Remembering Malcolm and Manning-By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

Remembering Malcolm and Manning-Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.
By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2011

And finally, I am deeply grateful to the real Malcolm X, the man behind the myth, who courageously challenged and transformed himself, seeking to achieve a vision of a world without racism. Without erasing his mistakes and contradictions, Malcolm embodies a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured. -- Manning Marable, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, 2011, 493
Professor Manning Marable was a member of the Political Science and Sociology Departments at Purdue University during the 1986-87 academic year. His scholarship, activism, and ground-breaking books and articles inspired faculty and students even though his stay at our university was brief. His classic theoretical work, "How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America," along with over 20 books and hundreds of articles, inspired social science scholarship on class, race, and gender.

His weekly essays, "Along the Color Line," were published in over 250 community newspapers and magazines for years. He once told me that writing for concerned citizens about public issues was the most rewarding work he ever did. He was a role model for all young, concerned and committed scholar/activists. -- Harry Targ, Purdue University Black Cultural Center Newsletter, April, 2011
I just finished reading the powerful biography of Malcolm X authored by Manning Marable. My encounter with this book was as fixating and transforming as I remember was my reading of Malcolm’s autobiography in the 1960s.

While I lack the deep sense of Malcolm X’s impact on African American politics and cultural identity that others have, I feel compelled to write something about this reading experience. (Bill Fletcher’s review and analysis of the Marable biography provides much expertise on the subject. “Manning Marable and the Malcolm X Biography Controversy: A Response to Critics," from The Black Commentator, July 7, 2011.)

During my first year at Purdue University in north central Indiana in 1968, I requested to teach a course called “Contemporary Political Problems.” Since I was on the cusp of becoming a political activist in belated response to the civil rights and anti-war movements, I thought I could use this course to have an extended conversation with students about where we needed to be going intellectually and politically.

My plan was to assign a series of books that reflected different left currents, politically and culturally, and get us all to reflect on their value for understanding 1968 America and what to do about it. We read Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Herbert Marcuse, the Port Huron and Weatherman statements, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

While my students and I embraced, endorsed, or rejected various of these authors, we were profoundly impacted by the power of Malcolm X’s personal biography and transformations from the streets to the international arena. As the word got out about the course, and largely because of Malcolm X, sectors of the Purdue campus got the word that there was a new “radical” in the political science department. Therefore, I owe my growing enrollments to Malcolm X.

More important, during the second semester in which I taught the course, I had a very quiet and respectful African American student in the class. He was a member of Purdue’s track team. One day, after he showed up at the local airport sporting a very thin, almost invisible, mustache the track coach ordered him off the plane. Why? Because he had unauthorized facial hair. His modest symbolic act, growing the mustache, set off extended protest activities over several weeks.

Shortly before this incident, we had spent a couple of weeks in class discussing Malcolm X’s autobiography. During one class period this very quiet person announced to the rest of us that we should consider ourselves lucky that he chose to participate in this class.

I saw him 40 years later for a fleeting moment. He remembered me and said that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography for the first time in my class. The student’s emerging boldness and his articulated sense of pride must have had something to do with his reading of Malcolm X.

Reflecting on the Marable biography, I was struck by the capacity of people to change their ways of thinking, their ideologies, and their practice. Marable attributes some of Malcolm X’s development to his conscious desire to reinvent himself and to do so as he told his life story to Alex Haley, his autobiographical collaborator.

Despite the world of racism, repression, and theological rigidity Malcolm experienced, Marable records how Malcolm X’s experience and practical political work were in fact transforming.

Different people gleaned different things from reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, and the same is true of a reading of Manning Marable’s stirring and frank biography. While those of us on the left were most inspired by the last two years of Malcolm X’s life, my student was probably impacted as much by Malcolm’s developing sense of pride and self-worth in a society that demeaned and ridiculed people of color

Reading Malcolm and Marable reminds us that, while we bring change through our organizational affiliations, each individual can have a role to play in achieving that change. Not all of us can be Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Dolores Huerta, or Mother Jones. But we can make a difference.

In addition, Manning Marable makes a particularly strong case for Malcolm X as an internationalist. The United Nations had adopted a Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 but human rights discourse was not part of the language of international relations until Malcolm X demanded the international community address the issue.

For Malcolm X, United States racism, while violating the civil rights of its Black and Brown citizens, was also violating the fundamental human rights of peoples at home and abroad. At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X was working to build a coalition of largely former colonial states to demand that each and every country, and particularly the United States, respect the human rights of all peoples. Multiple problems including racism, poverty, disease, hunger, political repression, and sexual abuse were problems at the root of twentieth century human circumstance AND the United States was a major violator of human rights.

Marable describes in great detail Malcolm X’s frenetic travels through Africa and the Middle East to build a coalition of Black and Brown peoples to demand in the United Nations and every other political forum the establishment of human rights. Bombing Vietnamese people and killing Black children in Birmingham were part of the same problem.

And, this campaign was being launched at the very same time that the countries of the Global South were struggling to construct a non-aligned movement to retake the resources, wealth, and human dignity that had been stripped from peoples by colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. This was the position that Dr. Martin Luther King came to in 1967, as articulated in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York. Malcolm X was introducing this global human rights project in 1964.

Marable’s Malcolm X therefore transformed himself from a minor street hustler, to a Black Muslim, to a visible world leader advocating a global human rights agenda. This is the Malcolm X that has meant so much to us over the years, along with his insistence that Black and Brown people be accorded respect everywhere and that they should honor and respect themselves.

But, Marable carefully documents Malcolm X’s flaws as well as his strengths. He was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, not unsympathetic to violence, and a man engaged in intense, some times petty, political struggles with his organizational colleagues.

