Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Piero Melograni, Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State 1917-1920, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1990, 02.95
Melograni’s book, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts. The author has read widely, and generally speaking shows a mastery of his source material This, however, varies greatly in quality; excellent on many occasions, it is of most slender worth in others. The text, first published in Italy during 1985, clearly shows signs of its original purpose, a polemic directed against the PCI. The theme starkly stated on the dust cover is startlingly simple: “Lenin did not want world revolution, but rather ... conceived the idea of ‘Socialism in only one country’ from the moment he took power”. Further, “the Third International ... in fact was not founded to export revolution, but simply to defend one state” (p.xii). The text, we are told, “evoked lively criticism in the Italian press”. The Italian Communists, however, made no comment, and “chose to remain silent”. Where caution bade the million strong PCI to avoid the fray, this reviewer will now plunge headlong.
In support of his argument Melograni draws on sources hitherto little known in Italy, sources of which left wing historiography in this country fails to take proper note even today. Some of this material is touched upon in my Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921. Much of the rest is examined in my forthcoming volume on the Communist International, which has yet to see the light of day. These sources bear on the earliest days of the Comintern, the dark and shrouded history of the relations between Germany and the Bolsheviks both before and after the Communist seizure of power, and the secret diplomatic exchanges between the Soviet government and the former Entente powers in the years between 1918 and 1920. In my own view Melograni handles this material reasonably well. On occasion he seems to stretch the argument further than the documentation will warrant, for example, on Lloyd George’s wish “to revise the Versailles Treaty” (p.113), “the talks were proceeding in a cordial atmosphere” (p.117); or to use highly partisan evidence as though it were impartial, for example, Field Marshal Henry Wilson (not “General Wilson”) (p.117); or to be wrong on a point of fact, “Lloyd George did not expel the leader of the Soviet delegation” (p.119), on which cf Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement ..., p.254 n138, p.415; or to use a fairly worthless source to establish an important point, the FIAT evidence (p.105), the testimony of “former Trade Commissar Bronski” (pp.120-21), the tale “I was told” retailed by the “American journalist Frazier Hunt” (pp.49-50); or even to give an impression quite the reverse of the truth, for example the quotation to the effect that already in 1920 Soviet Russia had achieved “a formal peace with all the Western states”, whereas the first states to accord diplomatic recognition to the USSR were Italy and Britain, and this only in 1924, whilst so powerful a nation as the United States did not accord recognition until 1933. Nevertheless, many polemicists before have done the same, as will many more who will come after. The discerning reader will need to be wary. If he does that he will not go far wrong.
There remains the vexed question of Bolshevik-German relations, the most accessible introduction to which is Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867-1924, London, 1965. ‘Parvus’, it will be remembered, was Trotsky’s close mentor and associate, and with him the original author of the theory of the Permanent Revolution. Did the Kaiser’s Germany subsidise would-be secessionists and revolutionaries inside and outside the Tsar's Russia during the First World War? Was the outcome of the revolutionary struggles between March and October 1917 materially affected by the buckets of Allied and German gold sloshing around in Petrograd at that time? Did close relations between Bolshevik leaders (especially Lenin) and the German ruling elite continue between March and October 1918 and even beyond? My own view, as one who has deeply pondered the material involved over a long period of time, is that the answers to each of these questions is ‘Yes’. Readers of Revolutionary History will need to make up their own minds, and check out Melograni’s references for themselves.
Melograni sets out his thesis in a highly compact form – 20 chapters, some only four to five pages long, which traverse the whole period from the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 1918) to the Russian advance on Warsaw (July-August 1920), in a total of little more than 120 pages. This polished performance makes for accessibility to the general reader, although it leaves the specialist seeking more documentation than the text itself supplies. What then of Melograni’s thesis? Did Lenin and the Bolsheviks genuinely seek ‘world revolution’ between 1917 and 1920? Or was their aim merely the short to medium term survival of Bolshevik hegemony over the Soviet state, for which aim all talk of ‘world revolution’ was but a smoke screen and nothing more?
In regard to the German question, I find the charge of German support for the Bolsheviks both before and after 1917 amply proven. Without German support the October coup would never successfully have taken place, nor without it could Bolshevik rule have continued thereafter. Both then and subsequently (up to and including the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact) Soviet foreign policy continually sought an alliance with the pro-Eastern, anti-Versailles wing of the German bourgeoisie, and from Trotsky onwards contracted its own mutual arrangements for mutual aid with the German military, until Hitler cut them off after 1933. Since German Social Democrats leant to the ‘West’ rather than to the ‘East’ they became the bête noir of the Russian state, Comintern and KPD, as in the end ‘Social Fascism’ itself bore out. (This ground is traversed in Chapters 1, 4, 11 and 12 in particular.)
Bolshevism’s struggle for an accommodation with defeated Germany did not at all prevent it working also for an accommodation with the victorious Entente as well. At the time of the near victorious advance on Warsaw in mid-summer 1920, the secret diplomatic manoeuvrings of Kamenev and Krassin with Lloyd George in London, as Melograni argues, were conducted in terms and tactics quite at odds with the slogans advanced by the Comintern and its parties both in Britain and elsewhere at the same time. The Comintern’s “turn to the East”, its Baku Congress of the Peoples of the Orient, and Roy’s subsequent revolutionary expedition to the very frontiers of Afghanistan, were indeed intended in part as a “diversion in Asia”, to ease pressure on the revolution more near at home. The Bolsheviks did indeed negotiate to trade these ventures off against diplomatic recognition, and to some extent, in the end, actually did so (Chapters 9, 14-19). On the other hand the Hungarian Revolution did seek to promote revolution in Austria (where a coup was in fact attempted), in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and Melograni’s endeavour to suggest that this was done against Lenin’s will is quite unconvincing (Chapter 10).
On balance then, I find the case for Melograni’s thesis unproven. What is quite clear from his evidence, and it may be that no one has ever made it quite so clear before, is that the Bolsheviks were continually running ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ policies at the same time. If the Russian advance reached Warsaw and the outcome was a new European settlement, well and good. If the Polish puppet government, constituted at Lublin out of Comintern cadres, took over the state, and another puppet government constituted out of German cadres held over from the Second World Congress of the Comintern, invited the Red Army to ‘protect’ the German Revolution in Berlin, so much the better. In the same fashion Bolshevik delegates negotiating with the British did promise to call off revolutionary propaganda abroad. So, in Asia, to some extent they did. More often the Russian state pleaded helplessness, explaining that the Communist Party and the Comintern were agencies outside its own control. A large measure of cynical manipulation and deliberate lying were thus integral parts of Bolshevik behaviour from the very beginning. The Comintern sprang from the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda at the Soviet Foreign Office, this at a time when Soviet foreign policy was ‘genuinely’ revolutionary, albeit that it was bound hand and foot to the Soviet Political Bureau from the very beginning. When Soviet home and foreign policy changed, Comintern policy, often after lengthy procedural and frictional delays, changed in line. Looked at in the light of history, it seems strange, 70 years later, that matters could ever have been seen in any other light. The Comintern, with it the Communist parties, signified the attempt to apply an aberrant Russian solution to what was primarily a European and Asian problem. As we can now see from the turmoil and wreckage of once Communist-ruled Central and Eastern Europe, that was an enterprise doomed from the start.
Melograni’s book does, however, raise contemporary issues which go far beyond the scope of its own brief pages. In particular it now behoves us to look more closely at the very issue of world revolution itself.
The Comintern at its foundation in March 1919 held that the “collapse of the Second International”, the havoc wrought by the First World War, and above all the October Revolution, signalled the irreparable decay of capitalism and the arrival of an era of world revolution. This ‘final crisis’ was so deep that capitalism was no longer able to maintain, still less to increase, the means of production. The political superstructure was now a barrier to any further increase of the productive forces. Only a revolution could release mankind from the crisis, and allow it to find a new way forward. World revolution was inevitable, not because people wanted it, but because without world revolution man could find no way forward. The ‘objective factors’ for revolution were complete. All that was lacking was the subjective factor, the necessary revolutionary ‘leadership’. The worldwide struggle for revolution required a unitary world leadership which was to be provided by the highly centralised national sections of the Comintern, each closely supervised and led by the yet more highly centralised ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’, the Executive Committee of the Communist International – ECCI – in Moscow. These were the propositions upon which the world Communist movement was founded. They were taken over intact as the fundamental basis of the Trotskyist movement, and remain its founding principles up to the present day.
Where stands this notion of world revolution more than 70 years later? It is clear that the world revolution has not yet arrived. Trotsky provided his own explanation. The Communist parties had become Stalinist, abandoned world revolution for the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, had thus become “counter revolutionary”. A new revolutionary leadership, a new, revolutionary Transitional Programme was required. Trotsky himself drafted the programme. The Fourth International was founded on his initiative during 1938. A further half a century and more has now elapsed. After 53 years the Fourth International is no more the ‘leadership’ of the world proletariat than it was at the beginning. Nor are any of the myriad Trotskyist ‘parties’, groups or sects markedly better placed.
Now the failures of this or that revolutionary sect or leadership cadre can very well be explained away by ‘subjective’ failings. But the failure of all such groups, over a whole historical era, can in no way be dealt with in this same fashion. Such an extended failure, over so prolonged a period of time, must surely be due to objective factors, not to subjective factors at all. It would seem, on the basis of the evidence, that we have critically to examine the notion of world revolution.
If world revolution was imminent in 1919, why has it not come about almost three quarters of a century later? The question cannot properly be evaded. A revolutionary epoch, after all, is one in which revolutions are on the order of the day. If we find ourselves in an epoch in which the great (Socialist) revolutions do not take place, in what sense may we legitimately term this a revolutionary era? One might, I suppose, once have argued in desperation that there were after all great revolutions, but in a degenerated form. At a time when the Soviet Union is clearly coming apart at the seams, at a time in which we have seen one by one, over the past 12 months, first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria break free of Communist rule, a total of some 110 million people, this would scarcely seem feasible any more.
What then went wrong? We have, I feel, to return to the original Marxian revolutionary syllogism to find the answer. People make revolutions not because they want to, but because they have to. They have to in the grand historical schema because the existing mode of production has become a fetter on the growth of the productive forces. The original expectation of the Comintern, the hidden premise upon which all else was founded, was the notion that twentieth century capitalism could no longer develop the productive forces. Even the quickest glance at the economic statistics covering the last 70 years will show that manifestly this is not the case. In point of fact the growth of productive forces in the twentieth century has been far greater than in the nineteenth century.
World output of inanimate energy, measured in million megawatt hour equivalent stood at 1,078 in 1860, rose to 6,089 in 1900, more than doubled again to 15,882 in 1940, and more than trebled to 53,206 in 1970. World output of steel, one million tons in 1870, stood at 29 million tons in 1900, and rose to 380 million tons by 1960. Industrial output per capita in Western Europe and the United States grew between 1900 and 1960, as shown in the following table:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
Western Europe
USA
1901
37
74
1937
67
160
1960
124
298
If we turn to the United Kingdom we find that Gross Domestic Product at constant factor cost increased between 1855 and 1965 (taking 1913 as 100) as follows:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
1855
32.7
1920
94.8
1875
50.2
1950
154.9
1900
82.3
1965
237.8
If we look instead to consumer expenditure in the United Kingdom we discover that this stood (at constant 1984 prices) at £58,543 million in 1900, and had increased to £194,673 by 1984. Food expenditure increased from £15,495 million to £28,448 million over the same period, expenditure on clothing from £3,415 million to £13,158 million, expenditure on consumer durables from £1,639 million to £19,241 million.
Clearly then, if revolutions are inevitable only when existing society can no longer develop the productive forces, and if existing capitalist society plainly does this, and does it very well, then surely all the expectations of ‘inevitable’ revolution, upon which ‘Trotskyism’ no less than ‘Communism’ have rested, simply fly straight out of the window.
Nor is that all. The notion that the ‘Socialist’ Stalinoid plan system, the command economy, is innately superior to that of advanced industrial capitalism can no longer be maintained either. The present economic crisis which threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union has clearly been brought about as a direct result of the failings of the ‘planned economy’ itself. The same holds true of every one of the other ‘planned economies’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Stalinist command economy, in the Soviet Union after 60 years (and despite all the appalling ‘sacrifices’), and Stalinist ‘planned economy’ in Eastern Europe after 40 years, have proved equally a failure. Most recent estimates put productivity in East Germany (the most advanced economy in the former Bloc) at one half or less than that of the Federal Republic.
Clearly there exists a problem as to where we go from here.
Walter Kendall
Note
1. My figures are taken from Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, pp.59, 75, 76; A.H. Halsey (Ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900, pp.146, 149; C.H. Feinstein, National Expenditure and Output in the United Kingdom 1855-1965, pp.T14, T19.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews
Piero Melograni, Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State 1917-1920, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1990, 02.95
Melograni’s book, like the proverbial curate’s egg, is good in parts. The author has read widely, and generally speaking shows a mastery of his source material This, however, varies greatly in quality; excellent on many occasions, it is of most slender worth in others. The text, first published in Italy during 1985, clearly shows signs of its original purpose, a polemic directed against the PCI. The theme starkly stated on the dust cover is startlingly simple: “Lenin did not want world revolution, but rather ... conceived the idea of ‘Socialism in only one country’ from the moment he took power”. Further, “the Third International ... in fact was not founded to export revolution, but simply to defend one state” (p.xii). The text, we are told, “evoked lively criticism in the Italian press”. The Italian Communists, however, made no comment, and “chose to remain silent”. Where caution bade the million strong PCI to avoid the fray, this reviewer will now plunge headlong.
In support of his argument Melograni draws on sources hitherto little known in Italy, sources of which left wing historiography in this country fails to take proper note even today. Some of this material is touched upon in my Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921. Much of the rest is examined in my forthcoming volume on the Communist International, which has yet to see the light of day. These sources bear on the earliest days of the Comintern, the dark and shrouded history of the relations between Germany and the Bolsheviks both before and after the Communist seizure of power, and the secret diplomatic exchanges between the Soviet government and the former Entente powers in the years between 1918 and 1920. In my own view Melograni handles this material reasonably well. On occasion he seems to stretch the argument further than the documentation will warrant, for example, on Lloyd George’s wish “to revise the Versailles Treaty” (p.113), “the talks were proceeding in a cordial atmosphere” (p.117); or to use highly partisan evidence as though it were impartial, for example, Field Marshal Henry Wilson (not “General Wilson”) (p.117); or to be wrong on a point of fact, “Lloyd George did not expel the leader of the Soviet delegation” (p.119), on which cf Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement ..., p.254 n138, p.415; or to use a fairly worthless source to establish an important point, the FIAT evidence (p.105), the testimony of “former Trade Commissar Bronski” (pp.120-21), the tale “I was told” retailed by the “American journalist Frazier Hunt” (pp.49-50); or even to give an impression quite the reverse of the truth, for example the quotation to the effect that already in 1920 Soviet Russia had achieved “a formal peace with all the Western states”, whereas the first states to accord diplomatic recognition to the USSR were Italy and Britain, and this only in 1924, whilst so powerful a nation as the United States did not accord recognition until 1933. Nevertheless, many polemicists before have done the same, as will many more who will come after. The discerning reader will need to be wary. If he does that he will not go far wrong.
There remains the vexed question of Bolshevik-German relations, the most accessible introduction to which is Z.A.B. Zeman and W.B. Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867-1924, London, 1965. ‘Parvus’, it will be remembered, was Trotsky’s close mentor and associate, and with him the original author of the theory of the Permanent Revolution. Did the Kaiser’s Germany subsidise would-be secessionists and revolutionaries inside and outside the Tsar's Russia during the First World War? Was the outcome of the revolutionary struggles between March and October 1917 materially affected by the buckets of Allied and German gold sloshing around in Petrograd at that time? Did close relations between Bolshevik leaders (especially Lenin) and the German ruling elite continue between March and October 1918 and even beyond? My own view, as one who has deeply pondered the material involved over a long period of time, is that the answers to each of these questions is ‘Yes’. Readers of Revolutionary History will need to make up their own minds, and check out Melograni’s references for themselves.
Melograni sets out his thesis in a highly compact form – 20 chapters, some only four to five pages long, which traverse the whole period from the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 1918) to the Russian advance on Warsaw (July-August 1920), in a total of little more than 120 pages. This polished performance makes for accessibility to the general reader, although it leaves the specialist seeking more documentation than the text itself supplies. What then of Melograni’s thesis? Did Lenin and the Bolsheviks genuinely seek ‘world revolution’ between 1917 and 1920? Or was their aim merely the short to medium term survival of Bolshevik hegemony over the Soviet state, for which aim all talk of ‘world revolution’ was but a smoke screen and nothing more?
In regard to the German question, I find the charge of German support for the Bolsheviks both before and after 1917 amply proven. Without German support the October coup would never successfully have taken place, nor without it could Bolshevik rule have continued thereafter. Both then and subsequently (up to and including the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact) Soviet foreign policy continually sought an alliance with the pro-Eastern, anti-Versailles wing of the German bourgeoisie, and from Trotsky onwards contracted its own mutual arrangements for mutual aid with the German military, until Hitler cut them off after 1933. Since German Social Democrats leant to the ‘West’ rather than to the ‘East’ they became the bête noir of the Russian state, Comintern and KPD, as in the end ‘Social Fascism’ itself bore out. (This ground is traversed in Chapters 1, 4, 11 and 12 in particular.)
Bolshevism’s struggle for an accommodation with defeated Germany did not at all prevent it working also for an accommodation with the victorious Entente as well. At the time of the near victorious advance on Warsaw in mid-summer 1920, the secret diplomatic manoeuvrings of Kamenev and Krassin with Lloyd George in London, as Melograni argues, were conducted in terms and tactics quite at odds with the slogans advanced by the Comintern and its parties both in Britain and elsewhere at the same time. The Comintern’s “turn to the East”, its Baku Congress of the Peoples of the Orient, and Roy’s subsequent revolutionary expedition to the very frontiers of Afghanistan, were indeed intended in part as a “diversion in Asia”, to ease pressure on the revolution more near at home. The Bolsheviks did indeed negotiate to trade these ventures off against diplomatic recognition, and to some extent, in the end, actually did so (Chapters 9, 14-19). On the other hand the Hungarian Revolution did seek to promote revolution in Austria (where a coup was in fact attempted), in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and Melograni’s endeavour to suggest that this was done against Lenin’s will is quite unconvincing (Chapter 10).
