Militant Longshoreman

No #14  January 3, 1986

Re-Elect Keylor to Executive Board

A few days ago a brother approached the editor and asked, “Are you still going to run for office on that pie in the sky program? Stan [Gow] doesn’t print up a program any more. You know the union is going down hill fast and these guys won’t fight PMA – and sure not the government.” This leaflet will try to respond to these questions.

First a few obvious examples why this brother is so pessimistic. The 1984 contract settlement allowed PMA to code hundreds of men out of PGP. The local was unable to stop many of these brothers from losing health and welfare benefits.

The increasingly desperate job squeeze for older men led to a dangerous confrontation between Locals 34 and 10 over the extra clerk jobs. At one point the Local 10 Executive Board seriously debated taking our sister local to court — a clear invitation to the capitalist courts to “administer” our contract. One of the few positive events this past year is that this issue was finally resolved, leaving our two locals free to fight PMA instead of each other.

The decline in traditional winch and lift skilled jobs due to containerization and the monopoly of better paid skilled jobs by 9.43 men means that a longshoreman in San Francisco has to spend 20 years working on the hold board. During the last couple of years we’ve seen continued attempts to wipe out seniority in promotions and skilled dispatch categories. Fortunately the membership recognized that seniority is the only remaining protection we have for older and partially disabled longshoremen, and voted these motions down.

DRUG & ALCOHOL SCREENING
COAST COMMITTEE ACTS AS PMA COPS

Those members who were at the November meeting got a real shock when it was reported that the class collaboration policies of the International has reached a new low. The union side of the Coast Committee has agreed with PMA to a “screening program” for alcohol and drug use. Applicants for registration and longshoremen being promoted will be subject to a screening or check for drug and alcohol use — supposedly to make the waterfront a safer place to work. This cynical and hypocritical demand from PMA should have been summarily rejected by the union side with the counter demand that the employers stop their speed-up, unsafe work practices, and short manning that create unsafe working conditions on the waterfront. For instance: In 1984 PMA adamantly refused to even consider updating the safety code to provide for safety conditions working aboard container ships that have been in effect in Asian and European ports for years. This is just another move by the stevedoring companies to try to make the individual longshoreman legally responsible for the high accident rate in the industry.

Think about it: How will this “screening” for drug and alcohol addiction take place? This program makes all arrest and legal actions and all medical records outside the job evidence that can be used against a longshoreman. There are two outstanding dangers here. “Evidence” accumulated in this way could be used by employers to get out of paying claims to longshoremen injured on the job. Even more sinister is the danger opened up by the Coast Committee grant of approval to PMA for the acquisition of this kind of information, thereby giving the bosses another weapon to use against union activists and militants!

Almost all unions have resisted employer drug testing programs, pointing out among other reasons the notorious unreliability of these “tests”. For example: A person who never uses marijuana but happens to be in a room or enclosed space where someone else is smoking a joint will test out as a user for up to 30 days afterwards. Our local Caucus delegates must go into the February Coast Caucus and demand that the Coast Committee reverse their decision to act as cops for PMA.

There is a traditional union solution to the problem of brothers who use substances that affect their functioning. In the earlier history of the union, before Harry Bridges and his buddies surrendered so much union power and control back to PMA, the union handled such problems internally. But when our local tries to exercise union discipline as part of the effort to help our brothers overcome their problem, PMA has rushed in to stop us. Our union must reassert this right and exercise internal union discipline and control.

WHY A CLASS-STRUGGLE PROGRAM?

Most brothers and sisters see no way out of the weakness, decline and isolation of our union. We say that the history of the working class and of our union has valuable lessons that show the way for workers to protect themselves and finally seize control of society. The MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN program, printed at the end of this issue, tries to apply these lessons to our own union as a guide to those things we should fight for, and the tactics we have to use to get them. That’s why we call for concrete acts of workers’ solidarity, from joining other unions on their picket lines to political strikes against U.S. imperialist intervention against Central American revolutionary movements. Unless we break out of our isolation and help to build ties with other workers, our isolation will lead to even more defeats.

We should be ashamed that, except for a tiny handful of longshoremen, the Restaurant workers on strike for months just a couple of blocks from our hall got no help from our local. While Chilean longshoremen are in a desparate strike to defend their union, ILWU locals continue to unload cargo from that country, while the International issues mealy-mouthed statements of support. No group of workers can even defend and preserve their hard-won gains without working class solidarity. Those who forget this lesson lead the working class into one defeat after another.

INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION:
LOCAL 10 DELEGATES SURRENDER TO HERMAN

Local 10 sometimes takes very good positions on paper, but doesn’t follow through. Last April our local went into the International Convention having .unanimously passed two historically important resolutions for working class solidarity. One resolution called for union wide boycott of South African cargo demanding the International organize the action, and urging other locals to make the same demand of the International. The second resolution  called for a 48-hour coastwise longshore strike if Reagan intervened militarily in Central America. [Stan Gow opposed both of these resolutions in the Executive Board — probably because Keylor proposed them.] But what happened then? Our convention delegates sat on their hands and failed to put up a fight for these resolutions allowing Jimmy Herman to line up his cronies and handraisers and defeat the proposals in the Resolutions Committee — thus preventing these issues, from even coming up on the floor for debate. Keylor was not a delegate, having failed to be elected in the February 1985 election Local 10 and our union appear even further away than in previous years from developing a class-struggle leadership — but the need is even greater. No other candidate for office besides Keylor has a program that answers the needs of our union. No other candidate is committed to such a program.

DON’T MISS THE NEXT MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN 

In February we will deal with the coastwise erosion of our jurisdiction and the sub-standard longshore contracts being negotiated by the International. We’ll try to describe an alternative to this no-win strategy to stop nonunion longshore operators.

We’ll also deal with the danger to workers posed by protectionism, union busting and the growing racist and fascist movements.

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. Weekly PGP, eliminate all “coding out” rules. Full-no-cap C.O.L.A on-wages.  Joint-Maritime union action against non-union barge operations.

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. Stopwork action to defend the hiring hall, the stop line, and older and disabled men.

3. DEFEND UNION CONDITIONS AND SAFTEY 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 injunctions. No employer drug or alcohol screening.

4. DEFEND OUR UNION – Eliminate class B registration category from the contract – promote all class B to class A coastwise. Keep racist anti-labor government and courts out of the union. Support union resistance against court suits and government “investigations”. Union action to break down racial and sexual discrimination and employer favoritism on the waterfront. Organize now for a coastwise contract fight to get what we need.

5. BUILD LABOR SOLIDARITY – against government/employer strikebreaking. No more PATCOs. Honor all picket lines – remove reactionary ones. 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 and Workmen’s Compensation.

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 to oppose U.S. military actions against Cuba, Nicaragua, or Salvadoran leftist insurgents. Boycott military cargo to Chile, El Salvador, Israel and Turkey. Defy the apartheid injunction. Boycott all South African cargo.

8. INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY – Oppose protectionist trade restrictions. Defend undocumented workers with strike action. ILWU support to military victory of leftist insurgents in El Salvador.

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 exploitation, racism, poverty, and war.

When Anti-Negro Prejudice Began

by George Breitman

[From Fourth International, Vol.15 No.2, Spring 1954. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/breitman/1954/xx/prejudice.htm ]

IT IS now common knowledge even among conservative circles in the labor movement that race prejudice benefits the interests of the capitalist class and injures the interests of the working class. What is not well known – it still comes as a surprise to many Marxists – and should be made better known is the fact that race prejudice is a uniquely capitalist phenomenon, which either did not exist or had no perceptible influence in pre-capitalist society (that is, before the sixteenth century).

Hundreds of modern scholars have traced anti-Negro prejudice (to take the most important and prevalent type of race prejudice in the United States) back to the African slave trade and the slave system that was introduced into the Americas. Those who profited from the enslavement of the Negroes – the slave traders and merchant capitalists first of Europe and then of America, and the slaveholders – required a rationalization and a moral justification for an archaic social institution that obviously flouted the relatively enlightened principles proclaimed by capitalist society in its struggle against feudalism. Rationalizations always become available when powerful economic interests need them (that is how most politicians and preachers, editors and teachers earn their living) and in this case the theory that Negroes are “inferior” followed close on the discovery that Negro slavery was exceptionally profitable.

This theory was embraced, fitted out with pseudo-scientific trappings and Biblical quotations, and trumpeted forth as a truth so self-evident that only madmen or subversives could doubt or deny it. Its influence on the minds of men was great at all levels of society, and undoubtedly aided the slaveholders in retarding the abolition of slavery. But with the growth of the productive forces, economic interests hostile to the slaveholders brought forth new theories and ideas, and challenged the supremacy of the slaveholders on all fronts, including ideology. The ensuing class struggles – between the capitalists, slaves, workers and farmers on one side and the slaveholders on the other – resulted in the destruction of the slave system.

But if anti-Negro prejudices and ideas arose out of the need to justify and maintain slavery, why didn’t they wither away after slavery was abolished? In the first place, ideas, although they must reflect broad material interests before they can achieve wide circulation, can live lives of their own once they are set into motion, and can survive for a time after the disappearance of the conditions that produced them. (It is instructive to note, for example, that Lincoln did not free himself wholly of race prejudice and continued to believe in the “inferiority” of the Negro even while he was engaged in prosecuting the civil war that abolished the slave system – a striking illustration both of the tendency of ideas to lag behind events and of the primacy of material interest over ideology.)

This is a generalization, however, and does not provide the main explanation for the survival of anti-Negro prejudice after the Civil War. For the striking thing about the Reconstruction period which followed the abolition of slavery was the speed with which old ideas and customs began to change and break up. In the course of a few short years millions of whites began to recover from the racist poisons to which they had been subjected from their birth, to regard Negroes as equals and to work together with them amicably, under the protection of the federal government, in the solution of joint problems. The obliteration of anti-Negro prejudice was started in the social revolution that we know by the name of Reconstruction, and it would have been completed if Reconstruction had been permitted to develop further.

But Reconstruction was halted and then strangled – by the capitalists, acting now in alliance with the former slaveholders. No exploiting class lightly discards weapons that can help maintain its rule, and anti-Negro prejudice had already demonstrated its potency as a force to divide, disrupt and disorient oppressed classes in an exploitative society .After some vacillation and internal struggle that lasted through most of Reconstruction, the capitalist class decided it could make use of anti-Negro prejudice for its own purposes. The capitalists adopted it, nursed it, fed it, gave it new clothing, and infused it with a vigor and an influence it had never commanded before. Anti-Negro prejudice today operates in a different social setting and therefore in a somewhat different form than a century ago, but it was retained after slavery for essentially the same reason that it was introduced under the slave system that developed from the sixteenth century on – for its convenience as an instrument of exploitation; and for that same reason it will not be abandoned by the ruling class of any exploitative society in this country.

But why do we speak of the introduction of anti-Negro prejudice in the slave system, whose spread coincided with the birth of capitalism? Wasn’t there slavery long centuries before capitalism? Didn’t race prejudice exist in the earlier slave societies? Why designate race prejudice as a uniquely capitalist phenomenon? A brief look at slavery of both the capitalist and pre-capitalist periods can lead us to the answers.

Capitalism, the social system that followed and replaced feudalism, owed its rise to world dominance in part to its revival or expansion of forms of exploitation originally developed in the pre-feudal slave societies, and to its adaptation and integration of those forms into the framework of capitalist productive relations. As “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation” through which the early capitalists gathered together the capital necessary to establish and spread the new system, Marx listed “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.” The African slave trade and slavery produced fortunes that laid the foundations for the most important of the early industries of capitalism, which in turn served to revolutionize the economy of the whole world.

Thus we see, side by side, in clear operation of the laws of uneven and combined development, archaic pre-feudal forms and the most advanced social relations then possible in the post-feudal world. The former were of course in the service of the latter, at least during the first stages of their co-existence. This was not a mere repetition of the slavery of ancient times: one basic economic difference was that the slave system of the Americas produced commodities for the world capitalist market, and was therefore subordinate to and dependent on that market. There were other differences, but here we confine ourselves to the one most relevant to the subject of this article – race relations in the early slave societies.

For the information that follows we are indebted to the writings of an anthropologist and of a sociologist: Ina Corinne Brown, Socio-Economic Approach to Educational Problems, 1942, chapter 2 (this government publication, the first volume in the National Survey of the Higher Education of Negroes sponsored, by the US Office of Education, is now out of print, but the same material is covered in her book. Race Relations in a Democracy, 1949, chapter 4); and Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, 1948, chapter 16. [1] Dr. Cox’s treatment is fuller; he also has been more influenced by Marx.

This is what they write about the ancient Egyptians:

So many persons assume that racial antipathy is a natural or instinctive reaction that it is important to emphasize the fact that race prejudice such as we know did not exist before the modern age. To be sure there was group antipathy which those who read history backwards take to be race prejudice, but actually this antipathy had little or nothing to do with color or the other physical differences by which races are distinguished. For example, the ancient Egyptians looked down upon the Negroes to the south of them. They enslaved these Negroes and spoke scornfully of them. Many writers, reading later racial attitudes into the situation, have seen in this scorn a color prejudice. But the Egyptians were just as scornful of the Asiatic sand dwellers, or Troglodytes as Herodotus called them, and of their other neighbors who were as light or lighter than the Egyptians. The Egyptian artists caricature the wretched captives taken in the frequent wars, but they emphasize the hooked noses of the Hittites, the woolen garments of the Hebrews, and the peculiar dress of the Libyans quite as much as the color or the thick lips of the Negroes. That the Egyptians mixed freely with their southern neighbors, either in slavery or out of it, is evidenced by the fact that some of the Pharaohs were obviously Negroid and eventually Egypt was ruled by an Ethiopian dynasty. (Brown, 1942)

There seems to be no basis for imputing racial antagonism to the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Persians. (Cox)

On the Greeks:

One frequently finds mention of the scornful way in which Negro slaves were referred to in Greece and Rome, but the fact is that equally scornful remarks were made of the white slaves from the North and the East. There seems to be no evidence that color antipathy was involved, and of the total slave population the Negroes constituted only a minor element. (Brown, 1942)

The slave population was enormous, but the slave and the master in Greece were commonly of the same race and there was no occasion to associate any given physical type with the slave status. An opponent of Athenian democracy complained that it was impossible in Athens to distinguish slaves and aliens from citizens because all classes dressed alike and lived in the same way. (Brown, 1949.)

… we do not find race prejudice even in the great Hellenistic empire which extended deeper into the territories of colored people than any other European empire up to the end of the fifteenth century.

The Hellenic Greeks had a cultural, not a racial, standard of belonging, so that their basic division of the peoples of the world were Greeks and barbarians – the barbarians having been all those persons who did not possess the Greek culture, especially its language … the people of the Greek city-states, who founded colonies among the barbarians on the shores of the Black Sea and of the Mediterranean, welcomed those barbarians to the extent that they were able to participate in Greek culture, and intermarried freely with them. The Greeks knew that they had a superior culture to those of the barbarians, but they included Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics in the concept Hellas as these peoples acquired a working knowledge of the Greek culture.

The experience of the later Hellenistic empire of Alexander tended to be the direct contrary of modern racial antagonism. The narrow patriotism of the city-states was given up for a new cosmopolitanism. Every effort was made to assimilate the barbarians to Greek culture, and in the process a new Greco-Oriental culture with a Greco-Oriental ruling class came into being. Alexander himself took a Persian princess for his wife and encouraged his men to intermarry with the native population. In this empire there was an estate, not a racial, distinction between the rulers and the un-Hellenized natives. (Cox)

On the Romans:

In Rome, as in Greece, the slaves did not differ in outward appearance from free men. R.H. Barrow in his study of the Roman slave says that “neither color nor clothing revealed his condition.” Slaves of different nationalities intermarried. There was no color barrier. A woman might be despised as a wife because she came from a despised group or because she practiced barbaric rites but not because her skin was darker. Furthermore, as W.W. Buckland points out, “any citizen might conceivably become a slave; almost any slave might become a citizen.” (Brown, 1949)

In this civilization also we do not find racial antagonism, for the norm of superiority in the Roman system remained a cultural-class attribute. The basic distinction was Roman citizenship, and gradually this was extended to all free-born persons in the municipalities of the empire. Slaves came from every province, and there was no racial distinction among them. (Cox)

There is really no need to go on quoting. The same general picture is true of all the societies, slave and non-slave, from the Roman empire down to the discovery of America – in the barbarian invasions into Europe, which led to enslavement of whites, in the reign of the Moslems, in the era of political domination by the Catholic Church. There were divisions, discriminations and antagonisms of class, cultural, political and religious character, but none along race or color lines, at least none that have left any serious trace in the historical materials now available. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century, when the West African slave trade to Portugal first began, the rationalization for the enslavement of Negroes was not that they were Negro but that they were not Christian. Those who became Christians were freed, intermarried with the Portuguese and were accepted as equals in Portugal. Afterward, of course, when the slave trade became a big business, the readiness of a slave to convert to Christianity no longer sufficed to gain his emancipation.

Why did race prejudice develop in the capitalist era when it did not under the earlier slave systems? Without thinking we have in any way exhausted the subject, we make the following suggestion: In previous times the slaves were usually of the same color as their masters; both whites and Negroes were masters and slaves; in the European countries the Negroes formed a minority of the slave population. The invidious connotations of slavery were attached to all slaves, white and Negro. If under these conditions the notion of Negro “inferiority” occurred to anyone, it would have seemed ridiculous on the face of it; at any rate, it could never have received any social acceptance.

But slavery in the Americas became confined exclusively to Negroes. [2] The Negro was distinguished by his color, and the invidious connotations of slavery could easily be transferred to that; it was inevitable that the theory of Negro “inferiority” and that anti-Negro prejudice should be created, that they should be extended to other non-white people who offered the possibility of exploitation, and that they should be spread around the globe.

Thus anti-Negro prejudice was not born until after capitalism had come into the world. There are differences of opinion as to the approximate birthdate. M.F. Ashley Montagu, discussing the “modern conception of ‘race’,” says:

“Neither in the ancient world nor in the world up to the latter part of the eighteenth century did there exist any notion corresponding to it … A study of the cultures and literatures of mankind, both ancient and recent, shows us that the conception of natural or biological races of mankind differing from one another mentally as well as physically, is an idea which was not born until the latter part of the eighteenth century,” or around the French Revolution. (Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race)

Cox says that if he had to put his finger on the year which marked the beginning of race relations, he would select 1493-94 – when the Pope granted to Catholic Spain and Portugal jurisdictional control over, and the right to exploit, all of the (pre-dominantly non-white) heathen people of the world and their resources. He sees “nascent race prejudice” with the beginning of the slave trade: “Although this peculiar kind of exploitation was then in its incipiency, it had already achieved its significant characteristics.” However, he finds that “racial antagonism attained full maturity” only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Whichever century one chooses, the point is this: Anti-Negro prejudice was originated to justify and preserve a slave-labor system that operated in the interests of capitalism in its pre-industrialist stages, and it was retained in slightly modified form by industrial capitalism after slavery became an obstacle to the further development of capitalism and had to be abolished. Few things in the world are more distinctly stamped with the mark of capitalism.

The implications of this fact are so plain that it is no wonder it has received so little attention in the schools and press of a country dominated by capitalists and their apologists. Anti-Negro prejudice arose out of the needs of capitalism, it is a product of capitalism, it belongs to capitalism, and it will die when capitalism dies.

We who are going to participate in the replacement of capitalism by socialism, and who have good reason to be curious about the first stages of socialism, because we will be living in them, need have no fear about the possibility of any extended lag with respect to race prejudice. Unlike the capitalist system that dominated this country after the Civil War, the socialist society will be free of all exploitative features; it will have no conceivable use for race prejudice, and it will consciously seek to eradicate it along with all the other props of the old system. That is why race prejudice will wither away when capitalism dies – just as surely as the leaf withers when the tree dies, and not much later.

Footnote

1. Neither of these would claim they were the first to discover this historical information, and it may well be that other scholars unknown to us preceded them in writing about this field in recent years; all we know is that it first came to our attention through their books. Historical material often lies neglected for long periods until current social and political needs reawaken interest in it. These writers were undoubtedly stimulated into a new and more purposeful interest in the subject by the growth of American Negro militancy and colonial independence struggles during the last 15-20 years.

2. Slavery was not confined to Negroes at the beginning. Before the Negro slave on the plantations, there was the Indian slave and the white indentured servant. But Negro slave labor proved cheaper and was more plentiful than either of these, and eventually they were abandoned. The most satisfactory study of this question is in the excellent book by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944. Williams writes:

“Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior … The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘sub-human’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”

Militant Longshoreman

No #13   January 7, 1984

Re-Elect Keylor (40-D) to Executive Board

From Defending Our Jobs at Levin to Opposing the Contract to Boycotting South African Cargo He’s Had A Strategy to Win!

Local 10 Shows the Way

Our eleven day boycott of South African cargo has done this Local proud. We pointed the way to effective international labor solidarity by reviving the “hot cargo” tactic. The unions used this tactic throughout the organizing drives of the 1930s and the bitter battles in 1946-48 to isolate struck employers. By refusing to transport or handle cargo from an anti-union employer workers even thousands of miles away and at widely dispersed locations could exert pressure to help other unions or oppressed workers. That’s why the infamous Taft-Hartley law passed in 1947 made “secondary boycotts” illegal. Our dramatic and effective action brought hundreds down to the docks in our support. We won the admiration of tens of thousands, showing that when the labor movement acts against apartheid the black community and trade unionists will rally to its support. We sparked a wave of anti-apartheid protests in the Bay Area which are still continuing, and we proved that concrete labor solidarity can have vastly greater impact than picketing embassies. Our union’s action was the longest political strike in memory on the West Coast. When the next ship carrying South African cargo comes in; if Reagan invades Nicaragua; or the next time the bosses try to break a union like PATCO or the Hotel and Restaurant workers, we should wage a solidarity strike again, appealing to other unions to join us in mass strike action. Actions which defend other workers give us strength and make real the ILWU motto “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All”.

At the same time, we should face squarely the shortcomings in the boycott, particularly since the Local is about to elect its officers for the next year. The South African cargo was finally unloaded, the Local lost PGP, ILWU-IBU member Jack Heyman was suspended by Crowley Maritime for approximately two weeks as a result of his participation in the embargo, and Local 10 is under a preliminary injunction which will be used against us when we act again.

WE COULD HAVE DEFEATED THE INJUNCTION

None of this had to happen. If Local 10 had officers and an Executive Board worthy of our fighting  membership, officers willing to risk jail if necessary, we could have won outright. From the moment the membership voted to act, our officers should have been inviting union and community support and publicly demanding that International President Herman sanction the action and extend it coastwise. Instead, our officers were telling the media that our action was unauthorized and individual. Our officers should have sent delegations to the other ports to meet with other local officials and-to appeal directly to all longshoremen to refuse to work the blood stained cargo. When PMA proposed to unload the Nedlloyd Kimberley in Stockton, Local 54 told them to go to hell. With support like that, and backed by the thousands of Bay Area residents who wished us success, we could have defeated the injunction, like we did at Levin. Instead, the officers and the Executive Board caved in and ordered us to work the Nedlloyd Kimberley.

Make no mistake about it: the PMA and the capitalist government were scared. They recognize how deeply blacl Americans feel about the oppression in South Africa and how popular our union action was. That’s the main reason why they were so slow in arbitrating and imposing an injunction, and that’s why so far the fines/damages have been suspended. When the continuing rebellion of the black trade unions and the South African masses stirs us to act collectively again, it is precisely that community support, properly organized in our defense, and spread to other unions which can help us smash the injunction.

Some union members, particularly Brothers Leo Robinson and his closest supporter, Dave Steward, who played an important role in the boycott, honestly believe that Local 10 has no choice but to give in to the injunction. The difference hereis that they don’t understand that the working class’ ability to stop the economic machinery of the capitalist system and their government makes us uniquely powerful, whether in the U.S. or in South Africa. Leo and Dave have a commitment to individual acts of consciousness and a belief that community action can force the multinational corporations to forgoe their enormous profits extracted from the super exploited black South African workers. This belief is combined with a lack of confidence that the organized labor movement can lead political struggles to victory, and can be won to successfully defy and defeat government/court repression.

For the same reason, during contract fights over the past ten years brother Leo Robinson in particular has failed to go beyond calling for a no vote, and has refused to advocate organizing coastwide strike action to defeat bad contracts and get what we need.

PEOPLE’S WORLD NO-WIN STRATEGY

If Leo and Dave want to engage in something more effective than symbolic acts of protest, they should reexamine their strategy and especially that of their allies around Archie Brown and the People’s World. Their strategy of pressuring the liberal Democratic wing of the capitalist class rather than trying to overturn the capitalist system has led the working class to disastrous defeats for the past 50 years. The People’s World played a large role in sabotaging an attempt to continue the boycott by other means after the Local Executive Board had agreed Monday night, December 3, to capitulate to the injunction. When I and others encouraged the several hundred supporters present at Pier 80 Tuesday morning to set up an effective picket line and shut down the pier, Franklin Alexander panicked the crowd by telling them that they faced 6 months in jail. People’s World supporters acted in conjunction with the SFPD to open up the picket line when we had the trucks stopped and the pier effectively closed. They managed to turn the picket line into an impotent demonstration, and thereby destroyed it.

JIMMY HERMAN STABS LOCAL 10 IN THE BACK – AGAIN!

International President Jim Herman should be thrown out of office for his back-stabbing. During the Levin strike, he sided with the employers. During the ILWU-IBU tankerman’s strike, he ordered longshoremen to cross the picket line. During the South African boycott he agreed with the PMA that our action was an “illegal work stoppage” in violation of the contract, and thereby Herman laid the legal basis for PMA being able to get  their apartheid injunction. Recently, in describing Herman’s disapproval of cargo boycott actions, the Pacific Shipper (December 24, 1984), an employers magazine, said: “Despite the fact that it was a local of his union that ignited the controversy in the Bay Area, Mr. Herman believes that the ‘proper place’ for demonstrations against South African apartheid are at that nation’s consulates, or by way of organized public demonstrations of limited duration.” We haven’t noticed him getting arrested along with the other labor “leaders”. While all actions against the apartheid regime are welcome, particularly those in support of the labor movement, it’s clear that many of the congressmen, clergymen and labor bureaucrats picketing the embassy are motivated by a desire to clean up the image of the Democratic Party after the Mondale fiasco.

DIVESTMENT AND PROTECTIONISM

As I said in Militant Longshoreman No. 12: “Some brothers favor a policy of divestment of shares of corporations which invest in South Africa, Personally I regard this as ineffective and potentially even counterproductive. It also creates the illusion that the big banks and investments houses, which make billions of dollars of blood-money from the racist exploitation of black labor in South Africa, can be pressured into becoming friends of the black masses in that racist hell-hole. The only kind of ‘divestment’ which I’m interested in pushing is the divestment of the white supremacist rulers and their international investors by the black workers of South Africa and the establishment of a black-centered government.

“Protectionism” is another issue where there are differences. Some brothers think that we shouldn’t unload South African steel because so many American steel workers are laid off. This action is aimed solely at providing a blow against the apartheid regime. That is why we shouldn’t unload that steel. The answer to the unemployment of U.S. steel workers is not to side with the shareholders of U.S. Steel etc. to export unemploy merit, and thus divide American workers from workers of other countries. It is by fighting with steel workers and other sections of the labor movement against the banks and the corporations for a shorter work week at no loss in pay. Nonetheless, despite my differences with other members of the committee on these and other questions, we can all agree to work together to build this fight and spread it coastwise.”

STAN GOW CALLS LONGSHOREMEN “SCABS”

Finally, Stan Gow merits special mention. As ILWU members are aware, Stan and I worked together for years. Until now, I have urged longshoremen to vote for him despite my criticisms, because on paper his program was largely correct. However, his actions during the boycott have drawn the line. Together with Peter Woolston and other Militant Caucus supporters in Local 6, and fully backed by the Spartacist League, Stan did everything he could to divide, confuse and disrupt our action.

We noted in Militant Longshoreman No. 4 that Stan and the Militant Caucus had begun to abandon their orientation to the organized working class. During his El Salvador stunt Stan substituted himself for the union with his one-longshoreman picket line, a sign of growing disorientation and disbelief that union members could be won to action. But at least he was on the right side on the El Salvador question, and I defended him. Now his actions served to split and confuse the most important political Strike in years.

On Saturday night, November 24, he and a handful of others piceted the Nedlloyed Kimberly despite the mebership’s decision to work the Australian cargo. When Keylor originally opened the discussion on the South African boycott he urged that longshoremen refuse to work the ship, but when it became clear that the overwhelming majority consensus of the membership was to not work the South African cargo he found that quite supportable, and actively worked to make the boycott a success. Stan says that’s “treachery”! Success is treachery! — Sabotage is militance! Stan and the Militant Caucus attempted to counterpose their fake-militant picket line to the real activity of the union. Stan and his friends were aiming to split the union action that should have been automatically supported by all genuine labor militants. In fact, the Militant Caucus and Spartacist supporters became so deranged that they called the unionists who came out to carry out the South African boycott “scabs”, and those in the crowd who were supporting them “racists”. Stan’s attitude was: adopt my program or I spit on you — even though you’ve stopped the South African cargo cold. Then when the injunction came down, after a lot of bluster about defying the injunction, Stan and his cohorts refused to join the picket line which I and many others had established in order to try to force the Nedlloyd Kimberley to leave port.

Stan makes much of the difference between working the cargo and working the ship. Why? He knows it’s just a matter of tactics. The membership decided on what they thought would be most effective. After two days the ship sat perfectly idle anyway. In 1974 the union refused to handle Chilean cargo but worked the ship. Stan and I helped to initiate the action and considered it a real victory. In 1977 we argued for more extensive action but still supported and helped build the South African cargo boycott. What’s new this time?

SLANDERS AND LIES

Similarly Stan accused the union, and me in particular, of treachery around the Nedlloyd Kyoto off-loading pig iron at Richmond Yard 1. First of all, the ship was, diverted, and we didn’t know it was arriving until two hours prior to starting work. Secondly, when you are planning a battle, you pull it where you are strongest. The ILWU has full and uncontested jurisdiction at Pier 80, San Francisco. At Richmond/Levin we had to wage an all out battle just to reestablish our toe hold, and the right to ghost riders when the dockside cranes are used. If we had had sufficient time we could have appealed to the Operating Engineers to stop the cargo at Levin’s, but in San Francisco we were able to rely on our own forces. Without adequate preparation the Local’s action could very easily have ended as unsuccessfully as Stan’s isolated attempts.

