can in any way be made to appear to support their point of view. And this sentence is part of a passage in which Trotsky explains to Shachtman that the Soviet state is counter-revolutionary, but nevertheless still a workers state. The comrades have their own good reasons for calling the Vern tendency “Talmudist” and “scholastic.” Admitting that the bureaucracy does do progressive work, Comrade Weiss maintains that bourgeois politicians also do some progressive things without changing their completely reactionary character.

This shows a complete disregard of class distinctions. Building roads, scientific research may be progressive in the general sense of the struggle to control nature; but for Marxists the terms progressive and reactionary have political meaning only in relation to the class struggle. A capitalist who gives a concession in response to a struggle is no more progressive than one who resists; the effect of capitalist resistance may even be more progressive, in that it forces workers to organize and fight more militantly. While a capitalist who makes the most liberal concessions is not doing anything progressive, a trade union leader who organizes a picket line is. And the activity of the Soviet bureaucracy in organizing the struggle against the Hitler counterrevolution was profoundly progressive. If the bureaucracy had deserted (and many bureaucrats did) the Soviet Union would have been conquered. It will be objected that the absence of an alternative, a Marxist leadership, was due entirely to ferocious suppression by the bureaucracy — and that is true. But this merely serves to point up the dual role of the bureaucracy, both progressive and reactionary.

If the Soviet state is really a workers state, then how can the administrator of the state, faced not only by a rebellious working class but also by a ferociously counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, be completely and to the core counter-revolutionary? This position cannot be held consistently; the supporters of the International Committee still cannot deny the fundamental changes in Eastern Europe. They insist that the changes were carried out by “military-bureaucratic action” and that the Chinese Stalinists are no longer Stalinists. How this proves the completely reactionary nature of the Soviet bureaucracy no one has yet shown.

The choice cannot be evaded: either give up the theory that the Soviet bureaucracy is completely counter-revolutionary, or give up more and more completely and openly Marxism on the state. The choice will have to be made. The silence will have to be broken. Until it is, the struggle against Pabloism cannot be carried to a conclusion.

Above all, and first of all, the silence on the Bolivian revolution must be broken. Pablo’s betrayal must be exposed and combatted. If Pablo’s silence on Bolivia is a sign of his abandonment of Marxism as a science, what shall we say of the silence of his opponents? To remain silent is to shield the betrayers and share in the betrayal.

WE NEED INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

Not only has there been no discussion of the Bolivian revolution, as though we have nothing to learn from it and no political aid to give; the Bolivian revolution has been almost completely absent from the propaganda activity of the Party.

When the revolution began, two years ago, the paper responded quickly and carried a goodly amount of material in the first few weeks. George Breitman wrote several good articles, which shows that he knows what a revolutionary policy should be. He even called the MNR government a bourgeois government, and wrote that “Lechin’s stay in the cabinet had better be brief.”

But after the first few weeks the paper carried only occasional references to the Bolivian revolution. Breitman apparently lost interest until, stung by the suppression of Lucha Obrera, he wrote a brief article in which he again called the MNR government “a capitalist government.” Even when Labor Action [Shachtman’s paper] accused the POR leaders of having accepted posts on governmental commissions, no reply was forthcoming. Even a letter written by the Secretary of the POR denying the charges was denied publication. (On this point, I admit an extenuating circumstance: the denial by the POR appeared to be a diplomatic one. The secretary of the POR denied being in the government, but said nothing about being on commissions. An open letter to Labor Action, promised by the Secretary of the POR, has never appeared.)

Since the first weeks, the paper has aped the line of the POR, calling the MNR government petty-bourgeois, pointing to the presence of labor leaders in the cabinet as proof of its progressive character, and later accusing the MNR of betraying the revolution. The last time, until this writing, that mention was made of Bolivia was on December 28 [1953]. That was an editorial dealing with the suppression of Lucha Obrera. The editorial denounced the cowardly labor leaders for their silence on Bolivia! The paper did win one victory. After two editorials calling for recognition of the MNR government, without any mass demonstrations, public meetings, or petitions, the State Department was convinced. Two later editorials protesting the suppression of Lucha Obrera did not have the same effect.

The Party has done nothing to popularize, defend, or explain the Bolivian revolution to the public. In two years there has been just one (1) public meeting on Bolivia; not one meeting per branch, but one meeting for the whole party! This was held in New York, and Bert Cochran was the speaker. The Bolivian revolution is sometimes mentioned in holiday orations, usually not at all. There has been just one branch discussion on the Bolivian revolution in the whole party, a debate in Los Angeles; and this took place six months after it was requested. “You have a fixation on Bolivia”, I was told, “we are busy with the American revolution.” This from the organizer of the branch in Los Angeles, with its large Latin American population!

This shameful neglect of the elementary duty of international solidarity is in glaring contradiction to the directives given by the Founding Congress of the Fourth International:

“Just as the Latin American sections of the Fourth International must popularize in their press and agitation the struggles of the American labor and revolutionary movements against the common enemy, so the section in the U.S. must devote more time and energy in its agitational and propaganda work to acquaint the proletariat of the U.S. with the position and struggles of the Latin American countries and their working class movements. Every act of American imperialism must be exposed in the press and at meetings, and, on indicated occasions, the section in the U.S. must seek to organize mass movements of protest against specific activities of Yankee imperialism.

“In addition, the section in the U.S., by utilizing the Spanish language and literature of the Fourth International, must seek to organize on however a modest scale to begin with, the militant revolutionary forces among the doubly-exploited millions of Filipino, Mexican, Caribbean, Central and South American workers now resident in the U.S., not only for the purpose of linking them with the labor movement in the U.S. but also for the purpose of strengthening the ties with the labor and revolutionary movements in the countries from which these workers originally came. This work shall be carried on under the direction of the American Secretariat of the Fourth International which will publish the necessary literature and organize the work accordingly.”

Due to reactionary laws, international affiliation is barred. But no capitalist law can prevent genuine orthodox Trotskyists from acting like internationalists. The Bolivian revolution should have the same importance for us as a strike in Minneapolis or Detroit.

Class Collaboration Makes a Recruit

by Sam Ryan, Los Angeles.

First published in the Socialist Workers Party Internal Bulletin, August 1953. Republished in and scanned from the LRP publication “Bolivia: The Revolution the ‘Fourth International Betrayed.”  

“Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary practice.”

— Lenin

1. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT BOLIVIA?

It is now sixteen months since the Bolivian revolution began. It is sixteen months since this little nation, of three and one-half million people, presented the Fourth International the opportunity of proving that Marxism — Trotskyism — can conquer the masses and thereby lead them to victory.

Considering the fact that a Trotskyist mass party, the POR, is involved in a revolutionary situation, we should expect by this time to have a mass of information from Bolivia, such information as would immeasurably enrich, deepen and concretize our Marxist theory.

How has the POR gone about the task of winning the massesfrom the NNW from the labor-fakers of the Lechin stripe?

How has the POR dealt with the various concrete questions which arise with the various stages of the struggle?

Who controls the COB? What is the strength of Lechin? of the POR? of the Stalinists? How has their strength varied in the course of the past sixteen months?

What about the curve of strike struggles? How has the strength of the POR varied with it? Have political strikes been increasing in intensity? If not, why? What has been the role of the POR? of Lechin?

Have any disputes arisen within the POR? Or has the POR, in a revolutionary situation, been completely monolithic?

These are just a few of the many questions on which we should by this time have a rich treasury of information.

Actually we have been given practically no information on the situation in Bolivia — the one revolution in which the Trotskyists play an important role.

It is not true, however, that we know nothing at all about what is going on in Bolivia. For the past month detailed reports have been circulating about the activities of the POR. According to these reports received from non-Trotskyist sources, the POR is accepting posts in the governmental machinery; Guillermo Lora, former Secretary of the party, has been appointed [to] the Stabilization Office; Comrade Moller, present Secretary of the POR, is director of the Workers Savings Bank, which is controlled by Juan Lechin, a member of the Cabinet; Allayo Mercado, another POR leader, is a member of the Agrarian Commission. In the face of these reports the silence of the PC of the SWP and of the International Secretariat should cause deep concern to all comrades.

Silence is acquiescence. And those who remain silent before a policy which politically disarms the workers and peasants before their class enemy must share the responsibility for the inevitable results.

The reports of coalitionism and class-collaboration by the POR do not come as a bolt from the blue. This is the direction the political line of the POR has taken, with the encouragement of the leading comrades of the International, since the April 9th, 1952 revolution.

In May, 1952 the paper carried an interview with Comrade Lora. I wrote a letter to the PC, which was printed in the June 1952 Internal Bulletin, expressing sharp disagreement with Lora’s political line. I stated then that I thought it was a conciliationist and class-collaborationist line, rather than the line of revolutionary Marxism; and I asked whether this was the line of the POR. The PC replied that this was “obviously a difference of opinion between you and Comrade Lora,” and it, the PC, was in no position to participate in the discussion.

Now we have the official position of the POR, in the form of an unsigned article in the magazine ( “One Year of the Bolivian Revolution” [Fourth International, Jan.-Feb. 1953]). This article, continuing Lora’s line, unmistakably lays the basis not for leading the proletarian revolution but for propping up the bourgeois state. Immediately on reading the article, I prepared a criticism, intended for the Internal Bulletin. On hearing of the actual steps the POR has taken toward getting into the government, I refrained from sending in my article, waiting for a denial, or an explanation, or a criticism, by the PC or the IS. However, no comment has up to now been forthcoming; and this fact is in itself a harsh indictment not only of the policy of the POR, but also of the line of the IS and of the PC.

2. A “CLASSICAL” REVOLUTION — AN UNCLASSICAL POLICY

Since the Second World War, the International has been in the habit of finding “exceptional” situations in which, “exceptionally,” the “classical’ laws and traditions of Leninism do not hold. In Eastern Europe the denial of the revolution-war character of the Soviet-German war led the International to see the establishment of workers’ states without proletarian revolution. In China the International sees a transitional state, neither bourgeois nor proletarian, baptized dual power and “workers and peasants government.” Furthermore, the International sees the Chinese Stalinist party reformed into a party that it expects will lead “the demonstration of proletarian power’; the role of Trotskyism is reduced from the struggle for power to that of “pushing” the CP and the masses. For these “exceptional” situations the International has adopted the concepts and methods of reformism. But a reformist course once embarked upon, cannot be confined; it is not at all difficult to see every situation as “exceptional”.

But the article (“One Year of the Bolivian Revolution”) notes that we have here no exceptional situation. It sees the close resemblance of the course of the Bolivian revolution to that of the Russian revolution. One would think that much could be learned by studying the strategy and tactics — above all, the conceptions — of the Bolsheviks in the February-October period.

The political line of the POR, however, is not that of Lenin but that of his class-collaborationist opponents, Kamenev and Zinoviev. The latter, in fact, did not go as far as the POR; they did not accept posts in the bourgeois government.

“If that policy (of Kamenev and Zinoviev) had prevailed,” says Trotsky, ‘die development of the revolution would have passed over the head of our party and, in the end, the insurrection of the worker and peasant masses would have taken place without party leadership; in other words, we would have had the repetition of the July days on a colossal scale, i.e., this time not as an episode but as a catastrophe. It is perfectly obvious that the immediate consequence of such a catastrophe would have been the physical destruction of our party. This provides us with a measuring rod of how deep our differences of opinion were.”

The same measuring rod should indicate to us the very serious penalty our movement will incur as the result of a wrong policy. Let me cite the three central paragraphs of the magazine article:

“The POR began by justifiably granting critical support to the MNR government. That is, it desisted from issuing the slogan down with the government’; it gave the government critical support ll against attacks of imperialism and reaction, and it supported all progressive measures. But at the same time it avoided any expression whatever of confidence in the government. On the contrary, it propelled the revolutionary activity and independent organization of the masses as much as it could.

“The POR limits its support and sharpens its criticism insofar as the government proves itself incapable of fulfilling the national-democratic program of the revolution, insofar as it hesitates, capitulates, indirectly plays the game of imperialism and reaction, prepares to betray and for this reason tries to harry and deride the revolutionists.

“The POR has been applying this flexible attitude which requires a carefully considered emphasis at each moment, one that is not confused but neither is it sectarian, and in applying this attitude the POR is demonstrating a remarkable political maturity. The POR has adopted an attitude of constructive criticism toward the proletarian and plebeian base of the MNR with the aim of facilitating a progressive differentiation within it.

Every sentence in these three paragraphs contains at least one assault on the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism; the policy outlined is the direct opposite of the one carried out by Lenin. It has become -the fashion here in Los Angeles to point out that Lenin is dead; but we can easily judge with what choice and pithy characterizations ations he would have answered anyone who called any kind of support of a bourgeois government’ justifiable.”

“‘Why didn’t you arrest Rodzianko and Co.’ (the Provisional Government)? he bitterly flung at the Bolshevik leaders on his arrival in Petrograd. The next day he wrote: ‘No support whatever to the Provisional Government.’ In the mass demonstrationtion toward the end of April the Bolsheviks raised the slogan: ‘Down With the Government’.”

Lenin withdrew the slogan “Down with the government.” But this had nothing in common, as Trotsky points out in “Lessons of October,” with the position of Kamenev that the slogan itself was an adventuristic blunder.

“Lenin, after the experience of the reconnoiter,” says Trotsky,

“withdrew the slogan of the immediate overthrow of the provisional government. But he did not withdraw it for any set period of time — for so many weeks or months — but strictly in dependence upon how quickly the revolt of the masses against the conciliationists would grow The oppositionists, on the contrary, considered the slogan itself a blunder. (They favored critical support of the provisional government—S.R.) In the temporary retreat of Lenin there was not even a hint of change in the political line. He did not proceed from the fact that the democratic revolution was not completed. He based himself exclusively on the idea that the masses were not at the moment capable of overthrowing the Provisional Government and that, therefore, everything possible had to be done to enable the working class to overthrow the Provisional Government on the morrow. ‘

Lenin’s “flexibility” in tactics has nothing in common with the flexible attitude” of the POR toward the MNR government. Lenin was not at all flexible but very rigid in his attitude toward the Provisional Government. All of Lenin’s flexible tactics were part of one unchanging line: overthrow of the Provisional Government.

Lenin reposed no confidence at all in the Provisional Government, nor in the parties that composed it; his confidence was entirely, reserved to the Bolshevik party. This statement is a truism, almost a tautology. The magazine, however, feels constrained to protest that the POR  “avoided (!!) any expression of confidence in this government.” What is this but the purely formal language of diplomacy? And like all diplomatic language, this passage is more useful in hiding than in clarifying the thought behind it.

What does this sentence mean? That the POR never said: “We have confidence in the government”? But there are many way to express the essence of confidence, above a in action, while “avoiding” the form. First of all, in the April 9,1952 revolution the POR, rather than striving for power for itself, for the working class, proposed that the MNR take power; that is, the POR proposed to maintain the bourgeoisie in power.

If confidence is not placed in the working class and its party, that they can take and exercise power, it is thereby given, like it or not, to the bourgeois government. Lenin understood this. When, in answer to his demand that the bourgeois government be overthrown, the Mensheviks asked the, to them, rhetorical question — Who among us will form a government and rule the nation? — Lenin shouted out — “We will!” And he was answered by derisive laughter, for the Bolsheviks were but a small minority in the Soviet and in the country.

The magazine article itself exposes the glaring contrast between the attitude of the POR and that of Lenin.

“The The direction of the Bolivian revolution up to now confirms step by step the general line of this type of classic development of the proletarian revolution in our epoch. It bears more resemblance to the course of the Russian revolution, although in miniature, than it does to the Chinese revolution, for example. It began by lifting the radical party of the petty bourgeoisie to power (as was the case with the Russian revolution in a particular stage before October) with the support of the revolutionary masses … and of the still revolutionary party of the proletariat, the POR.”

This is not “avoiding any expression of confidence in the MNR government”! Furthermore, it is arrantly false to imply that the Bolsheviks gave any support to any”radical party of the petty bourgeoisie” which ruled Russia ‘in a particular stage before October.”

3. WHITEWASHING THE LABOR LIEUTENANTS

Could the working class have taken power in April, 1952? The above-quoted paragraph implied that a proletarian revolution was not possible. But this is a hopelessly formalistic view of the matter. The working class was armed and had defeated the army and the police. Nothing prevented it from taking power except its own illusions and its own capitulationist leadership. Exactly as in Russia! the power of the working class is shown by the fact that it was able to force the MNR to admit two of its leaders into the government.

