From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The SWP—A Strangled Party (1986)

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than 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. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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The SWP—A Strangled Party
from Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986

Written: 1986
Source: Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.


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See Also: “Memories of a 1960s Oppositionist” and “Memories of a 1970s Oppositionist”


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The American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) decisively shed the formal ideological connection to its once revolutionary past when National Secretary Jack Barnes explicitly denounced the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution in a speech at the convention of the party’s youth organization on 31 December 1982. In the months preceding and following this speech, Barnes and his gang of fellow epigones ruthlessly purged the SWP of all opponents of the new line, including virtually every remaining long-time member of the party (see “Barnes-town, U.S.A.,” Workers Vanguard No. 320, 31 December 1982). The expelled oppositionists eventually constituted themselves into three separate organizations—Socialist Action (SA), Socialist Unity (SU) and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT)—with the older cadre tending to group around the FIT.

In February 1986 the FIT and SU (which latter has since merged with some Shachtmanite remnants to form a new reformist outfit dubbed “Solidarity”) co-published the pamphlet, “Don’t Strangle the Party.” The pamphlet contains three letters and a speech by SWP founding leader James P. Cannon, all from his last years, plus an introduction by FIT leader George Breitman. Breitman’s introduction purports to show, among other things, that the SWP’s organizational practice remained unchanged from the founding of American Trotskyism in 1928 until far past Cannon’s death in 1974—until Jack Barnes and his friends suddenly changed the rules in 1980.

During our preparation of this review of the FIT/SU pamphlet, we were saddened to learn of the death of George Breitman on April 19. In bringing out Cannon’s last known thoughts, feelings and opinions on a question with which he was pre-eminently familiar—the prerequisites for building a revolutionary Marxist party—comrade Breitman performed another valuable service for the Marxist movement.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Yet Breitman’s view of the Barnes clique as a sudden aberration in a party with an otherwise unbroken revolutionary continuity is flat out wrong: the SWP is today a fundamentally reformist party and the roots of its degeneration go back much further than Breitman could admit or understand. The SWP opted for class collaborationism over class struggle 20 years ago when it subordinated a revolutionary program in order to build a popular-frontist coalition against the Vietnam War. The party’s departure from erstwhile working-class politics began around 1960, using the Cuban Revolution as a springboard.

Cold War Stagnation
The rapid degeneration of the once revolutionary SWP, going through centrism into reformism, necessarily had an evolution. The party had endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the postwar McCarthy era. Concomitant with the emergence of the U.S. as the pre-eminent capitalist world power, the SWP recruited a substantial layer of proletarian militants, including many black workers, and then lost the bulk of them with the onset of the witchhunt. In the 1950s, the aging SWP cadre, seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of world imperialism, no doubt thought life was passing them by, as did the Cochranite wing which split from the party in 1953. The SWP correctly adopted a perspective of regroupment following the crisis in the Stalinist movement (the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations) and achieved some gains. But a tendency to “get rich quick” schemes led to opportunist bulges. In early 1957 the party adopted a fully principled and comprehensive 12-point program for regroupment, but this program remained a dead letter. Failing to find elements moving to the left out of the Communist Party (CP), the SWP briefly flirted with the rightward-moving Gatesite wing of the CP and then courted the National Guardian and the New York remnants of the Progressive Party with a “United Socialist Ticket” in the 1958 elections.

The SWP in the postwar period no longer understood the world very well. As the Second World War approached, Trotsky had understood the urgency of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. He correctly foresaw that world war would bring social convulsions and the possibility for proletarian revolutions, as the first inter-imperialist war had led to the Russian October. In 1938 the Trotskyists founded the Fourth International and Trotsky sought to gear its nascent sections up for the challenge. Trotsky predicted that successful proletarian revolutions against capitalism would also sweep away Stalinism, itself a product of a global stalemate between the isolated Soviet Union and world imperialism after the defeat, particularly in Germany, of the revolutionary wave.

However, the mainly tiny sections of the FI were in effect militarily defeated. Under conditions of great repression, the groups fragmented to carry out diverging policies, some of them quite heroic. Insulated in the U.S. from the carnage in Europe and the colonial countries, the SWP emerged from the war with its cadre intact. But internationally, virtually all the young and older cadres were killed by war and by fascist and Stalinist repression. Those would-be Trotskyists who after the war became the impressionistic leadership of the decimated FI were mainly youth who had learned their “Trotskyism” from books. Trotsky, himself murdered, did not live to see the restabilization of capitalism in Western Europe—with the active complicity of the Stalinist and other reformist parties whose participation in “national” governments was required to restabilize bourgeois rule in Italy and Greece and, to a lesser extent, in France and even Britain.

In exchange, in the countries of Eastern Europe where the smashing of the Nazi occupation by the Soviet Red Army had left rather a vacuum of power, the Russians retained control; a series of deformed workers states ensued by social transformations from the top down. Something different occurred in Yugoslavia when Tito’s guerrilla bands (and later Mao’s peasant army in China) brought about a deformed social revolution. In Yugoslavia and China, national Stalinist formations made revolutions in the interests of their own survival despite Moscow’s counterrevolutionary line. In the absence of the proletariat in its own right as a contender for power, these revolutions have confirmed in the negative the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, in that they were unable to establish any “middle” course or petty-bourgeois state—deformed workers states were consolidated.

In the postwar period, the SWP retreated into an increasingly formal “orthodoxy.” They had a hard time for a couple of years trying to figure out how the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe had been created. The SWP and FI were disoriented by Tito’s revolution, the first break in the formerly apparently monolithic Stalinist “camp”—the American party was quick to hail the Titoists as “left centrists.” On the other hand the SWP took until 1955 to categorize Mao’s China as a deformed workers state. That the party made opposite, symmetrical errors over these two qualitatively identical revolutions was a telling measure of its disorientation.

Then in 1959 Cannon himself was led into a brief flirtation with the Chinese regime which he had labeled Stalinist four years earlier. Cannon, along with several other Los Angeles National Committee (NC) members including Arne Swabeck, submitted resolutions on the question of the Chinese peasant communes in opposition to the Political Committee (PC) majority of Farrell Dobbs and Murry Weiss. The Los Angeles resolutions came but a hair’s breadth from declaring workers democracy to be alive and well in China. Cannon pulled back and Swabeck’s position was smashed at a subsequent NC plenum. In this case, and in general, restorative forces (usually seen as Cannon) operated and the party program was kept within nominally orthodox limits. But over Cuba this restorative “spring” snapped.

In the case of both China and Yugoslavia the SWP eventually came to the correct position that the states which issued out of the revolutions were structurally identical to the end-product of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, where workers democracy had been usurped by a bureaucratic political counterrevolution. Trotskyists fight for the program of political revolution against the nationalistic bureaucratic caste. This was a program which Trotsky had laid out as necessary to open the road to socialist development in the case of the degenerated USSR:

“In any case, the bureaucracy can be removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as always, there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack. To prepare this and stand at the head of the masses in a favorable historic situation—that is the task of the Soviet section of the Fourth International

“The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms

“It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings—palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways—will be crowded out in favor of workers’ dwellings. ‘Bourgeois norms of distribution’ will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of decorations will go into the melting pot. The youth will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains. And, finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism.”

—Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936

Cuba—The Acid Test
By 1960 the SWP was looking for something, and they found it in Cuba. Dropping the qualitative distinction between a deformed workers state and a healthy workers state, the SWP dropped its program on the need for a Trotskyist party leading the working class, in response to the Cuban Revolution, where a petty-bourgeois guerrilla formation overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista regime and nationalized large sections of the economy under imperialist pressure. The SWP took the fact that a social revolution had occurred in Cuba to mean that the Cuban leadership was on a par with that of the Bolshevik Revolution. Morris Stein spoke for a whole layer of the SWP when he proclaimed, at the 1961 convention, that the Cuban Revolution was the greatest thing since the Russian October. Hooray, they said, we’ve lived to see it. However much the FIT wants to deny it, they were part of an SWP which began to abandon Trotskyism in 1960, two decades before Barnes and his gang dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

In January 1961 the SWP NC adopted Joseph Hansen’s “Theses on the Cuban Revolution” which declared that Cuba had “entered the transitional phase of a workers state, although one lacking as yet the forms of democratic proletarian rule.” These theses were adopted following the explicit objections made in the document, “The Cuban Revolution and Marxist Theory,” which three leaders of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA)—Shane Mage, Jim Robertson and Tim Wohlforth—had submitted in August 1960 to oppose the party’s tendency to characterize Cuba as a “workers state.” It was at this plenum that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT—forerunner of the Spartacist League) was formed out of the opposition of Mage, Robertson and Wohlforth to the SWP’s liquidationism over Cuba.

The RT’s resolution, “The Cuban Revolution,” submitted to the 1961 YSA Convention, was in sharp counterposition to the SWP majority not only in its analysis of the emerging deformed workers state in Cuba, and the necessity to oppose the growing bureaucratism, but fundamentally on the role of Trotskyists:

“The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.”

The minority’s warning applied no less to the SWP itself. In abandoning the fight for a revolutionary Trotskyist party in Cuba, the SWP was well down the road to its own liquidation as a revolutionary instrument: a party whose leadership looked to alien class forces “only 90 miles away” didn’t have a very good prognosis.

The SWP Adopts Breitman’s Black Nationalism
Lenin described centrists as “revolutionaries in word and reformists in deed”—a good capsule description of the SWP in the early 1960s. The SWP’s rightward-moving centrism expressed itself not just over Cuba, but domestically as well. The Southern civil rights movement offered an excellent opportunity for the SWP to break out of isolation and intersect a new generation of plebeian black militants. Since 1955 there had been an ongoing discussion in the SWP on orientation to the civil rights movement. The two poles of the discussion were George Breitman, who advocated the demand of “self-determination” for the black masses, and Richard Kirk (Dick Fraser) who put forward a program of revolutionary integrationism. Throughout the 1950s the party continued to intervene in the struggle against black oppression with an integrationist perspective. Though the 1957 convention resolution, “The Class Struggle Road to Negro Equality,” envisioned support to separatist demands “if they should reflect the mass will,” it was adopted by the convention with significant reservations expressed on this question. But by 1963 the SWP leadership was ready to fully embrace Breitman’s long-standing support to black nationalism, with the concomitant policy of abstention from the civil rights struggle—they were ready to become sideline cheerleaders for black radicals who would supposedly acquire revolutionary consciousness without the intervention of a revolutionary party. Richard Kirk was in fullblown opposition to the SWP leadership by this time, and his tendency, which otherwise advocated a weird brand of sectoralist politics, submitted a resolution to the 1963 convention upholding the program of revolutionary integrationism. The RT supported the Kirk resolution with the following statement:

“I. Our support to the basic line of the 1963 Kirk-Kaye resolution, ‘Revolutionary Integration,’ is centered upon the following proposition:

“The Negro people are not a nation; rather they are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. From this condition the consequence has come that the Negro struggle for freedom has had, historically, the aim of integration into an equalitarian society.

“II. Our minority is most concerned with the political conclusions stemming from the theoretical failures of the P.C.’s draft, ‘Freedom Now.’ This concern found expression in the recent individual discussion article, ‘For Black Trotskyism.’ The systematic abstentionism and the accompanying attitude of acquiescence which accepts as inevitable that ‘ours is a white party,’ are most profound threats to the revolutionary capacity of the party on the American scene.”

The RT’s one-page amendment to the perspectives document at the 1963 convention was dismissed by the SWP leadership as ridiculous and wildly adventuristic because it demanded the party initiate modest trade-union work in a few carefully chosen places and seek some involvement in the mass civil rights struggles in the South:

“As regards the South today, we are witnessing from afar a great mass struggle for equality. Our separation from this arena is intolerable. The party should be prepared to expend significant material resources in overcoming our isolation from Southern struggles. In helping to build a revolutionary movement in the South, our forces should work directly with and through the developing left-wing formations in the movement there. A successful outcome to our action would lead to an historic breakthrough for the Trotskyist movement. Expressed organizationally, it would mean the creation of several party branches in the South for the first time—for example, in Atlanta, Birmingham or New Orleans.”

Kirk had lost favor with the SWP leadership when he fought against the party’s adoption in 1955, under Breitman’s urging, of the slogan, “Federal Troops to Mississippi.” Not only did this slogan pose a fundamental revision of the Marxist understanding of the nature of the bourgeois state, but it prompted the party to support Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops into Little Rock in 1957—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. The policy of painting U.S. imperialist troops as reliable defenders of black people had engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, but by 1964 the party adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” And this wasn’t the only sign that in the SWP’s mind the bourgeois state was no longer an instrument of class oppression. Following the November 1963 Kennedy assassination, SWP party administrator Farrell Dobbs sent a sniveling telegram of condolence to the widow of the imperialist chief who ordered the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba!

Despite the SWP’s deepening reformist practice, the party remained committed to some kind of formal Trotskyism on paper. The leadership had the able services of Joseph Hansen to cover over the deviations with numerous caveats and paragraphs of ritual orthodoxy. Hansen was careful—you had to read between the lines to see the real line. This was important because it allowed the older cadre to carry out their opportunist appetites while still maintaining—often sincerely—the formal adherence to the revolutionary principles of their youth.

