Markin comment:
In October 2010 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.
I am continuing today 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.
*********
Markin comment on this series of Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) articles:
Coming out of the radical wing of the Vietnam War anti-war movement in the early 1970s, and having done military service as well, I was intrigued when I first read about the Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP-U.S.) Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) as propounded by that party just before and during World War II. The intriguing part, initially at least, was the notion that radicals could have a democratic propaganda platform to work off of in bringing their fellow soldiers around to an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist by proposing to control the then much less powerful American military through democratic methods like election of officers, etc..
And then life intruded. Or rather I reflected on my own somewhat eclectic anti-war military work and, as well, of various schemes by reformists to “control” various aspects of bourgeois society without having to take power and replace those institutions. In short, take political responsibility for the current regime. In the year 2010 we, after years of defeat and decline, are quite used to reformists and others putting forth all kinds of nice schemes for turning swords into plowshares by asking the bourgeois state to take the war budget and create jobs, better educational opportunities, provide better health care, you name it all without, seemingly, positing the need to change the state.
A classic and fairly recent example of that, in the aftermath of the Professor Henry Louis Gates arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the renewed call for “community control of the police.” And of course, come election time, the willingness, sometimes without even the caveat of refusal to take office if elected, of all and sundry leftists to run from the executive offices of the bourgeois state. Thus, by standing for those offices, exhibiting a touching “innocence” on the question of responsibility for the administration of the capitalist state. To my mind, the PMP is on that order. The idea, the utopian idea, when you talk about the central organs of bourgeois state power, the armed forces, the police, the courts and the prisons that something short of the struggle for power will do the trick. The hard, hard reality is otherwise, as we are also too well aware of every time we get a little uppity.
Reflecting on my own military experience about what can and cannot be done in order to influence soldiers and sailors and fight for an anti-war perspective military does not mean that nothing can be done short of taking take power to do so. The real problem with the PMP, and it may have reflected a lack of knowledge of wartime military possibilities, cadre familiar with the then peacetime volunteer military, and the “weak” military presence in pre-World War II America was that it was trying to project a positive program where what was called for, and is usually called for in war time conditions, were defensive measures such as creation of rank and file servicemen’s unions that fight for democratic right for soldiers, essentially the right to organize, and against victimizations of both radicals and others that get into the military’s cross hairs. The other key policy was to link up the civilian political anti-war opposition with the soldiers through the vehicle of coffeehouses or other off base places and soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. Late in the Vietnam War period those effects were beginning to have effect as rank and file disaffection with that war almost split the soldiery. Certainly it was a factor in Vietnamization of the war as the American army became more unreliable as a tool to carry out imperial policy.
As the material presented notes, especially in the introduction, the SWP never, as far as I know, repudiated the PMP (it kind of drifted away as World War II entered its final phases.) This, perhaps, reflected a certain “softness” as also noted on the question of running for executive offices of the bourgeois state which that party did after the war and revolutionaries’ relationship to that state in the struggle for power. As well it is not clear how much Leon Trotsky’s posthumous residual authority, who pushed the PMP as much as anybody else, played in this whole mess. Read this material as a modern Marxist primer on the bourgeois state.
******
A Propos of ‘Trade-Union Control of National Defense’ ”
(Letter sent to the Committee by Comrade C.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1941
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The French text of this letter was taken from Bulletin Mensuel de la IVe Internationale (zone libre), No. 2, April 1941. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library. Quotations from the SWP resolution have been changed to conform to the English original.
The army plays an important role in the capitalist system: one can say that it forms the backbone of the state. For the bourgeoisie, the army has a dual role: it serves as an instrument to conquer new territories—this inevitable law of the system is the reason the army exists—and at the same time it is a means of coercion against the working class when capitalism comes up against its own internal problems.
Recognizing that the army is the clearest expression of the class division of society means admitting that the highest levels of the capitalist state direct its organization and functioning toward the dual goal we mentioned. Military discipline is merely subservience fabricated by the bourgeoisie to serve its interests and requirements.
