Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Revolutionary Regroupment:Spartacists Win Leftists From Social Democracy (March 1979)
Young Spartacus is pleased to present the following condensed version of a February 8 forum given in Ann Arbor by Bruce Richard. Comrade Richard was a leader of a heterogeneous left-critical/activist grouping in the Socialist Party. USA (SP) called the Debs Caucus. When the Caucus declared it self pro- Leninist, they stirred considerable attention on the left. The soft-Maoist Guardian and the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in particular scurried after the Caucus' members, but the serious elements in the grouping recognized that neither of these reformist outfits represented an authentic revolutionary Marxist program. Comrade Richard, who joined the SP in 1976 and was its Michigan state secretary, is now a member of the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League.
To preserve the verbal character of the original presentation, we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
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What we're really talking about is a fairly important question for the left: why would anybody in 1978-1979 go from the Socialist Party (SP), the extreme right wing of anything we would call ostensibly socialist in this country, to the revolutionary communism of the Spartacist League? How is a group of militant, but raw, social democrats recruited, turned into communists, by the SL?
Those of us who came from the SP had a chance to test in action revolutionary politics in the workers movement. We had a lesson in what revolutionary politics are throughout our fight in the SP and our process of coming to the SL. Now why is it, first of all, that anyone would go to the Socialist Party in the first place? Many people who come to left politics go through a stage of thinking—some of them never leave it— that all who oppose capitalism should be organizationally united, despite their different programs. There is an illusion that there is a "family of the left" which can join together to fight the capitalists despite the fact that they have many different programs and strategies for doing so. Now the Socialist Party of today holds itself out as a "non-sectarian, multi-tendency" party, open to ill who sign an application which says, in effect,
"Relieving that socialism should be brought about by democratic means, 1 hereby apply to the SP." To politically raw youth, ignorant of the historic divisions in the workers movement, this seems only sensible.
The SP's History of Betrayal
Most of the people who later formed the Debs Caucus in the SP and split to the left were in fact ignorant of the political history of the SP, as well as of the history of the whole left movement. What we discovered, after joining the SP, was an unfolding series of revelations about the SP's history. We found out, more or less by accident—an accident which led to considerable research on our part as we grew more interested and appalled—that the SP during the whole of the Vietnam war had opposed military victory for the National Liberation Front. Under the slogan "Negotiate Now for a Neutralized South Vietnam," the SP basically supported the U.S. war effort. Leading members of the SP, such as Max Shachtman, furthermore had supported the imperialist adventure of the Bay of •Pigs invasion against the Cuban revolution—on the grounds that "totalitarian communism" had to be smashed by any means necessary.
The SP leadership for 60 years consistently fought any revolutionary tendencies that arose within the SP. In 1919 they expelled tens of thousands of people—many of whom later became the Communist Party—for adherence to the ideals of the Russian Revolution. I n 1937 they threw out a large Trotskyist cadre, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. In 1953 they basically threw their youth organization out, the Young People's Socialist League, the YPSLs, which later went to join Max Shachtman's group, which was at the time somewhat to the left. And in 1964, when the reconstituted YPSLs called for "Vote No for President" instead of endorsing Lyndon B. Johnson as the party itself did, again the youth organization was simply dissolved, the locks on its office padlocked and its membership thrown out.
The SP through most of its history was tied to the crustiest section of the labor bureaucracy—people like Albert Shanker, George Meany people who under the guise of some form of socialism had been bitterly anti-communist and had been the most consistent betrayers of working-class struggles. What we found out in fact was the historical role of the social democracy in America: to be the bourgeoisie's own anti-communist cover in the labor movement. The SP's ties with the right-wing section of the labor bureaucracy allowed it to be a transmission belt for bourgeois ideas into the labor movement.
The social democracy has had this role internationally since 1914, when the parties of the Second International supported their own bourgeois governments against the workers of other countries at the start of World War 1. Ever since then the social democrats have played the role of fighting the communists on behalf of the bourgeoisies under the guise of "democratic socialism."
A "Non-Sectarian" Swamp
Furthermore, we had a series of corresponding revelations about the present state of the organization we had joined, the product of this rotten history. We saw what the "non-sectarian party" looked like in practice. Torpid functioning. Half the membership hadn't paid its 1978 $4 dues by September of last year. The SP newspaper, % Socialist Tribune, was infrequent and •irregular. Its political content was determined erratically by a volunteer collective, which led to wild swings in political line. Because of the SP's erratic notions of discipline, individual members would put forward their own motions in the name of the party. For instance, the National Chairman, Frank Zeidler, would often issue press releases without clearing it with anyone. Although a quarter of the membership has trade-union experience, there was not a single SP trade-union fraction anywhere in the country. Many of the locals existed primarily on paper; and did absolutely nothing at all. This is basically what this "multi--tendency, non-sectarian" party looks like in .practice, it's a swamp in which nothing gets done and in; which the formal politics, such as they are, are the politics of class betrayal.