Manning Marable humanizes Malcolm X. Humanizing our heroes makes our efforts to pass the messages and symbols of the past to newer generations of activists more convincing. Young people do not need to see progressive heroes as untainted by their own humanity. And when we present those who make a contribution to building a better world to new generations, the examples of their flaws make it clear that no one is beyond personal and political redemption.

Finally, the biographer, Manning Marable, as my statement at the outset suggests, was a profoundly important scholar/activist. Marable used his historical knowledge, social scientific analytical skills, and political values to craft a career of writing and activism that impacted his students, his academic colleagues, and his fellow socialists in the struggle for a better world.

Telling Malcolm X’s story was Marable’s way of advocating for fundamental social change in a deeply troubled world.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:
BOOKS / Tony Bouza: Manning Marable's 'Malcolm X' / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2011

The Rag Blog

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- September 1970

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
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Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus

The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—Riazanov Library

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Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue (the Campus Work Stoppage Committee article):

As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for a labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.

The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.

Additional comment on SDS and Women’s Liberation:

There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncriticized by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.

The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity, have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- "Socialism And Technology"

Workers Vanguard No. 983
8 July 2011

Socialism and Technology

(Quote of the Week)

In the wake of the Japanese nuclear disaster, much of the left calls for shutting down nuclear power plants, echoing the antitechnology nostrums of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois environmentalists. Addressing the needs of the planned economy of the former Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky stressed that the all-round, qualitative development of industry and technology, which is arrested and distorted under the capitalist profit system, is essential for socialist construction.

We must not destroy technology. The proletariat has taken over the factories equipped by the bourgeoisie in that state in which the revolution found them. The old equipment is still serving us to this day. This fact most graphically and directly shows us that we do not renounce the “heritage.” How could it be otherwise? After all, the revolution was undertaken, first and foremost, in order to get possession of that heritage.

However, the old technology, in the form in which we took it over, is quite unsuitable for socialism. It constitutes a crystallization of the anarchy of capitalist economy. Competition between different enterprises, chasing after profits, unevenness of development between different branches of the economy, backwardness of certain areas, parcelization of agriculture, plundering of human forces: all this finds in technology its expression in iron and brass. But while the machinery of class oppression can be smashed by a revolutionary blow, the productive machinery that existed under capitalist anarchy can be reconstructed only gradually. The completion of the restoration period, on the basis of the old equipment, has only brought us to the threshold of this tremendous task. We must carry it through at all costs.

—Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism” (3 February 1926), reprinted in Problems of Everyday Life (1973)

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Germany: Greens’ Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Amnesties Capitalism

Markin comment:

In a long left-wing political career I have held several pet peeves of shorter or longer duration. You know things like people at parties, very respectable parties now, going on and on about how forty years ago they gave the best two years of their lives to “the revolution” before scurrying off to find the “main chance,” some professional or academic career. Well, I don’t burn over that peeve as much as I used but I do however still burn over the subject of this article-the uses or opposition to uses of nuclear energy as a power source, now or in our communist future although the axis shifts somewhat on that latter turn of events.

My problem with anti-nuclear energy types without sounding like some boorish redneck on the question is that, to a person, they do not live in tents, to a person do not live on two dollars a day, christ, they cannot go to the corner convenience store without spending a hundred dollars, and to a person have the possibilities to decide whether they want to go “back to nature,” or not. I might add, that to a person, or almost, they have followed every twist and turn of American Cold War (and now-post Cold War) reliance on a vast nuclear arsenal to deter friend or foe without a murmur. Of course, opposition to nuclear weapons would mean taking on the state power and, oh well, that might be just a little tricky. The point is that now, in the short future, and certainly in our communist future all energy options should remain open as the fossil fuels dwindle or become prohibitively expensive.

Now I know as well as anyone that nuclear power plants run on the profit motive are subject to safety concerns, rightly places concerns. I would argue that our tasks around this issue are essentially negative though. We don’t, and don’t want to, make energy policy for the bourgeoisie but we have a stake in demanding higher safety standards, and more importantly, having worker committees that can shut nuclear plants down for safety problems. That is our real axis of struggle.

For the future an international workers government would decide, for or against, uses of any particular energies, and the placement of any particular plants. While I am agnostic on the actual plans that might come up I do know one thing I would argue, argue strenuously, against putting any nuclear power plants under today’s technological conditions anywhere near earthquake-ridden Japan.
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Workers Vanguard No. 983
8 July 2011

Germany:Greens’ Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Amnesties Capitalism

The following excerpted article is translated from Spartakist No. 188 (May 2011), newspaper of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Almost four months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan, some 2,500 workers and engineers are still struggling to stabilize three crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Although the full extent of the damage remains unknown, Tokyo for the first time early last month acknowledged that fuel rods in three reactors had probably melted through their inner containment vessels. According to state officials, the amount of radiation released in the first week was more than twice the original estimate.

With the crisis still unresolved, the Japanese government has abandoned plans to expand its nuclear power industry and may forego it altogether. Several European countries are following suit. On June 30, the Bundestag (German parliament) voted to close all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022, making it the first major nation with a nuclear industry to completely renounce the technology in years.

As in Germany and elsewhere following the disaster in Japan, much of the reformist left in the U.S. echoed petty-bourgeois environmental groups in beating the drums of opposition to nuclear power. In a Socialist Worker article titled “The Nightmare That Could Happen Here” (31 March), the International Socialist Organization opined, “The potential exists to build a new vibrant anti-nuclear movement here in the U.S.” For their part, the fake Trotskyists of Socialist Action headlined their March 18 article on the Japan crisis “No More Nukes!” The pretensions of these organizations to socialism are once again shown to be so much hot air. Playing to the antitechnology prejudices of the “green” milieu, they hope to conjure up another “movement” premised on the continuation of the capitalist profit system, which sacrifices safety for the bottom line and blocks the rational, full development of technology.