In every case, whatever the state of demoralization in the army may be, in order to find a solution to a revolutionary situation the working class must win over this instrument which will facilitate its seizure of power. The proletariat should never even think that the capitalist army can evolve, can be transformed, into an army of the working class.
There is no doubt that we are at a stage preparatory to the revolution. In such a stage, the orientation that should be adopted by a party claiming to be working-class and revolutionary, to be advocated by militants claiming to be Marxists, is to make the proletariat see clearly the contradictions of the capitalist regime, to sharpen those contradictions to the point of creating a situation that impels the masses to fight for power.
And that is where we, as Marxists, find reason to confront the SWP leadership, which says: “We fight against sending worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and without equipment. We oppose the military direction of worker-soldiers by bourgeois officers who have no regard for their treatment, their protection or their lives. We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes—but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory training of workers? Yes—but only under the control of the trade unions!”
American capitalism is working feverishly to enter the war under the best circumstances. What it lacks is not just stockpiles of arms and equipment, but also pro-war hysteria among the masses. What prevents this hysteria from being created is formal democracy in the USA (as in France and England)—that is why, as events unfold, the American bourgeoisie will gradually have to rid itself of democratic impediments. So it cannot grant relative control of the workers by trade-union tops. Supposing, however, that the American bourgeoisie did decide to make this concession, the “management” of the working class would have a corporatist, fascist character.
In the area of production in general, in certain situations the workers movement has demanded control of production. It goes without saying that the revolutionary vanguard never viewed this control as a way to help capitalism to resolve its crisis, but as a way to deepen it even more and to demonstrate and expose to the working class how the surplus value is allocated. Fascism has been able to heighten its demagogy by granting the workers not “control” but “direct participation” in running the factories. One must not, of course, confuse a factory with a regiment and the army with the capitalist regime as a whole, but the control the American comrades demand does not go in the direction of exposing the very purpose of the army, nor does it further the disintegration of the army. Rather it results in maintaining the cohesiveness of this powerful instrument of the capitalist state whose goal is to resolve the crisis of the system.
Classical “soldiers’ committees” are the instruments to fight for the democratic demands that soldiers can and should always raise. To concede this mission to the American trade unions means reverting to the position of “parity committees” that we have seen in the area of production. Experience has proven that this path leads not toward intervention by the working class into the affairs of the state, but on the contrary state intervention into the affairs of the working class. Is the SWP giving Roosevelt the chance to form some sort of “parity committees” within the army, that is, to drag the working class into war? In that case, Roosevelt himself, not the SWP, would be the one most concerned with ensuring that soldiers have good material conditions and are well equipped (look at the example of the German army).
The strikes taking place in the United States demonstrate the existence of a working class fighting for transitional demands, which for the moment distance it from the union sacrée with its bourgeoisie. So these strikes are political in character and the role of a true vanguard party must be to push the movement toward a revolutionary outcome. There is a sharp contradiction between the fact of the strikes and the slogan advanced by the SWP leadership.
Here in Europe, lacking detailed and precise information, we are not very well able to measure the workers’ resistance to the bourgeoisie and to the trade-union bureaucracy. We know the dangers that such a conflict entails, but once it is begun—and we should push to begin it—the revolutionary party must fight to win political leadership of it. The workers’ independence from the interests of their own bourgeoisie underscores the contradictions—which at that point can be resolved only by extreme solutions. At this time, we do not know what the practical result will be. Either we will be faced with favorable prospects or subjected to severe restrictions on the possibilities for struggle. In any case, the position of the SWP will prove wrong, whatever the result of the current strikes.
Revolutionary policy should always be clearly defined for the working class which is waiting for an orientation. If the American comrades agree with us on the characterization of the imperialist war, we ask them: what interests of the working class does the militarization of that class correspond to? Especially considering that militarization corresponds precisely to preparation for participation in the war. Such a position does not go beyond that of social democracy which exposes the working class to the warmongering demands of capitalism—which during a period of crisis can resolve matters only by imperialist war.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks taught us that situations change and tactics change with them, but they taught us fidelity to principles, including always steadfastly opposing intervention in an imperialist war. The ideological future and historical prospects that the convulsions of capitalism promise the proletariat are well beyond those offered by the most carefully elaborated opportunism.