Now, the activist youth recruited over-the last two or three years realized that a concerted effort would be necessary if fife would ever be breathed into the SP's political corpse. Oppositional activity formally began at the May 1978 Wisconsin Socialist Party state convention, where there was an unsuccessful, but aggressive, challenge to the extreme right wing of the Wisconsin party led by a group of young comrades from Milwaukee. Between this May convention and the September National Convention, the left-wing activists in the SP, primarily located in Michigan and Wisconsin, coalesced into the Debs Caucus. This was to be the main organizational vehicle for left-wing opposition in the SP. The Caucus came together formally just prior to the September Convention after a series of rather vague and formless discussions.
The name. Debs Caucus, was not an acronym. It reflected, first of all, oppositional history in the SP. The Zeidlerites had been organized as the Debs Caucus when they were antiwar and against liquidation into the Democratic Party in 1973. More importantly, the name reflected a concept of the Socialist Party as it was in the time of Eugene V. Debs, before World War 1—an all-inclusive party in which revolutionaries like Big Bill Haywood, James P. Cannon and others coexisted with reformists such as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger. This concept of the party reflected the Caucus' own political heterogeneity. It contained self-proclaimed Maoists, Trotskyists, "non-Leninist Marxists" and so on.
The basic programmatic document of the Debs Caucus set forward our philosophy: "We prefer to emphasize the commonality among socialists rather than the differences." This concept of the party, called "Kautsky-ist" after the leading theoretician of the pre-World War 1 Second International is that of the "party of the whole class." All the working-class tendencies were factions of a common organization. These "parties of the whole class" everywhere in the world split in 1914 when one section of them, the reformists, supported their own bourgeoisie in World War I. This was a historic betrayal of the workers of the world, precisely when there was a need for militant opposition to the ruling class.
Like the Kautskyists, the Debs Caucus had programmatically vague statements about the need for unity, and ignored or slid over key questions such as the Russian question. The main document of the Caucus contained not one word on the Russian question. The call for the Debs Caucus, distributed at the 1978 convention, evaded the question by simply stating that we don't believe that the USSR is the main threat in the world today. Incorrect and temporizing as this attitude was, the social-democratic majority in the SP would have none of it. We were met with red-baiting hysteria and crude anti-communist slander. One National Committee member summed up the right-wing opposition's stance with the simple statement that "Lenin was a murderer."
SP's Right Wing Calls the Cops
Furthermore, the SP majority was not about to engage in political debate with a group of potential revolutionaries. It relied instead on bureaucratic maneuverings to crush the Caucus' opposition. When it looked like the Caucus would get a significant proportional representation on the National Committee of the SP at the Convention, the majority simply canceled the elections. The national secretary, Tom Spiro (a member of the Debs Caucus), was summarily fired, and at the time that the Caucus split from the SP in November, the majority had prepared to revoke the charter of all the left-wing locals.
After the September national convention, leading right-wingers began a new campaign of slander against the Debs Caucus. They claimed that we were agents of other left groups and that in any case we were politically ignorant and irresponsible. This is the answer of these "non-sectarians" to an attempt to clarify certain political differences within their "non-sectarian" party. The right-wingers were upset in particular by the entry of a small group in New York called the Communist Cadre-Marxist (CTCM), a tiny 1972 split from the Workers World Party of Sam Marcy. CTCM had drifted in the political wilds of New York City for a number of years before coming to rest in the SP.
Despite all their faults, the Communist Cadre were opposed by the social-democratic right wing precisely on the issues on which one could say they were right. It was because they claimed to be revolutionaries. The CTCM, for example, proposed a motion to expel chairman Zeidler for having crossed a picket line several months before in order to speak on the same platform as Henry Hyde (the well-known sponsor of an amendment to cut off Medicaid funding for abortions). This of course threw the SP right wing into a frenzy, and they attempted to throw the CTCM out.
Additionally, the Spartacist League exposed the fact in Workers Vanguard that Zeidler had helped break a bitter strike in Wisconsin in 1954 by using his power as mayor to allow scab goods to be unloaded at the harbor. On seeing this revelation the Milwaukee local of the SP also proposed the expulsion of Zeidler. This more or less forced the hand of the right-wingers who immediately summoned the National Committee and prepared to decharter the left-wing locals. When the Debs Caucus stood up at this meeting, 15 of us, the response of the right-wing majority was to call the police! This is what social democracy means: calling in the bourgeois state against the revolutionaries. This is how the majority bureaucratically dealt with the political challenge they were confronting.