Nothing at all is said about this in the magazine article. The author speaks of a future differentiation with the MNR, of a future revolutionary wing emerging from the MNR, but he says nothing at all of the fact that this differentiation is already over a year old; that what the masses supported in April, 1952, was not the MNR but its proletarian (class-collaborationist) left wing. What were, and are, the relations between the POR and this already-existing left wing? This question is not even discussed. The article “avoids” mentioning the “expression of confidence” which the POR extended to the class-collaborationist labor leaders (and to the government) when it supported ttheir entry into the government. And to this day the POR has not raised the demand that the labor leaders break with the bourgeois government and take power.

The decisive question of the revolution is not even mentioned! The struggle of the POR for power is concretely embodied in its struggle with the MNR left wing for leadership of the workers and peasants. Before the Marxists can take power they must defeat the Compromisers ideologically and politically. This is an integral and unavoidable part of the class struggle; the Compromisers embody the influence of the enemy class within the working class.

How did the Bolsheviks defeat the Russian Compromisers? The Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries also had the support of a majority of the workers and peasants. They also entered the bourgeois government. The Bolsheviks mercilessly attacked the Compromisers for their class treachery. They intransigently opposed the collaboration of the Mensheviks and SRs in the bourgeois government. When the Bolsheviks were in a small minority they insistently demanded that the Mensheviks and SRs break with the bourgeois politicians and take power, and not some time in the future, but now, immediately. Even if the Mensheviks and SRs had taken power in the spring of 1917, that would not have won them the confidence of the Bolsheviks, nor a governmental coalition with them; the Bolsheviks promised only to overthrow them peacefully, insofar as that should be possible.

How is the POR going to expose and defeat the Bolivian compromisers? Far from attacking their class treachery, the POR demanded their inclusion in the MNR government. Far from calling on them to break with the MNR and take power (establish a “workers’ and peasants’ government”) ) the POR relegates the workers’ and peasants government to “the final aim of the struggle.” The POR speaks of the “collaboration of a revolutionary wing emerging from the MNR in a future workers’ and peasants’ government. It has thus solved the problem — verbally. If the future left wing is revolutionary, all we have to do is merge with it and form a bigger revolutionary party. But to grapple with the present reformist left wing? This the POR fails to do.

The assumption that a POR government was inevitable is an attempt to whitewash the false and treacherous leaders of the working class by blaming their class treachery on the “backwardness” of the masses.

4. CRITICAL SUPPORT AND CLASS COLLABORATION

The question of critical support has become a difficult thing to discuss in our party; its meaning has become obscured since the International decided to give critical support to the Mao government in China and to the MNR government in Bolivia. Is critical support political support? Is critical support material defense against armed counter-revolution? Is critical support of a government merely support of its progressive measures? All these definitions are included in one brief and very confused passage in the magazine article.

In the Spanish civil war the Trotskyists were quite clear about the distinction between material aid and critical support. We gave material aid to the bourgeois Loyalist government; but we gave it no hint of critical support. Shachtman was sharply rebuked by Trotsky for proposing it. Our attitude toward the working class parties, including the POUM, the most left of them all, was the same; we refused to give them critical support.

Lenin likewise drew a sharp line between defense and support. At the time of Kornilov’s attempt to overthrow Kerensky he wrote:

“We ought not even now support the Kerensky government. This is unprincipled. You may ask ‘Ought we not to fight against Koraov?’ Yes, of course, But these are two entirely different things. A boundary line divides them which some Bolsheviks transgress and fall into conciliationism, allowing themselves to be carried away by the flood-tide of events.”

Lenin’s defense of Kerensky was an integral part of his struggle to overthrow Kerensky.

In the conception of the POR, as exemplified by the magazine article under discussion, the word “defense” as applied to the bourgeois government is nowhere to be seen. The word “support” is applied indiscriminately to mean both political support and material defense. Besides being an impoverishment of our theoretical heritage, this confusion gives aid and comfort to all the compromisers.

“The POR limits its support and sharpens its criticism insofar as the government proves itself incapable of fulfilling the national-democratic program of the revolution, insofar as it hesitates, capitulates, indirectly plays the game of imperialism and reaction, prepares to betray and for this reason tries to harry and deride the revolutionists.

What is this but political support — that is, support of the policy of the MNR government, insofar as it does carry out the national- democratic. program of the revolution? How reminiscent of the “insofar” as of Stalin and Kamenev, who, before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, proclaimed their readiness to support the Provisional Government “insofar as it fortifies the conquestsrevolution. `insofar as ” it fortifies the conquests of the revolution.”

What is wrong with both examples of “insofar as”? Just this — to correlate “support” and “criticism” means that our support is political; how can you correlate physical defense with political criticism?

If, however the POR means that we “limit” our material defense of the treacherous ally depending on their political policy or there attitude toward us, then this could only result in sectarian isolation and passivity at the very moment when material defense is necessary. This is another instance of the well-known fact that opportunism and sectarianism are carried in the same theoretical shell. Let us remember that Kornilov’s attempt on Kerensky came in August, precisely during Kerensky’s repression of the Bolsheviks; Trotsky was in prison, Lenin in hiding. Kerensky had certainly “proved proved himself incapable of fulfilling the national-democratic program of the revolution”‘; he was certainly “harrying and deriding the revolutionists.” Furthermore, Kerensky was actually plotting with Kornilov to destroy the Soviets. Wasn’t this the ideal time for Lenin to “limit his support”? Yet if he had taken such “revenge” on Kerensky the revolution would have suffered a smashing defeat.

Before the recent plenum of our National Committee, the Los Angeles Local held a discussion in which the question of critical support of the Mao Tse-Tung government figured prominently. “Critical support,”  said Myra Tanner, “is not political support”. “Critical support”, said Murray Weiss, also a supporter of the IEC position, “is political support.” And he castigated the Vern tendency as hopeless sectarians because they oppose giving critical support to a working class party which has led a revolution. Together with Comrade Vern I have written a reply to this position, which has been submitted but not as yet published in the Internal Bulletin (“Open Letter to the National Committee ). [This Open Letter was published in the same issue of the SWP Internal Bulletin as the current document.]

But the argument of Murray Weiss does not apply to Bolivia; and this was pointed out several times in the course of the discussion. When we asked “What about Bolivia?” our only answer was an embarrassed silence. And this silence has been maintained by Murray Weiss and all the comrades supporting the position of the IEC all through the discussion and to this very day!

The question whether critical support is political support could only arise because the traditional Trotskyist position on critical support has been overthrown. The question could not arise in the past because Trotskyists have never before given critical support to a party  or a government. We have never hesitated, however, to give critical support to all progressive actions of any party, any government. Giving critical support to President Truman’s suggestion for an increase in the minimum wage, for example, did not imply critical support to the Democratic party, and did not raise the question whether or not we were giving political support to the government.

5. DOES THE THIRD CAMP RULE BOLIVIA?

Is the Bolivian government a bourgeois government? Does it serve one of the two major contending classes of modern society? On this question too the POR has abandoned the traditional and principled position of Marxism. And in making this “exception” it finds support in the other “exceptions” found by the International in the “intermediate status” of Eastern Europe in 1945-48 and in the “workers’ and peasants’ government” the IEC sees in China.

“The MNR, says the POR, “is a mass party, the majority of its leadership petty-bourgeois but fringed with a few conscious representatives of the nascent industrial bourgeoisie, one of whom, for example, is very probably Paz Estenssoro himself” And the government is, naturally, characterized as a “petty-bourgeois” government “fringed with conscious agents of the native feudal-capitalists and of imperialism.” The agents of imperialism and of the capitalist class are on the fringes of the party and of the government. Such a ludicrous assertion is possible only in an atmosphere poisoned with neo-reformism. The bourgeois politicians are on the fringes of the MNR in exactly the same sense in which Henry Ford is on the fringe of the Ford Motor Co.

How do the leaders of the POR account for the fact that these agents of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism control the government, including in their ranks that prominent inhabitant of the “fringe,” the president of Bolivia? Every successful and unsuccessful revolution since 1917 teaches us that the petty-bourgeoisie (and this applies doubly to the urban petty bourgeoisie) cannot have a party of its own; cannot establish its own government. This is the cornerstone of the Permanent Revolution.

Contrast the superficial approach of the POR with that of Trotsky:

“The revolution,” he says in “Lessons of October,” “caused political shifts to take place in two directions; the reactionaries became Cadets and the Cadets became Republicans against their own wishes — a purely formal shift to the left; the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks became the ruling bourgeois party — a shift to the right. These are the means whereby bourgeois society seeks to create for itself a new backbone of state power, stability and order.”

We should not forget that the counterpart of the Mensheviks and SRs is not the MNR, but its labor left wing. Trotsky does not fail to characterize those Bolsheviks who favored critical support to the government:

“But at the same time, while the Mensheviks were passing from a formal socialist position to a vulgar democratic one, the right wing of the Bolsheviks was shifting to a formal socialist position, i.e., the Menshevik position of yesterday.

6. THE MNR IS OUR DEADLY ENEMY!

Why is it so important to understand that the MNR government is a bourgeois (and not a petty-bourgeois) government? Because the Trotskyists must be absolutely clear that the government is their deadly enemy. And the Trotskyists must be the deadly enemy of the MNR and its government. This is not the conception of the POR.

“In a more advanced stage of the revolution, says the magazine article, “it (the Paz Estenssoro government) will fall under the drive of the right seekingking to impose a military dictatorship, , or of the left to establish the genuine workers’ and peasants’ government, the dictatorship of the proletariat allied to the peasant poor and the urban petty-bourgeoisie.”

What will the MNR do? Will it wait to be overthrown?

No. The MNR will tie the hands of the working class, entangle it in bourgeois legalism and red tape, using its labor lieutenants for this purpose. It will persecute the revolutionary militants, disarm the workers politically (again, using its labor lieutenants), then physically.

And the forces of “the right, seeking to impose a military dictatorship,” who are they? With what will they impose this military dictatorship? Aren’t they the officers, the general staff, of precisely this “petty-bourgeois” government? Don’t the petty-bourgeois democrats always, like Kerensky, like Azana, like Paz Estenssoro, build up and conspire with their own generals? Kornilov was Kerensky s chief of staff. Franco was Azana s mllilitary ruler of North Africa. And let us not forget that most left of democrats, the darling of the Stalinized Comintern, Chiang Kai-shek, who was his own Kornilov, That the future would-be military dictator of Bolivia is at present preparing himself and his forces under the protection of Paz Estenssoro is indicated by the recent attempt at a coup d’etat by army and police officers.

The MNR government is the deadly enemy of the working class. Its overthrow is an urgent necessity.

7. CONSCIOUS PLANNING OR FATALISTIC OPTIMISM?

One of the most striking features of the POR line is its fatalistic optimism. One example:

“The urban petty bourgeoisie,” says the magazine article, “is divided between a very poor majority, highly radicalized because of its unstable conditions and always available (my emphasis—S.R.) as an ally of the revolutionary proletariat…”

But the impoverished petty bourgeoisie is not always available as an ally of the revolutionary proletariat. One of the major lessons of the Russian October, and of the aborted German revolution of 1923, and of the rise of Hitler, is exactly this: The radicalized petty bourgeoisie, and the working class for that matter, cannot be regarded as so much bullion, always available to the Party once they have been convinced of the necessity for a revolutionary change. They have turned first to the social reformists. Disappointed in Marxists critically, suspiciously. If the Marxists prove timorous, hesitate in carrying out their allotted task of overthrowing the bourgeois government, the support of the masses will quickly melt away. The radicalized petty bourgeoisie then become easy prey for a fascist demagogue; the petty bourgeoisie is then “available” not for revolution but for counter-revolution.

That is why the insurrection is so very necessary a part of the revolution. That is why the moment of insurrection is the decisive moment in the life of the revolutionary party. That is why Lenin was so insistent that the Bolshevik Central Committee treat insurrection as an art.

“The persistent, tireless, and incessant pressure which Lenin exerted on the Central Committee throughout September and ctober arose from his constant fear lest we allow the propitious moment to slip away.” This is Trotsky speaking, in “Lessons of October.” “What does it mean to lose the propitious moment? …the relation of forces undergoes change depending on the mood of the proletarian masses, depending upon the extent to which their illusions are shattered and their political experience has grown; the extent to which the confidence of intermediate classes and groups in the state power is shattered; and finally, the extent to which the latter loses confidence in itself During revolution all these processes take place with lightning speed. The whole tactical art consists in this: that we seize the moment when the combination of circumstances is most favorable to us… Neither the elemental disintegration of the state power, nor the elemental influx of the impatient and exacting confidence of the masses in the Bolsheviks could endure for a protracted period of time. The crisis had to be resolved one way or another. It is now or never! Lenin said.”

There is nothing of this sense of urgency in the line of the POR, as expressed in the magazine article. “The final aim of the struggle strygle” is expressed as:I

“the formation of a genuine workers’ and peasant’s government. This government will not arisemechanically but dialectically, basing itself on the organisms of dual power created by the mass movement itself..” “The workers’ and peasants’ government will appear tomorrow as the natural emanation of all these organisms on which it will base itself.”

All the expressions used — “formation,” “arise dialectically,” “appear” — can describe an evolutionary process. The decisive question, however, is not how the workers state will appear, arise, or be formed, but how it will take power, become the ruler of the nation. What is missing is the consummation of the revolution, the consciously organized insurrection.

One possible reply to my criticism (if it is answered at all) may be that I am too critical of the POR; that the leaders of the POR know what has to be done in a revolution; that they simply do not want to tell all their plans.

Unfortunately, such reasoning, alluring as it may appear, demands an exercise of faith rivaling that of the believer in the Immaculate Conception. For it is not the subjective intentions of the leaders of the POR which are at issue (I admit they are only the best), but the objective results of their neoreformist conceptions.

It is a very difficult thing to shift a party’s line from peace to war, from critical support to revolutionary overthrow. Even if the POR had the line of irreconcilable opposition to the government from the very beginning, the change from preparation to actual overthrow would bring with it a crisis of leadership, such as plagued the Bolsheviks in October, when a section of the Central Committee, led by Kamenev and Zinoviev, came out in public opposition to insurrection.

“Each party,” says Trotsky, “even the most revolutionary party, must inevitably produce its own organizational conservatism; for otherwise it would be lacking in the necessary stability… We have already quoted the words of Lenin to the effect that even the most revolutionary parties, at a time when an abrupt change occurs in a situation and when new tasks arise as a consequence, frequently pursue the political line of yesterday, and thereby become, or threaten to become, a brake upon revolutionary development. Both conservatism and revolutionary initiative find their most concentrated expression in the leading organs of the party.”

In overcoming the opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin had this advantage: the publicly-stated party line was on his side. Six months before, in April, Lenin had rearmed the party; he had decisively defeated those who wanted to give critical support to the Provisional Government. Since then the party had openly agitated for the prepared the overthrow of that government.

8. THE SEED AND THE FRUIT

Who will have the advantage in the POR — the partisans of conservatism, or the partisans of revolutionary initiative? The question is already answered. the POR is to the right of the right-wing Bolsheviks who, as Trotsky says, adopted a formal socialist position.

The POR occupies, on all major questions, the positions occupied by Menshevism in the Russian revolution, and by Stalinism in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27.

The POR, in its reformist conceptions, its conciliationist attitude, and its class-collaborationist methods, bases and supports itself upon the neo-reformist position adopted by the International since the Second World War. Such is the theory adopted by the International in explaining the transformations in Eastern Europe. This theory, which since its adoption has received no defense in our press, either public or internal, holds in effect that reformism worked in Eastern Europe; that the class nature of the state was changed without proletarian revolution, by manipulations in the top circles; that the state for three years was in an intermediate status. This revision of Marxism had its roots, like all revisionism since 1917, in the Russian Question; and inability or unwillingness to see the Soviet-German war as a class war — that is, as revolution and counterrevolution.

The political line of the International in China brings its neoreformism down from the realm of theory (or terminology ), to that of political activity. The idea of a transitional state, a state that is neither a bourgeois nor a workers’ state, is made more explicit; through “critical support” of the Mao government the leading role of Stalinism is affirmed, while the crucial necessity of Marxist consciousness, embodied in the Trotskyist party, is thrown overboard. Revolutionary consciousness is to be replaced by the “pressure of the masses.”

The POR has introduced nothing new. It is applying in Bolivia the revisionist line of the International — moreover, with the support and encouragement of the International.

I have no doubt that a majority of the comrades are uneasy over the course being pursued in Bolivia; that they do not agree with the line of the POR. But an embarrassed silence is not enough. Those who remain silent for the sake of a false harmony cannot escape responsibility for the consequences of a wrong political line.

A Letter on the Bolivian Revolution

by Sam Ryan

First printed in the Socialist Workers Party Internal Bulletin, June 1952. Republished in and scanned from the LRP publication “Bolivia: The Revolution the ‘Fourth International Betrayed.”