* * *

Millions of people around the world are gazing anxiously toward Fukushima, where power plant workers are risking their lives in a struggle to prevent further explosions that would release yet more radioactive material from the nuclear facility. Many people are concerned over the safety of nuclear power plants in their own countries. Workers experience daily in their own workplaces how speedup is intensified and on-the-job safety undermined by the drive for profits. It’s not hard for them to imagine that the capitalists run their nuclear power plants much the same way. While power companies and capitalist governments claim that nuclear plants are safe, and they may even institute a few safety controls in the hope of calming people down, environmental organizations are beating the drum against nuclear technology and praising “alternative energy sources” such as wind turbines as a replacement for nuclear power.

Some of the most virulent reaction is to be found in Germany. As soon as the catastrophe in Japan became known, nationwide “warning vigils” were organized against nuclear power. On March 12, more than 50,000 people formed a 27-mile-long human chain from the Neckar-Westheim nuclear plant to Stuttgart to protest the extension of operating licenses granted last fall to the seven oldest nuclear reactors by the CDU/FDP [Christian Democrat/Free Democrat] coalition government led by Angela Merkel. A three-month moratorium on license extensions for nuclear power plants was intended to provide a little breathing space for the government and the energy bosses, until fear in Germany—which in some places had risen to hysteria—receded. In the March 27 elections to state parliaments in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, the Greens doubled their voting totals.

The petty-bourgeois anti-nuclear movement, with the reformist left in its wake, is channeling rage away from the capitalists, blaming nuclear power itself and, beyond that, modern large-scale industry. In this way, the reformists assist in solidifying capitalist rule, ultimately increasing the danger they claim to be fighting. At the same time, the nuclear weapons arsenals in the hands of the major imperialist powers could extinguish life on earth many times over—this is the main threat to the existence of mankind. Fukushima is a nuclear accident caused by the capitalists’ drive for profits, their corruption and irresponsibility. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the calculated mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people, carried out by “democratic” U.S. imperialism.

While the environmental movement may at times rightly protest against crimes of capitalism, nonetheless there is nothing inherently leftist or progressive about environmentalism. In Germany today, it stretches from anti-racist groups like Ökolinx through the bourgeois Greens right into the fascist National Democratic Party (NPD), which also calls for abandoning nuclear power. The Green Party itself was constructed in the late 1970s by demoralized ex-leftists who had turned away from the working class and sought their political fortunes in the petty-bourgeois environmental protests. The ideology of the ecology movement sees modern industry and technology as the root of all evil. It looks to the past and is hostile to science. The Green milieu is permeated by and overlaps with esoteric cultism, practitioners of “alternative medicine” and other such backward nonsense. An example is the Greens’ Renate Künast, who as Federal Minister [for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture] advocated using homeopathic sugar globules in farming.

Our Marxist perspective is diametrically opposed to this. It is capitalist property relations that are the problem. Capitalist competition means that any efforts in the direction of “sustainability” and “friendliness to the environment” that result in additional costs bring with them the threat of bankruptcy. Factories do not produce goods according to need but in quantities that can be sold at a profit. It is necessary to overthrow capitalism through socialist revolution, in which the working class seizes power and expropriates the capitalist class. Only when the productive forces are placed in the service of all humanity will it be possible to develop those forces through science and technology to the point where hunger and poverty become a thing of the past; this improved technology will of course also alleviate the destruction of the environment.

Anti-Nuclear Power: The Left Signs Up

Sections of the SPD [Social Democrats], which was originally a strong advocate of nuclear power plant construction during the chancellorships of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, are now calling for Germany to abandon nuclear power. The Left Party [composed mainly of ex-Stalinists and former SPDers] is attempting to portray itself as the most determined opponent of atomic power. It is fishing among the rank and file of the environmental movements, many of whom are quite disillusioned with the Greens themselves, implicitly accusing the Greens of opportunism for not having pushed through the abandonment of nuclear power in 1998-2005, when they were governing the country in coalition with the SPD.

This criticism is not from the left. The supposed opportunism of the Greens is an expression of the fact that their “back to nature” program is a reactionary utopia. Without industry, the majority of mankind would simply starve to death. It is reactionary to reproach the Greens for not having actually made their program a reality. Here the Left Party casts a lustful eye at the next federal elections, offering its services to the Greens as a potential coalition partner in an SPD/Green/Left Party government after 2013.

Some 250,000 people attended the March 26 mobilizations held in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich under the slogan “Shut down all nuclear power plants!” They were organized through a trans-class popular front consisting of environmental organizations and the Greens as well as the Left Party along with parts of the SPD and the DGB trade-union federation. The aim was to channel the justifiable anger away from the capitalist state and the profit-driven corporations and direct it onto a parliamentary course.

A more leftist example of spreading illusions is the Workers Power Group (Gruppe Arbeitermacht, GAM), German section of the League for a Fifth International. In the April issue of its journal Neue Internationale the GAM observes that radioactive contamination from the nuclear incident at Fukushima was a true tragedy “because it was preventable, not simply a natural catastrophe, but rather must be placed fully at the door of capitalism.” Simultaneously, the GAM capitulates to the Greens and the Left Party, asserting that the problem was technology itself: “The events surrounding Fukushima show that atomic power presents an insurmountable risk.” This is only to conclude: “Fukushima demonstrates that the modern productive forces, that development can benefit all human society only if the rule of capital and its state is broken. The alternative to nuclear power is not just wind and sun, but socialism!”

The GAM’s gyrations become much more comprehensible when you take a look at the front page of the April Neue Internationale: “Switch Off Black-Yellow!” [referring to the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Free Democrats]. In the state elections the GAM had warned that “not voting helps Mappus” [CDU premier of Baden-Württemberg] and called to “vote for the Left Party—but organize struggle!” (Neue Internationale, March 2011). This makes clear how the GAM intends to institute “workers’ control over the energy industry”: via a “left” parliamentary, i.e., capitalist, SPD/Green government, preferably with the participation of the Left Party.