The current strikes have a clear class content, as does the imperialist war. The American workers will not avoid being dragged into the slaughter and the SWP’s current line (trade-union control of national defense after the “Referendum on War”) does not assist them in setting out on a path other than the one that leads to the battlefield.
The revolutionary possibilities for the world proletariat will arise when the consequences of the conflict begin to become clear. The means to bring forth and ripen these possibilities have been defined by Marxist revolutionaries on many occasions: first, explain the class character of the imperialist war, then total independence of the working class taken to its most extreme conclusions (revolutionary defeatism).
The opportunism we are condemning here is the reflection the masses produce in a small group. Being enmeshed in trade-union activity has led the American comrades to put tactics appropriate to a simple demand and the conquest of power in the same bag.
_____________
Our local Committee published the SWP’s position without giving its opinion, since we don’t think the remark that it represents a new sort of tactical tendency which is “original” constitutes an opinion. We won’t discuss the question of “originality,” for us it is quite relative (Jaurès talked a lot about a certain “New Army,” etc.), but we do accuse the local Committee of aiding in sowing confusion, of not opposing something that is contrary to the principled positions of Bolshevism.
********
The Committee's Reply to Comrade C.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1941
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The French text of this document was taken from Bulletin Mensuel de la IVe Internationale (zone libre), No. 2, April 1941. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library.
It is true that the Committee has not yet written down its opinion in black and white concerning the SWP’s position. It felt, perhaps wrongly, that first the discussion should be started on the American documents, which already happened a few months ago. In cell meetings, comrades were unanimous in condemning the famous phrases: “We fight against sending into battle...” etc. And for the benefit of comrade C. we would point out that it was members of the Committee who were the first to stress the inappropriateness, the unfortunate nature of these phrases, to point out the more or less utopian character of the slogan “trade-union control of the army,” the all-too-obvious contradiction between the first part of the Manifesto (“not one man, not one penny, not one rifle for the bourgeois army”) and the second part, which was the “original” contribution (we maintain the epithet: everyone is free to interpret it as he wishes). It was our intention to subject this document to the most searching criticism—so much so that we didn’t include this first part in the Bulletin, since it merely confirmed our traditional position on war and the bourgeois army.
Once this critical assessment had been made—an assessment which C.’s informant R. did not contribute to—it seemed to us wise to await new information and documents. It was all the more wise in that the SWP seems to us to still have a clearly BL [Bolshevik-Leninist] position: genuine opposition to the war, anti-Anglophilia (but also clearly setting themselves off from the pacifists and isolationists), in a word an independent class policy. To date there has been no trace of union sacrée. And that is why their position on the army seems to us—pending further information—to be a gross tactical error if you will, but nothing more, at least for the moment.
In addition, this position seems to us sufficiently open to criticism as it is, without having to find ways to distort it or even make it say what it doesn’t say. Don’t forget (and what follows is not written with the intention of making excuses for the American position, but to clarify matters) that for our comrades it is a question of transitional slogans. C. counterposes trade-union control over the army to “Soldiers’ Committees.” That’s wrong! Control is only a slogan for an immediate demand, like our “Down with two years” [length of army service] or “Five francs pay” [for soldiers]. We say this, to reiterate, without calling into question the incorrectness of the slogan “trade-union control of the army.” But if the first two slogans are agitational, all the more so should the latter one be agitational. Comrade C. sees a “sharp contradiction” between the fact that there are strikes and the slogan put forward by the SWP leadership. Now the CIO (headed by Lewis) generally supported the strike movement. Well, it is that same CIO which would probably be named by the SWP to “control” the army—because the union remains a union, even if its leader supports a reactionary candidate in the elections. So where is the contradiction between strikes and “control”?
Finally, we would point out that although trade-union “control” of the army seems to us a utopian slogan, without practical application and as such wrong (even isolated from its dubious context), we also know that for the last few months the American fraternal party has been at the cutting edge of the strike wave, and that it has been doing nothing but “pushing this movement toward a revolutionary outcome.”
—The Committee
In October 2010 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.