What lies behind this sorry story is that Stan’s Militant Caucus has given up on the working class. In 1974 and 1977, during the Chile cargo boycott and the first South African cargo boycott Stan, the Militant Caucus, and the Spartacist League played a principled role in trying to support the ILWU action and extend it coastwise. This time shamefully, they tried to wreck it. No vote for Stan Gow.

STOPWORK ACTION TO DEFEND THE HIRING HALL AND OLDER/DISABLED MEN!

CANCEL THE CONTRACT!

By now, six months after the disastrous 1984 contract was imposed on us, everyone should be able to see that business as usual won’t preserve our union or our jobs. We’re going to have to carefully pick the issues and take arbitrary stopwork action outsidethe contract grievance procedures. Whether it’s PMA coding older and disabled men out of PGP, arbitrarily mis-ordering men, working in violation of the contract, or tampering with the dispatch system and hiring hall, we must be prepared to go to the mat, any not simply knuckle under to Sutliff or Edwards.

If we do it right we can lay the basis for a coastwise movement to cancel the contract, and go for what we all need. In spite of repeated indications that the mebership is ready to fight, neither the officers nor the Executive Board have been willing to even systematically discuss a program of action to resist PMA. None of the many brothers running for office have developed and come forward with a program that can even be seriously discussed as to whether the brother merits electoral support. For that reason the Militant Longshoreman makes no endorsement of any candidate for local office.

We appeal to brothers and sisters to carefully read the program printed below, and vote for Howard Keylor.

MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN PROGRAM

1. DEFEND OUR JOBS AND LIVELYHOOD – Six hour shift, no extensions, at eight hours pay. Manning scales on all ship operations; one man, one job. Full- no-cap C.O.L.A. on wages. Weekly PGP, eliminate all “coding out” rules. No restrictions on PGP eligibility. No “take back” on travel time.

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. Stopwork action to defend the hiring hall, the stop line 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 injunctions.

4, DEFEND OUR UNION – Eliminate class B registration category from the contract – promote all class B to class A coastwise. Keep racist anti-labor government and courts out of the union. Support union resistance against court suits and government “investigations”. Union action to break down racial and sexual discrimination and employer favoritism on the waterfront. Lay the basis for cancelling the contract and waging a coastwise fight for what we need.

5. BUILD LABOR SOLIDARITY – against government/employer strikebreaking. No more PATCOs. Honor all picket lines – remove reactionary ones. 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 and Workmen’s Compensation.

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 to oppose U.S. military actions against Cuba, Nicaragua, or Salvadoran leftist insurgents. Boycott military cargo to Chile, El Salvador, Israel and Turkey. Defy the apartheid injunction. Boycott all South African cargo during periods of intense struggle and repression.

8. INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY – Oppose protectionist trade restrictions. Defend undocumented workers with strike action. ILWU support to military victory of leftist insurgents in El Salvador.

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 sieze all major industry without payment to the capitalists and establish a planned economy to end exploitation, racism, poverty, and war.

Coletivo Lenin/Brazil breaks relations with the International Bolshevik Tendency

December 2010

With the following statement, the Coletivo Lenin/Brazil publically breaks off relations with the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) and establishes fraternal relations with Revolutionary Regroupment, an IBT split from 2008.

I – The origins of our contact with the IBT 

The Coletivo Comunista Internacionalista – CCI (forerunner of the Coletivo Lenin) was set up in October 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We were a Trotskyist group of a few militants who were sure of one thing: we could never remain a national organization. For Trotskyists, it is necessary that a revolutionary organization to belong to a world party or strive to build one. We therefore, from the very beginning, we made a serious attempt to study the different political currents which claimed the legacy of Trotskyism. We conducted research into 27 organizations that had their origins in the Fourth International, studying their documents on the internet having meetings with those organizations that had sections in Brazil. We looked to join an organization whose political understanding was closest to our own. At that time our three main criteria were:

1)     That the current considered the destruction of USSR and the deformed workers’ states in East Europe as counterrevolutionary defeats. That consequently, it would have been necessary to have temporarily entered into military blocs with those sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy opposed to capitalist restoration whenever they showed any resistance.

2)     That the current should recognize the politically strategic importance of fighting against all forms of special oppression (such as sexism, racism and homophobia) for a successful socialist revolution. That the current therefore prioritize recruiting workers who suffer those forms of oppression, who are also usually the most exploited workers under capitalism.

3)     That the current should reject the notion that the productive forces had ceased developing in the imperialist epoch, since only through such a rejection was it possible to make a coherent analysis of contemporary capitalism.

We discovered that those currents which traced their political origins to the early Spartacist League/USA (SL/USA) most closely fit that criterion. They were the Spartacist League (and its international co-thinkers in the International Communist League) itself and two splits – the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) and the Internationalist Group (IG). In the course of studying their documents, the issues they were arguing over appeared small, but they were also over many questions and issues that were completely new to us.

We learned that the SL had taken up a variety of strange positions by the end of the 1970’s. In 1979, while correctly siding with the Soviet Army against CIA backed Islamic fundamentalists, their response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was to also raise the uncritical slogan “Hail Red Army!” Similar pro-Stalinist adaptations followed, such as organizing a contingent at a protest named the “Yuri Andropov Brigade” after the leader of the USSR at the time, and responding to criticisms by then printing a poem in his honor on the front page of their newspaper following his death. Adaptations to US national chauvinist pressures were also expressed such as the 1983 failure to militarily side with forces in Lebanon struggling to drive out the US Marines occupying their country. When a bomb then exploded at the Marine barracks the SL raised the call “Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive.” These criticisms were raised by the IBT. A criticism raised by both of the split groups was the bureaucratic organizational degeneration the SL had gone through by that point. The SL was transformed into an organization with little internal life; the leadership was in the hands of a bureaucratic clique which suppressed its internal critics and stifled debates through threats, intimidation and repression. Through such methods all critics were effectively driven out or, when that failed, expelled.

That was why we were repulsed by the SL and felt closer to the IG and IBT from the very start. At this point we established discussions with both groups with the objective of studying the degeneration of the Spartacist League, whose earlier politics we were in close agreement with and believed (and still believe) provided an important programmatic foundation for rebuilding a revolutionary Fourth International.

We engaged in personal meetings and online chats with Bill Logan and a few other IBT members and had personal meetings with the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB), the IG’s Brazilian comrades in the League for the Fourth International. We also had some personal meetings with IG’s main international leader, Jan Norden. After a period, we realized that the IBT’s analysis of the SL’s degeneration was more coherent than the IG’s. For example, the IBT argued that the SL’s deliberate destructions of their trade union caucuses in early 80’s was a clear demonstration that the organization’s leaders main priority was keeping the ranks under tight control rather than building a base in the working class. The IG on the other hand argued the SL’s degeneration only began from the point they were pushed out in 1996. The very similar organizational measures through which several future members of IBT were driven out or expelled in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s were ignored, denied or defended in their analysis. The IG also defended all the SL’s positions (including the mentioned positions on Afghanistan, Yuri Andropov and Lebanon) before the period of their expulsion as well.

One question that the IG sought to use against the IBT was the scandal surrounding Bill Logan. Bill Logan (who had been a prominent leader of the Spartacists in New Zealand and Australia during the 1970’s) was expelled from the International Spartacist Tendency on grounds of being a “sexual psychopath” who suppressed his internal critics and psychologically manipulated his ranks. We were aware that Logan, like most other SL leader, was guilty of bureaucratic abuses and organizational crimes. But we also knew that the IG was looking to exploit the scandal surrounding Logan to deflect from responding to the IBT’s criticisms of their politics. Unfortunately, at that time we also took the IBT at their word that they had not inherited any of the SL’s bureaucratic organizational methods and that Logan personally had profoundly changed his ways.

In the aftermath of Bill Logan’s visit to Brazil in October 2007, we decided amongst ourselves on a perspective of fusing with the IBT. We believed our few outstanding differences and questions were insufficient for continuing to remain a separate group for too long. We hoped in time many of these differences would be resolved through discussions and were willing to co-exist in a common group as disciplined comrades. What actually occurred during the entire subsequent period though was the consistent frustration of attempts at discussions by the IBT’s leadership, whose ultimatums and stalling tactics towards discussing our differences were very apparently geared towards wearing us out and demoralizing us into complete submission as the price for fusion. It gradually became obvious that the IBT’s leadership was not looking for political fusions with militants who, while sharing their political analysis, also had secondary political and tactical differences to debate internally, but rather looking to transform us into docile pliant hacks who could then be organizationally absorbed into a group where their absolute control was fully safeguarded from future challenges.

Our relations with the IBT in many ways paralleled early Spartacist relations with Gerry Healy’s International Committee during the 1960’s. Healy similarly feigned interest in a loyal fusion while in reality engaging in a variety of unscrupulous tactics designed to psychologically break a young group of revolutionaries. Like us, along with substantial political agreement, the Spartacists also had their own analytical appreciations of different questions and expressed an apparent capacity to stand up to and challenge Healy’s authority. Following the final breaking of relations in 1966, the Spartacists commented:

“The reason for the behavior of the SLL leadership toward the Spartacist delegation is not hard to find. You obviously wish to create a Trotskyist movement in the U.S. which would be completely subservient to the SLL leadership…  You were not interested in creating a movement united on the basis of democratic centralism with strong sections capable of making theoretical contributions to the movement as a whole and of applying Marxist theory creatively to their own national arenas. You wanted an international after the manner of Stalin’s Comintern, permeated with servility at one pole and authoritarianism at the other.” 

II – Three years of stalling and stagnation 

We ended our engagements with the IG in January 2008. In our last discussions with them, we were appalled to hear from Jan Norden himself that the IG/LFI not only defended the SL’s adaptations to the Stalinists and failure to advance a revolutionary program during fall of the Soviet bloc, but was also intent on repeating their political behavior if the opportunity arose in the future. We also recognized the bureaucratic nature of IG’s League for the Fourth International. The IG in the US was the leadership responsible for formulating all the political decisions and the Brazilian and other sections would simply execute them. This did not correlate with our understanding of Leninist democratic centralism. Our contact with the LQB and the IG’s Jan Norden reinforced our decision to seek a fusion with the IBT.

In the course of further relations with the IBT, we were able to identify and correct many of our previous political and organizational misconceptions. From reading their literature we were able to establish a more precise understanding of the nature of the united front tactic (see our document “Leninism, United Fronts and Propaganda Blocs”, available on our web site in Portuguese), develop a more coherent analysis of political developments in Brazil, and learn how to apply the Transitional Program in our daily political work. Studying the history of the Trotskyist movement we expanded our appreciation of the historic significance of the early SL, which sought to uphold the Trotskyist program after the political destruction of the Fourth International and the US Socialist Workers Party by Pabloite revisionism. We started to understand the nature of a propaganda perspective for a small revolutionary organization of our size which, along with engaging in exemplary mass work, would initially need to grow by focusing on winning the politically conscious vanguard to our programmatic conceptions through polemically engaging with other ostensibly revolutionary currents. Most of our political and theoretical direction since early 2008 had been informed by the IBT’s historic writings and perspectives, making us believe we were very methodologically and programmatically close.

At the same time, we also had our own unique theoretical understanding of certain questions that we potentially differed with the IBT on. We sought to discuss these with them as (we thought) we were making progress towards becoming their Brazilian section. Our differences were the following: [*]

1)     We shared with Rosa Luxemburg her theory of capital accumulation, with its conclusion that capitalism is leading society to barbarism. This position didn’t lead to any practical differences, but simply called attention to our intent to discuss the Leninist understanding of imperialism.

2)     We were influenced by the theories of Brazilian Marxist Rui Mauro Marini. We regarded countries such as Brazil, India, Israel, Russia and South Africa as sub-imperialist countries rather than dominated neo-colonies. In these countries, the fusion of national and foreign capital establishes a base for them to control and exploit other countries within their region of influence. That would be the case with Brazil and its relationship to other South American countries for example. Therefore, in a hypothetical war between Brazil and Bolivia, we would militarily side with Bolivia against its regional oppressor. We also recognize that sub-imperialist countries are at the same time also dependent countries and would therefore, in turn, defend them against imperialist military attacks. We know that ultimately any real freedom from imperialist oppression, for either the neo-colonies or sub-imperialist countries such as Brazil, can only be achieved through world socialist revolution.

3)     Like most Latin American organizations, but unlike the IBT and possibly other smaller propaganda groups based in the more economically developed capitalist countries, we have traditionally accepted comrades with religious beliefs into our membership. Since a requirement of membership is agreement with the organizations political positions (including the defense of science, separation of church and state, defending the rights of women, gays and lesbians and other similar questions), we believe this represents the religious comrades’ personal contradiction as long as they maintain the organizations collective discipline. As Marxists we remain materialists and defenders of science, recognize the historic role that organized religion has played in serving the interests of the ruling class and struggle to educate all our militants in that spirit.

4)     While we argue that the Chinese state is still a deformed workers’ state, we also recognize that large sections of China’s economy have been allowed by its Stalinist rulers to become privatized. These measures have in turn strongly undermined and placed in question the dominance of its traditional (bureaucratic) planned character. We believe these measures initiated by the bureaucrats currently ruling China create large openings and dangers for the victory of capitalist counterrevolution. We also see strong historic parallels with the NEP period of the Soviet Union during the 1920s. There the lack of a developed planned economy combined with a temporary reintroduction of capitalist measures placed in strong question the nature of the dominant economy, but, similarly, was also not decisive in determining the class character of the state.

5)     We believed that the IBT was overly focused on continuing to organizationally pursue its historic differences with the SL to the detriment of what should be the main responsibility of a Trotskyist propaganda group, looking to engage with the more dynamic groups that were either in leftward motion or had an active animated rank and file. While we recognized the historic significance of the early Spartacist League and the importance of educating militants about its history and were not arguing for completely ignoring them, the truth is the contemporary Spartacist League (and its co-thinkers in the International Communist League) has for many years now been a shrinking stagnating organization that along with being in rightward political motion had a largely depoliticized rank and file. For what appeared to be similar reasons of continuing to pursue historic differences from their personal pasts, the IBT’s leadership planned for us to mainly focus on organizationally pursuing Jan Norden’s followers, who, at least in Brazil, have also visibly shrunk and aged over the years. At the same time it seemed to us the IBT had shown far less interest in pursuing groups whose membership can actually play a role in rebuilding the revolutionary movement. We saw this as a tactical difference perhaps arising from the IBT leadership being stuck in a political time warp, without yet fully understanding the reasons for such passivity and routinism.

The IBT’s leadership continued to postpone clarifying these issues with us through written discussions over the next two years. They would only, at our insistence, agree to briefly touch on these questions in the course of our online chats dealing with other issues.  At the same time they argued for resolving these differences as a precondition for merger. We believed these minor theoretical and tactical differences should not be a bar to unity, since they paled in significance next to our areas of important agreement.

On Luxemburg’s accumulation theory and Marini’s sub-imperialism, the IBT leadership expressed a total lack of interest in understanding our concerns. We tried summarizing our views on these complex theories and referred them to documents for a deeper study, but they never followed up. On the tactical question involving their focus on the SL/IG and our view on China, the IBT acknowledged that in principle they should not necessarily prevent a fusion, while at the same time they made “resolving” these issues a precondition for organizationally moving forward. On the question of our religious members, the IBT seemed uncertain as they never argued for excluding religious members as a principle, while continuing to use this issue as a barrier to further progress. They seemed uninterested in investigating the experience of the different political culture in Latin America, where members of ostensibly revolutionary organizations have historically been permitted to hold private religious views.

It is important to reiterate that during this entire period we were willing to accept the position of being a disciplined minority on these questions inside the IBT’s ranks, since we seemed to have reached agreement on the major issues. By demanding these issues previously be resolved, while barring their resolution for either side by stalling for years on engaging in written discussions, the IBT made moving forward, in practice, impossible. At the same time we were kept in limbo through constant assurances they took the prospect of fusion with us seriously.

For almost three years, we used an adaptation of the IBT document “For Trotskyism!” as our main programmatic statement. We regarded and publically argued (until two months ago) that the IBT represented the programmatic continuity of Trotskyism on our website and in our activities in the workers’ and students’ movement. We translated all of the documents they used for the Portuguese language section of their web site. Despite this, the IBT refused to publically acknowledge having any relations with us or even our existence. We considered their behavior strange since public recognition of fraternal relations is usually a first step for a future fusion perspective with another organization.

In December 2008 we wrote a letter to IBT demanding a discussion of our outstanding differences and asking them to take practical measures to facilitate the possibility for a future fusion. At that point we began suspecting that perhaps the IBT, despite its claims, had no interest in fusing with us. That they would only fuse with groups who would previously renounce all differences and independent opinions. Such a monolithic “fusion” would require that we first be psychologically broken, thereby ceasing to be revolutionaries.

In early 2009, the CCI became the Coletivo Lenin (CL) following a fusion with a group of comrades who had resigned from the Brazilian PSTU, associated with the late Nahuel Moreno. This represented a qualitative leap in our group’s capacities. With some organizational advice from the IBT, we established more intelligent organizational priorities, improved our finances, and established a regular press. We elected a National Leadership, since we were now present in two cities. We also saw the need for the comrades in the newly fused group to start engaging in common work. One way of doing this was to choose to center our work in Rio de Janeiro with a homeless organization, the Internationalist Homeless Front (FIST). It was an opportunity to work with radicalized militants from one of the most exploited and oppressed sectors of Brazilian society

The IBT responded in a harshly sectarian manner towards our tactical choice. They appeared to believe a propaganda group should completely focus their entire work on other left groups, particularly the Brazilian Nordenites in our case, to the total exclusion of all other possible arenas. We were falsely accused of being movementists who were looking to recruit politically raw people.

In response, some of our comrades began considering the possibility that our differences with the IBT could be more significant than appeared on the surface. The IBT seemed to be extremely passive and conservative, not only in moving forward towards fusing with us but also to trying to do any broader mass work. Because of this we wrote a formal letter to the IBT in October 2009 discussing the recent reorganization of our work and demanding they state more forthrightly their views on the prospects of a fusion and how to proceed towards it. Another letter from February 2010 explained our work in FIST and responded to their criticisms and misconceptions about it.

That letter for the first time elicited a written formal response from the IBT since it stated our refusal to continue engaging in online chats until we receive a document responding to our concerns. Though their answer only strengthened our suspicions that they had a passive/organizationally conservative attitude towards party building, we agreed to have their representative visit us and attend our first conference to be held on August 2010. Up to this time we still believed they were open towards fusing with us.

III – The IBT’s conduct at our conference: bureaucratic maneuvers

As part of the process of further consolidating our organization, we organized our first conference with the goal of mapping out the Coletivo Lenin’s perspective for the following two years. As is common in any healthy democratic organization in a pre-conference period, three different internal factions arose inside CL. On our relations with IBT, the decisive majority supported continuing to work for a fusion, while a minority, concluding that the IBT was sectarian and passive/ conservative, was opposed. As was already our established custom, we shared all our internal documents and opened our internal life to the IBT, (a practice which the IBT never reciprocated on during the entire time). As a result, the IBT became very close to one of the three internal factions.

During the conference (which the IBT’s representative participated in) two of the internal factions and the majority of CLers supported fusing with the IBT. The Coletivo Lenin decided to continue pursuing a fusion and requested that the IBT finally start responding to our differences (whose resolution they had always insisted was a precondition for further progress in relations) within the next month since we were also all frustrated and anxious to move forward after three years of stagnating relations. The newly elected leadership was an expression of this decision: it was composed of those comrades who were supporters of fusing with the IBT. At the same time, the CL also decided to take a firmer attitude on ending the 3 years of IBT inaction in further developing relations with us. We asked for concrete proof of the IBT’s sincerity in wanting relations to move forward – a statement publically acknowledging our relationship (which the IBT subsequently decided to not do).

The IBT’s immediate response stunned us all greatly. After phoning in a report to his leadership, the IBT representative informed us their evaluation was that the CL was organizationally unstable and that the CL was politically moving away from the IBT (after we had just voted for a direct fusion proposal!). It was true that a minority consisting of one comrade was moving away from the IBT, but the majority’s commitment was firm. As for the CL being unstable, our organization had (and still has) an internal life where differences arise and are therefore debated, as we believe every Bolshevik organization should have. That doesn’t mean we are organizationally unstable or undisciplined. We now know that for the IBT (which had its last organized faction in late 1997), any serious internal differences with the leadership is a sign of dangerous “instability”. Fusing with us represented a danger for a bureaucratic leadership whose primary objective is absolute control over their organization, rather than building a group that can grow, develop and be capable of acting as a vehicle for advancing working class revolution.

The worst, however, was still to come. The day after the conference, while still claiming to desire moving towards a fusion, the IBT secretly “invited” a couple of comrades from the faction closer to it to resign from CL and become the IBT’s representatives in Brazil. It is important to look at their decision more closely. First, this indicated to us that all of the differences that the IBT pretended to feel so strongly about (our willingness to accept religious members, sub-imperialism, their SL centered focus) during this entire time was actually meaningless to them, since the comrades they tried to split had the same positions as the rest of the group on these issues. Secondly, it indicated the organizationally unscrupulous character of the IBT’s leadership. While claiming to have close comradely fraternal relations with us, they were secretly maneuvering to split us, treating us in reality as a hostile enemy. Thirdly, it displayed a great lack of confidence in their politics and organization which also no doubt reflected a deeper demoralization. While a majority of the CL was not only willing but actively supporting a fusion they preferred to attempt to split our group instead of moving further with us. Fortunately, the comrades turned down their offer and reported it to the rest of Coletivo Lenin.

The impact of the IBT leadership’s bureaucratic and disloyal cowardice increased with the passage of time, as our comrades sought to process the recent turn of events and make sense of it in light of all their previous dealing with them. That action on their part made clear to us that the IBT was not willing to fuse with our organization, despite their disingenuous claims to the contrary, but only maneuvering us to try to win a minority of our youngest and least inexperienced militants. They assumed it would then be easy to absorb and assimilate these comrades into their bureaucratized internal culture and convince them to abandon their differences. We were still puzzled though as to why the IBT would behave in a manner so at odds with their professed politics and their past criticisms of their parent organizations bureaucratism.

IV – Revolutionary Regroupment

A few weeks before our conference, we had our first contact with Revolutionary Regroupment’s Sam Trachtenberg who split from the IBT in the fall of 2008. The IBT had chosen to never inform us of his resignation and decision to set up a competing organization. Trachtenberg gave a Marxist explanation for the IBT’s behavior in his resignation letter entitled “The Road Out of Rileyville”. He also developed some of that explanation in the course of a brief correspondence we had before our conference. At that point we unfortunately did not give his analysis the sufficient attention it deserved, since we were very eager to carry out a fusion with a group whose positions, on paper, seemed so close to ours and in whom we had already invested three years of work. One of the topics discussed in the conference was a proposal to establish relations with Revolutionary Regroupment. The proposal was rejected, but no doubt also impacted the panicked attempt to wreck our organization by the IBT’s leadership. But the analysis (and future predictions) we received from Revolutionary Regroupment fit our experience with the IBT like a glove.

As explained by RR, the IBT over the years had become transformed into a bureaucratized organization controlled and manipulated by a clique of “permanent leaders”. Those leaders place their ability to control their organization above their professed claims to want to see the group grow and develop into an instrument for socialist revolution. The IBT was at this stage narrowly dominated by a leadership clique consisting of those who previously also had corrupt histories as SL leaders before being purged by their fellow bureaucrats. With the passage of time, the other senior members (without such corrupt previous histories) who helped found the group either left or were driven out, while the remaining leadership was never replenished by younger comrades, becoming smaller in composition and acting as a tight self-protective unit in all their dealings with the rank and file.

Meanwhile, after almost 30 years of existence, much of the ranks also aged and grew increasingly tired and passive in reaction to the lack of any significant organizational breakthroughs. This allowed the remaining leadership to feel fewer and fewer constraints in their ability to use the corrupt unscrupulous methods they had previously wielded in their careers as SL leaders. These methods, along with some newly developed ones, were used on the IBT’s membership, sympathizing groups and peripheries for the purpose of maintaining their absolute control. Abandoning any hopes for growth and breakthroughs in the class struggle, the IBT (like its parents inside the SL) has instead opted to preserve internal order and allow itself to “die with dignity.

The IBT’s main role is to protect and preserve the personal legacies of its aging leadership (now all well into their 60’s) rather than seek to use their group as a vehicle for building a revolutionary party. Under such circumstances, any serious expression of differences inside the organization is seen as a threat to the stability of the organization and its new unstated purpose, rather than as an opportunity to correct errors and theoretically develop its membership. Fusion with our organization therefore, which roughly equals a third of the IBT’s current membership and which would eventually be included within the leadership of the fused organization, posed a threat to the IBT’s leaders’ current unchallengeable status. Our ability to differ with them may have also have re-politicized and set an example for others inside the IBT’s ranks to begin to speak up their minds. That is why the IBT chose to attempt to wreck our group rather than fuse with it.

In his resignation letter Sam Trachtenberg argued: “However formally correct its paper program may be for the moment, history has shown that the sort of organization which the IBT has developed into, a static, stagnating group dominated by a Machiavellian deeply entrenched permanent leadership, can never have younger comrades grow, develop, and therefore play little role in that process [of rebuilding the Fourth International].” Defense (or rather “preservation”) of the IBT’s history and program has thus become divorced from being an organic expression of the groups revolutionary aspirations and is instead used as a mechanism to transform the group into an authoritarian sect. The sects leaders become “guardians” of the “program” (or rather their own personal historic legacies). Along with the IBT, this has previously happened to the Spartacists and others. In the previously cited 1966 document on their split with Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the Spartacists explained;

“Under conditions of pronounced isolation of the world movement from the working class, the revisionists abandoned a working-class revolutionary perspective for an orientation toward petit-bourgeois formations such as Stalinist bureaucrats, social-democratic labor bureaucrats, and the nationalist leaderships of the colonial countries…  The British leaders seem to have responded to the “theoretical, political, and organizational crisis” of Trotskyism by retreating into “orthodoxy,” Their reaction to revisionism seems to have been that of high priests entrusted with the protection of holy writ; thus the emergence of an iron-fisted, authoritarian leadership.”

V – Final Attempt

In September, the CL’s newly elected leadership, that is those comrades inside our group who had previously been the most ardent in their desire to fuse with the IBT, reacted to the turn of events by convincing others of the need to re-establish contact and engage in discussions with RR. We had not, however, fully decided to close the door to the IBT yet. We wanted to be absolutely sure of any decision we were going to make. So we continued discussing with the IBT and communicated our reactions to their underhanded dealings with us in the hope they may be pressured to acknowledge wrongdoing and change their methods. The IBT’s response was to rationalize their behavior, disingenuously deny any wrongdoing, and attempt to convince us we were reacting in a paranoid manner. That was received by our members as an insult to our intelligence.

In a desperate attempt to deflect our course towards RR, the IBT sent us a limited selection of internal documents involving the departure of Trachtenberg from its ranks. Remarkably, the IBT leadership seemed deluded enough about their practices to think the documents put them in a good light. However, even the selection of documents they chose to send us showed a generalized pattern of the criminal bureaucratism that we experienced in our own relationship with them. In these documents, the leadership simultaneously denied and explicitly defended the use their use of bureaucratic procedures against past internal critics. They defended (secretly) withholding internal organizational information from their internal critics (including those who formally held positions of leadership before exiting), and attempts to prevent internal debates by putting the rest of the organization under informal discipline not to discuss their differences. This in effect transformed those comrades membership into a fiction. The IBT leadership argued that it was correct to use the same kinds of dishonest methods on members of their organization who they decide are in “rapid political motion” and sympathizing groups (not to mention others on the left) that they would use with opponent or enemy organizations.

The internal documents showed the leadership defending their right to use both “formal and informal sanctions” against members who present “opportunist politics”. Outside the fact that “opportunist politics” implies simple disagreement with the leadership rather than any actual organizational wrongdoing, the use of “informal sanctions” is an implicit defense of the bureaucratic leaderships right to pursue such “sanctions” informally, that is without ever formally pressing any charges or even informing the comrade as part of their effort to either break them or drive them out without, at the same time, leaving any record of bureaucratic wrongdoing on their part.

The document also showed similar methods used to drive out Trachtenberg, one of the few remaining IBT comrades with a record of opposing the leadership on many questions (which included their initial attempt to have the IBT support voting for Hugo Chavez to stay in in office during the 2004 recall referendum in Venezuela). Even the partial record they sent us showed a pattern of attempts to demoralize him and, as with others, transform his membership into a fiction. The leadership also attempted to exploit his history of depression by frequently alluding to the possibility that his criticisms of their organizational methods were due to a “mental disorder.”

The IBT’s leadership tells their members that groups, such as ours, who decide to end contact due to such bureaucratic methods in reality do so due to hidden opportunist disagreement. The IBT has attempted to publically rewrite history by making similar claims about a fraternal Argentine group which translated most of the documents currently on the Spanish section of their sites.

“A less public, but more significant, setback was our failure to successfully regroup with a small circle of Argentine comrades who appeared to be rather close to us programmatically. This is partly attributable to language difficulties, but a more important factor was a gap in political culture manifested in differences over the tasks and priorities of a micro-propaganda group.”

http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no28/no28IBTConference.html

But the documents they sent us indicate the Argentine group broke contact due to the sort of dishonest behind the scenes manipulations we ourselves have experienced and their own selection of documents verify they’ve used with so many others. We have little reason to not assume that similar false explanations will be given about our decision. While we have been informed by recent ex-IBT members that most of the IBT’s ranks have been given very little information by their leaders about us for the past 3 years, it is their responsibility to face the painful reality and recognize that our experience with their organization follows a long pattern that will continue to be repeated.

VI – Conclusion

We have not abandoned our revolutionary program! We continue to defend the political legacy of the Spartacist League and the political legacy of the International Bolshevik Tendency until their respective bureaucratic degenerations. We will not be demoralized by this experience! We will not draw false conclusions on the impossibility of re-building a revolutionary Fourth International, or rationalize the situation publically by changing our politics as the IBT’s bureaucratic leadership hopes. We have only concluded that the contemporary IBT can no longer contribute to rebuilding a revolutionary workers movement.