On balance then, I find the case for Melograni’s thesis unproven. What is quite clear from his evidence, and it may be that no one has ever made it quite so clear before, is that the Bolsheviks were continually running ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reformist’ policies at the same time. If the Russian advance reached Warsaw and the outcome was a new European settlement, well and good. If the Polish puppet government, constituted at Lublin out of Comintern cadres, took over the state, and another puppet government constituted out of German cadres held over from the Second World Congress of the Comintern, invited the Red Army to ‘protect’ the German Revolution in Berlin, so much the better. In the same fashion Bolshevik delegates negotiating with the British did promise to call off revolutionary propaganda abroad. So, in Asia, to some extent they did. More often the Russian state pleaded helplessness, explaining that the Communist Party and the Comintern were agencies outside its own control. A large measure of cynical manipulation and deliberate lying were thus integral parts of Bolshevik behaviour from the very beginning. The Comintern sprang from the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda at the Soviet Foreign Office, this at a time when Soviet foreign policy was ‘genuinely’ revolutionary, albeit that it was bound hand and foot to the Soviet Political Bureau from the very beginning. When Soviet home and foreign policy changed, Comintern policy, often after lengthy procedural and frictional delays, changed in line. Looked at in the light of history, it seems strange, 70 years later, that matters could ever have been seen in any other light. The Comintern, with it the Communist parties, signified the attempt to apply an aberrant Russian solution to what was primarily a European and Asian problem. As we can now see from the turmoil and wreckage of once Communist-ruled Central and Eastern Europe, that was an enterprise doomed from the start.
Melograni’s book does, however, raise contemporary issues which go far beyond the scope of its own brief pages. In particular it now behoves us to look more closely at the very issue of world revolution itself.
The Comintern at its foundation in March 1919 held that the “collapse of the Second International”, the havoc wrought by the First World War, and above all the October Revolution, signalled the irreparable decay of capitalism and the arrival of an era of world revolution. This ‘final crisis’ was so deep that capitalism was no longer able to maintain, still less to increase, the means of production. The political superstructure was now a barrier to any further increase of the productive forces. Only a revolution could release mankind from the crisis, and allow it to find a new way forward. World revolution was inevitable, not because people wanted it, but because without world revolution man could find no way forward. The ‘objective factors’ for revolution were complete. All that was lacking was the subjective factor, the necessary revolutionary ‘leadership’. The worldwide struggle for revolution required a unitary world leadership which was to be provided by the highly centralised national sections of the Comintern, each closely supervised and led by the yet more highly centralised ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’, the Executive Committee of the Communist International – ECCI – in Moscow. These were the propositions upon which the world Communist movement was founded. They were taken over intact as the fundamental basis of the Trotskyist movement, and remain its founding principles up to the present day.
Where stands this notion of world revolution more than 70 years later? It is clear that the world revolution has not yet arrived. Trotsky provided his own explanation. The Communist parties had become Stalinist, abandoned world revolution for the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’, had thus become “counter revolutionary”. A new revolutionary leadership, a new, revolutionary Transitional Programme was required. Trotsky himself drafted the programme. The Fourth International was founded on his initiative during 1938. A further half a century and more has now elapsed. After 53 years the Fourth International is no more the ‘leadership’ of the world proletariat than it was at the beginning. Nor are any of the myriad Trotskyist ‘parties’, groups or sects markedly better placed.
Now the failures of this or that revolutionary sect or leadership cadre can very well be explained away by ‘subjective’ failings. But the failure of all such groups, over a whole historical era, can in no way be dealt with in this same fashion. Such an extended failure, over so prolonged a period of time, must surely be due to objective factors, not to subjective factors at all. It would seem, on the basis of the evidence, that we have critically to examine the notion of world revolution.
If world revolution was imminent in 1919, why has it not come about almost three quarters of a century later? The question cannot properly be evaded. A revolutionary epoch, after all, is one in which revolutions are on the order of the day. If we find ourselves in an epoch in which the great (Socialist) revolutions do not take place, in what sense may we legitimately term this a revolutionary era? One might, I suppose, once have argued in desperation that there were after all great revolutions, but in a degenerated form. At a time when the Soviet Union is clearly coming apart at the seams, at a time in which we have seen one by one, over the past 12 months, first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria break free of Communist rule, a total of some 110 million people, this would scarcely seem feasible any more.
What then went wrong? We have, I feel, to return to the original Marxian revolutionary syllogism to find the answer. People make revolutions not because they want to, but because they have to. They have to in the grand historical schema because the existing mode of production has become a fetter on the growth of the productive forces. The original expectation of the Comintern, the hidden premise upon which all else was founded, was the notion that twentieth century capitalism could no longer develop the productive forces. Even the quickest glance at the economic statistics covering the last 70 years will show that manifestly this is not the case. In point of fact the growth of productive forces in the twentieth century has been far greater than in the nineteenth century.
World output of inanimate energy, measured in million megawatt hour equivalent stood at 1,078 in 1860, rose to 6,089 in 1900, more than doubled again to 15,882 in 1940, and more than trebled to 53,206 in 1970. World output of steel, one million tons in 1870, stood at 29 million tons in 1900, and rose to 380 million tons by 1960. Industrial output per capita in Western Europe and the United States grew between 1900 and 1960, as shown in the following table:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
Western Europe
USA
1901
37
74
1937
67
160
1960
124
298
If we turn to the United Kingdom we find that Gross Domestic Product at constant factor cost increased between 1855 and 1965 (taking 1913 as 100) as follows:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
1855
32.7
1920
94.8
1875
50.2
1950
154.9
1900
82.3
1965
237.8
If we look instead to consumer expenditure in the United Kingdom we discover that this stood (at constant 1984 prices) at £58,543 million in 1900, and had increased to £194,673 by 1984. Food expenditure increased from £15,495 million to £28,448 million over the same period, expenditure on clothing from £3,415 million to £13,158 million, expenditure on consumer durables from £1,639 million to £19,241 million.
Clearly then, if revolutions are inevitable only when existing society can no longer develop the productive forces, and if existing capitalist society plainly does this, and does it very well, then surely all the expectations of ‘inevitable’ revolution, upon which ‘Trotskyism’ no less than ‘Communism’ have rested, simply fly straight out of the window.
Nor is that all. The notion that the ‘Socialist’ Stalinoid plan system, the command economy, is innately superior to that of advanced industrial capitalism can no longer be maintained either. The present economic crisis which threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union has clearly been brought about as a direct result of the failings of the ‘planned economy’ itself. The same holds true of every one of the other ‘planned economies’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Stalinist command economy, in the Soviet Union after 60 years (and despite all the appalling ‘sacrifices’), and Stalinist ‘planned economy’ in Eastern Europe after 40 years, have proved equally a failure. Most recent estimates put productivity in East Germany (the most advanced economy in the former Bloc) at one half or less than that of the Federal Republic.
Clearly there exists a problem as to where we go from here.
Walter Kendall
Note
1. My figures are taken from Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, pp.59, 75, 76; A.H. Halsey (Ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900, pp.146, 149; C.H. Feinstein, National Expenditure and Output in the United Kingdom 1855-1965, pp.T14, T19.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
*Victory To The French Strikers In Their Defense Of The Right To Retire Before The Grave-The Struggle For Power Is Posed
Click on the headline to link to a National Public Radio report on the situation in France (as of October 19, 2010) as the strikers take to the streets again, and close down public faculties.
Markin comment:
Earlier in the day I wrote a short commentary concerning a three-point program for home foreclosure relief for the working class in America
*Freeze Home Foreclosures, Freeze Mortgage Payments, Restructure Debt- A Fighting Program To Save The Working Class In Order To Fight Another Day
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History entry,
FOR A MORATORIUM ON HOME FORECLOSURES- And A Note On The Housing Question From Friedrich Engels, dated Saturday, May 26, 2007, that relates to this commentary.
Markin comment:
It does not take a hard-bitten communist, although that helps, to know that our class, the working class, along with the marginal working poor, and the vast majority of minorities in this country have borne the brunt, the immediate brunt, of the now several year old economic crisis spear-headed by the continuing debilitating housing crisis. What has not happened, although one would have expected the explosion from the left by now, is any push back against those who created this crisis, the capitalists. This Tea party thing doesn’t count, for our side any way, because from all the anecdotal evidence that I have gathered their position on the plight of the working class is –“tough luck.”
Tough luck, however, is not the policy of those of us who want to fight for our communist future. Thus, since the American Bankers Association, an organization chock- filled with villains in the various crises of the past few years, is meeting this week, the week of October 17th, in Boston to further their dastardly plans to wreck havoc on the economy I have a three-point program that those of us on the other side can fight around.
Immediate, Unconditional Freeze On Home Foreclosures. This is a no-brainer, even on technical grounds according to the various recent media reports recently about the snafus in this process.
Freeze Mortgage Payments. Hey, those who are swamped in debt up to their eyeballs need relief from these ballooning mortgage payments that have forced millions to walk away from their homes probably never to have another change, at least under this capitalist system, to own their own homes.
Restructure Debt. One of the key practices that has been exposed for all to see during this crisis is that working people, with nothing but their labor to survive on, have been gouged on ultra-usurious interest rates, penalty rates, and extra add-ons. Enough.
Of course, any self-respecting banker, although that seems oxymoronic here, is going to choke on her or his five-course dinner on reading this program. Oh well, if that is the worst thing that happens to them in their sorry lives they will have gotten off easy. If they, and their finance capitalist-driven system can’t see their way clear to do this then we say move on over and we will take charge and implement the program. For that it does take hard-bitten communists though. Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government!
FOR A MORATORIUM ON HOME FORECLOSURES- And A Note On The Housing Question From Friedrich Engels, dated Saturday, May 26, 2007, that relates to this commentary.
Markin comment:
It does not take a hard-bitten communist, although that helps, to know that our class, the working class, along with the marginal working poor, and the vast majority of minorities in this country have borne the brunt, the immediate brunt, of the now several year old economic crisis spear-headed by the continuing debilitating housing crisis. What has not happened, although one would have expected the explosion from the left by now, is any push back against those who created this crisis, the capitalists. This Tea party thing doesn’t count, for our side any way, because from all the anecdotal evidence that I have gathered their position on the plight of the working class is –“tough luck.”
Tough luck, however, is not the policy of those of us who want to fight for our communist future. Thus, since the American Bankers Association, an organization chock- filled with villains in the various crises of the past few years, is meeting this week, the week of October 17th, in Boston to further their dastardly plans to wreck havoc on the economy I have a three-point program that those of us on the other side can fight around.
Immediate, Unconditional Freeze On Home Foreclosures. This is a no-brainer, even on technical grounds according to the various recent media reports recently about the snafus in this process.
Freeze Mortgage Payments. Hey, those who are swamped in debt up to their eyeballs need relief from these ballooning mortgage payments that have forced millions to walk away from their homes probably never to have another change, at least under this capitalist system, to own their own homes.
Restructure Debt. One of the key practices that has been exposed for all to see during this crisis is that working people, with nothing but their labor to survive on, have been gouged on ultra-usurious interest rates, penalty rates, and extra add-ons. Enough.
Of course, any self-respecting banker, although that seems oxymoronic here, is going to choke on her or his five-course dinner on reading this program. Oh well, if that is the worst thing that happens to them in their sorry lives they will have gotten off easy. If they, and their finance capitalist-driven system can’t see their way clear to do this then we say move on over and we will take charge and implement the program. For that it does take hard-bitten communists though. Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government!
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)-Revolution In Hungary and The Crisis Of Stalinism
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
*For Those In Search Of A Blues Primer- The Best Of The Mississippi Blues- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Muddy Waters performing I've Got My Mojo Working.
CD Review
The Best Of Mississippi Blues, various artists, Fuel, 2000
Okay, blues aficionados that you are you have heard it all, right? From the old Delta country blues artists who first gave form to the genre, the likes of Charly Patton, Son House, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, through to the heyday of the women touch blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ida Mack, through to the transformative figure like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters who turned the blues from acoustic (of necessity for lack of electricity) Saturday night juke joint stuff to the electric jiving and arriving hot Midwest urban Saturday night stuff.
And then after you had the basics down you went to the second tier; those who make the blues more sophisticated like Billie Holiday, and other later interpreters, some black, some white, some rock-influenced, some by jazz, and other by various revivalist trends. And in order to get you “doctorate” in blues-ology you delved into the back streets, the singers for nickels and dimes; the chittlin’ circuit where many performers got their start (and too many their finish) with their endless bowling alley, small bar, small restaurant clienteles; the world music blues scene of Tex-Mex, Cajun, and Western swing stuff. And then for post-doctoral work, a look at those who currently keep that now slender tradition alive out on those mean streets and small clubs.
Okay, Mister or Ms. Aficionado, you have some “cred” but how about those of us who are clueless, or just searching for the sound that keeps beating in the back of our heads. Give us a primer. Well, this is a roundabout way of telling you that this little CD under review will give you a sampler of some of the trends that I have mentioned above, especially of the first generation country and electric urban blues milieu. There are others out there but you are on your own to dig the stuff out so that you too can be a “doctor”.
Stick outs here include: Mississippi John Hurt on Casey Jones; Tommy Johnson on Canned Heat Blues; the legendary rocker, Ike Turner on Matchbox, and the also legendary Muddy Waters on I’ve Got My Mojo Working. But, really this whole compilation, as befits an all-star lineup, could have been included.
CD Review
The Best Of Mississippi Blues, various artists, Fuel, 2000
Okay, blues aficionados that you are you have heard it all, right? From the old Delta country blues artists who first gave form to the genre, the likes of Charly Patton, Son House, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, through to the heyday of the women touch blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ida Mack, through to the transformative figure like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters who turned the blues from acoustic (of necessity for lack of electricity) Saturday night juke joint stuff to the electric jiving and arriving hot Midwest urban Saturday night stuff.
And then after you had the basics down you went to the second tier; those who make the blues more sophisticated like Billie Holiday, and other later interpreters, some black, some white, some rock-influenced, some by jazz, and other by various revivalist trends. And in order to get you “doctorate” in blues-ology you delved into the back streets, the singers for nickels and dimes; the chittlin’ circuit where many performers got their start (and too many their finish) with their endless bowling alley, small bar, small restaurant clienteles; the world music blues scene of Tex-Mex, Cajun, and Western swing stuff. And then for post-doctoral work, a look at those who currently keep that now slender tradition alive out on those mean streets and small clubs.
Okay, Mister or Ms. Aficionado, you have some “cred” but how about those of us who are clueless, or just searching for the sound that keeps beating in the back of our heads. Give us a primer. Well, this is a roundabout way of telling you that this little CD under review will give you a sampler of some of the trends that I have mentioned above, especially of the first generation country and electric urban blues milieu. There are others out there but you are on your own to dig the stuff out so that you too can be a “doctor”.
Stick outs here include: Mississippi John Hurt on Casey Jones; Tommy Johnson on Canned Heat Blues; the legendary rocker, Ike Turner on Matchbox, and the also legendary Muddy Waters on I’ve Got My Mojo Working. But, really this whole compilation, as befits an all-star lineup, could have been included.
Monday, October 18, 2010
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout The World
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Sunday, October 17, 2010
*On Getting “Hip” To The Blues, The Delta Blues - A CD Primer
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Delta blues great, Bukka White, performing Aberdeen Mississippi Blues
CD Review
The Rough Guide To Delta Blues, various artists, World Music Network, 2002
Okay so the blues have got your attention. Maybe you heard it as background music while traveling and can’t get that sound out of your head, or heard someone strumming in some urban square trying to scratch a few pennies out of those little chords on a guitar. Whatever. You are hooked, or at least intrigued. So you need a little primer of the guys (mainly, guys, but not exclusively so) who taught the guys who taught the guys who you heard on that street corner or in some current concert hall. That is where this nice little CD comes in. In one place and at one sitting you will most of the key guitarists who created the beat and the singers who put words to the mournful sounds about hard women, hard work, hard living and hard liquor. Names like Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Son House, of course, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton and so on.
But wait a minute this is only the beginning of the journey. From there you will need, desperately need, to hear the material John and Alan Lomax recorded back in the days down in the South when these guys were still alive. And, of course, check out Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Oh, ya, don’t forget the women blues singers who got more renown when they were alive and filling the gin mils and concert halls. And the blues as it moved north to places like Chicago and Detroit. And then people like the Stones, Rory Block, and others who cover the old classics. And don’t forget the Cajun influences, And Tex-Mex, and…. Hell by the time you get done you will be an old codger or codgerette. But here is where you start.
I would direct your attention to several outstanding efforts here, first and foremost a great version of Sitting On Top Of The World by the under-appreciated Mississippi Sheiks; Tommy Johnson on Cool Drink of Water Blues; the incredible Bukka White and his flailing National Steel guitar on Aberdeen Mississippi Blues;, and, Louise Johnson’s On The Wall.
CD Review
The Rough Guide To Delta Blues, various artists, World Music Network, 2002
Okay so the blues have got your attention. Maybe you heard it as background music while traveling and can’t get that sound out of your head, or heard someone strumming in some urban square trying to scratch a few pennies out of those little chords on a guitar. Whatever. You are hooked, or at least intrigued. So you need a little primer of the guys (mainly, guys, but not exclusively so) who taught the guys who taught the guys who you heard on that street corner or in some current concert hall. That is where this nice little CD comes in. In one place and at one sitting you will most of the key guitarists who created the beat and the singers who put words to the mournful sounds about hard women, hard work, hard living and hard liquor. Names like Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Son House, of course, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton and so on.