The SWP didn’t have to look hard to find cothinkers for their revisionism on Cuba: they entered into negotiations to reunify with the International Secretariat (IS), which was led by one Michel Pablo. By 1951 Pablo, a leader of the devastated Fourth International (FI), had reacted to the postwar overturns of capitalism in Eastern Europe by claiming that the imminence of World War III would “force” the Stalinist parties to play a generally revolutionary role. Pablo’s line demanded liquidationist conclusions: Trotskyist nuclei should dissolve into the Stalinist parties and become left pressure groups. This perspective of “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties led to the destruction of the FI.

From afar and in the face of an escalating witchhunt which hindered full international collaboration (it was a U.S. felony, for example, for an American Communist or ex-Communist to apply for a passport), Cannon had originally acquiesced to Pablo’s blatant, and in some cases suicidal, revisionism. Only when the Cochran-Clarke faction emerged in support of Pablo in the U.S. did Cannon take up the fight. Yet Cannon had great difficulty in getting the central SWP cadre to go along with him against Cochran-Clarke. The New York leadership of Dobbs, Kerry, Hansen and Morris Stein only belatedly came over to Cannon and Los Angeles SWP leader Murry Weiss, and the internal disputes in the SWP of the mid-1950s reflected the reality of this heavily nuanced bloc.

Cannon’s SWP did eventually raise the banner of orthodox Trotskyism, aligning itself with the former majority of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste and with Gerry Healy’s faction in the fragmented British Trotskyist movement to form the “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC). But in the case of the Cuban Revolution the SWP adopted the fundamental premise of Pabloism and opted for looking toward some other, non-Leninist, non-proletarian force, to make the revolution. The SWP’s line converged with that of Pablo. The RT opposed reunification and was in general political agreement with the IC majority led by Gerry Healy, who at that time espoused at least a literary defense of orthodox Trotskyism (see especially the 1961 document “The World Prospect for Socialism” of Healy’s Socialist Labour League). The SWP voted for reunification with the Pabloites in 1963, giving birth to the United Secretariat (USec) which explicitly espoused a petty-bourgeois, guerrilla “road to socialism” in the colonial countries. The RT’s resolution on the world movement, “Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International,” submitted to the SWP’s 1963 convention, upheld the Leninist road:

“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerrilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”

The Purge of the RT
The RT’s fight against the SWP leadership’s precipitous surrender of a working-class perspective occurred at a time when the SWP was seething with internal oppositions. We have already mentioned the Kirk-Kaye tendency, but there were others, totaling perhaps a third of the SWP’s membership. Some were dissident branches, others were national tendencies but they all had one thing in common: in a few years they would find themselves outside of the SWP. In the early 1960s it certainly wasn’t excluded in advance that the RT could win over a chunk of the cadre. Despite the leadership’s right-centrism, the SWP had not lost all of its revolutionary juices. At the same time, the RT had few illusions on how long they would be allowed to carry out the fight inside the party. The tired, aging Dobbs was growing increasingly irritable at the presence of critics, and he had the majority.

The RT was dealt a real blow when the miserable Tim Wohlforth, acting as Gerry Healy’s tool, provoked an unprincipled split in the tendency in 1962. Evidently the despicable Healy thought he still had a chance to keep the SWP in the IC, so he ordered the RT majority to recant their view that the SWP had become centrist. (Healy demanded the recantation despite his own July 1962 polemic against the SWP, “Trotskyism Betrayed.”) When the majority of the RT refused, Wohlforth and his partner Philips split from the RT. This was a crime on two counts: it not only demoralized and drove away some tendency supporters, it also made the RT look like a bunch of unserious, juvenile, professional factionalists in the eyes of many SWP members.

Wohlforth’s next service to Dobbs was to falsely accuse the RT of having a “split perspective” by selectively quoting from intra-tendency discussion drafts in a document submitted to the SWP internal bulletin. Dobbs, annoyed by the RT’s having managed to elect two delegates to the 1963 convention, found Wohlforth’s frame-up useful as a pretext. After a farcical Control Commission “investigation”—which only one elected member of the Control Commission, a hard majorityite, participated in—the outcome was hardly in doubt. In December 1963, five leaders of the RT were expelled for having a “hostile and disloyal attitude” toward the SWP. Dobbs summed up the majority’s own attitude in his arrogant declaration to the New York branch that “the majority is the party.”

Dobbs’ purge of the RT had been preceded by numerous other organizational abuses—the bureaucratic removal of the YSA leadership, provocative factional raids into minority tendency meetings, and the like, all documented in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 4, Parts I and II. The RT consciously and deliberately abided by the then-existing SWP organizational rules, forcing Dobbs to change the statutes in order to justify his purge. Thus our abiding by the formal organizational rules pushed the Dobbsite majority to bring the rules into line with the evolving new rightward-moving political practices.

The 1965 Organizational Resolution
According to Breitman’s introduction, “the PC decided to submit a resolution on organizational principles to the 1965 convention....” But the PC didn’t just “decide” out of the blue: the National Committee authorized the drafting of this resolution in the same motion which expelled the leading RTers. The resolution (“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”) was discussed and voted by the 1965 convention on the same agenda point which denied the expelled RT members even the right to appeal their expulsion. Fully one-third of the content of the 1965 organizational resolution is taken up with an explicit ex post facto justification of the RT’s expulsion. Breitman ignores these overwhelming facts. The SWP leadership decided to codify its bureaucratic treatment of the RT: this is what organizationally consummated the strangling of the party.

Stripped of the jumbles of paragraphs taken here and there from past SWP organizational resolutions, Dobbs’ document amounted to the destruction of the rights of any minority. Opposition to the majority line was equated with “disloyalty” to the party. In essence, the 1965 rules boil down to the following syllogism: (1) factions are permitted in the SWP; (2) factionalists are disloyal people; (3) disloyal people are expelled from the SWP. Needless to say, this document was to prove quite useful to Dobbs’ successors.

A party dedicated to proletarian revolution must demand discipline in action from its members as well as provide a fully democratic internal life. This allows cohesiveness while insuring that the organization’s line and tactics can be adjusted, in the light of past experience, to new situations. But when the party abandons a revolutionary program—as the SWP did around 1960—then the coupling between the two components of democratic centralism changes as well. When Dobbs purged the RT, it meant the eclipse of internal democracy by unbridled centralism. Indeed, the SWP after 1965 had tighter rules than the Bolsheviks during the Civil War.

That certainly wasn’t the historic norm—before 1963 a disciplined minority such as the RT could easily have been tolerated and in fact become part of a new generation of party leadership. The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. had a long experience with internal oppositions, uneven to be sure, but nothing like the later monolithic conception of Dobbs. The “textbook” case was the 1939-1940 fight with the Shachtmanites, who wanted to abandon the military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. This was a fight on fundamental principles; but despite the positions of the minority, Cannon did not move organizationally until the political issues were fully brought out and the minority had de facto split. At other times the leadership had been hard, as in 1935 with the uncontrollable Oehlerites who issued their own bulletin and refused to stop fighting again after the party had made its decision to enter the Socialist Party’s emerging left wing. In the mid-1940s on the other hand, in the case of the Goldman-Morrow group, the SWP leadership was very soft. Morrow was given a second chance to mend his ways even after he was caught openly giving verbal reports of SWP PC meetings to the Shachtmanites at a time when they were a significant opponent organization to the SWP.

Party case law, and its codification into resolutions, developed in the course of struggle, with the ups and downs of a living revolutionary movement. But the bottom line was that at each juncture, the party sought revolutionary solutions to the disputes—i.e., it stuck to its program. Centrally, it saw its task as constructing the revolutionary vanguard in the light of essential international and domestic experience. In that regard Cannon, as he points out repeatedly in the letters reprinted in “Don’t Strangle the Party,” had a great advantage—he was able to directly benefit from the example of the Bolshevik Revolution and from the internationalism of the Comintern in Lenin’s time, as well as his later collaboration with Trotsky.

The material assembled in “Don’t Strangle the Party” helps to round out Cannon’s literary legacy and it sheds some light on what has been a very shadowy matter—friction in the preceding period between Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs took over the day-to-day administration of the SWP when Cannon moved to Los Angeles in 1952. Cannon was rumored to be unhappy with the SWP’s trajectory under Dobbs, who moved only very late to join the fight against the Pabloite revisionism of Cochran-Clarke. In the following period Cannon reportedly gave backhanded support to the grouping around Murry Weiss as against Dobbs and Tom Kerry. But by 1965, by Breitman’s account, Cannon didn’t even bother to raise his objections to the important, Dobbs-authored organizational resolution; by 1968 he had stopped writing to the party center at all.

Breitman buttresses his argument that the 1965 resolution meant no fundamental change in party democracy chiefly by what Cannon didn’t say on the subject. But Cannon in his later years of semi-retirement got pretty shaky politically (e.g., his early support for Swabeck on China) and in 1965 he was 75 years old. This dimension has to be taken into account when discussing a resolution to which, by Breitman’s own account, Cannon basically only acquiesced. While Cannon stood by, objecting once in a while as these letters show, the party he had led from its founding degenerated into a reformist, and correspondingly bureaucratic, shell.

Into the Abyss
In 1965, the rising ferment over the escalating U.S. imperialist military involvement in Vietnam presented the SWP leadership with the “mass movement” which would provide a full outlet for their accumulated reformist appetites. The SWP’s definitive overt leap from centrism to reformism came around the November 1965 antiwar conference in Washington, D.C., where the SWP attempted an (unsuccessful) organizational grab. In doing so, the SWP threw overboard the last remnants of class-struggle opposition to the war in favor of the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop the imperialist intervention in Vietnam. Richard Kirk, then still a member of the SWP NC, condemned the SWP’s wretched role at the November conference in a letter to the PC dated 13 December 1965:

“Here the party and youth carried on an unprincipled, disruptive and politically reformist struggle against the entire left wing of the antiwar movement. They disrupted the conference around tertiary organizational demands and ended in isolation and national disgrace. They established an indelible and deserved record for political conservatism and dead-end factionalism.”

Kirk had copies of his letter sent to his supporters on and off the NC, as well as to several majority supporters, including Larry Trainor. For this violation of “committee discipline” (which Cannon called a “non-existent law”) Kirk was censured by the February 1966 NC plenum. Breitman says in his preface that the “whole question” of discipline was “dropped” at this plenum. But Kirk’s criticisms, unlike Swabeck’s, cut too close to the SWP’s actual reformist practice. After the censure of Kirk the SWP leadership opened up an “investigation” of the entire Kirk-Kaye tendency, sending the bully Asher Harer to Seattle where the Fraserites had the majority. This action precipitated the resignation of the entire tendency.

It is clear that Dobbs felt much earlier that taking political disputes outside the NC was a violation of “normal party procedures” warranting disciplinary action. In early 1962—four years before Cannon opposed disciplining Arne Swabeck—Dobbs went after Tim Wohlforth for violating this norm. This was before Wohlforth split the RT, and he was the only minorityite on the Political Committee. When the RT submitted a document signed by Wohlforth and another member of the NC, plus ten other well-known comrades, Wohlforth was treated to a real browbeating by Dobbs, as recorded in the minutes of the 11 April 1962 PC meeting.

The whole notion of “committee discipline” is hardly new, as Cannon notes in his 8 February 1966 letter. In the early American CP it was mostly honored in the breach. But breach of such a norm cannot become the occasion for disciplinary action in a revolutionary party, which must allow for free political discourse between its leading members and the rank and file if the party convention is to make an informed decision on the disputed issues. We note that even Stalin’s guilt-ridden defense in Pravda did not invoke “committee discipline” against the Central Committee members who signed the Left Opposition’s “Platform of the 46” in October 1923.

The SWP’s qualitative descent into reformism occurred alongside the emergence of a new leadership configuration. Cannon was “promoted” to advisory status in 1965, and his agent Carl Feingold was eliminated forthwith. The Dobbs-Kerry leadership which had been administering the party since 1952 didn’t last much longer—they were old and tired. The intermediate layer—40-year-olds like Nat Weinstein, Ed Shaw and Clifton DeBerry—were mediocre at very best. And the SWP had purged their layer of revolutionary-minded youth when they booted out the RT. So they were pretty much stuck with Barnes, Barry Sheppard, Doug and Linda Jenness, Larry Seigle, Mary-Alice Waters, Peter Camejo, et al. These were political animals of quite another sort—unlike even the lackluster 40-year-olds who at least had some experience with the old SWP and its trade-union work, the Barnesites had no organic connection to the party’s revolutionary past. They had come to the SWP during the period of its centrist degeneration and were recruited from the petty-bourgeois student milieu. Further, their first taste of power came during the RT fight when Dobbs seized control of the YSA, and Barnes, Sheppard and Camejo were dropped into the youth leadership. The Barnes clique certainly didn’t learn Trotskyist politics—but Dobbs did give them the tools to “deal” with oppositionists.