I am continuing today 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.
*********
Markin comment on this series of Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) articles:
Coming out of the radical wing of the Vietnam War anti-war movement in the early 1970s, and having done military service as well, I was intrigued when I first read about the Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP-U.S.) Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) as propounded by that party just before and during World War II. The intriguing part, initially at least, was the notion that radicals could have a democratic propaganda platform to work off of in bringing their fellow soldiers around to an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist by proposing to control the then much less powerful American military through democratic methods like election of officers, etc..
And then life intruded. Or rather I reflected on my own somewhat eclectic anti-war military work and, as well, of various schemes by reformists to “control” various aspects of bourgeois society without having to take power and replace those institutions. In short, take political responsibility for the current regime. In the year 2010 we, after years of defeat and decline, are quite used to reformists and others putting forth all kinds of nice schemes for turning swords into plowshares by asking the bourgeois state to take the war budget and create jobs, better educational opportunities, provide better health care, you name it all without, seemingly, positing the need to change the state.
A classic and fairly recent example of that, in the aftermath of the Professor Henry Louis Gates arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the renewed call for “community control of the police.” And of course, come election time, the willingness, sometimes without even the caveat of refusal to take office if elected, of all and sundry leftists to run from the executive offices of the bourgeois state. Thus, by standing for those offices, exhibiting a touching “innocence” on the question of responsibility for the administration of the capitalist state. To my mind, the PMP is on that order. The idea, the utopian idea, when you talk about the central organs of bourgeois state power, the armed forces, the police, the courts and the prisons that something short of the struggle for power will do the trick. The hard, hard reality is otherwise, as we are also too well aware of every time we get a little uppity.
Reflecting on my own military experience about what can and cannot be done in order to influence soldiers and sailors and fight for an anti-war perspective military does not mean that nothing can be done short of taking take power to do so. The real problem with the PMP, and it may have reflected a lack of knowledge of wartime military possibilities, cadre familiar with the then peacetime volunteer military, and the “weak” military presence in pre-World War II America was that it was trying to project a positive program where what was called for, and is usually called for in war time conditions, were defensive measures such as creation of rank and file servicemen’s unions that fight for democratic right for soldiers, essentially the right to organize, and against victimizations of both radicals and others that get into the military’s cross hairs. The other key policy was to link up the civilian political anti-war opposition with the soldiers through the vehicle of coffeehouses or other off base places and soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. Late in the Vietnam War period those effects were beginning to have effect as rank and file disaffection with that war almost split the soldiery. Certainly it was a factor in Vietnamization of the war as the American army became more unreliable as a tool to carry out imperial policy.
As the material presented notes, especially in the introduction, the SWP never, as far as I know, repudiated the PMP (it kind of drifted away as World War II entered its final phases.) This, perhaps, reflected a certain “softness” as also noted on the question of running for executive offices of the bourgeois state which that party did after the war and revolutionaries’ relationship to that state in the struggle for power. As well it is not clear how much Leon Trotsky’s posthumous residual authority, who pushed the PMP as much as anybody else, played in this whole mess. Read this material as a modern Marxist primer on the bourgeois state.
******
A Propos of ‘Trade-Union Control of National Defense’ ”
(Letter sent to the Committee by Comrade C.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1941
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The French text of this letter was taken from Bulletin Mensuel de la IVe Internationale (zone libre), No. 2, April 1941. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library. Quotations from the SWP resolution have been changed to conform to the English original.
The army plays an important role in the capitalist system: one can say that it forms the backbone of the state. For the bourgeoisie, the army has a dual role: it serves as an instrument to conquer new territories—this inevitable law of the system is the reason the army exists—and at the same time it is a means of coercion against the working class when capitalism comes up against its own internal problems.
Recognizing that the army is the clearest expression of the class division of society means admitting that the highest levels of the capitalist state direct its organization and functioning toward the dual goal we mentioned. Military discipline is merely subservience fabricated by the bourgeoisie to serve its interests and requirements.
In every case, whatever the state of demoralization in the army may be, in order to find a solution to a revolutionary situation the working class must win over this instrument which will facilitate its seizure of power. The proletariat should never even think that the capitalist army can evolve, can be transformed, into an army of the working class.