Such leftists have adapted to and deepened the massive retrogression of political consciousness stemming from the destruction of the Soviet Union. They stand opposed even to Marxism’s elementary vision of progress: the worldwide elimination of hunger and poverty through the all-sided development of the productive forces.

In the face of this farce we reaffirm what we wrote in “Nuclear Power and the Workers Movement” (Kommunistische Korrespondenz No. 18, May 1977, the predecessor to Spartakist [also printed in WV No. 146, 25 February 1977]):

“As Marxists we generally strongly support the introduction of new technology, including the development, construction and operation of nuclear fission reactors. Certainly proponents of a socialist society based on material abundance have a vastly different viewpoint on this subject than ecological crackpots who in effect seek a return to pre-industrial society. At the same time we point out that the economic advisibility of nuclear fission power can only be judged within the framework of an internationally planned socialist economy.

“There are very real problems of safety connected with nuclear reactors. As throughout industry, we demand union control of working conditions and, where there are specific hazards, action to shut down dangerous facilities. But beyond this we have no particular interest in determining how the bourgeoisie meets its energy needs. Those who assume that ‘wide public discussion’ within the framework of capitalist rule will satisfactorily resolve this question are guilty of sowing the worst utopian/reactionarypacifist illusions.”

Raw Materials and Self-Sufficiency

There was turmoil in Germany when Russia turned off the spigot of natural gas to Ukraine in the winter of 2006 after Ukraine refused to pay the higher natural gas prices imposed by Russia in retaliation for Ukraine’s tilting to the West. It was in this context that Hermann Scheer, the SPD’s spokesman on energy questions and winner of the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” articulated an encapsulation of bourgeois “alternative” energy strategies in a 9 January 2007 interview on German radio:

“In 1950 in Germany, 5 percent of our energy consumption depended on imports. Today, this figure is around 75 percent and it is much the same for other countries. This is related to the fact that there simply aren’t that many countries where petroleum, natural gas, coal or uranium can be extracted, while the need for energy is universal. The logical conclusion is that one can escape this trap of energy dependence only through a comprehensively devised mobilization of renewable energies, so as to replace fossil fuels and nuclear energy.”

This explains why the SPD/Green government decided to abandon nuclear energy in 2002 as it pursued a more independent course vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism (for example, its rejection of the 2003 Iraq war).

The capitalist great powers strive to increase their self-sufficiency so as to be less subject to blackmail and to maintain a stronger position in the world market and in the struggle for resources. The heyday of nuclear power plant construction was the 1970s, in the wake of the oil crisis of late 1973, when the capitalists aimed to decrease dependence on imported oil. In addition, domestic German coal extraction became less and less profitable and oil reserves were declining in the U.S., while Japan and France possessed hardly any domestic resources from which to generate energy.

How the Bourgeois State Serves the Capitalists

In “Corruption, Cronyism, Fukushima” (31 March), Spiegel online gives examples of how the state and businesses are intertwined. There are 20,000 instances documented by the Japanese government of a civil servant shifting over to the private sector following retirement and “then frequently working for a company that he had previously regulated as a civil servant.” TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant] knew how to make “optimal” use of such connections to maximize profit. In the ’80s and ’90s TEPCO repeatedly falsified data from inspections, including the number of cracks in reactor containment vessels. [For more information see “Japan Tsunami Disaster and Capitalist Criminality” (WV No. 978, 15 April)].

Germany (or the U.S., etc.) is no different. The nuclear incident in Block A of [utility giant] RWE’s Biblis power plant in 1987 demonstrates the same intertwining of regulatory authority and the nuclear industry in Germany. When the reactor was powered up on 16 December 1987, a cooling system ventilator, which had been opened during the three-day shutdown to discharge the remaining heat, failed to close. It took over 15 hours for the problem to be noticed. Even then the reactor was not shut down immediately, as the situation demanded, since this would have meant writing off at least a day of production at full power. In addition, there was the possibility of the authorities getting riled up. Instead, an attempt was made to shut the valve while the reactor was running, causing 300°C [572°F] radioactive water from the primary cooling system to spurt at high pressure outside the reactor containment vessel. It was extremely fortunate that a second safety valve didn’t seize up like the first one and closed after seven seconds.

The [Hessian Environmental] Ministry and government investigators kept the matter secret for nearly a year. Only thanks to research by the U.S. technical journal Nucleonics Week was the fact exposed that Biblis had risked a leak of a type that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a 1975 study had determined would cause the system to fail, “initiating a core meltdown and the escape of radioactivity outside the containment.”

The 2007 Greenpeace report “Black Book on Obstacles to Climate Protection—The Intertwining of Politics and the Energy Industry” names ten members of the Bundestag with seats on either the advisory or the supervisory board of the five largest German energy companies, among them the SPD and CDU/CSU spokesmen for energy questions. Twenty-eight former politicians or top governmental regulators are currently working for the large energy companies.

Reformist Illusions in the Bourgeois State

The intertwining of state and business is not peculiar to Japan or Germany, nor is it limited to energy companies. Rather it is an expression of the class character of the bourgeois state. In The State and Revolution (1917) Lenin explains the teachings of Marx and Engels regarding the state:

“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, ‘the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital.’…

“In a democratic republic, Engels continues, ‘wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely,’ first, by means of the ‘direct corruption of officials’ (America); secondly, by means of an ‘alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange’ (France and America).”

