Click on the headline to link to a Zimmerwald Conference website online copy of the Zimmerwald Manifesto, a document that heads in the right direction against pacifistic class collaboration in the anti-war movement discussed below.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
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Markin comment on Spartacist statement
In many ways 1965 was a watershed year in the struggle against the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam War. Not only was there a grievous escalation of troop levels and bombing attacks based on the usual frame-up set-up (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) that seem to be conveniently available when the tom-toms of war get beating but the fledgling anti-war movement (at least in the East) was getting organized in more than a token manner. Thus, on the serious matter of which way forward for that movement to drive it to victory those New York meetings, the epicenter of the East Coast opposition, described in the document below take on added meaning both for the immediate struggle against the war and the long term prospects for a real anti-imperialist opposition. And, maybe, more.
Listen, in 1965, I was at the height of my Catholic Worker/ Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)-tinged left liberal pacifistic political views. Although not philosophically absolutely committed to non-violence or to working totally within the parliamentary system I was no embryonic Bolshevik ready to raise all kind of hell. I still believed that “sweet” reason could be brought into play in bourgeois politics and the “better angels of our nature” (a term that I was fond of even then) would prevail. I was in no way hostile to communists, of whatever tendency, but merely saw them as another set of partners in the struggle against war. In short, I held a very popular frontist attitude to use a term of art in our communist movement that I was not familiar with then.
All of the above is by way of saying that had I been at the New York anti-war meetings, as I had been at various Boston meetings with the same kind of groups, including SANE (a group that I had worked with on their nuclear disarmament campaigns in the very early 1960s) which drove anti-war efforts around here in those days, I would have been nonplussed by the Spartacist League withdrawal statement. Whatever their reasons. Now, of course, long after the fact, I can see that the commitment of the vast majority of anti-war groups to “sweet” reason toward Johnson Administration war policy and a commitment to an essentially pacifist, parliamentary opposition that could easily be pieced off was doomed to failure. Failure, if the object, as it was for me to stop the bloody bastards.
Fortunately the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front took matters into their own hands and saved the day by beating the American imperialist forces and ending the war. No one can say truthfully that the American anti-war movement was minimal in that effort but it was, in the end, hardly decisive as some would have it. Those famous pictures of the United States Embassy in Saigon being evaluated by helicopter from the rooftops graphically make the point for those who want to argue otherwise.
History is full of little twists and turns, and maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from studying it. Here is the lesson that we can use today. The next time that you are in an anti-war planning meeting and someone argues for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all troops and mercenaries from (name the current imperial adventure) as a central slogan for the demonstration vote for that proposal with both hands (and feet if you have to). That, in effect, is today’s anti-war version of those 1965 events.
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NY Peace Parade
Press Release:
Spartacist Breaks with New York Parade Committee
—from Spartacist No. 5, November-December 1965
The following statement was read by a Spartacist representative at the 29 September 1965 meeting of the New York Peace Parade Committee, an anti-war coalition dominated by right-wing pacifists and liberals. Among the "individuals" in the committee were members of Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Party, Workers World, ACFL (predecessor of the Workers League), the Communist Party, the liberal New York SANE and the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Previous meetings had decided in favor of a single, liberal slogan ("Stop the War in Vietnam Now") for the October 16 anti-war parade and a speakers list at the rally featuring the liberal Dr. Benjamin Spock, among others. The committee's grossly social-patriotic "Call" objected to in the Spartacist statement said that the "war in Vietnam is not necessary for national security," since the "United Slates is the richest, most powerful...nation in the world," and the war "cannot enhance the honor of the American people." After reading its statement the Spartacist delegation withdrew from the committee.
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At the last meeting on September 22, we raised serious objections to the "one slogan" policy and the political composition of the Rally speakers list.
Had we been invited to the first meeting on September 15 where the substantial issue of non-exclusion was discussed and decided, we would have made our views known then. We objected to the concept that this is a committee of "individuals" rather than organizations.
But of course votes are taken on the basis of organization and not individuals since that is the reality. In an attempt to obscure the exclusion taking place, speakers for the rally were chosen on the basis of artificial "representative" categories: Women. Art. Negroes. Puerto Ricans. Students, Marxist-anti-lmperialists. etc.. with one speaker from each category. But our objections are not simply petty organizational grievances they are political ones.
Since the last meeting we have carefully considered these issues as well as the line of the Call that has been issued and have decided that we can no longer participate in this committee on a principled political basis. Therefore we announce our withdrawal and request that our name be removed from the list of sponsors of the demonstration.
Stop WHOSE War in Vietnam?
The slogan "Stop the War in Vietnam Now" can mean many things to many people. But given the composition of this Committee, the fact that it is dominated by right-wing pacifists and "liberals," i.e., pro-capitalist and pro-LBJ, it is clear that the slogan is deliberately ambiguous in order to avoid facing the duty to advance the only demand that has any meaning: "For the Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S. Troops from Vietnam!" Instead of this, the Call demands that "all foreign troops" be removed from Vietnam. This is only an endorsement of the position of the U.S. Government. Further, we are not simply for stopping the war, but rather for the victory of the social revolution that is taking place in Vietnam. It is absurd, and against the interest of the revolution, to call simply for disengagement of forces, and implies a confidence in the integrity of U.S. Imperialism to keep such a bargain. You have completely obscured what we think is the most important character of the Vietnam war -that this is a naked, ruthless intervention by U.S. Imperialism to interrupt and drive back a social revolution in Vietnam, a revolution that is the only road to freedom for the Vietnamese working masses. We are not neutral in this. What is involved is not simply a matter of self-determination or moral indignation or national security or the honor and reputation of the American people as the Call indicates. The best defense of the Vietnamese revolution in this country is to build a militant antiwar movement strong enough to compel the United States to get out of Vietnam!
For Real United Action!
There are many people in this committee with whom we share a number of positions on a range of issues including Vietnam. As in the past, we stand ready to work fully and loyally with you on the basis of political agreement. But we cannot be a party to this committee as it is presently constituted, containing forces that in a class sense are simply not compatible.
This split might have been avoided by a policy of genuine non-exclusion, where all political viewpoints could be expressed. This would have meant, of course, that SANE and some others would have left the committee as they have threatened to do. Instead, in the name of "unity," you have combined with these right-wing elements and chosen to frustrate this alternative and suppress all but the most "respectable" political views. The Socialist Workers Party has deliberately acted as a broker to cement this unprincipled alliance. Well, we for one value our political viewpoints more than we do such a fake "unity."
All those who recognize the truth of what I have said should seriously reconsider their continued participation in this committee and act accordingly.
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