We will continue to critically analyze the IBT’s history to better understand the reasons for its degeneration, as well as the degeneration of its predecessors. We will continue seek out comrades and groups interested in rescuing the important contributions of organizations which once represented Trotskyist continuity, rather than looking to defend the histories of leaders who themselves played a role in their degeneration. Our objective is to build a party capable of leading a revolution – which means being unafraid of taking organizational risks when necessary and maintaining a healthy internal life where critics are treated in an honest loyal manner, and are able to challenge long held orthodoxies without persecution. A party that can swim against the stream in defending temporarily unpopular ideological conquests as well as be capable of reviewing previously held positions if they have been shown to be wrong.

Therefore, we declare our fraternal relations with Revolutionary Regroupment. We invite those IBT militants and ex-militants who remain uncorrupted by their experience, as well as others who may agree with our political objectives, to discuss with Revolutionary Regroupment and with the Coletivo Lenin on how to go forward.

Saudações Comunistas!

Coletivo Lenin/Brazil

December 2010

[*] Note from Revolutionary Regroupment: Although we maintain what we see as the central elements of the Lenin Collective program, from the first moment after our separation we abandoned most of the positions described in the first four points (except for the characterization of China as a deformed workers state, but without the undue comparison with the Soviet NEP). Even within CL, these were unconsolidated positions among most members, reflecting a certain programmatic looseness.

Bolshevism and Trotskyism

Defending our history

[First Printed in Marxist Bulletin #8, February 1999. Copied from http://www.bolshevik.org/mb/8trotskyism.htm ]

In the middle of last year, Marxist Bulletin supporters received a document from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) which stated their desire to ‘clarify the attitude of a number of Trotskyist organisations and individuals towards the project of revolutionary unity at this stage’.

The CPGB are advocating a process of ‘rapprochement’, which consists of attempting to convince other groups on the left to join with them in the ‘Communist Party’ and argue out political differences within that framework.

The International Bolshevik Tendency has a different project. We believe that shared organisational frameworks and communist discipline grow out of fundamental programmatic agreement and cannot precede it. Building such programmatic convergence in a party with the strength to implement its programme is the historic task of communists today – but we cannot take shortcuts by simply bringing larger numbers together.

The CPGB say that they had been asked to ‘provide a “collective position” on Trotskyism by some comrades’ to help in that process. While stating that they were incapable of coming to a collective position (and could not even understand why they should even try) they did provide a set of ‘brief notes’ to act as a ‘gateway to exchange’. Apparently this document has also been sent to a number of other ‘Trotskyist’ organisations.

These eight points were indeed brief on one important thing – the closest they came to addressing the political and programmatic differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism was in point 5 which mentioned internationalist opposition to socialism in one country along with other unspecified positions.

For a group breaking from Stalinism this is hardly a serious approach to an analysis of Trotskyism and shows a weakness in understanding the centrality of programmatic clarity to Bolshevism. The CPGB need to explain where they stand on the central programmatic distortions of Bolshevism by the Stalinists and the defence of that Bolshevik programme by Trotsky (programmatic distortions which lead, where they had any significant influence, to real material disasters for the working class). One would have thought that this was particularly important in a letter specifically aimed at persuading groups who call themselves Trotskyist to enter serious discussions. It is incumbent on the CPGB to show that they have truly broken from the political revisionism of Stalinism.

In the interests of political clarity and debate we reproduce the letter from the CPGB and our reply, as first printed in the Weekly Worker of 16 July 1998.

……….

Frozen in dogma

Notes by Mark Fischer in consultation with PCC members

1. Leon Trotsky was a great intellect of the 20th century, one of the two towering figures of the Russian Revolution. The calumny heaped onto the head of this revolutionary should be rejected with contempt by all partisans of the working class.

2. Despite this, Trotsky’s contribution to the revolutionary workers’ movement did not constitute a qualitative development of the theoretical categories of Marxism, an extension according to its own logical laws of development. In this sense therefore, there is no ‘Trotskyism’ in the same way there is a ‘Leninism’.

3. In the struggle against the rising bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky and the left (and later, the united) opposition defended many positions of orthodox revolutionary Marxism, centrally the need for world revolution. However, Trotsky made numerous tactical errors in the inner-party struggle, blunders that contributed to eventual defeat. Crucially, Trotsky failed to correctly estimate the potential strength of the Stalin centre, based on the Party apparatus. In this error, he evidenced a tendency to mechanically collapse political forces into social base. This combined with a certain technocratism contributed to the eventual political fragmentation of the opposition, with many capitulating to Stalin after 1928.

4. Trotsky’s analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and the social consequences of the USSR’s isolation contained many brilliant insights. Yet it must be taken as the product of the provisional working categories of a brilliant Marxist attempting to understand the laws of motion of a totally unprecedented social formation in the very process of its emergence and consolidation.

5. Thus, to the very end of his life, Trotsky’s thought revealed development and dynamic tensions within itself. This is true despite a certain degeneration of his thought conditioned by the intense pressure of Stalinism and his personal isolation. It is entirely possible that – given the developmental logic of his ideas before his assassination – Trotsky would have been able to resolve the contradictions in his analysis positively, to critique and outgrow his conditional category of ‘degenerated workers’ state’.

6. Trotsky’s followers subsequently froze his method and these provisional categories into dogma. This was evident in the immediate aftermath of World War II and was a characteristic of both sides in the 1953 split in Trotskyism. Trotskyism thus emerged – in contrast to the method of Trotsky at his best – as sterile sectarianism.

7. We observe that today Trotskyism in Britain is embodied in general in two degenerate forms. First, there are the tiny, biblical sects engaged in squabbles over the letter of Trotsky’s work, not his method and its results in the real world. Second, where Trotskyist groups have attempted to relate to the mass, they have adapted to social democracy and become practically indistinguishable from left social democrats.

8. The place for all revolutionaries and communists is in a single revolutionary party. Trotskyists committed to the creation of a mass revolutionary workers’ party should begin immediate discussions with the Provisional Central Committee with a view to the reunification of Trotskyism with the Communist Party of Great Britain.

……….

Lenin’s Heir

Reply by supporters of the Marxist Bulletin/IBT

We have recently received a document from the CPGB presenting some views on Trotskyism and asking for a response. While we do not think this is a subject that can be adequately covered in a short exchange, we would like to make a few essential points in defence of Trotskyism.

You suggest that, unlike Lenin, ‘Trotsky’s contribution to the revolutionary workers’ movement did not constitute a qualitative development of the theoretical categories of Marxism’. However, it is not clear what ‘theoretical categories’ of Marxism you mean, and what contributions to their development you ascribe to Lenin. In our view, Lenin’s most important political contribution to the Marxist tradition was on the Party question – rejecting the social democratic notion of a party of the whole class in favour of a disciplined, democratic-centralised combat party composed of only the most advanced workers. Some of Lenin’s other important contributions are his analysis of the nature of the imperialist epoch, his programme for addressing the national question, his development of the tactics of the united front, and his recognition of the importance of the proletarian vanguard championing the interests of the specially oppressed.

Trotsky was Lenin’s continuator on all these questions – not merely in the abstract but in politically combating the revisionism of the bureaucratised CPSU led by JV Stalin. In addressing the central political questions that arose in the 1920s and 30s, Trotsky certainly extended and deepened Lenin’s programme ‘according to its own logical laws of development’. The Trotskyists upheld the internationalist traditions of Marx and Lenin against the narrow Russian nationalism of ‘socialism in one country’. Against the criminal sectarianism of the Stalinised Comintern’s denunciations of social democrats and other members of the workers’ movement as ‘social fascists’, the Left Opposition advocated the creation of a united front to smash the Nazis, modelled on the Bolshevik Party’s united front with Kerensky to defeat Kornilov in 1917.

In China, Trotsky counterposed a policy of working class political independence to the Comintern leadership’s disastrous policy of capitulation to the ‘anti-imperialist’ bourgeoisie. The Trotskyists opposed the Comintern’s turn to the popular front (i.e. overt class collaboration) in the mid-1930s. The Comintern’s popular front policy in Spain succeeded only in beheading the Spanish revolution and directly resulted in Franco’s victory. During World War II in the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries, the cadres of the Fourth International upheld the Leninist position that ‘the main enemy is at home’, while the Stalinists poisoned the workers with social-patriotism.

Trotsky brilliantly analysed the social roots of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. He located the profound contradiction embedded in the degenerated Soviet workers’ state between the proletarian property forms and the political monopoly of the parasitic caste headed by Stalin. Trotsky’s prediction – that if the Soviet workers did not rise in a proletarian political revolution to overthrow the Kremlin oligarchy, the Soviet Union would ultimately succumb to capitalist restoration – has (unfortunately) been fully vindicated by history.

The designation ‘Trotskyism’ is important precisely to distinguish Bolshevism from Stalinism – the ideology of the gravediggers of revolution. But one cannot counterpose Leninism to Trotskyism, any more than one can counterpose Marxism to Leninism. Of course Marx, Lenin, Trotsky (and countless others) addressed different questions and made distinctive contributions, but they are all contributors to the development of humanity’s ‘positive self-consciousness’.

Trotsky is no more responsible for the multiplicity of ‘Trotskyists’ who prostrate themselves before Lech Walesa, Ayatollah Khomeini or Tony Blair than Marx or Lenin are for the crimes of ‘Marxist-Leninists’ like Stalin or Pol Pot. (The history of the Trotskyist movement after Trotsky can only be understood in the context of the struggle against the Pabloist revisionism that destroyed the Fourth International.)

A revolutionary party can only be created by embracing the living tradition of Leninism – and that must mean a decisive rejection of Stalinism. Instead of ‘socialism in one country’ – world revolution; in place of the minimum/maximum programme – a revolutionary transitional programme of the sort advocated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A ‘reunification’ of the Trotskyist and Stalinist traditions would be just as retrograde as a reconciliation between Leninism and Kautskyism.

On Sunday July 19 we will be speaking on the subject of the transitional programme at a CPGB seminar in London. We will also be presenting the Trotskyist view on the Soviet Union at your ‘Communist University’ in August. We hope that these discussions can help further clarify the differences between our two organisations. Perhaps a process of discussion and debate can narrow the political distance between us. In any case we think it would be a mistake to paper over these differences in the interest of promoting the appearance of ‘revolutionary unity’ where there is none. For the question of Trotskyism versus Stalinism is not merely a historical question – it poses issues of methodology and programme that are crucial to building a viable international revolutionary movement today.

A Communist Perspective

for Student/Educational Struggles

[The following is a slightly edited English translation of “A New Political Group at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University: Join the Hora de Lutar [Time to Fight].” The statement was distributed to students on August 2010 at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University as an introduction to the Coletivo Lenin’s student group on campus..]

Hora de Lutar [Time to Fight] was formed by the Coletivo Lenin in the aftermath of the last student union elections. It was necessary to form a new group which was politically independent of existing student organizations, and which based itself programmatically on orienting students to the working class.

An alliance with the working class is essential for winning even the smallest steps towards the goal of a free quality university education, since the working class produces all the wealth in society and compromises the majority of the population. Student struggles will therefore only be effective and have lasting long-term value if they are linked to a working class political strategy. Only when the working class takes power and establishes its democratic political rule can we ensure that the wealth it produces be used to meet society’s needs. Otherwise, even the very small and specific temporary reforms that have been won under capitalism remain fragile and reversible with a change in the correlation of forces. This will remain true as long as the capitalists and their political agents continue to rule society. In this statement, we offer students a brief political evaluation of other left groups active at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University and some of our main programmatic proposals related to current campus struggles.

***

Elections for the Rio de Janeiro Federal University student union are a time when many questions get debated and help highlight and clarify the differences between competing political groups. The left groups who ran in the last elections all opportunistically lowered their politics and limited themselves to demands they believed would win them more votes.

In their initial slate meetings, Correnteza [Stream], student group of the orthodox Stalinist Partido Comunista Revolucionário, put forward a highly advanced program of an alliance with workers which included a call for a universal free quality education. But as the campaign developed, they politically retreated from that initial platform, chose to drop the call for open admissions and limited themselves to defending the currently existing affirmative action programs.

A Plenos Pulmões [With All the Strength of Lungs], student group of the formerly Morenoite Liga Estratégia Revolucionária – Quarta Internacional, took a similar political turn. Their slate also limited themselves to only defending racial quotas, even though they frequently claim to be militant fighters for open admission, instead choosing to leave the demand for their “Sunday Socialism” speeches and articles. Calls for solidarity with and permanently hiring the campus’s grossly underpaid and predominantly black and female temp agency workers were similarly scrapped. While these issues were at first prominently raised in their initial leaflets, they were simply disappeared from subsequent statements once the campaign was in progress.

Despite having many serious political differences between themselves (including whether or not to break away from the National Student Union), student supporters of the Morenoite Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado and the Mandelite Enlace chose to run as part of a common slate which mostly did not go beyond advocating increasing the school budget and some other minor reforms. The minimal low level quality of the politics put forward was necessary to ensure the participation of both groups, who could only run as part of a joint slate by publically burying their existing differences. Both groups could have raised the level of political discourse and clarity amongst both students and their own supporters had they chose to openly debated these issues instead

We support participating in united fronts with other groups around specific issues and campaigns we may agree on. While engaging in joint struggles, everyone would maintain their political independence and be free to raise disagreements and express their full politics. On the other hand, opposing groups which choose to participate on a common political platform, such as an election slate, are forced to dishonestly water down and hide their politics in order to get elected. Besides, there is no purpose for socialists to be in the students’ union leadership unless it is to openly lead their struggles in a socialist direction.

While the working class taking state power can guarantee free access to and make vast improvements to social programs such as education, health, housing and transportation, this would simply not be possible for any government tied to the capitalists and their system. The last 8 years of Brazil being governed by Lula and the PT [Workers Party] has amply demonstrated this. Unfortunately, large sections of the student movement are under the direct influence and control of this very government. Even while defending REUNI and PROUNI, government programs designed to attack public universities by transferring large chunks of their budgets to fund private universities, student supporters of the PT [Workers Party] and PCdoB [Communist Party of Brazil] formed a common electoral slate and were able to reach second place.

Despite its bureaucratic leadership, the UNE is still the largest student union federation in the country. It is therefore necessary to participate in it while maintaining a perspective of fighting against students illusions in the government and its supporters in the leadership. We believe those groups who call for abandoning the UNE to create a new federation (such as the PSTU-controlled ANEL [Free Students National Assembly]), are therefore making a serious tactical mistake. We are not for abstaining from ANEL either, but as participants also oppose the politics of its leadership and argue for ending the organizational division amongst student unions.

We invite those who agree with our aims to join our new organization. Along with the selection of demands raised in the charter below we also fight for others, including – free childcare and cafeterias open to students, teachers and all workers; down with the super-exploitation of female and black workers – equal pay for equal work; for the integration of temp agency and other part time workers into the permanent workforce; and for student/ campus-worker control of the universities.

HORA  DE  LUTAR Charter

I) Our group’s central task is in politically connecting student’s struggles to those of the working class. Most of us will either become workers in the future or already work to pay for our education. So we either already now, or will upon graduation, share the same interests as the rest of the working class. The values and ideology of exploitation are also deeply integrated into the present educational system, whose main purpose is to instill them into students from the earliest age as a way of politically and socially conditioning us in preparation for our future roles as disciplined workers in a capitalist society.

II) We oppose all policies aimed at the super-exploitation of young people at the workplace. We oppose poorly (or non) – paid internships/apprenticeships where the real aim is more frequently to exploit rather than teach us. We are opposed to poor starting salaries and the lack of job security for less experienced workers, which particularly effect youth and force them to the bottom of the job market.

III) We fight for a truly free and universal higher education, which must include financial assistance that would cover all living expenses, including food, transportation, housing, textbooks as well as leisure and cultural needs. Such assistance must also allow students to attend school without the obligation of working to support ourselves and studying at the same time, which frequently damages our academic progress and leads many to drop out of college.

IV) Education can only be free if it is accessible to everyone. Thus we fight for an end to admission tests. We are for the expropriation of all private universities and vastly expanding and improving the quality of the public university system.

V) We defend affirmative action as a partial gain, while also recognizing it’s inadequacy in addressing racial inequality for more than a minority. So while defending affirmative action, our main demand is for free tuition and open admissions for all, which would permanently end the universities status as the elite racist institutions they currently are.

VI) We fight against every form of oppression, such as sexism and racism, mechanisms for increasing capitalist profits through the super-exploitation of the oppressed, and for hindering the organization and dividing the struggles and of workers and students.

VII) We are opposed to the state and its armed bodies (such as the police and the military), which exist to serve the interests of the ruling class. We oppose the Brazilian military’s international presence, as in Haiti, where it suppresses black workers and helps maintain order to protect the property interests of the Haitian and international bourgeoisie.

Then, As Now, CLC Tops Were Main Obstacle to Victory

The 1934 San Francisco General Strike

[First printed in Workers Vanguard #109, 14 May 1976]

The recently defeated San Francisco craft workers’ strike induced many comparisons with the S.F. general strike of 1934. International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (lLWU) leader Harry Bridges, who played a key role in sparking the 1934 strike, remarked ironically at one point: “Well. I came in during a general strike, and it looks like I may be going out with one.” Although this year’s conflict never reached the proportions of the earlier struggle which proved the major event in making San Francisco into a union town for several weeks it teetered on the brink of becoming a general strike. It was above all the actions-and inaction of Bridges and his cronies that stood in the way,

The most important of the lessons of 1934, confirmed this year as well, is the need to defeat and take leadership away from the treacherous pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy. In 1934 Teamster president Michael Casey and Central Labor Council head Edward Vandeleur sold out the general strike. If the struggle for union recognition did not suffer an irremediable setback it was only because the leadership of a key section of the workers– the maritime workers– was in the hands of rank-and-file militants who were able to at least conduct an orderly retreat. In 1976 every union was controlled by hardened bureaucrats– from CLC head John Crowley to Harry Bridges, the completely domesticated militant of yesteryear– and there existed no elected strike committees at all, a fact which is central in explaining the total rout of the workers. The whole bunch of labor fakers, moreover, give political support to the Democratic “friends of labor” who are among the most dangerous leaders of the union-busting crusade.

How It Began

The general strike of 1934 grew out of the shipping companies’ determination to smash the reviving dock workers’ union. In the years since the destruction of the AFL longshoremen’s union in 1919, employers had a free hand in dictating working conditions on the waterfront. Longshoremen were forced to join a company union to get work, militants were blacklisted, the speed-up was grueling, and bribery and favoritism were the rule in the daily “shapeup.”

By the middle of 1933, however, partly under the impetus of the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), of which section 7(a) purported to guarantee the right of union organization, there was a mass influx of longshoremen into the virtually defunct AFL union, the International Longshoremen’s Association (lLA).

The union’s demands, which were circulated up and down the Coast and used as the basis for recruiting new members, included: union recognition, union-controlled hiring halls with preference for ILA members (closed shop), a six-hour day /30-hour week, and a wage increase from 85 cents per hour to $1 (with $1.50 for overtime). By early March 1934 the employers had already decided to oppose these demands unconditionally, provoke a strike and break the union. After an initial delay, a coastwide longshore strike began on May 9 and rapidly gained support from the other maritime trades, tying up shipping on the entire coast.

The shippers retaliated by using oldline AFL leaders, principally ILA president Joseph Ryan, to compel arbitration of the key issues. When that failed, they attempted to open the S.F. port by force. But the strike held solid for 80 days. When police killed two strikers and the governor sent in the National Guard, the result was a three day general strike in San Francisco.

These events did not occur spontaneously, however. Supporters of the Communist Party and the” Albion Hall” group (named after their meeting place) around Harry Bridges, provided the driving force behind the struggle to build the union. It was these militant trade unionists who, while unable to present a program of consistent class struggle, pushed the strike forward. Their serious errors led to the betrayal of the general strike by the treacherous AFL misleaders, but without these militants the strike probably never would have happened in the first place,

The Communist Party, by that time a pliant tool of the Stalinist counterrevolutionary bureaucratic usurpers in the Kremlin, was still operating on the basis of the ultra-left sectarian “Third Period” line laid down by Stalin in 1929. Following this policy both the New Deal and the AFL union tops were denounced as “fascist” and dual unions were the order of the day, The Stalinist dual union on the West Coast waterfront was the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), composed of both seamen and longshoremen.

After 1933, however, the Stalinist line began to shift in an empirical reaction to Hitler’s unopposed march to power in Germany. Already preparing to build “popular-front” alliances with liberal bourgeois politicians, the Stalinist parties began to reconsider working in the unions dominated by old-line bureaucrats. Thus when longshoremen flocked to their historic AFL union in 1933-34, CP cadres followed and were thus able to link up with Bridges’ group, rather than being totally isolated in their own sectarian “red” union.

The longshoremen who began joining the ILA in 1933 faced difficulties at once. The employers defended the “Blue Book,” a company union formed after the defeat of the 1919 strike, and fired workers for wearing ILA buttons on the job or for not having their “Blue Book” dues paid up. The newly elected ILA leadership advised workers to refer such disputes to the NRA administration, which promptly ruled that the “Blue Book” was a bonafide union! It was the “Albion Hall” group which actually built the AFL union by organizing job actions and a successful strike against Matson Lines in 1933, to reinstate four fired workers.

Membership dissatisfaction with NRA stalling was evident and a coastwide ILA convention was called for February 1934. Bridges prepared for it by making a tour of the Northwest ports, discussing the issues and urging the election of militant delegates from the ranks. As a result, the convention adopted a democratic constitution and called for the federation of all unions in the industry, which drastically cut across craft-union prejudices. The interunion solidarity prepared for by the militants at this convention was critical: seamen had crossed longshoremen’s picket lines in 1919, while the longshoremen scabbed on seamen in 1921.

Following the employers’ flat refusal to bargain- based largely on the assessment that the West Coast union was in the hands of radicals who had to be smashed- and the taking of a coastwide strike vote, Bridges initiated an elected strike committee in the San Francisco Bay area. Delegates, who were elected from the docks and gangs on both sides of the Bay as well as from casuals totaled nearly 50 in number. The need for such a measure became even clearer when the head of the ILA Pacific Coast District. “Burglar Bill” Lewis, unilaterally called off the strike in March on a request from F.D.R.

The Key: Inter-Union Solidarity

The strike finally got under way on May 9, and inter-union solidarity of maritime workers was the key to its initial success. The MWIU led its members off the ships as they hit port. This sparked general walkoffs of seamen, even from foreign ships, and the eventual sanctioning of the strike by the AFL seamen’s union. Other maritime crafts also walked off in sympathy and a joint strike committee, as called for by the ILA convention, was set up, with each union pledging not to return to work until the others had settted. Shipping on the entire West Coast was halted.

Despite this militant maritime solidarity, support from truck drivers remained critical to the success of the strike. The shippers immediately recruited scabs ·-many of them students from the University of California dubbed the “scab incubator”- to unload the ships, while police armed with an anti-picketing ordinance kept the strikers at a distance. Over the vigorous objections of its president, Michael Casey, however, the S. F. Teamsters local voted not to move scab goods off the piers. By May 27, there were at least 25,000 workers out, and the San Francisco port alone was losing $100,000 per day because of the strike.

While maritime workers were marching on the Embarcadero, ILA president Ryan, a fossilized craft unionist who defended the “shape-up” system against hiring halls, flew into town at the request of government mediators and attempted to convince longshoremen to arbitrate wages and hours and accept a jointly controlled hiring hall (i.e., leaving control in the employers’ hands) with no closed shop provision. Though roundly voted down in all ports, he proceeded to sign an agreement to this effect about two weeks later in San Francisco Mayor Rossi’s office, pledging the longshoremen’s compliance with the agreement. But the dockers rejected the deal, and Ryan was booed off the platform in the San Francisco local. More importantly, Ryan’s treachery made the need for militant leadership clear, and the joint strike committee established earlier was empowered by the ranks to replace the regular executive board in handling negotiations.

At this point, city rulers represented by the S. F. Chamber of Commerce and the Industrial Association decided to open the port by force. Trucking goods from the piers to the warehouses was the employers’ immediate tactical objective, so they focused on breaking Teamster support for the strike. Police formed cordons for scab trucks and attacked strikers. For two days clubs flailed, and on “Bloody Thursday,” July 5, two strikers were’ killed by police bullets. The port was immediately occupied by the National Guard.

Bridges and the Communist Party (CP) had already begun agitation for a general strike in response to the employers’ “open the port” declaration, and now the movement mushroomed, although stalling AFL leaders prevented immediate action. Bridges and 1,000 longshoremen and seamen were present at a July 11 Teamster meeting, despite protests from Casey and CLC president Vandeleur, who argued vigorously against the strike. Through rank-and file pressure, Bridges was allowed to address the Teamsters, and an overwhelmingly pro-strike vote was taken following his speech.

Similar delegations of up to 75 strikers were sent to other unions throughout the city, with similar results. Sympathy strikes were declared by ship boilermakers, machinists, welders, butchers and laundry workers. By July 13, 32,000 workers belonging to 13 unions were on strike. Some of them, like the Market Street streetcar employees, put forward their own contract demands.

The Central Labor Council was rapidly being forced to revise its tactics under this intense pressure. Earlier in June it had passed a resolution demanding that the ILA “disavow all connections with the communistic element on the waterfront.” However, to undercut the rising general strike sentiment after “Bloody Thursday” the CLC set up a Strategy Committee, which stalled for a week while supposedly “studying” the possible implementation of a general strike. The CLC also sent a whining telegram to the governor, saying that the National Guard wasn’t necessary because the city police were well-equipped to do their job. And this, after they had just murdered two strikers!

General Strike!

The maritime strike committee had called a mass meeting for July 7, to which all Bay Area unions had been urged to send delegations for the purpose of implementing general strike action and forming a broad strike leadership. The support for a general strike was solid, but when the establishment of the officials’ Strategy Committee was announced the maritime committee decided to postpone action in order not to undercut the CLC which was apparently taking steps toward a general strike. This deferral by Bridges and his CP supporters to the Labor Council bureaucrats handed the strike leadership to labor fakers whose sole aim was to betray the strike. This was the critical mistake of the militants, from which disastrous consequences inevitably followed.

The CLC began to feel an increasing pressure for strike action. Finally, the Strategy Committee asked all city unions to send five delegates each to a meeting July 14, at which a vote of 315 to 15 authorized a general strike for July 16. A strike committee was appointed by the Labor Council, consisting for the most part of salaried union officials who were chummy with the top AFL bureaucrats.

On Monday, July 16, the city was seriously crippled, but the CLC began to sell out the general strike from the very first day. Employees of the Municipal Railway (Muni) were told to return to work on the grounds that striking would jeopardize their civil service status. Phone, telegraph and power workers were never called out on strike, leaving communications in the grip of the bourgeoisie. Printing union leaders dangled the restoration of a 10 percent pay cut before the eyes of union members, convincing them to stay at work. Moreover, since the CLC did not publish a central strike bulletin, the city’s workers were totally dependent for news on the bosses’ press, none of which supported the strike. A publisher’s committee censored all newspapers to make sure the strike was slandered and red-baited from every column. The Hearst papers in particular were so vicious that several unions took boycott action and their members refused to read them!

Sheet metal workers were told by the CLC to repair police cars, a traitorous act providing direct aid to the military fist of the class enemy. While originally only a few services, such as hospitals and milk deliveries, were allowed to function, permits were soon given to hundreds of owner-operators of trucks, amid charges of scandals in issuance of permits. Numbers of restaurants were allowed to open, feeding the rich, while many small groceries were kept closed.

In addition, squads of police agents, posing as dissatisfied workers, were organized to carry out a vicious witchhunt. On the second day of the strike (and with at least tacit support of the AFL bureaucracy), these provocateurs went on an anti-communist rampage, smashing the offices of the CP’s Western Worker, the IWW and the MWIU. The police who “mopped up” after them arrested more than 300 “radicals” in one day. Militants were even pulled out of picket lines and victimized. These activities had a demoralizing effect on the strike, and the CP’s isolation from the labor movement plus its tactical sectarianism made it difficult to mobilize a broad defense against these “red scare” attacks. Meanwhile, Bridges’ strike committee had already undercut the defense by affirming that, while it was willing to accept support from any source, it was an “anti-communist” organization (Charles Larrowe, Harry Bridges, 1972).

Bureaucratic Sabotage

On July 17 the CLC strike committee presented a resolution to the city unions calling for arbitration of all issues in dispute. This passed the assembled body of delegates, over the protests of the maritime unions, by a hand vote of 213 to 180. The labor brass then met with General Hugh Johnson, head of Roosevelt’s supposedly “pro-labor” National Recovery Administration, who had just denounced the strike in violent terms. With such “leadership,” it was easy to call off the general strike only three days after it began. Even so, the vote was close and the ranks never voted to return to work.

With the general strike over, the Teamsters could then be pressured to end their strike on July 20, but only after verbal assurances from Casey that this would not mean handling scab cargo. Yet the next day truck drivers found themselves going through picket lines under armed guard, while Casey’s goons helped police protect them from the strikers! This final blow forced the longshoremen to vote to accept arbitration on July 21 and return to work ten days later. In the intervening period, however, they provided a dramatic display of solidarity to other maritime unions. Although they had voted to go back, the longshoremen honored their commitment to stay out until all other maritime unions had also voted. When the maritime workers returned, they all marched across the Embarcadero together, as an unbroken group.

Although the general strike was sold out and the dockers were forced to accept arbitration of all their demands, the workers had built powerful union organizations and decisively smashed the company unions. The strikes strengthened the entire Bay Area labor movement with an influx of new members. And in the following months, maritime workers (both longshoremen and seamen) were able to establish the closed shop and union-controlled hiring halls through militant job actions, despite the fact they they lost on these points under the arbitration award.

Although the leadership provided by the Albion Hall group and CP was decisive at several points in preventing defeat of the 1934 strike at the hands of ILA chief Ryan and his cronies- and in laying the basis for the later creation of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific- both faiIed at the critical point to prevent domination of the general strike by the AFL bureaucrats. The AFL tops, in turn, after spending months trying to cram arbitration by Roosevelt’s NRA down the throats of the longshoremen, only took over leadership of the general strike because they were afraid of losing control of their organizations.