Needed: A Program For Revolutionary Leadership
Under the blows of the right wing the Debs Caucus had to reassess its "family-of-the-left" conception. How could we coexist in the same party with people that called the cops on us? We carefully studied the basic writings of Lenin and Trotsky on the question of the organization of the revolutionary party, and we in the process made the transition to Leninism. The primary thing for a party is its program, which describes the basic tasks of a revolutionary party for making a socialist revolution. One needs a party committed programmatically to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism—a disciplined party capable of mobilizing the working class and seizing state power.
The fight for leadership of the working class, betrayed by the social democrats and their brothers under the skin, the Stalinists, is the fight against the other tendencies on the left. There is one party and one program only is revolutionary. All the misleaders must be exposed in action before the workers and politically defeated. The "multi-tendency" party subverts this struggle for leadership.
This struggle for revolutionary leadership governs the relations not only within the party, but between other left groups as well. This is the question of the united front. It's often necessary to form blocs between different tendencies for the defense of the working class, especially when the revolutionary party is not the sole or main party of the workers. Thus, in Germany in 1933 it was objectively vitally necessary for the Communist Party to actively seek out a united front with the social democrats to fight the fascists. Even in such blocs, however, the struggle to expose the misleadership of the other parties must go on. There must be merciless criticism of their program, the program of defeats, and the constant counterposition of the revolutionary program to theirs. The workers can then see each program tested in action. They can see which program wins gains.
Another question that divides social democrats from revolutionaries is the Russian question: do you defend the USSR against capitalist attack or not? If not, you are in alignment with the world bourgeoisie; there is no "third camp." The USSR represents a great gain, even under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy which must be overthrown by the Russian workers themselves. The same follows for the deformed workers states: China, and so on. The Russian question is the critical question for the world left movement. It defines one's attitude towards the world bourgeoisie. Take for example Maoism in China, where anti-Sovietism has led the Chinese bureaucracy to make a bloc with the U.S. against Russia. If they succeed in destroying the Soviet Union, they will only thereby set themselves up for decimation by the U.S. bourgeoisie.
The Russian question also has immediate importance because of the present reactionary campaign by the U.S. government for "human rights" in the Soviet Union. This is nothing but a cover for cold war hysteria—which most of the left has tailed. For example the Communist Party itself calls on Jimmy Carter and his government to "enforce human rights" at home. The Socialist Workers Party raises the call for "human rights" all the time in the context of calling on the bourgeois government to make good on its promises. But this is the same government that fought, -the .Vietnam war for 10, 20 years, that oppresses people throughout the world. Groups like these build illusions in the ability of this government to be "even-handed."
Program and Style
The party question in a sense comes down to "style." The reaction that most of the Debs Caucus members had early on in their exploration of other left groups was that they like the politics of the Spartacist League on questions such , as the Russian question, the party—but the "style" of the Spartacist League was "divisive." The majority of the left in general doesn't want to hear what the Spartacist League has to say. They don't want to confront communist politics, and they take refuge in criticizing what they call the "style" of the SL.
The Spartacist League is like Lenin's Bolsheviks, who only became a hard fighting party capable of leading the October Revolution through constant polemics against the misleaders: the Mensheviks, the social democrats. These were "destructive, divisive" polemics, that shattered parties, disgraced opponents and lined up the workers for the revolution. For 15 years Lenin fought to make a party by counterpoising his strategy for revolution in Russia to that of the reformists. And for this Lenin was insulted by social democrats throughout Europe. He was called sectarian, divisive, abrasive and so on. Communist politics, however, are abrasive in bourgeois society. There is no way to escape that. Anyone who wishes to practice communist politics should be resigned to incurring the anger of all the different species of misleaders who bring bourgeois consciousness into the workers movement.
Let me read you a description of Lenin's "abrasiveness" which was written by Trotsky. Speaking of Lenin talking at a public meeting, he says: "[Lenin's] answers are entirely unexpected and annihilating in their simplicity. Point-blank, he lays bare a situation which, according to all expectations, he should have sought to camouflage. The Mensheviks went through this experience more than once during the initial period of the revolution when charges of violations of democracy still had a ring of novelty. 'Our newspapers have been shut down!' [the Mensheviks cried.] 'Of course! But unfortunately not all of them as yet. They will all be shut down presently. The dictatorship of the proletariat will destroy at its very roots this shameful traffic in bourgeois opium!' [Lenin] has straightened up [on the podium]. Both hands are in [his] pockets. There is not even a hint of posing, in the voice not [even] a trace of oratorical modulation — instead the entire figure, the angle of the head, the compressed lips, the cheekbones, the slightly hoarse timbre of the voice all radiate an indomitable confidence in his correctness and his truth. 'If you want to fight, then come on, let's really fight.'" — Leon Trotsky, Portraits: Political & Personal (1977)
It's the same with us. The rest of the left can't stand our bluntness. The rest of the left is "nice." They don't raise the hard truths. The Socialist Workers Party is a very nice party. It calls for free speech for fascists, people who are for the destruction of the workers movement, for genocide. That's nicer. It's less abrasive in bourgeois society.