The Secretariat, SWP

June 1, 1952

Dear Comrades,

This letter is a request for clarification on the program and policy of the POR of Bolivia. The POR has been presented the opportunity of leading a revolution and thereby rendering a great service to our international movement. Our movement, and not least the SWP, has the duty of giving the Bolivian comrades all possible aid, both material and political. It is only natural that we in United States should be extremely anxious that the Bolivian comrades pursue a policy that will bring them success.

The interview with Comrade Guillermo Lora, carried in The Militant of May 12 and May 19, raises some serious questions about the program and policy of the POR which, I believe, should be resolved as soon as possible. The questions raised in the interview, and not satisfactorily answered by Comrade Lora include:

1. The class character of the government;

2. The character of the MNR;

3. Our attitude toward the compromisers;

4. The revolutionary transitional program for Bolivia.

Let me comment briefly on the manner in which Comrade Lora appears to answer these questions.

1. THE CLASS CHARACTER OF THE GOVERNMENT

I think it is incontestable that the present Bolivian government is a bourgeois government, whose task and aim is to defend by all means available to it the interests of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism. It will, if it can, harness and disarm the working class, smash its revolutionary vanguard, and rebuild the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which has been shaken but not destroyed by the first phase of the revolution. This government is therefore the deadly enemy of the workers and peasants, and especially of the Marxist party.

Comrade Lora does not take up explicitly the question of the class character of the government. The closest he comes is the following:

“The Paz Estenssoro government, dominated by its reactionary wing, shows all the characteristic features of ‘Bonapartism, operating between the proletariat and imperialism. “

Does this imply the bourgeois character of the government? Perhaps. I hope so. But this is question that will have to be answered, and not by implication or inference but directly.

One thing does appear clearly: Comrades Lora does not regard this government as an enemy of the working class and of the POR.

“One cannot exclude the possibility,” he says, “that the right wing (of the government) faced with the sharpening of the mass struggle against it, will ally itself with imperialism to crush the so-called ‘Communist’ danger.

This formulation is wrong, very wrong! This is an error which, if it actually represents the position of the POR, can have tragic consequences for the very physical existence of the cadres of the Bolivian Trotskyist party.

This is the warning the leaders of the POR must give the working class and above all its own supporters: We must expect with absolute certainty (not merely “not exclude the possibility”) that the government (not merely its right wing) will ally itself with imperialism and try to crush the mass movement and first of all its vanguard, the POR which is the real (and not “so-called”) communist danger.

“It is beyond doubt,” concludes Comrade Lora, that the new government is now being subjected to enormous pressure by the feudal bourgeoisie (this term is no doubt the result of a faulty translation) and by imperialism to make it capitulate or to destroy it. Under such conditions the POR defends the government with all its strength and by means of mobilization of the masses … Today, far from succumbing to the hysteria of a struggle against the MNR, whom the pro-imperialists have baptized as ‘fascists,’ we are marching with the masses to make the April 9 movement the prelude to the triumph of the workers and peasants government.

Three separate questions seem to be mixed up here:

a. The Marxist political opposition to a bourgeois government; a government which, because of its weakness, is forced to maneuver with the working class and appear to have not yet “capitulated” to the bourgeoisie. Comrade Lora seemingly is taken by the appearance of impartiality.

b. The opposition of the more open pro-imperialists to the government as “fascist.” This opposition aims at strengthening the hand of the government against the working class or at overthrowing the government or both. This opposition has nothing in common with the Marxist opposition from the left; and Comrade Lora is guilty of a serious error confusing the two when he says that the POR is “far from succumbing to the hysteria of a struggle against the MNR.”

c. The technical and material cooperation and aid which Marxists would give the MNR government against a Kornilov or Franco-type coup. This must be sharply differentiated from political support, which we would never give. We would continue to struggle against the government — with means suited to the situation, naturally — even while striking together with it against a military overthrow

This confusion by Comrade Lora of two different types of “opposition” and two different types of “support” appears to parallel the potentially disastrous March-April (1917) policy of the Bolsheviks, who in the absence of Lenin declared their support against reaction or counter-revolution. I ~ But it does not appear to parallel the policy of Lenin in the struggle against Kornilov, Lenin wrote:

“It would be the profoundest mistake to imagine that the revolutionary proletariat is capable, so to speak, out of ‘vengeance upon the SR s and Mensheviks, of refusing to `support them against the counter-revolution … We ought not even now to support the government of Kerensky. That would be unprincipled. You ask: But mustn’t we fight Kornilov? Of course, yes. But that is not the same thing. There is a limit here. Some of the Bolsheviks are crossing it, slipping into compromisism, getting carried by the flood of events.”

2. WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF THE MNR?

Comrade Lora answers this question as follows: “The MNR is a petty-bourgeois party which bases itself on the organizations of the masses.” I think this is wrong, and is the basis for a conciliationist attitude toward the MNR. The MNR is a bourgeois party, which politically exploits the masses. The majority of its members, as in all mass parties, are no doubt workers and middle-class elements; but that does not determine its class character. It is controlled not by its majority but by its tiny minority, and the absentee controllers, the capitalist class. How else explain the composition of the government which, as Comrade Lora says, “is weighted with the most reactionary elements of the MNR and particularly the Freemasons… the most effective agents of imperialism”?

Is this the type of government the POR meant when it raised the slogan: “The MNR to Power”? The composition of the government is in complete conformity with the character of the MNR. I think it was wrong to raise this slogan. Unless our comrades retrieve their error by reconsidering their characterization of the MNR, they will inevitably suffer along with the MNR when the masses, through their own experience, begin to see the real class character of this bourgeois party.

3. OUR ATTITUDE TOWARD THE COMPROMISERS.

Toward the labor leaders in the government, Comrade Lora takes an unequivocal attitude; he supports them, and presents no criticism of their role. The textile workers, he recounts, obliged the MNR to accept working-class elements into the cabinet. Did the POR support this demand? The presumption is strong that it did. Comrade Breitman quotes the New Leader as saying that Comrade Lora is Lechin’s Secretary; and Breitman does not contradict this report. If true, would not this place the POR as a subordinate, ex-officio member of the bourgeois coalition government? And if the report is not true, the situation is not decisively different. Suppose the POR had been strong enough to force its way into the cabinet? Suppose, as we all hope and envisage, the POR gains more mass support in the future, will it then enter a bourgeois coalition government? This is the logic of the position outlined by Comrade Lora.

The Marxist attitude has always been and will continue to be one of hostility toward the compromisers; to call on them to break with the bourgeois politicians and form a workers’ and farmers’ government. According to late reports, Lechin is capitulating to the right wing of the government on the question of nationalization of the mines. This should be no surprise to us. It was inevitable. How much would the POR have gained in the confidence of the masses if it had predicted this capitulation? How much has it lost by its support of the compromisers?

Of course the POR would thereby have lost Lechin’s friendship. But Lechin’s is a treacherous, and undependable friendship. Lechin will capitulate again, and again. He will help disarm the workers. He will help smash the POR, no matter how it may try to placate him. And Lechin’s betrayal will facilitated if the POR continues to support him.

4. THE REVOLUTIONARY TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM.

The independence of the revolutionary party is an absolute law in a revolutionary situation. But this does not fall from the sky. It arises out of the Marxist theory and the program of the party. The central slogans put forward by our party, according to Comrade Lora, were as follows:

“1. Restoration of the constitution of the country through the formation of an MNR government which obtained a majority in the 1951 elections.

“2. Struggle for the improvement of wages and working conditions.

“3. Struggle for democratic rights.

“4. Mobilization of the masses against imperialism, for the nationalization of the mines, and for the abrogation of the UN agreement.

Points 2 and 3 are clearly insufficient to differentiate our party from other tendencies in the labor movement. They are too general. The question how we carry on the struggle must be elaborated, and in such a way as to form a part of the revolutionary transitional program.

Is the demand for nationalization sufficient to differentiate the Marxist program from those of all other tendencies? I don’t think so. Both the right and left wings of the MNR are for nationalization. And there is no compelling reason to suppose the MNR cannot accomplish it to one degree or another. Cardenas, Mossadegh, Peron, have carried through nationalizations without thereby giving up an iota of their bourgeois character.

Nationalization does not change the class character of the state. Nationalization itself has a class character, deriving it from the class character of the government that carries it out. Of course, we don not oppose such nationalizations; we defend them against imperialism. But the decisive question remains: Which class has political and military control? Is the state power in the hands of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? And the bourgeois power can be removed only by proletarian revolution.

Comrade Lora apparently does not draw this sharp line in the class character of the state. By his designation of the present government as “Bonapartist”  operating between the proletariat and imperialism, by characterizing the MNR as a petty-bourgeois party, and by his emphasis on nationalization, he seems to regard the present regime as a transitional regime having no fixed class character.

“It is now necessary”, says Comrade Lora, “to fight for the nationalization of the mines, the key industries, and the land. This struggle will be intimately connected with the development of the mass upsurge, with the involvement of new working-class sectors in the struggle in such a way that it assumes nationwide scope, and finally with the constitution of a workers’ and farmers’ government.

An elaboration of this statement would of course result in the projection of a transitional program. I hope it will be so elaborated.

But how does this square with the demand for restoration of the bourgeois constitution? I well remember how sharply the French right-wing Trotskylsts were castigated (and very correctly) for voting for a bourgeois constitution. They defended themselves by pointing to the fact that the working-class organizations were for it, while the reactionaries were against. Is this the justification of the POR? This would make Marxist policy very simple: Look at what the extreme right is doing and do the opposite.

But the masses were fighting under the slogan of restoration of the constitution? Marxists can participate in the struggles of the masses without their wrong slogails. True, they would then be a minority; but that is the penalty we must pay for pointing out the objective necessities which the masses do not yet completely understand. The Marxists must patiently explain.

Comrade Lora points to the influence which the POR gained in the leftwing of the MNR. Worthless influence, it appears to me, if it is achieved by adopting the program of the MNR. A united front with a bourgeois party with the aim of establishing a bourgeois constitution and placing the bourgeois party in power is not a united front but a peoples front.

The united front that the Marxists advocate aims to unite the workers and peasants on a minimum program embodying a stage of the revolutionary transitional program. This united front, in a revolutionary situation, turns into the workers and peasants soviets. And even in the soviets the struggle goes on. Far from accepting the conciliationist program which may be imposed on the soviets, the Marxists advocate their own program, calling on the soviets to break with the bourgeoisie, their parties and their government, and take the complete power, establishing a workers’ and peasants’ government.

But Comrade Lora does not raise the question of a break with the bourgeois government. The workers and peasants government he advocates appears as some ultimate conclusion to a gradual reshuffling of the personnel of the bourgeois government, whereby the right wingers will be forced out and the cabinet take on a more and more left tinge.

In a revolutionary situation the slogan of a workers’ and farmers’ government is not an ultimate goal but an immediate demand, inseparable from a break with and overthrow of the bourgeois government. The workers’ and farmers’ government can be realized in actuality only as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This letter, comrades, is based on one interview with one leader of the POR. I realize — rather fervently hope — that I have not a sufficient basis to characterize the policy of the POR. I have therefore restrained the tone of my criticism to the utmost. But there is a danger, or at least the possibility, in the midst of a great struggle, of being carried away by the flood of events. Without dictating to the Bolivian comrades their specific tactics, the leaders of our party must help the POR base its tactics strictly on the revolutionary Marxist program, the only hope of victory.

I hope you view this letter in the spirit in which it is written: more an inquiry than a criticism.

Centrist Debacle in Bolivia

Originally published in Workers Vanguard No. 3 (December 1971). First posted online at http://anti-sep-tic.blogspot.com/2009/05/1971-dec-centrist-debacle-in-bolivia.html  

The issue of the role of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario in the recent Bolivian events has become inevitably a factional football in the power fight between the Healyite (SLL-WL) and Lambertiste (OCI) wings of the now split International Committee. But in addition to providing a test of, the revolutionary capacity of both wings of the IC, the lessons of Bolivia are important in their own right, as a verification, in the breech, of the lessons of the October Revolution of 1917. The POR is an avowedly Trotskyist organization under the leadership of Guillermo Lora, which since 1970 has claimed agreement with the anti-revisionist avowals of the IC. Despite its opportunist policy following the 1952 Bolivian uprising in Conciliating the left wing of the bourgeois nationalist MNR government of Paz Estenssoro, the POR is an organization which must be, treated seriously because of its considerable implantation in the most militant sector of the Bolivian proletariat, the tin miners.

People’s Assembly

The POR played an active role in the People’s Assembly which came into existence under the bonapartist regime of left militarist General Juan Jose Torres, which was overthrown by the rightist coup of General Hugo Banzer in August. The People’s Assembly was composed of a majority of representatives from working-class organizations and included representatives of the significant left political organizations. The basis for adherence to the People’s Assembly was defined as support to the Theses of the Fourth Congress of the Central Obrera Boliviana, the main trade union federation, which is heavily influenced by left nationalists and Stalinists. The People’s Assembly pledged to lead the struggle against imperialism and for socialism:

“The People’s Assembly is a revolutionary anti-imperialist front led by the proletariat, constituted by the Central Obrera Boliviana, the trade union confederations and federations of a national character, the people’s organizations and the political parties of revolutionary orientation. It recognizes as its political leadership the proletariat and declares that its program is the Political Theses passed by the Fourth Congress of the COB, held in May 1970….

 “The People’s Assembly constitutes itself as the leadership and unifying center of the anti-imperialist movement and its fundamental goal consists in attaining national liberation and the establishment of socialism in Bolivia.

(from the statutes of the People’s Assembly, reprinted in the POR organ Masas of 13 July 1971)

According to the POR, the People’s Assembly was a body of the soviet type which had the potential to become an institution of dual power – i.e., that it was an embryonic workers government within and in contradiction to the bourgeois government under Torres. Masas engaged in occasional sharp criticism of the CP for pursuing a “rightist and pro-government line” in the Assembly but did not systematically expose the CP and the other reformist parties for their betrayal of the working class in attempting to subordinate the Assembly to Torres, devoting at least as much emphasis to praising the Assembly and defending it against “leftist” detractors.

Centrist Vacillation

Even on the basis of insufficient documentation, what emerges clearly is a pattern of centrist vacillation on the part of the POR. For example, in an article written by Guillermo Lora after Banzer’s coup is the admission:

“At this time [October 1970] everybody thought – including we Marxists – that the arms would be given by the governing military team, which would consider that only through resting on the masses and giving them adequate    firepower could they at least neutralize the gorila right. This position was completely wrong….”

 (Bulletin, 27 September 1971)

To have placed any confidence in Torres to arm the masses shows the most severe disorientation on the part of the POR over the crucial question of the class nature of the state. Torres was a bonapartist seeking to balance between the working class, roused by a foretaste of power and eager to struggle for its own, class rule, and the reactionary generals – at the head of a bourgeois state. Although forced to grant concessions to the masses, Torres, as Lora points out:

“…preferred to capitulate to his fellow generals before arming masses who showed signs of taking the road to socialism and whose mobilization put in serious danger the army as an institution.”

The issue is clear, but the attitude and role of the POR is not. For in the 31 May 1971 issue of Masas we find a call for the formation of independent workers and peasants militias and the categorical assertion that: “General Torres Will never arm the workers and peasants militias. “

An article in the SLL’s Workers Press of 24 August quotes POR leader Filemon Escobar:

 “…we will work for political objectives that help radicalize the present process – for example, worker-participation in COMIBOL [Bolivian Mining Corporation].”

And Lora’s Bulletin article speaks of “the danger to the state that majority working class participation in COMIBOL would mean.” Yet a major article in the 31 May Masas exposes the plan for “worker-participation at COMIBOL as the point of departure for the bureaucratization and political control over the ‘worker-managers’ on the part of the state,” counterposing to this the demand for “workers control – with veto rights” and pointing out that workers control does not obviate the class struggle.

A severe blunting of a hard Leninist edge is apparent in an article in the 9 May Masas which states:

“…the fundamental contradiction in Bolivia is nothing else than that which exists between the proletariat and imperialism.”

Our question is simple: what role does the national bourgeoisie play in this schema? For the fatal illusion fostered by the nationalist-Stalinist cabal was precisely the conception of the “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie as an ally. What was required of the POR was precisely to break the working class from subordination to the “revolutionary,” “anti-imperialist” regime of Torres. To Marxists, the counterposed class forces are the working class supported by the peasantry on the one side and the bourgeoisie – both the puppets of imperialism and the “progressive” nationalist wing – on the other.

The OCI’s response to the grave accusations levelled against the POR is an attempt to bluff it out. The 19 September statement declares:

“…the coup d’etat organized by the CIA and the military dictators of Brazil and Argentina and facilitated by the action of the Torres government is the proof that the policy carried by the POR was fundamentally based on the interests of the Bolivian proletariat…

 “… All those who attack the POR through this, represent the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They take the sides of imperialism and Stalinism. They are agents of counterrevolution and are enemies, conscious or unconscious, of the Fourth International.”