The Communist Party admitted shortly afterwards that:

“The Party. at the decisive moment when the bureaucrats stood isolated and the workers were rallying for the General Strike in the first meeting at which the General Strike leadership was elected, did not develop a struggle against the misleaders and saboteurs. It allowed them through this course to place themselves at the head of the General Strike and overcome their isolation by feigning support for the General Strike.”

-“Lessons of the Recent Strike Struggles.” CP Central Committee, 5-6 September 1934

Thus at the same time as it was victimized for its ultra-leftism, the CP adapted opportunistically to trade union militants within the maritime unions. The politics of the CP longshore fraction was indistinguishable from “rank-and-file” activists like Harry Bridges, who strongly distrusted the AFL bureaucrats but shrank from the task of challenging them for leadership at key points. Though militant, Bridges was never more than a practical trade unionist, ready to check the AFL leaders, but lacking a full political program for smashing the bureaucracy by building a class-struggle leadership.

Throughout the entire strike, although it lambasted the AFL, the CP refused to criticize Bridges’ conciliationist failures. And within a few short months, the “fraternal” alliance between Bridges and the CP became part of the Stalinists’ trade-union back-up for a “popular-front” alliance with Roosevelt, under which it ceased to play a militant role even on a trade-union level. Though persecuted for years as an “alien” and “Communist,” Bridges was soon transformed into a trade-union bureaucrat.

1934 and Today

The few general strikes that have broken out in the history of the U.S. labor movement have been of a localized and defensive character. This was true of San Francisco in 1934 and characterizes the situation today as well. Responsibility for the defeat of these strikes lies squarely with the reactionary leadership of the unions.

This year’s craft workers’ strike proves once again the treacherous role of the legalistic and cowardly union bureaucracy, which acts as the labor lieutenants of capitalism in sacrificing the most fundamental union gains and betraying the most bitterly fought struggles. These class traitors’ support for the bourgeoisie extends from obstructing the movement for a general strike to opportunistically seeking to take it over for the purpose of derailing it.

The task of revolutionaries is to begin now to lay the groundwork for ousting these dangerous fakers, by educating the working class in the need for uncompromising independence from the capitalists, exposing the betrayals of the present misleaders and providing militant leadership for the workers movement in its vital struggles. Only a strategy of consistent class struggle can lead to victory—the “realistic” conciliators have nothing to offer but defeat.

The Spartacist League, the Minority and Voix Ouvriere

By Liz Gordon

[Key internal factional document with supporters of the Voix Ouvriere/ Lutte Ouvriere group in France. First printed in Spartacist League Internal Bulletin #7, December 1968. Reprinted and scanned from the SL publication “Lutte Ouvriere and Spark: Workerism and National Narrowness”.]

While the Turner-Ellens-Stoute Mi­nority faction has not, at least yet, taken a formal position on the Voix Ouvriere group, the organizational meth­ods of VO, at least as described by Comrade Ellens, have played an important role in the present factional dispute in the SL. Presumably the Minority has chosen not to take a position as a fac­tion on the questions raised by Ellens’ report of 8 April 1968 on “Organiza­tional Methods” of a European Trotskyist group which was circulated by Comrade Ellens nationally. The group in ques­tion, the French “Union Communiste,” has since been dissolved by government de­cree as a result of the May general strike and its organs, Voix Ouvriere and the bilingual Lutte de Classe/Class Struggle, no longer appear. (The docu­ment submitted by Turner on 17 July 1968 is-the first document to be signed by the Minority comrades collectively.) At the same time, the tendency of which Comrade Ellens is a leading spokesman has concentrated its fire heavily on questions of organization and so-called “Leninist functioning.” Comrade Ellens’ first documentary contribution to the discussion was an attachment to the PB minutes of 25 March 1968, as a statement qualifying her vote in favor of Comrade Robertson’s motions on how we seek to function politically and organizational­ly. These motions were presented and motivated in the PB meeting of 4 March. Her entire statement was, “The three motions on organization do not take into account that we are not functioning in a Leninist manner. This must be done in their implementation.” While Comrade Ellens’ justification for having circu­lated her report on VO’s organizational methods herself and over the head of the PB was that the report was not a fac­tional document, her use of the time allotted her during her recent July trip to the Bay Area for a factional presen­tation to present the organizational ideas of VO has made it clear that VO is being used as a major factional issue by the Minority. This makes it necessary that the Majority respond to the issues raised.

It seems clear that the Minority, or Comrade Ellens at least, has been at­tempting to sell VO’s successes and impressive aspects, especially in lieu of a more concrete schema of proposals by them for what the SL should seek to be and to do. This is not to say that there has been no political basis of real differences in the founding of the Minority tendency. The general proposi­tion of “getting to the masses” and an implied policy of proletarianization as the solution to the SL’s ills has become more and more clear, and poses legiti­mate political questions which must be discussed in their own right. But the question of VO and its organizational methods has been a second current running through the proselytizing of Com­rade Ellens and, further, is one which ties in well, at least superficially, with the expressed concern with “getting to the working class,” since VO is pre­sented as being the model of a proletar­ian Trotskyist organization with proper “Leninist functioning” which the SL should emulate. VO has been used as a prime recruiting device of the Minority and is therefore de facto part of the Minority’s program for change.

It is in a way unfortunate that VO has become a factional football. The necessity of answering the attributions and attacks of the Minority makes us insist here on the weak sides of VO. The comrades must keep in mind that VO is in many respects a fine and Trotskyist organization, and it is not an accident that the SL has chosen to maintain fra­ternal relations between our two groups. Further, VO has behaved towards the SL and the IC (the two opportunities we have had to observe VO most closely) in a serious, comradely and scrupulous manner. Likewise, the comrades must keep in mind that, despite the Minority’s attempt to suggest an implicit identity between itself and VO, the Minority is not VO. In choosing to wear the mantle of VO, Ellens is implicitly assigning to VO her opinions of the SL and her con­cept of what VO is. A VO’er, for ex­am]ile, might choose to accentuate some of its disagreements with the SL over political questions which Comrade Ellens has not chosen to treat in her represen­tation of what is basic to that organi­zation. For another example, Comrade Ellens has stated that VO’s position against having full-time political func­tionaries is not very important and flows from a specific difference between French and U.S. conditions, i.e., the allegedly greater ease of getting a part-time job in France. Judging from the whole of VO’s organizational out­look, it seems likely that VO itself considers this question of considerable importance and strongly disapproves of having full-timers whose only political assignment is party work. In short, we cannot exclude the possibility that VO views itself differently from the way Comrade Ellens views it and/or that she has chosen to emphasize those ideas and aspects of VO which would be most “sale­able” to SL’ers, in order to recruit to her faction. Similarly, we have had rather little day-to-day contact with VO’s actual functioning and cannot judge whether Ellens’ picture of VO’s effi­ciency is idealized. One SL’er whose contact with VO was much more limited than Comrade Ellens’ points out that, despite Ellens’ assertion that “meetings start on time,” those which she [this other SL’er] attended started late, monthly meetings 45 minutes late, classes less so. Trivial reminders like this may serve to keep us within the bounds of reality. But the most impor­tant point, of course, is that we must not be misled by the spectre of VO being raised to lend weight to the arguments of the Minority; if Comrade Ellens has received the VO “franchise,” we are not aware of it.

False Comparison

One obvious point to be made about the use of VO as a factional point by Ellens is that the comparison is not particularly fitting. While the organi­zational theories of VO are certainly relevant points to be debated, as are VO’s political differences with the SL, VO certainly cannot be used as a measure of efficiency or effectiveness. Accord­ing to Comrade Ellens’ report, the VO organization has four times as many full members as the SL, four times as many candidate members and again four times as many organized sympathizers. Using our membership criteria, this would give them eight times as many members as we have (we do not distinguish in counting our members between fulls and candi­dates) and four times as many of a cate­gory for which we have no equivalent, but would be roughly whatever close contacts we have regular working rela­tions with in arenas and, in addition, have sufficient agreement with us to work with us to some extent as the SL, circulating the paper and the like. Thus the SL has at this point roughly one-twelfth VO’s strength in members and contacts. Clearly our existence is much more tentative, our standards for what makes a minimally acceptable member somewhat lower by necessity, and our expected efficiency of functioning in no way comparable. Further, while VO’s membership is overwhelmingly concen­trated in Paris, ours is very lightly spread over an area which, translated into French terms, extends over the equivalent of Paris to the. Sahara to the Urals. Hence the effective force we can bring to bear on the main American cen­ter, New York, is in the range of one one-hundredth of VO’s sheer numerical impact in Paris! It is clear that the burdens on our national center include not only maintaining local functioning in the political center of the country with far less concentrated forces but. also attempting to service a national organization with local groups thousands of miles away. While we must concern ourselves with VO’s theories of organi­zation, we must realize that to reduce them in our minds to being identical with VO’s more efficient functioning is to render them absurd.

Selection of Leadership

The actual organizational structure of VO is, in our terms, rather fright­ful. According to the information in Comrade Ellens’ written organizational report and verbal presentation to the PB of 30 January 1968, VO’s structure may be described as federated in the choos­ing of a national political leadership. (“Federated” in this context should not be taken to mean that locals are autono­mous in their coordination with each other or with the central leadership.) Members of the VO equivalent of the Central Committee are chosen on the following basis: one member of each cell is elected by the cell to serve on the higher body. This is not necessarily undemocratic (cells are undoubtedly of roughly equal size; this system is not equivalent to our having, for example, one representative apiece from Berkeley and Austin) but it is most certainly not Leninist. In a Leninist organization like the SL, the central political lead­ership is chosen by the membership as a whole irrespective of what local they come from, on the basis of political positions. Attempts to make VO’s system more workable in practice (for example, by having a second CC-level person from a cell choose to attend CC meetings as an observer, or juggling the membership in the cells to be sure that there is somebody qualified in each one–and who would get to gerrymander the cells in this way anyway?) may rectify individual inequities but are in principle not enough to reconcile this structure with Leninist principles of organization. Such a selection of national leadership on the highest bodies of the organiza­tion is clearly incompatible with proportional representation for national minority factions. If one cell is in its majority in opposition on some question, it can of course send somebody repre­senting its particular views to the CC. But what if a minority view is spread across several cells, without a majority in any? The selection of a leadership geographically, rather than on the sole basis of political views, does a funda­mental injustice to the right of fac­tional democracy in a Leninist organiza­tion. The right to factions is key in the Leninist method of determining the line of the organization. While it is quite likely that minority elements are given some leeway in the VO organi­zation–we have no knowledge of VO’s provisions for internal discussion–and may well be positively encouraged by the leadership, VO’s structure means that any representation of minority views necessarily has the character of a privilege, not a right. To be permit­ted–if they are permitted–to discuss differences internally is not enough; part of the Leninist concept of internal discussion is the right to stand for election on the basis of views, have representation proportional to the strength of those views in the entire organization, and seek to become a majority and determine the line of the organization. Minority views should not simply be aired as criticisms; there must be a mechanism for their competing with the majority line, which means ultimately the right to elect leaders embodying the line.

A further aspect of the selection of the political leadership is even strang­er. Three particular leading VO’ers are automatically put on the CC-type body, without standing for election by the membership in the cells or otherwise. While we have no evidence to indicate that the co-option of these particular leading comrades is anything but in accord with what would be the result if these designated leaders stood for elec­tion on the same basis as the others, it is certainly clear that such a provision leaves the door open to bureaucratic abuse of the worst sort. At best this feature is a kind of benevolent despo­tism, even if it is never abused.

Contact Work and Education

Other features of VO’s organiza­tional practice are quite good. These features are not so much structural as practical, although there are theories behind the emphasis they are given. Undoubtedly the most touted of these practices has been VO’s systematic con­tact work. Another is the heavy emphasis on internal Marxist education of mem­bers. I would hope it is clear that the SL is strongly in favor of both these practices. Energetic pursuit of contacts and an attempt to make high Trotskyists of all members are mainly just common sense. The New York local has adopted a motion in favor of energetic and sus­tained contact with contacts, and has put Comrade Ellens in charge of this aspect of functioning. The local has also nominated Ellens for local orga­nizer on two occasions in order to assist her in putting into action what­ever practical improvements in function­ing she had learned from VO or could think up. (She has repeatedly refused to accept the post, perhaps to avoid taking responsibility for making her schemas live up to the implied promises.)

At the same time there are features of VO’s emphases on systematic contact work and internal education which are not wholly positive. In our discussions in the PB following Comrade Ellens’ presentation, some comrades felt that the extreme emphasis on individual con­tacting seemed to produce an excessively linear assessment of tasks. A process of individual members discussing with indi­vidual contacts can proceed almost independently of the course of development of objective situation and struggle; each member should recruit a certain number of contacts per year by individu­ally convincing individuals. Such a conception leads to a kind of theory of stages; everybody recruits contacts until we reach a size of x members, then we move on to a different stage. (There is no room in such a conception for the possibility that under some circum­stances a group might get smaller rather than ever and automatically larger.) PB comrades also feared that such an ap­proach, if overemphasized, could lead to VO’s ignoring political struggle with competing organizations and leftward-moving sections of other groups, the possibility of splits in opponent groups on the basis of Bolshevik politics. The struggle to become the vanguard party entails not only increasing one’s own forces but also combating whatever “os­tensibly revolutionary organizations” are competing for the banner of revolu­tionary Marxism, by exposing them and seeking to win individual members and sections of such groups to one’s own program. Otherwise, all groups might grow by linear contacting, with little progress being made toward political clarification and the crystallization of a vanguard party.

Regarding internal Marxist education and a disdain for coffee-klatch, cafe-society politicking, this indicates first of all VO’s concern with being serious. But VO’s method of putting this desire into practice can be criticized. One of the features considered by VO, according to Comrade Ellens, as integral to this approach is the organizing of people according to their levels of commitment. The resulting division into full and candidate member cells has something of a hierarchical character. In the candidate member cells, each of which contains one full member assigned to it, a kind of student-to-teacher relationship could develop; instead of all members being considered as equals, the newer members would be second-class citizens. Great stress is put by Comrade Ellens on the advantages this type of organization offers for education and re-shaping the minds of new members in an anti-petty-bourgeois direction. How­ever, such a concept of education is a very formalistic one. With the exception of the monthly political meetings and the contact with the one assigned full member, the candidate members are iso­lated from working contact with the real cadres of the organization on the living political questions. In addition, the Leninist concept of education is that the most important way in which comrades are educated is through internal fac­tional struggle. Purely on educational grounds, then, the lack of this basic Leninist practice renders the VO concept of education purely formal in character. Education means to a Leninist far more than the study of texts.

Organization Tied to Politics

The function of organizational structure and methods is to safeguard against bureaucratic abuse and political stultification. While the leading cadre of VO may well lean over backwards to prevent these faults, whatever internal democracy exists in VO exists in spite of and not because of VO’s much-touted organizational procedures. We want our members to have rights, not to be con­stantly granted privileges by a benev­olent and paternalistic leadership.

Thus we have severe criticisms of VO’s organizational practices. Before going on to examine VO’s intimately related theoretical positions on organi­zational and political questions, we would like to establish that they are extremely relevant to the present dis­pute within the SL. No doubt the Minor­ity would like to disclaim responsibil­ity for VO’s positions, pointing out that they have never tried to defend all of VO’s views. In fact, our Minority would probably like to avoid defending any of them. Our Minority would like to stand entirely on the basis of VO’s functioning. And certainly, if one seeks only to demonstrate that VO is a more effective organization than the SL (i.e., visits more contacts, holds more classes, has more union fractions, has a better publication schedule) then one need not defend VO’s theories. But, as shown above, to show that an organiza­tion twelve times the size of another is more effective is not very startling, and cannot exhaust the relevance of the VO example in the eyes of the Minority. In having made VO a factional point, Comrade Ellens has made it incumbent upon her faction to show 1) that the SL’s weaknesses relative to VO are a result of the SL’s political line and/or its organizational practices, and 2) that the Minority’s program and pro­posals have the answer. So far, with the exception of the question of energetic contact work (which suggestion has been widely accepted by the organization and the leadership), no other specifics of VO’s practices have been frankly sug­gested for the SL out of the totality of the VO example. Yet this cannot possibly exhaust the criticisms of Comrade Ellens or explain why she felt it necessary to make an extended report on VO’s func­tioning as part of the time allotted her in the Bay Area for a factional presen­tation. It is hardly necessary to form a faction in order to argue for systematic contact work. What Ellens seeks to capi­talize on through raising the issue of VO is the non-success of the SL over the past year or so, during which time mem­bership size has been about constant. The Minority attempts to lay these dif­ficulties at the door of 1) our alleged­ly non-proletarian orientation and, 2) our allegedly non-Leninist mode of func­tioning. Both Ellens and Turner have submitted documents dealing with the first point; VO has been offered as the model of what we should be if not for the second. But to select a few gimmicks (e.g., systematic contacting) out of one’s model is not enough. Since VO is irrelevant as a quantitative measure of the SL (i.e., efficiency in function­ing), the Minority must mean VO to be a qualitative measure–i.e., relevant for its principles of organization, its politics, since the question of who has the right line is always relevant to any organization no matter what its size. The theories and practices of VO form an integrated whole, and the Minority must take responsibility for the organiza­tional and political theories of VO, not simply seek to take credit for its efficiency and its practical features.

Theory Behind Organizational Emphasis

Underlying VO’s emphasis on organi­zational methods is the proposition,. with which we heartily concur, that organizational questions are not sepa­rate from politics and that organiza­tional theories are themselves political questions. According to Ellens, the con­cern with organizational questions began during and after the second World War, when the individuals who were to form VO reacted against the increasing social-patriotism of the formerly-Trotskyist organizations in France. VO’s founders sought to determine what practices and concepts of functioning had facilitated the deterioration into revisionism. From Ellens’ representation to the PB of 30 January 1968: “They decided that the policies taken by the other groups had come about in the absence of contact with working-class areas, as a way of meeting widespread petty-bourgeois sen­timent. They wanted to avoid themselves coming under such strong petty-bourgeois influences. They saw that groups could change their policies very easily under pressure and concluded that this was a function of a lack of basic education and training and an attitude toward being a lifetime Trotskyist revolution­ary….” Ellens’ presentation to the PB of 6 May also dealt with this point and stressed VO’s determination to avoid functioning like an unserious, dilet­tantish discussion group. Ellens’ or­ganization report of 8 April deals with the necessity of rooting out petty-bourgeois hang-ups, proletarianization of the organization and of the minds of petty-bourgeois recruits and deepening seriousness and commitment. Through its internal education and organizational methods, VO, according to Ellens, is frankly trying to prevent the seeds of political degeneration from springing up in their organization.

At the London Conference of the IC in April 1966, the VO comrades submitted several documents dealing with the ques­tion of Pabloism and the Fourth Interna­tional. Their view was that this revi­sionism stemmed primarily from the petty-bourgeois composition of the Trot­skyist movement. To quote from their documents:

“…the the failure of the Fourth Inter­national was due to the refusal of its militants and of its leaders …to admit that the social compo­sition of the sections in majority petty-bourgeois, intellectuals, necessitated strict political and organization measures to keep out corrupt elements, and, as far as possible, to escape from the influ­ence of petty-bourgeois ideology by making a maximum effort to recruit within the working-class, and by obliging elements of petty-bourgeois origin to tie themselves to work in the factories…. Pabloism, in the form of liquidationism, was but the finished expression of this petty-bourgeois opportunism of all the sections of the International…. Pabloism was not the cause of the failure and the demise of the Fourth International; it was its product.”

And later:

“Our organization was born precisely of the necessity to separate physi­cally from the petty-bourgeois envi­ronment with its Social-Democratic practices which made up the Trotsky­ist organizations in France at the beginning of the war, to be able to recruit, educate and form cadres capable of putting into practice Leninist and Trotskyist organiza­tional principles and which were not content with ‘Bolshevik’ verbiage covering up opportunist practice. It is because we ran up against the sarcasm and incomprehension of the militants of the Fourth Interna­tional with respect to these ques­tions that we had to carry on an activity separate from the Fourth International, although we have always upheld its ideas and its program.”

Another document makes it clear that “petty-bourgeois ideology” is defined by VO by the class composition of those who hold the ideas; in another document they speak about seeing “the Pabloite degen­eration as an elaborated form of the ideology of certain strata of the petty-bourgeoisie influenced by the apparatus of imperialism and of the bureaucracy” (our emphasis). In our opinion, Pabloism is a petty-bourgeois ideology because it denigrates the idea of a proletarian class party and a proletarian revolution in favor of revolutions made by petty-bourgeois or bureaucratic strata in the interests of a class other than the proletariat–e.g., Negroes as a multi-class nationality, peasants in Latin America, a petty-bourgeois bureaucratic elite. On the question of the roots of Pabloism, see Spartacist No. 6, the statement of the SL delegation to the IC conference. While one may argue with merit that the lack of deep roots within the working class is a built-in source of weakness and can in changing circum­stances reinforce and even produce deep disorientation and a tendency to shift the axis of the party away from a revo­lutionary line, should one then conclude that a super-proletarian orientation is a safeguard against political error and revisionism? A number of questions are raised: Should one expel one’s members of petty-bourgeois origins? This would undoubtedly reduce the size and effec­tiveness of the organization, but surely it is preferable to have a small organi­zation with the right line than a large group which is necessarily centrist. How completely can one revamp the conscious­ness of one’s petty-bourgeois members by formal Marxist education? Or, alternate­ly, are one’s members of petty-bourgeois origins still petty-bourgeois despite having chosen to become “class traitors” in favor of the cause of the proletar­iat? What of Lenin’s concept of de­classed professional revolutionaries? With such an analysis, how does one ex­plain the conservative tendencies that have developed in the Russian Bolshevik party, or the CPUSA, or the SWP, among the party’s trade unionists? (Regarding the latter, see Cannon’s article on the Cochran group, “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” Fourth International  magazine, Spring 1954.) Or, on the most serious note, what do you do in.an ob­jective situation (which includes your size, composition and roots) in which you are not likely to have great success in reaching and recruiting workers? .

The Politics of VO

Continuing with the correct proposi­tion that politics and organization are intimately related, we come to the po­litical positions of VO. Let us note first of all that we are dealing here with the positions of difference between VO and the SL, which is to say, in our terms, with their wrong positions; we must continue to keep in mind that many of VO’s positions are correct. The Minority, ignoring the intimate con­nection between organizational and political questions, has chosen re­peatedly not to deal with VO’s political differences with the SL. They have not chosen to defend VO’s positions; neither have they put themselves on record as being opposed to them. In fairness to the Minority, this should be taken to constitute not necessarily agreement on VO’s politics, but rather an elaborate non-concern over political questions. Yet we must assume that VO itself, unlike the Minority, would agree that political questions are important in evaluating an organization. And perhaps this document will at least cause our Minority to tell us where they stand on VO’s political differences with the SL.

In general, VO’s emphasis on class composition is indicative of its semi-syndicalist deviation from Trotskyism. In a letter to a comrade in Europe on 20 January 1967 I characterized VO as having “an excessive concentration on ‘the point of production”‘ and as having “semi-syndicalist tendencies.” This leads them to a de-emphasis of the importance of Marxist theory and the con­sequent over-emphasis on organization. It is not an accident that in the “Out­line of Study-Week Session” reproduced in the Ellens document, of the 13 num­bered points 11 of them, in her words, “elaborate points on organizational methods.” VO seems to feel that it is defined primarily as a tendency by its organizational theories rather than by its politics; and in the sections quoted above from the documents presented to the IC conference VO frankly defines its modes of functioning as the basis for its separate existence.

VO’s semi-syndicalist deviation from Trotskyism (which is not to say that VO has a semi-syndicalist perspective or that it is not Trotskyist) is the main methodological point which produces both VO’s political strengths and its politi­cal weaknesses. In its domestic line, VO was the only left-of-Stalinism organiza­tion with a significant base in the working class, but was limited in its influence in the radical student move­ment. Unlike the SWP’s orientation ex­clusively to the petty bourgeoisie, excessive concentration in the working class cannot be defined as a political sellout, but may well be a tactical error. When elevated to the level of a theory, it is a theoretical one.

In its international line, VO does very well indeed whenever the working class is a real factor in the situation; VO’s line on, for example, the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” made its primary insistence, correctly, on the need for the working class to act as a class in its own interests and the need for a Trotskyist vanguard party. Unlike the Healyites, Pabloites, Posadasites and their ilk, VO knew that the Shanghai general strike was important, that the working class is not a fascist class, that the Cultural Revolution is directed against the workers. They were not about to give any quarter to the enemies of the Chinese working class.

Yet in situations in which the as­cension of the working class to power does not seem to be an immediate possi­bility, VO is disoriented. Their strong proletarian class instinct (the positive aspect of their emphasis on working-class composition and work in the mass movement) is not a sufficient substitute for consistent Marxist theoretical anal­ysis in such cases. On a whole series of issues involving what seem to them to be national questions or sections of the population other than the working class (U.S. Negroes, Latin American peasants, petty-bourgeois guerrilla movements, the Viet Cong) VO’s line and essential meth­odology is not qualitatively different from that of the Pabloists.

VO on the U.S. Negro Question

Regarding the Negro Question, Class Struggle/Lutte de Classe of October 1967 (No. 8) stated: “If a Trotskyist organi­zation appears within the black popula­tion this could, through a quirk of history, and our epoch abounds in such quirks, bring down the international citadel of capitalism through a class struggle in which the national and ra­cial factor is predominant at the begin­ning.” VO here sees the Negro Question as a legitimate national question, al­though they nonetheless view the na­tional question as ultimately secondary to the class question. Further, we have here the possibility that the black movement, or, by implication, any move­ment, can spontaneously generate a Trot­skyist leaderhsip. In methodology, this is not different from the Pabloists’ abdication.

To quote further, “The white popula­tion can learn to forget its racism, half through solidarity with people who know how to defend themselves and half through fear.” Of the two criteria here, the first is sensible—i.e., respect. The concept of the white population’s increasing fear having any progressive, anti-racist aspect is wishful thinking and is dangerously wrong. White working-class racism can only be eroded by the opposite of fear, the realization of common interests with the black workers. Race fear, on the contrary, has only reactionary effects. In Algeria, the increasing predominance of the race-nationality question ended by the total eclipse of the class question and caused the total demise of the communist move­ment which had previously had strong holdings among the white workers in Algeria. The classic response of the racial or national grouping which is “on top” in the society to fear of the other race is a massacre. A fear reaction can only strengthen a reactionary solution. It is the recognition of common class interests which alone can heighten the tempo and intensity of class struggles and increasing consciousness on the part of the whites.

VO goes on, “The oppressed must build their own power to free them­selves.” The lesson drawn by us here is an anti-nationalist one, the fight against lumpenization of the ghetto masses. To the extent that the Negroes have no economic power through unions and the possibility of strikes, etc., they become increasingly vulnerable to a fascist solution, in the worst case, of concentration camps, deportation, exter­mination. VO continues, “The most radi­cal among the present leaders of the black movement [i.e., H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael] have already pro­gressed a great deal. Will they, in the course of the struggle, come to a so­cialist consciousness, a clear vision of the antagonistic classes…? One cannot say.” Again the possibility of sponta­neous development of socialist con­sciousness without the intervention of the Trotskyists is raised. Continuing, “The first necessary step is to create a black revolutionary organization, strictly independent on a national basis on all levels from American organiza­tions including whites. It is not a matter of creating a mass organization. It is a matter of creating a Trotskyist revolutionary party, an authentic orga­nization of the struggle of American blacks, since the black population has the highest level of consciousness.” This is a frank statement of a dual vanguardist position.

Examining VO’s conclusions, we find: “If the Trotskyists are incapable of taking the head of the black movement, as it is now constituted, and in a man­ner appropriate to the movement, they have only several years, if not several months, left before they can do nothing but support Carmichael and Brown uncon­ditionally, attributing to them an un­conscious and transcendent socialism in order to appease their own conscience. At the present time, the actions of Brown and Carmichael must be physically supported, while their limits must be pointed out unhesitantly.” Thus, to the extent that the present leaders are not supplanted, they must be supported. Having nothing to offer as transitional demands, with the exception of the question of self-defense, it is hard to see how VO could avoid this position which is essentially liquidationist and capitulatory to Black Nationalism. An active VO’er, informed on American conditions, with whom we discussed, agreed with our criticisms of this line and said that it flowed simply from lack of knowledge of the U.S. situation. Yet this issue is not the only example of .such disorientation.

VO took a position of support to the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. To be sure, their line was less obnox­ious and more honest than that of the Pabloists; VO denied that there was any such animal as the “Arab Revolution.” Yet VO’s position, while more honest and therefore less consistent, shows again the inability to respond in a correct manner in a situation where the class question seems immediately less promi­nent than some other question, i.e., the national question. It is worth noting here that at that time Comrade Ellens held the VO position on this question. Despite the PB having raised political criticisms of this and other political positions of VO at two times (PB meetings of 30 January and 6 May), Comrade Ellens is evidently so little interested in VO’s politics that there has been no way to tell whether she still holds her former position on this question; she has never bothered to say.

VO on the Soviet Bloc

As VO would no doubt be quick to say, the Russian Question is paramount for Trotskyists. And on this question, VO has shown itself unable to develop and apply Trotskyist theory to the East European Soviet bloc countries, China and Cuba. As all comrades should already be aware, VO recognizes the Soviet Union as a deformed or degenerated workers state and China, Cuba and the East Euro­pean Soviet bloc countries as capital­ist. (From the logic of their analysis, they should not recognize the Soviet Union as a deformed workers state ei­ther.) The methodology here is again that of the Pabloists, with the impor­tant difference that VO chooses to take essentially a revolutionary state capit­alist position while the Pabloist posi­tion is liquidationist of the Trotskyist vanguard party and essentially a capitulation to Stalinism regarding political revolution.