The Bolshevik Leninist Group [a tiny clot in Ann Arbor] which some of you saw tonight, is also very "nice." They crossed a picket line and helped break a strike. To them things like picket lines are intellectual abstractions to be debated learnedly in 60-page documents. The fact that a picket line is the living embodiment of the class struggle means nothing for these people, because after all it's "abrasive" to call for honoring picket lines.
So that's it for the style question. Yes, the Spartacist League's politics are abrasive in bourgeois society. The reformists don't like our style because they can't stand our politics. They can't stand the truth. They take the line of least resistance to bourgeois ideology. It was this that the ex-social democrats of the Debs Caucus broke with when they broke with the "family of the left" and with Kautskyism.
Their Party Wasn't Our Party
Even before it split from the SP the Debs Caucus began investigating other groups in the light of what it had learned in its own factional struggle. We oriented from the start towards fusion with another group. There was a felt inadequacy among its members for finding an independent political path.
The Debs Caucus rejected Stalinism and Maoism and the so-called "state-capitalist" tendencies out of hand. These tendencies have historically proven time and again to be betrayers of the proletariat wherever they have had a chance.
So, taking the lessons of history, the Debs Caucus members turned to Trotskyism, confronting first of all the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—the natural choice, one would think, for social democrats. Precisely—it's too much like the social democracy we just left. On all the key questions the Socialist Workers Party has no differences with the SP.
On the question of the party, their slogan "Our Party is Your Party," says it all. Join the SWP, no matter what your political position is. We even heard the Socialist Workers Party people openly proclaim that it's not necessary that you believe in Trotskyism to join the SWP!
On the Russian question the SWP very pointedly held up its fusion with the Revolutionary Marxist Committee, a small state-capitalist Shachtmanite group, as a model of a fusion. In other words they were saying: "Look, you may all be third camp, but come on in anyway. We don't care enough about defense of the gains of October to even ask you about it."
The SWP's attitude towards the bourgeois state is classically social-democratic. It sees the state as a neutral mediator between classes, not as an armed fist of bourgeois rule. Thus the SWP called for federal troops to Boston during the busing crisis there in 1974. They called on the bourgeois state which wrote slavery into its constitution, which for decade after decade institutionalized racism throughout the country; they called on this government to defend black people against racist mobs!
The SWP's trade-union work is a record of lackeyism to the bureaucracy. They play the role of a left cover for traitors like Arnold Miller of the Mineworkers. In 1972 when Miller was elected, the bought-and-paid-for candidate of the Labor Department, the SWP supported him uncritically. Even in 1978 when the rest of the left (which supported Miller previously) had at least enough embarrassment to say nothing favorable about Miller's despicable role in the great coal strike, the SWP stood alone in covering for Miller until the very end of the strike. Then, they finally introduced a few mild criticisms of the way he had sold out thousands of militant mineworkers.
Then there were the little groups that hang around the left. The chief of those we investigated was the Bolshevik-Leninist Group (BLG). In a way our investigation of the BLG shows the naiveté of Debs Caucus members. Why should anyone look into the revolutionary, pretensions of a group that has no press, no documents stating its political positions and no public face? However, it also shows that the Debs Caucus explored every avenue of ostensible Trotskyism in its search for a revolutionary party.
Now the BLG simply ignored the question of building a revolutionary party. It is not interested in it. For the BLG, politics is an abstraction. Tonight, for instance, despite the fact that a number of their supporters stood at the door for 30 minutes, they refused to come in and participate in the discussion. They had nothing to say, and they knew it.
The first real 'test of the BLG's politics—given its restriction to the Ann Arbor milieu—was a very small test. And they flunked. It was the question of picket lines, which I spoke about earlier.
For the Spartacist League!
Let me conclude by stepping back a bit from this relatively small struggle on the left,
involving a relative handful of people, to the larger tasks that face revolutionaries in the world today. The job of the Leninist vanguard is to wrest leadership from the rest of the left. The revolutionary party can't ignore or abstain from struggle with other tendencies or with the labor bureaucracy. The only way the Bolsheviks in this country, the Spartacist League, can win this leadership is by politically defeating in action the left fakers.
The struggle to build a revolutionary party in this country, and a revolutionary world party—to reforge the Fourth International—is the key task that faces revolutionaries today. Only the Sparta cist League participates in this task. Every other tendency in the left capitulates in one way or another to bourgeois consciousness. That is why comrades of the Debs Caucus, after investigating the claims of the various tendencies in the left to be revolutionary, came to the Spartacist League.
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