The Barnesite Conspiracy
Early on the Barnesites had a sense of us vs. them regarding the older SWP cadre who retained at least a sentimental attachment to Trotskyism, albeit diluted. Joseph Hansen was the quintessential old-timer—he had been Trotsky’s personal secretary from 1937-1940 and the living link between Cannon and Trotsky. An able polemicist, Hansen was the SWP’s principal international spokesman during and after the 1963 reunification with the Pabloites (in this role he had earned the psychotic enmity of Gerry Healy who later waged an international slander campaign against Hansen as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky and an agent of the GPU, FBI, etc.). Hansen had a real base of support among the cadre he had trained on the staff of the SWP’s journal, Intercontinental Press. So Barnes & Co. simply eased the older cadre out of power by shunting them into “advisory” status on the party’s leading committees. By the mid-1970s, the Barnesites had secured control and the advisory bodies were dissolved. Later, the Barnesites would gloat over how easily and adroitly they eased out the old-timers. Mary-Alice Waters in a May 1985 report to the SWP NC enthused:

“Because of the strengths of the party leadership, we made it through the decade of the 1970s and into the 1980s before any section of older cadres tried to claim the mantle of age to justify refusal to be disciplined.... The split that came to a head in 1982-83 was, in part, a split we had prevented year after year throughout the 1970s as we made the transition.... When some individuals who left the party last year tried to turn it into an ‘old timers’ revolt, it was too late

—SWP Information Bulletin No. 2, June 1985, quoted in FIT’s Bulletin in Defense of Marxism No. 22, September 1985

Hansen’s death in early 1979 was very convenient for the Barnes clique: it rid them of a formidable potential internal opponent at a time when their leadership was more than a little vulnerable to attack. Party membership was on the wane—the antiwar movement from which the SWP had recruited significantly had long since petered out. Barnes’ forays into other areas had been a disaster. “Consistent feminism” hadn’t led to socialism—instead the SWP experienced the hardly unforeseeable redbaiting of its fraction in the bourgeois-feminist National Organization for Women. The much-vaunted “turn” to industry fared no better—it recruited next to no workers while simultaneously driving out many of the petty-bourgeois recruits from the 1960s and 1970s.

The Barnesite epigones moved into high gear in 1980: they were the “secret factionalists” and they certainly were part of a conspiracy. The FIT is right on that score. The inside story of the SWP in the early 1980s is certainly one of corridor gossip, the lining up of traitors, the marking of those who didn’t sneer at Trotsky in private. The Barnes gang engaged in provocations designed to push the old cadre into opposition—Doug Jenness’ Militant articles attacking Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution are an example. When Breitman, Steve Bloom, Frank Lovell, Nat Weinstein and Lynn Henderson timidly voiced their objections, Barnes & Co. framed them up and blackjacked them with the 1965 organizational rules—for which incidentally Breitman, Lovell and Weinstein had all voted. Those now grouped in the FIT, SU and SA were the victims of a calculated purge—it is very difficult to believe that the enormous, fine-print “List of Splitters” in the January 1984 Party Organizer hadn’t been drawn up long, long before. In classic Stalinist fashion, Barnes first purged, then submitted the planned line change to the remaining faithful hand-raisers.

The Two-Tier Conception of Party Membership
After reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” one would believe that in the period after Swabeck’s expulsion the SWP was virtually opposition free—until the Barnes gang suddenly decided to junk Trotskyism in 1980. But this is far from the case. The RT expulsion had not rid the SWP of all leftist elements and at least some of the recruits gained after 1965 believed that the SWP had something to do with revolutionary socialism.

In the early 1970s a myriad of often overlapping oppositions arose in the SWP—the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT), the Leninist Faction (LF), the Communist Tendency, the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (RIT), the Internationalist Tendency (IT)—and none of them got the kid-gloves treatment reserved for old-time NCers like Arne Swabeck (see “Memories of a 1970s SWP Oppositionist,” page 30). All of these oppositions consisted for the most part of relatively newer members and they were viewed as unruly kids who were disloyal and didn’t belong in the party anyway.

Breitman and the FIT do not see the systematic brutalization of every SWP opposition after 1963. Implicit in both Cannon’s material and the Breitman introduction is the actual two-tier conception of party membership which operated in the SWP from 1960 to 1980. There was, in fact, one set of rules for those people with standing—those who had been around and on the NC for a while—and quite another set for the people who hadn’t. Among the mass of oppositions in the 1963 SWP the RT was singled out for expulsion because its fight for the historic revolutionary program of the SWP was an extreme embarrassment to Dobbs.

In 1974 the SWP expelled 115 members of the Internationalist Tendency from the party and the YSA— the largest “split” in the SWP since 1953. At the time, the SWP was embroiled in a desultory faction fight with the Mandel-led tendency in the USec. One of the hot issues was guerrilla warfare, one of the points of unity in 1963. The SWP had abandoned its brief pro-guerrilla enthusing in favor of abject social-democratic reformism, but Mandel remained a vicarious “guerrilla,” and the IT supported him. The United States government, in the form of the House Internal Security Subcommittee, targeted Mandel’s USec and the IT in particular as “terrorists.” To the Barnesites this was the kiss of death for the IT. The SWP’s “Watersuit” against the U.S. imperialist spy agencies’ decades-long surveillance of the SWP was then under way and the last thing Barnes wanted was a clot inside the SWP tainted with the suggestion of “terrorism.” So the IT was declared to be a “separate rival party” by PC diktat and summarily expelled—on the Fourth of July 1974! The SWP’s own internal bulletins on the purge (including a list of ITers’ pseudonyms) showed up in court as the showpiece of the SWP’s attempt to demonstrate its “respectability” before the bourgeoisie. The significance of this patriotic purge was not lost on the federal judge:

“There was never anything, in my view, beyond the most tenuous suggestion of a possible implication of violence in the United States. In view of the ouster of the minority faction, I believe that tenuous suggestion has been basically eliminated.”

The IT was offered up to the government by Barnes & Co. on the specious hope that the federal court would recognize the SWP’s right to practice its weird brand of reformism without the interference, infiltration and intrusion of the FBI. Years later the judge has yet to announce his verdict, but the verdict of history is clear: Barnes’ SWP is a party which the U.S. capitalist class has truly no reason to fear.

In the “Watersuit” trial, the SWP underscored its vindictive hatred for the remnants of the leftist IT when, in 1981, it slandered ex-ITer Hedda Garza as a government fink, based on an FBI claim that Garza had met privately with a government attorney. The SWP aggressively retailed this disgraceful lie in the Militant and tried to silence the few who protested inside the SWP by making the ludicrous claim that “district attorneys don’t lie.” The Spartacist League protested this gratuitous slander of a socialist comrade in our detailed press coverage of the “Watersuit” (see especially “Reformism on Trial,” Workers Vanguard No. 286, 31 July 1981). Our press documented the SWP’s reformist assurances that the party’s legalism was in no way “contravened” by anything Lenin or Trotsky might have written, the suggestions that Nicaraguan pluralism or even American “checks and balances” rather than the Russian Revolution were the SWP’s model, the vicious slander of Garza solely because she used to sometimes hang around with USec leaders. We protested the violation of SWP members’ rights, facilitated by the panicky incompetence of the SWP, which in a touching display of faith in the government handed over party members’ names and international comrades’ pseudonyms, then turned around and in response to demands for financial information claimed the party had destroyed its own financial records. We wrote that the “Watersuit” fully displayed not only the SWP’s quirky reformist politics but the organizational consequences of having driven out of party influence the experienced cadres who, despite the political erosion, would still have known how to competently administer a legal case. The same lack was evident again in the SWP’s initial public non-response to the dangerous Gelfand suit (where a Healyite agent appealed to the government to intervene in the SWP’s internal life to restore him to membership), which the SWP treated like a guilty secret until the SL press exposed the Healyites’ organization-busting gambit and called for anti-sectarian support to the SWP against Gelfand.

Cannon’s 1966 speech refers to the SWP’s “capacity to attract the young” as a sign of its vitality. But from 1963 on, the SWP under Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry (and later under Barnes & Co.) systematically purged those youth who thought they were joining some kind of revolutionary Trotskyist party. The Spartacist League won some of these elements out of the RIT, LF and IT on the basis of the Trotskyist program for which it had fought since its inception as the RT. By 1980 all that was left of the revolutionary SWP was its initials—and those few old-timers whom Barnes expelled when he repudiated Trotskyism.

We wonder whether the concern Cannon expresses in his letter to Reba Hansen about “any possible proposal to weaken the constitutional provision about the absolute right of suspended or expelled members to appeal to the convention” reflected support to SWP PC member George Weissman’s fight to hear the RT’s appeal at the 1965 convention. Weissman’s motion to give the RT members time to present their case was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 32 to 24. In any case the attempt to uphold the RT’s formal rights to appeal in 1965 was a gesture. While every oppositional current in the SWP had opposed the expulsion, the majority of the cadre—including Weissman and Cannon—supported it. Weissman, who wrote a powerful protest against his own expulsion from the SWP, was a member of the FIT at the time of his death last year (see our obituary in Workers Vanguard No. 382, 28 June 1985).

Yet the letters and speech in “Don’t Strangle the Party” carry the clear implication that Cannon didn’t much like where the SWP was going in the mid-1960s. We mentioned earlier the rumored friction between Cannon and Dobbs. We have to say here that Dobbs and Tom Kerry, after groping around, groomed Barnes and his cohorts as their replacements. Breitman says nothing about that. Cannon’s last letters certainly strongly support our contention that the SWP’s renunciation of Trotskyism didn’t just fall from the skies in 1982. We recall that by the 1981 SWP convention Tom Kerry was screaming in impotent rage at Barnes and his crew of hacks. How much did Kerry reflect the views of his former partner, Dobbs? It’s hard to tell. In a democratic party the disputes are all in the internal bulletins. In the bureaucratic post-1963 SWP the real stuff of party internal life happened behind the scenes.

FIT—Blinded by Centrism
After their expulsions, the veteran comrades of the ex-SWP milieu found themselves unceremoniously ejected from the party’s public events and slandered as “disrupters.” Indignant at being deprived of their democratic rights as members of the socialist public, by a party to which many had devoted decades of service, the FIT protested publicly, including claiming that this was the first time in the SWP’s history that people had been excluded from its “public” events because of their political views. Yet the FIT knows different. Indeed, in the mid-70s, FIT leader Frank Lovell had prevented the SWP San Francisco branch from excluding Spartacists from a Militant Forum. Informed that the exclusion of Spartacists was standard SWP policy, Lovell retorted that after all his years of addressing democratically organized public meetings he wasn’t about to start excluding people now. This defense of workers democracy should be a source of pride for Lovell and the FIT, but instead they are constrained to forget it since the incident points clearly to the decisive break in the SWP’s revolutionary continuity having occurred much earlier than the FIT is willing to look. The FIT’s view that Barnes’ party remained the revolutionary SWP until very lately in fact plays into the hands of currents among the ex-SWP oppositionists like Alan Wald, who uses atrocities of Barnes’ party over two decades to buttress his case that Trotskyism itself has failed and should be dumped in favor of regroupments with “state capitalist” formations.

The omissions in Breitman’s introduction are not the result of cynicism or willful disingenuousness. Breitman and the FIT literally can’t see what happened to the SWP because they are blinded by their centrist politics. They long for a return to the SWP of the 1960s and 1970s, when their popular-frontist antiwar work garnered a wave of recruits and Joe Hansen wrote so beautifully, proving that the SWP’s support to Castro was consistent with this or that Comintern resolution. To anyone who at the time doubted the SWP’s attachment to Trotsky, the old-timers could proudly point to the party’s efforts in collecting, editing and publishing Trotsky’s and Cannon’s writings.

Breitman certainly deserves central credit in that effort, the results of which today educationally arm the members of the Spartacist tendency. Yet it was Breitman himself who proposed dropping the SWP’s designation as “Trotskyist” in a letter to the NC dated 6 April 1965:

“On the whole, the label ‘Trotskyist’ is a handicap, not an asset. To new people it gives the impression that we are some kind of cult, creating unnecessary obstacles to reaching them with our program, especially rebellious youth who are suspicious of cults.”

This proposal was a resurrection of one made by Cannon in 1951, but Cannon scrapped it during the Cochran-Clarke fight when the minority came out with the slogan, “Junk the Old Trotskyism.” Breitman was undoubtedly more comfortable with Cannon’s 1951 rightist flinch than with other thoughts of Cannon. Cannon never excluded the possibility that the American workers would bypass a reformist labor party dominated by the conservative trade-union tops and come directly to revolutionary consciousness in the heat of struggle. Such an idea is literally inconceivable to both today’s SWP and the FIT.

The FIT sees the crux of the problem in Barnes’ supposedly “new” orientation to Castroism, beginning in 1979. As we have shown, the SWP’s decisive adaptation to Castro began much earlier than that. But something did happen in 1979—the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. This prompted Barnes to offer the idiotic thought that the SWP could make the big time internationally by cutting a deal with Managua. All that allegedly stood in the way was the old baggage of Trotskyism and its aged centrist supporters still in the SWP. And the Barnesites weren’t part of the “old guard” who tacitly understood, however wrongly, that the 1965 organizational rules wouldn’t be used against them.

Breitman’s failure to associate himself with a revolutionary program left him incapable of effectively combating the Barnesite epigones during his brief internal opposition, or even understanding his subsequent expulsion. His tragic end—kicked out of the party which he had loyally served for close to half a century—is reminiscent of others who, lacking a sufficient program, couldn’t understand what hit them. Leopold Trepper, the heroic Polish Communist who led the Soviet intelligence network in Nazi-occupied Belgium and France during World War II, spoke movingly as one of the many who saw the flame of Bolshevik Revolution smothered by Stalin:

“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”

—The Great Game, 1977

Breitman noted that, in opposing disciplinary action against Swabeck, Cannon may have looked “a little farther ahead than most of the NC members.” Cannon also foretold the possibility that the SWP would not be capable of meeting its revolutionary obligations:

“We know that our party, as at present constituted, is not ordained. We are human, and therefore capable of error and of failure. But if we fail; if we ossify into sectarianism, or degenerate along the lines of opportunism, or succumb to the pressures of our times and let history pass us by—it would simply mean that others, picking up the program and taking hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, would have to create another party of the same type as the SWP.”