But wait a minute this is only the beginning of the journey. From there you will need, desperately need, to hear the material John and Alan Lomax recorded back in the days down in the South when these guys were still alive. And, of course, check out Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Oh, ya, don’t forget the women blues singers who got more renown when they were alive and filling the gin mils and concert halls. And the blues as it moved north to places like Chicago and Detroit. And then people like the Stones, Rory Block, and others who cover the old classics. And don’t forget the Cajun influences, And Tex-Mex, and…. Hell by the time you get done you will be an old codger or codgerette. But here is where you start.
I would direct your attention to several outstanding efforts here, first and foremost a great version of Sitting On Top Of The World by the under-appreciated Mississippi Sheiks; Tommy Johnson on Cool Drink of Water Blues; the incredible Bukka White and his flailing National Steel guitar on Aberdeen Mississippi Blues;, and, Louise Johnson’s On The Wall.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- After The Last Dance- "Midnight Cryin’ Time" –A CD Review
CD Review
Midnight Cryin’ Time: Teen Angst Classics From The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, various artists, 3-CD set, Sanctuary records Group, 2003
Come on now, do you really expect me to pass up the opportunity to review a CD set with that title after all the ink I have spilled over the past few years in this space going on and on about various aspects of teenage life, teenage alienation and teenage angst in the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of my own coming of age. Of course not, this thing is like manna from heaven and came my way via a book sale at the local library. I had to pick it up at any cost, if only to be able to use the above lead-in.
That said, what I want to discuss is the aftermath of the school dance, or those lonely nights when there were no schools dances. After all how many dances can you have in a school year. How many times can you ask, ask pretty please like, certain younger teachers on the faculty to, wink, wink, chaperon these things before they go ballistic on you. And how about those other teen social situations between dances then (and now, maybe, except the communications technology is different). For example; being stood up for a date; or when that certain he or she did not call; or that certain he or she had another date; or that certain "unto death" friend of yours took that certain he or she away from you; or when that certain he or she said no, no for any number of things but you know the real “no”, right?; or, finally, the subject of this CD that midnight cryin’ time when something he or she, did or did not do, or did or did not say, or that he or she forgot to remember, and so on that seems to be the umbrella that these three discs focus on.
So what is the demographic that this CD compilation is being pitched to, aside from the obvious usual suspects, the AARP crowd. Well that's simple. Any one who has been wounded in love’s young battles; any one who has longed for that he or she to come through the door, late or not; anyone that has been on a date that did not work out, or been stranded on a date that has not worked out; anyone who has had to submit to being pieced off with car hop drive-in food; anyone who has gotten a “Dear John” letter, or its equivalent; anyone who has been jilted by that certain he or she; anyone who has been turned down for that last school dance from that certain he or she that you counted on to make your up until then lame evening; anyone who has waited endlessly for the telephone (now iphone, etc.,okay, for the younger set who may read this) to ring to hear that certain voice; and, especially those hes and she who has shed those midnight tears for youth's lost love. In short, everybody except those few “most popular “ types who the rest of us will not shed one tear over, or the nerds who didn’t count (or care) anyway.
Okay, that is the big build-up and usually at the end of these things, these oldies review things, I give my choices for the tunes that stick out. Well, aside from providing a little fodder for this entry there is not one damn song on this messed-up thing that I can, or would, recommend. It seems impossible that a 3-CD set of old time rock and roll music would provide nothing more than a….headache after I spent my short, sweet life listening to it one afternoon. Hoping, hoping against hope that there would be one song I could listen to that I didn’t want upon hearing get up and throw the whole thing out the window. May, just maybe, that is why some perverted AARPer “donated” this beauty to the book sale. I want that person’s e-mail address pronto as someone has some midnight crying of his or her own to do.
Note: Before anyone hollers at me that Marcie Blane, Eddie Cochran (whose work I am going to write a review on soon), and a few other well-known rockers are on this compilation I know that. The material of theirs that is presented here though is the B (or C or D ) side of their better known work. I rest my case.
Midnight Cryin’ Time: Teen Angst Classics From The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era, various artists, 3-CD set, Sanctuary records Group, 2003
Come on now, do you really expect me to pass up the opportunity to review a CD set with that title after all the ink I have spilled over the past few years in this space going on and on about various aspects of teenage life, teenage alienation and teenage angst in the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of my own coming of age. Of course not, this thing is like manna from heaven and came my way via a book sale at the local library. I had to pick it up at any cost, if only to be able to use the above lead-in.
That said, what I want to discuss is the aftermath of the school dance, or those lonely nights when there were no schools dances. After all how many dances can you have in a school year. How many times can you ask, ask pretty please like, certain younger teachers on the faculty to, wink, wink, chaperon these things before they go ballistic on you. And how about those other teen social situations between dances then (and now, maybe, except the communications technology is different). For example; being stood up for a date; or when that certain he or she did not call; or that certain he or she had another date; or that certain "unto death" friend of yours took that certain he or she away from you; or when that certain he or she said no, no for any number of things but you know the real “no”, right?; or, finally, the subject of this CD that midnight cryin’ time when something he or she, did or did not do, or did or did not say, or that he or she forgot to remember, and so on that seems to be the umbrella that these three discs focus on.
So what is the demographic that this CD compilation is being pitched to, aside from the obvious usual suspects, the AARP crowd. Well that's simple. Any one who has been wounded in love’s young battles; any one who has longed for that he or she to come through the door, late or not; anyone that has been on a date that did not work out, or been stranded on a date that has not worked out; anyone who has had to submit to being pieced off with car hop drive-in food; anyone who has gotten a “Dear John” letter, or its equivalent; anyone who has been jilted by that certain he or she; anyone who has been turned down for that last school dance from that certain he or she that you counted on to make your up until then lame evening; anyone who has waited endlessly for the telephone (now iphone, etc.,okay, for the younger set who may read this) to ring to hear that certain voice; and, especially those hes and she who has shed those midnight tears for youth's lost love. In short, everybody except those few “most popular “ types who the rest of us will not shed one tear over, or the nerds who didn’t count (or care) anyway.
Okay, that is the big build-up and usually at the end of these things, these oldies review things, I give my choices for the tunes that stick out. Well, aside from providing a little fodder for this entry there is not one damn song on this messed-up thing that I can, or would, recommend. It seems impossible that a 3-CD set of old time rock and roll music would provide nothing more than a….headache after I spent my short, sweet life listening to it one afternoon. Hoping, hoping against hope that there would be one song I could listen to that I didn’t want upon hearing get up and throw the whole thing out the window. May, just maybe, that is why some perverted AARPer “donated” this beauty to the book sale. I want that person’s e-mail address pronto as someone has some midnight crying of his or her own to do.
Note: Before anyone hollers at me that Marcie Blane, Eddie Cochran (whose work I am going to write a review on soon), and a few other well-known rockers are on this compilation I know that. The material of theirs that is presented here though is the B (or C or D ) side of their better known work. I rest my case.
From The "Workers Press" Blog- The Struggle For A Workers Party In The United States
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Reporting on the St. Louis Launch of the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL)
Labor Advocates Seek a New Way Forward for Workers
Tuesday evening, September 28th 2010; New and familiar faces from St. Louis’ activist and Labor Left alike came together at the Carpenter Library to hear an appeal from the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL) on the pressing need for a New Left political alignment in America to combat the rising tide of corporate power and poverty, and give real voice to America’s Working Class, minorities, immigrants and the oppressed alike.
Their solution: a mass Labor Party, based in the Unions and Working Class communities across the country.
The CMPL is a broad coalition of Left and Labor activists, community leaders, students and workers founded by the Workers International League (WIL), a national organization which advocates for the interests of the Working Class. The purpose of the campaign, as described on their website, is to:
1. Explain the need for the labor movement to break with the Democrats and Republicans, run independent labor candidates, and build a mass labor party based on the unions.
2. Connect this idea with the struggles of workers and youth.
3. Show how a mass labor party could change society for the benefit of the working class, which makes up the vast majority of the population.
Speakers at the event included Nikhil Kothegal, an unemployed full-time college student and former educator in St. Louis Public Schools and member of the WIL; Tim Kaminski, a retired UAW local 110 committeeman and production line worker at the Fenton, MO Chrysler plant; and David May, a local production line worker and also member of the WIL.
While the panel made a solid argument for the need for a mass Labor Party to continue the economic struggle of the Unions on the political stage, speaker Tim Kaminski stole the show with a fiery critique of decades of corrupt Union leadership, joined at the hip to the Democrats and often closer to the corporate executives on the other side of the table than they are to their own rank and file.
In his critique Kaminski was clear “we need to base this campaign on the unions, because they are the only true mass organizations the American Working Class has got left, but we can’t repeat the mistakes of the National Labor Party Advocates in the 1990’s. We’ve got to base this campaign on the rank and file – NOT the leadership – because when the leadership defends the interest of the corporations, of the bosses, instead of the workers; they are not on our side. If people want to ignore the truth like its still 1937 – it ain’t! – we won’t be able to sort out any of these problems which we, the working class, face each and every day. It’s got to come from the rank and file.”
The panel did not get by without some criticism, though. A lively discussion followed in which participants in the diverse audience raised questions on issues from the circular nature of the “race to the bottom”, the destruction of our communities and the ways in which workers are kept divided (union against non-union, white against black, immigrant vs. citizen and male vs. female workers).
Questions were raised as to the nature of the historic “Labor’s Giant Step” and the conflicting roles of the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (the “CIO” in today’s ALF-CIO) opposed to Labor’s alliance with the Democrats, the production and prosperity boom of the post war period in the 1950’s, the current period of retreat and decline in the Labor Union movement, and the failure of the National Labor Party effort in the late 1990’s.
In reply to the panel’s answers to the questions and points raised by the audience, local activist Don DeVivo said “clearly you’re right about one thing; the two-party system isn’t working.” One participant, a local Labor activist and member of the Laborers, Bradley Veltry asked “this all sounds right, but what are the nuts and bolts of getting this started?”
The panel closed with David May of the WIL answering that question with an appeal to join and support a local committee that is tasked with reaching out to unions, community organizations, churches, student groups, the homeless and working class communities besieged and threatened by the economic crisis; to advocate for local independent Labor candidates and 3rd Party candidates when their campaigns are strongly pro-Labor; to advocate within union locals for the withholding of PAC funds from Democrats; to make contacts, build bridges, rally around struggling communities, and uncompromisingly raise the demands and interests of the Working Class majority.
Before the audience dismissed and rallied around a CMPL sign-up sheet on the other side of the room, David May proposed a thought: that the real reason we’ve not seen a serious fightback against cuts in public services and against attacks on working people’s communities is because our fractured Labor Movement is fighting on the economic front – but giving financial and political support to a pro-corporate, pro-capitalist party (the Democrats) who keep Wall Street especially close in their “Big Tent”, closer than Labor can ever be – and our fractured political Left is torn between one single issue campaign after another. Isn’t it time our unions, the fighting organizations of the Working Class, carried the economic struggle onto the political field and united all America’s oppressed minorities under their own organization, A mass Party of Labor?
May ended with a quote by Victor Hugo, which seemed strangely appropriate: “there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Paul Poposky is a Socialist activist in the greater-St. Louis area involved in local and national social justice campaigns, and a proud member of CWA Local 6355.
Posted by PaulJosephPoposky at 7:26 PM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Reporting on the St. Louis Launch of the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL)
Labor Advocates Seek a New Way Forward for Workers
Tuesday evening, September 28th 2010; New and familiar faces from St. Louis’ activist and Labor Left alike came together at the Carpenter Library to hear an appeal from the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor (CMPL) on the pressing need for a New Left political alignment in America to combat the rising tide of corporate power and poverty, and give real voice to America’s Working Class, minorities, immigrants and the oppressed alike.
Their solution: a mass Labor Party, based in the Unions and Working Class communities across the country.
The CMPL is a broad coalition of Left and Labor activists, community leaders, students and workers founded by the Workers International League (WIL), a national organization which advocates for the interests of the Working Class. The purpose of the campaign, as described on their website, is to:
1. Explain the need for the labor movement to break with the Democrats and Republicans, run independent labor candidates, and build a mass labor party based on the unions.
2. Connect this idea with the struggles of workers and youth.
3. Show how a mass labor party could change society for the benefit of the working class, which makes up the vast majority of the population.
Speakers at the event included Nikhil Kothegal, an unemployed full-time college student and former educator in St. Louis Public Schools and member of the WIL; Tim Kaminski, a retired UAW local 110 committeeman and production line worker at the Fenton, MO Chrysler plant; and David May, a local production line worker and also member of the WIL.
While the panel made a solid argument for the need for a mass Labor Party to continue the economic struggle of the Unions on the political stage, speaker Tim Kaminski stole the show with a fiery critique of decades of corrupt Union leadership, joined at the hip to the Democrats and often closer to the corporate executives on the other side of the table than they are to their own rank and file.
In his critique Kaminski was clear “we need to base this campaign on the unions, because they are the only true mass organizations the American Working Class has got left, but we can’t repeat the mistakes of the National Labor Party Advocates in the 1990’s. We’ve got to base this campaign on the rank and file – NOT the leadership – because when the leadership defends the interest of the corporations, of the bosses, instead of the workers; they are not on our side. If people want to ignore the truth like its still 1937 – it ain’t! – we won’t be able to sort out any of these problems which we, the working class, face each and every day. It’s got to come from the rank and file.”
The panel did not get by without some criticism, though. A lively discussion followed in which participants in the diverse audience raised questions on issues from the circular nature of the “race to the bottom”, the destruction of our communities and the ways in which workers are kept divided (union against non-union, white against black, immigrant vs. citizen and male vs. female workers).
Questions were raised as to the nature of the historic “Labor’s Giant Step” and the conflicting roles of the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (the “CIO” in today’s ALF-CIO) opposed to Labor’s alliance with the Democrats, the production and prosperity boom of the post war period in the 1950’s, the current period of retreat and decline in the Labor Union movement, and the failure of the National Labor Party effort in the late 1990’s.
In reply to the panel’s answers to the questions and points raised by the audience, local activist Don DeVivo said “clearly you’re right about one thing; the two-party system isn’t working.” One participant, a local Labor activist and member of the Laborers, Bradley Veltry asked “this all sounds right, but what are the nuts and bolts of getting this started?”
The panel closed with David May of the WIL answering that question with an appeal to join and support a local committee that is tasked with reaching out to unions, community organizations, churches, student groups, the homeless and working class communities besieged and threatened by the economic crisis; to advocate for local independent Labor candidates and 3rd Party candidates when their campaigns are strongly pro-Labor; to advocate within union locals for the withholding of PAC funds from Democrats; to make contacts, build bridges, rally around struggling communities, and uncompromisingly raise the demands and interests of the Working Class majority.
Before the audience dismissed and rallied around a CMPL sign-up sheet on the other side of the room, David May proposed a thought: that the real reason we’ve not seen a serious fightback against cuts in public services and against attacks on working people’s communities is because our fractured Labor Movement is fighting on the economic front – but giving financial and political support to a pro-corporate, pro-capitalist party (the Democrats) who keep Wall Street especially close in their “Big Tent”, closer than Labor can ever be – and our fractured political Left is torn between one single issue campaign after another. Isn’t it time our unions, the fighting organizations of the Working Class, carried the economic struggle onto the political field and united all America’s oppressed minorities under their own organization, A mass Party of Labor?
May ended with a quote by Victor Hugo, which seemed strangely appropriate: “there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Paul Poposky is a Socialist activist in the greater-St. Louis area involved in local and national social justice campaigns, and a proud member of CWA Local 6355.
Posted by PaulJosephPoposky at 7:26 PM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
*See Jack Run- The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Elections of 1960, A 50th Anniversary, Of Sorts
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry, dated, Thursday, August 23, 2007, entitled ON COMING OF POLITICAL AGE-Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers to give a little flavor to the commentary.
Markin comment:
On Saturday afternoon, October 16, 2010, I spent some time in downtown Boston awaiting American President Barack Obama’s appearance in support of his friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, whose is running in a tough reelection race. Oh, make no mistake I was not there to hail Caesar, but rather I was down there with others, precious few others given the occasion and infrequent chance to confront warmonger-in-chief Obama in person, to protest his Iraq and Afghan wars. Naturally, we were outnumbered by Patrick/Obama supporters but that is neither nor there for this comment.
During the course of the afternoon that event (the Patrick campaign event), and the particular locale where it was staged, brought back a flood of memories of my first serious organized political actions in 1960 when, as a lad of fourteen, I set out to “save the world.” And my soul, or so I thought at the time, as well. That was the campaign of our own, Jack Kennedy, as he ran for president against the nefarious sitting Vice President, one Richard Milhous Nixon. In the course of that long ago campaign he gave one of his most stirring speeches not far from where I stood on this Saturday (near the Hynes Center).
Although gathering troops (read: high school and college students) for that speech was not my first public political action of that year, a small SANE-sponsored demonstration against nuclear proliferation further up the same street was but I did not help to organize that one, the Kennedy campaign was the first one that hinted that I might, against all good sense, become a serious political junkie. Ya, I know, every mother warns their sons (then and now) and daughters (now) against such foolhardiness but what can you do. And, mercifully, I am still at it. And have wound up on the right side of the angels, to boot.
The funny thing about those triggered remembrances is that as far removed from bourgeois politics as I have been for about the last forty years I noticed many young politicos doing their youthful thing just as I did back then; passing out leaflets, holding banners, rousing the crowd, making extemporaneous little soapbox speeches, arguing with an occasional right wing Tea Party advocate, and making themselves hoarse in the process. In short, exhibiting all the skills (except the techno-savvy computer indoor stuff you do these days before such rallies) of a street organizer from any age, including communist street organizers. Now if those young organizers only had the extra-parliamentary left-wing politics to merge with those organizational skills. In short, come over to the side of the angels.