First, capitalist governments shifted the costs of the ongoing financial crisis caused by the banks onto the shoulders of working people. The lust for profits of concerns like TEPCO as well as state corruption then endangered the existence of millions of Japanese. Faced with such a state of affairs, the Left Party sees a “danger” that workers’ and leftists’ illusions in bourgeois democracy might suffer some “erosion.” Left Party leader Gregor Gysi opined in a speech in the Bundestag (March 17):

“In the past year, during the financial crisis, everyone could see how the speculators and heads of the banks were dominating events and politics.... Only if politics can acquire the courage and the power to breach the dominance of these speculators, bank heads, nuclear power and other industry lobbyists and secure the primacy of democratic institutions will we be acting for our population, will we save our democracy and live up to our function as representatives of the people in the Bundestag!”

Well, the state governments in which the Left Party participates, as in Berlin and Brandenburg, are no less servile to capitalism. These capitalist governments guarantee the “dominance” of the banks and industry. In Berlin, the SPD/Left Party [city] Senate bailed out the Berlin Bankgesellschaft bank, which cronyism and speculation had driven into bankruptcy, at the expense of the working people, ripping up contracts, slashing wages and eliminating public services.

And when there’s resistance, then the core of the state—the “special armed bodies,” i.e., the police, army and prisons—are employed. This is seen in attacks on picket lines, as occurred recently in France in the oil refinery strikes that were protesting the assault on pensions, or the bludgeoning of leftist demonstrators to clear the way for a Nazi mobilization, as happened repeatedly in Berlin under the SPD/Left Party Senate.

Profits at the Expense of Safety

At Fukushima Daiichi 450 workers, mostly unskilled and hired through subcontractors, are risking their lives to fight a catastrophe for which the TEPCO bosses are responsible. As of April 1, 21 workers had been subjected to excessive radiation with more to follow, since, according to the government, it will take months before the power plant is sealed off. For decades, nuclear firms have employed low-wage contract workers. This has been spurred on by privatization and, in Europe, the intensified competition deriving from the liberalization of the European Union energy market. Die Zeit (31 March) wrote that hundreds of temporary workers died of radiation sickness in the ’70s in Japan.

In Germany, there are 23,000 contract workers employed in this field. In 1985, in his well-known book Ganz unten [Rock Bottom], Günter Wallraff, who had disguised himself as a Turkish “guest worker,” described his experiences as Ali Levant Sigirioglu. As we wrote in “Turkish Workers in the German Fourth Reich” (WV No. 399, 14 March 1986):

“The final act in Wallraff’s career as Ali came when friends of his made entrepreneur Vogel [an SPD member] a fake offer to see just how far he would go. Six Turks were supposedly needed to repair equipment in a power plant poisoned by escaping radioactive fumes. To avoid a scandal only Turks who would soon be returning to Turkey could be chosen so they would not die in West Germany. Vogel had no qualms accepting this deal, demonstrating that West German capitalists would kill foreign workers in order to make a profit.”

Wallraff accused the nuclear concerns of sending mostly ethnic Turkish contract workers “into radiation” where they were “consumed like fuel.” A report by former nuclear workers in the Berliner Zeitung (8 January 1999) confirms that this is common practice.

Training specialists is costly, and the trained specialists are themselves expensive. Thus, as few specialists as possible are hired, with barely trained and unskilled laborers left to do the dangerous hands-on work. All of these are employed by subsidiaries. Even under “normal” operating conditions, this is often fatal for the workers, but it generates a fountain of profits. If, however, there is a breakdown in the highly complex nuclear plants, as now in Fukushima, it paves the way for catastrophes. There is no competent, well-rehearsed team, one that knows what has to be done, with sufficient numbers to reduce the radiation health risk by frequently rotating workers.

Far from being an “anomaly,” these conditions make evident the regular workings of capitalism. In Volume One of Capital, Karl Marx explains:

“Après moi le déluge! [After me, the deluge!] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.”

Since this was written in 1867, free competition led to the forming of monopolies, to monopoly capitalism. As analyzed by Lenin, domestic monopolies intensify competition on the world market, i.e., they reproduce and intensify the contradictions of capitalism.

Despite not being all that numerous, energy workers possess enormous social power. The trade unions must lead a struggle for the companies to make contract workers regular employees and for their appropriate training and remuneration as well as lifelong health care. The dangerous lack of specialists and the reduction in regular fixed staff must be fought through class struggle. Such a struggle would generate strong support in the working class, which has the greatest interest in the safety of power plants, especially nuclear plants. But the trade-union tops at BCE [Mining, Chemistry, Energy Industrial Union] and ver.di [public employees union], in which nuclear workers are organized, instead pursue a policy of class collaboration. Again and again, BCE has issued statements jointly with capitalist associations calling for maintaining “competitiveness” and “Production-Site Germany.”

The union misleaders limit the workers’ demands to what is “acceptable” to declining, rotting capitalism. The fight for basic needs must be linked to the struggle for expropriation of the energy concerns without compensation. This must be part of the fight for a socialist revolution to establish an internationally planned economy under the control of workers councils. Only then, based on an international division of labor, will it be possible to consider whether it is really necessary to construct nuclear power plants in thickly settled earthquake zones like Japan.

Pacifism Disarms the Workers, Not the Capitalists

In his March 17 response in the Bundestag to Chancellor Merkel’s governmental statement on the conclusions to be drawn from the events in Japan, Gregor Gysi stated: “Anyone having at his disposal the technology for the peaceful use of atomic energy and the ability to produce electric current from nuclear plants is also potentially capable of producing nuclear weapons.... The examples of Iran and North Korea demonstrate that these dangers have not been eliminated. Consistent initial steps must be taken toward finally destroying all the nuclear weapons in the world. Only then will the international community have the right to ban the production of new nuclear weapons worldwide.”