This kind of argumentation can simply be dismissed out of hand. As Trotskyists, we have listened too many times to the hysterical accusations of Stalinists of all stripes along the same lines: the ferocity of U.S. imperialism’s aggression against the NLF and the North Vietnamese regimes proves that their leaderships have not sold out; all those who attack Chairman Mao are taking the side of imperialism; Trotsky was a conscious or unconscious agent of fascism; those who stand in opposition to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, ad nauseam. We only that this “defense” of the POR says nothing about the POR but a great deal to the discredit of the OCI.

The OCI asserts that the People’s Assembly was “under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR.” This statement is open to question. In an interview in the 9 August Bulletin, POR leader Victor Sossa States that “the POR represented only around 20 per cent of the delegates, perhaps a little more.” Yet he expected that the Assembly, still predominantly influenced by Stalinists, bourgeois nationalism and “ultra-left adventurist petty-bourgeois groups, ” to do the following:

“In the case of a coup the People’s Assembly will call a general strike, will assume the military and political command of the masses. The decision to go over to the systematic organization of militias is geared to this perspective and prepares the working class for the inevitable confrontation, the fight to fully install its own government, the workers and peasants government.”

The question here is not whether the POR had already established its hegemony over the workers organizations, but whether it was struggling to do so – whether the POR’s perspective was to expose the reformists’ and nationalists’ treachery before their supporters by demanding that the Assembly counterpose itself to the regime, breaking all ties with the regime and struggling to establish a workers and peasants government – i. e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would appear that the POR placed political confidence in the Assembly under its existing leadership.

Soviets: Form vs Content

What was the role of the POR within the People’s Assembly? The OCI notes that:

“…the setting up of the People’s Assembly expresses the fundamental trend of the period, the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power.”

But Allende’s Popular Front government in Chile, for example, also without doubt represents “the will of the proletarian and peasant masses to enter into the struggle for power” – yet we know that the Chilean masses have been terribly deceived and they are likely to pay for their misleaders’ promises in blood. The willingness of the working masses to struggle is not in dispute. In Bolivia, as in Chile, Spain, Vietnam and dozens of other instances, the question is whether their combative heroism has been betrayed.

The OCI declares:

 “It is the unity in and around the People’s Assembly, organ of dual power, which under the leadership of the Trotskyist party, the POR, dominated the whole revolutionary process before and after the confrontations of August 20-23.”

What does it mean to acclaim the “unity in and around the People’s Assembly”? If the People’s Assembly was indeed an embryonic soviet form, how was the struggle for its leadership carried out? A soviet is a united front of the working class raised to the level of struggling for power. There is nothing sacred about the soviet or any other united front form. Soviets arise, even spontaneously, in revolutionary crises as the proletarian axis in the dual power situation, with the potential under revolutionary leadership to oust the bourgeois state power and become the agency of working-class rule – i.e. to consummate the revolution on the national plane. They are the best arena in which the Bolsheviks can demonstrate their superiority in carrying forward the tasks implicit in the soviet as an embryonic form of the state of a different class: the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A Menshevik-led soviet, for example, may indeed be an authentic soviet – but it will inevitably betray. Thus a Leninist call for the formation of soviets, for power to the soviets, must contain within it the perspective of struggle within the soviet: in order to demonstrate to the workers that it is they, unlike the revisionists and reformists, who have nothing to fear from soviet power and that only their policy can achieve and defend it. The existence of a soviet is in itself no guarantee of revolutionary principle. (Even the Stalinists have called – bureaucratically, to be sure – for the formation of soviets in their “left” zigzags, after having doomed the workers in advance by their policies – policies which guaranteed the ruin of the soviet.) Without the presence of revolutionaries intransigently struggling at every point to expose before the working class the traitorous misleaders within its ranks, the People’s Assembly offered no more promise for the Bolivian proletarian revolution than George Meany’s AFL-CIO raised to the political level. Does the OCI really want to boast that the POR expounded “unity in and around the People’s Assembly”?

When questions of power politics between the wings of the IC were not so clearly and ultimatistically posed, the OCI was willing to take a more critical attitude toward the POR on precisely this question. A letter to the POR leadership dated 30 July 1970 and later published in the Lambertistes’ public theoretical magazine discussed the COB Theses which the POR had helped prepare and voted for. The sections of the COB document singled out for sharp criticism by the OCI include the following:

“In order to attain socialism, it seems necessary first of all to make a unity of all the revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces. The people’s anti-imperialist revolution is linked to the struggle for socialism. The people’s front is an alliance of related classes, and the unitary instrument for making the revolution. The expulsion of imperialism and the realization of national and democratic tasks will render possible the socialist revolution.” (La Verite, October 1970)

What this paragraph sets forward is the Menshevik theory of stages, pure and simple – first national liberation, then socialist revolution. It is the classic reformist rationale for class collaboration, which has led to the most bitter and bloody defeats for the working class. And yet the POR supported this resolution and continued to acclaim it in Masas. Instead of struggling around this question, the POR compromised around a contradictory hodge-podge document which contained affirmations of internationalism, condemnations of class collaboration alongside praise of the so-called “socialist” nations and clear popular frontism.

It speaks well of the Lambertistes that they were willing to raise to the POR and subsequently make public their criticisms of the POR’s departure from principle. Now, however, the OCI’s opportunism has gained the upper hand, and so all critics of the POR become “agents of counterrevolution”!

And what of the POR’s conduct since the coup? The 6 December issue of the SWP’s Intercontinental Press reprints a declaration signed by the POR – along with the Communist Party, the “POR” of the Moscoso Pabloists, left nationalist groups and General Torres himself! The document again pays lip service to “the leadership of the proletariat, the ruling class of the revolutionary process” but the tone of the document is nationalist-populist (“revolutionary priests,” “revolutionary officers,” “patriots,” “the power is now in the hands of foreigners,” etc.) and its core is the following:

“Therefore the need is undeniable to build a fighting unity of all the revolutionary democratic and progressive forces that the great battle can be begun in conditions offering a real perspective for a popular and national government….

“This is not a battle that concerns only one sector of the exploited people, or one class, institution or party. … Any form of sectarianism is counterrevolutionary. Let us be worthy of the sacrifice of those who fell August 21 defending Bolivia.” (our emphasis)

In fact, the declaration is a classic popular front which subordinates the working class to alien class forces and ideologies to which it is in fundamental and irreconcilable opposition.

Healyite Pop Frontism

For the political bandits of the Healyite SLL-WL, the OCI’s decision to march in lockstep behind the POR is a godsend, a cheap way to assert their Leninist orthodoxy and cast themselves as the principled left wing in the IC split. But the real difference between the Healyites and the POR on proletarian policy toward a “leftist” bourgeois government is that the POR has had the opportunity to wreck a pre-revolutionary situation and the Healyites have not. Healy-Wohlforth have seized on Bolivia as a pretext for ridding themselves of the OCI, which was increasingly playing a dominant role in the IC — and that’s all. For although they would now prefer to bury it, the Healyites have a shining example of how they would deal with a Popular Front bourgeois government: Chile.

The 21 September 1970 Bulletin advised the workers of Chile:

“There is only one road, and that is the revolutionary road of the October Revolution…. as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises….”

Wohlforth’s road is not that of the October Revolution, but of those Bolsheviks, Stalin prominent among them, who very nearly ruined the chances for October by their policy – denounced by Lenin and Trotsky – of support for the bourgeois Provisional Government “insofar as it struggles against reaction or counterrevolution.” Wohlforth’s statement parallels the notorious Pravda articles capitulating to Menshevism in February and March of 1917, filled with statements like the following:

“The way out is bringing pressure to bear on the Provisional Government with the demand that the government proclaim its readiness to. begin immediate negotiations for peace.”

Against this policy Lenin declared: “To turn to this government with a proposal of concluding peace is equivalent to preaching morality to the keeper of a brothel,” And Trotsky, in Lessons of October, said:

“The programme of exerting pressure on an imperialist government so as to ‘induce’ it to pursue a pious course was the programme of Kautsky and Ledebour in Germany, Jean Longuet in France, MacDonald in England, but never the programme of Bolshevism.”

One must be sharply critical, as was Trotsky, of those Bolsheviks who would have let slip a revolutionary opportunity if it had not been for the sharp correction of Lenin. But more than criticism is merited by the Healyites, who claim to stand on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks, to have assimilated the “lessons of October.”

Lenin expressed his policy in an uncompromising formula:

“Our tactic: absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of the proletariat the sole guarantee;. . . no rapprochement with other parties.”

Against Lenin’s policy stand both the centrism of the POR-OCI and the Healyite pseudo-Leninist posturing.

And now the Healyites sanctimoniously denounce the POR-OCI for the same kind of Pop Frontist capitulation which they themselves espoused for Chile!

Healy lawyers for the LSSP

But perhaps an even purer example of Healyite hypocrisy is the question of Ceylon. The 30 August Bulletin declares:

“…Though less known than the evolution of the LSSP in Ceylon, the role of Lora and the POR has been no less treacherous and important.”

For years, in endless articles, the Healyites have used the betrayal of the Ceylonese masses by the LSSP – which tail-ended the bourgeois nationalist party of Mrs. Bandaranaike and when it came to power in 1964 entered the government – as an expose of the United Secretariat Pabloists, who covered for the LSSP until the last moment. (The Bulletin has just concluded yet another four-part series on the subject.) And rightly so, for their role over Ceylon was an important verification of the SWP-United Secretariat’s departure from Trotskyism. But what the Healyites are unlikely to mention is that they themselves are tarred with the same brush!

In May 1960 the SWP, then affiliated with the IC as was Healy’s SLL, began to get increasingly nervous about the line and conduct of the LSSP. On 17 May Tom Kerry addressed a letter on behalf of the SWP’s Political Committee to the LSSP. It states:

“We are greatly disturbed by the parliamentary and electoral course now pursued by the leadership of the LSSP….

“Your policy of working for the creation of an SLFP government appears to us to be completely at variance with the course of independent working class political action which you have always promoted in the past as a matter of principle….

“Your new political course also appears to us to be a form of ‘popular frontism’ of the kind promoted in many countries by the Stalinists since 1935 – that is, class collaboration between the working-class parties and a section of the bourgeoisie….”

Despite their concern the SWP leadership hesitated to raise this betrayal in the public press.

On 8 August James Robertson, then a member of the SWP, wrote to the Political Committee:

“I am addressing you on the matter of our party’s public silence concerning the recent and continuing betrayal of the Ceylonese working class and of the world Trotskyist movement by the, Lanka Sama Samaja Party. I refer, of course, to that party’s entry into a ‘Popular Front’ electoral pact with the Stalinist party and with the left bourgeois nationalist party represented by the widow Bandaranaike.

“In raising this matter privately with several members of your body I was told that letters have been sent the Ceylonese and that your view is that for the present a greater advantage is to be gained by revolutionary Marxists in the LSSP through our remaining publicly silent, I must disagree and urge you to reconsider…”

The letter concludes:

“Comrades, that you condemn the Ceylonese ex-Trotskyist I have no doubt, but your failure to raise this publicly and with great seriousness does the movement internationally a disservice.”

And what was the position of Gerry Healy, who now proclaims himself the world’s only consistent anti-Pabloist After having written to the SWP that delicate maneuvers among the Pabloists were required in Ceylon, Healy on 14 August wrote to the SWP’s Joe Hansen:

“We discussed at some length… the proposition concerning the situation in Ceylon. We think that it is necessary to write again asking for the fullest possible information concerning the present situation in the party in Ceylon.

“There is no doubt that they are in a severe crisis but if we take their situation and recent events in Europe it is not improbable that there will now be important developments inside the Pablo camp, This is all the more reason for us to proceed with caution – as you have in the past so rightly insisted.

“We are going to cable them tomorrow for information and we suggest you do likewise and hold up for the time being publication of anything in the Militant “

Rebuild the Fourth International!

It is their own sordid history which gives the lie to the Healyites’ claims of internationalism and anti-revisionism. If the Lambertistes – who in 1952 launched the struggle against Pabloism never transcended centrism and have now hardened themselves in opportunism – their line on Bolivia and their conduct at Essen, the Healyites’ pretensions of principle have always rested on sand.

Only the Fourth International – rebuilt in the process of struggle against all varieties of Pabloist revisionism, including the inverted Pabloism of the IC – can provide the way forward toward the decisive victory of the international working class.

Militant Longshoreman

No #7  January 5, 1984

Re- Elect Keylor (36-A) to Executive Board

Build A Fighting Union

“What’s going to happen with our contract?”

That’s the question asked dozens of times a day on the waterfront. Everyone sees the U.S. employers demanding and getting wage cuts and contractual take-sways all dot-in the line. The army of unemployed remains at a high level, no end of the depression is in sight, and the visciously anti-labor Reagan administration seems determined to make workers and minorities pay for the depression. On the other hand the organized labor movement, which has declined to less than 20% of the work force, has given only isolated and sporadic resistance to emnloyer/government attacks.

The real question that needs to The asked (and answered) is, “What, is the state of our union and what can we do about it?” Let’s start by taking a quick look at the record for 1983. This newsletter neinted out last car that one of the most alarming symptoms of our weakness was the PMA’s increasingly blatant violation of the contract on the job. At that time, 1982, the officers had tried in a limited way to resist employer contract violations. But no sooner were they re-elected when our officers appeared to collapse; now almost no resistance is offered. Tn fact, inexcusable concessions violating the contract are frequently granted, such as permitting PMA companies to work past the contractual shift quitting time.

PMA ran two big tests on us this year, one coastwise and one locally. Coastwise occured when the reconvened Negotiating Committee met with PMA to discuss the continuous 3-shift proposal. PMA dropped the three shift idea and proposed to reconstruct PGP eligibility and earnings so that a longshoreman’s PGP would be based on his individual earnings. This divisive move, which would have drastically cut PGP for San Francisco longshoremen, was just, narrowly rejected. PMA will undoubtedly try gain this year.

Locally PMA demanded, and it looks like they will get, a drastic cut in gangs. This attack on the gang system came at the same time PMA was bypassing the gangs by ordering “unit gangs” or” make-up gangs” at the last minute on break bulk cargo. Instead of exposing PNIA’s sabotage of the gang system by refusing to dispatch these non-contractual “unit” and “make-up” gangs, the officers attempted to “negotiate” concessions and finally arbitrated the issue. Instead of defending the gang system so that we could go over to the offensive in 1984 and demand that gangs be used on container ships, the formula agreed to by the officers and the Executive Board spells the end of gangs in San Francisco.

The International and the Coast Committee gave no leadership or help to the local in resisting PMA during 1983. When they weren’t “unavailable” their “advice” was usually limited to telling the local to put it in the grievance machinery. We all know what that means — let the arbitrator decide!

RICHMOND PARR 5 – THE MEMBERSHIP WILL FIGHTI

A year ago we warned in Militant Longshoreman #5 that Levin’s threat to our job jurisdiction could only be met by shutting down the port, mass picketing of Paar 5 (old Richmond Yard 1), getting support of other maritime unions, and ignoring injunctions. When the membership saw the threat to their jobs materialize that’s exactly what they did! Levin was stopped cold in their attempt to take auto, container, and break bulk cargo out from under our jurisdiction. Local 10 membership proved that when they see a threat clearly they stand ready to put. up one hell of a fight.

As the Militant Longshoreman has been pointing out (and the Longshore Militant before that) the union lacks and needs a class-struggle leadership that knows what needs to be done, has a strategy for getting it, and has confidence in the rank and file to fight. Our local officers, who probably had good intentions when they started, lack any of these qualifications and have failed dismally to give any real leadership. Just for example: Our local President Brother Carr showed his lack of confidence in the membership by ruling “out of order” more Executive Board and membership motions than any other presiding officer that the author can ever remember seeing in the ILWU. Brother Carr clearly feared the membership’s judgement.

WHO CAN I VOTE FOR?

The above is the second most frequent question asked this season. Maybe the easiest way to approach an answer is to describe the main parts of a candidate’s program that shows if he has some idea of what it takes for a union even to defend its’ members, let alone wage an offensive battle for what workers need.

First – the union has to be willing to break out of the hand-cuffs and leg-irons imposed on us, take job action and strike action that may violate the work-now – arbitrate later provisions of the contract. Ask your favorite candidate whether he agrees that we have to be ready to defy court injunctions when the chips are down. Most of them — if they are honest– will tell you that they don’t want to go to jail.

Second – Labor unity: No union can win alone. We have to rebuild the kind of, labor unity that enabled unions in the 30s to organize millions of workers in the face of massive opposition from employers. That means mass picketing and refining to handle seat, or struck cargo.