The underlying methodology of the VO position is made clear in VO’s comradely and serious critique of the SL’s Guer­rilla Warfare Theses (Spartacist No. 11) which appeared in Class Struggle No. 15, May 1968. This critique is mainly con­cerned with the question of Cuba. VO shares with the Healyite IC the view that Cuba is a capitalist state, and for much of the same reasons. The view seems to be that if we grant that Cuba is a deformed workers state, there is no more reason for a Trotskyist party; if the petty bourgeoisie can ever be forced to break with the capitalist economic sys­tem and establish what is viewed as a deformed kind of socialism, Trotskyists can have no perspective except to become a left pressure group seeking to push the Stalinists to the left. A few quota­tions will make their position clear.

“In the last analysis, such a state will be a workers’ state only if the working class seizes power and builds its own state apparatus. And this holds true whatever the extent of the economic reforms carried out” (page 13). “And to consider that this state interference has the slightest ‘workers’ or ‘socialist’ character leads directly to abandon­ing the proletariat in favor of other social groups supposed able to play the same historical role. Indeed, this conception leads to openly admitting that bourgeois organizations (or petty-bourgeois organizations) can, by leaning on certain petty-bourgeois and in any case non-proletarian social layers, create workers’ states, even de­formed ones, and lay the bases for significant economic progress in the underdeveloped countries. This is the very negation of the Communist Manifesto. It is also the negation of the reasoning which led Trotsky to characterize the USSR as a ‘de­formed workers’ state’ because of the particular and decisive role played by the proletariat in its creation” (page 14).

It is clear that a kind of healthy attitude leads VO to this analysis: they fear that to grant Cuba (and by implica­tion East Europe or any place where the workers never took power) a characteri­zation of “deformed workers state” will cause them to sell out. And they don’t want to sell out. This is admirable. However, this position also leads them to deny reality. The East European states, and Cuba, and China, are identi­cal in qualitative terms to what now exists in the Soviet Union as a result of its degeneration. The power of theory and a dynamic and creative approach to a changing world is that it is not necessary to falsify history in order to reach a revolutionary conclusion.

The basis of VO’s theoretical in­capacity over these questions is a too close identification between a “workers state” and a “deformed workers state.” It is this error which leads the Pablo­ists to liquidationism: if the Stalin­ists or the petty bourgeoisie can ever, under the pressure of one of the two contradictory forces operating on them, actually create something which is “pretty good,” then what role is there for the Fourth International? What the VO comrades forget here is that in order for the Soviet Union to go from being a workers state, however seriously threat­ened and in crisis, to a deformed work­ers state, it required a political coun­terrevolution and the physical extermi­nation of the old Bolshevik party. VO and the Pabloists see only a quantita­tive difference between the victorious Russian workers state and the product of its degeneration.

The Spartacist analysis has two virtues: it leads us to a revolutionary conclusion, and it is correct. We concur wholeheartedly that “such a state will be a workers state only if the working class seizes power and builds its own state apparatus.” But the VO comrades apply this same criterion to a deformed workers state. Is this criterion true now for the USSR? Certainly not. Yet VO considers it a deformed workers state. Their only reason must be that in the USSR the working class once did hold political power. This can be only a sentimental reason for characterizing the Soviet Union as a deformed workers state. Further, to hold that such a state does not have the slightest “work­ers” or “socialist” character is over-simplistic, and denies the fundamental contradiction facing the bureaucracies: that they are both the enemies of the working class in their own countries and internationally and at the same time rest on top of a state in which the economic system and the formal ideology constantly pose the issue of workers control. The renunciation of the recog­nition of this fundamental contradiction has been the basis for all third camp theories–Shachtman’s bureaucratic col­lectivism and J.R. Johnson’s or Tony Cliff’s state capitalism. Finally, VO’s semi-syndicalism leads them to write off the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie (for example, in the Cuban case) as fundamen­tally irrelevant to Marxists. In fact, the cause of intermediate classes can at times overlap to some extent the inter­ests of working-class revolution; in such cases we will conclude an uneasy alliance with these forces–for example, the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government. Where we agree with VO is that the working class must maintain hegemony over the peasants and that the vanguard party is absolutely not a two-class party, but a party of the proletariat.

Further, let us not be too bemused by the fact that VO’s analysis is at present both incorrect and episodically revolutionary. Incorrect analysis takes its toll, and we may in the future find our positions dramatically counterposed. VO would critically defend the Soviet Union against imperialist aggression. But what line would they take in a war between East and West Germany? Let us hope that VO would find some inconsis­tent excuse to avoid being neutral about the reintroduction of capitalism into the deformed workers states. Or, what was their line on the India-China border war? Here is a clear case in which the logic of their position must lead them to be neutral.

The “Trotskyist Family”

Another political weakness of VO has been a too-fraternal and non-combative attitude toward other formally “Trotskyist” groups. At the London Conference in 1966 we raised the criticism that VO seemed to have a conception of a “Trot­skyist family” (see Spartacist No. 6), that they seemed to have the conception that all groups calling themselves “Trotskyist” were actually Trotskyist. This criticism, at least, of all the ones we have raised, has been disputed by Comrade Ellens as a question of fact. She has stated that VO only recognizes a certain responsibility to new members of “Trotskyist” groups who may have joined such groups on the basis of their formal “Trotskyism” rather than their opportun­ist practices. If this is the case, of course, the SL has the same view, in insisting on the necessity for a contin­ual struggle to expose the Pabloists and others as not really Trotskyists and for clarification and polarization in groups which are the only representatives of formal “Trotskyism” in their countries and therefore may include members who would choose a revolutionary position. Yet the present rather disturbing course of VO lends some preliminary support to our criticism of their “Trotskyist fami­ly” orientation.

Re-Unification with Pabloism?

Much concern has been voiced within the SL over the unity-of-action pact signed between the Pabloists and VO, and later also signed by the Pablo Pablo­ites, who are insignificant in France. The text of the pact is:

“In view of the development of the present situation, which cruelly points up the absence of a revolu­tionary leadership, and considering that it is essential to unify the struggle carried on by the organiza­tions claiming to be Trotskyist, representatives of the Union Commu­niste [VO], the Parti Communiste Internationalists [Pabloist] and the Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire [Pabloist youth] met on Sunday, May 19, 1968, and decided to form a permanent coordinating committee for their three organizations. This coordinating committee now calls on all organizations claiming to be Trotskyist to join in this move. The three organizations advise their members everywhere to come together to coordinate their activity.” –Reprinted in Intercontinental Press, 3 June 1968

While initially it was not clear whether VO viewed this agreement as the beginning of a reunification of the “Trotskyist” movement, the Healyites in their denunciations and the Pabloists in their applaudings of the pact certainly view it as such. Several comrades in the PB raised the fear that VO had been dis­oriented by finding itself on the same side of the barricades with the Pablo­ists and were reacting in an over-fraternal manner to this, and perhaps also as a reaction to the inability of the leftists to bring France past the negative situation of a general strike into a positive struggle for workers’ power. It was decided after discussion in the PB and NYC local to raise in the article for Spartacist No. 12 on the French events the criticism that VO had chosen the wrong axis to capitalize on the French events and the exposure of the PCF-CGT; that the comrades should have called upon all those who stand in favor of workers’ committees and work­ers’ power to come together to form the needed new vanguard party of the working class–that is, for regroupment based on the Bolshevik program, not only the basis of the formal protestations of Trotskyism of the various groups, which latter axis might include some who actu­ally stood outside the actual basis for the formation of a new revolutionary party and might exclude sections of groups who had moved left under the pressure of the events and now stood for workers’ power. Although we consider it highly unlikely that VO now wishes con­sciously an unprincipled unification with the Pabloists, a group such as VO which has functioned on the basis of subjective revolutionary class instinct without much theoretical capacity could well find itself in such a situation despite its intentions.

Concern over this point has been strengthened considerably by the front-page editorial in the new Lutte Ouvriere No. 4, dated 17 July 1968, entitled “Towards the Revolutionary Party.” The article states:

“May ’68 has been a forceful demon­stration of the validity of revolu­tionary ideas…. The future now depends on the capacity of the revo­lutionary movement to capitalize on this acquisition of confidence…. We have already written and repeated several times in our columns that this is only possible if the revolu­tionary movement is capable of sur­mounting its division into multiple indifferent tendencies however dis­trustful each is of the others…. To struggle for the fusion of the forces which, until now, have been fighting dispersed, and to surmount for that the obstacles, the mis­understandings, the dangers, this is the most imperative duty of all revolutionaries at this time. The objection which one meets most fre­quently among even those revolution­aries who are most sincerely desir­ous of seeing the far left possess­ing the organization strength equal to its ideas concerns the seeming incompatibility between effective­ness and the absence of centralism, the latter being understood as mono­lithism…. However it is not only that the unity of action doesn’t exclude the free confrontation of ideas= this is even the condition for action to stand on a sane base. The bolshevik party…has known in the course of its history numerous tendencies and sometimes even fac­tions. Its militants have by all means the right and even the duty to publicly defend their own ideas even when [the ideas] are in contradic­tion with the official positions of the Party. (?)… Also it is not a question of hiding that the politi­cal differences which separate the revolutionary tendencies are impor­tant and sometimes grave… It is the experiencing of action and ex­perience (of the facts) which will be charged with selecting the ideas. But in order for that to bet it is necessary that the revolutionary  movement have a stake in the events  and that will not really be the case unless they are united. What seems  the most difficult [problem] to sur­mount is that the differences are not only political, but concern,even the conception of the Party. But even that is up to experience to determine, for if the different revolutionary currents wait, before uniting themselves, to convince one another only by the discussion, they can wait a long time. Events, by contrast, do not wait. Certainly the unification of the existing revolu­tionary forces will not give [us] ipso facto a party capable of lead­ing the struggle of the proletariat to victory. Such a party will be forged through long years of strug­gle…. Unification is not an end, it is a beginning…. Revolutionary militants that are separated by important differences learned to struggle together in the factories, in the neighborhoods, in the differ­ent committees, and to make a common front against their common enemies. They discover, through the daily combat that they lead together that, although what separates them is sometimes very important, what unites them is fundamental” (our emphasis).

This seems to be a call for a unifi­cation among the ostensibly revolution­ary organizations. Parenthetically, one might note that the most serious diffi­culty is conceived to be differing con­cepts of the party, i.e., of organiza­tional questions, rather than political differences. No demands are raised as to the basis of such a unification–unifi­cation on the basis of what political program, workers power? formal Trotsky­ism? being left of CP?–except that all the revolutionary organizations (in this conception, there seem to be lots of them) should unite in order to make their combined force strong enough to influence the events. From having called for all Trotskyist organizations to get together on no particular basis except an implied opposition to the CP’s ref­ormism (in the original unity-of-action pact), there is now a move to call for all “revolutionary” groups to get to­gether on no basis whatsoever. Judging from VO’s past history of principled (and perhaps too standoffish) behavior towards other groups, we find it likely that Trotskyists will pull back from the present course before such a unification, or at least find itself compelled after such a unification to split out and reaffirm a program which is to be found nowhere in this editorial and a commitment to Trotskyism which is to be found nowhere in this publication.

What is pervasive to VO’s political errors is the syndicalist-related feel­ing (and resulting practice) that the working class is immune from anti-revo­lutionary deviations and a kind of nar­row “workerism” which leaves them with­out a revolutionary line towards other struggles (U.S. Negroes, the Arab peas­ant masses) and without any axis towards social transformations in which the working class has been largely absent (East Europe, Cuba). This “workerism” is a current in the Bolshevik movement which has been fought since the Leninist amplification of Marxism, e.g., in “What is to be Done?”, written by Lenin in 1902. The working class is our class because it is the only class capable of decisively smashing the capitalist sys­tem and laying the basis for social progress in our epoch. The working class is not, however, a magic talisman to ward off evil and bring automatic suc­cess to the socialist movement.

The Minority and VO

As pointed out above, the Minority as a faction has not embraced the Ellens VO document as they have the Turner document. At the same time it is clear that VO is being used by Comrade Ellens as an at least informal recruiting device and an implicit comparison with the SL. Yet, Ellens has steadfastly refused to deal with VO in a serious and political way. She has sought to sell VO’s successes as a plank in the Minority’s program for the SL, but only covertly. She has created the image (perhaps some­what idealized) of VO as an eminently serious (which it is) and efficient organization through propagandizing VO’s gimmicks–systematic contacting, orderly meetings, internal Marxist educational programs, proletarianizing the psyches of petty-bourgeois members–while only tacitly accepting VO’s essential and theoretical organizational precepts and ignoring VO’s politics. We are tacitly promised that we can be “as good” as VO if we will support the Minority, but since neither the organizational philo­sophy nor the politics is frankly pushed, her assurances can mean only that an organization of our size can be as effective as one twelve times larger through the institution of systematic contacting and the like. Ellens has sought to concentrate on the gimmicks of VO and ignore the basic questions. Fur­ther, the strengths of VO are certainly not employed and embodied by the Minor­ity–any VO’er worth his salt would be horrified with the proposition that the situation for the SL in the New York hospital workers’ union was essentially unchanged by the departure of both party members in the union. If there is one thing which epitomizes VO’s strength it is the desire to be involved in real struggle, to have a caucus-building perspective in unions, to be above all serious and responsible in its work in the mass movement. Finally, there is no indication that a VO’er in the SL would concentrate so exclusively on the tech­niques of organization; in short, VO is not as non-political as our Minority.

The Spartacist League has very grave weaknesses–in its functioning, its re­sources, its human material. And it has a strength–its uniquely correct politi­cal line. It is the particular political ideas of the SL which justify its exis­tence as a separate organization. Let us not be so eager, as is the Minority, to sell our strength down the river in ex­change for phantom schemes and implied promises which cannot solve our prob­lems. Those who support the Minority are headed for a political destination which they perhaps do not know yet, but which is liquidation of Trotskyism.

–6 August 1968

Militant Longshoreman

No. 5 February 4, 1983

Re-Elect Keylor

Caucus and Convention Delegate

No Give – Backs. No Lay – Offs

In the last Militant Longshoreman the editor wrote about the critical state of the union, the need for an offensive program to save our jobs, and the danger of further disastrous concessions. These questions will come to a focus at the Longshore Division Caucus and the International Convention in April of this year. This issue of the Militant Longshoreman will talk about the two most critical dangers to the Longshore Division: 1) loss of jurisdiction through a combination of raiding and hiring non-union scabs and 2) lay-offs.

Given the economic crisis, the decline in foreign trade, and the cut-throat competition in shipping, we can expect an attack on our waterfront jurisdiction loading and unloading ships and barges. At Richmond Yard 3 last December, Operating Engineers Local 3 collabor­ated with Levin Terminals to raid our jurisdiction. We stood help­lessly out in the muddy street while a barge was unloaded and load­ed by non-ILWU and non-union people working unsafely and at sub­standard wages. But the stakes in Richmond are much higher than one or more barges. Construction at Yard 3 is rapidly nearing com­pletion as a coal exporting facility and Levin management is up front that the ILWU has no place in their plans. Utah, Wyoming, and Nevada coal shipments out of Northern California are expected to increase enormously during the next few years. Selby (among other places) is being talked about for building more loading fac­ilities. The various companies getting into this lucrative bus­iness will be encouraged to bypass the ILWU if Levin gets away with it at Richmond. It’s reported that Levin will start handling coal within 30 to 60 days; around 16 full-time jobs are immediately at stake.

Looking further down the road, we can expect businesses owning private docks to look around for non-PMA stevedoring outfits (or create them!) to load and unload vessels with non-ILWU and non-un­ion labor. The jurisdiction sections of our contract protect our jobs only where PMA member companies are involved.

THE BEST WEAPONS: MASS PICKETING AND UNION SOLIDARITY

How can we protect our jurisdiction? Mass pickets to stop scab­bing and union solidarity to avoid isolation are the only weapons that will work. A handful of token “informational pickets” help­lessly standing in the street while scabs drive past splashing mud on them won’t protect our jobs. But (we are told) if we do try to stop scabs the courts will issue injunctions limiting us to a few token pickets and the cops will beat on us while, they escort scabs past us. For the last 35 years the Taft-Hartley law has given jud­ges the right to issue “restraining orders” against mass picketing and “secondary boycott” picket lines. Thousands of strikes have been lost when workers obeyed strike-breaking, union-busting court orders.

This doesn’t have to go on. Even the government has been known to back off when faced with massive union action. Several years ago the State of Washington tried to break the Inland Boatmen’s Union manning Puget Sound Ferries. A state-wide strike of all ILWU locals supported by the IBT shut down Puget Sound, made the State back down and saved the IBU. We must organize now for just such port-wide strike action the minute another non-ILWU cargo operation (barge or ship) begins in Richmond. The full power of our union to shut down the port and put thousands of men on the picket line will be necessary to make clear to the murderous Richmond cops that union busting and scabherding will not be permitted.

Even our token picketing last December hurt Levin; Teamster truck drivers refused to go through our picket lines. Several months earlier Teamster warehousemen at the giant Sealand CFS in Oakland went on strike and picketed the Sealand piers at 14th St. When the ILWU honored the picket lines, Sealand had to capitulate. We must take the lead in initiating and building such joint support actions to defend each other against take-aways and union-busting. When the ILA negotiates a contract this fall, we must make it clear that we will honor their picket lines like we did in 1977 but that this time we won’t permit the courts to bust our solidarity action.

NO MORE TAKE-AWAYS! NO GIVE-AWAYS

The editor warned in Militant Longshoreman #4 last month that it looks like we are being softened up for concessions. Our Internat­ional officers have “negotiated” wage freezes in Warehouse and in Hawaii. They have alibied and justified two of the historic betray­als in longshore: M&M, in which we gave up manning scales and job action, and 9.43 where we allowed PMA to undermine the hiring hall. Herman and the other officers have no program to meet the jobs cri­sis in longshore; they can only point to PGP and the “no-layoff” clause of the contract. Contractual guarantees sure didn’t pro­tect the auto workers from wage and benefit cuts and Supplement III provides for layoffs “…should unusual circumstances develop…” The unusual circumstances are already herel After haunting the hall for four to five days without getting a job, longshoremen are begin­ning to mutter “we have too many men”. Our leaders are not shouting as they should be “we have too few jobs”. In the past they co-oper­ated with PMA’s attempt to export poverty by forcing hundreds of longshoremen to transfer out of this port. Now they squash and ridicule any aggressive program for jobs (manning scales, shorter work shift), leaving the field open to debating which concessions like lay-offs we should swallow.

Strike action will be necessary just to block takeaways. We ought to take a lesson from the Canadian Chrysler workers who three months ago struck on their own against give-backs. The UAW US-Canadian brass sabotaged and isolated the strike. Nonetheless, they and Chrysler were forced to reopen negotiations. Many of the proposed benefit cuts were withdrawn and Chrysler was forced to of­fer a substantially better although still inadequate wage package.

NEEDED: A PROGRAM TO UNITE TRADE UNIONS, UNEMPLOYED, BLACKS, RETIRED

Not even the most aggressive trade union program has a chance of success unless the unions take the lead in defending the livelihood of the 80% of unorganized workers, the over 10% who are unemployed, and the millions of retired, disabled and destitute who are suffering from cutbacks in social benefits.

The employers will try to hire the unemployed and destitute as scabs unless the unions organize them first. When the ILWU was foun­ded in the strikes of 1934, the union took action successfully to win over casual dock workers who could have been recruited to scab. The six hour day was demanded and won not to give overtime pay for the last two hours but to provide jobs for all who had fought in the str­ike. The union controlled hiring hall was the membership’s guarantee to each other that there would be no discrimination on the basis of race, religion, age, political beliefs, union loyalty, etc.

The Teamster strikers in Minneapolis in 1934 went even further. They won the unemployed to their side by organizing IBT auxiliar­ies of unemployed workers and workers on federal public works re­lief projects. These auxiliaries, backed by Teamster solidarity act­ions , fought for higher relief benefits for the unemployed and liv­ing wages for federal WPA workers.

That’s the basis for Point 5 of the Militant Longshoreman program which calls for: “Organize the unorganized and the unemployed. Labor strikes to stop cuts in Social Security, Medical, Medicare.”

Keylor will argue for such a program at the International Conven­tion. It is a key for union survival and will be a critical step in forging an alliance between the employed and the poor. Such an al­liance must be carried forward under the leadership of a workers party based on the unions to an actual fight to establish a workers govern­ment which will provide jobs for all through a planned socialist econ­omy.

VOTE FOR STAN GOW BUT WATCH WHAT HE DOES

I had hoped Stan would think about what I’d said last month. In­stead, he defended the new policies being pursued by the Militant Caucus and criticized his own fighting instincts. As I said, the Militant Caucus in Local 6 is largely pursuing extra-union issues and is paying less and less attention to union problems. Apparently dis­couraged by the near paralysis of Local 6, the constant giveaways en­gineered by the leadership (the last Master Contract included a 6 month wage freeze), and the inability of the membership so far to org­anize to halt these sellouts, the Caucus is turning its attention elsewhere, largely abandoning workers who are still employed and in the union. Recognizing the danger posed to our survival by Reagan’s drive toward nuclear war and by the growth of the fascists around the fringes of U.S. society, the Militant Caucus is beginning to look for shortcuts. Downgrading the fact that the most effective  opposition to the native fascists in the 1930’s and to Roosevelt’s war drive which brought the U.S. into World War II came from within unions led by class-struggle Trotskyist militants centered in the Teamsters in Minneapolis, the Caucus and their co-thinkers in Workers Vanguard are increasingly directing their organizing activity away from the unions and towards the unemployed, particularly in the ghettos.

THE UNION CAN BE CHANGED BUT THE MILITANT CAUCUS DOUBTS IT

Rather than openly stating their reorientation and defending it politically, they are trying to camouflage it by extending their cor­rect historic opposition to the union bureaucracy into a blanket con­demnation of the union. For example, they now say that because cer­tain sections of the ILWU leadership are racist that it’s OK to give backhanded support to court suits against the union (the Gibson Case). (Why didn’t Stan say he’s for defending the hiring hall against the government and that instead of longshoreman fighting longshoreman over ever fewer jobs, we should strike together coastwise for 6 for 8, all skill jobs through the hall, manning scales on container ships and full A status to all B men now?) Also, Stan now says that the union is so rotten that he’s just running for Caucus and Convention to expose Herman and the Caucus delegates rather than trying to win sections of the coast delegates over to a fighting program. Similar­ly the Militant Caucus doesn’t want to fight for d South African cargo boycott because they think a limited strike would only serve to re­build Herman’s credentials.

SELF IMPOSED ISOLATION

Equally dangerous is the Militant Caucus’ developing posit­ion that anyone is a hopeless case who is at this time pro-Demo­cratic or supports the strategy of pressuring the Democratic Party. That makes it OK to boycott their activities (the anti-Nazi march in Oroville) or even to urge workers not to demonstrate against Reaganism under the present pro-Democratic Party union leadership. Stan’s statement that “it was a bad thing that thousands of workers were out there that day because it strengthened the hands of our enemies” summarizes this developing abstentionist position. In ef­fect Stan and the Militant Caucus have said: accept our leadership’ or we’ll have nothing to do with you. This policy is out and out self-isolating sectarianism.

Until recently the Militant Caucus and.their co-thinkers would have been in Oroville, (as I and other longshoremen were), carrying signs aimed at winning the anti-Nazi demonstrators over to the winning strategy of labor/black/latino defense guards instead of essentially abandoning Oroville’s black community by dismissing their misdirect­ed efforts at self-defense as “an adventure” (remember Taft, Califor­nia, 1975?). Until recently the Caucus would have been in the labor parade with signs calling for a break with the Democrats and for a workers party as they did in last year’s SF Solidarity Day with PATCO labor parade. This year Stan marched with the 50-70,000 other unlonists who deeply resent Reagan’s policies which breed unemployment, cuts in medical care, cuts in care for the aged, etc., but he march­ed with no sign distinguishing him from the pro-Democratic “Vote Labor for Jobs and Justice”; and when I was subjected to an anti-communist exclusion for carrying a sign calling for a workers party and specif­ically for a vote for the Spartacist candidates for SF Supervisor, Stan kept right on marching without a word of protest.

REDBAITING

MY ASS!

Now on the subject of “redbaiting”. Many union members in both Local 6 and 10 know that Stan and I have long been supporters of the political program of the Spartacist League and its paper the Workers  Vanguard, and know that in the past we were both supported by it. Last year in Militant Longshoreman #2 I referred to “differences… with some Caucus members on issues which did not involve the union or the Caucus program.” These differences did involve the WV and the Spartacist League whose program I support but of whose practices I am increasingly critical.

Much of what Stan writes was, in the past, and is now influenced by the views of the WV. WV reports extensively on Stan’s leaflets. I support their right to report on and attempt to influence the ILWU as I support this right for any tendency in the workers movement. But I don’t support WV when they distort things in a misguided ef­fort to make their organization and its genuinely socialist program look better any more than I support the People’s World (with its reformist program and apologias for the liberal capitalists and their labor lieutenants) when the PW distorts things to make their organi­zation look better.

STAN SHOULD FIGHT

I urge you to vote for Stan again for Caucus and Convention dele­gate — but watch what he does. Stan and the Militant Caucus have shifted ground but they have by no means broken clearly from class struggle politics. Stan is still running on a supportable class struggle program. To regain his orientation toward fighting for a new leadership to build a fighting union which will work in the in­terests of all workers he’ll have to fight first within the Militant Caucus and with their political co-thinkers in WV to return to their old policies. I hope he does fight and I hope that he succeeds.

MILITANT LONGSHOREMAN PROGRAM

1.DEFEND OUR JOBS AND LIVELIHOOD – Reopen the contract if PMA cuts the PGP. For six hours work at eight hours pay; manning scales on all ship operations; one man, one job. Call all SEO men back to the hall. Prepare the union for a coastwise fight to delete 9.43, SEO, and crane supplement sections from the contract.

2.DEFEND THE HIRING HALL – No, surrender of union control over registra­tion.

3.DEFEND UNION CONDITIONS AND SAFETY THROUIGH JOB ACTION – No dependance an arbitrators. Mobilize to smash anti-labor injunctions.

4.DEFEND OUR UNION – No second class B or C registration lists. Full class A status for all B men coastwise. Keep racist anti-labor government and courts out of the union. Support all ILWU locals against court suits and government “investigations”. Union action to break down racial and sexual discrimination 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/Latin de­fense actions. No dependance on capitalist police or courts to smash fascists.

7.WORKING CLASS ACTICN TO STUD YONCMS WAR DRIVE AGAINST IM SOVIET UNION – Oppose reactionary boycotts against. Soviet and Polish ship­ping. Labor strikes against military blockades of Cuba or Nicaragua. Boycott military cargo, to Chile, South Africa, El Salvador and Israel.

8.INTERNATIONAL LABOR SOLIDARITY – Oppose protectionist trade restricttons. ILWU support to military victory of leftist insurgents in El Salvador. Defend the Palestinians – U.S. Marines, Israelis, French and Italian troops out of Lebanon.

8. 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.

The ‘X’ That Won’t Go Away

[First printed in 1917 West #3 December 1992 http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/West/1917%20West%20%233.html

A phenomenon has swept large parts of the United States. There has been a proliferation of people wearing the letter X, the symbol of Malcolm X, on pants, shoes, shirts, caps, etc. Many celebrities, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and even Arsenio Hall have appeared on national television with the X on their baseball caps. Something is definitely going on when Hall, who once shamelessly bragged about having told a friend to “put his Malcolm X tapes away,” now proclaims in an interview with Denzel Washington that people should read the Autobiography of Malcolm X! Many People are wondering if this is just a fad.

While it is true that many people are walking around with the X on their clothing but little of Malcolm’s story or ideas inside their heads, there is evidence that this is more than a fad. Fads generally do not enjoy four or five years of rising popular interest; the increased sales of Malcolm X books and speeches reveal the interest in Malcolm is beyond the visible fashion image. On a recent tour with Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, Yolanda King, Martin Luther King’s daughter said on national television she was more in agreement with Malcolm X’s philosophy than that of her father.

Why has there been such a resurgence of interest in a man who has been dead for almost twenty-eight years and who was vilified by the bourgeois media during his lifetime? Perhaps the most important reason is the realization by black people that the struggle for liberation in the U.S., which began the slave rebellions of the last century, is not finished. Malcolm, a key figure in the 1960s, made many important statements, observations, and predictions that are still relevant today. For instance his prediction that the mainstream civil rights organizations’ strategy of seeking to integrate black Americans into the existing social order would fail has been powerfully vindicated, and even many of Malcolm’s detractors, like Louis Lomax, have had to concede this.

Although the bourgeois media ignored or slandered Malcolm X during his lifetime, and was much more favorably disposed toward Dr. King because of his preaching of nonviolence and belief in the system, large numbers of black people, for good reason, looked upon Malcolm as an honestly committed man to be respected and revered for his fiery drive for black liberation. Black people know that these qualities are necessary for a successful liberation struggle and, as long as the need to struggle exists, Malcolm X will not fade away.

Great Man

By being sincere and dedicated to the ordinary black people who comprised his audience, Malcolm X built up a trust with his followers that neither the U.S. government nor his detractors were able to take away. He was a brilliant, eloquent and charismatic man who could break down and communicate his ideas on important issues to his audience. He harnessed these abilities and worked to enhance them. For instance, he learned to speed read, which enabled him to expand his knowledge more quickly. His prison transformation from “Detroit Red,” hustler, to Malcolm X, fiery orator, should be an inspiration to all.

With a burning desire, fearless spirit, and tireless energy he played a major role in building the Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI—or “Black Muslims”) from about 5,000 members nationwide to 100,000 between 1954 and 1960. Although the Muslims played no significant role in the political and social struggles against racial oppression that were building during this period, their appeal—as a black-separatist self-help organization—lay not in their apolitical religious cultism but rather in their strident denunciation of the racist reality of American society.

Differences With Elijah Muhammad

For most of his time in the NOI Malcolm was a loyal and uncomplaining follower of Elijah Muhammad. After Malcolm had gained considerable notoriety for the NOI through his columns in Harlem’s Amsterdam News and the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, he did not object when these columns were appropriated by Elijah Muhammad. Nor did he complain when Muhammad Speaks, which he had started from his own basement in New York, containing mostly his own copy, was taken from him and placed under the administration of John Ali in Chicago.