—“Concluding Speech at the May Plenum,” 31 May 1953

Cannon clung to the SWP through its degeneration, but the Revolutionary Tendency took hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, based on the heritage of Cannon and the revolutionary SWP. As opposed to the sentimental looking-back, with centrist blinders, of the FIT, we look forward with the confidence that we are the continuators of revolutionary Marxism in the United States, and internationally.



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Memories of a 1960s SWP Oppositionist
While preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Al Nelson, who was a young member of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Comrade Nelson’s letter has been edited for publication.



When I joined the SWP in February 1962 the New York Organizer, Carl Feingold, cautioned me that I had a “major difference” with the SWP (the nature of the Cuban Revolution) and that of course I would not be expected to speak in public or do other work where Cuba was involved. This projected RT supporters as second-class members and implied an inability to abide by discipline. The SWP soon moved to keep known RT supporters in the youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), out of the SWP. When Dave K. was kept out of the SWP, the reason cited was that he was not “active enough.” Jim Robertson, a leader of the RT, was a member of the New York local Executive Committee later in 1962 and he objected to this policy.

When I joined the YSA in the fall of 1961 there was a general policy of social ostracism toward minority supporters that extended to brand-new YSA members, who were lined up against the minority immediately—they were warned to avoid us. The leadership, especially the more factionally-crazed New York YSA leadership, tried as much as possible to prevent RT members from working in public arenas. We were criticized as “free agents” when we took part in pickets or demonstrations without “consultation” with the branch leadership. RT supporter Roger A. was eventually expelled in February 1964 for taking part in picketing the Greek Queen because, in so doing, he “consciously and arrogantly violate[d] party discipline.” Shirley Stoute, a black RT member, was forbidden to work in the civil rights movement in the South in the summer of 1962. She then received a personal invitation from SNCC leader James Forman, which the SWP could not refuse. Shirley and Steve Fox went to the South, followed by Pete Camejo and Ken Schulman specifically to spy on Shirley and report back to New York.

Shirley was eventually told to return to New York for a YSA National Committee (NC) plenum in September 1962. Then she was told that she could not return to the South and was under discipline not to reveal the reasons why to SNCC! She was merely to send for her belongings.

On 28 January 1963, in an obvious factional provocation, two young members of the majority “raided” a private RT discussion meeting. I made an informal protest the next day to the National Organization Secretary Tom Kerry, who seemed surprised. But the PC decided to cover for Carl Feingold, who had engineered the raid, and on 2 February 1963 passed a motion by Dobbs and Kerry endorsing Kerry’s statement at the New York branch meeting that the RT was violating party discussion procedures by having meetings at all before the formal pre-conference discussion period. Thus the majority leadership eliminated the distinction between private and party discussion. In response we wrote, “For the Right of Organized Tendencies to Exist Within the Party.”

Wohlforth published accusations against us as splitters in the party discussion bulletin in June 1963; two days later we replied to his lies with “Discipline and Truth,” submitting it just under the bulletin deadline. Nearly one-third of the SWP was in political opposition on the eve of the 1963 convention. Barry Sheppard, Camejo and others predicted gleefully that the ax would fall on the RT at the convention. We heard later that Myra Tanner Weiss warned Cannon not to expel us at the convention or she would go public. Tom Kerry denounced us on the floor of the convention for being “disloyal.” This was cited later as evidence of “suspicion” to warrant our expulsions. Robertson was kept off the National Committee and the Political Committee, which became basically majority bodies.

The Control Commission convened in August, following the convention, to investigate Wohlforth’s charges against us. All RT supporters in New York were called for tape-recorded interrogations. Robertson, Mage, White, Harper and Ireland were suspended by the PC in October and expelled at an NC plenum in December for “disloyal conduct” though no violations of discipline were alleged or proved.

On 9 January 1964, a plenum report centering on the expulsions was made to the New York branch. The report included some self-criticism on the public positions of the SWP when Kennedy was killed—these were called “errors in formulation.” The expulsions were described as a big step, aimed not only at the Robertson tendency. “Wild” branch meetings were cited. “Loyalty” to the party was now to be a prerequisite for party membership. The expulsions were intended to affirm what kind of party the SWP was. This internal situation was allowed to develop so long, the report said, because the SWP was just coming out of isolation—it had become lax. Now the party was making a turn; no more leaning over backwards. It was time to tighten up.

When Doug Gorden (Swabeckite) denounced the “frame-up charges” from the floor, Nat Weinstein, the New York organizer, said that the party would no longer permit the NC to be attacked in that way. He said this was a final warning and proposed that Doug be censured by the Executive Committee—reaffirming Dobbs’ statement that “the majority is the party.” Various minorities objected during the discussion. In his summary remarks Weinstein stated that this was an “information report” and that NC decisions could not be changed until the next convention.

On 20 February 1964, the first issue of Spartacist was sold outside the Thursday night New York branch meeting by Jim Robertson. It seemed that nearly everyone in the meeting was reading a copy. A furious Weinstein took the floor and stated that with the publication of Spartacist the Robertson group had become an “enemy of the party” and that no collaboration by any party member with Spartacist would be permitted, nor would any expression of sympathy for their ideas be tolerated (this “sympathy for ideas” clause was deleted from the later formal charges against the remaining RT supporters). Sympathizers of those expelled were to be viewed with suspicion and closely scrutinized. They would be “on trial.”

Weinstein’s report was put to a vote: 31 were for, 5 against (all RT supporters) and 6 abstained (that was the Weissites and Swabeck supporters). Following the vote Weinstein declared that he wanted to know why these comrades voted against, and said that there would be an investigation.

As I recall, this was a particularly hysterical meeting. After the meeting adjourned various comrades were screaming at each other. Fred Halstead was screaming at me, “If you don’t like it why don’t you just leave!” To which I and others would reply, “No! You’d like that. We intend to stay and continue to fight for our positions.”

In general, the tenor in the New York SWP branch meetings after the report on the December expulsions was “love it or leave it.” But we acted as model members, doing more than our share of the work, paying dues promptly, etc. It drove them mad.

On 25 February 1964 I and the other four RT supporters received a formal notice of charges based on our vote against Weinstein’s report. We were notified that the trial was set for March 2. The “trial” was conducted by an expanded New York branch Executive Committee composed entirely of majority supporters. On March 5 the conclusions of this all-majority “trial body” were reported to the branch by Nat Weinstein. He tried to insist that the expulsions were “absolutely not for ideas.” We expel people for acts, he claimed, and then cited three “acts”: the intra-tendency discussion document cited by Wohlforth; our vote against Weinstein’s report to the branch; the publication of attacks on the SWP (i.e., Spartacist) and the “approval” of this by the remaining RTers.

There were about 60 people at this meeting, a large turnout. The Weissites were particularly incensed. Myra Weiss gave an eloquent speech in defense of the right of organized tendencies to exist. She defended the publication of Spartacist, blamed the majority for the whole situation, and admitted that she had given her PC motion against RT expulsions (reprinted in Spartacist No. 1) to the leading RTers when they were still party members. She intended to vote “No” on Weinstein’s report. A number of majority speakers warned Myra to stay out of this and go back to the PC where she belonged.

Tim Wohlforth was at this meeting. He said he opposed expulsion for ideas—and then went on to declare that the RT’s ideas were “alien,” that we were “destroying Trotskyism,” and attacked us for accepting support for our democratic rights in the party from the Weissites and Swabeckites.

The vote to expel the five of us was: 44 for, 14 against with one abstention and one not voting. These expulsions cleaned the RT out of the SWP in New York. However, seven RTers including some of those just expelled from the SWP were still members of the New York YSA. Some of us were very visible active Spartacists and all of us were open supporters of Spartacist views. We worked with Progressive Labor (PL) and in the Congress of Racial Equality (rent strike work). RT member Shirley Stoute was on the YSA NC and a member of the SWP in Philadelphia.

This situation in the YSA wasn’t going to last long. But the dual membership was permitted by a provision (which Jim Robertson had opposed at the founding YSA Convention) that permitted YSAers to be members of “any adult socialist party.” Barry Sheppard was YSA national chairman and Peter Camejo was the national secretary. Jack Barnes was New York YSA Organizer. A lovely crew.

Their method of seeking our expulsion was very clumsy. On 2 May 1964 several of us were part of a joint defense guard with PL for a demonstration. The YSA was nominally taking part in this. Before the march Barry Sheppard approached three of us to carry YSA signs. We declined, stating that we already had assignments as Spartacist supporters on the defense guard. Several days later we received notification of charges that we had “deliberately violated discipline” by refusing assignments given out the morning of May 2 at a YSA meeting (not true). A trial before the NY YSA local was scheduled for May 30. In addition, as an NC member, I would be tried by the National Executive Committee (NEC) following the local trial. It was all very contrived—individual acts of indiscipline. Nothing to do with political purges in the SWP of course!

Before the trial I wrote up and mimeoed a “Trial Circular” which blew their case out of the water. This was distributed to the local members, many of whom were very new. It gave a history of the origins of the RT and the political expulsions from the SWP. It denounced the fraudulent charges against us as part of a continuing attempt to turn the YSA into an instrument of the SWP majority in violation of the historical norms of youth-party relations as described by the SWP itself (see Murry Weiss’ letter in Marxist Bulletin No. 7, “The Leninist Position on Youth-Party Relations”).

A number of new members objected to the proceedings and wanted to know if what was in the “Circular” was true. It wasn’t going over. Barnes got up and denounced the circular itself for claiming that the YSA was controlled by the SWP. He said the circular was a “fink” document and these people are “objective agents” of the FBI! Then the despicable Freddy Mazelis—Wohlforth’s lieutenant—came to the rescue of the majority leadership. He proceeded to offer a rationale for political expulsions, arguing that since we had major differences with the SWP and YSA there was no way we could be disciplined members of the YSA. The expulsions carried.

On 5 September 1964 we appealed to a YSA NC plenum. The plenum upheld our expulsions and furthermore expelled five other RTers including Shirley Stoute. The only “charges” against the five new expellees was their “support to Spartacist.” It was simply a summary political expulsion of a whole group. Shirley was criticized for going to Cuba “without permission”! Following the plenum Shirley had to return to Philadelphia, where Dobbs had instructed the SWP branch to put her on trial (the “charges” are in Spartacist No. 3). She was expelled. It bothers me that after all these years comrade Breitman cannot admit the truth: that the expulsions of the RT marked the crossroads for the SWP; that it was wrong to have gone along with all this crap. After all, in defending our tendency we defended Breitman’s rights too, then and in the future. The majority is not the party! Democratic centralism is the organizational method of the revolutionary (insurrectionary) party. It serves only the revolutionary program. And there’s the rub.

—Originally dated 18 March 1986

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Memories of a 1970s Oppositionist
White preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Sam H., a former member of the Leninist Faction of the Socialist Workers Party, now a supporter of the Spartacist League. Comrade Sam’s letter has been edited for publication.

I became a contact of the SWP in 1969 during my four-year hitch in the Air Force, and joined the Madison Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in June 1970, one month after I was discharged. My decision to join was based on reading Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, a selected works by Trotsky, and on my understanding of the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. The Madison YSA was a left-talking Mandelite [i.e., followers of United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel] branch that was essentially led by the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT).

So while I thought I was joining the SWP of 1938 I began wondering why there were no trade-union fractions. Why was I one of the few union members in the local organization? I began pressing the branch leaders on this and one day I was led into one of their apartments to read the POT’s 1969 document, “On Sending Young Comrades into the Trade Unions.” I then realized that there was an impending faction fight inside the SWP and I quickly sided with the POT.

The 1971 SWP Convention turned out to be the POT’s only coordinated fight and I’m sorry I wasn’t there. The pre-conference discussion produced 30 or more bulletins and my most vivid memory from the returning Madison delegates was Barry Sheppard’s admonition at the end of the convention. The POT delegates were roundly defeated vote-wise. Since 1961 the party members functioned as a fraction within the youth so Sheppard’s admonition at the final Session was, “And there will be no wrecking job in the youth, comrades!”

Sheppard was calling POT supporters to task: they had better obey the party statutes or else. The POT challenged the party’s orientation but had no counterposed political program, so their intervention suffered dramatically. The POT essentially agreed with the SWP majority’s resolutions on the antiwar movement, black question, feminism, etc. So they were politically disarmed from engaging in political combat with the reformist Barnes clique.

The Mandelite POT was never a programmatically counterposed faction. They saw themselves as a dissident “tendency”—loyal, but with differences. I remember the first internal class I gave was on “democratic centralism.” The POT leaders who helped me to prepare this class were in political solidarity with the 1965 org rules [“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”] and the RT expulsion. The Spartacist League (SL) was not in Madison at that time so I had never seen us in action before. I dutifully repeated the common SWP refrain that the “Robertsonites” were expelled for “double-recruiting” and the Madison YSA branch simply accepted this as orthodox SWP history.

The POT leaders never challenged these 1965 org rules so they were condemned to live under them. We actually believed that you only discuss major political questions for three months every two years (the pre-conference discussion period). We skirted this in Madison on a number of occasions but I remember attending branch meetings in Chicago where, whenever a well-intentioned POTer would raise tactical differences with the SWP’s wretched pacifist line on the Vietnam War, a majorityite hack would quickly take the floor and say, “This discussion is taking on the character of a pre-conference discussion and this is not the proper time nor place for this.” I heard this over and over again!