Third – International working class solidarity. Corporations are organized worldwide but the labor movement is divided up by national boundaries. We need to take concrete actions to support workers outside U.S. borders. Your officers didn’t even tell you about the Canadian longshore strike (and that is the same union) where cargo was being diverted to the Puget, Sound area.

Fourth – Labor can only depend on its own working class strength and power. The government is hostile to labor and only grants concessions (unemployment insurance, Social Security etc.)) to “keep the peace”. law suits that bring the courts and government into the union are extremely dangerous. At best they end up with a pro-capitalist judge rewriting your contract. At worst they can permanently strangle unions’ ability to take the necessary strike actions to wring concessions from the employers.

Fifth – Workers need their own political party. None of our problems can be permanently solved under capitalism. But tailing after the Democrats, as our local and International officers do, leads them to avoid strikes and try to win a few crumbs from the pro-capitalist politicians.

When you look around the hall you see a bushel basket of candidates for union office who either duck these questions or come down on the wrong side of a winning class-struggle program. That’s why the Militant  Longshoreman is making no endorsements at this time.

OUR PROGRAM – 1984 CONTRACT

Before the February round of elections, which will elect Caucus delegates, another issue of this newsletter will describe what we will have to defend, what we need, and how we can get it. The program printed on the back page describes very briefly the position of Howard Keylor on the main issues facing longshoremen and other workers.

STAN GOW – WHAT NEXT?

We can expect Stan Gow and the Longshore/Warehouse Militant Caucus to again come out just before the election with a leaflet entitled “No Vote for Keylor – the fink, racist, would-be bureaucrat, Nazi lover, wife beater etc….”. The union faces threats far too serious to waste much paper and ink in a pissing contest or to try eternally to deny and refute slanders and lies. We’ve already devoted more than enough newsprint to this purpose. Enough said.

KOREAN/CIA SPY PLANE

JIMMY HERMAN FLINCHES

Reagan is driving whole-hog toward a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The U.S. labor bureaucrats are falling right in line behind the anti-communist hysteria  generated by Reagan’s provocations toward the U.S.S.R. Our union in the past (1950 – Korean war – for example) stood almost along at times, resisting anti-communist war hysteria. But when the 007 Korean passenger plane (spy plane) was shot down President Herman flinched badly when he said in effect that the Soviet Union doesn’t have the right (and the obligation) to defend it’s most important Far Eastern military bases from provocative incursions. Instead of condemning the log Angeles Local 13 Longshore leadership which refused to work a Russian ship and instead of attacking Reagan for trying to precipitate World War III, Jimmy gave backhanded support to Reagan’s anti-Soviet crusade painting the Soviet Union as a brutal, satanic, evil empire. To their credit Canadian and Mexican longshoremen continued to work Russian ships.

We would remind Jimmy Herman that PATCO’s kissing Reagan’s ass didn’t save the Air Controllers union from being smashed and its’ leaders from being jailed.

MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN PROGRAM

1. DEFEND OUR JOBS AND LIVELIHOOD – Six hour shift, no extensions, at eight hours pay. Manning scales on all ship operations; one man, one job. Full C.O.L.A. on wages. No cap, weekly PGP; no 25%  “coding out” rule; no further restrictions on PGP eligibitity. No “take back” on travel time.

2. DEFEND THE HIRING HALL – Use regular gangs  on container ships; no dispatch of “unit gangs”. Prepare the union for a coastwise fight to eliminate 9.43, S.E.O., and crane supplement from the contract.

3. DEFEND UNION CONDITIONS AND SAFETY THROUGH JOB ACTION Stop PMA chiseling on the contract. Elminate “work as directed”, “no illegal work stoppage”, and arbitration sections from the contract. Mobilize to smash anti-labor injunctions.

4. DEFEND OUR UNION – Eliminate class R registration category from the contract – promote all class B to class A coastwise. Keen racist anti-labor government and courts out of the union. Support all ILWU, locals’ resistance against court suits and government “investigations”. Union action to break down racial and sexual discrimination and employer favoritism on the waterfront.

5. BUILD LABOR SOLIDARITY – against government/employer strikebreaking. No more PATCOs. Honor all picket lines. Don’t handle struck or diverted cargo. No raiding of other unions. Organize the unorganized and the unemployed. Labor strikes to stop cuts in Social Security, Medical, Medicare.

6. STOP NAZI/KLAN TERROR through union organized labor/black/Latino defense actions. No dependance on capitalist police or courts to smash fascists.

7. WORKING CLASS ACTION TO STOP REAGAN’S WAR DRIVE AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION – Oppose reactionary boycotts against Soviet and Polish shipping. Labor strikes against military litary blockades of Cuba or Nicaragua. Boycott military cargo to Chile, South Africa, El Salvador, Israel, and Turkey.

8. INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY – Oppose protectionist trade restrictions. ILWU support to military victory of leftist insurgents in El Salvador. Defend the Palestinians – U.S. Marines out of Lebanon -by all means necessary.

9. BREAK WITH DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES – Start now to build a workers Party based on the unions to fight for a workers government which will seize all major industry without payment to the capitalists and establish a planned economy to end exploitation, racism, poverty, and war.

Militant Longshoreman

No.2, January 29, 1982

Build A Fighting Union

ELECT KEYLOR AND GOW CAUCUS DELEGATES

Brothers may be surprised that Howard Keylor and the MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN urge Local 10 members to vote for Stan Gow after his hyster­ical, leaflet of January 6 attacking the editor. The MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN supports candidates for union office on the basis of their program, not on their tactical sense or their effectiveness. I hope that Local 10 longshore­men will again follow my advice, as they did January 8 when they reelected both Keylor and Gow to the Executive Board with the highest percentage vote we’ve ever received.

SETBACK FOR BUILDING ALTERNATE CLASS-STRUGGLE LEADERSHIP

Their is no denying that the attempt of the LONGSHORE – WAREHOUSE MILITANT CAUCUS to destroy and discredit Keylor represents a setback in the struggle to promote those principles of Militant Trade Unionism which can help to build the alternative class-struggle leadership our union so desperately needs. The frantic and dishonest misrepresentation of Keylor’s positions on a whole range of important issues tends to discredit the Cau­cus, the LONGSHORE MILITANT, and Brother Gow and makes it increasingly un­likely that they will be able to build an alternative leadership.

KEYLOR’ S NON-EXISTENT “DIFFERENCES”

It’s impossible to completely counteract the lies and distortions about my positions that are contained in the MILITANT CAUCUS leaflet. For every word of slander I would have to use 10 words of factual description in order to set the record straight. Nevertheless, it could be useful to describe some of the background to my resignation from the MILITANT CAUCUS in November 1981.

Stan’s leaflet says that “Keylor no longer supports the MILITANT CAUCUS prograrn!” The fact is that until the November 1981 Caucus meeting where the votes had been lined up to pass a motion forbidding me to run for reelection to the Local 10 Executive Board and the Coast longshore Caucus, none of the issues dealt with in Stan’s leaflet were raised or discussed in a Caucus meeting: No differences on program between myself and the Caucus existed then or exist now!.

So what is behind this hysterical attack on me? I had developed differ­ences early last year with same Caucus members on issues which did not involve the union or the Caucus program. Those differences led the Caucus leadership to engage in a campaign of character assassination outside the Caucus, leading up finally to the meeting where they demanded that I cooperate in my own polit­ical suicide in the union. At that meeting I told the Caucus that I could best advance the program of the Caucus by running independantly for reelection and. continuing to argue for those principles and actions that could defend the union and advance working class solidarity.

KEYLOR FOUGHT FOR CAUCUS PROGRAM IN 1981 CONTRACT

It would be much easier to set the record straight if Stan and I had been permitted to issue a LONGSHORE MILITANT after the April contract coast caucus, which formulated contract demands and than turned them over to the Negotiating Committee. Keylor was successful at the April Caucus in getting motions on the floor for debate and a vote on a whole range of issues vital to the union in­cluding:

100 % Cost of Living formula in pension contract
Abolish all Master Contract sections allowing steady equipment operators
Honor all union picket lines
Abolish “work as directed” and arbitration sections of the contract grievance procedure
Abolish 20.61 allowing PMA to cancel PGP for alleged union actions

I argued after the April Caucus that it was vital to issue a LONGSHORE MILITANT warning the membership that the coast caucus had failed to put togeth­er a contract program which could unite the membership for a strike to get what we need and that in fact the caucus had left everything (including the right to extend the contract past July) in the hands of a Negotiating Conmittee dominat­ed by 6 International officers. I wrote an outline fora leaflet but the MILITANT CAUCUS refused to. allow it to be printed. The Caucus leadership dismissed the outline with the cynical comment “we’re not. an informational bureau, besides it’s boring.” This was the first tine in the history of the LONGSHORE MILITANT that we had not issued a leaflet to prepare the membership in advance for a contract fight.

LONGSHORE MILITANT SILENT ON INTERNATIONAL -CONVENTION

After the June International Convention  in Hawaii I wanted to issue a LONGSHORE MILITANT, warning the membership that the union leadership was falling in behind Reagan’s anti-Soviet war drive, refused to support military victory for the worker and peasant supported leftist insurgents in El Salvador, continued to rely on the capitalist courts and cops to stop the KKK and Nazis, and blocked even a floor discussion on the need for a workers’ party. Again the Caucus re­fused to issue a leaflet leaving the membership in the dark about the direction the union was taking.

It’s apparent now that the real reason for the refusal to issue leaflets on the caucus and convention was to “disappear” Keylor as much as possible, making it easier to rewrite later the history of Keylor’s role as Local 10 delegate.

HOW TO DEFEAT THE SEO CANCER – ACTION OR ABSTRACTION

Keylor was the only Local 10 delegate to vote against attempts to modify  the SEO system at the April Caucus. Brother Gow has been making a big thing out of the fact that in Item 1 of my program I demand: “Call all SEO men back to the hall. Dispatch all skilled equipulent jobs from the hall.” Is Brother Gow, oppos­ed, to this action? Does he advise us to wait until the contract is open in 1984? Doesn’t Stan remember that in previous non-cmtract years we, the LONGSHORE MILITANT, advised smashing this section of the contract in practice rather than suf­fering three more years?

After the September membership meeting I realized that I had made a mistake when I said that I would probably vote for Brother Reg Theriault’s motion to limit SEO men from driving rolling stock against the ship. At that meeting I argued (to a lot of applause) that it was impossible to simply modify the system; that any fight could only succeed if it upped the ante to call all SEO men back to the hall. I spoke before Brother Gow whose comments were largely unintelli­gible, so I don’t know what he said. After that meeting I argued that when the issue came before the Executive Board, we should vote against Brother Theriault’s motion and came up with a practical alternative motion to call SEO men back to the hall.

POLAND – INTERNATIONAL OFFICERS LINE UP WITH COUNTERREVOLUTION

Brother Gow’s January 6 leaflet tries. to link Keylor’s June 1981 position on Poland with Reagan’s anti-Soviet war drive. But it is unclear from his leaf­let how Brother Gow sees the International officers December 21 statement deploring the Polish Anny’s smashing of Solidarity’s moves toward counterrevolution.

I have no intention of ducking the issue of Polish Solidarity. It is a tragedy that the bulk of the Polish working class was led by their hatred of the incompetent, repressive, Polish government bureaucracy to support the clerical-nationalist moves to take Poland out of the Warsaw Pact and lay the basis for the restoration of capitalism. The Polish. workers would have been in far worse shape if Solidarity had brought the Polish economy under western capitalist control, and a civil war had developed, in which the most right-wing catholic-nationalists had seized political power.

KEYLOR AND THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLER’S STRIKE – A DELIBERATE LIE

It’s painful to have to say that Brother Gow’s January 6 leaflet lies when it says that Keylor was for consumer boycotts and against labor solidarity ac­tion to shut down the airports. At strike support meetings, at Executive Board meetings, and elsewhere Keylor argued vehenently that only the united power of mass labor picket lines could shut down the airports and win the strike of the air traffic controllers.

MILITANT CAUCUS ATTACK ON KEYLOR – THE REAL PURPOSE

Some Brothers commented that the famous January 6 MILITANT CAUCUS attack on Keylor sounded unbelievable and at times incomprehensible.

That’s right – the leaflet was not written for longshoremen! The leaflet was written for a wider audience than Local 10; it was designed to be reprinted and quoted from in publications addressed to the left in Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne, Hamburg, Paris and London. The lies and distortions contained therein could be used to discredit Keylor outside the union. Waterfront workers know enough about these issues to detect the inaccuracies strained arguments and conclusions.

RUN OFF ELECTION – NO CHOICE

The January primary election showed that none of the leading contenders for full time union office have anything approaching a real mandate from the member­ship. This is not surprising, since none of the leading candidates or groups competing for office have a program to unite the membership, in defending us against the employers and their government.

THE GIBSON CASE – COAST UNITY AGAINST THE CAPITALIST COURTS IS THE ISSUE

Brother Gow in his election leaflet ducked the question of the Gibson case, where the issue is coast longshore unity against lawsuits, which threaten our hiring hall. The Local 10 politicians have cynically created such anger and hysteria around this issue that it’s not surprising that Brothers who know better have hidden out on this question. I hope Brother Gow will see fit to publicly support a move for local 10 to pay our share of the coastwise costs of this anti-union lawsuit.

WHERE IS THE MILITANT CAUCUS GOING?

The LONGSHORE – WAREHOUSE MILITANT CALICUS, appears to be giving up on the task of building a principled class-struggle caucus in longshore. Their atti­tude towards Keylor reveals a position that no one who does not subject himself to the discipline of the MILITANT CAUCUS can provide honest leadership to the union – that anyone who finds it counter-productive to militant trade unionism to remain in the Caucus must be discredited and destroyed.

We still face the task of building the core of an alternative class-strug­gle leadership in the ILWU.

Fourth Congress of the Communist International

The Black Question

30 November 1922

Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/blacks.htm

1 During and after the war a revolutionary movement began to develop among the colonial and semi-colonial peoples and this movement is still successfully challenging the domination of world capital. Therefore, if capitalism is to continue, it must come to terms with the increasingly difficult problem of how to intensify its colonisation of the regions inhabited by black people. French capitalism clearly recognises that the power of pre-war French imperialism can only be maintained by creating a Franco-African empire, welded together by a Trans-Saharan railway. American finance magnates (who already exploit twelve million blacks in their own country) have begun a peaceful invasion of Africa. The extent to which Britain, for its part, fears any threat to its position in Africa is clearly shown by the extreme measures it took to suppress the strikes in South Africa. [This refers to the Rand Strike of 1922, an all-white affair conducted under the slogan: “For a White South Africa”. The Communist Party supported the strike movement, while calling for the unity of black and white workers] While competition between the imperialist powers in the Pacific has grown into the threat of a new world war, imperialist rivalry in Africa, too, is playing a more and more sinister role. Finally, the war, the Russian revolution, and the powerful anti-imperialist rebellion among the Asiatic and Moslem peoples have awakened the consciousness of millions of blacks who for centuries have been oppressed and humiliated by capitalism, in Africa, and probably to an even greater degree in America.

2 The history of the American blacks has prepared them to play a major role in the liberation struggle of the entire African race. 300 years ago the American blacks were torn from their native African soil, transported to America in slave ships and, in indescribably cruel conditions, sold into slavery. For 250 years they were treated like human cattle, under the whip of the American overseer. Their labour cleared the forests, built the roads, picked the cotton, constructed the railroads – on it the Southern aristocracy rested. The reward for their labour was poverty, illiteracy and degradation. The blacks were not docile slaves; their history is full of revolts, uprisings, and an underground struggle for freedom, but all their efforts to free themselves were savagely suppressed. They were tortured into submission, while the bourgeois press and religion justified their slavery. When slavery became an obstacle preventing the full and unhindered development of America towards capitalism, when this slavery came into conflict with the slavery of wage labour, it had to give way. The Civil War, which was not a war for the emancipation of the blacks but a war for the preservation of the industrial hegemony of the North, confronted the blacks with a choice between forced labour in the South and wage slavery in the North. The blood, sweat and tears of the ‘emancipated’ blacks helped to build American capitalism, and when the country, now become a world power, was inevitably pulled into the World War, black Americans gained equal rights with the whites … to kill and to die for ‘democracy’. Four hundred thousand coloured proletarians were recruited to the American army and organised into special black regiments. These black soldiers had hardly returned from the bloodbath of the war before they came up against racial persecution, lynchings, murders, the denial of rights, discrimination and general contempt. They fought back, but paid dearly for the attempt to assert their human rights. The persecution of blacks became even more widespread than before the war, and the blacks once again learned to ‘know their place’. The spirit of revolt, inflamed by the post-war violence and persecution, was suppressed, but cases of inhuman cruelty, such as the events in Tulsa, [City in Oklahoma. Scene of a pogrom in 1921 which turned into a veritable race war] still cause it to flare up again. This, plus the post-war industrialisation of blacks in the North, places the American blacks, particularly those in the North, in the vanguard of the struggle for black liberation.