We’ve been hearing such disarmament appeals since the “peace” movement of the 1980s. As against the appeals of the pacifists for the Soviet Union to carry out nuclear self-disarmament, we were damn glad that the Soviet Union had developed, produced and had at the ready the atom bomb. Otherwise, U.S. imperialism would certainly have made a horrific reality of its atomic first-strike scenarios—that was the message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hatred for the Soviet Union sprang from its class character as a workers state that continued to embody the gains of the 1917 October Revolution despite the degeneration it underwent under Stalin starting in late 1923. This is equally true of China and North Korea today, which escaped nuclear incineration in the 1950s, as called for at the time by U.S. generals, only thanks to the existence of the Soviet nuclear shield. The destruction of the Soviet Union by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92 has made the world a much more dangerous place for the oppressed. The imperialists can now tromp around on the neocolonial oppressed peoples of the world unhindered by the Soviet military counterweight. Having starved Iraq since 1991, bombed it flat and finally bloodily occupied it in 2003, the imperialists now have Iran in their crosshairs for supposedly intending to develop nuclear weapons. The example of Iraq, which could be leveled because it possessed no weapons of mass destruction, is instructive: Iran needs nuclear weapons to ward off invasion by the imperialists.

The fundamental basis of pacifism is support to capitalism. It disarms only the working class and the oppressed, never the capitalist class. In fact, it actually contributes to the preparation for war, through spreading the illusion that capitalism can be made peaceable. This is also shown by the example of the Greens, who like to put on a show as saviors of mankind and the environment. In their coalition government with the SPD in 1999, they pushed through German participation in the NATO war against Serbia, followed in 2001 by participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. Incidentally, among the weapons raining death and destruction down on the Serbian population were shells made of depleted uranium. Today, the Greens are some of the most vehement warmongers against Libya, advocating sending in the Bundeswehr [German army].

Anti-Communist Hysteria Over Chernobyl

Even today, in the reactions to Fukushima one can discern reflections of the anti-Communist arrogance toward the [1986] Chernobyl nuclear accident, which was dismissed essentially as the result of the incapacity of the “backward Soviets” and their planned economy, which had built an unsafe type of reactor. Federal chancellor Merkel remarked in her March 17 statement that the situation had changed because “the seemingly impossible had become possible in such a highly developed country as Japan.”

Basically the imperialist powers believed their own fairy tale that Western reactors were much safer and that something of this sort was impossible in the highly developed nuclear power plants of the West. At the time of Chernobyl, they deliberately overlooked the fact that this was not the first major accident in a nuclear power plant. On 28 March 1979 there was a partial core meltdown in a “highly developed country,” the U.S., at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Whereas opponents of nuclear power let the March 28 anniversary pass by, major mobilizations are being planned for the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl reactor disaster.

After Fukushima, Iouli Andreev, who was for years responsible for the decontamination work around the stricken Chernobyl reactor, made the obvious point that nuclear plant operators have intentionally ignored the lessons from Chernobyl in their hunt for profits and that the government encouraged them. In “Ten Years of Chernobyl,” he wrote:

“Both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ [Soviet] reactor technology demonstrate strengths and weaknesses: The strength of the Eastern technology lies in the fact that both material-intensive construction and highly trained staff were inexpensive. The result is robust technical facilities with a low degree of automation. This must be viewed positively, as highly trained people are always preferable to robots, as exemplified in air travel, where even today planes are still being flown by pilots. Lack of quality control must be seen as the weak side of Eastern technology. Compared to this, Western reactor technology has developed under the limiting framework of economic competition, with high costs for both personnel and technical components. The result is less robust facilities with a higher degree of automation and fewer skilled personnel.”

But lack of quality control was the direct expression of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet regime. Only a regime of workers democracy can ensure the necessary safety and work morale. The reaction to the catastrophe testified both to the possibilities of a planned economy and also to its bureaucratic deformation. Over 600,000 engineers, scientists and soldiers were marshaled to deal with the radioactive pollution around the sealed reactor. But Andreev is probably right that the large number of deaths could have been avoided had the other three reactor blocks at the facility not been restarted and if technically well-prepared cleanup work had been carried out after more time had passed.

One of the arguments of Western “experts” was always that reactors like Chernobyl had no secondary reactor safety vessel. But New York physicist Michio Kaku remarked in a talk on Chernobyl (reprinted in WV No. 405, 6 June 1986): “Well, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant in Long Island has a containment structure which is weaker than the containment structure at Chernobyl. The reactor there has a containment—not the four-foot concrete dome characteristic in U.S. plants, it has a structure which can contain 57 pounds per square inch overpressure.” The Long Island reactor, he said, could withstand only 30 pounds.

So-called third-generation reactors have been in operation since the 1990s in Japan. In contrast to second-generation reactors like that in Fukushima and most other commercial nuclear power plants, they depend on so-called passive safety devices based on physical principles (gravity, convection, resistance to high temperatures), not on technological safety controls that depend on electrical power or operator intervention to avoid a catastrophe in the event of a malfunction. They possess, for example, the capability of a controlled burn-off of accumulated hydrogen, thereby averting explosions like those in Fukushima. Additionally, in the light of the rescue operations after Chernobyl, so-called core-catchers were developed that, in the event of a core meltdown, catch the hot material and cool it down. In Chernobyl, such a core-catcher was constructed beneath the devastated reactor using an underground tunnel. Fortunately, it proved unnecessary.

As of now, there exists only a single nuclear power plant equipped with such a core-catcher, and it is in China. China is now being subjected to an anti-Communist attack for having decided to massively expand its nuclear capacity in mid March as part of its five-year plan; at the same time, it is disparaged as the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide.

In the case of China, and previously the Soviet Union and East Germany (DDR), the Greens’ and the environmentalists’ anti-Communism and hostility to large industry and centralism come together on the basis of their glorification of bourgeois democracy. Every five-year plan that expanded these countries’ industrial capacity filled these types with horror. This is why they cooperated in fueling the Chernobyl hysteria in 1986. Following German reunification, as a spearhead of the witchhunt against the Stasi [secret service], the Greens assisted in the smashing of DDR industry by the Treuhand [privatization agency]. This led to massive unemployment in East Germany and the emigration of over a million people. Now they’re in the vanguard in the anti-Communist witchhunting of China.