The bottom line is that the POT leadership thought we could bring the reformist SWP line to the working class and that would make a difference. So while bemoaning the Barnes leadership’s undemocratic functioning they never challenged the political program that the organizational abuses flowed from. The American POT was an example of the wretched Mandelites’ refusal to build any serious opposition to Barnes’ SWP.

How rotten the POT was became clear to me at the 1971 Houston YSA Convention. I was one of the few pro-POT delegates, elected by the Milwaukee YSA. The big issue at the convention was the removal of a POT YSAer from the youth National Committee. It was clear that this guy was being dumped because the Barnesites were starting to clean house in the youth. This was one of the rare periods that you could raise differences, but the POT was acting in complete accordance with Sheppard’s warning against monkeying around with the youth. Not only was I instructed not to raise political differences on the convention floor but I was also instructed not to fight the purge on the basis of the comrade’s political views. I was given the unenviable task of taking the floor and simply asserting that the Nominating Commission had not provided a convincing enough case that this comrade’s functioning had gone downhill. I did place the POT YSAer’s name in nomination and was later congratulated by POTers as being the first person to ever challenge a YSA nominating slate. I don’t know if that’s true; I certainly didn’t feel proud. I felt that we ducked the political fight on the right of minorities to exist and maintain their political views. Luckily for me the SL had a table up at the convention so I got to read Workers Vanguard and took home with me a collection of Marxist Bulletins. It was my first contact with the SL.

On the last day of the convention I did get to talk to a comrade from Boston who couldn’t help but notice how pissed off I was at the POT. This became my first contact with the developing Leninist Faction (LF) which I quickly joined. The history of the LF is well documented in Spartacist No. 21. My resignation letter from the LF (co-signed by Dave E., Pam E. and Tom T.) appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 14.

Reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” and thinking about this letter has certainly jogged my memory and put these events in a clearer light. In the POT we had to put up with discussion only three months every two years regardless of what was happening in the world. A tendency was a “temporary” formation that was supposed to disband after you got your ass kicked at a convention. Factions were disloyal. To be an oppositionist during this time you had to deal with a good dose of paranoia and get nothing but crap from the Barnes leadership. When I returned from the Houston YSA convention a Barnesite hack was virtually sitting on the doorstep ordering the local Executive Committee (all of whom were POT supporters) to pack their bags and leave town. Branches like Milwaukee were destroyed while Barnes supporters were moved around the country to achieve mechanical branch majorities.

—Originally dated 19 April 1986

*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)-On Tactics

Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)

Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Third Congress of the Communist International
On Tactics

Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

12 July 1921 (drafted by Russian delegation in consultation with German delegation; introduced by Radek).

I. Definition of the Question
A new international association of workers is being formed to organise the united action of the proletarians who live in different countries, but share a common aim: the overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to the first stage of Communist society – an international Soviet republic which will completely eliminate classes and will establish socialism. This definition, confirmed in the statutes of the Communist International, clearly points to all the tactical questions that have to be solved – the tactical questions, in other words, that we face in our struggle for the proletarian dictatorship: how to win the majority of the working class to Communism, and how to organise the more active section of the proletariat for the coming struggle for Communism. The statutes also touch on the questions of what attitude the proletariat should take to the proletarianised petty-bourgeois layers, the quickest ways to bring about the disintegration and destruction of the organs of bourgeois power and how to prepare for the dictatorship. There is no question of there being any other path to victory than through dictatorship. The development of the world revolution has proved beyond any doubt that in the given historical situation the dictatorship of the proletariat is the only alternative to the dictatorship of capital. The Third Congress of the Communist International is reviewing the question of tactics at a time of revolutionary developments in a whole number of countries, when several mass Communist Parties have been formed, none of which, however, has yet taken into its hands the actual leadership of the working masses in its genuinely revolutionary struggle.

II. On the Eve of New Battles
The world revolution, which is produced by the decay of capitalism, the accumulation of the revolutionary energy of the proletariat and its organisation into a militant, triumphant force, will require a long period of revolutionary struggle. Because the level of social conflict varies from one country to another, social structures and the obstacles to social change also vary. In the capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America, the World War has not been followed by the victory of the world revolution, because the bourgeoisie here is highly organised. The Communists were therefore right when they said, even during the war, that the epoch of imperialism would develop into a protracted epoch of social revolution, i.e., into a long series of civil wars in individual capitalist states and a succession of wars between capitalist governments on the one hand and proletarian states and the exploited colonies on the other. The world revolution does not develop along a straight line: at certain periods of chronic capitalist decay, the day-to-day revolutionary work aimed at undermining the system leads to heightened social tension and acute crises. However, the world revolution is developing even more slowly than was expected, because strong workers’ organisations and workers’ parties, namely the social-democratic parties and the trade unions, which were created by the proletariat to fight the bourgeoisie, turned during the war into organs of counter-revolutionary influence that ensnared the proletariat and are continuing to hold it in their grip. As a consequence, the bourgeoisie has found it easier to cope with the problems of the demobilisation period and, during the fluke period of economic prosperity in 1919 and 1920, was able to raise working-class hopes of improving their position within the framework of the existing capitalist system. The proletarian defeats of 1919 and the sluggish growth of the revolutionary movement in 1919 and 1920 can be attributed to the influence of the social-democratic parties and trade unions. However, the world economic crisis which began in 1920 and has now spread right across the world, creating and increasing unemployment on every hand, demonstrates to the international proletariat that the bourgeoisie is powerless to rebuild the world from the ruins of the war. Political conflicts at the international level are intensifying. The French campaign of plunder against Germany, the conflicting interests of Britain and America, and America and Japan, and the resulting increase in armaments on a worldwide scale are evidence that the moribund capitalist world is approaching the brink of world war. Even the League. of Nations, that international trust set up by the victors to organise the exploitation of their defeated rivals and the colonial peoples, has been split by Anglo-American rivalry. The working class is beginning to shed its illusions and understand that if it rejects revolutionary means of seizing political power in favour of acting peacefully and gradually, it can never establish political and economic rule. By fostering these illusions, international social-democracy and the bureaucracy of the trade unions have up until now managed to restrain the working masses from participation in revolutionary struggle. In Germany, however, the farcical nationalisation programme which the Schiedemann-Noske government employed in March 1919 to prevent a workers’ uprising has been shelved. Idle talk about socialisation has given way to Stinnesation i.e., the subordination of German industry to a capitalist dictatorship and its clique. The attack launched by the Prussian government under the social-democrat Horsing is merely the prelude to a general campaign by the German bourgeoisie aimed at reducing the wages of all German workers. In Britain all nationalisation projects have been thrown overboard. Instead of implementing the nationalisation plans of the Sankey Commission, the government is using military force to support the lock-out of the miners. The French government is only saving itself from economic bankruptcy by robbing Germany. It is giving no thought to the question of systematic economic reconstruction. There has been some attempt to rebuild the devastated regions of northern France, but only in so far as this serves to enrich the capitalists. The bourgeoisie in Italy, aided by the reactionary fascist groups, has taken the offensive against the proletariat. Bourgeois democracy has had to compromise itself everywhere, both in the countries where it has been long established and in the new nations which have risen from the ruins of imperialism. Witness the White Guard organisations and the dictatorial government action against the miners in Britain; the fascists and the Guardia Regia in Italy; the Pinkertons, the expulsion of socialist deputies from parliaments and lynch-law in the United States; the White Terror in Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Latvia and Estonia; and its legalisation in Finland, Hungary and the Balkan States; anti-Communist legislation in Switzerland, France, etc. On every hand the bourgeoisie is attempting to push the consequences of the deepening economic chaos onto the shoulders of the working class by lengthening the working day and reducing levels of pay. Its efforts are aided by the leaders of social-democracy and the Amsterdam Trade-Union International. However, while they may succeed in temporarily delaying the development of new working-class struggles and a new wave of revolutionary activity, they cannot stem the tide. At this very moment the German proletariat is preparing a counter-attack and the British miners, in spite of being betrayed by their trade-union leaders, have been fighting heroically against the capitalist mine-owners for many weeks. The advanced sections of the Italian proletariat have learnt from their experience of the vacillating policies of the Serrati group and their will to fight has hardened, as witnessed by the creation of the Italian Communist Party.

We can see how the Socialist Party in France, now that it has split and dissociated itself from the social-patriots and the centrists, is no longer content with engaging in Communist agitation and propaganda, but is initiating mass campaigns against the outrages of imperialism. In Czechoslovakia we have seen the political strike of December in which, despite the complete absence of a united leadership, millions of workers took part and after which the mass revolutionary Czech Communist Party was founded. In February there was the railway strike in Poland led by the Communist Party, and also a general strike called in sympathy with the railway workers. We are now witnessing the disintegration of the social-patriotic Polish Socialist Party. In the present situation we must expect not the ebb of the revolutionary wave, but on the contrary the aggravation of social contradictions, the escalation of the social struggle and the transition to open civil war.

III. The Most Important Tasks of the Day
At the present moment the most important task of the Communist International is to win a dominant influence over the majority of the working class and involve the more active workers in direct struggle. Although the economic and political situation is objectively revolutionary and a revolutionary crisis could develop without warning as a result of a major strike, a colonial uprising, a new war or a serious parliamentary crisis, the majority of the working class is nevertheless outside the Communist sphere of influence. This is particularly true in countries such as Britain and America where finance capital is so powerful that it has enabled imperialism to corrupt entire sections of the working class, and effective revolutionary mass propaganda is in its early stages. From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously stated that its task is not to establish small Communist sects aiming to influence the working masses purely through agitation and propaganda, but to participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and in the course of the struggle create large, revolutionary, mass Communist Parties.

Even in the first twelve months following its foundation the Communist International repudiated sectarian tendencies and demanded that all affiliated parties, however small, should work in the trade unions in order to defeat the reactionary union bureaucracy from within and transform the unions into revolutionary mass proletarian organisations that could further the proletarian struggle. In its first year the Communist International made it clear that the Communist Parties were not to act merely as propaganda circles, but were to take advantage of all the opportunities the bourgeois state provided for organising the working class and conducting agitation. Freedom of the press, freedom of association and A bourgeois representative institutions were to be used, the International argued, even if the freedoms they offered were very limited. In its resolutions on the trade-union movement and on the tactic of parliamentarianism passed at its Second Congress, the Communist International politically rejected sectarian tendencies.

The experience of the Communist Parties over the last two years of struggle has fully confirmed the position taken by the Communist International. The tactics of the Communist International have in a number of countries succeeded in separating the revolutionary workers not only from the open reformists, but also from the centrists. The latter have founded the Two-and-a-Half International which openly joins the Scheidemanns, Jouhauxs and Hendersons in accepting the positions of the Amsterdam Trade-Union International. This can only clarify the real state of affairs for the proletarian masses and make future battles easier to fight. At the time of the January and March struggles in 1919, German Communism was only an insignificant political tendency, but by pursuing the tactics of the Communist International – revolutionary work in the trade unions, open letters, etc. – it has transformed itself into a great and revolutionary mass Party. The influence the Party has gained in the trade unions has been so great that the trade-union bureaucracy, fearing the revolutionary influence of Communist activity, has been forced to expel many Communists from the trade unions and take the blame for splitting the unions. In Czechoslovakia the Communists have succeeded in winning the majority of the politically organised workers to their side. The Polish Party, in spite of incredible persecution which has forced it underground, has worked in the trade unions so effectively that it has not only maintained contact with the masses but come forward as the leader of the mass struggle. In France the Communists have won a majority in the Socialist Party. The Communist groups in Britain are consolidating their position by following the tactics and directives of the Communist International. The social-traitors have responded to the growing influence of the Communists by trying to close the doors of the Labour Party to them. The sectarian Communist groups such as the KAPD in Germany etc. have, on the other hand, not met with any success at all. The theory of promoting Communism by propaganda and agitation alone and by the formation of separate Communist trade unions has been proved utterly incorrect. Not a single Communist Party of any influence has been formed by these means.

IV. The Situation in the Communist International
The Communist International has not been totally successful in its attempts to organise mass Communist Parties. A great deal still remains to be done in some of the most important countries, where capitalism is still firmly in position.

For various historical reasons there was no large revolutionary movement in the USA in the period before the war and even now the Communists are still at the elementary stage of creating a nucleus of Party members and establishing links with the working masses. The present economic crisis, which has thrown five million people out of work, means favourable conditions for this kind of work. The American capitalists are well aware of the threat a revolutionised workers’ movement would represent and of the influence that Communism would be likely to have on such a movement. They are therefore trying to suppress and destroy the young Communist movement, employing barbarous methods of persecution to force the Party underground. They hope that the Communist Party will lose its links with the masses, degenerate into a propaganda sect and die a natural death. The Communist International reminds the United Communist Party of America that, though it is illegal, the Party must not only recruit and educate members, but must do all it can to reach beyond its underground organisations to the discontented working masses and find ways and means of uniting the broad masses in open political struggle against the American capitalists.

The British Communist movement has also failed to develop into a mass Party, despite the fact that the Communists have united in a single Party.

The British economy continues to be unstable, the strike movement is without precedent, the broad masses are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the Lloyd George government and it is possible that at the next General Election there will be a Lib/Lab victory. New perspectives for the development of the revolution are opening up in Britain, placing questions of the utmost importance before the Communists.