But that is where we come back to old Jack Kennedy and that 1960 campaign. Who would have thought that a kid, me, who started out walking door to door stuffing Jack Kennedy literature in every available door in 1960 but who turned off that road long ago would be saying thanks, Jack. Thanks for teaching me those political skills.
Oh, not so fast, though. Let us not get all musty-eyed yet.We have a little unfinished business yet. No thanks, Jack, for the Vietnam War. And no thanks for handing it off to your boy Lyndon. And Lyndon handed off it to Tricky Dick who you thought you had finished off. And Tricky Dick handed off to Jerry. Finally the DRV/NLF put paid to all of that. But while we are at it Jimmy, no thanks, for Iran. Ditto Ronnie for Central America and Bush I for Iraq I. And Bill for Serbia. And George II for Iraq II and Afghanistan I. See, that is one big, one very big, reason I was not out there working with those young Markins this past Saturday. I haven’t forgotten about the real business of being warmonger-in-chief. As For Iraq II and Afghanistan II I haven’t forgotten that either. Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Note: The See Jack Run in the title refers to the title of an exhibit on the 1960 election at the JFK Library in Boston.
Markin comment:
On Saturday afternoon, October 16, 2010, I spent some time in downtown Boston awaiting American President Barack Obama’s appearance in support of his friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, whose is running in a tough reelection race. Oh, make no mistake I was not there to hail Caesar, but rather I was down there with others, precious few others given the occasion and infrequent chance to confront warmonger-in-chief Obama in person, to protest his Iraq and Afghan wars. Naturally, we were outnumbered by Patrick/Obama supporters but that is neither nor there for this comment.
During the course of the afternoon that event (the Patrick campaign event), and the particular locale where it was staged, brought back a flood of memories of my first serious organized political actions in 1960 when, as a lad of fourteen, I set out to “save the world.” And my soul, or so I thought at the time, as well. That was the campaign of our own, Jack Kennedy, as he ran for president against the nefarious sitting Vice President, one Richard Milhous Nixon. In the course of that long ago campaign he gave one of his most stirring speeches not far from where I stood on this Saturday (near the Hynes Center).
Although gathering troops (read: high school and college students) for that speech was not my first public political action of that year, a small SANE-sponsored demonstration against nuclear proliferation further up the same street was but I did not help to organize that one, the Kennedy campaign was the first one that hinted that I might, against all good sense, become a serious political junkie. Ya, I know, every mother warns their sons (then and now) and daughters (now) against such foolhardiness but what can you do. And, mercifully, I am still at it. And have wound up on the right side of the angels, to boot.
The funny thing about those triggered remembrances is that as far removed from bourgeois politics as I have been for about the last forty years I noticed many young politicos doing their youthful thing just as I did back then; passing out leaflets, holding banners, rousing the crowd, making extemporaneous little soapbox speeches, arguing with an occasional right wing Tea Party advocate, and making themselves hoarse in the process. In short, exhibiting all the skills (except the techno-savvy computer indoor stuff you do these days before such rallies) of a street organizer from any age, including communist street organizers. Now if those young organizers only had the extra-parliamentary left-wing politics to merge with those organizational skills. In short, come over to the side of the angels.
But that is where we come back to old Jack Kennedy and that 1960 campaign. Who would have thought that a kid, me, who started out walking door to door stuffing Jack Kennedy literature in every available door in 1960 but who turned off that road long ago would be saying thanks, Jack. Thanks for teaching me those political skills.
Oh, not so fast, though. Let us not get all musty-eyed yet.We have a little unfinished business yet. No thanks, Jack, for the Vietnam War. And no thanks for handing it off to your boy Lyndon. And Lyndon handed off it to Tricky Dick who you thought you had finished off. And Tricky Dick handed off to Jerry. Finally the DRV/NLF put paid to all of that. But while we are at it Jimmy, no thanks, for Iran. Ditto Ronnie for Central America and Bush I for Iraq I. And Bill for Serbia. And George II for Iraq II and Afghanistan I. See, that is one big, one very big, reason I was not out there working with those young Markins this past Saturday. I haven’t forgotten about the real business of being warmonger-in-chief. As For Iraq II and Afghanistan II I haven’t forgotten that either. Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Note: The See Jack Run in the title refers to the title of an exhibit on the 1960 election at the JFK Library in Boston.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Against Pabloist Revisionism
Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”
On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.
Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.
********************
Friday, October 15, 2010
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective (INDORP, 1962)
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.
*******
Markin comment on In Defense Of A Revolutionary Perspective (INDORP)
As noted above those of us who adhere to the Marxist traditions are very concerned with revolutionary continuity over time. Even with a quick or lightly informed look at that history one is struck by the fact, the hard fact, that for myriad reasons formerly revolutionary organizations lose steam. This can be caused by political defeats, military defeats, decisions to forgo revolutionary opportunities on those, as we now understand, rare occasions when they come up, decisions to go for the “main chance” offered by bourgeois society rather than maintain revolutionary vigilance, and, frankly that the core cadre can get tired, disillusioned or isolated.
As INDORP notes several of those factors led to the creation of the RT, particularly over the fudging of the Cuba question by the SWP leadership when that revolution was at the height of its popularity in America (and elsewhere) before the hammer of American imperialism came down and at a time when the aging and wearing out of the original cadre that carried the organization, heroically in some situations, through thick and thin was accelerating. Note also that the RT’s perspective early on was to fight WITHIN the organization for a revolutionary course. Obviously the timeliness and circumstances of creating another, revolutionary, organization depend on many factors but if revolutionary continuity means anything that initial fight has to be inside the previously revolutionary organization. To just walk away from the SWP (especially with its historic links to Trotsky) in 1962 would have been the height of political dilettantism.
Note: As any attentive reader of Workers Vanguard and/or Spartacist is aware the SL/ICL has had its share of political problems over the past decade or so, reflecting in those organizations very graphically that decline of political consciousness of the international working class that they have noted has been prevalent since the demise of the Soviet Union and the political isolation, the severe political isolation, and lack of class struggle in the period. This problem was reflected most recently earlier this year over their line on Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake there in January (a line that I partially shared for a time) so that there is no magic elixir that can ward off the evil spirits when the deal goes down. Nevertheless, like the SWP before it, it could lose its revolutionary tradition. Some people, obviously, already believe that it has lost that edge, others that it never had it. Such is politics, but I would go back to that important point about fighting inside for a revolutionary perspective before abandoning ship if I were them.
*****************
In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective
March, 1962
— A Statement of Basic Position by the Revolutionary Tendency,
Presented to the June 1962 plenary meeting of the SWP National Committee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1962
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published originally in Marxist Bulletin No. 1, 1964.
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.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1962/perspective.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The material bearing on the history and struggles of the Revolutionary Tendency inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) occupies a special place in the Marxist Bulletin series. Without a serious and critical attitude toward its own development, no political formation can go beyond the first stages in meeting the central challenge facing Marxist-Leninists in the United States the building of a revolutionary party.
Marxist Bulletins Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all devoted to the period from the consolidation of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the SWP to the expulsion of the RT leadership from the SWP, which covered the two-year span, 1962-1963.
Origin of the Revolutionary Tendency
The nucleus of the RT originated in the central leadership of the Young Socialist Alliance, and first came together as a left opposition to the SWP Majority’s uncritical line toward the course of the Cuban Revolution. This preliminary dispute culminated in the adoption of a thoroughly revisionist position by the SWP Majority at the June 1961 party convention. The party’s theoretical revisionism, together with its abstentionist and opportunist practice, were carried into the party’s general international line and began to turn the party away from a revolutionary perspective in the United States as well. (The causes of this dramatic degeneration of the SWP constitute a principal theme in Marxist Bulletin No. 2, “The Nature of the SWP”.)
Need for a Basic Document
The left oppositionists responded to the general assault of the Majority upon the party’s past positions by counterposing a revolutionary program. This document, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” (INDORP for short), achieved three results which led to a crystallization of the RT: (l) INDORP analyzed and made explicit the general political basis of the left opposition; (2) in gaining co-authors and signers, INDORP drew into the organized opposition a number of older party comrades, thus giving authority to the RT beyond its numbers; (3) INDORP linked the American opposition to the Majority of the International Committee (IC) of the Fourth International by endorsing the international resolution prepared by the British Socialist Labour League and adopted by the IC, “The World Prospect for Socialism.”
Drafting INDORP
“In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” was the result of a lengthy, collective effort. The need for such a statement was first advanced by Tim Wohlforth in the Fall of 1961 with the advice of Gerry Healy in Britain. Geoffrey White authored the first draft; comrades Shane Mage and Cliff Slaughter contributed sections and criticism on Marxist method and theory. Wohlforth furnished general editorial expansion, and several others made lesser contributions.
The final approved version was presented by the Revolutionary Tendency to the National Committee of the SWP in March 1962. After the expanded party plenum in June 1962, where the document was voted down 43 to 4, it was printed for the SWP membership in the internal Discussion Bulletin (Vol. 23, No. 4, July 1962). This statement of basic position by the RT now becomes available to the general radical public for the first time.
After INDORP
Even as INDORP was being introduced into the party discussion, the contradiction between the course of the SWP and a revolutionary position was becoming ever more acute and apparent. Thus the RT had just affirmed in INDORP that the opposition regarded the SWP as “the American section of our world party” (section “Where We Stand”, point 10). Yet the co-thinkers of the RT in Britain, the Socialist Labour League, felt obliged in July 1962 to attack the SWP in a major document significantly entitled “Trotskyism Betrayed—The SWP Accepts the Political Method of Pabloite Revisionism.” In September of the same year IC representatives at an international meeting officially stated that “they did not politically represent the SWP”.
Since the IC which thus repudiated its earlier ties with the SWP was then equivalent to the world party, the relation of the SWP Majority to the RT in the U.S. was rendered moot. Thus within the American tendency arose a necessary political discussion to examine the nature of the SWP and clarify the relation of the RT to the SWP Majority (see subsequent numbers of the Marxist Bulletin series).
Despite the demise of the SWP as a revolutionary organization, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” remains unimpaired to this day as a statement of basic position.
—SPARTACIST Editorial Board
January 1965
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN DEFENSE OF A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
—A statement of Basic Position
The decisive instrument of the proletarian revolution is the party of the class-conscious vanguard. Failing the leadership of such a party, the most favorable revolutionary situations, which arise from the objective circumstances, cannot be carried through to the final victory of the proletariat and the beginnings of the planned reorganization of society on socialist foundations. This was demonstrated most conclusively and positively in the 1917 Russian Revolution. This same principled lesson derives no less irrefutably even though negatively from the entire world experience of the epoch of wars, revolutions and colonial uprisings that began with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
—“Theses on the American Revolution” adopted at the 12th National Convention of the SWP in Chicago, November 15-18, 1946.
Introduction: The Method of Marxism
The contradictory character of the present historical period presents the gravest dangers, as well as the highest potentialities, to the Trotskyist movement. The combination of the great revolutionary upsurge throughout the colonial and non-capitalist sectors of the world with the seeming stabilization and progress of capitalism in its heartland; the prolonged crisis of proletarian leadership and domination of the world labor movement by social-democratic and Stalinist agents of capital combined with the continual resurgence of working class struggle; these are the terms of a situation in which our world movement constantly risks ideological disorientation and consequent political collapse as a revolutionary force. Only the fullest grasp of the dialectical materialist method, the constant development of Marxist theory, will enable our movement, in a perpetually changing reality, to preserve and develop its revolutionary perspective.
The essence of the political methodology of Marxism is to pose all problems actively from the specific and purposive viewpoint of the only consistently revolutionary class in modern society, the proletariat. This proletarian class viewpoint has its highest expression in the scientific theory of Marxism. Marxists, in other words, analyze all problems in terms of a rigorous and scientific theoretical structure. At the same time they are full participants in the historical process itself as the most advanced section of the working class and their action is guided by theory. Thus the conclusions derived from Marxist theory, and accordingly the theory itself, are continually being tested in practice.
“Revisionism” is the view that every new development requires the abandonment in practice of basic aspects of previously held theory. Ultimately this drift from the dialectical materialist method leads to a drift from the working class itself. Marxism, on the contrary, develops through the continual integration of new elements, new realities, into its theoretical structure. It explicitly criticizes and rejects, where necessary, erroneous or outlived propositions, while maintaining at every point its character as a systematic, rigorous and unified scientific structure.
The pressure of the capitalist class is most intense precisely against this methodology of Marxism, which its ideological agents revile as dogmatic fanaticism. Unless Trotskyists are able to use and develop Marxist theory they, like many other Marxists before them, inevitably succumb to this pressure, fall into a vulgar, pragmatic, empiricist view of reality, and convert Marxian theory into a set of sacred dogmas useful only to provide labels which can be slapped on an unruly and uncomprehended reality.
Particularly in the present period, when the working class seems to the empiricist to be under the complete and everlasting domination of reformist bureaucracies, this ideological pressure is the result of a terribly strong social pressure. The Trotskyist groups feel small and isolated at the very moment that significant leftist forces are clearly in motion throughout the world. These forces, however, are under the leadership of non-proletarian tendencies: “left” social democrats, Stalinists of one or another variety, and “revolutionary” bourgeois or petty-bourgeois groups in the colonial countries.
The revolutionary party, if it does not possess a real comprehension of the methodology of Marxism, is condemned merely to reflect the contradiction between its own relative isolation and the mass upsurges. This reflective pose finds expression in an objectivist outlook where one views from afar an unfolding panoramic process from which the conscious active factor is completely divorced. Instead of posing the problem of principled struggle against these ultimately pro-capitalist leaderships with the goal of developing a new proletarian leadership, the party then seeks only to influence the movement as it is and in order to affect the policy of the existing leadership, enters into a process of political, organizational and theoretical accommodation to, and regroupment with, these alien tendencies.
Once the thread of Marxist theory is lost, the concepts of other social forces come to dominate the thought of socialists. The party thus comes to lose its revolutionary perspective—it comes to see in other political and social groupings, rather than in the working class led by its Marxist vanguard, the leadership of the revolution. The Trotskyists relegate themselves to an auxiliary role in the historical process.
The world Trotskyist movement has been in a political crisis for over ten years. This crisis has been caused by the failure of theory and leadership in the Fourth International, resulting in the loss of a revolutionary perspective by important sections of the Trotskyist movement under conditions of isolation from the masses and under pressure from the capitalist class through its petty-bourgeois agents within the labor movement. Only the re-establishment of a revolutionary perspective in our world movement and the definitive rooting out of defeatist, accommodationist, and essentially liquidationist politics from our ranks can lay the basis for the rebuilding of our world cadres and thus for the victory of the world revolution.
It was Pablo’s theory of accommodation to alien tendencies that led those Trotskyists determined to preserve a revolutionary perspective to break with the International Secretariat (IS) in 1953, a move crippling to the International, but deemed by the party at that time to be essential to the preservation of a principled revolutionary movement. However, the continued paralysis of our world forces since that time and the present deep division within the International Committee (IC) are signs that the forces that were operating on Pablo were also affecting, to a lesser degree, the Socialist Workers Party. With the passage of the eight years since the split the signs of this same disease in our own ranks are reaching major proportions. We feel that this process has now reached a point where resistance is essential.
In this statement we are attempting to assess the degree to which this empiricist methodology and these accommodationist views have penetrated our party and what we feel can be done to reaffirm our revolutionary world perspective. It is only on this political basis that we will be able to rebuild our world forces. This statement is our contribution to the forthcoming party plenum which, in our opinion, should prepare the party for participation in the discussion now going on in our world movement. As this discussion is preliminary to the forthcoming World Congress of Trotskyism, called by the International Committee of the Fourth International, our political participation in it is essential.
The Nature of Pabloism
Pabloism is essentially a revisionist current within the Trotskyist movement internationally which has lost a revolutionary world perspective during the post-war period of capitalist boom and the subsequent relative inactivity of the working class in the advanced countries. The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organized vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success. Fundamental to their political approach is an “objectivist” world outlook which sees capitalism collapsing and Stalinism shattering under the impact of an abstract panoramic world historic process, thus removing the necessity for the conscious intervention of the working class through its Marxist vanguard. The role of the Trotskyists is relegated to that of a pressure group on the existing leaderships of the workers’ organizations which are being swept along by this revolutionary process.
In its methodology the Pablo group is essentially empiricist. It reacts to the constantly changing world political situation with seemingly radical changes of political line but without recognizing, much less giving a theoretical accounting for, the previous errors. Underlying these reversals, however, is a fundamental proposition: the existence of a “new world reality” in which the balance of forces has shifted definitively in favor of socialism and in which, accordingly, resolution of “the crisis of proletarian leadership” is no longer the sine qua non of the world socialist revolution. On this basis, the Pabloites have consistently maintained their objectivist approach, and have proposed one substitute after another for the revolutionary role of the working class and its Marxist vanguard.
In 1949 Pablo put forward his theoretical conception of “centuries of deformed workers states.” Reacting impressionistically to the expansion of Stalinism in East Europe and China, he envisioned a whole historic epoch during which bureaucratized states of the Stalinist type, not workers’ democracy, would prevail. This theory was as deeply revisionist as that of Burnham and Shachtman, which projected a historical epoch for “bureaucratic collectivism.” Like the Shachtman-Burnham theory, this theory denied a revolutionary perspective for our movement and saw in Stalinism the objective expression of the revolutionary forces in the world.
Soon thereafter, Pablo, in his “War-Revolution Thesis” made this theoretical abandonment the basis for a new political line. World War III, he forecast, would break out in the immediate future. This war would be essentially a class war. It would result in the victory of the Red Army (aided by the European workers led by the Communist parties), and the formation in Germany, France, and England of “deformed workers states.” The experience of East Europe and China would be repeated in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. Therefore, in the short time remaining before the onset of the “War-Revolution,” it was essential for the Fourth International to integrate itself, on any terms and at all costs, into the Stalinist parties (where there were mass parties) which would soon “project a revolutionary orientation” and emerge as the objective leaders of the European revolution.