The Question of Final Storage

A further prevalent argument against nuclear power plants is the question of nuclear waste and its final disposal. In this question of ultimate storage, profit and irrationality distort what is basically a geological/technical question. Such distrust of capitalist governments and companies is rightly indicated by the more than 40-year-old “trial repository” in the former salt mine Asse II near Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony. Following a report in the Braunschweiger Zeitung (11 June 2008) of brine contaminated with radioactivity in Asse, a status report by the then-Federal environmental minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) revealed that it had been known, even before the first nuclear waste was deposited in the former mine, that it was not watertight. Nonetheless, from 1967 to 1978 126,000 barrels were deposited, some of them damaged in loading and others rusted through. Since at least 1988, water has been gushing into the mineshafts, and since about 1994 radioactive brine has been collecting there, which ultimately the facility’s operator secretly pumped out underground. There is a threat of collapse, and no one can say whether some of this brine might at some time reach the outside.

This has fueled ongoing protests since plans were revealed in 1977 for a new final repository in Gorleben in Lower Saxony. Since 1995 there have been regular protests against the Castor [casks of radioactive material] transports from the French spent fuel treatment plant La Hague to the temporary Gorleben repository, whose suitability as a final repository is still being investigated. As many as 30,000 police were mobilized to escort the transports and bludgeon nuclear power opponents and residents of neighboring localities who had blocked the way in protest. The workers movement must, of course, defend the protesters against state terror. But even a planned economy would in all probability require ultimate storage facilities, if only to store already existing wastes. These could, however, in the absence of corruption and the demand for profitability, be set up in a way that took into account the interests and opinions of the local population.

In Germany, compared to the 123,000 cubic meters of radioactive nuclear waste generated so far, 500,000 cubic meters of toxic chemical waste are produced per year, which has to be deposited in final repositories. In contrast to radioactive waste, the potential danger of toxic chemical waste does not decrease with time. Whether or not it’s radioactive, the capitalists don’t give a damn what happens to their waste.

Opponents of nuclear power cite Greenpeace to the effect that there’s only enough uranium for 60 years of production. But even if this were true, using fast breeder reactors it is possible to split uranium 238, the majority of which is now being discarded unused. Thorium, which exists in much larger deposits than uranium, could be employed for the production of nuclear energy. Fast breeders also produce noticeably less nuclear waste than second- and third-generation reactors. Finally, the technological realization of nuclear fusion, such as occurs in the sun, is also being researched. Fusion holds the promise of an abundant source of power whose by-product is helium, a harmless noble gas.

Nuclear energy—whether generated by fission or fusion—has, alongside its very real risks, a gigantic potential for propelling forward the development of humankind, and thereby its social liberation. But for this the rule of capitalism must be overthrown and a socialist society established. We fight for the construction of a revolutionary multiethnic workers party as part of a reforged Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution.

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-May-June 1970

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus

The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Markin comment on the labor anti-war strike slogan raised in this issue:

As I have noted on other occasions timing in politics is very important, and the timing of the raising of slogans in the revolutionary movement is a fine art that was most successfully practiced by the Bolsheviks during the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Speaking of the slogans for anti-war work today (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya on the active fronts, Pakistan and Iran on the hands off front) I have not seen lately any call for a labor anti-war strike. And just at this minute rightfully so. While many (including some die-hard conservatives for their own perverse reasons) are ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and Libya there is no mass movement afoot ready to smite the Obama administration down over the issue. And certainly while the working class has borne the brunt of the economic hard times, sent their sons and daughters in combat as cannon fodders in high numbers, and is as war-weary as most of the rest of the population this has not resulted in any significant movement to take the matter in their own hands. The reasons for that are many, although they will be not detailed here, except to note that a call for an labor anti-war strike would find no resonance right this moment.

The whole point of making that last statement above is to contrast today with the situation in 1970 when not only was the general populace, including the working class, war-weary of the Vietnam War but there were ripples of overt opposition to the war that was costing the working class its economic security, to speak nothing of its sending off the cream of it youth, mainly sons, to fight that war. Thus raising the labor anti-war strike slogan when there was some motion in the working class, the bankruptcy of the mainstream anti-war movement strategy of endless marches, bourgeois electioneering, and praying (and conversely by those radicals who were repulsed those dead-end solution, madcap adventurism), and the objective political situation of the time (the Johnson/Nixon regimes’ almost seamless bi-partisan continuation of the war) made perfect political sense. In fact not to raise it then bordered on revolutionary political irresponsibility, at least as a propaganda point and cutting edge against the reformists. Yes, timing in politics is many times decisive. Let’s hope we will be able to raise that labor anti-war strike slogan ourselves in the next period.

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)- March 1970

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus

The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment :

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********

Markin comment on the Racial Oppression-Irvine and RMC Positions article in this issue:

As I have noted on numerous other occasions I am a proud son of the working class, of the desperate working poor segment of that class to boot. Nevertheless I had written off the working class as a factor in my early political schemes. That is until 1969. And even then, as I noted in an earlier series of commentaries (see archives, July 3, 2011, on Campus Spartacist), I was only “toying” with Marxism in that year. And part of that “toying” was a rather hard-headed approach to the capacities of the American working class (others, like the French and Italian, I was more agnostic on) to make a socialist revolution, and keep it.