The most important task of the British Communist Party is to become a mass Party. The British Communists must take as their starting point the mass movement which already exists and is continuing to expand. They must study every aspect of the movement and base a persistent and militant campaign of agitation and propaganda on the various individual and partial demands of the workers.

For many thousands and millions of workers the strength of the strike movement is the test of the reliability, perseverance and good intentions of the trade-union apparatus and its leaders. The work the Communists do in the trade unions is therefore particularly important. Party criticism coming from the outside is less effective than the persistent, daily efforts of the Communist cells in the trade union to show up and discredit the hypocrites and traitors of the union movement, who, in Britain more than in any other country, have become political pawns in the hands of the capitalists.

In countries where the Communist Parties are mass Parties, they aim at taking greater initiative in launching mass action, but in Britain the Party must make it a priority to intervene in mass activity and show the masses in practice that the Communists represent working-class interests, demands and feelings effectively and bravely.

The mass Communist Parties of Central and Western Europe are not only developing methods of revolutionary agitation and propaganda that can give expression to their militancy, but are making the transition from propaganda and agitation to action. This transition is hampered by the fact that in many countries the workers became revolutionary and moved towards the Communists under leaders who had not broken with their centrism and are either incapable of conducting genuine Communist agitation and propaganda or are simply afraid of doing so, because they know that this agitation will lead the Party to revolutionary struggle.

In Italy these centrist tendencies have brought about a split in the Party. Instead of harnessing the spontaneous, growing movement of working-class activity in order to develop a conscious struggle for power, for which the conditions in Italy were ripe, the Party and union leaders of the Serrati group have allowed opportunities to slip by. They did not see Communism as a means of initiating revolutionary upsurge and uniting the working masses in the struggle. They were afraid to fight and so they diluted their ideas and gave their agitation and propaganda a centrist slant. The influence of centrists in the Party (Turati and Treves) and in the unions (d'Aragona) increased. There was nothing either in their words or deeds to distinguish these centrists from the reformists, with whom as a consequence they were loath to part company, preferring to break with the Communists. This Serrati-type policy increased on the one hand the influence of the reformists and on the other the danger of anti-parliamentary, ultra-left tendencies emerging in the Party. The split at Livorno and the formation of an Italian Communist Party uniting all the Communists on the basis of the decisions of the Second Congress of the Communist International could make Communism a mass force in Italy. This will depend on whether the Party keeps firmly to its fight against the opportunist policy of Serrati, at the same time maintaining close contact with the trade-union rank and file during strikes and in the struggle against the counter-revolutionary fascist movement. It also depends on whether the Party unites the mass action of the working class and transforms spontaneous action into well-prepared campaigns.

The chauvinist poison of ‘national defence’ and the intoxication of victory proved stronger in France than in any other country and the reaction against the war developed at a slower pace. Nevertheless, the majority of the French Socialist Party moved towards Communism even before the march of events posed decisively the need for revolutionary action. Socialists were influenced by the Russian revolution, the revolutionary struggles in other capitalist countries and the experience of their leaders’ betrayals. The more decisively the French Communists Party acts to rid its ranks, and in particular its leadership, of the national-pacifist and parliamentary-reformist ideology which still has a grip, the more completely and effectively the Party will be able to take advantage of its position. The Party must make closer contact than it has done in the past, or is doing at present, with the mass and particularly with the more oppressed layers in both town and country, in order to gain a precise and complete picture of their needs and sufferings. The Party must make a clean break with all the hypocritical formality and false courtesy of French parliamentarianism, deliberately fostered by the bourgeois to hypnotise and intimidate the working masses. The parliamentary representatives of the Communist Party must do all in their power through their tightly controlled parliamentary interventions to show the hollow nature of nationalist democratism and traditional revolutionism and present every question as one of class interests and inevitable class struggle.

Agitation must, in practice, be concentrated on a few issues and be conducted with more energy. It must be capable of adapting to the changes in the political situation.

Agitation must draw revolutionary lessons from each and every event, whether of major or minor importance, and see that they are learned by the most backward of the working masses. Only by adopting such a truly revolutionary approach can the Communist Party become something more than just a left wing of the radical Longuet bloc – a ‘bloc’ that is more and more eagerly and successfully placing itself at the service of bourgeois society, offering to shield it from the series of upheavals which are inevitably approaching. The decisive revolutionary events may come sooner or they may come later, but a disciplined, determined revolutionary Communist Party, even at this preparatory stage, can mobilise the working masses around economic and political demands and broaden and develop their world-view.

The attempts of politically impatient and inexperienced elements to resort to extreme methods, e.g., the proposal that those conscripted in 1919 resist the call-up, contain elements of a highly dangerous adventurism that demands an all-out revolution when it is a single issue that is being raised. If these methods were adopted, all the real revolutionary work done to prepare the proletariat for the seizure of power would be set back for some considerable time.

The French Communist Party and all other Parties must reject such highly dangerous methods. In no circumstances, though, must the Party use this as a pretext for inactivity.

Closer contact with the masses means, above all, closer contact with the trade unions. The aim of the Party is not to achieve the mechanical and formal subordination of the trade unions, but to ensure that the truly revolutionary elements inside the unions which are unified and led by the Party give trade-union activity a direction that accords with the general interests of the proletariat in its struggle for dictatorship. The French Communist Party must criticise in a friendly but also clear and firm manner those anarcho-syndicalist tendencies which reject the dictatorship of the proletariat and deny the need to unite the vanguard within a single centralised leading organisation – in other words through a Communist Party. The Party should also be critical of those syndicalist tendencies that are using the charter of Amiens – drawn up eight years before the war – as an excuse to avoid giving a clear and straight answer to this fundamental question of the post-war period.

The French syndicalists’ dislike of politicians is mainly the expression of a perfectly justified sense of indignation at the conduct of traditional ‘Socialist’ parliamentarians.

The Communist Party as a genuinely revolutionary Party can convince all revolutionary elements that political groups are needed if the working class is to win power. The fusion of the revolutionary syndicalist and Communist organisations is essential if the French proletariat is to engage in serious struggle. The revolutionary sydnicalists’ tendency to act prematurely, and their principles of loose organisation and organisational separatism, must be defeated and rejected. Success in this endeavour will only be achieved, we repeat, if the Party takes a revolutionary approach to the day-to-day questions of life and struggle and proves capable of attracting the French working class.

Over the last two years the working masses of Czechoslovakia have largely freed themselves from reformist and nationalist illusions. In September of last year the majority of the social-democratic workers broke away from their reformist leaders. In December one million of the three-million-strong industrial work force took part in a mass revolutionary struggle against the Czech capitalist government. In May of this year a Czechoslovak Communist Party with 350,000 members was established alongside a German-Bohemian Party with 60,000 members which had been founded some time before. The Communists therefore represented a significant section not only of the Czechoslovak proletariat, but of the population as a whole. The Czechoslovak Party now has to engage in effective Communist agitation to win still wider masses of workers to the Party and to educate them by using its clear and uncompromising Communist propaganda. The Party must unite the workers of the country’s different nationalities and form a solid proletarian front against nationalism. Nationalism is the main weapon of the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie and so if the proletariat can form a united front it will be invincible in the forthcoming battles against the government and against capitalist oppression. The clarity and determination with which the Party discards its centrist traditions of hesitation and the willingness with which it revolutionises and unites the broadest proletarian masses and prepares them for victorious struggle will depend on the establishment of the united front. Congress resolves that the Czechoslovak and German-Bohemian Party organisations should merge by a date decided upon by the Executive Committee.

The United Communist Party of Germany, formed by the fusion of the Spartacusbund and the left independent working masses, is already a mass party but the tasks facing it are enormous: to increase its influence on the broad masses, strengthen the proletarian mass organisations, win the trade unions and break the influence of the social-democratic parties and the trade-union bureaucracy, and thus lead the mass proletarian movement in future struggles. All the Party’s agitational and organisational work must therefore aim at winning the sympathy of the majority of the working class, for without their support Communism cannot defeat the power of German capital. Neither the content of the agitation nor it influence is as yet adequate for this purpose. Nor is it the case that the Party has succeeded in consistently following the course laid down in its ‘Open letter’ – the course of counterposing the practical interests of the proletariat to the right-wing policy of the social-democratic parties and the trade-union bureaucracy. The Party press and its organisation still bear the stamp of a peaceful association rather than of a militant organisation. Because of its centrist tendencies, the Party, when faced with the need to fight, is inclined to take up struggles without sufficient preparation; at the same time, it lacks vital contact with the, non-Communist masses. The German national economy continues to disintegrate and capitalism threatens the very existence of the working masses. The VKPD win soon have to move into action. This action will only be effective if, .instead of seeing agitation and organisation as a way to prepare for action, the Party maintains its. revolutionary militancy at all times, carries out agitation that can reach the people, and builds an organisation that has close contact with the masses and is capable of weighing the military situation carefully and preparing thoroughly for the struggle.

The Parties of the Communist International can become revolutionary mass parties only when they finally overcome the tradition and influence of opportunism in their ranks. They can achieve this by maintaining the closest contact with the working masses in their struggles, deriving their tasks from the battles of the proletariat, and rejecting revolutionary demagogy and the opportunist and self-deceiving policy of smoothing over irreconcilable social contradictions. The Communist Parties came out of the split in the old Socialist Parties. This split occurred because during the war these parties scabbed on the proletariat and continued to do so after the war had ended, forging alliances with the bourgeoisie or following a cowardly policy of avoiding struggle. The fundamental positions and principles of the Communist Party provide the basis for the unity of the working masses, because they sum up all the needs of the proletarian struggle. The social-democratic and centrist parties and currents atomise and divide the working masses, while the Communist Parties are a force for unity. Thus, when the majority of the German Party chose Communism, the centrists broke away. Fearing the influence of Communism, the German social-democrats and Independent democrats as well as the social-democratic trade-union bureaucracy rejected the Party’s suggestion that they work with the Communists to defend the day-to-day interests of the proletariat. In Czechoslovakia it was the social democrats who split the old Party when they saw that the Communists had won. The Communist Party in France is working to unify the Socialist and syndicalist workers, while the Longuet group has cut itself off from the majority of the French socialist workers. In Britain the reformists and centrists are afraid of the Communists’ influence; they have driven the Communists out of the Labour Party and are constantly sabotaging attempts to unite workers in the fight against the capitalists. Everywhere it is the Communist Parties which are supporting proletarian unity based on the struggle to defend proletarian interests; an awareness of their role will give the Communists new strength.

V. Single-Issue Struggles and Single-Issue Demands
The Communist Parties can only develop through struggle. Even the smallest Parties should not limit themselves to propaganda and agitation. The Communists must act as the vanguard in every mass organisation. By putting forward a militant programme urging the proletariat to fight for its basic needs, they can show the backward and vacillating masses the path to revolution and demonstrate how all parties other than the Communists are against the working class. Only by leading the concrete struggles of the proletariat and by taking them forward will the Communists really be able to win the broad proletarian masses to the struggle for the dictatorship.

All the agitation, propaganda and political work of the Communist Parties must start from the understanding that no long-term improvement in the position of the proletariat is possible under capitalism and that only the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the destruction of capitalist states will make possible the transformation of working-class living conditions and the reconstruction of the economy ruined by capitalism. This does not mean, however, that the proletariat has to renounce the fight for its immediate practical demands until after it has established its dictatorship.

Even though capitalism is in progressive decline and is unable to guarantee the workers even a life of well-fed slavery, social democracy continues to put forward its old programme of peaceful reforms to be carried out on the basis and within the framework of the bankrupt capitalist system. This is a deliberate deception of the working masses. Although it is evident that capitalism in its present stage of decline is incapable of guaranteeing workers a decent human existence, the social democrats and reformists everywhere are daily demonstrating their unwillingness and inability to fight even for the most modest demands in their programme. The demand advanced by the centrist parties for the socialisation or nationalisation of the most important branches of industry is equally a deception because it is not linked to a demand for victory over the bourgeoisie. The centrists want to divert the workers from the real, vital struggle for their immediate goals by holding out the hope that industrial forms can be taken over gradually, one by one, and that ‘systematic’ economic construction can then begin. The social democrats are thus retreating to their minimum programme, which now stands clearly revealed as a counter-revolutionary fraud.

Some centrists think that their programme of nationalisation (e.g., of the mining industry) is in line with the Lassallean idea of concentrating all the energies of the proletariat on a single demand, using it as a lever of revolutionary action that then develops into the struggle for power. However, this theory is false. In the capitalist countries the working class suffers too much; the gnawing hardships and the blows that rain down thick and fast on the workers cannot be fought by fixing all attention on a single demand chosen in a doctrinaire fashion. On the contrary, revolutionary action should be organised around all the demands raised by the masses, and these separate actions will gradually merge into a powerful movement for social revolution.