These concepts (never subsequently repudiated by Pablo) were present in somewhat concealed form in the main theses of the Third World Congress of the F.I. (1951) and immediately thereafter were openly revealed as the practical orientation of the Pablo leadership. During the period around the Third World Congress, Pablo carried on a worldwide factional battle against the French, British and Canadian sections of the world movement in order to develop forces capable of carrying out this essentially liquidationist entry into the Stalinist parties. In this country the Cochran grouping was a legitimate reflection of Pabloism. There were two elements involved in the Cochran group. The Bartell-Clarke wing wished to adapt to the Stalinist movement in this country while the Cochran wing wished to adapt to the labor bureaucracy. Both sections of this liquidationist minority shared with Pablo the same objectivist outlook which no longer gave to our world forces any independent role.
The “Fourth (1954), Fifth (1957) and Sixth (1961) World Congresses” (these were not “world congresses” but rather meetings of a revisionist faction of the world movement) of the Pabloites have all expressed this outlook. There were, of course, important political shifts as the Pabloites responded impressionistically to the changes in the world situation. The later congresses do not emphasize the imminence of war, nor is everything banked on the onrolling sweep of Stalinism. Rather they tend to see the Stalinist bureaucracy collapsing automatically without the necessity of our own conscious intervention.
As a new substitute for the working class and its vanguard, the colonial revolution tends to replace the Stalinist bureaucracy, damaging the critical importance of the advanced working class and its struggles. The Sixth World Congress formally declares that the new “epicenter of World Revolution is in the colonial sector.” Thus socialism is now advancing on the tide of leaderless revolution in the colonial countries.
In 1949 it was a form of Stalinism that would prevail for centuries; in 1951 it was imminent war that would force the Stalinists to project a revolutionary orientation; today it is the colonial revolution that is unfolding automatically. At no time has it been the working class organized under Marxist leadership that is central in the world revolutionary strategy of Pabloism.
On the tactical level the Pabloites generalized their deep entrist perspective to include the social democratic and centrist parties in Europe and the national bourgeois formations in the colonial areas. They entered these parties with an adaptationist political line; they were seeking to pressure the leadership of the centrist opposition into becoming the revolutionary leadership; they were not entering in order to build a new alternative revolutionary leadership based on the rank-and-file workers.
The role of Pabloism in England and in Belgium expresses clearly in action the true nature of this tendency. In England our comrades have devoted many years to the development of an alternative revolutionary leadership to both the right-wing Labour Party leadership and the Stalinists. They have based their tactics at all times on the rank-and-file class conscious workers.
The Pabloites in Britain, with the full support of the IS center, have had another orientation. They have attempted to function as a pressure group on centrist trends within the BLP. Thus they state in Socialist Fight (organ of the English Pabloites): “Above all pressure must be applied at Branch and district level” and the Fourth International (Fall, 1960) sees “The central task of the British revolutionary Marxists” not as building an alternative revolutionary leadership, but rather “regrouping inside the Labour Party, all these scattered forces of the labor left.” When our British comrades organized the Socialist Labour League, the Pabloites joined the hue and cry of the BLP leadership and the capitalist press and attacked them for “irresponsible adventurism.”
Since the formation of the SLL, our comrades have continued to gain substantially within the BLP especially from the youth. The Pabloites, on the other hand, have been unable to build an effective group in England. The British experience has dramatically proved that only an entry policy based entirely on an attempt to create an alternative revolutionary leadership representing the true interests of the rank-and-file workers can build an effective force. Such a policy is based fundamentally on the maintenance of a revolutionary world perspective for the working class under Marxist leadership. The policy of the Pabloites in Britain is a reflection of their abandonment of a revolutionary world perspective: their seeing in others the forces with revolutionary potential. Thus the differences between Pabloism and Trotskyism in England are fundamental, not simply tactical.
The same lesson can be learned from the Belgian experience. In Belgium the Pabloites have had a group functioning for several years under the leadership of one of the IS’s central international figures. This group has devoted its energies to seeking positions of influence within centrist circles in Belgium rather than attempting to develop roots on a rank-and-file basis in the Belgian working class. During the 1960-61 Belgian General Strike, the most important radical development on the Continent in several years, the Belgian Pabloites were unable to put forward a revolutionary political line independent of the centrist circles they were working in. Thus Trotskyism played no independent political role in the revolutionary events and the strike generally failed because of the inadequacy of the centrist trade union leaders that the Pabloites were supporting. The inability of the Pabloites to play an independent role in these crucial events was simply an expression of a central political outlook which places little emphasis on the revolutionary role of our movement.
After 12 years of experimentation the Pabloites have little to show for their efforts. The European movement has been decimated under their leadership. The Latin-American sections of the IS are small and weak. The only organizations on the continent having real working-class roots are affiliated with the IC. In Asia all they have is the formal affiliation of the LSSP (Ceylon) which, over the years, has been evolving in an opportunist direction and at present has reached the point of giving critical support to the bourgeois government.
The International Committee, despite its organizational weaknesses and political problems that have plagued it (due to lack of clarity on Pabloism in some groups), contains the only sections of our world movement that have shown substantial, solid growth. The development of the British section from a small group into a sizable, effective organization with deep roots in the working class and significant support among the youth is a major development for the whole world movement. The growth of the new Japanese section and of the Chileans and Peruvians was based on their break with Pablo.
The experience of our Chilean group illustrates this pattern. In 1954 the Chilean Trotskyist group split over the decision of the “Fourth World Congress” that it should carry out a deep entry tactic in the SP. Fifty members of the group followed the IS’s instructions and entered the SP while only five comrades refused to enter and broke with the IS. These five comrades became the nucleus of the present section of the IC in Chile. This section today is the strongest Trotskyist force in Chile with important roots in the Chilean trade union movement and a very fine potential for the future.
The Argentine section of the IC, however, like the LSSP, has fallen into an essentially Pabloite political line. Its adaptation to the current left capitalist leadership of the Argentine working class has brought it to glorify Peron and to present itself merely as a left-Peronista movement. Organizational advantage bought at such a price can only pave the way for ultimate disaster. The evolution of the Argentine group can be attributed to the failure of the IC to carry through the political struggle against Pabloism in the period since the 1953 split.
Our whole approach to the problem of our world movement must therefore begin with an understanding that Pabloism is a revisionist current which negates the essential revolutionary content of Trotskyism while still clinging to a formal adherence to Trotskyism. It is as much a revision of Trotskyism as Kautskyism was of Marxism. The present division of our world forces is the most fundamental and longest lasting political crisis in the whole history of our world movement. What is at issue is the preservation of Trotskyism itself!
In 1953, our party, in the “Open Letter” (Militant, 11/11/53), declared that “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and Orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.” The political evaluation of Pabloism as revisionism is as correct now as it was then and must be the basis for any Trotskyist approach to this tendency.
The Differences with the SLL
Over the past year, differences within the IC forces that had been smouldering for some time broke out into the open. Differences first began to crop up between the SWP and the Socialist Labour League over conflicting approaches towards Pabloism. The SLL insisted that the time had come to deal with Pabloism politically rather than simply with organizational unity proposals. The British felt that a political approach must begin with an understanding of Pabloism as a revisionist political current. They therefore insisted that a full political discussion must precede any unity moves internationally, for the unification of the world movement must be based firmly on a sound principled political program.
The SWP majority defended exactly the opposite approach. They saw political differences between themselves and Pabloites growing less. Quite logically, from this point of view, they therefore emphasized the organizational basis for unity, taking it for granted that the political basis existed.
When a situation occurs within our world movement creating confusion on such an essential question as the role of the movement itself, it is necessary to prepare a document which presents the essential views of Trotskyism in application to the current world situation. Then it is possible, on the basis of discussion around such a basic document, to determine exactly wherein lie the agreements and disagreements in our world forces. The SLL took on this responsibility and prepared its International Resolution.
This resolution puts forward all the essentials of a revolutionary perspective. It starts with the centers of world capitalism, understanding that it is the struggle of the working class in these centers which is critical for the development of the World Revolution. It replaces ephemeral hopes in an automatic revolutionary process in the colonial countries with revolutionary optimism about the future struggles of the working class in the advanced countries. It sees in the working class the only force in modern society that can overthrow capitalism on a worldwide basis. It sees the world Trotskyist movement as the only movement which represents the true interests of the working class as the only movement capable of carrying through the world revolution. It sees in the existing cadres of world Trotskyism the essential conscious factor in the modern world. It relates all revolutionary tactics, all revolutionary strategy to the development of the working class and its vanguard—the world cadres of Trotskyism. It puts Trotskyism, embodied in the living human beings organized into existent groups and parties, back into our historical perspective.
Significantly, the majority responded to this initiative not by warmly supporting this important effort but by producing an international resolution of its own. While the SWP document is not designed as a worked out theoretical alternative to the position of the SLL—it is equivocal, and contains in eclectic fashion many absolutely correct propositions—as a whole it expresses a different political position from that of the SLL. Certainly, if it did not, it would be difficult to explain why the majority wrote the resolution immediately after receiving the SLL resolution. It is also significant that the majority rejected minority amendments containing the same essential line as the SLL resolution because, they claimed, these amendments projected a line contradictory to the majority resolution.
The SWP Majority’s International Line
The majority international resolution marks an important political step in the direction of the objectivist international outlook and methodology of the Pabloites. The resolution begins by claiming that the victory of the Chinese Revolution “definitively altered the world relation of forces in favor of socialism.” This concept permeates the document and is repeated throughout in one form or another.
The conception of a qualitative transformation of the world situation is the essence of the Pabloite “new world reality” which can be found in the documents of the “Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth World Congresses.” In our 1953 resolution “Against Pabloist Revisionism“ (Discussion Bulletin A-12, November, 1953), which analyzed the central document of Pablo’s “Fourth World Congress,” “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” we rejected this concept, stating: “A rounded review and realistic resume of the net result of the march of the international revolution from 1943 to 1953 leads to this conclusion. With all its achievements and greater potentialities, the failure of the revolution to conquer in one of the major industrialized countries has thus far prevented the revolutionary forces of the working class from growing strong enough to overwhelm the Kremlin oligarchy and give irresistible impetus to the disintegration of Stalinism. There has not yet been such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of class forces.
“Up to date the counter-revolutionary intervention of the bureaucracy itself in world politics has forestalled the objective conditions for such a consummation. It caused the revolution to recede in Western Europe, weakened the working class in relation to the class enemy, and facilitated the mobilization of the world counter-revolution. The struggle between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution is still inconclusive, and far from being settled. This very inconclusiveness, which it strives to maintain, at the present time works to the advantage of the Kremlin.”
This brings us to the heart of the matter. In 1953 our party rejected the concept that the balance of forces is now in favor of revolution. We did this because, in our opinion, the decisive factor was the conscious element. As long as the working class does not come to power in an advanced country, the revolutionary forces cannot be dominant on a world scale. Stalinism and social democracy are essential forces preventing the working class from coming to power in these countries—therefore it is our task to defeat them and create a Trotskyist vanguard movement of the working class. This was our strategic orientation in 1953.
Today the SWP resolution claims that the forces of revolution are dominant despite the fact that the working class since 1953 has not come to power in an advanced country and our own forces remain weak. Thus, consciously or not, the SWP leadership has accepted the central theoretical position of Pabloite revisionism.
This objectivism is reflected in other ways throughout the document. The resolution tends to minimize the danger of Stalinism as a world counter-revolutionary force. In fact it goes so far as to suggest that Khrushchev is taking a “left turn,” allying himself with the colonial revolution. Without specifying the counter-revolutionary objectives and methods of Kremlin diplomacy, the resolution ”recognizes” that “in the diplomatic arena, since the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union has displayed growing boldness and flexibility, scoring gains among the ‘neutral’ countries through aid programs and through exposures of Washington's aggressive policies” and that “in this ‘new reality’ of enormous pressures, inviting openings and deadly dangers, the Soviet bureaucracy has had to revise and adapt and shift its line.” In the Plenum discussion on Cuba last year Comrade Stein made the same point in a more blatant fashion, stating: “...The Soviet Union is compelled today, instead of playing a counter-revolutionary role—to place itself on the side of revolution.” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2, p. 21.)
In 1953 the Pabloites took an identical stand in their resolution. They did not claim that Stalinism was no longer a counter-revolutionary force—rather they claimed it no longer could be effective as a counter-revolutionary force because of the objective sweep of revolution. At that time we stated clearly:
“It is true that world conditions militate against the Kremlin’s consummation of any lasting deals with imperialism or its bargains with the national bourgeoisie. But the objective consequences of its attempts to maintain the status quo or arrive at such agreements have much more than ‘limited and ephemeral’ practical effects. Its maneuvers help block the advance of the revolutionary movement and adversely affect the world relationship of forces. The bureaucracy together with its agencies is not simply a passive reflector and acted-upon object of the world relationship of forces; the bureaucracy acts and reacts on the international arena as a potent factor in shaping the latter...Not only is the vanguard miseducated by this minimizing of the pernicious results of the Kremlin’s course, but it is disarmed in the struggle to dispel illusions about Stalinism among the workers in order to break them from Stalinist influence...The fact that the Soviet bureaucracy couldn’t ‘smash and arrest’ the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions where the revolutionary tide broke through its dikes, doesn’t wipe out the fact that elsewhere, by and large, the bureaucracy succeeded in turning the revolutionary tide in the opposite direction. This has influenced the relationship of forces for an entire period.”
In addition to minimizing the real danger of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary world force, the resolution accepts the Pabloite view that the changes in the world objective situation have ended the isolation of the Soviet Union and declares bluntly: “The Soviet Union is no longer isolated internationally.” But in 1953 we stated:
“How then, can it be so unqualifiedly asserted in the resolution that the isolation of the S.U. has disappeared? The isolation has been modified and mitigated, but not at all removed. The pressures of the imperialist environment weigh upon the entire life of the Soviet people.”
At that time we insisted that only the breakthrough of revolution in Western Europe could end the isolation of the Soviet Union.
Much of the treatment of Stalinism in the resolution is given over to speculation on the fissures within the bureaucracy with the “break-up of Stalinist monolithism.” However, in 1953 we clearly stated:
“The proposition that no significant segment of the bureaucracy will align itself with the masses against its own material interests does not mean that the bureaucracy would not manifest deep cleavages under the impact of an uprising. Such disorganization, disintegration and demoralization was observable in East Germany. But the function of a revolutionary policy is to organize, mobilize and help lead the masses in their struggle, not to look for, even less to bank upon any real break in the bureaucracy.”
In 1953 we reasserted the essential concept of the Transitional Program that the destruction of Stalinism required the conscious intervention and revolutionary struggle of the working class both within the Soviet countries and in the advanced countries. And for the victory of such struggle a Marxist vanguard party was essential. Much is made in the 1953 statement of the fact that while the Pabloite resolution formally mentions the political revolution it does not specifically refer to our strategy of creating Trotskyist parties in these countries. The current SWP resolution not only does not mention the need to create these parties—it does not even mention the political revolution. Instead the restoration of Soviet democracy is treated simply as a reflex of the objective changes in the world situation and within the Soviet Union.
The majority resolution formally states that the struggle of the working class in the advanced countries is the critical struggle and thus differentiates itself from the position of the Pabloite “Sixth World Congress” resolutions. However, this correct proposition, far from being central to the resolution and its perspectives for revolutionary strategy, was in fact inserted only after the rest of the document had been written. Thus in contrast to the uncritical optimism pervading its sections on the colonial revolution, the sections on the advanced countries are mere commentary, lacking in revolutionary analysis and perspective. In fact the SLL resolution treats the American scene and its relationship to the world revolution more fully and more adequately than does the American document itself.
Our central task of creating Marxist parties in all countries of the world is not given proper emphasis in the resolution. Within a general context which gives main weight to objective factors which have already tipped the scales in favor of revolution, it is stated: “Now mighty forces, gathering on a world scale, project the creation of such parties in the very process of revolution.” While every effort must be made to create revolutionary parties during a revolutionary uprising, it is also the duty of our movement to explain that this is no simple task. The failure of the European revolution following the victorious Russian Revolution was due to the failure to create effective Marxist parties in the various European countries prior to the development of revolutionary situations. The resolution does not make this point; rather the implication is that in the “new world reality” the “mighty forces” (what forces? the objective tide of revolution?) will create the needed party automatically as the revolution unfolds. This is indeed a serious weakness of the resolution and another expression of an “objectivist” outlook which minimizes the importance of the arduous task of creating the revolutionary vanguard.
It is our opinion that the international resolution of the majority represents a serious departure from the essential views of our movement in the direction of the revisionist political thinking of the Pabloites. This political move has been taken hesitatingly, ambiguously, and therefore the resolution is eclectic. But the move is nevertheless being taken. The failure of the party to fight politically against Pabloism internationally is now leading to the growth of Pabloite methods of thinking in our own movement.
Cuba, China, and Guinea
Pabloite methods of thought have penetrated different layers of the party in differing degrees and around different political questions. For instance, the entire national leadership of the party was swept up in the Cuban events and lost sight of the basic strategic approach that our movement must take towards such a revolution. The party’s whole orientation was towards the governing apparatus in Cuba and its leaders. It was hoped that through its virtually uncritical support to this government, the leadership could be won over wholesale to Trotskyism. A Trotskyist approach to Cuba, however, must begin with the working class, not the governmental apparatus. The Trotskyists should remain politically independent of the Castro government even though they may deem it tactically advisable to enter the single party. The Trotskyists should urge the workers to consciously struggle for democratic control over the governing apparatus rather than expecting the government to hand over such control to them on its own. Our strategic orientation in Cuba, as everywhere, should be based on the workers themselves rather than on other forces which we hope will be transformed into Trotskyists by mass pressure.
