On Passing Left-Wing
Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
One of the worst
excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and
immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of
those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the
1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of
left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of
those thinkers, cadre and organizations who had come before us and whom were
disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just
ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The
expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but
serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too
late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then
current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously
inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of
organizing the struggle against the American beast.
I can remember more
than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I
and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking
part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became
heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be
Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the
Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the
right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in
this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and
revolutionary youth. Those two organizations then far too eager to traffic with
what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since
they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the
moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and
“old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those
nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know,
and I know that many others at the time,
had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious
disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was
irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all
our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting
loudly and vehemently from this or that
book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the
rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)
So it is always a
good thing when somebody comes by and says as part of the reason that he is
looking at something like the very mixed early history of the American
Communist Party (after the two previously separate communist organizations
merged when the serious differences were ironed out in the early 1920s), as
here in the book under review, that he is doing so to embrace the legacy of the
past of the left-wing movement. If not back then in the 1960s then now as a new
wind, maybe a new movement is beginning to take shape after decades of defeats
and disaffection, that is a very important reason to take a look at the early
history of the American Communist movement. Look back at a time when a
generation, or the best part of a generation, at least three generations
removed from today‘s young militants tried to bring off a working class
revolution in this country under the beacon of the October Revolution in
Russia.
Additionally any book
like The First Ten Years Of American Communism that features the role of James
P. Cannon, who in his time had the desire and the capacity to lead such a
revolution, is onto something important because he is one of the few figures
who was able to try to build the communist movement through the good offices of
the Communist International when that organization was in the business of
“fomenting” revolution and to break with the CI when it lost its moorings under
Stalin (and a few others, mainly his henchmen in the end) when it became an
adjunct of Soviet foreign policy. This book, and the books cited in the article
by Theodore Draper and others, including the key letters by Cannon to Draper in
the 1950s, is an important addition to those who want to carry on that early
tradition and know what it was like when men and women fought for revolution
for real. I am not sure we of the older generation would have been able to
learn anything from such a book but today’s left-wing militants surely
can.