As the NOI grew, a layer of members centered in Chicago around Elijah Muhammad’s family developed a vested interest in the considerable real estate holdings and commercial enterprises which had been financed by the contributions of the membership. Although the enterprises were owned by the NOI, which was tax-exempt because of its status as a religious organization, it was common knowledge that most of them benefitted Elijah Muhammad’s immediate family and their business partners. At the time of his death Elijah Muhammad had amassed a fortune of $25 million (Emerge, April 1992). Elijah Muhammad and his inner circle felt threatened by Malcolm X and his attempts to politicize their organization.

There was an uproar in the black community of Los Angeles when the cops shot down several unarmed Muslims, killing one and paralyzing another, on 27 April 1962. Malcolm saw this as the moment to “go out there now and do what I’ve been preaching all this time,” which was to organize the NOI with all black people against this barbaric attack. He also had strong support from local churches, community activists, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in what was to be mass protest action. Elijah Muhammad stopped all the protest campaigns. According to Louis Lomax, “Malcolm began to smart under charges from militant blacks that he and his group were all talk and no action” (To Kill a Black Man). The fact that no legal assistance was provided by the NOI to the four Black Muslims that went to prison as a result of this incident made matters worse.

Louis Lomax pointed out that:

“Malcolm was consistently pressing Elijah Muhammad for permission to become involved in demonstrations. Each time Malcolm received a flat and unequivocal ‘No!’ It finally came to the point that Elijah ordered Malcolm not to raise the matter again. Malcolm obeyed.”

Black Nationalism Makes Strange Bedfellows

There was a perverted logic in the NOI’s self-satisfied desire to maintain the status quo. Malcolm X explained that in December 1960:

“I was in the home of Jeremiah, the [NOI] minister in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m going to tell you the truth. I sat at the table myself with the heads of the Ku Klux Klan, who at that time were trying to negotiate with Elijah Muhammad so that they could make available to him a large area of land in Georgia or I think it was South Carolina. They had some very responsible persons in the government who were involved in it and who were willing to go along with it. They wanted to make this land available to him so that his program of separation would sound more feasible to Negroes and therefore lessen the pressure that the integrationists were putting upon the white man. I sat there I negotiated it. I listened to their offer. And I was the one who went back to Chicago and told Elijah Muhammad what they had offered.”

    —Malcolm X: The Last Speeches

Malcolm X concluded: “From that day onward the Klan never interfered with the Black Muslim movement in the South.”

This was not the first time that black nationalists, who claimed they were acting on behalf of the persecuted black masses, have made common cause with the most deadly enemies of black people. Marcus Garvey created an uproar in his Universal Negro Improvement Association, when he visited the Ku Klux Klan in June of 1922. In 1985 Louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammad’s successor, personally invited Tom Metzger, former grand dragon of the California KKK, to a rally in Los Angeles at which Metzger donated $100 as “a gesture of understanding;” and today in South Africa we witness the grotesque alliance between Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha and the fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB).

How can these black nationalist misleaders justify fraternizing with the avowed enemies of black people? If they really believe all white people are devils, or some equivalent, that means there are no significant political differences between whites, at least as regards blacks. The logic of this is that a marriage of convenience with white fascists is no worse than an alliance with any other whites. White racism, which justifies and advocates systematic oppression, should not be equated with black nationalism, which is a response to that oppression. There is nevertheless a strange symmetry between the objectives of black nationalists, who want a separate black “nation” and white supremacists pushing segregation.

The FBI and Malcolm X

As chief spokesperson for the NOI, Malcolm had attracted the attention of the FBI. He and many others were aware of the FBI’s surveillance of him and the NOI, but few people are aware of the extent of that surveillance (over 3,600 pages)! Clayborne Carson has contributed a useful and informative service to the public by gathering and compressing a selection of documents from Malcolm X’s enormous FBI file.

In a report dated January 10, 1955 the FBI interviewed Malcolm X and asked him if he would defend the U.S. in the event of a foreign attack. Malcolm X declined to answer. He also declined to answer whether of not he considered himself a citizen of the U.S. (Malcolm X—The FBI File). In contrast to the belly-crawling, flag-waving official leadership of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X was no flag-waving patriot of U.S. imperialism.

In a July 2, 1958 account the FBI, which recognized Malcolm X’s desire to play a leading role in the black movement, designated him a key figure in the NOI (Ibid, p 149). Later that year it had noticed that older members of the NOI were fearful of Malcolm’s radicalism. They even went so far to claim in a statement dated November 17, 1960 that Malcolm X was forming a nucleus within the NOI to take it over.

Elijah had declared that any NOI member that participated in the 1963 civil rights march on Washington would be suspended for 90 days. Malcolm went further: he denounced the march as the “farce on Washington,” taking King and other liberal civil rights leaders to task for making sure that the march was a tame event, in no way hostile to the Kennedy administration. When Malcolm responded to the assassination of John F. Kennedy by noting that it was a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” Elijah Muhammad suspended him from the NOI.

Exit From the Nation of Islam

During his time in the NOI Malcolm tried to close his eyes to the contradiction between the need to struggle against racist injustice and the passive acceptance of the status quo preached by Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X, to his credit, finally recognized that if he was going to play a leading role in the black liberation struggle it would have to be outside the NOI.

Initially his break with the Muslims was cloudy. At the March 1964 press conference he called to announce his departure from Elijah Muhammad’s organization he said: “I still believe that Mr. Muhammad’s analysis of the [race] problem is the most realistic, and that his solution is the best one.” He did not go into the reasons that compelled him to leave the NOI, and expressed reluctance at having to make the move. In an interview with Les Crane on December 12, 1964 he said that he didn’t think he would “contribute anything constructive to go into what caused the split.” Far from encouraging other members to follow his example, he explicitly stated: “my advice to all Muslims is that they stay in the Nation of Islam under the spiritual guidance of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. It is not my desire to encourage any of them to follow me,” (Malcolm—The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, Bruce Perry).

Such statements could only confuse and disorient people who may have looked to Malcolm X for leadership. The rebellious black urban youth who knew of and respected Malcolm X were not about to join any religious sect. They wanted a fighting organization.

But Malcolm X at this time had not developed an understanding of the importance of a clear revolutionary program to attract and organize the most conscious layers of the black liberation movement. This was clearly revealed in his assertion that:

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”

    —Malcolm X: A Man and His Time

Build a Workers Party!

After leaving the Muslims, Malcolm made a pilgrimage to Mecca and toured various newly independent African states. While he was in Africa he commented that:

“The U.S. Peace Corps members are all espionage agents and have a special assignment to perform. They are spies of the American government, missionaries of colonialism and neo-colonialism.”

    —Malcolm X: The FBI File

It was statements like this, along with his attempts to enlist the support of African heads of state to denounce the U.S. government in the United Nations for its mistreatment of American blacks, that led to the FBI’s push for the use of the Logan Act to put Malcolm X behind bars—again. Unfortunately, while Malcolm was correct in situating the black struggle in the U.S. in an international context, he also displayed a certain amount of disorientation on this issue. His faith in the UN, which at the time was seeing an influx of black African states, was totally unjustified. It should have been obvious that the UN was dominated by world imperialism and could take no decisive action against the interests of the U.S. ruling class. Likewise he overestimated the ability of the petty-bourgeois leaders of the new African states to influence or oppose U.S. policy. Despite their claims to independence and even “socialism,” these regimes were never really able to escape the control of the imperialist powers.

Probably the most significant result of Malcolm’s trip to Mecca was the recognition that he had been mistaken to assume that all whites were necessarily and automatically evil and racist. This discovery opened the door to redefining the struggle against racist oppression and, potentially, connecting it to struggle against the capitalist system which produces it. In the last year of his life Malcolm paid tribute to the great abolitionist fighter, John Brown, and stated his willingness to ally with whites like him.

Malcolm’s attempts to build a new organization after his break with the Muslims led Louis Farrakhan to threaten that, “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” But it was not just Elijah Muhammad’s followers who wanted Malcolm out of the picture. Once Malcolm was independent of the Muslims and their religious dogma, he was perceived as a much greater potential danger to the status quo.

For all his talents as a thinker and an inspirational orator, Malcolm X left very little in terms of a tangible political legacy. Because he was in political motion at the time of his death, the legacy of Malcolm X has been claimed by everyone from the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party to black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas.

Liberation for black people cannot come about within capitalist society, which needs and breeds racism as a mechanism of exploitation and control. Black capitalism, advocated by the likes of Farrakhan, is no alternative. Religion is a distraction from the struggle for equality. The creation of a society without racism and exploitation requires a force with the social weight to bring it about. No individual, no matter how serious or talented, can act effectively alone. Black nationalism, which can have a certain appeal in times of social reaction, offers no solutions for the oppressed black masses. Blacks in the United States are not a nation, but rather a color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. Only the working class which, because of its position in capitalist society as the creator of wealth, has both the social weight to overthrow capitalist rule and an objective interest in doing so.

The working class must have its own revolutionary party to accomplish its historic task through linking workers’ struggles to those of other people oppressed by capitalism, including blacks. Such a party must in turn be armed with the correct program, a road map pointing the way forward. As great an individual as V.I. Lenin was, he would not have led the overthrow of capitalism in czarist Russia if he were not part of a mass-based workers party, the Bolshevik Party, with a collective leadership and a program that answered the needs of the masses.

The Bolshevik Tendency, is committed to the task of building such a party, the American section of a reborn Fourth International, the party of world-wide socialist revolution. Our program for black liberation includes calls for a struggle against all manifestations of racism and all racial discrimination; for workers’ defense guards to stop racist violence and to smash the Nazis and Klan; for an end to unemployment through a fight for decent jobs for all; for special worker-run programs to upgrade the positions of women, blacks and other specially oppressed minorities; for open admissions to colleges and universities along with well-funded teacher-student-run programs to guarantee an education to everyone who wants one. As revolutionary socialists we call for a complete break with the Democratic and Republican Parties, the twin parties of capitalism; the expropriation without compensation of basic industry under workers control, and the establishment of a workers state with a democratically planned economy.

We urge all workers, blacks, women, youth and other oppressed peoples inspired by Malcolm X’s heroic fight for black liberation to consider seriously the political program and ideas put forward by the Bolshevik Tendency. Capitalism is in an international depression, and the U.S. economy, which is in a fairly advanced state of decay, is being hit particularly hard. The election of Bill Clinton, the governor of a “right-to-work” state, who interrupted his campaign for the Democratic nomination to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged black man, will not improve the lot of ordinary people in this country, regardless of color. Capitalism has long outlived its usefulness and can only offer oppression, environmental deterioration, racism, sexism, poverty, hunger and, eventually, world war. We are in complete solidarity with Karl Marx who said at the end of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Brandon Gray’s Resignation Letter from the International Bolshevik Tendency

For the interest of our readers we are posting Brandon Gray’s 7/17/10 resignation from the International BolshevikTendency (7/17/10). Copied from

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34713289/Resignation-From-the-International-Bolshevik-Tendency

While we do not agree with all the arguments made here, it presents a truthful picture of the current state of the IBT. We will be posting a more in depth commentary on it. Please check back soon.

**************

I hereby resign from the International Bolshevik Tendency. I have considered this action carefully and have concluded that it is no longer possible for me to remain under the discipline of the organization.

Our organization was guilty of abstentionism towards the solidarity demonstrations occurring throughout the city following the G20 Summit. This came on the heels of our cowardly performance on Saturday 6/26/10 at which we failed to distinguish ourselves from the trade union bureaucrats by passively standing by as they worked with the police to isolate the more militant activists committed to confronting the security fence. Contrary to the leadership’s hyper-cautious approach, it was an acceptable risk to participate in the solidarity demonstrations and at past protests we did not automatically flee when police started using repression against protesters. Nearly all the Left groups and trade union bureaucrats marched around mindlessly in a circle and then went running to their homes Saturday afternoon when the police attacked our basic bourgeois democratic rights. As a result the best and brightest youth suffered with little to no tactical or political support and were needlessly isolated. A smart and full engagement by our organization could have created real opportunities for us in the future to win over activists and youth to the banner of socialist revolution. Instead, by abstaining, we damaged our reputation in the eyes of the very people we need to win over to build a revolutionary party.

Contrary to the contentions of other comrades, there was never supposed to be a police line at Queen Street and when the TU march reached the intersection at Spadina Avenue. Comrades later noted that they saw individuals trying to pass by the line, as well as a commotion and several people screaming to not return to Queen’s Park, but instead to remain at the line. Despite being near the head of the march, under Tom Riley’s tactical leadership we failed to utter so much as a peep of protest against the TU bureaucrats’ immediate retreat. We were in a valuable strategic position that may have allowed us to agitate amongst the crowd, and encourage people to stay at the intersection and tie up the bulk of the riot police while the full 25,000 people streamed by us. Our contingent would not have been exposed as we filtered out the good from the bad and established a contingent at the police line that could have pushed the line or joined the breakaway protest as we did in Quebec City in 2001. In our local meeting before the protests it was acknowledged that we would be facing such a decision and were supposed to prepare for it. We did nothing but obediently follow the TU bureaucrats and as a result the breakaway march went it alone and was more vulnerable to identification and arrest upon reaching Queen’s Park where many, including us, had already dispersed.

Our chant “2, 4, 6, 8, We don’t want a police state” was taken up by many protesters, the bourgeois press reported this, and in protests later that week it had made it onto the chant sheets that were distributed to all protesters by liberal organizers. This, along with the general notion that many wanted to march south of Queen Street, indicates that it was not unreasonable to argue we may have influenced many to form a sizable contingent capable of playing a role in the more militant demonstrations, and assisted our comrades elsewhere.

In response to Canadian Labour Congress President Ken Georgetti’s pro-police letter condemning ‘vandals’ who left their march, about 250 officials, stewards, retirees, and rank and file activists published their own letter condemning Georgetti. They stated that after, “the ‘Peoples First’ march, many of us remained on the streets throughout the weekend contesting the unprecedented militarization of our city and the G20 neoliberal agenda.” Sadly, in this particular instance, the IBT is not in this camp, but rather, that of Georgetti. They note that, “thousands mobilized in front of police headquarters on June 28th in solidarity with the hundreds of activists still being detained and our unions and union flags were absent.” Of course, as our comrades well know, our placards were also absent. Even the overtly opportunist Socialist Action (Usec) displayed their banner. The union members’ retaliatory letter ends with a concluding statement that the IBT comrades should take to heart, “we will not and cannot win the struggle we face against the violent onslaught of neoliberalism by abandoning our allies and our communities in the wake of a massive crackdown on dissent.” That is exactly what Georgetti and the IBT have done and the refusal to acknowledge this error speaks volumes about our organization.

Several groups ranging from Anarchist to Maoist to the liberal NOII had publicly called for all to breakaway from the TU march and confront the fence which our IEC were well aware of. After testing the line in several places as we marched west on Queen Street and upon the bulk of the TU march reaching the intersection, the breakaway demonstration doubled back down Queen Street where there were less riot police and cut a path close to the fence before circling back to Queens Park. We contributed to their isolation by not doing our job of exposing TU bureaucrat betrayal and the riot police were able to close in on them as they reached the park. At the time I was severely disappointed as we marched up Spadina Avenue away from the best militants, but followed my leaders due to misplaced confidence in their experience and skill, despite their approach being, as our most senior comrade, HK, later described, as “conservative to the extreme.” However, I no longer will be making that mistake again. The continued abstention throughout the following week further deepened my dismay.

On my own personal initiative I and other activists spent Tuesday 6/29/10 supplying political prisoners with food and drink as they were released on bail. None of the Toronto left groups were there. Later the next day I learned via email that our main international leader Tom Riley spent that evening playing baseball with conservative gentlemen that were quite upset about how the police brutally trounced on civil rights, wanted to talk politics and had been phoning politicians. While this was taken as a reminder that “almost anything is possible”, it still did not dawn on him to leave the baseball game and join me to help those continuing to suffer under such repression. While comrades are entitled to their personal time, this sort of charge has been used against others inside and outside the group and therefore Riley should be held to his own standards.

Our characterization of the breakaway protesters was aimed at discrediting them by writing them off as powerless youth looking for a quick solution and undertaking isolated, individualist acts of brainless symbolic violence. I think this is satisfying to our leadership because it excuses their own abstention. I think our group is all too content with sitting at home regurgitating “For Grynszpan” for its seemingly Trotskyist orthodoxy regardless of whether it has any bearing on the tactics used. These protesters hurt nobody while Grynszpan shot a man dead. Equating the breakaway protest with ‘left-wing-terrorism’ by any stretch was dangerous, stupid and should have never happened. While this kind of direct action protest is insufficient to “pave the way” to revolution on its own, it does work to a limited extent in popularizing a subjectively revolutionary perspective for many young people. I do not think that any of the breakaway protesters thought that smashing some bank windows and torching cop cars was going to create an overthrow of capitalism nor was it done because it was emotionally satisfying. Rather, I think that those youth did what they felt was necessary at the time, however poorly conceived, despite being terrified throughout the ordeal. Our leadership’s failure to recognize this is endemic of a larger problem.

At every step of the way the immediate impulse by leading members of the group was to write off any potential gains that would be had by intervening vigorously in the Toronto G20 demonstrations and merely retreat to the safety of home.

Our silent and quick retreat Saturday and subsequent abstention is in stark contrast with our performance at the April 2001 FTAA summit in Quebec City during which we fully engaged with the breakaway protest that confronted the fence and stood shoulder to shoulder with those young militants as an incredible barrage of gas was fired on the crowd. At the time we denounced the Trade Union tops and media who “by playing up distinctions between the ‘violent’ protesters at the fence and the far more numerous ‘peaceful’ ones in the official march, the media sought to marginalize the young radicals who stood up to the cops.” [1] This time we found ourselves dutifully following the bureaucrats and internally scorning the breakaways as childish adventurists bent on mindless violence. One must therefore begin to draw the conclusion that our group has suffered significant degeneration during the decade or so since.

When I raised these serious criticisms, all but our comrade in Ireland immediately and mindlessly lined up behind our leadership before even addressing my points. A variety of personal slanders was used to discredit my opinion and I was shocked at how the overwhelming majority of our group could only view dissent as anger and hostility toward our dear leader Tom Riley. Any attempt to sympathize with my perspective was hedged in the conception that I was childishly fetishizing arrest and confrontation with the police despite making it clear that I was doing no such thing. Such unhealthy internal life confirmed my worst suspicions about our organization.

I formally joined the IBT in the spring of 2009 after being a sympathizer working with the group for two years in Toronto. The high level of programmatic education earned my confidence and respect despite the small size of the group relative to others. However, when the resignation of Sam Trachtenberg [2] in New York came to light I took some time to investigate his case and delayed applying for full-time membership. The political criticisms raised by Sam. were never explained to me. Instead, damning personal attacks were made against his credibility. Personal health issues were ruthlessly exploited and distorted in order to discredit him and avoid articulating any of his criticisms. Unable to recognize these attacks for what they were, I submitted my application and after being accepted, I brought up the fact that I had taken a good look at Sam’s case before finalizing my decision to join. I was told he was paranoid and delusional, and that it was a good thing he left so the leadership didn’t have to work even harder to push him out. I regret that I did not contact Sam, at the time to get his side of the split but in my defense, my personal ties to the younger comrades in the TBT local influenced me to leave the issue in the past though I kept my suspicions in the back of my mind for a day when more information would come to light.

At a 15 April 2010 local meeting it was suggested that a comrade who roughly fit my own description in terms of my limited relationship with Sam “befriend” him on a social media site in order to monitor him and relay information back to the leadership. I was the only person to comment on that point, stating that I would be the best candidate for such a job but that I don’t feel comfortable with it; that it felt dishonest and wrong. Riley merely shrugged and dismissed my objections by saying it wasn’t so bad and I shouldn’t have a problem with it. This was another weird side of the organization to which I responded with dismay. Could Samuel Trachtenberg be accurately describing the internal workings of my group? The validity of his case had grown with time and now a concrete example of unhealthy leadership practices had been demonstrated to me. I must now conclude that a disgusting campaign of lies and slander was used against Sam in order to push him out after he made various correct criticisms of the leadership. I now agree with Sam’s criticisms and urge comrades to look at them with open eyes.

As everyone in the IBT knows, membership has continued to decline since Sam in New York left the group. The dropping off of long-time supporters such as L. in NYC and the dismissal of W.’s attempt to transfer to our local was merely brushed aside because they were “old” and “useless.” An appropriate political explanation was not given. Our London local is constantly trashed for various reasons that seem unfair to me. More recently it has been announced that we should expect the “likely” loss of A. in Ireland who is a long-time comrade of the group and probably one of our most energetic members in terms of adapting to tactical realities and functioning with keen initiative. I recognized at the time that it was no accident that yet another of our most energetic, engaging and least abstentionist comrades who was working outside of the direct supervision of either Riley or Logan had become a target for being pushed out. The only value this comrade had according to our local and international leader was that he is one of our few comrades who can maintain the website, hence, he will be kept around as long as is convenient. It is also no coincidence that he was my only supporter when I raised my criticisms.

After recruiting a couple members in recent years, in large part due to the interventions of their youngest comrades, the TBT local is now shrinking back down in size and everywhere else our membership continues to contract under the burden of a bureaucratic leadership. Contact sessions have consistently broken down after initially showing promise and there seems to be little expectation of winning over Toronto leftists to the group in the foreseeable future. Our performance during the G20 protests has only made our prospects worse.

Some time ago, when it was indicated that the fusion talks with a group of contacts in Latin America were probably not going to work out because the contacts had demanded we do what our leadership described as “OCAP-type entry work” I was unsure if this was inevitable. As a rank and file member of the IBT I was never privy to any discussions with these comrades and news of our progress with them only came from our senior leaders who constantly portrayed them less as dedicated revolutionaries, and more as naïve children with silly ideas floating around in their heads, despite the fact that they were working under much harsher conditions than us. This is an even more bureaucratic repeat of the way our leadership botched similar fusion talks in the past.

It is amazing how much the 9/5/81 resignation letter to the Spartacist League by HK [3], our most senior comrade, applies to our situation

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

When internal critics struggling to give criticism in order to better build the organization are branded as traitors and apolitical slanders are used to discredit them, honest revolutionaries cannot continue to remain silent.

There is an obvious pattern of degeneration present in the tradition of Jim Robertson’s brand of Trotskyism that we stand in. After abortion rights in Pennsylvania were restricted by Governor George Casey amidst the presidential elections of 1992, New York’s Village Voice newspaper gave Casey a platform to explain how a liberal can be anti-abortion. About one hundred angry protesters, including the now defunct New York Bolshevik Tendency, confronted Casey in order to disrupt his reactionary diatribe and draw attention to the legal lynching of political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal who continues to sit on death row in Pennsylvania. The IBT wrote the Spartacist League a letter criticizing them for sending a sales team to sell at the door for half an hour before leaving, without ever entering the building. The protest successfully called attention to Mumia’s case and stole the spotlight from Casey. Our letter asked the SL “how could you have passed up such a perfect opportunity to demonstrate in action the politics you profess on paper?” to which we provided our own explanation:

“We have noted in the past that the SL’s autocratic internal regime has created organization ‘permeated with servility at one pole and authoritarianism at the other,’ (as Harry Turner characterized Gerry Healy’s organization in 1966). Such organizations produce people accustomed to operating according to a script, in situations where all the variables can be controlled. When they venture into the big world, where events can sometimes take an unexpected turn, the limitations of such training are thrown in sharp relief. Did you shun the protest against Casey for fear of participating in an action you could not fully control? Or perhaps because the presence of other left groups would have prevented the Spartacist League from claiming exclusive credit? And does Workers Vanguardignore the events of October 2 out of embarrassment over this shameful abstentionism? [4]

Considering this in light of our performance during the Toronto G20 protests, one has to wonder how we can also find ourselves at the end of such charges.

During the CUNY student protests of 1995-7 [5], another symptom of organizational degeneration was demonstrated by the Spartacist League in a tactical betrayal of working-class youths on 23 March 1995. Roughly 15,000 students of all ages, including our NYC branch, demonstrated in front of City Hall and suffered mass arrests and high volume pepper spray to prevent them from then marching to Wall Street. As the confrontation rapidly heightened and the predominantly black and working class students began staging a mass sit in inside City Hall Park, the Spartacist League’s sales team quickly packed up their lit table and fled. This cowardly flinch was widely noted and commented on amongst CUNY’s student activists, ruining the SL’s reputation for years to come.

The “staid Marxists” of the Spartacist League forced us to address their “Politics of Chicken” yet another time [6] when they abstained from the 1984 anti-Moral Majority protests in the Bay Area;

“We will explain that, fearful of state repression, you were too cowardly to join the thousand or more anti-Falwell protesters; that we are the ones who put forward the Trotskyist program to those who had assembled to oppose this sinister rise of the reactionary “Moral Majority.”

If history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, then what do we say about the third and fourth time? At minimum there is an unhealthy pattern occurring that stretches back through the IBT and into the SL. Lifelong permanent leaders grow to dominate the organizations they create which they take down with them. This is a problem that cannot simply be remedied by creating a new copy of the old group.

Sadly, our own outgrowth from Robertson’s school of party building has followed the same path as each subsequent challenger to Riley and Logan’s leadership fell away over the past decades. While Robertson had his style, his protégées carry on the tradition of manipulation and maneuvering in their own personal style of “informal sanctions” and behind the scenes maneuvers against opponents to retain control of the group. While Robertson’s group managed to partially break out of their marginalization in the early 1970s, our own group has not and almost 3 decades later our publications have been plagued with the same sort of publication infrequency and delay found in the early years of the Spartacist League as the leadership control and monopoly of even the most minor detail of organizational life has suffocated and stifled the ability of new comrades to learn and develop.

It is far past due for every honest comrade to speak out against the organizational degeneration inside the International Bolshevik Tendency. I hope I will not be the last to do so.

-Brandon Gray

[1] FTAA Demonstration in Quebec: For Socialist Globalization!; 1917 No. 24, 2002

http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no24/socialist_globalization.html

[2] The Road Out of Rileyville; 9/25/08

[3] Resignation from the Spartacist League

[4] A Letter WV Didn’t Print; by Jim Cullen 11/02/92

http://www.bolshevik.org/Leaflets/WV%20letter%201992.html

[5] IBT CUNY Documents 1995-1997

[6] ET Protests Moral Majority—SL Abstains: A Case of Mistaken Identity, ET Bulletin #4, May 1985

http://www.bolshevik.org/ETB/ETB4/ETB4.htm#Identity

Black Family Firebombed in Chicago

UAW Local Sets Up Labor/Black Defense Guard

[Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 67, 25 April 1975]

CHICAGO, April 18 — C. B. Dennis, black UAW union member, has been trying to move into the white neighborhood of Broadview. His house was firebombed and stoned repeatedly. But tonight, like every night for the past week, the Dennis family home is being protected by an integrated defense guard of his union brothers. Local 6 of the United Auto Workers, International Harvester, voted unanimously at the membership meeting Sunday to set up the defense guard.

At a time when there is a dramatic increase in racist terror against blacks all across the country, the UAW local’s action is a powerful example of what can be done to stop the night riders. And it is the best possible answer to those who preach reliance on the bourgeois cops by hiding behind the despairing lament, “workers won’t defend blacks against racist attacks — there’s no solution except to call on the troops”!

The attacks, which have caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the house and prevented the family from moving in, are part of a pattern of terror against blacks in white areas here, where right-wingers have been trying to stir up race hatred. In another neighborhood on the Southwest Side, four black families have been forced to live under a virtual state of siege, with the National Socialist White People’s Party (Nazis) all but taking direct credit for the firebombings (see article in this issue).

The first volunteers from Local 6, including Local president Norman Roth, were at posts outside the damaged house within hours of the union meeting. C. B. Dennis, who is a repairman at the Melrose Park IH plant and has been working there for 15 years, was interviewed at the house by Workers Vanguard. He said he had been unable to get adequate police protection.

“They said they would come by 20 minutes out of the hour. But that’s no protection at all,” Dennis told WV, observing that patrols had been by only once in two hours that night. “This is the best thing we could do,” he said, referring to the volunteer guards, “I was really proud of the union today. I think it’s a good thing.” An older black worker who was listening agreed, saying he could recall no similar action by the Local in its history. He likened it to the defense activities of the anti-eviction campaigns in which he had participated in the 1930’s.

The UAW Local’s defense action received considerable attention in Chicago. Articles appeared in both daily papers on Monday, and Dennis and Local 6 officers were interviewed on two television stations Monday evening. At least three radio reports were also made.

On the second night, the union guards were heckled by passers-by in the area, and a neighbor two doors down shouted at them to “get the hell out” of there. Another white resident, however, had earlier come over to talk to Dennis for 20 minutes, expressing sympathy and pointing out that some of the rocks had hit his house as well.

It is clear that the racial polarization runs deep but the entire neighborhood has not been terrorized. Local 6 defense volunteers speak in terms of the need to prevent another Boston-type racist mobilization in Chicago. There have been no new attacks as the teams of union volunteers have been guarding the house daily. Members vow the guards will remain “as long as necessary” to ensure that the family is safely moved into the house.

The attacks on black families have mounted during an organizing offensive by fascist and racist groupings in Chicago. Besides the attacks on four black families on the Southwest Side, there were earlier attacks on other families in Broadview. The Nazi Party ran candidates for alderman in five wards in the last elections, and the Ku Klux Klan has also been actively organizing lately.

These scum thrive on the despair generated by heavy inflation and unemployment in the working class, and their efforts to divide the workers along race lines can only benefit the employers. Resolute action such as that undertaken by Local 6 could, if followed through and adopted by the rest of the labor movement, prevent future attacks and quickly lay the tiny but deadly dangerous fascist movement in the grave where it belongs.

The third attack on the Dennis house, which occurred two days prior to the union meeting, particularly incensed many members of the Local. The motion to set up the volunteer union defense guards was made by a member of the Labor Struggle Caucus, which had distributed a newsletter in the plant before the meeting calling for a militant response to the wave of racist terror. The Labor Struggle Caucus is a grouping in Local 6 with a class-struggle program which has recently been active in successful struggles against a company leafleting ban in the plant and against a move to extend terms for local union officers to three years. Its resolution at the Sunday meeting supported the “struggle for integration of blacks in housing, education, and jobs,” as “vital interests of the entire working class,” and denounced reliance on the police, who “serve the employers and cannot be depended upon to defend the rights of blacks or of the trade unions.” The motion also called for defense activities to be extended to the black families on the Southwest Side, as well as Broadview.