3 The Communist International is extremely proud to see the exploited black workers resisting the attacks of the exploiters, since the enemy of the black race and the enemy of the white workers is one and the same – capitalism and imperialism. The international struggle of the black race is a struggle against this common enemy. An international black movement based on this struggle must be organised: in America, the centre of black culture and black protest; in Africa, with its reserve of human labour for the further development of capitalism; in Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua and the other ‘independent” republics), where American capitalism rules; in Puerto Rico, Haiti, San Domingo and the other Caribbean islands, where the brutal treatment of our black brothers by the American occupation has provoked a world-wide protest from conscious blacks and revolutionary white workers; in South Africa and the Congo, where the growing industrialisation of the black population has led to all kinds of uprisings; and in East Africa, where the inroads of world capital have led to the local population starting an active anti-imperialist movement.

4 The Communist International must show the black people that they are not the only ones to suffer capitalist and imperialist oppression; that the workers and peasants of Europe, Asia and America are also victims of imperialism; that the black struggle against imperialism is not the struggle of any one single people, but of all the peoples of the world; that in India and China, in Persia and Turkey, in Egypt and Morocco, the oppressed non-white peoples of the colonies are heroically fighting their imperialist exploiters; that these peoples are rising against the same evils, i.e., against racial oppression, inequality and exploitation, and are fighting for the same ends – political, economic and social emancipation and equality.

The Communist International represents the revolutionary workers and peasants of the entire world in their struggle against the power of imperialism – it is not just an organisation of the enslaved white workers of Europe and America, but is as much an organisation of the oppressed non-white peoples of the world, and so feels duty-bound to encourage and support the international organisations of the black people in their struggle against the common enemy.

5 The black question has become an integral part of the world revolution. The Third International has already recognised what valuable help the coloured Asiatic peoples can give to the proletarian revolution, and it realises that in the semi-capitalist countries the co-operation of our oppressed black brothers is extremely important for the proletarian revolution and for the destruction of capitalist power. Therefore the Fourth Congress gives Communists the special responsibility of closely applying the “Theses on the Colonial Question” to the situation of the blacks.

6 i) The Fourth Congress considers it essential to support all forms of the black movement which aim either to undermine or weaken capitalism and imperialism or to prevent their further expansion.

ii) The Communist International will fight for the racial equality of blacks and whites, for equal wages and equal social and political rights.

iii) The Communist International will do all it can to force the trade unions to admit black workers wherever admittance is legal, and will insist on a special campaign to achieve this end. If this proves unsuccessful, it will organise blacks into their own unions and then make special use of the united front tactic to force the general unions to admit them.

iv) The Communist International will immediately take steps to convene an international black conference or congress in Moscow.

Malcolm X [Obituary]

[First printed in Spartacist #4, May-June 1965]

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the libberals’ frontman has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn’t play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have litle reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which could encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm’s death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic ntional leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burglar, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emnacipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm’s organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. One the one hand.there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm’s murder on “Chinese Communists” will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the oher hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike as a heroic and tragic figure in a dark period of our common history.

Bay Area Spartacist Committee

2 March 1965

Militant Longshoreman

No. 17,  January 2, 1987

1987  COAST CONTRACT

NO CONCESSIONS — NO TAKEBACKS

Six months before the coast contract runs out the most common question that brothers in Local 10 are asking is’ “Do you think PMA is going to demand concessions?” Three years ago the question most often asked was *What are we going for in this contract?” It’s just possible that PMA will miscalculate the mood of longshoremen and insist on concessions – “take aways” in either conditions or money. We know that the waterfront employers want more “flexibility”, that they want to eliminate categories and assign men to any jobs. We also note that, PMA is demanding that the dispatch hall be moved to Oakland and all travel time be done away with.

What PMA may not figure on is that Longshoreman know that we gave the employers major concession many years ago, lost thousands of jobs as a result, and got very damn little in return. Bridges and Goldblat’s two M and M agreements 1961/1966 gave up manning and allowed massive mechanization. The 9.43 -skilled steadyman section drove a wedge in the union, undermined the hiring hall, and gave Bay Area PMA the highest coastwise production on container ships. Longshoremen are in no mood for concessions; if PMA doesn’t understand that they could walk into a strike situation. Just recently PMA came very close to precipatating coastwise work stoppages over their refusal to employ partially disabled longshoremen in three different ports and their demand that these men be deregistered.

WHAT IS PRESIDENT HERMAN’S STRATEGY?

International President Jimmy Herman seems to be pushing a strategy of trying to buy off PMA by offering a long-term contract in exchange for a status quo agreement with “modifications”. Look out for those “modifications”! There are two things wrong with long contracts. First of all, too many of us remember how the employers ran wild, tearing up job conditions during Harry Bridge’s two 5 year contracts 1961-1971. With no strike threat, at the end of a contract facing them PMA, backed up by a tame arbitrator and a timid international could go even further than they already have in undermining job conditions and weakening the union.

Second- many powerful unions tried to hold on to wages and conditions in the face of capitalism’s anti-labor offensive by signing long term contracts. What happened? Their employers arbitrarily violated the terms of the agreement, demanded contract reopeners, and cut wages and benefits mid-way during the contracts.

We have to get the union ready for a strike even to keep what we have contractually. Our weakest link is the International. Even before going into a strike we have to demand that the strike and negotiations be run by a broad rank and file strike committee based on locally elected strike committees. If negotiations and strike strategy are left in the control of the Coast Committee we’ll be in deep trouble.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ILA?

The disastrous erosion in their jurisdiction that overwhelmed the ILA in their contract this year made a deep impression on our ILWU brothers. After non-union stevedoring companies successfully wrested more than half the work away from the Gulf and South Atlantic ILA, those locals signed special contracts with massive take-aways in wages, benefits, and manning. Then when the ILA international called a union-wide strike following stalled negotiations for their master contract, the Gulf and South Atlantic Ports kept working! Result- New York and the North Atlantic ILA made major concessions in manning and wage guarantees.

NO PLACE TO HIDE

The growing international crisis of capitalism and the weakness and disunity of the trade union and working class political movements leave ILWU longshoremen with no real economic security. Even those of us approaching retirement know that our pensions and social security are no more secure than this rotting economic system from which our union wrested these gains in earlier decades. Our appeals for the ILWU to take the lead in organizing a workers party to expropriate basic industry and finance capital aren’t just utopian demands; we’re simply describing the only way out for the working class here and internationally.

One way our union can try to influence events is to reaffirm and send to the coast longshore caucus the resolution we sent to the last international convention; a resolution calling for a 48 – hour coast longshore protest strike if Reagan takes military action against Nicaragua.

CROWLEY DEMANDS 33% WAGE CUTS/ELIMINATE THE HIRING HALL

12 Crowley contracts with the IBU-ILWU (INLAND BOATMEN’S UNION) are up on Feb. first, next year. Crowley is demanding 33% wage concessions and an end to the union hiring hall. These contracts cover tug and barge work from Alaska to Los Angeles. Crowley is a PMA member and has contracts with the ILWU longshore division in Hawaii and the northwest. Full longshore support to the IBU-ILWU to defeat Crowleys takeaway demands would be a signal to PMA to back off on any concession  demands. But don’t forget; several years ago Jimmy Herman ordered Local 10 longshoremen to cross an IBU picket line against a Crowley scab barge at the army base I

MILITANT LONGSHOREHAN PROGRAM 

1. DEFEND OUR JOBS AND LIVELIHOOD – Six hour shift, no extensions, at eight hours pay. Manning scales on all ship operations, one man – one job. Weekly PGP. Full no – cap C.0.L.A. on wages. Joint maritime union action against non – union barge, shipping, and longshore operations. No chest riders or witnesses. Ho long term contracts.

2. DEFEND THE HIRING HALL – use regular gangs on container ships; no dispatch of “unit gangs”. Call all 9.43 men back to the hall. Stop work action to defend the hiring hall and older and disabled men.

3. DEFEND UNION CONDITIONS AND SAFETY THROUGH JOB ACTION Stop PMA chiseling on the contract. Eliminate “work as directed”, “no illegal work stoppage”, and arbitration sections from the contract. Mobilize to smash anti-labor injuntions. No employer drug or alcohol screening.

4. DEFEND OUR UNION – No Class B or C longshoremen. Register directly to Class A. Keep racist anti-labor government and courts out of the union and BALMA. Support unions resistance against court suits and government “investigations”. Union action to break down racial and sexual discrimination and employer favoritism on the waterfront. Organize for a coastwide strike to get what we need – No concessions – no give backs.

5. BUILD LABOR SOLIDARITY – against government/employer strikebreaking. No more defeated PATCO or HORMEL strikes. Honor all class struggle picket lines – remove phony, racist, anti-working class picket lines. Don’t, handle struck or diverted cargo. No raiding of other unions. Organize the disorganized, and the  unemployed. Defend IBU – ILWU (INLAND BOATMEN) against Crowley union busting.

6. STOP NAZI/KLAN TERROR through union organized labor/black latino defense actions. No dependence on capitalist police or courts to smash fascists..

7. WORKING CLASS ACTION TO STOP REAGAN’S WAR DRIVE – Labor strikes to oppose U.S. military actions against Cuba, Nicaragua, or Salvadoran leftist insurgents. Boycott military cargo to Central America. Build labor action to smash the apartheid injunction.

8. INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY – oppose protectionist trade restrictions – for a massive trade union program of aid to help non-U.S. workers build unions and fight super-exploitation by the multi-national corporations – Defend undocumented workers with union strike action.

9. BREAK WITH THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN PARTIES – Start now to build a workers party based on the unions to fight for a workers government which will seize all major industry without payment to the capitalists and establish a planned economy to end exploitationo racism, poverty, and war

Militant Longshoreman

No #8  February 3, 1984

NO GIVE-AWAYS! — NO TAKE-BACKS!

MANNING SCALES!

8 HOURS PAY FOR A 6 HOUR SHIFT!

HOWARD KEYLOR 33 – B

CAUCUS & CONVENTION

PREPARE FOR A STRIKE IN 1984!

Local 10 will elect 10 Caucus delegates this Friday, February 10. These delegates (plus the Local President) will represent the Local at a Coast Contract Caucus, probably in March. That Caucus will put together contract demands and strategy for the 1984 negotiations with PMA. After negotiations the Caucus will recommend either acceptance or rejection of the proposed contract. Which levers you pull for this office is about the most important vote a member can cast in affecting his and the union’s future.

WILL PMA DEMAND TAKE-AWAYS?

It’s too early to predict whether PMA will follow the national pattern and demand direct give-backs in contractual guarantees on wages, seniority, job security etc. However, there are four areas in which the editor thinks. that PMA will press hard to undermine our union.

PMA will undoubtedly reintroduce their demand that a longshoreman’s PGP will be based in the future on his earnings for actual jobs worked in a previous base period (like unemployment insurance). This would put a real hardship on ports like San Francisco. Even if all dispatch categories were abolished and all longshoremen were availble 7 days a week, the lack of jobs (and earnings) would still result in reduced PGP payments in San Francisco to all except steady killed men. The most immediate result of such punitive contract lanuage would be PMA pressure to reduce categories (combine Dock and old Borads for example) and increase compulsory availability (signing n the hall every day – no stop line).

Partially disabled and older longshoremen would be the first to suffer since to maintain their maximum earnings (and PGP) these men would be compelled to accept steel and lashing jobs or suffer a drastic cut in heir own individual PGP.

A BUY-OUT?

Along with reduced PGP partially disabled men will probably be faced with pressure to accept a cash payment (Buy-out) to give up their books. Just as in U.S. capitalist society as a whole, where 25% of the workers including a high proportion of blacks) are being more and more openly treated as unwanted, excess human beings, PMA wants to get rid of older and disabled welfare recipients (men drawing PGP) in the longshore work force .

TRAVEL TIME/HIRING HALL IN DANGER

There are also signs that PMA wants to eliminate most travel time by demanding an East Buy dispatch hall. We can also expect PMA to bring up their demand for a fully computerized dispatch eliminating any possible choice or selection of job, virtually abolishing union control of dispatch.

FUTURE TAKE-AWAYS ALREADY IN THE CONTRACT!

Many brothers ask the honest question, “If we can keep our contract as It is, without any give-backs, won’t we be ok?”. That’s whistling in the dark brother. PMA already has contract language that allows continuous future give-aways in manning, jobs, conditions, and earnings. For over 20 years language surrendering manning (1961), equalized earnings (1966 – steady skilled men – 9.43), “PGP abuse”, “work as directed” and other sections have been added to the contract to give PMA all the weapons they need to continue taking away jobs and conditions. To add insult to injury Local 10 has been singled out to bear the full brunt of  the worst PMA stooges as arbitrators, Barsamian and Sutliff. That’s why we urge Local 10 delegates to go into the Caucus with contract demands to take-back for the union powers that we once had to protect our members. Eliminate steady skilled men, “PGP abuse”, work, now -arbitrate later” contract sections. Restore manning scales on all ship operations.

WANTED – A  FIGHT FOR JOBS

“Bay Area Tonnage UP – Jobs and Earnings of Longshoremen Down!”

That could be the headline on a yearly “state of the union” report. And it’s not what some demagogic politicians shouted in the past: “Los Angeles is taking our world”, “All the ships are going to Seattle!” Brother Harry Bridges gave away manning, the stevedoring companies mechanized, the world’s shippers went over to bigger and ever more efficient (less men) container ships. The hour is getting damned late for us. If we don’t get manning and a shorter work shift in 1984 the next contract could see us facing a lay-off.

PRESIDENT JIMMY HERMAN – RUNNING SCARED

Anyone who pays close attention to Brother Herman’s editorials and speeches can see that he’s running scared. Jimmy has done everything possible to avoid a conflict with the employers. Meanwhile he f/’es around making militant sounding speeches threatening to shut down the country. Probably. the most disgusting picture in the editor’s mind Is Jimmy Herman standing in front of the door of Greyhound on December 3 in San Francisco trying to disperse an angry crowd of pickets.

TO STRIKE OR NOT TO STRIKE

Brothers ask us “Why do you say in your election card ‘Prepare for a strike in 1984’ when you know we don’t have any leadership?” These brothers remember how Brother Bridges and the international officers sabotaged the 1971/1972 strike. What these brothers forget is that the 1971 Caucus in its last minutes turned over all powers to run the strike to the Negotiating Committee dominated by Bridges, Herman and the International officers! If you’re really serious about defending your jobs and your union you have to be willing to prepare for a strike. That also means taking control of the strike away from the mis-leaders in the International and the Local. We will have more to say later about elected strike committees and how to win a strike. The defensive victory we won last June at Richmond Levin Terminals Paar 5 shows what can be accomplished when the membership begins to organize.

NO CONTRACT EXTENSIONS – NO MASTER CONTRACT UNTIL ALL MISCELLANEOUS CONTRACTS SIGNED WITH PMA

We’ve gotten damned little in our local miscellaneous contracts with -IMA. Linemen, gearmen, coopers, sweepers, baggagemen haven’t made any -eal gains in years-why? Because the International hastens to sign the Master contract with PMA beforelocal agreements are reached leav- Ing us with no strike power to compel PPIA concessions. The only way to creak out of this no-win strategy is to start local negotiations early, flien PMA stalls tell them: “No contract extensions of local or master, last July 11No contract – no work! No Master contract signed until Local contracts agreement reached!” Only by linking Local and Coast  contracts together with the threat of a strike can we get PMA to negotiate seriously on the miscellaneous contracts.

STAN GOW – WHAT NOW!

Last month we made no written endorsement of Brother Stan Gow for Executive Board. After we had published issue No. 7 of this Newsletter Brother Gow distributed his campaign leaflet which completely omitted for the first time since 1974 any itemized program for the union. When Gow was asked whether his program was dropped in order to duck the question of whether he still opposes law-suits against the union Stan (and the organizer of the Militant Caucus, Brother Woolston) replied that Stan still opposes bringing the capitalist government, courts, and agencies into the union.

On that basis we advised members to vote for Brother Gow even though we remain increasingly critical of his actions. Howard Keylor will vote for Stan Gow for Caucus Delegate. We recommend that while brothers also vote for Stan that they urge him when elected to work with Brother Keylor at the Caucus in fighting for local 10 and the Longshore Division membership’s needs.

Militant Longshoreman

No #15  January 25, 1986

[This issue was reprinted in 1917 #2,  Summer 1986. First posted online at http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no2/no02bafs.html ]

BAFSAM’s Impotent Tactics

Reprinted below is the text of Militant Longshoreman No. 15, which was distributed to participants in a impotent BAFSAM-initiated ‘‘picket’’ of Pier 80 last January.