Others in the party have begun to carry out the logical implications of this Pabloite approach in other areas, and the results of their efforts should pull up short every party member. For instance, Arne Swabeck and John Liang have shown that they see the logic of the majority’s position better than does the majority itself: Mao could, like Castro, produce a real workers’ state without relying on the workers support in the revolution, without workers democracy, and without, presumably, a Marxist party either. Swabeck and Liang proclaimed the Chinese CP to be no longer Stalinist, and if not exactly Trotskyist, something well on the road to that. They declared that the Chinese workers state is not deformed, but genuine; and that the slogan of the political revolution as applied to China must be withdrawn. Here again, on a much more significant scale, workers democracy—workers’ control—is regarded as optional and accessory, the role of the working class is undermined, and the revolutionary task is assigned to another, hostile political tendency. Making Mao an honorary Trotskyist does not change the significance of this position.
Frances James, in an article issued during the Cuba discussion, suggests that Guinea is becoming a workers state. In the short time since she wrote this article events have proved how disastrous such impressionism can be. Sekou Toure has imprisoned Communist and other opponents, has suppressed an important teachers’ strike, and has launched an attack against “Marxist disruptors.” Frances James’ line in Guinea or Ghana or Mali would be completely suicidal for our forces there.
These approaches towards Cuba, China and Guinea are but concrete expression of the Pabloite objectivist line. Neither the party leadership on Cuba, nor Swabeck on China, nor James on Guinea, have a revolutionary orientation which starts with the working class and the task of organizing its Trotskyist vanguard.
The Drift from the International
The essential differences in our party and our world movement are brought into focus by one question, the question of the International. As accommodationism makes further inroads into the SWP, the political break with Pablo is more and more seen as easily remediable. Our differences with Pablo, say the majority, are narrowing. This is true, but it is the American majority that has shifted its ground, not the IS. As Pabloism becomes more and more acceptable to the majority, conversely, the SLL with its firm adherence to the Trotskyist position and the principles of the Open Letter, becomes an embarrassment. It is obvious from the published exchange of letters between the SLL and the SWP, from James P. Cannon’s “Letters to the Center,” from the political critique of the SWP international resolution presented by the SLL within the IC, that our long established and deep-rooted solidarity with the British section has been seriously eroded. That such a situation should be allowed to develop without any discussion whatsoever within the ranks of our party is an intolerable state of affairs.
It was the political inspiration of the SWP with its Open Letter which brought the IC into existence. When we issued the Open Letter we took upon ourselves the responsibility for the split in the International. Yet, as the British have charged and documented, we have been politically neglectful of it since its founding. Now when a most fundamental political conflict breaks out between the party majority and the British section, the majority does everything it can to prevent a political discussion of the serious political questions that have been raised. The majority international resolution was originally prepared as a contribution to the international discussion. The British comrades have presented their opinions of this resolution now it is the responsibility of the party majority to defend its political line within the world movement. The British have responsibly brought their critique of the SWP resolution to the International Committee. This Committee, with only one opposing vote, expressed its opposition to the line of the SWP Resolution at its July meeting. Then in December the IC voted in favor of the general line of a revised version of the SLL international resolution.
We fully support the general line of the international resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International, though we disagree with major aspects of its evaluation of the Cuban Revolution. We are in fundamental political solidarity with the International Committee and its sections throughout the world. It is this resolution and this solidarity which are the principal bases upon which we stand. Where does the majority stand? Why will it not carry out its political responsibility to defend its views within a world organization it did so much to bring into existence?
If the present drift of the SWP continues unchecked it will lead to one of two equally disastrous situations. The SWP majority may carry its political coming together with the Pabloites to its proper conclusion and announce its solidarity with the IS or some faction within it as against the IC. Or, the SWP majority may drift away from any political relationship with the IC or the IS. Thus it would break from its 30 years’ tradition of political solidarity and support to the party of the world revolution, the Fourth International. Such a drift away from the world organization of Trotskyism would be a sign that a provincialism which has not been completely absent from the SWP in the past has taken a profound grip on the organization, a grip which cannot but be disastrous for the party’s domestic course as well. It was the essentially provincial outlook of the LSSP, its real lack of deep concern or connection with the Fourth International, which has contributed to its present opportunistic domestic course. Such inevitably will be the future of the SWP if it continues to drift away from the Fourth International. A return to real support and political participation in the International is the indispensable first step toward the reaffirmation of a revolutionary world perspective.
Theses on the American Revolution
In 1946 the Socialist Workers Party issued an important document, the “Theses on the American Revolution.” This document projected a revolutionary course for the party, and it was the ideas contained in this document—the concept that all tactics, all strategy must be related to the goal of creating the Leninist party that will lead the American Revolution—which kept the party going over the difficult years that lay ahead. By 1952 an important section of the central party cadres had succumbed to the pressures of isolation and prosperity and had lost this revolutionary perspective. Comrade Cannon put forward this document once again and insisted quite correctly that despite its inaccurate evaluation of the economic perspectives of American capitalism its essentials were still correct and should be the central policy of our party. He called for the re-education of the party cadres around the principles embodied in the “Theses.”
The way in which this question arose in 1952-53 is quite instructive for the problems which our party faces today. The Cochranites claimed that the decisions of the Pabloite-dominated Third World Congress brought the “Theses” into question and in fact superseded them. Thus, they saw in the world view of Pabloism the theoretical basis for jettisoning a revolutionary perspective in this country.
At first the party majority attempted to answer this attack on the very fundamentals of the program of our party by affirming support for both the “Theses” and the Third World Congress decisions. Thus, they seemed to hold that the Third World Congress decisions held for the rest of the world while the “Theses” held for the U.S. This was an untenable position politically, for the “Theses” themselves theoretically destroy any concept of “American exceptionalism,” making it clear that the laws of world capitalist development hold sway here too. Thus, if the “Theses” apply to the U.S. they must also hold for other advanced capitalist countries, and the same holds for the Third World Congress decisions. This theoretical bind was finally resolved when the party majority decided to carry through a political struggle against Pabloism on a world scale in order to maintain its domestic revolutionary perspective.
Today again we face a situation where a world revolutionary perspective is being challenged—this time by the party majority itself. It is our strong conviction that the party cannot maintain a revolutionary perspective in this country while at the same time slighting a world revolutionary perspective. This contradiction between a domestic and an international perspective will in time be resolved. For the sake of the world revolutionary movement, it must be resolved by projecting the revolutionary orientation of the “Theses” on an international scale rather than by putting the “Theses” on the shelf and allowing an accommodationist spirit to penetrate our work in this country as well.
So far the party maintains its revolutionary perspective for this country. However, there is much confusion in the party as to exactly where we are going, and at times it seems as if the party is drifting from campaign to campaign not fully in command of its own political course. We must at all times realize that we seek to become the vanguard of the American working class. This means that all our work must be related to the central task of developing roots in the trade union movement and in the Negro movement. This is not simply a matter of winning recruits here or there; rather it is the development of the cadre itself as leaders of the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class and against its own false leaders.
Some in the party attempt to counterpose hollow “party building” to this essential task of building the party by developing its roots in the class. These people tended to view our regroupment or Cuba defense work as a substitute for rather than as an auxiliary to our central tasks. We do not claim that these tendencies to drift from a revolutionary perspective in this country have become dominant in the party. But we do feel strongly that complacency about our party and its perspectives would be very harmful at this time.
Where We Stand
In sum, we believe that the failure of the SWP leadership to apply and develop the theory and method of Marxism has resulted in a dangerous drift from a revolutionary world perspective. The adoption in practice of the empiricist and objectivist approach of the Pabloites, the minimization of the critical importance of the creation of a new Marxist proletarian leadership in all countries, the consistent underplaying of the counterrevolutionary role and potential of Stalinism, the powerful tendencies toward accommodation to non-proletarian leaderships particularly in the colonial revolution—these pose, if not countered, a serious threat to the future development of the SWP itself.
What do we counterpose to this drift?
(l) We look to the working class and only the working class as the revolutionary force in modern society.
(2) We consider the creation of revolutionary Marxist parties, that is, Trotskyist parties, as essential to the victory of socialism in every country of the world.
(3) We call for the reviving of the traditional Trotskyist emphasis on workers democracy as an essential part of our program and propaganda.
(4) We hold that Stalinism is counter-revolutionary in essence, that it is the deadly enemy of revolution, that it still remains the major threat within the working-class camp to the success of the world revolution,
(5) For these reasons we call for full support to the general line of the International Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
(6) We call for a political struggle against Pabloism internationally and Pabloite ideas and methodology within our own ranks, recognizing in Pabloism a centrist disease which counsels liquidationism to our world cadres.
(7) We favor the reunification of the Fourth International on the political basis of a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of Trotskyism and the application of these fundamentals to the current world situation. We call for support to any step which furthers the international discussion process, for this brings us closer to our goal of a healthy, strengthened international movement capable of expanding into a powerful world force.
(8) We call for a return to true internationalism, in the spirit of which our party was built. We must fully participate in the discussion process now going on within our world movement; we must give full support to the International Committee and its struggle to rebuild our scattered world forces. We must realize that we can build an effective party in the United States only by playing an important political role in the development of our world movement.
(9) We must continue to educate the entire membership in the spirit of the fundamental principles laid down in the “Theses on the American Revolution.” We hold that those fundamentals are as valid today as they were in 1946, and they were in 1952. We hold that those fundamentals are internationalist to the core.
(10) Finally, we regard the SWP with the YSA, in the political sense, as the American section of our world party. In our party are to be found the most principled and developed Marxists in our country and the embodiment of the rich experiences of our 30 year battle for Leninism and Trotskyism. In presenting our views to the party on these critical issues we are acting in the most fundamental interests of the party and the world revolutionary movement. This document, taken with the IC International Resolution, expresses the essentials of the political outlook to which our party must return.
We approach our party in the spirit of the “Theses on the American Revolution” which concludes as follows:
“The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the U.S., does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY. It is the sole legitimate heir and continuator of pioneer American Communism and the revolutionary movements of the American workers from which it sprang. Its nucleus has already taken shape in three decades of unremitting work and struggle against the stream. Its program has been hammered out in ideological battles and successfully defended against every kind of revisionist assault upon it. The fundamental core of a professional leadership has been assembled and trained in the irreconcilable spirit of the combat party of the revolution.
“The task of the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY consists simply in this: To remain true to its program and banner; to render it more precise with each new development and apply it correctly in the class struggle; and to expand and grow with the growth of the revolutionary mass movement, always aspiring to lead it to victory in the struggle for political power.”
Submitted by:
Joyce Cowley (San Francisco)
J. Doyle (Philadelphia)
Albert Philips (Detroit)*
Ray Gale (San Francisco)
Margaret Gates (Philadelphia)
Ed Lee (Berkeley-Oakland)
Shane Mage (New York)
Jim Petroski (Berkeley-Oakland)
Liegh Ray (San Francisco)
Jim Robertson (New York)
Geoffrey White (Berkeley-Oakland)
Tim Wohlforth (New York)
*Differences in sociological evaluation aside, I want to indicate support for the general thrust of this statement and of its political conclusions.
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.
*******
Markin comment on In Defense Of A Revolutionary Perspective (INDORP)
As noted above those of us who adhere to the Marxist traditions are very concerned with revolutionary continuity over time. Even with a quick or lightly informed look at that history one is struck by the fact, the hard fact, that for myriad reasons formerly revolutionary organizations lose steam. This can be caused by political defeats, military defeats, decisions to forgo revolutionary opportunities on those, as we now understand, rare occasions when they come up, decisions to go for the “main chance” offered by bourgeois society rather than maintain revolutionary vigilance, and, frankly that the core cadre can get tired, disillusioned or isolated.
As INDORP notes several of those factors led to the creation of the RT, particularly over the fudging of the Cuba question by the SWP leadership when that revolution was at the height of its popularity in America (and elsewhere) before the hammer of American imperialism came down and at a time when the aging and wearing out of the original cadre that carried the organization, heroically in some situations, through thick and thin was accelerating. Note also that the RT’s perspective early on was to fight WITHIN the organization for a revolutionary course. Obviously the timeliness and circumstances of creating another, revolutionary, organization depend on many factors but if revolutionary continuity means anything that initial fight has to be inside the previously revolutionary organization. To just walk away from the SWP (especially with its historic links to Trotsky) in 1962 would have been the height of political dilettantism.
Note: As any attentive reader of Workers Vanguard and/or Spartacist is aware the SL/ICL has had its share of political problems over the past decade or so, reflecting in those organizations very graphically that decline of political consciousness of the international working class that they have noted has been prevalent since the demise of the Soviet Union and the political isolation, the severe political isolation, and lack of class struggle in the period. This problem was reflected most recently earlier this year over their line on Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake there in January (a line that I partially shared for a time) so that there is no magic elixir that can ward off the evil spirits when the deal goes down. Nevertheless, like the SWP before it, it could lose its revolutionary tradition. Some people, obviously, already believe that it has lost that edge, others that it never had it. Such is politics, but I would go back to that important point about fighting inside for a revolutionary perspective before abandoning ship if I were them.
*****************
In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective
March, 1962
— A Statement of Basic Position by the Revolutionary Tendency,
Presented to the June 1962 plenary meeting of the SWP National Committee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1962
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York. Published originally in Marxist Bulletin No. 1, 1964.
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.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1962/perspective.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
The material bearing on the history and struggles of the Revolutionary Tendency inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) occupies a special place in the Marxist Bulletin series. Without a serious and critical attitude toward its own development, no political formation can go beyond the first stages in meeting the central challenge facing Marxist-Leninists in the United States the building of a revolutionary party.
Marxist Bulletins Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all devoted to the period from the consolidation of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the SWP to the expulsion of the RT leadership from the SWP, which covered the two-year span, 1962-1963.
Origin of the Revolutionary Tendency
The nucleus of the RT originated in the central leadership of the Young Socialist Alliance, and first came together as a left opposition to the SWP Majority’s uncritical line toward the course of the Cuban Revolution. This preliminary dispute culminated in the adoption of a thoroughly revisionist position by the SWP Majority at the June 1961 party convention. The party’s theoretical revisionism, together with its abstentionist and opportunist practice, were carried into the party’s general international line and began to turn the party away from a revolutionary perspective in the United States as well. (The causes of this dramatic degeneration of the SWP constitute a principal theme in Marxist Bulletin No. 2, “The Nature of the SWP”.)
Need for a Basic Document
The left oppositionists responded to the general assault of the Majority upon the party’s past positions by counterposing a revolutionary program. This document, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” (INDORP for short), achieved three results which led to a crystallization of the RT: (l) INDORP analyzed and made explicit the general political basis of the left opposition; (2) in gaining co-authors and signers, INDORP drew into the organized opposition a number of older party comrades, thus giving authority to the RT beyond its numbers; (3) INDORP linked the American opposition to the Majority of the International Committee (IC) of the Fourth International by endorsing the international resolution prepared by the British Socialist Labour League and adopted by the IC, “The World Prospect for Socialism.”
Drafting INDORP
“In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” was the result of a lengthy, collective effort. The need for such a statement was first advanced by Tim Wohlforth in the Fall of 1961 with the advice of Gerry Healy in Britain. Geoffrey White authored the first draft; comrades Shane Mage and Cliff Slaughter contributed sections and criticism on Marxist method and theory. Wohlforth furnished general editorial expansion, and several others made lesser contributions.
The final approved version was presented by the Revolutionary Tendency to the National Committee of the SWP in March 1962. After the expanded party plenum in June 1962, where the document was voted down 43 to 4, it was printed for the SWP membership in the internal Discussion Bulletin (Vol. 23, No. 4, July 1962). This statement of basic position by the RT now becomes available to the general radical public for the first time.
After INDORP
Even as INDORP was being introduced into the party discussion, the contradiction between the course of the SWP and a revolutionary position was becoming ever more acute and apparent. Thus the RT had just affirmed in INDORP that the opposition regarded the SWP as “the American section of our world party” (section “Where We Stand”, point 10). Yet the co-thinkers of the RT in Britain, the Socialist Labour League, felt obliged in July 1962 to attack the SWP in a major document significantly entitled “Trotskyism Betrayed—The SWP Accepts the Political Method of Pabloite Revisionism.” In September of the same year IC representatives at an international meeting officially stated that “they did not politically represent the SWP”.
Since the IC which thus repudiated its earlier ties with the SWP was then equivalent to the world party, the relation of the SWP Majority to the RT in the U.S. was rendered moot. Thus within the American tendency arose a necessary political discussion to examine the nature of the SWP and clarify the relation of the RT to the SWP Majority (see subsequent numbers of the Marxist Bulletin series).
Despite the demise of the SWP as a revolutionary organization, “In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective” remains unimpaired to this day as a statement of basic position.
—SPARTACIST Editorial Board
January 1965
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
IN DEFENSE OF A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
—A statement of Basic Position
The decisive instrument of the proletarian revolution is the party of the class-conscious vanguard. Failing the leadership of such a party, the most favorable revolutionary situations, which arise from the objective circumstances, cannot be carried through to the final victory of the proletariat and the beginnings of the planned reorganization of society on socialist foundations. This was demonstrated most conclusively and positively in the 1917 Russian Revolution. This same principled lesson derives no less irrefutably even though negatively from the entire world experience of the epoch of wars, revolutions and colonial uprisings that began with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
—“Theses on the American Revolution” adopted at the 12th National Convention of the SWP in Chicago, November 15-18, 1946.
Introduction: The Method of Marxism
The contradictory character of the present historical period presents the gravest dangers, as well as the highest potentialities, to the Trotskyist movement. The combination of the great revolutionary upsurge throughout the colonial and non-capitalist sectors of the world with the seeming stabilization and progress of capitalism in its heartland; the prolonged crisis of proletarian leadership and domination of the world labor movement by social-democratic and Stalinist agents of capital combined with the continual resurgence of working class struggle; these are the terms of a situation in which our world movement constantly risks ideological disorientation and consequent political collapse as a revolutionary force. Only the fullest grasp of the dialectical materialist method, the constant development of Marxist theory, will enable our movement, in a perpetually changing reality, to preserve and develop its revolutionary perspective.
The essence of the political methodology of Marxism is to pose all problems actively from the specific and purposive viewpoint of the only consistently revolutionary class in modern society, the proletariat. This proletarian class viewpoint has its highest expression in the scientific theory of Marxism. Marxists, in other words, analyze all problems in terms of a rigorous and scientific theoretical structure. At the same time they are full participants in the historical process itself as the most advanced section of the working class and their action is guided by theory. Thus the conclusions derived from Marxist theory, and accordingly the theory itself, are continually being tested in practice.
“Revisionism” is the view that every new development requires the abandonment in practice of basic aspects of previously held theory. Ultimately this drift from the dialectical materialist method leads to a drift from the working class itself. Marxism, on the contrary, develops through the continual integration of new elements, new realities, into its theoretical structure. It explicitly criticizes and rejects, where necessary, erroneous or outlived propositions, while maintaining at every point its character as a systematic, rigorous and unified scientific structure.
The pressure of the capitalist class is most intense precisely against this methodology of Marxism, which its ideological agents revile as dogmatic fanaticism. Unless Trotskyists are able to use and develop Marxist theory they, like many other Marxists before them, inevitably succumb to this pressure, fall into a vulgar, pragmatic, empiricist view of reality, and convert Marxian theory into a set of sacred dogmas useful only to provide labels which can be slapped on an unruly and uncomprehended reality.
Particularly in the present period, when the working class seems to the empiricist to be under the complete and everlasting domination of reformist bureaucracies, this ideological pressure is the result of a terribly strong social pressure. The Trotskyist groups feel small and isolated at the very moment that significant leftist forces are clearly in motion throughout the world. These forces, however, are under the leadership of non-proletarian tendencies: “left” social democrats, Stalinists of one or another variety, and “revolutionary” bourgeois or petty-bourgeois groups in the colonial countries.
The revolutionary party, if it does not possess a real comprehension of the methodology of Marxism, is condemned merely to reflect the contradiction between its own relative isolation and the mass upsurges. This reflective pose finds expression in an objectivist outlook where one views from afar an unfolding panoramic process from which the conscious active factor is completely divorced. Instead of posing the problem of principled struggle against these ultimately pro-capitalist leaderships with the goal of developing a new proletarian leadership, the party then seeks only to influence the movement as it is and in order to affect the policy of the existing leadership, enters into a process of political, organizational and theoretical accommodation to, and regroupment with, these alien tendencies.
Once the thread of Marxist theory is lost, the concepts of other social forces come to dominate the thought of socialists. The party thus comes to lose its revolutionary perspective—it comes to see in other political and social groupings, rather than in the working class led by its Marxist vanguard, the leadership of the revolution. The Trotskyists relegate themselves to an auxiliary role in the historical process.
The world Trotskyist movement has been in a political crisis for over ten years. This crisis has been caused by the failure of theory and leadership in the Fourth International, resulting in the loss of a revolutionary perspective by important sections of the Trotskyist movement under conditions of isolation from the masses and under pressure from the capitalist class through its petty-bourgeois agents within the labor movement. Only the re-establishment of a revolutionary perspective in our world movement and the definitive rooting out of defeatist, accommodationist, and essentially liquidationist politics from our ranks can lay the basis for the rebuilding of our world cadres and thus for the victory of the world revolution.
It was Pablo’s theory of accommodation to alien tendencies that led those Trotskyists determined to preserve a revolutionary perspective to break with the International Secretariat (IS) in 1953, a move crippling to the International, but deemed by the party at that time to be essential to the preservation of a principled revolutionary movement. However, the continued paralysis of our world forces since that time and the present deep division within the International Committee (IC) are signs that the forces that were operating on Pablo were also affecting, to a lesser degree, the Socialist Workers Party. With the passage of the eight years since the split the signs of this same disease in our own ranks are reaching major proportions. We feel that this process has now reached a point where resistance is essential.
In this statement we are attempting to assess the degree to which this empiricist methodology and these accommodationist views have penetrated our party and what we feel can be done to reaffirm our revolutionary world perspective. It is only on this political basis that we will be able to rebuild our world forces. This statement is our contribution to the forthcoming party plenum which, in our opinion, should prepare the party for participation in the discussion now going on in our world movement. As this discussion is preliminary to the forthcoming World Congress of Trotskyism, called by the International Committee of the Fourth International, our political participation in it is essential.
The Nature of Pabloism
Pabloism is essentially a revisionist current within the Trotskyist movement internationally which has lost a revolutionary world perspective during the post-war period of capitalist boom and the subsequent relative inactivity of the working class in the advanced countries. The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organized vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success. Fundamental to their political approach is an “objectivist” world outlook which sees capitalism collapsing and Stalinism shattering under the impact of an abstract panoramic world historic process, thus removing the necessity for the conscious intervention of the working class through its Marxist vanguard. The role of the Trotskyists is relegated to that of a pressure group on the existing leaderships of the workers’ organizations which are being swept along by this revolutionary process.
In its methodology the Pablo group is essentially empiricist. It reacts to the constantly changing world political situation with seemingly radical changes of political line but without recognizing, much less giving a theoretical accounting for, the previous errors. Underlying these reversals, however, is a fundamental proposition: the existence of a “new world reality” in which the balance of forces has shifted definitively in favor of socialism and in which, accordingly, resolution of “the crisis of proletarian leadership” is no longer the sine qua non of the world socialist revolution. On this basis, the Pabloites have consistently maintained their objectivist approach, and have proposed one substitute after another for the revolutionary role of the working class and its Marxist vanguard.
In 1949 Pablo put forward his theoretical conception of “centuries of deformed workers states.” Reacting impressionistically to the expansion of Stalinism in East Europe and China, he envisioned a whole historic epoch during which bureaucratized states of the Stalinist type, not workers’ democracy, would prevail. This theory was as deeply revisionist as that of Burnham and Shachtman, which projected a historical epoch for “bureaucratic collectivism.” Like the Shachtman-Burnham theory, this theory denied a revolutionary perspective for our movement and saw in Stalinism the objective expression of the revolutionary forces in the world.
Soon thereafter, Pablo, in his “War-Revolution Thesis” made this theoretical abandonment the basis for a new political line. World War III, he forecast, would break out in the immediate future. This war would be essentially a class war. It would result in the victory of the Red Army (aided by the European workers led by the Communist parties), and the formation in Germany, France, and England of “deformed workers states.” The experience of East Europe and China would be repeated in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. Therefore, in the short time remaining before the onset of the “War-Revolution,” it was essential for the Fourth International to integrate itself, on any terms and at all costs, into the Stalinist parties (where there were mass parties) which would soon “project a revolutionary orientation” and emerge as the objective leaders of the European revolution.
These concepts (never subsequently repudiated by Pablo) were present in somewhat concealed form in the main theses of the Third World Congress of the F.I. (1951) and immediately thereafter were openly revealed as the practical orientation of the Pablo leadership. During the period around the Third World Congress, Pablo carried on a worldwide factional battle against the French, British and Canadian sections of the world movement in order to develop forces capable of carrying out this essentially liquidationist entry into the Stalinist parties. In this country the Cochran grouping was a legitimate reflection of Pabloism. There were two elements involved in the Cochran group. The Bartell-Clarke wing wished to adapt to the Stalinist movement in this country while the Cochran wing wished to adapt to the labor bureaucracy. Both sections of this liquidationist minority shared with Pablo the same objectivist outlook which no longer gave to our world forces any independent role.
The “Fourth (1954), Fifth (1957) and Sixth (1961) World Congresses” (these were not “world congresses” but rather meetings of a revisionist faction of the world movement) of the Pabloites have all expressed this outlook. There were, of course, important political shifts as the Pabloites responded impressionistically to the changes in the world situation. The later congresses do not emphasize the imminence of war, nor is everything banked on the onrolling sweep of Stalinism. Rather they tend to see the Stalinist bureaucracy collapsing automatically without the necessity of our own conscious intervention.
As a new substitute for the working class and its vanguard, the colonial revolution tends to replace the Stalinist bureaucracy, damaging the critical importance of the advanced working class and its struggles. The Sixth World Congress formally declares that the new “epicenter of World Revolution is in the colonial sector.” Thus socialism is now advancing on the tide of leaderless revolution in the colonial countries.
In 1949 it was a form of Stalinism that would prevail for centuries; in 1951 it was imminent war that would force the Stalinists to project a revolutionary orientation; today it is the colonial revolution that is unfolding automatically. At no time has it been the working class organized under Marxist leadership that is central in the world revolutionary strategy of Pabloism.
On the tactical level the Pabloites generalized their deep entrist perspective to include the social democratic and centrist parties in Europe and the national bourgeois formations in the colonial areas. They entered these parties with an adaptationist political line; they were seeking to pressure the leadership of the centrist opposition into becoming the revolutionary leadership; they were not entering in order to build a new alternative revolutionary leadership based on the rank-and-file workers.
The role of Pabloism in England and in Belgium expresses clearly in action the true nature of this tendency. In England our comrades have devoted many years to the development of an alternative revolutionary leadership to both the right-wing Labour Party leadership and the Stalinists. They have based their tactics at all times on the rank-and-file class conscious workers.
The Pabloites in Britain, with the full support of the IS center, have had another orientation. They have attempted to function as a pressure group on centrist trends within the BLP. Thus they state in Socialist Fight (organ of the English Pabloites): “Above all pressure must be applied at Branch and district level” and the Fourth International (Fall, 1960) sees “The central task of the British revolutionary Marxists” not as building an alternative revolutionary leadership, but rather “regrouping inside the Labour Party, all these scattered forces of the labor left.” When our British comrades organized the Socialist Labour League, the Pabloites joined the hue and cry of the BLP leadership and the capitalist press and attacked them for “irresponsible adventurism.”
Since the formation of the SLL, our comrades have continued to gain substantially within the BLP especially from the youth. The Pabloites, on the other hand, have been unable to build an effective group in England. The British experience has dramatically proved that only an entry policy based entirely on an attempt to create an alternative revolutionary leadership representing the true interests of the rank-and-file workers can build an effective force. Such a policy is based fundamentally on the maintenance of a revolutionary world perspective for the working class under Marxist leadership. The policy of the Pabloites in Britain is a reflection of their abandonment of a revolutionary world perspective: their seeing in others the forces with revolutionary potential. Thus the differences between Pabloism and Trotskyism in England are fundamental, not simply tactical.
The same lesson can be learned from the Belgian experience. In Belgium the Pabloites have had a group functioning for several years under the leadership of one of the IS’s central international figures. This group has devoted its energies to seeking positions of influence within centrist circles in Belgium rather than attempting to develop roots on a rank-and-file basis in the Belgian working class. During the 1960-61 Belgian General Strike, the most important radical development on the Continent in several years, the Belgian Pabloites were unable to put forward a revolutionary political line independent of the centrist circles they were working in. Thus Trotskyism played no independent political role in the revolutionary events and the strike generally failed because of the inadequacy of the centrist trade union leaders that the Pabloites were supporting. The inability of the Pabloites to play an independent role in these crucial events was simply an expression of a central political outlook which places little emphasis on the revolutionary role of our movement.
After 12 years of experimentation the Pabloites have little to show for their efforts. The European movement has been decimated under their leadership. The Latin-American sections of the IS are small and weak. The only organizations on the continent having real working-class roots are affiliated with the IC. In Asia all they have is the formal affiliation of the LSSP (Ceylon) which, over the years, has been evolving in an opportunist direction and at present has reached the point of giving critical support to the bourgeois government.
The International Committee, despite its organizational weaknesses and political problems that have plagued it (due to lack of clarity on Pabloism in some groups), contains the only sections of our world movement that have shown substantial, solid growth. The development of the British section from a small group into a sizable, effective organization with deep roots in the working class and significant support among the youth is a major development for the whole world movement. The growth of the new Japanese section and of the Chileans and Peruvians was based on their break with Pablo.
The experience of our Chilean group illustrates this pattern. In 1954 the Chilean Trotskyist group split over the decision of the “Fourth World Congress” that it should carry out a deep entry tactic in the SP. Fifty members of the group followed the IS’s instructions and entered the SP while only five comrades refused to enter and broke with the IS. These five comrades became the nucleus of the present section of the IC in Chile. This section today is the strongest Trotskyist force in Chile with important roots in the Chilean trade union movement and a very fine potential for the future.
The Argentine section of the IC, however, like the LSSP, has fallen into an essentially Pabloite political line. Its adaptation to the current left capitalist leadership of the Argentine working class has brought it to glorify Peron and to present itself merely as a left-Peronista movement. Organizational advantage bought at such a price can only pave the way for ultimate disaster. The evolution of the Argentine group can be attributed to the failure of the IC to carry through the political struggle against Pabloism in the period since the 1953 split.
Our whole approach to the problem of our world movement must therefore begin with an understanding that Pabloism is a revisionist current which negates the essential revolutionary content of Trotskyism while still clinging to a formal adherence to Trotskyism. It is as much a revision of Trotskyism as Kautskyism was of Marxism. The present division of our world forces is the most fundamental and longest lasting political crisis in the whole history of our world movement. What is at issue is the preservation of Trotskyism itself!
In 1953, our party, in the “Open Letter” (Militant, 11/11/53), declared that “The lines of cleavage between Pablo’s revisionism and Orthodox Trotskyism are so deep that no compromise is possible either politically or organizationally.” The political evaluation of Pabloism as revisionism is as correct now as it was then and must be the basis for any Trotskyist approach to this tendency.
The Differences with the SLL
Over the past year, differences within the IC forces that had been smouldering for some time broke out into the open. Differences first began to crop up between the SWP and the Socialist Labour League over conflicting approaches towards Pabloism. The SLL insisted that the time had come to deal with Pabloism politically rather than simply with organizational unity proposals. The British felt that a political approach must begin with an understanding of Pabloism as a revisionist political current. They therefore insisted that a full political discussion must precede any unity moves internationally, for the unification of the world movement must be based firmly on a sound principled political program.
The SWP majority defended exactly the opposite approach. They saw political differences between themselves and Pabloites growing less. Quite logically, from this point of view, they therefore emphasized the organizational basis for unity, taking it for granted that the political basis existed.
When a situation occurs within our world movement creating confusion on such an essential question as the role of the movement itself, it is necessary to prepare a document which presents the essential views of Trotskyism in application to the current world situation. Then it is possible, on the basis of discussion around such a basic document, to determine exactly wherein lie the agreements and disagreements in our world forces. The SLL took on this responsibility and prepared its International Resolution.
This resolution puts forward all the essentials of a revolutionary perspective. It starts with the centers of world capitalism, understanding that it is the struggle of the working class in these centers which is critical for the development of the World Revolution. It replaces ephemeral hopes in an automatic revolutionary process in the colonial countries with revolutionary optimism about the future struggles of the working class in the advanced countries. It sees in the working class the only force in modern society that can overthrow capitalism on a worldwide basis. It sees the world Trotskyist movement as the only movement which represents the true interests of the working class as the only movement capable of carrying through the world revolution. It sees in the existing cadres of world Trotskyism the essential conscious factor in the modern world. It relates all revolutionary tactics, all revolutionary strategy to the development of the working class and its vanguard—the world cadres of Trotskyism. It puts Trotskyism, embodied in the living human beings organized into existent groups and parties, back into our historical perspective.
Significantly, the majority responded to this initiative not by warmly supporting this important effort but by producing an international resolution of its own. While the SWP document is not designed as a worked out theoretical alternative to the position of the SLL—it is equivocal, and contains in eclectic fashion many absolutely correct propositions—as a whole it expresses a different political position from that of the SLL. Certainly, if it did not, it would be difficult to explain why the majority wrote the resolution immediately after receiving the SLL resolution. It is also significant that the majority rejected minority amendments containing the same essential line as the SLL resolution because, they claimed, these amendments projected a line contradictory to the majority resolution.
The SWP Majority’s International Line
The majority international resolution marks an important political step in the direction of the objectivist international outlook and methodology of the Pabloites. The resolution begins by claiming that the victory of the Chinese Revolution “definitively altered the world relation of forces in favor of socialism.” This concept permeates the document and is repeated throughout in one form or another.
The conception of a qualitative transformation of the world situation is the essence of the Pabloite “new world reality” which can be found in the documents of the “Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth World Congresses.” In our 1953 resolution “Against Pabloist Revisionism“ (Discussion Bulletin A-12, November, 1953), which analyzed the central document of Pablo’s “Fourth World Congress,” “The Rise and Decline of Stalinism,” we rejected this concept, stating: “A rounded review and realistic resume of the net result of the march of the international revolution from 1943 to 1953 leads to this conclusion. With all its achievements and greater potentialities, the failure of the revolution to conquer in one of the major industrialized countries has thus far prevented the revolutionary forces of the working class from growing strong enough to overwhelm the Kremlin oligarchy and give irresistible impetus to the disintegration of Stalinism. There has not yet been such a qualitative alteration in the world relationship of class forces.
“Up to date the counter-revolutionary intervention of the bureaucracy itself in world politics has forestalled the objective conditions for such a consummation. It caused the revolution to recede in Western Europe, weakened the working class in relation to the class enemy, and facilitated the mobilization of the world counter-revolution. The struggle between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution is still inconclusive, and far from being settled. This very inconclusiveness, which it strives to maintain, at the present time works to the advantage of the Kremlin.”
This brings us to the heart of the matter. In 1953 our party rejected the concept that the balance of forces is now in favor of revolution. We did this because, in our opinion, the decisive factor was the conscious element. As long as the working class does not come to power in an advanced country, the revolutionary forces cannot be dominant on a world scale. Stalinism and social democracy are essential forces preventing the working class from coming to power in these countries—therefore it is our task to defeat them and create a Trotskyist vanguard movement of the working class. This was our strategic orientation in 1953.
Today the SWP resolution claims that the forces of revolution are dominant despite the fact that the working class since 1953 has not come to power in an advanced country and our own forces remain weak. Thus, consciously or not, the SWP leadership has accepted the central theoretical position of Pabloite revisionism.
This objectivism is reflected in other ways throughout the document. The resolution tends to minimize the danger of Stalinism as a world counter-revolutionary force. In fact it goes so far as to suggest that Khrushchev is taking a “left turn,” allying himself with the colonial revolution. Without specifying the counter-revolutionary objectives and methods of Kremlin diplomacy, the resolution ”recognizes” that “in the diplomatic arena, since the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union has displayed growing boldness and flexibility, scoring gains among the ‘neutral’ countries through aid programs and through exposures of Washington's aggressive policies” and that “in this ‘new reality’ of enormous pressures, inviting openings and deadly dangers, the Soviet bureaucracy has had to revise and adapt and shift its line.” In the Plenum discussion on Cuba last year Comrade Stein made the same point in a more blatant fashion, stating: “...The Soviet Union is compelled today, instead of playing a counter-revolutionary role—to place itself on the side of revolution.” (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 22, No. 2, p. 21.)
In 1953 the Pabloites took an identical stand in their resolution. They did not claim that Stalinism was no longer a counter-revolutionary force—rather they claimed it no longer could be effective as a counter-revolutionary force because of the objective sweep of revolution. At that time we stated clearly:
“It is true that world conditions militate against the Kremlin’s consummation of any lasting deals with imperialism or its bargains with the national bourgeoisie. But the objective consequences of its attempts to maintain the status quo or arrive at such agreements have much more than ‘limited and ephemeral’ practical effects. Its maneuvers help block the advance of the revolutionary movement and adversely affect the world relationship of forces. The bureaucracy together with its agencies is not simply a passive reflector and acted-upon object of the world relationship of forces; the bureaucracy acts and reacts on the international arena as a potent factor in shaping the latter...Not only is the vanguard miseducated by this minimizing of the pernicious results of the Kremlin’s course, but it is disarmed in the struggle to dispel illusions about Stalinism among the workers in order to break them from Stalinist influence...The fact that the Soviet bureaucracy couldn’t ‘smash and arrest’ the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions where the revolutionary tide broke through its dikes, doesn’t wipe out the fact that elsewhere, by and large, the bureaucracy succeeded in turning the revolutionary tide in the opposite direction. This has influenced the relationship of forces for an entire period.”
In addition to minimizing the real danger of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary world force, the resolution accepts the Pabloite view that the changes in the world objective situation have ended the isolation of the Soviet Union and declares bluntly: “The Soviet Union is no longer isolated internationally.” But in 1953 we stated:
“How then, can it be so unqualifiedly asserted in the resolution that the isolation of the S.U. has disappeared? The isolation has been modified and mitigated, but not at all removed. The pressures of the imperialist environment weigh upon the entire life of the Soviet people.”
At that time we insisted that only the breakthrough of revolution in Western Europe could end the isolation of the Soviet Union.
Much of the treatment of Stalinism in the resolution is given over to speculation on the fissures within the bureaucracy with the “break-up of Stalinist monolithism.” However, in 1953 we clearly stated:
“The proposition that no significant segment of the bureaucracy will align itself with the masses against its own material interests does not mean that the bureaucracy would not manifest deep cleavages under the impact of an uprising. Such disorganization, disintegration and demoralization was observable in East Germany. But the function of a revolutionary policy is to organize, mobilize and help lead the masses in their struggle, not to look for, even less to bank upon any real break in the bureaucracy.”
In 1953 we reasserted the essential concept of the Transitional Program that the destruction of Stalinism required the conscious intervention and revolutionary struggle of the working class both within the Soviet countries and in the advanced countries. And for the victory of such struggle a Marxist vanguard party was essential. Much is made in the 1953 statement of the fact that while the Pabloite resolution formally mentions the political revolution it does not specifically refer to our strategy of creating Trotskyist parties in these countries. The current SWP resolution not only does not mention the need to create these parties—it does not even mention the political revolution. Instead the restoration of Soviet democracy is treated simply as a reflex of the objective changes in the world situation and within the Soviet Union.
The majority resolution formally states that the struggle of the working class in the advanced countries is the critical struggle and thus differentiates itself from the position of the Pabloite “Sixth World Congress” resolutions. However, this correct proposition, far from being central to the resolution and its perspectives for revolutionary strategy, was in fact inserted only after the rest of the document had been written. Thus in contrast to the uncritical optimism pervading its sections on the colonial revolution, the sections on the advanced countries are mere commentary, lacking in revolutionary analysis and perspective. In fact the SLL resolution treats the American scene and its relationship to the world revolution more fully and more adequately than does the American document itself.
Our central task of creating Marxist parties in all countries of the world is not given proper emphasis in the resolution. Within a general context which gives main weight to objective factors which have already tipped the scales in favor of revolution, it is stated: “Now mighty forces, gathering on a world scale, project the creation of such parties in the very process of revolution.” While every effort must be made to create revolutionary parties during a revolutionary uprising, it is also the duty of our movement to explain that this is no simple task. The failure of the European revolution following the victorious Russian Revolution was due to the failure to create effective Marxist parties in the various European countries prior to the development of revolutionary situations. The resolution does not make this point; rather the implication is that in the “new world reality” the “mighty forces” (what forces? the objective tide of revolution?) will create the needed party automatically as the revolution unfolds. This is indeed a serious weakness of the resolution and another expression of an “objectivist” outlook which minimizes the importance of the arduous task of creating the revolutionary vanguard.
It is our opinion that the international resolution of the majority represents a serious departure from the essential views of our movement in the direction of the revisionist political thinking of the Pabloites. This political move has been taken hesitatingly, ambiguously, and therefore the resolution is eclectic. But the move is nevertheless being taken. The failure of the party to fight politically against Pabloism internationally is now leading to the growth of Pabloite methods of thinking in our own movement.
Cuba, China, and Guinea
Pabloite methods of thought have penetrated different layers of the party in differing degrees and around different political questions. For instance, the entire national leadership of the party was swept up in the Cuban events and lost sight of the basic strategic approach that our movement must take towards such a revolution. The party’s whole orientation was towards the governing apparatus in Cuba and its leaders. It was hoped that through its virtually uncritical support to this government, the leadership could be won over wholesale to Trotskyism. A Trotskyist approach to Cuba, however, must begin with the working class, not the governmental apparatus. The Trotskyists should remain politically independent of the Castro government even though they may deem it tactically advisable to enter the single party. The Trotskyists should urge the workers to consciously struggle for democratic control over the governing apparatus rather than expecting the government to hand over such control to them on its own. Our strategic orientation in Cuba, as everywhere, should be based on the workers themselves rather than on other forces which we hope will be transformed into Trotskyists by mass pressure.
Others in the party have begun to carry out the logical implications of this Pabloite approach in other areas, and the results of their efforts should pull up short every party member. For instance, Arne Swabeck and John Liang have shown that they see the logic of the majority’s position better than does the majority itself: Mao could, like Castro, produce a real workers’ state without relying on the workers support in the revolution, without workers democracy, and without, presumably, a Marxist party either. Swabeck and Liang proclaimed the Chinese CP to be no longer Stalinist, and if not exactly Trotskyist, something well on the road to that. They declared that the Chinese workers state is not deformed, but genuine; and that the slogan of the political revolution as applied to China must be withdrawn. Here again, on a much more significant scale, workers democracy—workers’ control—is regarded as optional and accessory, the role of the working class is undermined, and the revolutionary task is assigned to another, hostile political tendency. Making Mao an honorary Trotskyist does not change the significance of this position.
Frances James, in an article issued during the Cuba discussion, suggests that Guinea is becoming a workers state. In the short time since she wrote this article events have proved how disastrous such impressionism can be. Sekou Toure has imprisoned Communist and other opponents, has suppressed an important teachers’ strike, and has launched an attack against “Marxist disruptors.” Frances James’ line in Guinea or Ghana or Mali would be completely suicidal for our forces there.
These approaches towards Cuba, China and Guinea are but concrete expression of the Pabloite objectivist line. Neither the party leadership on Cuba, nor Swabeck on China, nor James on Guinea, have a revolutionary orientation which starts with the working class and the task of organizing its Trotskyist vanguard.
The Drift from the International
The essential differences in our party and our world movement are brought into focus by one question, the question of the International. As accommodationism makes further inroads into the SWP, the political break with Pablo is more and more seen as easily remediable. Our differences with Pablo, say the majority, are narrowing. This is true, but it is the American majority that has shifted its ground, not the IS. As Pabloism becomes more and more acceptable to the majority, conversely, the SLL with its firm adherence to the Trotskyist position and the principles of the Open Letter, becomes an embarrassment. It is obvious from the published exchange of letters between the SLL and the SWP, from James P. Cannon’s “Letters to the Center,” from the political critique of the SWP international resolution presented by the SLL within the IC, that our long established and deep-rooted solidarity with the British section has been seriously eroded. That such a situation should be allowed to develop without any discussion whatsoever within the ranks of our party is an intolerable state of affairs.
It was the political inspiration of the SWP with its Open Letter which brought the IC into existence. When we issued the Open Letter we took upon ourselves the responsibility for the split in the International. Yet, as the British have charged and documented, we have been politically neglectful of it since its founding. Now when a most fundamental political conflict breaks out between the party majority and the British section, the majority does everything it can to prevent a political discussion of the serious political questions that have been raised. The majority international resolution was originally prepared as a contribution to the international discussion. The British comrades have presented their opinions of this resolution now it is the responsibility of the party majority to defend its political line within the world movement. The British have responsibly brought their critique of the SWP resolution to the International Committee. This Committee, with only one opposing vote, expressed its opposition to the line of the SWP Resolution at its July meeting. Then in December the IC voted in favor of the general line of a revised version of the SLL international resolution.
We fully support the general line of the international resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International, though we disagree with major aspects of its evaluation of the Cuban Revolution. We are in fundamental political solidarity with the International Committee and its sections throughout the world. It is this resolution and this solidarity which are the principal bases upon which we stand. Where does the majority stand? Why will it not carry out its political responsibility to defend its views within a world organization it did so much to bring into existence?
If the present drift of the SWP continues unchecked it will lead to one of two equally disastrous situations. The SWP majority may carry its political coming together with the Pabloites to its proper conclusion and announce its solidarity with the IS or some faction within it as against the IC. Or, the SWP majority may drift away from any political relationship with the IC or the IS. Thus it would break from its 30 years’ tradition of political solidarity and support to the party of the world revolution, the Fourth International. Such a drift away from the world organization of Trotskyism would be a sign that a provincialism which has not been completely absent from the SWP in the past has taken a profound grip on the organization, a grip which cannot but be disastrous for the party’s domestic course as well. It was the essentially provincial outlook of the LSSP, its real lack of deep concern or connection with the Fourth International, which has contributed to its present opportunistic domestic course. Such inevitably will be the future of the SWP if it continues to drift away from the Fourth International. A return to real support and political participation in the International is the indispensable first step toward the reaffirmation of a revolutionary world perspective.
Theses on the American Revolution
In 1946 the Socialist Workers Party issued an important document, the “Theses on the American Revolution.” This document projected a revolutionary course for the party, and it was the ideas contained in this document—the concept that all tactics, all strategy must be related to the goal of creating the Leninist party that will lead the American Revolution—which kept the party going over the difficult years that lay ahead. By 1952 an important section of the central party cadres had succumbed to the pressures of isolation and prosperity and had lost this revolutionary perspective. Comrade Cannon put forward this document once again and insisted quite correctly that despite its inaccurate evaluation of the economic perspectives of American capitalism its essentials were still correct and should be the central policy of our party. He called for the re-education of the party cadres around the principles embodied in the “Theses.”
The way in which this question arose in 1952-53 is quite instructive for the problems which our party faces today. The Cochranites claimed that the decisions of the Pabloite-dominated Third World Congress brought the “Theses” into question and in fact superseded them. Thus, they saw in the world view of Pabloism the theoretical basis for jettisoning a revolutionary perspective in this country.
At first the party majority attempted to answer this attack on the very fundamentals of the program of our party by affirming support for both the “Theses” and the Third World Congress decisions. Thus, they seemed to hold that the Third World Congress decisions held for the rest of the world while the “Theses” held for the U.S. This was an untenable position politically, for the “Theses” themselves theoretically destroy any concept of “American exceptionalism,” making it clear that the laws of world capitalist development hold sway here too. Thus, if the “Theses” apply to the U.S. they must also hold for other advanced capitalist countries, and the same holds for the Third World Congress decisions. This theoretical bind was finally resolved when the party majority decided to carry through a political struggle against Pabloism on a world scale in order to maintain its domestic revolutionary perspective.
Today again we face a situation where a world revolutionary perspective is being challenged—this time by the party majority itself. It is our strong conviction that the party cannot maintain a revolutionary perspective in this country while at the same time slighting a world revolutionary perspective. This contradiction between a domestic and an international perspective will in time be resolved. For the sake of the world revolutionary movement, it must be resolved by projecting the revolutionary orientation of the “Theses” on an international scale rather than by putting the “Theses” on the shelf and allowing an accommodationist spirit to penetrate our work in this country as well.
So far the party maintains its revolutionary perspective for this country. However, there is much confusion in the party as to exactly where we are going, and at times it seems as if the party is drifting from campaign to campaign not fully in command of its own political course. We must at all times realize that we seek to become the vanguard of the American working class. This means that all our work must be related to the central task of developing roots in the trade union movement and in the Negro movement. This is not simply a matter of winning recruits here or there; rather it is the development of the cadre itself as leaders of the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class and against its own false leaders.
Some in the party attempt to counterpose hollow “party building” to this essential task of building the party by developing its roots in the class. These people tended to view our regroupment or Cuba defense work as a substitute for rather than as an auxiliary to our central tasks. We do not claim that these tendencies to drift from a revolutionary perspective in this country have become dominant in the party. But we do feel strongly that complacency about our party and its perspectives would be very harmful at this time.
Where We Stand
In sum, we believe that the failure of the SWP leadership to apply and develop the theory and method of Marxism has resulted in a dangerous drift from a revolutionary world perspective. The adoption in practice of the empiricist and objectivist approach of the Pabloites, the minimization of the critical importance of the creation of a new Marxist proletarian leadership in all countries, the consistent underplaying of the counterrevolutionary role and potential of Stalinism, the powerful tendencies toward accommodation to non-proletarian leaderships particularly in the colonial revolution—these pose, if not countered, a serious threat to the future development of the SWP itself.
What do we counterpose to this drift?
(l) We look to the working class and only the working class as the revolutionary force in modern society.
(2) We consider the creation of revolutionary Marxist parties, that is, Trotskyist parties, as essential to the victory of socialism in every country of the world.
(3) We call for the reviving of the traditional Trotskyist emphasis on workers democracy as an essential part of our program and propaganda.
(4) We hold that Stalinism is counter-revolutionary in essence, that it is the deadly enemy of revolution, that it still remains the major threat within the working-class camp to the success of the world revolution,
(5) For these reasons we call for full support to the general line of the International Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
(6) We call for a political struggle against Pabloism internationally and Pabloite ideas and methodology within our own ranks, recognizing in Pabloism a centrist disease which counsels liquidationism to our world cadres.
(7) We favor the reunification of the Fourth International on the political basis of a reaffirmation of the fundamentals of Trotskyism and the application of these fundamentals to the current world situation. We call for support to any step which furthers the international discussion process, for this brings us closer to our goal of a healthy, strengthened international movement capable of expanding into a powerful world force.
(8) We call for a return to true internationalism, in the spirit of which our party was built. We must fully participate in the discussion process now going on within our world movement; we must give full support to the International Committee and its struggle to rebuild our scattered world forces. We must realize that we can build an effective party in the United States only by playing an important political role in the development of our world movement.
(9) We must continue to educate the entire membership in the spirit of the fundamental principles laid down in the “Theses on the American Revolution.” We hold that those fundamentals are as valid today as they were in 1946, and they were in 1952. We hold that those fundamentals are internationalist to the core.
(10) Finally, we regard the SWP with the YSA, in the political sense, as the American section of our world party. In our party are to be found the most principled and developed Marxists in our country and the embodiment of the rich experiences of our 30 year battle for Leninism and Trotskyism. In presenting our views to the party on these critical issues we are acting in the most fundamental interests of the party and the world revolutionary movement. This document, taken with the IC International Resolution, expresses the essentials of the political outlook to which our party must return.
We approach our party in the spirit of the “Theses on the American Revolution” which concludes as follows:
“The revolutionary vanguard party, destined to lead this tumultuous revolutionary movement in the U.S., does not have to be created. It already exists, and its name is the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY. It is the sole legitimate heir and continuator of pioneer American Communism and the revolutionary movements of the American workers from which it sprang. Its nucleus has already taken shape in three decades of unremitting work and struggle against the stream. Its program has been hammered out in ideological battles and successfully defended against every kind of revisionist assault upon it. The fundamental core of a professional leadership has been assembled and trained in the irreconcilable spirit of the combat party of the revolution.
“The task of the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY consists simply in this: To remain true to its program and banner; to render it more precise with each new development and apply it correctly in the class struggle; and to expand and grow with the growth of the revolutionary mass movement, always aspiring to lead it to victory in the struggle for political power.”
Submitted by:
Joyce Cowley (San Francisco)
J. Doyle (Philadelphia)
Albert Philips (Detroit)*
Ray Gale (San Francisco)
Margaret Gates (Philadelphia)
Ed Lee (Berkeley-Oakland)
Shane Mage (New York)
Jim Petroski (Berkeley-Oakland)
Liegh Ray (San Francisco)
Jim Robertson (New York)
Geoffrey White (Berkeley-Oakland)
Tim Wohlforth (New York)
*Differences in sociological evaluation aside, I want to indicate support for the general thrust of this statement and of its political conclusions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)