The Communist Parties do not put forward minimum programmes which could serve to strengthen and improve the tottering foundations of capitalism. The Communists’ main aim is to destroy the capitalist system. But in order to achieve their aim the Communist Parties must put forward demands expressing the immediate needs of the working class. The Communists must organise mass campaigns to fight for these demands regardless of whether they are compatible with the continuation of the capitalist system. The Communist Parties should be concerned not with the viability and competitive capacity of capitalist industry or the stability of the capitalist economy, but with proletarian poverty, which cannot and must not be endured any longer. If the demands put forward by the Communists correspond to the immediate needs of the broad proletarian masses, and if the masses are convinced that they cannot go on living unless their demands are met, then the struggle around these issues becomes the starting-point of the struggle for power. In place of the minimum programme of the centrists and reformists, the Communist International offers a struggle for the concrete demands of the proletariat which, in their totality, challenge the power of the bourgeoisie, organise the proletariat and mark out the different stages of the struggle for its dictatorship. Even before the broad masses consciously understand the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they can respond to each of the individual demands. As more and more people are drawn into the struggle around these demands and as the needs of the masses come into conflict with the needs of capitalist society, the working class will come to realise that if it wants to live, capitalism will have to die. This realisation will be the main motivation in their struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The task of the Communist Parties is to extend, deepen and unify the struggle around these concrete demands. The bourgeoisie mobilises to respond to every step the working masses take in fighting for even a single demand and, on the occasion of any major economic strike, the whole ruling class comes swiftly to the side of those employers threatened, in order to prevent the proletariat from winning even a partial victory (mutual employers’ aid in Czechoslovakia, the bourgeois strike-breakers in the rail strike in Britain, and the fascists in Italy are examples). In the struggle against the workers the bourgeoisie mobilises its entire government machine: in Poland and France workers have been called up into the army; emergency laws were passed in Britain during the miners’ strike. In this way, workers fighting on single issues are automatically forced to take on the whole bourgeoisie and its government apparatus. As the struggle over single issues and the separate struggles of different groups of workers develop into a general working-class struggle against capitalism, the Communist Party must extend its slogans, grouping them around the main slogan of overthrowing the enemy. The Communist Parties should make certain that the demands they put forward not only correspond to the demands of the broad masses, but also draw the masses into battle and lay the basis for organising them. Concrete slogans that express the economic need of the working masses must lead to the struggle for control of industry – control based not on a plan to organise the economy bureaucratically and under the capitalist system, but on the factory committees and revolutionary trade unions. Only the creation of such organisations and their co-ordination within the different industries and areas makes possible the organisation of a unified struggle of the working masses and a fight against the split in the mass movement – a split for which social democracy and the leaders of the trade unions bear responsibility. The factory committees will be able to accomplish their tasks only if they are established in the course of the struggle to defend the economic interests of the broad working masses and if they succeed in uniting all the revolutionary sections of the proletariat – the Communist Party, the revolutionary workers’ organisations, and those trade unions undergoing a process of radicalisation. The objections raised against single-issue demands and the accusations that campaigns on single issues are reformist reflect an inability to grasp the essential conditions of revolutionary action. This was the case with the opposition of certain Communist groups to participation in trade unions and in parliament. It is not a question of appealing to the proletariat to fight for the ultimate goal, but of developing the practical struggle which alone can lead the proletariat to the struggle for the ultimate goal. The fact that even the tiny organisations formed by the so-called Left Communists as sanctuaries of pure theory have been forced to formulate single demands, in order to attract a larger number of workers to the struggle than they have hitherto managed to muster, is the best proof that their objections to partial demands are groundless and divorced from the realities of revolutionary life. The present epoch is revolutionary precisely because the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society, and the struggle for these demands is therefore bound to develop into the struggle for Communism.

While the capitalists are using the growing army of unemployed to put pressure on the organised workers by lowering wages, the cowardly social democrats, the Independents and the official leaders of the trade unions distance themselves from the unemployed; they regard them as objects of state and trade-union charity and categorise them politically as lumpen-proletarian. The Communists must understand clearly that in the present circumstances the army of the unemployed represents a revolutionary factor of tremendous significance. They must assume the leadership of this army. By exerting pressure on the unions through the unemployed, the Communists can hasten the liberation of the trade unions from the influence of their scab leaders. By uniting the unemployed with the proletarian vanguard in the struggle for socialist revolution, the Communist Party can restrain the more revolutionary and impatient elements among the unemployed from engaging in individual acts of desperation. If conditions are favourable, the Party can organise the mass of unemployed in support of the action of one or another section of the proletariat and, by extending the struggle beyond the limits of the original conflict, can make it the start of a major offensive. In short, the unemployed can be transformed from the reserve army of labour into an active army of the revolution.

By actively defending this layer of the working class, by supporting the most oppressed section of the proletariat, the Communist Parties are not championing one layer of the workers at the expense of others, but are furthering the interests of the working class as a whole. This the counter-revolutionary leaders have failed to do, preferring to advance the temporary interests of the labour aristocracy. The more unemployed or short-term workers there are, the more important it is that their interests become the interests of the working class as a whole, and the more important it is that they are not subordinated to the interests of the labour aristocracy. Those who promote the interests of the labour aristocracy, either counterposing or simply ignoring the interests of the unemployed, destroy the unity of the working classes and are pursuing a policy that has counter-revolutionary consequences. The Communist Party, as the representative of the interests of the working class as a whole, cannot merely recognise these common interests verbally and argue for them in its propaganda. It can only effectively represent these interests if it disregards the opposition of the labour aristocracy and, when opportunities arise, leads the most oppressed and downtrodden workers into action.

VI. Preparing the Offensive
The character of the transition period makes it imperative that every Communist Party does all it can to prepare for military combat. Any confrontation may turn into a struggle for power. The Party can only achieve a sufficient level of preparation if all its agitation is a vehement attack on capitalist society, if, through its agitation, it succeeds in making contact with the broadest layers of the people, and if it speaks to them in a language which can convince them that the vanguard at their head is fighting for power. The task of the Communist press and propaganda is not just to prove theoretically that Communism is right, but to herald the proletarian revolution. The job of the Communists in parliament is not to debate with their opponents or attempt to convert them, but to unmask ruthlessly the agents of the bourgeoisie, encourage the working masses to take up the struggle and win the semi-proletarian and petty-bourgeois layers to the side of the proletariat. Our organisational work in the trade unions and Party must not be aimed at consolidating structures and increasing membership in a mechanical way, but at preparing for the battles of the future. Only when the Party’s activity and organisation is permeated with the will to struggle can it take advantage of the opportunities for large-scale militant action.

Where Communist Parties represent a mass force and have an influence on the broad working masses outside the Party organisation, they must encourage the masses to struggle. The influential mass Parties must not limit themselves to criticising other parties and counterposing Communist demands to theirs. Such Communist Parties have a responsibility for the development of revolutionary ideology. Wherever the position of the working masses is deteriorating, the Communist Parties must do all they can to get the working masses to fight for their interests. In Western Europe and America where the working masses are organised in trade unions and political parties and the emergence of spontaneous movements is therefore only likely to be a rare occurrence, the Communist Parties must try to launch a joint struggle for the immediate interests of the proletariat by strengthening their influence in the trade unions and increasing their pressure on the proletarian-based parties. Should non-Communist parties be drawn into the struggle the Communists must warn the working masses that they could be let down by these parties at any stage of the struggle. The Communists must do all they can to intensify the conflict and consolidate their position so that, if necessary, they can continue the struggle independently. The ‘Open letter’ of the VKPD is an excellent example of this tactic. If Communist Party pressure in the press and on the trade unions is not sufficient to produce a united proletarian front in the struggle, the Communist Party must independently lead large sections of the masses into action. The Party must rouse the masses from passivity by organising a militant proletarian minority.

The most active and conscious section of the proletariat can defend the interests of the whole class with success only if it is able to involve the backward masses, if it proposes goals which stem from the actual situation and if these goals are accepted by the broad masses, who, even though they are not yet capable of fighting for these interests, recognise them as their own.

The Communist Party, however, must do more than just defend the proletariat from the dangers threatening it and the blows directed at it. In the period of the world revolution the Communist Party is essentially a party on the offensive, a party at war with capitalist society. It must extend and intensify every defensive struggle, transforming it into an attack on capitalist society. It must make every effort. whenever the conditions are right, to draw the working masses into this campaign. To reject in principle this policy of taking the offensive means to abandon the basic tenets of Communism.

Taking the offensive depends, firstly, on stepping up the struggle in the camp of the bourgeoisie at the national and international level. If the forces of the class enemy are divided by this struggle, then the Party must take the initiative into its own hands and, after careful political and – where possible – organisational preparation, lead the masses into battle.

Secondly, it depends on important sections of the working class displaying a militancy which gives grounds for hope that the working class as a whole is ready to form a united front against the capitalist government. If the movement is growing, the Communist Party must develop more militant slogans; in the event of a defeat, it must organise a disciplined and orderly retreat. The actual circumstances determine whether the Communist Party wages a defensive or an offensive struggle. What is most important is that the Communist Party should be ready and willing to fight, and that its agitational and organisational work and struggle should be capable of overcoming the centrist attitude of ‘wait and see’ which holds back even the advanced workers. The mass Communist Parties must be ready and willing to take the offensive at any moment, not only because it is their duty as mass Parties to wage such a struggle, but because the contemporary situation is one of capitalist decay and falling living standards of the masses. This period of decline must not be allowed to continue, for otherwise the material basis of Communism will be destroyed and the militancy of the working masses crushed.

VII. The Lessons of the March Events
The March Action was forced upon the VKPD by the government’s attack upon the proletariat of central Germany.

This was the first important struggle in which the Party intervened, and it committed a number of mistakes. In the first place, it failed to emphasise clearly the defensive character of the struggle. The bourgeoisie, the SPD and the USPD – unscrupulous enemies of the proletariat – were able to use the fact that the Party called for an offensive to prove to the proletariat that the VKPD was attempting a ‘putsch’. Several Party comrades made matters worse by developing the theory that this offensive was at that time the Party’s main method of struggle. The Party – through its chairman comrade Brandler has officially admitted this mistake.

The Third Congress of the Communist International nevertheless considers the March Action to have been a step forward. Hundreds of thousands of proletarians participated in an heroic struggle against the bourgeoisie. By assuming the leadership of the defence of the workers of central Germany, the VKPD has shown itself to be the party of the German revolutionary proletariat. Congress is of the opinion that by adapting its fighting slogans to the actual situation, studying more thoroughly the balance of forces and co-ordinating its actions, the VKPD will be better placed to organise mass action.

The VKPD must pay careful attention to the facts and opinions which point to the obstacles to action and must examine thoroughly the arguments put forward against action. The Party must then be in a position to weigh carefully its chance of success.

Once the Party has decided on a certain course of action, all comrades must abide by the decisions of the Party and actively assist in their implementation. Criticisms should be made only after the campaign has been completed, only inside the Party organisations and only after taking into consideration the position of the Party in relation to the class enemy.

VIII. Forms and Methods of Direct Action
The forms and methods and the scope of the struggle are dependent – as are the questions of offensive and defensive action – on certain conditions which cannot be created at will. Previous revolutionary experience has shown us various forms of partial action:

431 Action by individual sections of the working class (the action of the miners and railway workers etc. in Germany and Britain and of agricultural workers etc.).

432 General working-class action directed towards a limited objective (the action during the Kapp putsch and the action of the British miners against their government’s military intervention in the Russo-Polish war.

Such struggles may spread across individual regions or across a number of countries simultaneously.

In the course of the revolution these methods will. be employed in every country. The Communist Party must not refuse to launch actions which are confined to a particular locality, but it must strive to transform every important local working-class action into a general struggle. The Party aims to involve the whole working class in the defence of workers of any one branch of industry and similarly persuade the proletariat in other industrial areas to come out in support of a local workers’ struggle. Revolutionary experience shows that the larger the field of battle, the greater the chance of victory. In its struggle against the unfolding world revolution the bourgeoisie relies, on the one hand, on the White Guard organisations and, on the other, on the atomisation of the working class and the difficulties in forming a united proletarian front. The larger the number of people drawn into the struggle and the broader its scope, the more the enemy is compelled to divide his forces. Sometimes workers move to support the section of the proletariat under attack, but for a time have few forces at their disposal. Even in this situation the capitalists have to divide their military strength, since they have no way of knowing to what extent these workers will take part in the struggle and to what extent their intervention will escalate the conflict.

Over the last year the capitalist offensive has become increasingly bold. One can observe that the bourgeoisie is no longer satisfied with the usual state institutions and in every country has created under its protection various legal and semi-legal White Guard organisations which have been playing an important role in all the major economic confrontations.

In Germany an organisation known as Orgesh has been formed; it has government backing and receives support from parties whose political leanings range from Stinnes to Scheidemann.

In Italy the activities of the fascist gangsters have brought about a complete change in the mood of the bourgeoisie and apparently also in the balance of forces.

When the Lloyd George government in England was faced with the threat of a strike, it called for volunteers prepared to defend property and ‘the right to work’ by scabbing on the strikers and destroying their organisations.

The semi-official French paper, Le Temps, which is clearly under the influence of the Millerand clique, is waging a campaign to promote the already existing Civic Leagues and introduce the methods of fascism into France.

American liberty has always been supplemented by strike-breakers and assassins but these have now acquired an organisation – the American Legion – which recruits the riff-raff left over from the war.

The bourgeoisie boasts of its power and stability, but the bourgeois governments know perfectly well that they have only won a brief respite and that in the present circumstances any mass strike could develop into a civil war and a direct struggle for proletarian power.

Not only must Communists be at the forefront and explain the fundamental revolutionary tasks to those participating in the struggle, but they must also work with the most dedicated and active elements of the industrial work force, create proletarian military organisations and workers’ defence groups, oppose the fascists and prevent the jeunesse dorée of the bourgeoisie slandering and attacking strikers.

The Communist Party, and particularly its trade-union cells, must devote special attention to the extremely important question of counter-revolutionary organisations. A good intelligence and communication network must be organised which can keep a constant watch on the military organisations and forces of the White Guards, their headquarters and arms depots. It must check on the links between the White Guard headquarters and the police, the press, and the political parties, and must have detailed contingency plans ready for defence and counterattack.