BAFSAM (Bay Area Free South Africa Movement) has had a leaflet out calling on enemies of apartheid to ‘‘Stop Nedlloyd Ship at Pier 80—Saturday, January 25 at 5 p.m.’’ People who respond to this call thinking that they are supporting a labor boycott of South African cargo may be surprised to find no ship with South African cargo docked at Pier 80. So what is BAFSAM doing? Is this just incompetence? Ever since the 11-day longshore boycott in 1984, BAFSAM has pulled a series of small, ineffective picket lines at Pier 80 in San Francisco, sometimes cynically picketing the entrance even when no Nedlloyd Line ship was docked there! Meanwhile BAFSAM has continued its lunchtime picket line in uptown Oakland at Pacific Maritime Association offices.

BAFSAM Strategy—A Total Failure

Last fall at U.C. Berkeley, BAFSAM spokespersons reported that their ‘‘Peace Navy’’ and picket lines had stopped South African cargo in the Bay Area. The truth is that in the Bay Area not one ship carrying South African cargo has been delayed in either docking, discharging or loading. Free South Africa Movement token picket lines in other West Coast ports resulted in at most a single 10-hour delay of one ship in Vancouver, WA. In every case arbitrators ordered longshoremen to work the cargo; orders promptly obeyed.

BAFSAM has refused to build a picket line big enough and militant enough to shut down Pier 80 when a Nedlloyd ship is in port; meanwhile they have ignored the ten US Lines and three Lykes Lines vessels carrying South African cargo calling at least weekly in the Bay Area. BAFSAM has been at Pier 80 in order to whore off the credit gained by S.F. longshoremen’s history making 11-day political strike. These friends of Archie Brown’s are the same people who later went on to organize BAFSAM. They are the same misleaders of the working class who helped the S.F. police to break up a picket line at Pier 80 on Dec. 4, 1984—the picket line which had temporarily halted work on the Nedlloyd Kimberley the day after the Federal Court injunction against Local 10 longshoremen.

If BAFSAM had just held demonstrations off to the side of the pier entrance while issuing their appeals to the ‘‘individual consciousness of longshoremen,’’ they would have been guilty of liberal ineffectiveness and political impotence. By putting up token picket lines they have prostituted this traditional trade-union weapon. Their actions are counter-productive; the only result is to train longshoremen to go through and work South African cargo behind picket lines. These cynical and irresponsible picket lines are only making it harder to organize a new longshore boycott. Clearly, the last thing BAFSAM wants is well organized and effective labor solidarity actions with the embattled black masses in South Africa.

BAFSAM’s Real Strategy—Beg the Capitalists…

BAFSAM’s presence at Pier 80 has nothing to do with working-class or trade-union action against apartheid. This was made very clear at a West Coast Labor Conference against apartheid called by BAFSAM in August last year. The underground South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU—supported by the ANC [African National Congress]) had just issued an appeal to trade unions, especially transport workers, in North America and Europe urging them to refuse to handle cargo, mail, communications to or from South Africa. One of the conference workshops introduced a motion to send delegates to the various labor union bodies in the Bay Area urging a union-organized two-week boycott of South African cargo during the forthcoming national period of protest against apartheid. Franklin Alexander and the other BAFSAM spokesmen demagogically attacked this motion for concrete action and were successful in getting it defeated.

Instead of labor action the conference passed a carload of liberal motions for letters to Congress, appeals to local government bodies, petitions to Port Commissions, and research into constitutional law. Their strategy is dead set against real actions of labor solidarity, and is centered on making liberal moral appeals to the consciousness of the capitalists and their political flunkies. During the Vietnam war these same people refused to even try to organize labor strikes against the war. They were conspicuous in the ineffectual pacifist peace crawls. It was the courageous struggle of the Vietnam workers and peasants against U.S. imperialism that led the U.S. to finally pull out of Vietnam. It’s not liberal appeals to the non-existent ‘‘moral consciousness’’ of capitalists that is causing banks and corporations to pull out of South Africa; it is the revolt of the black masses which is making their investments in apartheid too risky to continue.

* Smash the apartheid injunction through a mass labor boycott of South African cargo!

Militant Longshoreman

No. 19,   March 13, 1987

Herman, Liddle, Estrada
Endanger Inland Boatmen’s Strike
Against Crowley!

Going into the fourth week of their strike against Crowley’s union busting the IBU-ILWU has stopped most of Crowley’s struck West Coast operations. With the help of longshoremen and clerks all Crowley tug docking and undocking and bunkering of ships worked by ILWU members has been stopped cold. A major victory was won when two struck Crowley barges brought from Hawaii by scabs sat idle in Oakland when longshoremen and clerks refused to work behind mass IBU pickets. On March 4 Coast arbitrator Sam Kagel upheld the union’s contention that Crowley had extended the struck site to his barges even when they were docked at Howard Terminal and Berth 10, and that the contract picket line language precluded PMA from forcing us to work the struck barges.

The main danger that threatens the Boatmen’s strike is the apparent fear of Jimmy Herman, Don Liddle, and the IBU leadership that a tough, effective militant strike will antagonize Crowley and make it impossible to “cut a deal” with the company. The IBU leaders tried to stop or delay a coastwise strike, kept vital information from the rank-and-file, and threw militants off the strike committee in Puget Sound and the Bay Area. IBU Regional Director, Rich Estrada, suppressed information that the two Hawaii Marine Lines barges had-been loaded in Hawaii when the longshoremen capitulated to a court injunction. We still don’t know whether Herman and Liddle ordered IBU pickets of the barges in Hawaii after the injunction came down; but you can be damn sure that Herman ordered the longshoremen to load those scab barges. IBU rank-and-filers have been unable to find out to what extent the struck Crowley barge trade to Alaska is still operating. Estrada dragged his feet, held back the documents and paperwork on the barges and handicapped the Local 34 and Local 10 officers in preparing for the arbitrations when PMA ordered clerks and longshoremen to work behind IBU picket lines.

Estrada Purges Strike Committee

Finally, on his own “authority”, Estrada removed George Gutekunst and Jack Heyman from the elected strike committee in spite of the widely recognized fact that they had organized an unusually effective strike in the Bay Area and had built excellent working relations with the clerk and longshore locals. The IBU Regional Executive Board ordered new elections and Gutekunst and Heyman were re-elected with the highest votes from their units.

One sinister and alarming result of the recent IBU elections is the placing of Estrada’s ally Doug Crute on the strike committee. Doug Crute  is the former regional Director of the IBU who was censured by his own membership for grossly racist remarks at a membership meeting. Is this an attempt to disrupt longshore local 10’s support for the boatmen’s strike?

Liddle’s Pipe Dream —Cut A Deal With Crowley

Herman, Liddle, and the IBU leadership are trying to strangle and defuse the membership’s determination to win this strike, and to save their jobs and their union. Crowley openly advertised for and hired scabs days before the strike and has made no bones about his intention to gut the union. The IBU leaders had by their own admission 15% concessions on the table when the strike broke out and have given every indication that they are willing to go even further in a desperate attempt to cut a deal. They, are afraid that militant strike tactics will escalate the conflict to where Crowley will not be open to even major give-aways.

Nice Guys Don’t Win!

What the IBU membership needs to understand is what we in longshore learned decades ago. The only way to protect the membership is to be willing to go as far as necessary to economically hurt the employer when he’s trying to smash you. It’s all a question of power – not wheeling and dealing. Crowley has departed from the fourty years of class collaboration since Taft Hartley that has dominated maritime labor relations. Crowley defeated the ILA in three ports on the Gulf and South Atlantic wiping out longspore union jurisdiction on his barge operations. When he bought Delta Lines he fired the entire Master, Mates and Pilots crews, ordering them hauled off ships by Federal Marshalls. Crowley will only sign acceptable contracts with the IBU if he’s hurt economically!

George Gutekunst and Jack Heyman issued a joint election statement which has most of the ingredients for what they call a “Program for Victory”. A) Winning support and cooperation from longshoremen and clerks. B) Mass Picketing to stop scab operations. CJ Defiance of court injunctions, that would limit mass picketing or allow scab operations.

Tell the Truth:
Herman and Liddle Will Snatch Defeat From the Jaws of Victory!

Unfortunately, the two brothers did not clearly warn their membership in their election statement that Herman, Liddle, Estrada and their cronies will sabotage such a winning strategy short of victory, because they don’t believe it’s possible to win in open battle. Gutekunst and Heyman failed to advise the IBU membership that they, the rank-and-file, will have to control the strike, overrule or replace their leadership when they try to sow confusion and demoralization in the ranks. Even if the ranks didn’t like to hear this necessary criticism of their leadership they must be told the truth if the strike is to be won.

After he purged the strike committee and took over its functions Estrada failed to inform Local 10 officers that three more H.M.L. barges had been loaded in Hawaii and were headed for the West Coast, and that Crowley had gone to the NLRB to get a Federal Court order overruling the ILWU-PMA contract grievance procedure and ordering longshoremen and clerks to work the scab barges! Crowley scab barges will shortly be tied up in three areas on the West Coast. If the IBU and the long-shore division capitulate to court injunctions it will be a major blow to an otherwise effective strike. We can expect no help from Herman and the Coast Committee. In both the Richmond Levin action and the Longshore South African cargo boycott the International sided with the PMA in finding Local 10 in violation of the contract leaving us open to legal actions.

Mass Picket Lines to Smash Court Ordered Scabbing!

If injunctions come down longshoremen and clerks will have to pull everyone out and join the IBU picket lines coastwise. If Crowley breaks the IBU he’s sure to ignore our jurisdiction and start working barges (and even ships) at so-called industrial docks utilizing non-ILWU workers at 1/4 to 1/3 our wages and benefits!

Theses on Ireland

[reprinted from Spartacist no 24, Autumn 1977. Originally posted online athttp://www.workersrepublic.org/Pages/Ireland/Trotskyism/thesesonireland2.html ]

The theses on Ireland reprinted here were adopted by the International Executive Committee of the international Spartacist tendency on 5 August 1977.

1. The current situation and social configuration in Ireland is the result of centuries of brutal British imperialist domination. It contains features characteristically associated with the former multi-national states of Eastern Europe, as well as with both the colonial settler states which established their own political economy by excluding or destroying native populations, and colonies in which the native population is exploited and oppressed by a relatively thin colonial hierarchy.

In the absence of any significant section of the Irish working class historically freed from national/communal insecurity, the result is a seemingly intractable situation in which prospects for the development of a genuine class-struggle axis and for an end to the interminable cycle of imperialist exploitation/repression and inter-communal violence appear remote. The strong possibility remains that a just, democratic, socialist solution to the situation in Ireland will only come under the impact of proletarian revolution elsewhere and concretely may be carried on the bayonets of a Red Army against opposition of a significant section of either or both of the island’s communities.

Nevertheless, no matter to what extent a bleak immediate prognosis is justified, the conflict in Ireland presents a crucial test of the capacity of a revolutionary internationalist tendency to provide a clear analysis and programme and to confront the national question in the imperialist epoch. For revolutionists, who refuse to deal in the simplicities (ultimately genocidal) of the nationalists, the situation in Ireland can appear to be exceedingly complex and intractable. The ‘Irish question’ provides a strong confirmation of the unique revolutionary potency and relevance of the international Spartacist tendency’s understanding of Leninism, particularly in relation to geographically inter-penetrated peoples.

2. An essential element of our programme is the demand for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the British army. British imperialism has brought centuries of exploitation, oppression and bloodshed to the island. No good can come of the British presence; the existing tie between Northern Ireland and the British state can only be oppressive to the Irish Catholic population, an obstacle to a proletarian class mobilisation and solution. We place no preconditions on this demand for the immediate withdrawal of all British military forces or lessen its categorical quality by suggesting ‘steps’ toward its fulfilment (such as simply demanding that the army should withdraw to its barracks or from working-class districts).

At the same time we do not regard the demand as synonymous with or as a concrete application of either the call for Irish self-determination (that is, a unitary state of the whole island) or for an independent Ulster – two solutions which within the framework of capitalism would be anti-democratic, in the first case toward the Protestants and in the second toward the Irish Catholics. Nor is the demand for the withdrawal of British troops sufficient in, itself, as though it has some automatic, inherent revol-utionary content or outcome. As the eminent British bourgeois historian AJP Taylor observed in an interview:

‘ I don’t know what the term bloodbath means. If it means people will be killed, they are being killed all the time. The alternative is not between an entirely peaceful Northern Ireland in which nobody’s being killed and a Northern Ireland in which a lot of people will be killed. If the British withdraw some sort of settlement would be arrived at. You can’t tell what it is because the forces in play can’t be judged until they can operate….

‘ … the presence of the British Army in Ireland prolongs the period of conflict and uncertainty…

‘ This [possibility of a united Ireland] is a matter of relative strength. Owing to the history of the last thirty years or perhaps longer, owing to history since 1885, when Randolph Churchill – Winston’s father – first raised the cry of ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ – in the past ninety years the Protestants of Northern Ireland have been taught to think of themselves as a separate body, almost separate nationality within Ireland, and have established now a longterm domination of Northern Ireland, partly, because of their superior economic strength, partly because of the backing they have received from the British Government, and partly because they are, or up to now have been, the more determined. For them, Protestant domination is the answer to the situation in Northern Ireland.’
Troops Out, No. 2

As historically demonstrated by examples such as India, Libya, Cyprus and Palestine, the withdrawal of British imperialism, while a necessary objective of the communist vanguard, in itself does not automatically ensure an advance in a revolutionary direction. Thus, the demand for the immediate withdrawal of the British army from Northern Ireland must be linked to and constitute a part of a whole revolutionary programme.

3. As Leninists we are opposed to all forms of national oppression and privilege and stand for the equality of nations. Writing in 1913 Lenin succinctly set forth as follows the fundamental principles underlying the revolutionary social-democratic position on the national question:

‘As democrats, we are irreconcilably hostile to any, however slight, oppression of any nationality and to any privileges for any nationality. As democrats, we demand the right of nations to self-determination in the political sense of that term … i.e., the right to secede. We demand unconditional protection of the rights of every national minority. We demand broad, self-government and autonomy for regions, which must be demarcated, among other terms of reference, in respect of nationality too.’
‘Draft Programme of the 4th Congress of Social Democrats of the Latvian Area,’

Collected Works, Vol. 19

Thus, the right to self-determination means simply the right to establish a separate state, the right to secede. We reject the notion that it means ‘freedom from all outside interference and control’ or entails economic indepen-dence. In the general sense the right to self-determination is unconditional, independent of the state that emerges or its leadership.

However, for Leninists this right is not an absolute demand, a categorical imperative, to be implemented at all times and everywhere there is a nation. It is only one of a range of bourgeois-democratic demands; it is a part, sub-ordinate to the whole, of the overall programmatic system. When the particular demand for national self-determination contradicts more crucial demands or the general needs of the class struggle, we oppose its exercise. As Lenin notes:

‘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.’ [emphasis in original]
‘The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,’ Collected Works, Vol. 22

In particular, in the case of interpenetrated peoples sharing a common territory, we oppose the exercise of self-determination by one nation where this flatly conflicts with the same right for another nation. In this situation the same general considerations apply, namely our opposition to all forms of national oppression and privilege, but in such circumstances the exercise of self-determination by one or the other people in the form of the establishment of their own bourgeois state can only be brought about by the denial of that right to the other. Under capitalism this would simply be a formula for reversing the terms of oppression, for forcible population transfers and expulsions and ultimately genocide. It is a ‘solution’ repeatedly demonstrated in history, for example in the cases of India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine and Cyprus.

In general our support for the right to self-determination is negative: intransigent opposition to every manifesta-tion of national oppression as a means toward the unity of the working class, not as the fulfilment of the ‘manifest destiny’ or ‘heritage’ of a nation, nor as support for ’progressive’ nations or nationalism. We support the right of self-determination and national liberation struggles in order to remove the national question from the historic agenda, not to create another such question. Within the framework of capitalism there can be no purely democratic solution (for example through universal suffrage) to the national question in cases of interpenetrated peoples.

The same general considerations apply not only to ‘fully formed’ nations, but also to nationalities and peoples which may still be something less than fully consolidated nations, for example the Eritreans in their struggle against Amharic domination or the Biafrans at the time of the Nigerian civil war. Indeed, not infrequently the historical formation of nations is tested and completed in the process of struggles for self-determination. Our opposition to the exercise of self-determination by an interpenetrated people would also apply where one or more of the groupings, though not a historically compacted nation, has sufficient relative size and cultural level that the exercise of self-determination could only mean a new form or reversal of the terms of oppression.