There is no doubt that we are at a stage preparatory to the revolution. In such a stage, the orientation that should be adopted by a party claiming to be working-class and revolutionary, to be advocated by militants claiming to be Marxists, is to make the proletariat see clearly the contradictions of the capitalist regime, to sharpen those contradictions to the point of creating a situation that impels the masses to fight for power.
And that is where we, as Marxists, find reason to confront the SWP leadership, which says: “We fight against sending worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and without equipment. We oppose the military direction of worker-soldiers by bourgeois officers who have no regard for their treatment, their protection or their lives. We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes—but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory training of workers? Yes—but only under the control of the trade unions!”
American capitalism is working feverishly to enter the war under the best circumstances. What it lacks is not just stockpiles of arms and equipment, but also pro-war hysteria among the masses. What prevents this hysteria from being created is formal democracy in the USA (as in France and England)—that is why, as events unfold, the American bourgeoisie will gradually have to rid itself of democratic impediments. So it cannot grant relative control of the workers by trade-union tops. Supposing, however, that the American bourgeoisie did decide to make this concession, the “management” of the working class would have a corporatist, fascist character.
In the area of production in general, in certain situations the workers movement has demanded control of production. It goes without saying that the revolutionary vanguard never viewed this control as a way to help capitalism to resolve its crisis, but as a way to deepen it even more and to demonstrate and expose to the working class how the surplus value is allocated. Fascism has been able to heighten its demagogy by granting the workers not “control” but “direct participation” in running the factories. One must not, of course, confuse a factory with a regiment and the army with the capitalist regime as a whole, but the control the American comrades demand does not go in the direction of exposing the very purpose of the army, nor does it further the disintegration of the army. Rather it results in maintaining the cohesiveness of this powerful instrument of the capitalist state whose goal is to resolve the crisis of the system.
Classical “soldiers’ committees” are the instruments to fight for the democratic demands that soldiers can and should always raise. To concede this mission to the American trade unions means reverting to the position of “parity committees” that we have seen in the area of production. Experience has proven that this path leads not toward intervention by the working class into the affairs of the state, but on the contrary state intervention into the affairs of the working class. Is the SWP giving Roosevelt the chance to form some sort of “parity committees” within the army, that is, to drag the working class into war? In that case, Roosevelt himself, not the SWP, would be the one most concerned with ensuring that soldiers have good material conditions and are well equipped (look at the example of the German army).
The strikes taking place in the United States demonstrate the existence of a working class fighting for transitional demands, which for the moment distance it from the union sacrée with its bourgeoisie. So these strikes are political in character and the role of a true vanguard party must be to push the movement toward a revolutionary outcome. There is a sharp contradiction between the fact of the strikes and the slogan advanced by the SWP leadership.
Here in Europe, lacking detailed and precise information, we are not very well able to measure the workers’ resistance to the bourgeoisie and to the trade-union bureaucracy. We know the dangers that such a conflict entails, but once it is begun—and we should push to begin it—the revolutionary party must fight to win political leadership of it. The workers’ independence from the interests of their own bourgeoisie underscores the contradictions—which at that point can be resolved only by extreme solutions. At this time, we do not know what the practical result will be. Either we will be faced with favorable prospects or subjected to severe restrictions on the possibilities for struggle. In any case, the position of the SWP will prove wrong, whatever the result of the current strikes.
Revolutionary policy should always be clearly defined for the working class which is waiting for an orientation. If the American comrades agree with us on the characterization of the imperialist war, we ask them: what interests of the working class does the militarization of that class correspond to? Especially considering that militarization corresponds precisely to preparation for participation in the war. Such a position does not go beyond that of social democracy which exposes the working class to the warmongering demands of capitalism—which during a period of crisis can resolve matters only by imperialist war.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks taught us that situations change and tactics change with them, but they taught us fidelity to principles, including always steadfastly opposing intervention in an imperialist war. The ideological future and historical prospects that the convulsions of capitalism promise the proletariat are well beyond those offered by the most carefully elaborated opportunism.