Following the meeting, the Local issued a special number of its newsletter. Although this was reportedly not very well distributed, a special meeting held Tuesday night for volunteers was attended by 25 members from all political groupings in the Local, as well as by a television crew, which filmed the entire proceedings. President Roth chaired and took a lot of criticism for the inefficient distribution of the special Local newsletter which, it was said, kept the meeting from being larger.

He also relented under pressure on his earlier objection to the formation of a special committee to organize the defense guards. A steering committee was then set up under the chairmanship of the by-laws committee chairman. It includes two members of the Labor Struggle Caucus, a member of the syndicalist Workers Voice group, and other Local members. Members of the steering committee immediately began signing up volunteers in the plant.

Support for the defense activity was forthcoming, at least verbally, from the UAW officialdom in the area, including regional director Robert Johnston. The special Local newsletter asserted, “These efforts are in accord with our UAW principles and policies.”

On the other hand, the UAW officials seemed primarily concerned to get government officials to intervene, thereby relieving the union of its responsibility. At the Dennis house on Sunday night, Roth told WV of his intention “to exert every political pressure possible to try to get the authorities to do something.” He further claimed that “In some instances, the police have given some protection.”

Roth, who is a prominent supporter of Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy, the trade-union group backed by the reformist Communist Party, not surprisingly places confidence in the bosses’ state. Yet neither courts, cops, troops nor National Guard will protect blacks against racist victimization. This can be clearly seen in the Boston situation, where the courts are conciliating the racists and have taken a giant step backward on the busing plan.

In Boston there have been two sharply counterposed lines on how to defend the endangered blacks from racist attack. On the one hand there are the liberals, joined by the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party, who have called for federal troops. Against this dead-end reliance on the armed forces of the capitalist state, the Spartacist League has called for integrated working class defense. Both in Chicago and Boston or elsewhere, labor/black defense guards could quickly eliminate racist terrorists, neutralize wavering elements in the white population and eventually defuse racist mobilizations.

The Local 6 action could be the start of a general initiation of militant, class-struggle response to racist terror in the Chicago area, but only if the whole Local, leadership included, works to undertake it seriously and spread the idea to other locals. If the Local 6 leadership instead spreads illusions in the state, the way will be left open for a worsening racial polarization. The guard must not be ended prematurely, on the advice or promise of the cops or city officials that defense will be provided by the state.

The recent action of the Local 6 members stands as an inspiring example for all trade unionists and black militants: black and white workers can unite and organize to fend off racist terror. It will take an all-sided fight for class struggle policies and leadership throughout the labor movement to turn this example into the rule. But an important beginning has been made.

Seize the Opportunity!

Revolutionary Regroupment

[First printed in Spartacist # 14, November-December 1969]

The pressing need in this country for a united Leninist vanguard could never be more heavily underscored than at the present moment. In the past two years, it is clear, the major direction of social motion has been toward the right, with political and ethnic-racial polarization increasing. The country is perhaps more sharply divided now than at any tIme since the  early years of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Flag-waving patrIotism with its blatant racist overtones is back in style; the Nixon administration has reassembled the Bourbon Dixiecrat/reactionary Republican alliance; “law and order” is the catchword; and the Black Panther Party faces a government attempt at root-and:branch destruction. All sections of society are deeply split over Viet Nam policy, giving rise to the seeming abberation of the anti-war bourgeoisie’s Viet Nam Moratorium. In the midst of thIs deepening polarization the the working class, rebellious and in motion, is turning to reactionary demagogues lIke Wallace for lack of a revolutionary alternative.

In general, the U.S. left-wing movement, pragmatic and opportunist, has moved to the right in keeplng with the general drift. However, in reflexIve reactIon to the prevaling mood, an impulse to the left has found expression within most. of the organized radical groups. Much recent evident fracturing has resulted from leftward-moving internal forces clashing with stand-pat or opportunist groupings with-In their organizations. The Spartacist tendency itself crystallized in opposition to the Socialist Workers Party’s capitUlation to Castroism, Black Nationalism and middle-class politics which marked its transformation from revolutionary Trotskyism to revisionism. In fact right/left tensions have recently appeared even in the remains of such fossilized reformist groups as the Socialist Party and Communist Party and even the Socialist Labor Party has had two recent substantial breakaways.

But perhaps the clearest expression of social motion refracted into left-wing politics is the SDS split in Chicago. The split took place over perhaps the two most fundamental issues facing revolutionaries today -the Black question and an orientation toward the workmg class. The result was a right/left split which has driven home to thousands of would-be revolutionaries the imperative necessity of political struggle and clarification. The winner in the SDS dispute was the Boston SDS, whose non-exclusionism embodied a recognition of this basic principle of political conduct. However, the behavior of the right wing-already split into violently hostile rival factions, the “RevolutIonary Youth Movement” and the “Weathermen” has undoubtedly served to disorient and demoralize many young radicals and drive them out of political activity.

Groupings like the Boston SDS and its Worker-Student Alliance caucus, and left tendencies in other organizations, are open to revolutionary politics. But, simple gut-level “leftism” and a crude working-class perspective only pose the question. Both major factIons in SDS have attempted to go beyond mindless activism toward a Marxist programmatic solutIon, yet large sectIons of them appear unable to reach beyond an arnazed rediscovery of the arch betrayers of the communist movement, Stalin and his various epigones! Nor was this abysmal nonsense separated out by an otherwIse clarifying, if unfortunate, split: the class-conscious WSA is led by the ProgressIve Labor Party, whose ambIvalence toward its most recent impulse toward a proletarian revolutionary line- places it in the excruciating. contradiction of maintaining Mao and Stalin as official heroes while often surreptitiously (and opportunistically) sweeping into the dustbin the grosser revisionist practices most characteristic of these self-same idols! (e.g., the bloc of four classes, the theory of the two-stage revolution, peasant-oriented “Third Worldism,” the popular front, violence. against left critics). An oscillation between a proletarian impulse and the tired old politics of Stalinism is the inevitable result of seeking a revolutionary practice in the anti-revolutionary dogma of Maoism. In fact, in the idiocies of Rudd’s Weathermen or Avakian’s Revolutionary Union, PL can see the journey to the Maoist shrine down the same path PL once unambiguously walked, and only marvel that these new Red Guards are more orthodox than they!

But PL is by no means the only organization with contradictions in its make-up. A group like the “third camp” International Socialists, like its sometime ally the Labor Committee of L. Marcus, can draw in young radicals on the basis of a revolutionary facade, although in essential thrust both groups might be best described as the extreme left wing of social democracy.

Left-Communist Regroupment

It would be sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist to passively accept a situation which allows would-be Marxists to persist in following a program which falls qualitatively short of a revolutionary line. To reverse this process, we call for political and theoretical polarization of the ostensibly revolutionary groupings, leading ultimately to a left-communist regroupment of all organizations, factions, tendencies and individuals who stand on an anti-revisionist Marxist program, toward the formation of a Leninist vanguard party. The objective preconditions for such a process are, we believe, abundantly fulfilled; however, the subjective desire to transcend the existing organizational lineups is manifestly lacking on the part of many of those who should seek such a regroupment. And the opportunity is transitory.

What “Regroupment” Means

It should not be thought that a call for regroupment means a cessation of political and theoretical struggle; on the contrary, only a conscious strategy of increased polarization separating the future cadre of the Marxist movement from the opportunists and garbage will make any future unity feasible. By analogy, we might say that perhaps the most deserving victim of the SDS split was the postulate-an ideological cornerstone of the New Left-that fundamental political divisions of an earlier era and other movements could be casually relegated to the scrap heap.

For ignoring history carries no guarantee history will reciprocate in like manner! After the Communist Party of France sold out the revolutionary upheaval of May 1968, many of the outlawed groups to the left of the CP felt the need for unity to counterpose a mass working-class party to the Stalinists. At this juncture a great opportunity was derailed, as the Lutte Ouvriere tendency compromised themselves fatally. Rather than proposing unity on the basis of a proletarian Marxist program (that is, the Leninist method of splits and fusions) they retreated to a search for the lowest common denominator, gratuitously abandoning their political positions in favor of the hoped for programless collective. Rather than unity this brought chaos and a swelling of the ranks of the revisionists within the Trotskyist movement; in the bargain LO actually placed themselves to the right of the revisionists.

Mutual Amnesty

Such a “unity” is of course no unity at all, but merely an ultimately defective strategy for an unprincipled coalition for the purpose of dodging political issues, a mutual amnesty from the testing in practice of competing theories and programs. Speaking of his own struggle within the Russian movement between his own faction and a grouping of “pro-party Mensheviks,” Lenin stated that the task facing his group was to organize militants around “a definite party line.” “Unity,” he said further, “is inseparable from its ideological foundation.” The political differences which had formerly existed between Lenin and the “pro-party Mensheviks” were resolved in the course of extended common work and theoretical struggle, as he had anticipated. And while Plekhanov and a few other unreconstructed leaders of this Menshevik grouping soon broke with the Leninists, the bulk of its rank and file came over squarely to the revolutionaries. It was precisely this fusion in 1912 which hardened the political separation and forged the revolutionary faction into the Bolshevik party. This fusion was not different in kind from the infinitely more famous entry of Trotsky’s Mezhrayontsi (InterDistrict group) into Lenin’s party in the summer of 1917, which set the stage for the successful October Revolution which followed it.

United Front Tactic

In the past few months the left has found itself bombarded with calls for “united actions,” for a lessening of “factionalism” and, so far as SDS is concerned, an end to the pitched battles between competing tendencies. It is ironic but no doubt typical that such calls for an increase in political consqiousness have emanated from exactly those people who have done their damnedest over the years to ridicule and destroy that consciousness whose lack they now bemoan (as, for example, the Guardian, whose shameless “reportage of the SDS split continued their whitewash of earlier efforts by the old SDS leadership to purge PL from their organization).

“Unity of action” among left orgaizations-when there is a real basis of political agreement on the specific issue-is essential to the crystaIlizatiod of a revolutionary vanguard. United fronts as formulated by Lenin and Trotsky had as their main goal the regroupment of both the cadre and the rank and file of non-communist workers’ organizations into the communist party, by demonstrating in action that only the communists were willing to carry the struggles through to the end. The slogan of the united front was “march separately, strike together” meaning that these groups cooperate against the common enemy, but were not politically subordinated either to each other or to a common organization.

The class line is decisive here. Revisionists try to subordinate the working class to the liberal bourgeoisie or other sectors of the ruling class by means of popular fronts. Thus the CP, under the slogan of an “anti-monopoly coaIition, has fought the emergence of a labor party by supporting liberal Democrats against “reactionaries”; the Black Panther Party, panicked and disoriented by fierce government repression and lacking the bulwark of ideological clarity, calls for a “united front against fascism,” a cover for capitulation to the CP in order to seek as allies the “respectable” liberals-that force which willingly abets and apologizes for their persecution!; the SWP ferociously opposes the introduction of anti-imperialst, pro-socialist politics into their seemgly endless aggregate of classless “peace” actions while throwing open the door to politicians like McCarthy and Lindsay. The purpose of all such popuar fronts is to blur political issues. A revolutionary regroupment must forthrIghtly stand on a decisive repudiation of these and like betrayals.

Political Basis

As our contribution to furthering a process of principled regroupment of revolutionaries, we raise the following political points as the basis of such a reegroupment:

1. For Democratic Rights Within the Workers’ Movement!

The task of the left is to fight for working-class consciousness. Consistent with thIs aim must be the repudiation of gangsterism, which substitutes physical for political confrontation. Exclusionism (and the “cult of violence” so typical of the frenzied petty-bourgeoisie) exposes its practitioners as afraid that their politics will not stand the test of open poItlcal debate and competition in action.

Concommitantly, the left must repudiate the method of oversimplification and slander against ideological opponents. To attack those with different programs as subjectively “racist,” ‘counter-revolutionaries” “police agents” “proto-fascists” etc. is to obscure the issues and play into the hands of the anti-communists _ e.g., social democrats, pro-capitalist liberals etc.- whose pet attack against the ostensIble revolutionaries has always been that the pro-Leninist left is “as bad as the right wing,” “only the reverse side of the coin,” etc. This is not to downgrade the necessity to struggle against wrong politics, which certainly serve objectively to disorient and weaken the revolutionary cause. But it is a far cry from this to the allegation -always so appealing to those whose political educatlon has been in the Stalinist movement -that opponent organizations and indivlduals are subjectively trying to do the work of the enemy. Likewise, regardless of political disagreement, all honest militants must mobilize for the defense of other left-wing tendencies against reactionary terrorism or bourgeois repression.

Revolutionaries must fight the imposition of organizational separations where political differences no longer hold sway. All organizations claiming adherence to revolutionary principles must declare their willingness to participate in and actively initiate united actions where political agreement exists, and must refuse to permIt necessary political polemic and criticism to be construed as a bar to principled united fronts.

2. For a ‘Working-Class Orientation!

The basis of a revolutionary perspective must be the reaffirmation of Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding ofproletarian revolution as the only feasible model. Would-be revolutionaries must forthrightly reject the GuevarIst-type “peasant guerrilla road to socialism” and the petty-bourgeois nationalism of bureaucratic Stalinist leaderships.

The central tactic in fighting for communist hegemony in the working class must be an orientation toward buildingfractions within the trade union movement, rather than toward the doomed sterile approach of abstract propagandism from the outside propounded by the SLP, Marcus’ Labor Committee and others. The concept of transitional demands- i.e., demands whIch lead to revolutionary consciousness and are realizable only through struggle- is vital here in avoiding the otherwIse inevitable frantic oscillation between minimal economist tail-ending of the labor bureaucracy and face-saving ultra-revolutionary rhetoric. RevolutIonarIes must fight, against the intervention of the capitalist state in the trade unions, both directly (as an “ImpartIal” arbIter of disputes between the corrupt labor bureaucrats and the rank and file) and indirectly through the class collaborationist of the bureaucrats. The reliance of the workers, on supposedly “prolabor” capitalist politiclans must be broken by fighting. for independent working-class politIcal actIon.

3. Defeat Black Nationalism by Class Struggle Politics!

Several. groupings on the left found themselves in substantIal agreement in condemning the recent pro-CP turn of the Black Panthers. In general these groups have also come – unwillingly and after a hIstory of opportunism on the questIon- to a realization of the necessity to break with the dead end Black Nationalism of the sort slavishly tail-ended by RYM and the SWP. The petty-bourgeoIs separatIst, anti-class approach of these demagogues has assisted in compoundmg the racism of the white working dass and drIving natural class allies further from each other. Likewise the classless demand of “community control does not remain classless in a class society and can be infused with simple reactionary content as well as gutless Populism.

Yet aspiring revolutlonarIes must utilize in the struggle against Black Nationalist illusions the recognition of Lenin’s dictum that the chauvinism of the oppressed is not IdentIcal to the chauvinism of the oppressor. Revolutionaries must transcend any impulse toward colorblind, oversImplIfied “workerism” in favor of a sensitivity to the pervasive special oppression of black workers.

4. For a Class Line on the War!

In the past virtually every orgamzatlon has climbed on the bandwagon of opportunist, middle-class anti-war politics, although none has exceeded the shameless machinations of the ex-Trotskyist SWP. Similarly, the left let itself be intimidated by the overwhelming mood of moralistic, anti-draft “resistance” confrontationism, refusing to raise the alternative of anti-war struggle in the army among working-class draftees until the creation willy-nilly of massive anti-war sentiment among G.I.s themselves forced the issue.

Those who are sincere in their anticapitalist intentions must break from their past mistakes as they would have the working class break from its misleaders. They must learn from the spectacle of avowed revolutionaries demanding a classless “peace” and catering to the social chauvinism of “Bring Our Boys Home Now” the necessity for a policy of revolutionary defeatism toward imperialism and a strategy’ of linking the so-called “war madness” to an understanding of the capitalist system with a program of workingclass- oriented anti-war demands, to break anti-war militants from middle class liberalism to proletarian intransigence.

5. For Internatioinalism!

Those who recognize the nature of capitalism as an international system must give more than’ lip service to the need for an international revolutionary movement to fight it. They must condemn the pragmatic know-nothing anti-internationalism of such groups as the Labor Committee, and also the slavish worship of what is which leads the RYM-Weatherman mob to betray those they profess to “serve” by issuing blank checks to the Stalinist mis-leaders of the “Third World.” They must carry further their condemnation of revisionism and recognize it as the inevitable result of a belief in “Socialism in One Country,” as the national bureaucracies desperately bargain away other revolutions in exchange for temporary curtailment of imperialism’s appetites toward the gains of their own. The urgent need for communist unity against imperialism presupposes political revolution in the deformed workers states to replace Stalinist nationalism with the revolutionary will of the international working class.

6. For a Vanguard Party!

The theoretical and organizational continuity of ‘the revolutionary movement cannot be preserved except through a Leninist vanguard. Without an internationalist vanguard party the spontaneous revolutionary aspirations of the working masses cannot effect the overthrow of capitalism. Class-conscious revolutionaries agreed on the essentials of principle and program must agree to join together in a democratic and’ centralist collective of those united in struggle on the basis of the above points.

Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay

by Leon Trotsky (1940)

[First Published in English: Fourth International [New York], Vol.2 No.2, February 1941, pp.40-43. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/tu.htm ]

(The manuscript of the following article was found in Trotsky’s desk. Obviously, it was by no means a completed article, but rather the rough notes for an article on the subject indicated by his title. He had been writing them shortly before his death. – The Editors of FI)

There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with the state power. This process is equally characteristic of the neutral, the Social-Democratic, the Communist and “anarchist” trade unions. This fact alone shows that the tendency towards “growing together” is intrinsic not in this or that doctrine as such but derives from social conditions common for all unions.

Monopoly capitalism does not rest on competition and free private initiative but on centralized command. The capitalist cliques at the head of mighty trusts, syndicates, banking consortiums, etcetera, view economic life from the very same heights as does state power; and they require at every step the collaboration of the latter. In their turn the trade unions in the most important branches of industry find themselves deprived of the possibility of profiting by the competition between the different enterprises. They have to confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately bound up with state power. Hence flows the need of the trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of superprofits of imperialist capitalism. The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the “democratic” state how reliable and indispensable they are in peace-time and especially in time of war. By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism.

Colonial and semi-colonial countries are under the sway not of native capitalism but of foreign imperialism. However, this does not weaken but on the contrary, strengthens the need of direct, daily, practical ties between the magnates of capitalism and the governments which are in essence subject to them – the governments of colonial or semi-colonial countries. Inasmuch as imperialist capitalism creates both in colonies and semi-colonies a stratum of labor aristocracy and bureaucracy, the latter requires the support of colonial and semicolonial governments, as protectors, patrons and, sometimes, as arbitrators. This constitutes the most important social basis for the Bonapartist and semi-Bonapartist character of governments in the colonies and in backward countries generally. This likewise constitutes the basis for the dependence of reformist unions upon the state.

In Mexico the trade unions have been transformed by law into semi-state institutions and have, in the nature of things, assumed a semi-totalitarian character. The stateization of the trade unions was, according to the conception of the legislators, introduced in the interests of the workers in order to assure them an influence upon the governmental and economic life. But insofar as foreign imperialist capitalism dominates the national state and insofar as it is able, with the assistance of internal reactionary forces, to overthrow the unstable democracy and replace it with outright fascist dictatorship, to that extent the legislation relating to the trade unions can easily become a weapon in the hands of imperialist dictatorship.

Slogans for Freeing the Unions

From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labor organizations. In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for the influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears. Such a position, however, would be false to the core. We cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes. It is infinitely more difficult to fight in a totalitarian or a semitotalitarian state for influence over the working masses than in a democracy. The very same thing likewise applies to trade unions whose fate reflects the change in the destiny of capitalist states. We cannot renounce the struggle for influence over workers in Germany merely because the totalitarian regime makes such work extremely difficult there. We cannot, in precisely the same way, renounce the struggle within the compulsory labor organizations created by Fascism. All the less so can we renounce internal systematic work in trade unions of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian type merely because they depend directly or indirectly on the workers’ state or because the bureaucracy deprives the revolutionists of the possibility of working freely within these trade unions. It is necessary to conduct a struggle under all those concrete conditions which have been created by the preceding developments, including therein the mistakes of the working class and the crimes of its leaders. In the fascist and semi-fascist countries it is impossible to carry on revolutionary work that is not underground, illegal, conspiratorial. Within the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian unions it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to carry on any except conspiratorial work. It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime. The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy.

* * *

The second slogan is: trade union democracy. This second slogan flows directly from the first and presupposes for its realization the complete freedom of the trade unions from the imperialist or colonial state.

In other words, the trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class. They cannot any longer be anarchistic, i.e. ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of peoples and classes. They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.

* * *

The neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past, gone together with the free bourgeois democracy.

* * *

From what has been said it follows quite clearly that, in spite of the progressive degeneration of trade unions and their growing together with the imperialist state, the work within the trade unions not only does not lose any of its importance but remains as before and becomes in a certain sense even more important work than ever for every revolutionary party. The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organizations, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish.

* * *

Inasmuch as the chief role in backward countries is not played by national but by foreign capitalism, the national bourgeoisie occupies, in the sense of its social position, a much more minor position than corresponds with the development of industry. Inasmuch as foreign capital does not import workers but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat soon begins playing the most important role in the life of the country. In these conditions the national government, to the extent that it tries to show resistance to foreign capital, is compelled to a greater or lesser degree to lean on the proletariat. On the other hand, the governments of those backward countries which consider inescapable or more profitable for themselves to march shoulder to shoulder with foreign capital, destroy the labor organizations and institute a more or less totalitarian regime. Thus, the feebleness of the national bourgeoisie, the absence of traditions of municipal self-government, the pressure of foreign capitalism and the relatively rapid growth of the proletariat, cut the ground from under any kind of stable democratic regime. The governments of backward, i.e., colonial and semi-colonial countries, by and large assume a Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist character; and differ from one another in this, that some try to orient in a democratic direction, seeking support among workers and peasants, while others install a form close to military-police dictatorship. This likewise determines the fate of the trade unions. They either stand under the special patronage of the state or they are subjected to cruel persecution. Patronage on the part of the state is dictated by two tasks which confront it.. First, to draw the working class closer thus gaining a support for resistance against excessive pretensions on the part of imperialism; and, at the same time, to discipline the workers themselves by placing them under the control of a bureaucracy.

* * *

Monopoly Capitalism and the Unions

Monopoly capitalism is less and less willing to reconcile itself to the independence of trade unions. It demands of the reformist bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy who pick the crumbs from its banquet table, that they become transformed into its political police before the eyes of the working class. If that is not achieved, the labor bureaucracy is driven away and replaced by the fascists. Incidentally, all the efforts of the labor aristocracy in the service of imperialism cannot in the long run save them from destruction.

The intensification of class contradictions within each country, the intensification of antagonisms between one country and another, produce a situation in which imperialist capitalism can tolerate (i.e., up to a certain time) a reformist bureaucracy only if the latter serves directly as a petty but active stockholder of its imperialist enterprises, of its plans and programs within the country as well as on the world arena. Social-reformism must become transformed into social-imperialism in order to prolong its existence, but only prolong it, and nothing more. Because along this road there is no way out in general.

Does this mean that in the epoch of imperialism independent trade unions are generally impossible? It would be fundamentally incorrect to pose the question this way. Impossible are the independent or semi-independent reformist trade unions. Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions which not only are not stockholders of imperialist policy but which set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution. In this sense, the program of transitional demands adopted by the last congress of the Fourth International is not only the program for the activity of the party but in its fundamental features it is the program for the activity of the trade unions.

(Translator’s note: At this point Trotsky left room on the page, to expound further the connection between trade union activity and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. It is obvious that implied here is a very powerful argument in favor of military training under trade union control. The following idea is implied: Either the trade unions serve as the obedient recruiting sergeants for the imperialist army and imperialist war or they train workers for self-defense and revolution.)

The development of backward countries is characterized by its combined character. In other words, the last word of imperialist technology, economics, and politics is combined in these countries with traditional backwardness and primitiveness. This law can be observed in the most diverse spheres of the development of colonial and semi-colonial countries, including the sphere of the trade union movement. Imperialist capitalism operates here in its most cynical and naked form. It transports to virgin soil the most perfected methods of its tyrannical rule.

* * *

In the trade union movement throughout the world there is to be observed in the last period a swing to the right and the suppression of internal democracy. In England, the Minority Movement in the trade unions has been crushed (not without the assistance of Moscow); the leaders of the trade union movement are today, especially in the field of foreign policy, the obedient agents of the Conservative party. In France there was no room for an independent existence for Stalinist trade unions; they united with the so-called anarcho-syndicalist trade unions under the leadership of Jouhaux and as a result of this unification there was a general shift of the trade union movement not to the left but to the right. The leadership of the CGT is the most direct and open agency of French imperialist capitalism.

In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new “leftist” trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.

No less graphic, although in a different sense, is the picture of the development or the degeneration of the trade union movement in Spain. In the socialist trade unions all those leading elements which to any degree represented the independence of the trade union movement were pushed out. As regards the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were transformed into the instrument of the bourgeois republicans; the anarcho-syndicalist leaders became conservative bourgeois ministers. The fact that this metamorphosis took place in conditions of civil war does not weaken its significance. War is the continuation of the self-same policies. It speeds up processes, exposes their basic features, destroys all that is rotten, false, equivocal and lays bare all that is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right was due to the sharpening of class and international contradictions. The leaders of the trade union movement sensed or understood, or were given to understand, that now was no time to play the game of opposition. Every oppositional movement within the trade union movement, especially among the tops, threatens to provoke a stormy movement of the masses and to create difficulties for national imperialism. Hence flows the swing of the trade unions to the right, and the suppression of workers’ democracy within the unions. The basic feature, the swing towards the totalitarian regime, passes through the labor movement of the whole world.

We should also recall Holland, where the reformist and the trade union movement was not only a reliable prop of imperialist capitalism, but where the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization also was actually under the control of the imperialist government. The secretary of this organization, Sneevliet, in spite of his Platonic sympathies for the Fourth International was as deputy in the Dutch Parliament most concerned lest the wrath of the government descend upon his trade union organization.

* * *

In the United States the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success.

* * *

The nationalization of railways and oil fields in Mexico has of course nothing in common with socialism. It is a measure of state capitalism in a backward country which in this way seeks to defend itself on the one hand against foreign imperialism and on the other against its own proletariat. The management of railways, oil fields, etcetera, through labor organizations has nothing in common with workers’ control over industry, for in the essence of the matter the management is effected through the labor bureaucracy which is independent of the workers, but in return, completely dependent on the bourgeois state. This measure on the part of the ruling class pursues the aim of disciplining the working class, making it more industrious in the service of the common interests of the state, which appear on the surface to merge with the interests of the working class itself. As a matter of fact, the whole task of the bourgeoisie consists in liquidating the trade unions as organs of the class struggle and substituting in their place the trade union bureaucracy as the organ of the leadership over the workers by the bourgeois state. In these conditions, the task of the revolutionary vanguard is to conduct a struggle for the complete independence of the trade unions and for the introduction of actual workers’ control over the present union bureaucracy, which has been turned into the administration of railways, oil enterprises and so on.

* * *

Events of the last period (before the war) have revealed with especial clarity that anarchism, which in point of theory is always only liberalism drawn to its extremes, was, in practice, peaceful propaganda within the democratic republic, the protection of which it required. If we leave aside individual terrorist acts, etcetera, anarchism, as a system of mass movement and politics, presented only propaganda material under the peaceful protection of the laws. In conditions of crisis the anarchists always did just the opposite of what they taught in peace times. This was pointed out by Marx himself in connection with the Paris Commune. And it was repeated on a far more colossal scale in the experience of the Spanish revolution.

* * *

Democratic unions in the old sense of the term, bodies where in the framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist. Just as it is impossible to bring back the bourgeois-democratic state, so it is impossible to bring back the old workers’ democracy. The fate of the one reflects the fate of the other. As a matter of fact, the independence of trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International. This leadership, naturally, must and can be rational and assure the unions the maximum of democracy conceivable under the present concrete conditions. But without the political leadership of the Fourth International the independence of the trade unions is impossible.

America and the Negro question

by John Reed

Speech at 2nd Congress of Comintern, July 25 1920. Copied from http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm#v1-p121

In America there live ten million Negroes who are concentrated mainly in the South. In recent years however many thousands of them have moved to the North. The Negroes in the North are employed in industry while in the South the majority are farm labourers or small farmers. The position of the Negroes is terrible, particularly in the Southern states. Paragraph 16 of the Constitution of the United States grants the Negroes full civil rights. Nevertheless most Southern states deny the Negroes these rights. In other states, where by law the Negroes possess the right to vote, they are killed if they dare to exercise this right.

Negroes are not allowed to travel in the same railway carriages as whites, visit the same saloons and restaurants, or live in the same districts. There exist special, and worse, schools for Negroes and similarly special churches. This separation of the Negroes is called the ‘Jim Crow system’, and the clergy in the Southern churches preach about paradise on the ‘Jim Crow system’. Negroes are used as unskilled workers in industry. Until recently they were excluded from most of the unions that belong to the American Federation of Labour. The IWW of course organised the Negroes, the old Socialist Party however undertook no serious attempt to organise them. In some states the Negroes were not accepted into the party at all, in others they were separated off into special sections, and in general the party statutes banned the use of Party resources for propaganda among Negroes.

In the South the Negro has no rights at all and does not even enjoy the protection of the law. Usually one can kill Negroes without being punished. One terrible white institution is the lynching of Negroes. This happens in the following manner., The Negro is covered with oil and strung up on a telegraph pole. The whole of the town, men, women and children, run up to watch the show and take home a piece of the clothing or the skin of the Negro they have tortured to death ‘as a souvenir’.

I have too little time to explain the historical background to the Negro question in the United States. The descendants of the slave population, who were liberated during the Civil War, when politically and economically they were still completely underdeveloped, were later given full political rights in order to unleash a bitter class struggle in the South which was intended to hold up Southern capitalism until the capitalists in the North were able to bring together all the country’s resources into their own. possession.