4. Concretely, in Ireland the question of Irish national self-determination was not fully resolved by the establish-ment of the Republic of Éire. But to demand ‘Irish self-determination’ today represents a denial of the Leninist position on the national question. It is incumbent on revolutionists to face up to exactly what the call for ‘self-determination of the Irish people as a whole’ means.

Obviously the call is not one for the simultaneous self-determination of both communities, an impossibility for interpenetrated peoples under capitalism. In another sense the demand is about as meaningful as calling for ‘self-determination for the Lebanese people as a whole’ in the middle of last year’s communal bloodletting. In the case of Ireland such a demand utterly fails to come to terms with the question of the Protestant community of Ulster, comprising 60 percent of the statelet’s and 25 percent of the whole island’s population. Such a demand is a call for the formation of a unitary state of the whole island, including the forcible unification of the whole island by the Irish bourgeois state irrespective of the wishes of the Protestant community. It is a call for the Irish Catholics to self-determine at the expense of the Protestants. It is a call for the simple reversal of the terms of oppression, an implicit call for inter-communal slaughter, forced population transfers and ultimately genocide as the way forward to the Irish revolution.

5. The present six-county enclave in Northern Ireland is a ‘sectarian, Orange statelet,’ the product of an imperial-ist partition. Prior to the partition revolutionaries would have opposed partition, striving to cement revolutionary unity in the struggle for independence from British imperialism. However, with the partition, the accompanying communal violence and demographic shifts, and the establishment of a bourgeois republic in the south it was necessary to oppose the forcible reunification of the six counties with the rest of Ireland. At the same time the present statelet guarantees the political and economic privileges of the Protestants. We oppose the Orange state and the demand for an independent Ulster as forms of determination for the Protestants which necessarily maintain the oppression of the Irish Catholic population of Ulster, an extension of the Irish Catholic nation. Since they are the local bodies of the British repressive state apparatus and the training ground for the present Protestant paramilitary groups and a future reactionary Protestant army, we demand: Smash the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).

6. There is a series of urgent democratic demands that apply to the situation of the oppressed Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. We demand full democratic rights for the Catholic minority and an end to discrimination in housing and hiring. But such demands must be linked to class demands which transcend the bounds of bourgeois democracy. Without the demand for a sliding scale of wages and hours, for example, the call to end discrimination will simply imply leveling in an already economically depressed situation. The relevant partial, negative, democratic and economic demands must be integrated into the revolutionary transitional programme which transcends the capitalist framework of economism and democratic reformism.

7. Historically the Protestants of Ulster were an extension of the Scottish and English nations. The 1798 United Irishmen uprising was led by the Protestant middle class and reflected the impact of the French and American bourgeois revolutions on the nascent capitalist class (overwhelmingly Protestant) in Ireland. This insurrection against British imperialism, which was defeated in part by development of the reactionary sectarian Orange Order and the mobilisation of the peasantry by Catholic priests, was the opportunity for the establishment of a modern nation of the whole island. Since that time, though the most modern capitalist sectors remained Protestant for a long period, the Protestants have acted for the most part as loyal and fervent defenders of the union with British imperialism. The bigotry and discrimination among the Protestants toward the Irish Catholic nation necessarily exceeds the worst excesses of Irish Green nationalism, and most of the sectarian murders in the current period have been carried out by Protestant paramilitary groups.

Though not yet a nation, the Protestants are certainly not a part of the Irish nation and are distinct from the Scottish and English nations. Presently their separate existence is defined in large part as against the Irish Catholic nation and at the ideological level is expressed in religious terms. With their own social and cultural fabric (epitomised in the Orange Order) and history of opposition to the Irish nationalist cause, they have therefore acted as the ‘loyalist’ allies of British imperialism. At the same time, in this century the allegiance has been more a means than an end, demonstrated, for example, by the willingness of Sir Edward Carson to seek German aid if British imperialism would not fulfil the Ulster Protestants’ demands and by the 1974 Ulster Workers Strike.

In all likelihood, a definite resolution of the exact character of the Ulster Protestant community will be reached with the withdrawal of the British army and will depend on the circumstances surrounding this. The particular conditions will pose point-blank their future and the ‘solution’ to the Irish question. The solution posed by AJP Taylor is but one possibility.

‘The question is whether the Irish nationalist majority is strong enough to expel the Protestants. If they are, that is the best way out’
quoted in the Guardian [London], 13 April 1976

At the same time the social organisation, weaponry, military expertise and alliances of the Protestants, make a ‘Zionist’ solution entirely conceivable. On the other hand, if the withdrawal of the British army was in the context of massive class mobilisations, opportunities would undoubt-edly arise for a class determination of the question.

8. Attempts to ignore or deny the separate identity and interests of the Ulster Protestants through the familiar liberal plea that British or other socialists cannot ‘tell the Irish how to wage their struggle’ or the argument that only oppressed nations have a right to self-determination can be rejected easily on general theoretical grounds. The Protestants are neither a colonial administration (as were the British in India) nor a closed colour caste (as are the whites in South Africa). Arguments that the Protestants have no legitimate claim because they were originally settlers and the present statelet is an artificial imperialist creation are based ultimately on notions of nationalist irredentism and ‘historical justice.’ Although sometimes expressed as the demand that the Protestants go ‘home,’ such arguments are in the last analysis genocidal. Also inadequate is the explanation of the Protestants as simply a backward sector of the Irish nation, whose loyalism/Orangeism is purely an imperialist ideology given a certain nationalist tinge in order to attract a mass base.

9. Protestant communalism does have a material basis in the marginal privileges enjoyed by the Protestant workers. The most explicit attempt to confront and discount the Protestant community’s separate identity in ‘Marxist’ terms is the description of the Protestant work-ing class as a ‘labor aristocracy.’ This explanation is similar to the New Left theories about the American white working class and involves an attempt to broaden the term so as to destroy its original meaning, while failing to recognise that the Protestant community extends through all classes and strata of society. Even to claim that the entire Protestant working class of Northern Ireland is a labour aristocracy is a gross distortion of the term. The Northern Ireland working class as a whole has some of the worst wages, unemployment and housing in the British Isles. Moreover, wage differentials between Protestant and Catholic workers are not so marked that the two communities have significantly different living standards.

10. From the point of view of the general interests of British imperialism the border between Ulster and the Republic is now anachronistic:

‘United Kingdom soldiers and officials and money are heavily deployed in Northern Ireland because Westminster has clear obligations there. English Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries planted the garrison-colonists whose descendents’ presence has been the principal source of Ireland’s twentieth century distress; and London is the seat of such authority as the Province knows To withdraw that authority now would intensify the problem of public order without in the least advancing a settlement of the central political question. The search for an acceptable local administration would simply continue in worsened circumstances. Britain’s strategic interest in Northern Ireland is dead, and its economic interest is all on the side of withdrawal; but moral as well as practical considerations demand that British resources should remain engaged until both the political and the public order problems are at least within sight of resolution.’

Observer [London], 1 February 1976

While historically British imperialism has used the sectarian divisions, played the ‘Ulster card’ to its own advantage, it is not now committed to the preservation of the Orange statelet and would prefer a settlement which would remove its direct political responsibility on the island. With the decline of Ulster industry and the growth of investment opportunities in the south, the border is an obstacle to its overall intentions. But at the same time as it adopts various schemes to this end British imperialism is constrained to maintain capitalist law and order and prevent a complete breakdown in the social order. The increase in independence talk by Ulster Protestants, the Ulster Workers Strike of 1974 and the significant number of Protestants imprisoned for political offences do not reflect mere ‘tactical’ differences between the imperialists and their subordinates, but rather a divergence of interests between genuinely distinct forces.

11. We reject the argument that Protestant workers are so reactionary that only force will convince them and that theprecondition for winning them is the destruction of the Orange statelet. The understanding that the current partition is inherently oppressive is perverted into a conception of a ‘two-stage’ revolution in which the socialist tasks can only follow the completion of Irish national unity on the whole island. Sometimes linked to this is the claim that it is ‘naïve’ to expect the Protestant and Catholic workers to unite on ‘economic’ issues, since it is these that divide them. By analogy, no working class could ever transcend its sectional interests. Economism is the political expression of the failure of the working class in the absence of a revolutionary leadership to reject bourgeois ideology and place its revolutionary class interests above particular, sectional or apparent needs or desires. The above argument is based on the central premise of economism – that the working class cannot transcend its immediate sectional interests and identify with all oppressed and the future of humanity. Such ‘anti-economism’ is in fact a denial of the pertinence of the Transitional Programme in the service of the nationalism of the oppressed.

12. The Protestants feel legitimately threatened by the proposal for a united (bourgeois) Ireland, that is, their forcible absorption into an enlarged version of the reactionary clericalist state of Éire. The communalism/nationalism of the Protestants has a defensive character and is not the chauvinism of a great power. A united bourgeois Ireland would not provide a democratic solution for their claims and we must therefore reject such a solution. Such a state would necessarily be sectarian, and the Protestants will not voluntarily enter such a union.

The difficulties of such a solution are indicated in the earlier experience of the Bolsheviks. At the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 the Ukrainian delegate Merejin observed in an amendment to the ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’:

‘The attempt made to settle the relationship between the nations of the majority and the minority nationalities in territories of mixed population (Ukraine, Poland, White Russia), has shown that the transfer of the power of govern-ment from the hands of the big capitalists to the groups of petty bourgeoisie constituting the democratic republics not only does not diminish but, on the contrary, aggravates the friction among the nationalities. The democratic republics oppose themselves to the proletariat and attempt to convert the class war into a national one. They become rapidly impregnated with nationalistic exclusiveness, and easily adapt themselves to the practices of the previous dominating nations, which fermented discord among the nationalities, and organised pogroms, with the assistance of the government apparatus, to combat the dictatorship of the proletariat.…’

The present Irish bourgeois republic is a clerical reactionary state in which the Roman Catholic Church enjoys considerable real and latent powers. An essential aspect of this is not the current level of religious persecution or discrimination (though the current repressive measures directed mostly against the IRA are an indication of the Irish bourgeoisie’s intentions), but the relationship of Roman Catholicism to Irish nationalism, especially as it helps to define the divisions between the two communities.

Leninism and nationalism are fundamentally counterposed political viewpoints. Thus, while revolutionists struggle against all forms of national oppression, they are also opposed to all forms of nationalist ideology. It is a revision of Leninism to claim that the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ is progressive and can be supported by communist internationalists. In one of his major works on the national question Lenin stressed:

‘Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the “most just,” “purest,” most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism….’

‘Critical Remarks on the National Question,’ Collected Works, Vol. 20

To attempt to dismiss the above-mentioned features of Irish nationalism and the Irish Republic, to suggest that somehow these matters are not important, is to imply that Irish nationalism and capitalism are in some way ‘progressive’ and (unlike all other nationalists and capitalists) will not promote racial, sexual and communal divisions in the working class, in particular will not discriminate and persecute non-members of their national grouping.

13. Ireland, like other situations of interpenetrated peoples as in the Middle East and Cyprus, is a striking confirmation of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. The inevitable conclusion is that while revolutionists must oppose all aspects of national oppression, they must also recognise that the conflicting claims of interpenetrated peoples can only be equitably resolved in the framework of a workers state. We struggle for an Irish workers republic as part of a socialist federation of the British Isles. while the establishment of a united workers state of the whole island may be preferable, the above demand is algebraic, leaving open the question of where the Protestants fall. This recognises that the nature of the Protestant community has not yet been determined in history. As such, it is counterposed to calls for a ‘united workers republic’ or for a ‘united socialist Ireland’ (where this demand is not simply an expression for left/nationalist or Stalinist two-stage theories). Placing the demand in the context of a socialist federation has the additional advantage of highlighting the essential relationship of the proletarian revolution in the whole area and the virtual impossibility of the resolution of the Irish question on a working-class basis outside this framework. This, and the strong representation of Irish workers in the working class in Britain, points to the demand for a British Isles-wide trade-union federation as a method of promot-ing joint struggle and cutting across the divisions in the working class in Ireland.

14. Particular emphasis must be placed on the demand for programmatically based anti-sectarian workers militias to combat Orange and Green terror and imperialist rampage. The British bourgeois press and the local imperialists’ bloodstained henchmen in the British Labour Party responded hysterically to a composite motion at the 1976 BLP Conference demanding the withdrawal of British troops and the formation of a trade-union based militia, despite the fact that the motion was the inadvertent result of right-wing culling of motions expressing ersatz Irish nationalist positions and a mealy-mouthed resolution from the Militant grouping. Our demand is not the same as that of the deeply opportunist and BLP-entrist Militant group, which links its call for trade-union militias to the call for troop withdrawal in a way that makes the existence of trade-union militias a precondition for troop withdrawal and which sees the militias as growing organically out of economist struggles. In Ulster the problem is not that the workers are not armed. Such militias will need a broad and strong programmatic basis if they are not to be derailed or co-opted. They cannot develop just out of trade unionism but fundamentally require the existence of a strong and authoritative revolutionary cadre. Each militia unit would need at least one member of each community and the presence and strong influence of trained revol-utionary cadre. Consequently, the demand for an anti–sectarian workers militia is closely linked to the growth of a Leninist party based on a developed revolutionary programme. Without being based on the demand for the immediate withdrawal of the British army and without our analysis of terrorism, for example, such workers militias would simply be the armed adjunct of the women’s peace movement.

15. In military conflicts between Irish nationalist organisations and the British army/state authorities we defend the actions of the former since this is still a struggle of an oppressed nationality against imperialism, even though their struggle may be associated with a programme which, if accomplished, would violate the democratic rights of the Protestants. This stance implies nothing about the programme of these groups, which can range from those similar to the Zionist Stern Gang and Grivas’ EOKA to more radical ‘socialist’ nationalists.

Outside this military struggle with British imperialism and its direct agents, in the conflict between the Irish Catholic and Protestant communities and their respective organisations, the national/communal aspect transcends any formal left/right differences. Such violence is frequently directed against symbols of non-sectarianism (for example, pubs where both Catholic and Protestant workers socialise) and is an obstacle to any form of integrated class struggle. Terrorist acts directed against the Protestant community by organisations of the oppressed Irish Catholic community are in no way a blow against imperialism, not justifiable as the ‘violence of the oppressed’ and are no more ‘progressive’ or defensible than similar acts by Protestant paramilitary groups. Thus, while attacks on British army posts or the bombing of Aldershot military barracks are politically defensible acts, the pub bombings (both in Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods), the London underground bombings, the South Armagh shootings and other such acts of indiscriminate terrorism are completely indefensible, in no way representing a blow against imperialism. Such acts, based as they are on nationalist and genocidal premises, can only deepen com-munal divisions and erect barriers to working-class unity.

In such circumstances we recognise the right of both communities to self-defence. Simply because an org-anisation claims to be fighting on behalf of the oppressed and against imperialism does not make all its acts defens-ible. If this were so, then revolutionists would be com-pelled to defend the actions of both the EOKA in Cyprus and the Zionist Stern Gang in Palestine (organisations to whom the Provisional IRA are akin), not only when they attacked British imperialism but respectively in their attacks on the Turkish community and the Palestinians (at Deir Yassin, for example). Only with this understanding of terrorism can the workers militias in Northern Ireland be armed against capitulating to a blanket approval of the terrorism of the oppressed or becoming a mask for the machinations of imperialism.

16. In the history of the Irish labour movement there have been examples of significant workers’ solidarity which have temporarily cut across the sectarian divisions. Invariably, as in the case of the 1919 Belfast engineers’ strike and the mass unemployment marches in the 1930s, they have been countered with massive sectarian mobilisations intended to wipe out the fragile proletarian unity. In the absence of a revolutionary party, there can arise examples of transitory unity, albeit on pacifist or reformist grounds. A sequel to the South Armagh shootings was joint marches of Protestant and Catholic workers; but they marched to demand the strengthening of the RUC, which must be smashed.

Even such examples indicate the potentiality for workers unity. The instances of class solidarity are not proof of a deep-seated strain of class unity or that the situation is not poisoned by sectarian hatreds, but indicate that the opportunity can arise for a revolutionary organisation, though perhaps hitherto isolated, weak and small to intervene, altering the course of the conflict toward a class determination and proletarian revolution.

For the Immediate and Unconditional Withdrawal of the British Army!
Smash the RUC and the UDR!
Down with the Prevention of Terrorism Act and all Other Special Powers Acts in Britain and Ireland!
Full Democratic Rights for the Catholic Minority in Northern Ireland!
No Discrimination in Hiring and Housing! For a Sliding Scale of Wages and Hours!
For a Programatically Based Anti-Sectarian Workers Militia To Combat Orange and Green Terror and Imperialist Rampage!
For a British Isles-Wide Trade-Union Federation!
Forward to the Irish Section of the Reborn Fourth International!