The current strikes have a clear class content, as does the imperialist war. The American workers will not avoid being dragged into the slaughter and the SWP’s current line (trade-union control of national defense after the “Referendum on War”) does not assist them in setting out on a path other than the one that leads to the battlefield.
The revolutionary possibilities for the world proletariat will arise when the consequences of the conflict begin to become clear. The means to bring forth and ripen these possibilities have been defined by Marxist revolutionaries on many occasions: first, explain the class character of the imperialist war, then total independence of the working class taken to its most extreme conclusions (revolutionary defeatism).
The opportunism we are condemning here is the reflection the masses produce in a small group. Being enmeshed in trade-union activity has led the American comrades to put tactics appropriate to a simple demand and the conquest of power in the same bag.
_____________
Our local Committee published the SWP’s position without giving its opinion, since we don’t think the remark that it represents a new sort of tactical tendency which is “original” constitutes an opinion. We won’t discuss the question of “originality,” for us it is quite relative (Jaurès talked a lot about a certain “New Army,” etc.), but we do accuse the local Committee of aiding in sowing confusion, of not opposing something that is contrary to the principled positions of Bolshevism.
********
The Committee's Reply to Comrade C.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1941
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published in Prometheus Research Series 2, 1989.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: David Walters, John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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The French text of this document was taken from Bulletin Mensuel de la IVe Internationale (zone libre), No. 2, April 1941. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library.
It is true that the Committee has not yet written down its opinion in black and white concerning the SWP’s position. It felt, perhaps wrongly, that first the discussion should be started on the American documents, which already happened a few months ago. In cell meetings, comrades were unanimous in condemning the famous phrases: “We fight against sending into battle...” etc. And for the benefit of comrade C. we would point out that it was members of the Committee who were the first to stress the inappropriateness, the unfortunate nature of these phrases, to point out the more or less utopian character of the slogan “trade-union control of the army,” the all-too-obvious contradiction between the first part of the Manifesto (“not one man, not one penny, not one rifle for the bourgeois army”) and the second part, which was the “original” contribution (we maintain the epithet: everyone is free to interpret it as he wishes). It was our intention to subject this document to the most searching criticism—so much so that we didn’t include this first part in the Bulletin, since it merely confirmed our traditional position on war and the bourgeois army.
Once this critical assessment had been made—an assessment which C.’s informant R. did not contribute to—it seemed to us wise to await new information and documents. It was all the more wise in that the SWP seems to us to still have a clearly BL [Bolshevik-Leninist] position: genuine opposition to the war, anti-Anglophilia (but also clearly setting themselves off from the pacifists and isolationists), in a word an independent class policy. To date there has been no trace of union sacrée. And that is why their position on the army seems to us—pending further information—to be a gross tactical error if you will, but nothing more, at least for the moment.
In addition, this position seems to us sufficiently open to criticism as it is, without having to find ways to distort it or even make it say what it doesn’t say. Don’t forget (and what follows is not written with the intention of making excuses for the American position, but to clarify matters) that for our comrades it is a question of transitional slogans. C. counterposes trade-union control over the army to “Soldiers’ Committees.” That’s wrong! Control is only a slogan for an immediate demand, like our “Down with two years” [length of army service] or “Five francs pay” [for soldiers]. We say this, to reiterate, without calling into question the incorrectness of the slogan “trade-union control of the army.” But if the first two slogans are agitational, all the more so should the latter one be agitational. Comrade C. sees a “sharp contradiction” between the fact that there are strikes and the slogan put forward by the SWP leadership. Now the CIO (headed by Lewis) generally supported the strike movement. Well, it is that same CIO which would probably be named by the SWP to “control” the army—because the union remains a union, even if its leader supports a reactionary candidate in the elections. So where is the contradiction between strikes and “control”?
Finally, we would point out that although trade-union “control” of the army seems to us a utopian slogan, without practical application and as such wrong (even isolated from its dubious context), we also know that for the last few months the American fraternal party has been at the cutting edge of the strike wave, and that it has been doing nothing but “pushing this movement toward a revolutionary outcome.”
—The Committee