Until recently the Negroes did not show any aggressive class consciousness at all. The first awakening of the Negroes took place after the Spanish-American War, in which the black troops had fought with extraordinary courage and from which they returned with the feeling that as men they were equal to the white troops. Until then the only movement that existed among the Negroes was a semi-philanthropic educational association led by Booker T. Washington and supported by the white capitalists. This movement found its expression in the organisation of schools in which the Negroes were brought up to be good servants of industry. As intellectual nourishment they were presented with the good advice to resign themselves to the fate of an oppressed people. During the Spanish War an aggressive reform movement arose among the Negroes which demanded social and political equality with the whites. With the beginning of the European war half a million Negroes who had joined the US Army were sent to France, where they were billeted with French troop detachments and suddenly made the discovery that they were treated as equals socially and in every other respect. The American General Staff approached the French High Command and asked them to forbid Negroes to visit places used by whites and to treat them as second-class people. After the war the Negroes, many of whom had received medals for bravery from the English and French governments, returned to their Southern villages where they were subjected to lynch law because they dared to wear their uniforms and their decorations on the street.

At the same time a strong movement arose among the Negroes who had stayed behind. Thousands of them moved to the North, began to work in the war industries and came into contact with the surging current of the labour movement. High as they were, their wage rates trailed behind the incredible increases in the prices of the most important necessities. Moreover the Negroes were outraged by the way all their strength was sucked out and the terrible exertions demanded by the work much more than were the white workers who had grown used to the terrible exploitation in the course of many years.

The Negroes went on strike alongside the white workers and quickly joined the industrial proletariat. They proved very ready to accept revolutionary propaganda. At that time the newspaper Messenger was founded, published by a young Negro, the socialist Randolf, and pursuing revolutionary propagandist aims. This paper united socialist propaganda with an appeal to the racial consciousness of the Negroes and with the call to organise self-defence against the brutal attacks of the whites. At the same time the paper insisted on the closest links with the white workers, regardless of the fact that the latter often took part in Negro-baiting, and emphasised that the enmity between the white and black races was supported by the capitalists in their own interests.

The return of the army from the front threw many millions of white workers on to the labour market all at once. The result was unemployment, and the demobilised soldiers’ impatience took such threatening proportions that the employers were forced to tell the soldiers that their jobs had been taken by Negroes in order thus to incite the whites to massacre the Negroes. The first of these outbreaks took place in Washington, where civil servants from the administration returning from the war found their jobs occupied by Negroes. The civil servants were in the main Southerners. They organised a night attack on the Negro district in order to terrorise the Negroes into giving up their jobs. To everybody’s amazement the Negroes came on to the streets fully armed. A fight developed and the Negroes fought so well that for every dead Negro there were three dead whites. Another revolt which lasted several days and left many dead on both sides broke out a few months later in Chicago. Later still a massacre took place in Omaha. In all these fights the Negroes showed for the first time in history that they are armed and splendidly organised and are not at all afraid of the whites. The results of the Negroes’ resistance were first of all a belated intervention by the government and secondly the acceptance of Negroes into the unions of the American Federation of Labour.

Racial consciousness grew among the Negroes themselves. At present there is among the Negroes a section which preaches the armed uprising of the Negroes against the whites. The Negroes who returned home from the war have set up associations everywhere for self-defence and to fight against the white supporters of lynch law. The circulation of the Messenger is growing constantly. At present it sells 180,000 copies monthly. At the same time, socialist ideas have taken root and are spreading rapidly among the Negroes employed in industry.

If we consider the Negroes as an enslaved and oppressed people, then they pose us with two tasks: on the one hand a strong racial movement and on the other a strong proletarian workers’ movement, whose class consciousness is quickly growing. The Negroes do not pose the demand of national independence. A movement that aims for a separate national existence, like for instance the ‘back to Africa’ movement that could be observed a few years ago, is never successful among the Negroes. They hold themselves above all to be Americans, they feel at home in the United States. That simplifies the tasks of the communists considerably.

The only correct policy for the American Communists towards the Negroes is to regard them above all as workers. The agricultural workers and the small farmers of the South pose, despite the backwardness of the Negroes, the same tasks as those we have in respect to the white rural proletariat. Communist propaganda can be carried out among the Negroes who are employed as industrial workers in the North. In both parts of the country we must strive to organise Negroes in the same unions as the whites. This is the best and quickest way to root out racial prejudice and awaken class solidarity.

BT/LTT Fusion Document

For Trotskyism!

[The following document was adopted by the fusion conference of the Bolshevik Tendency and the Left Trotskyist Tendency on November 1986 as a codification of the programmatic agreement reached by the two organizations. It was originally printed in 1917 #3, Spring 1987. This version copied from  http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no3/no03btlt.html]

1. Party and Program

‘‘The interests of the [working] class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a program; the program cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party. ‘‘The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious.’’

—L.D. Trotsky, ‘‘What Next?’’ 1932

The working class is the only thoroughly revolutionary class in modern society, the only class with the capacity to end the insanity of capitalist rule internationally. The fundamental task of the communist vanguard is to instill in the class (particularly its most important component, the industrial proletariat) the consciousness of its historic role. We explicitly reject all stratagems put forward by centrists and reformists, lifestylists and sectoralists which see in one or another non-proletarian section of the population a more likely vehicle for social progress.

The liberation of the proletariat, and with that the elimination of the material basis of all forms of social oppression, hinges on the question of leadership. The panoply of potential ‘‘socialist’’ leaderships are in the final analysis reducible to two programs: reform or revolution. While purporting to offer a ‘‘practical’’ strategy for the gradual amelioration of the inequities of class society, reformism acts to reconcile the working class to the requirements of capital. Revolutionary Marxism, by contrast, is based on the fundamental antagonism between capital and labor and the consequent necessity for the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the precondition for any significant social progress.

The hegemony of bourgeois ideology in its various forms within the proletariat represents the most powerful bulwark to capitalist rule. As James P. Cannon, the historic leader of American Trotskyism, noted in The First Ten Years of American Communism:

‘‘The strength of capitalism is not in itself and its own institutions; it survives only because it has bases of support in the organizations of the workers. As we see it now, in the light of what we have learned from the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, nine-tenths of the struggle for socialism is the struggle against bourgeois influence in the workers’ organizations, including the party.’’

The key distinction between a revolutionary organization and a centrist or reformist one is found not so much in abstract statements of ultimate goals and objectives, but in the positions which each advances in the concrete situations posed by the class struggle. Reformists and centrists tailor their programmatic response to each new event in accordance with the illusions and preconceptions of their audience. But the role of a revolutionary is to tell the workers and the oppressed what they do not already know.

‘‘The program must express the objective tasks of the working class rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as it is and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness….We cannot postpone, modify objective conditions which don’t depend upon us. We cannot guarantee that the masses will solve the crisis, but we must express the situation as it is, and that is the task of the program.’’

—Trotsky, ‘‘The Political Backwardness of the American Workers,’’ 1938

We seek to root the communist program in the working class through building programmatically-based caucuses in the trade unions. Such formations must actively participate in all struggles for partial reform and improvements in the situation of the workers. They must also be the best upholders of the militant traditions of class solidarity, e.g., the proposition that ‘‘Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross!’’ At the same time they must seek to recruit the most politically conscious workers to a world view that transcends parochial shopfloor militancy, and addresses the burning political questions of the day in a fashion which points to the necessity of eliminating the anarchy of production for profit and replacing it with rational, planned production for human need.

Our intervention in the mass organizations of the proletariat is based on the Transitional Program adopted by the founding convention of the Fourth International in 1938. In a certain sense there can be no such thing as a ‘‘finished program’’ for Marxists. It is necessary to take account of historical developments in the past five decades and the need to address problems posed by specific struggles of sectors of the class and/or the oppressed which are not dealt with in the 1938 draft. Nonetheless, in its essentials, the program upon which the Fourth International was founded retains all its relevance because it poses socialist solutions to the objective problems facing the working class today in the context of the unchanging necessity of proletarian power.

2. Permanent Revolution

Over the past five hundred years, capitalism has created a single world economic order with an international division of labor. We live in the epoch of imperialism—the epoch of capitalist decline. Experience this century has demonstrated that the national bourgeoisies of the neo-colonial world are incapable of completing the historic tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. There is, in general, no path of independent capitalist development open for these countries.

In the neo-colonial countries the accomplishments of the classical bourgeois revolutions can only be replicated by smashing capitalist property relations, severing the tentacles of the imperialist world market and establishing working class (i.e., collectivized) property. Only a socialist revolution—a revolution carried out against the national bourgeoisie and big landowners—can lead to a qualitative expansion of the productive forces.

We reject the Stalinist/Menshevik ‘‘two-stage’’ strategy of proletarian subordination to the supposed ‘‘progressive’’ sectors of the bourgeoisie. We stand for the complete and unconditional political independence of the proletariat in every country. Without exception, the national bourgeoisies of the ‘‘Third World’’ act as the agents of imperialist domination whose interests are, in a historic sense, far more closely bound up with the bankers and industrialists of the metropolis than with their own exploited peoples.

Trotskyists offer military, but not political, support to petty-bourgeois nationalist movements (or even bourgeois regimes) which enter into conflict with imperialism in defense of national sovereignty. In 1935, for example, the Trotskyists stood for military victory of the Ethiopians over the Italian invaders. However, Leninists cannot automatically determine their position on a war between two bourgeois regimes from their relative level of development (or underdevelopment). In the squalid 1982 Malvinas/Falklands war, where the defense of Argentine sovereignty was never at issue, Leninists called for both British and Argentine workers to ‘‘turn the guns around’’—for revolutionary defeatism on both sides.

3. Guerrillaism

Our strategy for revolution is mass proletarian insurrection. We reject guerrillaism as a strategic orientation (while recognizing that it can sometimes have supplementary tactical value) because it relegates the organized, politically conscious working class to the role of passive onlooker. A peasant-based guerrilla movement, led by radical petty-bourgeois intellectuals, cannot establish working-class political power regardless of the subjective intent of its leadership.

On several occasions since the end of the Second World War it has been demonstrated that, given favorable objective circumstances, such movements can successfully uproot capitalist property. Yet because they are not based on the mobilization of the organized working class, the best outcome of such struggles is the establishment of nationalist, bureaucratic regimes qualitatively identical to the product of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution (i.e., Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Vietnam and Cuba). Such ‘‘deformed worker states’’ require supplementary proletarian political revolutions to open the road to socialist development.

4. Special Oppression: The Black Question, The Woman Question

The working class today is deeply fractured along racial, sexual, national and other lines. Yet racism, national chauvinism and sexism are not genetically but rather socially programmed forms of behavior. Regardless of their present level of consciousness, the workers of the world have one crucial thing in common: they cannot fundamentally improve their situation, as a class, without destroying the social basis of all oppression and exploitation once and for all. This is the material basis for the Marxist assertion that the proletariat has as its historic mission the elimination of class society and with that the eradication of all forms of extra-class or ‘‘special’’ oppression.

In the United States, the struggle for workers power is inextricably linked to the struggle for black liberation. The racial division between black and white workers has historically been the primary obstacle to class consciousness. American blacks are not a nation but a race-color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of society and concentrated overwhelmingly in the working class, particularly in strategic sectors of the industrial proletariat. Brutalized, abused and systematically discriminated against in the ‘‘land of the free,’’ the black population has historically been relatively immune to the racist imperial patriotism which has poisoned much of the white proletariat. Black workers have generally proved the most militant and combative section of the class. The fight for black liberation—against the everyday racist brutality of life in capitalist America—is central to the construction of a revolutionary vanguard on the North American continent. The struggle against the special oppression of the other national, linguistic and racial minorities, particularly the growing Latino population, is a question which will also be key to the American revolution.

The oppression of women is materially rooted in the existence of the nuclear family: the basic and indispensable unit of bourgeois social organization. The fight for complete social equality for women is of strategic importance in every country on the globe. A closely related form of special oppression is that experienced by homosexuals who are persecuted for failing to conform to the sexual roles dictated by the ‘‘normalcy’’ of the nuclear family. The gay question is not strategic like the woman question, but the communist vanguard must champion the democratic rights of homosexuals and oppose any and all discriminatory measures directed at them.

In the unions communists campaign for equal access to all jobs; union-sponsored programs to recruit and upgrade women and minorities in ‘‘non-traditional’’ fields; equal pay for equivalent work and jobs for all. At the same time we defend the seniority system as a historic acquisition of the trade-union movement and oppose such divisive and anti-union schemes as preferential layoffs. It is the historic responsibility of the communist vanguard to struggle to unite the working class for its common class interests across the artificial divisions promoted in capitalist society. To do this means to advance the interests of the most exploited and oppressed and to struggle relentlessly against every manifestation of discrimination and injustice.

The oppressed sectors of the population cannot liberate themselves independently of proletarian revolution, i.e., within the framework of the social system which originated and perpetuates their oppression. As Lenin noted in State and Revolution:

‘‘Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the toiling and exploited masses, whom the bourgeoisie exploits, oppresses and crushes often not less, but more, than it does the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.’’

We live in a class society and the program of every social movement must, in the final analysis, represent the interests of one of the two classes with the potential to rule society: the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. In the trade unions, bourgeois ideology takes the form of narrow economism; in the movements of the oppressed it manifests itself as sectoralism. What black nationalism, feminism and other forms of sectoralist ideology have in common is that they all locate the root of oppression in something other than the system of capitalist private property.

The strategic orientation of the Marxist vanguard toward ‘‘independent’’ (i.e., multi-class) sectoralist organizations of the oppressed must be to assist in their internal differentiation into their class components. This implies a struggle to win as many individuals as possible to the perspective of proletarian revolution and the consequent necessity of an integrated vanguard party.

5. The National Question and ‘Interpenetrated Peoples’

‘‘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….’’

—V.I. Lenin, ‘‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’’

Marxism and nationalism are two fundamentally counterposed world views. We uphold the principle of the equality of nations, and oppose any privileges for any nation. At the same time Marxists reject all forms of nationalist ideology and, in Lenin’s words, welcome ‘‘every kind of assimilation of nations, except that founded on force and privilege.’’ The Leninist program on the national question is primarily a negative one designed to take the national question off the agenda and undercut the appeal of petty-bourgeois nationalists, in order to more starkly pose the class question.

In ‘‘classic’’ cases of national oppression (e.g., Quebec), we champion the right of self-determination, without necessarily advocating its exercise. In the more complex cases of two peoples interspersed, or ‘‘interpenetrated,’’ throughout a single geographical territory (Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel), the abstract right of each to self-determination cannot be realized equitably within the framework of capitalist property relations. Yet in none of these cases can the oppressor people be equated with the whites in South Africa or the French colons in Algeria; i.e., a privileged settler-caste/labor aristocracy dependent on the super-exploitation of indigenous labor to maintain a standard of living qualitatively higher than the oppressed population.

Both the Irish Protestants and the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel are class-differentiated peoples. Each has a bourgeoisie, a petty bourgeoisie and a working class. Unlike guilty middle-class moralists, Leninists do not simply endorse the nationalism of the oppressed (or the petty-bourgeois political formations which espouse it). To do so simultaneously forecloses the possibility of exploiting the real class contradictions in the ranks of the oppressor people and cements the hold of the nationalists over the oppressed. The proletarians of the ascendant people can never be won to a nationalist perspective of simply inverting the current unequal relationship. A significant section of them can be won to an anti-sectarian class-against-class perspective because it is in their objective interests.

The logic of capitulation to petty-bourgeois nationalism led much of the left to support the Arab rulers (the embodiment of the so-called ‘‘Arab Revolution’’) against the Israelis in the Mid-East wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973. In essence these were inter-capitalist wars in which the workers and oppressed of the region had nothing to gain by the victory of either. The Leninist position was therefore one of defeatism on both sides. For both Arab and Hebrew workers the main enemy was at home. The 1956 war was a different matter; in that conflict the working class had a side: with Nasser against the attempts of French and British imperialism (aided by the Israelis) to reappropriate the recently nationalized Suez Canal.

While opposing nationalism as a matter of principle, Leninists are not neutral in conflicts between the oppressed people and the oppressor state apparatus. In Northern Ireland we demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops and we defend the blows struck by the Irish Republican Army at such imperialist targets as the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British Army or the hotel full of Conservative cabinet ministers at Brighton. Similarly, we militarily side with the Palestinian Liberation Organization against the forces of the Israeli state. In no case do we defend terrorist acts directed at civilian populations. This, despite the fact that the criminal terrorism of the Zionist state against the Palestinians, like that of the British army and their Protestant allies against the Catholics of Northern Ireland, is many times greater than the acts of communal terror by the oppressed.

6. Immigration/Emigration

Leninists support the basic democratic right of any individual to emigrate to any country in the world. As in the case of other democratic rights, this is not some sort of categorical imperative. We would not, for example, favor the emigration of any individual who would pose a threat to the military security of the degenerated or deformed worker states. The right of individual immigration, if exercised on a sufficiently wide scale, can come into conflict with the right of self-determination for a small nation. Therefore Trotskyists do not raise the call for ‘‘open borders’’ as a general programmatic demand. In Palestine during the 1930’s and 1940’s, for example, the massive influx of Zionist immigration laid the basis for the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian people from their own land. We do not recognize the ‘‘right’’ of unlimited Han migration to Tibet, nor of French citizens to move to New Caledonia.

The ‘‘open borders’’ demand is generally advocated by well-meaning liberal/radical muddleheads motivated by a utopian desire to rectify the hideous inequalities produced by the imperialist world order. But world socialist revolution—not mass migration—is the Marxist solution to the misery and destitution of the majority of mankind under capitalism.

In the U.S., we defend Mexican workers apprehended by La Migra. We oppose all immigration quotas, all roundups and all deportations of immigrant workers. In the unions we fight for the immediate and unconditional granting of full citizenship rights to all foreign-born workers.

7. Democratic Centralism

A revolutionary organization must be strictly central ized with the leading bodies having full authority to direct the work of lower bodies and members. The organization must have a political monopoly over the public political activity of its members. The membership must be guaranteed the right of full factional democracy (i.e., the right to conduct internal political struggle to change the line and/or to replace the existing leadership). Internal democracy is not a decorative frill—nor merely a safety valve for the ranks to blow off steam—it is a critical and indispensible necessity for the revolutionary vanguard if it is to master the complex developments of the class struggle. It is also the chief means by which revolutionary cadres are created. The right to internal factional democracy, i.e., the right to struggle against revisionism within the vanguard, is the only ‘‘guarantee’’ against the political degeneration of a revolutionary organization.

Attempts to gloss over important differences and blur lines of political demarcation internally can only weaken and disorient a revolutionary party. An organization cohered by diplomacy, lowest-common denominator consensus and the concomitant programmatic ambiguity (instead of principled programmatic agreement and the struggle for political clarity) awaits only the first serious test posed by the class struggle to break apart. Conversely, organizations in which the expression of differences is proscribed—whether formally or informally—are destined to ossify into rigid, hierarchical and lifeless sects increasingly divorced from the living workers movement and unable to reproduce the cadres necessary to carry out the tasks of a revolutionary vanguard.

8. Popular Fronts

‘‘The question of questions at present is the Popular Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism.’’

—Trotsky,‘‘The POUM and the Popular Front,’’ 1936

Popular frontism (i.e., a programmatic bloc, usually for governmental power, between workers organizations and representatives of the bourgeoisie) is class treason. Revolutionaries can give no support, however ‘‘critical,’’ to participants in popular fronts.

The tactic of critical electoral support to reformist workers parties is premised on the contradiction inherent in such parties between their bourgeois (reformist) program and their working-class base. When a social-democratic or Stalinist party enters into a coalition or electoral bloc with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois formations, this contradiction is effectively suppressed for the life of the coalition. A member of a reformist workers party who stands for election on the ticket of a class-collaborationist coalition (or popular front) is in fact running as a representative of a bourgeois political formation. Thus the possibility of the application of the tactic of critical support is excluded, because the contradiction which it seeks to exploit is suspended. Instead, revolutionists should make a condition of electoral support the breaking of the coalition: ‘‘Down With the Capitalist Ministers!’’

9. United Fronts and ‘‘Strategic United Fronts’’

The united front is a tactic with which revolutionaries seek to approach reformist or centrist formations to ‘‘set the base against the top’’ in situations where there is an urgent felt need for united action on the part of the ranks. It is possible to enter into united-front agreements with petty-bourgeois or bourgeois formations where there is an episodic agreement on a particular issue and where it is in the interests of the working class to do so (e.g., the Bolsheviks’ united front with Kerensky against Kornilov). The united front is a tactic which is not only designed to accomplish the common objective but also to demonstrate in practice the superiority of the revolutionary program and thus gain new influence and adherents for the vanguard organization.

Revolutionists never consign the responsibility of revolutionary leadership to an ongoing alliance (or ‘‘strategic united front’’) with centrist or reformist forces. Trotskyists never issue common propaganda—joint statements of overall political perspective—with revisionists. Such a practice is both dishonest (as it inevitably involves papering over the political differences separating the organizations) and liquidationist. The ‘‘strategic united front’’ is a favorite gambit of opportunists who, despairing of their own small influence, seek to compensate for it by dissolution into a broader bloc on a lowest common-denominator program. In ‘‘Centrism and the Fourth International,’’ Trotsky explained that a revolutionary organization is distinguished from a centrist one by its ‘‘active concern for purity of principles, clarity of position, political consistency and organizational completeness.’’ It is just this which the strategic united front is designed to obliterate.

10. Workers Democracy and the Class Line

Revolutionary Marxists, who are distinguished by the fact that they tell the workers the truth, can only benefit from open political confrontation between the various competing currents in the left. It is otherwise with the reformists and centrists. The Stalinists, social democrats, trade-union bureaucrats and other working-class misleaders all shrink from revolutionary criticism and seek to pre-empt political discussion and debate with gangsterism and exclusions.

We oppose violence and exclusionism within the left and workers movement while upholding the right of everyone to self-defense. We also oppose the use of ‘‘soft-core’’ violence—i.e., slander—which goes hand-in-hand with (or prepares the way for) physical attacks. Slander and violence within the workers movement are completely alien to the traditions of revolutionary Marxism because they are deliberately designed to destroy consciousness, the precondition for the liberation of the proletariat.

11. The State and Revolution

The question of the state occupies a central place in revolutionary theory. Marxism teaches that the capitalist state (in the final analysis the ‘‘special bodies of armed men’’ committed to the defense of bourgeois property) cannot be taken over and made to serve the interests of working people. Working-class rule can only be established through the destruction of the existing bourgeois state machinery and its replacement with institutions committed to the defense of proletarian property.

We are adamantly opposed to bringing the bourgeois state, in any guise, into the affairs of the labor movement. Marxists oppose all union ‘‘reformers’’ who seek redress from bureaucratic corruption in the capitalist courts. Labor must clean its own house! We also call for the expulsion of all cops and prison guards from the trade-union movement.

The duty of revolutionists is to teach the working class that the state is not an impartial arbiter between competing social interests but a weapon wielded against them by the capitalists. Accordingly, Marxists oppose reformist/utopian calls for the bourgeois state to ‘‘ban’’ the fascists. Such laws are invariably used much more aggressively against the workers movement and the left than against the fascistic scum who constitute the shock troops of capitalist reaction. The Trotskyist strategy to fight fascism is not to make appeals to the bourgeois state, but to mobilize the power of the working class and the oppressed for direct action to crush fascistic movements in the egg before they are able to grow. As Trotsky remarked in the Transitional Program, ‘‘The struggle against fascism does not start in the liberal editorial office but in the factory—and ends in the street.’’

Leninists reject all notions that imperialist troops can play a progressive role anywhere: whether ‘‘protecting’’ black schoolchildren in the Southern U.S., ‘‘protecting’’ the Catholic population in Northern Ireland or ‘‘keeping the peace’’ in the Middle East. Neither do we seek to pressure the imperialists to act ‘‘morally’’ by divesting nor by imposing sanctions on South Africa. We argue instead that the ‘‘Free World’’ powers are fundamentally united with the racist apartheid regime in defense of the ‘‘right’’ to superexploit black labor. Our answer is to mobilize the power of international labor in effective class-struggle solidarity actions with South Africa’s black workers.

12. The Russian Question

‘‘What is Stalinophobia? Is it hatred of Stalinism; fear of this ‘syphilis of the labor movement’ and irreconcilable refusal to tolerate any manifestation of it in the party? Not at all….

’’Is it the opinion that Stalinism is not the leader of the international revolution but its mortal enemy? No, that is not Stalinophobia; that is what Trotsky taught us, what we learned again from our experience with Stalinism, and what we believe in our bones.

‘‘The sentiment of hatred and fear of Stalinism, with its police state and its slave labor camps, its frame-ups and its murders of working class opponents, is healthy, natural, normal, and progressive. This sentiment goes wrong only when it leads to reconciliation with American imperialism, and to the assignment of the fight against Stalinism to that same imperialism. In the language of Trotskyism, that and nothing else is Stalinophobia.’’

—JamesP. Cannon, ‘‘Stalinist Conciliationism and Stalinophobia,’’ 1953

We stand for the unconditional defense of the collectivized economies of the degenerated Soviet worker state and the deformed worker states of Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, North Korea and Cuba against capitalist restoration. Yet we do not lose sight for a moment of the fact that only proletarian political revolutions, which overthrow the treacherous anti-working class bureaucrats who rule these states, can guarantee the gains won to date and open the road to socialism.

The victory of the Stalinist faction in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s under the banner of ‘‘Socialism in One Country’’ was crowned with the physical extermination of the leading cadres of Lenin’s party a decade later. By counterposing the defense of the Soviet Union to the world revolution, the Stalinist usurpers decisively undermine both. The perspective of proletarian insurrection in order to reestablish the direct political rule of the working class is therefore not counterposed but inextricably linked to the defense of the collectivized economies.

The Russian question has been posed most sharply in recent years over two events: the suppression of Polish Solidarnosc and the intervention of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. We side militarily with the Stalinists against both the capitalist-restorationists of Solidarnosc and the Islamic feudalists fighting to preserve female chattel slavery in Afghanistan. This does not imply that the Stalinist bureaucrats have any progressive historical role to play. On the contrary. Nonetheless, we defend those actions (like the December 1981 suppression of Solidarnosc) which they are forced to take in defense of the working-class property forms.

13. For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

‘‘Trotskyism is not a new movement, a new doctrine, but the restoration, the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practised in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International.’’

—JamesP. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the revolutionary Marxism of our time—the political theory derived from the distilled experience of over a century-and-a-half of working-class communism. It was verified in a positive sense in the October Revolution in 1917, the greatest event in modern history, and generally negatively since. After the bureaucratic strangulation of the Bolshevik Party and the Comintern by the Stalinists, the tradition of Leninism—the practice and program of the Russian Revolution—was carried forward by the Left Opposition and by it alone.

The Trotskyist movement was born in a struggle for revolutionary internationalism against the reactionary/utopian conception of ‘‘Socialism in One Country.’’ The necessity of revolutionary organization on an international basis derives from the organization of capitalist production itself. Revolutionists on each national terrain must be guided by a strategy which is international in dimension—and that can only be elaborated by the construction of an international working-class leadership. To the patriotism of the bourgeoisie and its social-democratic and Stalinist lackeys, the Trotskyists counterpose Karl Liebknecht’s immortal slogan: ‘‘The Main Enemy is At Home!’’ We stand on the basic programmatic positions adopted by the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International, as well as the first four congresses of the Communist International and the revolutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky.

The cadres of the Fourth International outside of North America were largely annihilated or dispersed in the course of the Second World War. The International was definitively politically destroyed by Pabloite revisionism in the early 1950’s. We are not neutral in the 1951-53 split—we side with the International Committee (IC) against the Pabloite International Secretariat (IS). The IC’s fight was profoundly flawed both in terms of political framework and execution. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, the impulse of the IC to resist the dissolution of the Trotskyist cadre into the Stalinist and social-democratic parties (as proposed by Pablo) and its defense of the necessity of the conscious factor in history, made it qualitatively superior to the liquidationist IS.

Within the IC the most important section was the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It had also been the strongest section at the time of the founding of the International. It had benefited by the most direct collaboration with Trotsky and had a leading cadre which went back to the early years of the Comintern. The political collapse of the SWP as a revolutionary organization, signalled by its uncritical enthusing over Castroism in the early 1960’s, and culminating in its defection to the Pabloites in 1963, was therefore an enormous blow to world Trotskyism.

We solidarize with the struggle of the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP (forerunner of the Spartacist League/US) to defend the revolutionary program against the centrist objectivism of the majority. We stand on the Trotskyist positions defended and elaborated by the revolutionary Spartacist League in the years that followed. However, under the pressure of two decades of isolation and frustration, the SL itself has qualitatively degenerated into a grotesquely bureaucratic and overtly cultist group of political bandits which, despite a residual capacity for cynical ‘‘orthodox’’ literary posturing, has shown a consistent impulse to flinch under pressure. The ‘‘international Spartacist tendency’’ today is in no important sense politically superior to any of the dozen or more fake-Trotskyist ‘‘internationals’’ which lay claim to the mantle of the Fourth International.

The splintering of several of the historic pretenders to Trotskyist continuity and the difficulties and generally rightward motion of the rest opens a potentially fertile period for political reassessment and realignment among those who do not believe that the road to socialism lies through the British Labour Party, Lech Walesa’s capitalist-restorationist Solidarnosc or the Chilean popular front. We urgently seek to participate in a process of international regroupment of revolutionary cadres on the basis of the program of authentic Trotskyism, as a step toward the long overdue rebirth of the Fourth International, World Party of Socialist Revolution.

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

’’But the same historical experience also shows that there are exceptions to this law too. The exceptions are the Marxists who remain Marxists, the revolutionists who remain faithful to the banner. The basic ideas of Marxism, upon which alone a revolutionary party can be constructed, are continuous in their application and have been for a hundred years. The ideas of Marxism, which create revolutionary parties, are stronger than the parties they create and never fail to survive their downfall. They never fail to find representatives in the old organizations to lead the work of reconstruction.

‘‘These are the continuators of the tradition, the defenders of the orthodox doctrine. The task of the uncorrupted revolutionists, obliged by circumstances to start the work of organizational reconstruction, has never been to proclaim a new revelation—there has been no lack of such Messiahs, and they have all been lost in the shuffle—but to reinstate the old program and bring it up to date.’’

—James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism