The Labor Party Question
In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That
Fights For A Workers Government
From The Pen Of Josh Breslin
Back in the early 1970s after they had
worked out between themselves the rudiment of what had gone wrong with the May
Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some
serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in
the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions, ill-conceived as they in
the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American
government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those
thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government.
All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a
round-up into the bastinado. Sam had been picked off in the round-up on
Pennsylvania Avenue as his group (his “affinity group” for the action) had been
on their way to “capture” the White House. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans
and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward
the Pentagon (they had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least
they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround it like had occurred
in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s
prize-winning book Armies Of The Night).
For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins
football team) had been the main holding area for those arrested and detained.
The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s
younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world”
political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and
in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all
that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time
and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in
Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions
when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection.
Sam, from Carver in Massachusetts, who
had been a late convert to the anti-war movement in 1969 after his closest high
school friend, Jeff Mullin, had been blown away in some jungle town in the
Central Highlands was like many late converts to a cause a “true believer,” had
taken part in many acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the
one in hometown Carver, federal buildings and military bases. From an
indifference, no that’s not right, from a mildly patriotic average young
American citizen that you could find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop
variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s,
he had become a long-haired bearded “hippie anti-warrior.” Not too long though
by the standards of “youth nation” of the day since he was running a small
print shop in Carver in order to support his mother and four younger sisters
after his father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965
which exempted him from military service. Not too short either since those
“squares” were either poor bastards who got tagged by the military and had to
wear their hair short an appearance which stuck out in towns like Cambridge,
Ann Arbor, Berkeley and L.A. when the anti-war movement started embracing the
increasingly frustrated and anti-war soldiers that they were beginning to run across or, worse,
cops before they got “hip” to the idea that guys wearing short hair, no beard,
looked like they had just taken a bath, and wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and
chinos might as well have a bulls-eye target on their backs surveilling the
counter-cultural crowd.
Ralph, from Troy, New York, had been
working in his father’s electrical shop which had major orders from General
Electric the big employer in the area when he got his draft notice and had
decided to enlist in order to avoid being an 11B, an infantryman, a grunt,
“cannon fodder,” although he would not have known to call it that at the time,
that would come later. He had expected to go into something which he knew
something about in the electrical field at least that is what the recruiting
sergeant in Albany had “promised” him. But in the year 1967 (and 1968 too since
he had extended his tour six months to get out of the service a little early)
what the military needed in Vietnam whatever else they might have needed was
“cannon fodder,” guys to go out into the bushes and kill commies. Simple as
that. And that was what Ralph Morris, a mildly patriotic average young American
citizen, no that is not right, a very patriotic average young American citizen
that you could also find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety
stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, did. But
see he got “religion” up there in Pleiku, up there in the bush and so when he
had been discharged from the Army in late 1969 he was in a rage against the
machine. Sure he had gone back to the grind of his father’s electrical shop but
he was out of place just then, out of sorts, needed to find an outlet for his
anger at what he had done, what had happened to buddies very close to him, what
buddies had done, and how the military had made them animals, nothing less.
(Ralph after his father retired would take over the electric shop business on
his own in 1991 and would thereafter give it to his son to take over after he
retired in 2011.)
One day he had gone to Albany on a job
for his father and while on State Street he had seen a group of guys in
mismatched military garb marching in the streets without talking, silent which
was amazing in itself from what he had previously seen of such marches and just
carrying a big sign-Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and nobody stopped
them, no cops, nobody, nobody yelled “commie” either or a lot of other macho
stuff that he and his hang out guys used to do in Troy when some peaceniks held
peace vigils in the square. The civilian on-lookers held their tongues that day
although Ralph knew that the whole area still retained a lot of residual
pro-war feeling just because America was fighting somewhere for something. He
parked his father’s truck and walked over to the march just to watch at first.
Some guy in a tattered Marine mismatched uniform wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers
in the march called out to the crowd for anybody who had served in Vietnam,
served in the military to join them shouting out their military affiliation as
they did so. Ralph almost automatically blurred out-“First Air Cav” and walked
right into the street. There were other First Air Cav guys there that day so he
was among kindred. So yeah, Ralph did a lot of actions with VVAW and with
“civilian” collectives who were planning more dramatic actions. Ralph always
would say later that if it hadn’t been for getting “religion” on the war issue
and doing all those political actions then he would have gone crazy, would have
wound up like a lot of guys he would see later at the VA, see out in the
cardboard box for a home streets, and would not until this day have supported
in any way he could, although lately not physically since his knee replacement,
those who had the audacity to march for the “good old cause.”
That is the back story of a
relationship has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal
times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even
the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was
happening in a world they did not crate, and were not asked about there were
plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer
world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Ralph had noticed
while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting
to be released, Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not
recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the
organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of
his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the
damn thing. That got them talking, talking well into the first night of their
captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply
entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy. Carver is
something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the
large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small
Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has
turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that
dots U.S. 495.) After a couple of days in the bastinado Sam and Ralph hunger,
thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard
that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some side
exits. They decided to surreptiously attempt an “escape” which proved
successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of letter, number and
state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading
toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days
later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence,
Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there
a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would
keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington
that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in
Cambridge to live in a commune Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the
summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem. Ralph did, although his
father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the
Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that.
So in the summer of 1971 Sam and Ralph
began to read that old time literature, although Ralph admitted he was not much
of a reader and some of the stuff was way over his head, Sam’s too. Mostly they
read socialist and communist literature, a little of the old IWW (Wobblie)
stuff since they both were enthrall to the exploits of the likes of Big Bill
Haywood out West which seemed to dominate the politics of that earlier time.
They had even for a time joined a loose study group sponsored by one of the myriad
“red collectives” that had sprung up like weeds in the Cambridge area. Both
thought it ironic at the time, and others who were questioning the direction
the “movement” was heading in stated the same thing when they were in the study
groups, that before that time in the heyday of their anti-war activity
everybody dismissed the old white guys (a term not in common use then like now)
like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their progeny as irrelevant. Now everybody was
glued to the books.
It was from that time that Sam and
Ralph got a better appreciation of a lot of the events, places, and
personalities from the old time radicals. Events like the start of May Day in
1886 as an international working class holiday which they had been clueless
about despite the May Day actions, the
Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolutions, August 1914 as
a watershed against war, the Communist International, those aforementioned
radicals Marx, Lenin, Trostky, adding in Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho whose names were
on everybody’s tongue (and on posters in every bedroom) even if the reason for
that was not known. Most surprising of all were the American radicals like
Haywood, Browder, Cannon, Foster, and others who nobody then, or almost nobody
cared to know about at all.
As they learned more information about
past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to
write appreciation of past events, places and personalities. His first effort
was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg,
and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in
January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior
college and the third not at all. After that he wrote various pieces like the
one below about the labor party question in the United States (leftist have always
posed their positions as questions; the women question, the black question, the
party question, the Russian question and so on so Sam decided to stick with the
old time usage.) Here is what he had to say then which he had recently freshly
updated. Sam told Ralph after he had read and asked if he was still a “true
believer” said a lot of piece he would still stand by today:
“These notes (expanded) were originally
intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum
on the question on Saturday August 4, 1972. They were updated for a study class
in 2012 recently again [2015] for this space. As a number of radicals have
noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the
fall bourgeois election settles [2014], regardless of who wins, the working
class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into
2016, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the
revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past
experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most
of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences,
particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American
Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work
of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the
scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not,
I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the
early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information
to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in
this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor Party
Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept
and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by
Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the
labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a
workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries
like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly
applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some
Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more
dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good
point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities,
women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two
algebraically-expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What
we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary
labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade
unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class)
fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an
expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a
term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off
the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined
revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need,
desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the
workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people
to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting
programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.
That program, the program that we as
revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes,
demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power.
Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get
people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the
available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the
banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home
foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more
demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many
efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way
back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later
efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become
the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of
Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various
European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All
those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and
the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor
movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of
the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber
barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was
the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society).
This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class,
the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging
from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW,
Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization
(party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for
working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW
Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website)
to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a
mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of
the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the
revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off
in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the
trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John
Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist
labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a
farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions
(breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely
intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder
(Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this
movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later
the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his
later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist
Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one,
not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American
Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass
base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this
organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from
class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for
Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement
of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by
leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to
form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American
Communist Party after 1936, except 1940, and even that is up for questioning,
would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the
Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers
Party essentially took the same stance.)
So much then for the historical aspects
of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for
revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James
P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can
revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a
revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To
pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes.
Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934
on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP
siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a
question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him
Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party
that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically
pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way
to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to
recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why
in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet
Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible
(mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the
Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade
union workers were.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody
else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out
of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that.
That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So
we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union
officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party.
That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is
about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American
Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above
there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a
labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands
of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are
small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies,
petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a
workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible,
especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences that some vague popular
frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League
that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds
of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting
for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President
Trumka [2012]made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had
too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night
before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While
at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front
with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of
pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my
final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the
1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small
revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate
in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power).
He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our
propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay)
government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the
labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor
expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their
memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will
take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary
instrument. Enough said.