The Communist Party must work through words and actions to convince the widest sections of the proletariat that, given the right combination of circumstances, every economic and political conflict can develop into a civil war which raises the question of the seizure of state power.

The Communist Party must not forget the horrors of the White Terror and must warn the proletariat against giving way to the enemy’s pleas for clemency at the time of the insurrection. The oppressors of the proletariat must be tried according to the principles of proletarian justice administered through the organised people’s court. When the proletariat is only preparing for struggle and is only beginning to mobilise through agitation, political campaigns and strikes, the use of weapons and acts of sabotage have a point only if they are aimed at obstructing the transport of troops intended for use against the fighting proletarian masses or at wresting strategic positions from the enemy in direct struggle. Individual acts of terrorism reflect the revolutionary indignation of the masses and can be justified as a protest against the lynch law of the bourgeoisie and its social-democratic hangers on, but they are in no way capable of raising the level of proletarian organisation and militancy, for they create the illusion amongst the masses that individual acts of terrorism can take the place of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

IX. Our Attitude to the Semi-Proletarian Strata
In Western Europe there is no class other than the proletariat which is capable of playing the significant role in the world revolution that, as a consequence of the war and the land hunger, the peasants did in Russia. But, even so, a section of the Western-European peasantry and a considerable part of the urban petty bourgeoisie and broad layers of the so-called middle class, of office workers etc., are facing deteriorating standards of living and, under the pressure of rising prices, the housing problems and insecurity, are being shaken out of their political apathy and drawn into the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. The bankruptcy of imperialism in the countries which were victorious in the world war, and the bankruptcy of pacifism and semi-reformist currents in the countries which were defeated, drives these middle layers either into the camp of open counter-revolution or into the camp of revolution. The Communist Party must always be concerned with these layers of the population. One of the main prerequisites for the triumph of the proletarian dictatorship is the winning of the small farmers to the ideas of Communism. This would make it possible to take the revolution from the industrial centres out into the countryside and create organisations in the villages to arrange food distribution – one of the most vital questions of the revolution. It is also important to win the sympathy of technicians, white-collar workers, the middle- and lower-ranking civil servants and the intelligentsia, who can assist the proletarian dictatorship in the period of transition from capitalism to Communism by helping with the problems of state and economic administration. If such layers identify with the revolution, the enemy will be demoralised and the popular view of the proletariat as an isolated group will be discredited. The Communist Party must watch closely the ferment within the petty-bourgeois layers and make as effective use of them as possible, even when they still cling to bourgeois illusions. The Communist Parties must draw into the proletarian front those sections of the intelligentsia and office workers which have freed themselves from these illusions, using them to win the support of the petty-bourgeois masses who are militant but not yet committed to the revolution.

The economic disintegration and consequent dislocation of state finances will force the bourgeois to condemn to increasing poverty the lower- and middle-ranking civil servants who are the main supporters of its own state apparatus. The economic decline of these layers directly threatens the whole structure of the bourgeois state and, though conflicts may be temporarily resolved, it is becoming more and more difficult for the bourgeois state to preserve its organisational base. In the same way it becomes impossible for capital to preserve its system of exploitation while at the same time guaranteeing a decent standard of living to its hired workers. By defending the interests of the lower- and middle-ranking civil servants regardless of the state of public finances, the Communist Parties are carrying out very important preliminary work for the destruction of the bourgeois state-institutions and preparing for the construction of the proletarian state.

X. International Co-ordination of Action
We must put all our energies into achieving a united international leadership for the revolutionary struggle. Only then will it be possible to effect a breach in the international counter-revolutionary front and employ the forces of the Communist International to hasten the victory of the revolution. The Communist International demands that all the Communist Parties render each other maximum support in the struggle. The national economic battles that are developing require that the proletariat of other countries, wherever possible, intervenes immediately. The Communists must use their influence to see that the trade unions not only oppose by all the means at their disposal the dispatch of blacklegs, but ban all exports to the countries where large sections of the proletariat are engaged in struggle. Where the capitalist government of one country takes action against another with the aim of robbing or dominating it, the Communist Parties must not simply make protests, but do everything to obstruct such a campaign of plunder. The Third Congress of the Communist International welcomes the demonstrations organised by the French Communists as the beginning of a more active struggle against the counter-revolutionary role of French capitalist exploitation. Congress reminds the French comrades of their duty to do all they can to bring the French soldiers in the occupied zone to the realisation that they are acting as the policemen of French capital and that they ought to refuse to play this shameful role. The French Communist Party has to make the French people understand that by allowing the army of occupation to be organised and drilled in the spirit of nationalism, it is tying its own noose, for the occupied areas are the training-ground for troops which will subsequently be at hand to crush the revolutionary movement of the French working class. The presence of black troops in France and in the occupied territories gives the French Communist Party special responsibilities. It provides the French Party with the opportunity of approaching these colonial slaves and explaining to them that they are serving their own oppressors and exploiters, of rallying them to fight against the colonial regime and establishing links with the peoples of the French colonies.

The German Communist Party must make it clear to the German proletariat that there can be no struggle against exploitation by Entente capital unless the German capitalist government is overthrown. For despite the noises of opposition to the Entente, the German government acts as its overseer and agent. The VKPD will only be able to encourage the proletarian masses of France to fight French imperialism if it mounts a fierce and relentless struggle against the German government, which would show that far from seeking to give bankrupt German imperialism a new lease of life, the Party wishes to free itself from the domination of this imperialism and fight alongside the working masses of France and Belgium for the reconstruction of Europe on Communist lines. The Communist International has made it clear to the international proletariat that it views the indemnity demands of the Entente capitalists as a campaign of plunder directed against the working masses of the defeated nations and has denounced the attempts of the Longuists and Independents to find a way of minimising the harmful effects of this campaign for the working masses as a cowardly capitulation to the Entente stock exchanges. The International demonstrates to the proletariat of France and Germany that the only way to reconstruct the devastated areas and to improve the lot of widows and orphans is to rally the proletariat of both countries to struggle together against their exploiters. The German proletariat can assist the Russian proletariat in its uphill climb only if, by its own victories, it brings nearer the unification of Russian agriculture and German industry.

It is the duty of Communist Parties in countries whose troops are participating in the subjugation and division of Turkey to use all available means to conduct a campaign to revolutionise these troops. The Communist Parties of the Balkan countries must do their utmost to oppose nationalism by establishing a Balkan Communist federation which could hasten their victory. The victory of the Communist Parties of Bulgaria and Serbia would bring about the fall of the shameful Horthy regime and end Boyar rule in Rumania, extending the base for agricultural revolution into most of the more industrially developed neighbouring countries. Unconditional support of Soviet Russia is still the priority for the Communists everywhere. Communists must resolutely resist any attempts to attack Soviet Russia and fight to eliminate the obstacles erected by the capitalist states to prevent Soviet Russia from establishing links with the world market and with the peoples of other countries. Only when Soviet Russia has successfully reconstructed its economy and alleviated the terrible poverty caused by three years of imperialist war and three years of civil war will productivity improve and the country be in a position to help the future victorious proletarian states of the West with food and raw materials and protect them from strangulation by American capital.

The international political task of the Communist International is not to organise demonstrations when important events take place, but to make sure that the links between the different national tightly organised Communist fronts are continuously improved. It is impossible to predict in advance on which front the proletariat will succeed in making a b break-through – whether it will be in Germany, where the proletariat is harshly oppressed by the German and Entente bourgeoisie and where the choice is between death or victory, or in the agrarian countries of South-East Europe, or in Italy, where the decline of the bourgeoisie has reached an advanced stage. The Communist International must therefore do everything it can to intensify proletarian militancy on all sections of the international front. Communist Parties must do their utmost to support the major campaigns of each individual section of the Communist International. This can best be achieved if, whenever there are large-scale conflicts in one country, other Communist Parties bring any internal conflicts in their own countries to a head.

XI. The Decline of the Second and Two-and-a-Half Internationals
The third year of the Communist International is witnessing the further political decline of the social-democratic parties and the reformist leaders of the trade-union movement.

Over the last year, however, they have attempted to achieve organisational unity and have attacked the Communist International. During the miners’ strike in Britain, the leaders of the Labour Party and the trade unions considered it their duty deliberately to destroy the workers’ front that was being formed and to protect the capitalists from the workers. The breakdown of the Triple Alliance is proof that the reformist leaders of the trade unions have no desire to fight to improve the position of the working class even within the framework of the capitalist system. When the German social-democratic party withdrew from the government, it became obvious that the party was no longer capable of even the oppositional agitation that social democracy had conducted in the pre-war period. If it made any oppositional gestures, its chief aim was to prevent the working class from engaging in struggle. In spite of the fact that, nationally, German social democracy was supposedly an opposition party, in Prussia it organised a White Guard campaign against the miners of Central Germany with the conscious aim of provoking an armed struggle before the Communists had had time to organise themselves for militant action. The German bourgeoisie had capitulated to the Entente; the Entente had dictated terms which the German bourgeoisie can only meet by reducing the German proletariat to abject poverty – but, in spite of this, German social democracy has entered the government once again and is assisting the bourgeoisie in enslaving the German proletariat.

In Czechoslovakia social democracy is mobilising the army and the police to deprive worker-Communists of their homes and organisations. The dishonest tactics of the Polish social-democratic party are helping Pilsudski to organise the intervention against Soviet Russia. The party helps the government to put thousands of Communists in prison, and throws Communists out of the trade unions where, in spite of all the persecution, they are winning more and more workers to their side. The Belgian social democrats remain in a government which is involved in subjugating the German people. The centrist parties and groups of the Two-and-a-Half International are conducting themselves just as shamefully as the counter-revolutionary parties. The German Independents have rejected outright the appeal of the German Communist Party for a joint struggle against the fall in working-class living standards, irrespective of the differences that divide them. The Independents registered their disapproval of the White Terror, but this was after they had unequivocally taken the side of the White Guard government during the battles of March, after they had helped contribute to the victory of the White Terror and had, in full view of the bourgeois republic, slandered the proletarian vanguard as gangsters, robbers and lumpen-proletarians. In spite of the fact that back at the Halle congress the party promised to support Soviet Russia, it is now conducting a slanderous campaign against the Russian Soviet republic in its press. It has joined Wrangel, Miliukov and Burtsev and the Russian counter-revolution in supporting the Kronstadt rising against the Soviet republican rising which signifies that the international counter-revolution has adopted a new tactic against the Soviet republic. It plans to overthrow the Russian Communist Party – the heart and soul, the brain and the backbone of the Soviet republic – judging that without the Party, the country is a lifeless corpse that can be dealt with easily. The French Longuetists have joined the German Independents in the campaign against Soviet Russia and, in doing so, have clearly sided with the French counter-revolutionaries who, the facts show, have supported the new tactic. It is the policy of the Italian centrist groups of Serrati and d'Aragona to retreat in the face of every struggle; this has given the bourgeoisie new strength and the possibility, with the help of the fascist bands, of dominating the Italian scene.

In spite of the fact that the centrist parties and social democracy differ only in the phrases they use, these groups have not so far united in one International. Last February the centrist parties even established their own international organisation, complete with political platform and statutes. On paper this Two-and-a-Half International hovers between the slogans of bourgeois democracy and those of proletarian dictatorship. In practice, it not only helps the capitalist class in each individual country, encouraging the development of splits within the working class, but even shows the bourgeoisie how to carry out its programme of exploitation without unleashing the revolutionary force of the masses – and this in spite of the fact that the bourgeoisie is responsible for the complete destruction of the world economy and the subjugation of part of the world by the capitalist states who, as Entente members, won the war. Both reformists and centrists are frightened of the power of capital, but the Two-and-a-Half International differs from the Second International in that it is also afraid of clearly formulating its position in order not to lose once and for all its influence over the masses, who have been radicalised but are still politically naive. The basic political similarity between the reformists and centrists, finds its expression in their common defence of the Amsterdam Trade-Union International, this last stronghold of the international bourgeoisie. In those trade unions in which they still possess some influence, the centrists have joined the reformists and the trade-union bureaucracy in fighting the Communists; they have responded to the attempt of the Communists to revolutionise the trade unions by excluding them from membership. In these ways, the centrists have shown that they can rival the social democrats as leaders of the counter-revolution and as staunch opponents of proletarian struggle.

Now and in the future the Communist International must firmly oppose not only the Second International and the Amsterdam Trade-Union International, but also the Two-and-a-Half International. Only by giving daily examples of the unwillingness of the social democrats and centrists to fight either for the overthrow of capitalism or for the most basic and pressing demands of the working class can the Communist International destroy the influence these agents of the bourgeoisie have on the working class. This struggle can be brought to a successful conclusion only if the Party completely suppresses any centrist deviations in its ranks. In its daily practice the Communist International has to show that it is an International of Communist action and not just of Communist phraseology and theory. The Communist International is the only organisation of the international proletariat which can provide the principles and the leadership needed in the fight against capitalism. Internal cohesion and international leadership and activity must be improved so that the Communist International can achieve the goals set out in its statutes: “to organise joint action by the proletarians of different countries who are pursuing a single aim: the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of an international soviet republic. “

*On The 8th Anniversary of The Iraq War (Really 20th) A March 19th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website.

Markin comment:

In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)

I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
********
December 1, 2010

A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”

Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”

That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.