Always implicit in the Marxist worldview of the centrality of the working class in the overthrow of the capitalist system is the notion that this class itself would have to break with its former traditions under capitalism. In short, to break with such notions as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” using trade unions as merely the best (at least for America since the early 1900’s) arenas for socialists to work in to bring class consciousness, revolutionary class consciousness, to working people. That was initially my problem with the Marxist worldview, that notion that revolutionaries should work in the trade unions to bring class consciousness to the workers. Or, maybe, at a more fundamental level, that “bringing” a class, or any other social formation for that matter, anything, much less a revolutionary solution, a, frankly, desperate revolutionary solution to their  problems, seemed way too, I will be kind, esoteric.       

It seemed on the face of it an improbable strategy, but only, as I did at the time, if one looked through the static situation of the class in any given period. A closer study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the work of the Bolsheviks since the aborted revolution of 1905, and of the necessity of a vanguard party (as opposed to a mass, all-purpose, all-inclusive workers party) broke me, somewhat, somewhat kicking and screaming really, to see this other way of organizing. And through fits and starts, successes and a rather longer number of failures, that notion, that vanguard notion, still makes sense. If we can just get enough cadres together to help pull it off.     

Additional Note:

The key historical argument in this issue centers on the role of revolutionaries in the fight against special oppression, as addressed here of blacks as a race-color caste in America. And a good exposition (the Tishman polemic) of our general attitude that while we see the working class as central leadership of the class struggle that class has to fight these special oppressions, even for those who we someday will see on the other side of the barricades. That is the reasoning behind our support for all types of basically democratic, non-revolutionary, demands. That is the importance of the Dreyfus example in the Tishman polemic. Those are our wedge into class-struggle perspectives as “tribunes of the people.”    

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School of Falsification Revisted-A Reply To The "Guardian", Part Eight- TROTSKYISM vs. SWP REVISIONISM

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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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited

These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]

Reply to the Guardian

THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED

8. TROTSKYISM vs. SWP REVISIONISM
T
The last four articles of the Guardian series on "Trotsky's Heritage" are devoted to demonstrating that Trotskyism is reformist and "counterrevolutionary" by discussing the current policies of the Socialist Workers Party and, to a lesser extent, of the Workers League (WL). Not once is the Spartacist League mentioned. This is no accident. The SWP, which was once the leading party of the Fourth International, has long since abandoned the path of revolutionary Trotskyism for the swamp of reformism. First adapting itself to Castroist in 1961-63 by foreseeing a "guerrilla road to power" and to black nationalism with the theory that "consistent nationalism" leads to socialism, the SWP made its dive into reformism in 1965, becoming the organizer of a popular-front antiwar movement dominated by bourgeois liberals. Since then it has extended this class collaborationism into new fields, organizing single-issue movements for the "democratic" demand of self-determination for just about everyone, from blacks (community control) and women to homosexuals and American Indians.

The political bandits of the WL, on the other hand, have made their mark in the U.S. socialist left by constantly shifting their political line in order to temporarily adapt to whatever is popular at the moment (Huey Newton, Red Guards, Ho Chi Minh. Arab nationalists, left-talking union bureaucrats) only to return to a more "orthodox" position soon after. Its constants are a belief that an all-encompassing final crisis of capitalism will eliminate the need to struggle for the Bolshevik politics of the Transitional Program and an abiding passion for tailing after labor fakers of any stripe, from pseudo-radicals to ultra conservatives.

Thus it is easy to "prove" that Trotskyism is reformist by citing the policies of the SWP and the WL. But this has about as much value as "proving" that Lenin was for a "peaceful road to socialism" by citing Khrushchev.

Feminism and Trotskyism

Because of the rotten betrayals of the SWP during the past decade, Trotskyism has become confused in the minds of many militants with the crassest reformist grovelling before the liberal bourgeoisie. It also gives Maoists like Davidson plenty of opportunity to make correct attacks:

"Their [SWP's] approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the 'vanguard' leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the 'vanguard of the vanguard' in each sector is presently made up of the student youth."
--Guardian, 13 June 1973

This theory, formerly called the "dialectic of the sectors of intervention" by the SWP's European friends, is a denial of the leading role of the proletariat and is expressed in their programmatic capitulation to feminism, nationalism, student power, etc. Elsewhere, Davidson criticized the SWP for tailing the nationalism of the black petty bourgeoisie and the WL for tailing the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy (Guardian, 30 May 1973). Again this is correct.

But such criticism is cheap--it represents not the slightest step toward a Marxist program of proletarian class struggle. Thus after criticizing the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois feminists, Davidson counterposes the "mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women." This is the tip of the iceberg, for behind the contention that the struggle for women's liberation is only "democratic" (and not socialist) lies a call for maintenance of the bourgeois family (simply "reforming" it by calling "for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home") and for an alliance with "even the women of the exploiting classes."

SL Embodies Trotskyist Program

Instead of capitulating to bourgeois pacifism the SL called for class-struggle opposition to the Vietnam war: for labor strikes against the war, bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement, military support to the NLF, all Indochina must go communist; instead of petty-bourgeois draft refusal the SL was unique in consistently advocating communist work in the army.

Rather than capitulating to bourgeois nationalism, the SL called for an end to all discrimination on the basis of race, opposition to community control and preferential hiring, for a transitional black organization on a program of united class struggle.

In the struggle for women's liberation, the SL opposed capitulation to bourgeois feminism and the equally reactionary abstentionism of various workerist groups: We called for women's liberation through socialist revolution, bourgeois politicians out of the women's movement, free abortion on demand and adopted the prospect of the eventual creation of a women's section of the SL, as envisioned by the early Communist International.

Alone of all the ostensibly Marxist organizations the SL has upheld the Leninist norms of youth-party relations, with the youth section (Revolutionary Communist Youth, RCY [now the Spartacus Youth League, SYL]) organizationally separate but politically subordinate to the party.

Nationalism vs. Class Struggle

On the question of black nationalism, Davidson criticizes the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois nationalists...and then declares that U.S. blacks constitute a nation and should have the right to secede. The nationalist theory of a "black nation" in the U.S. ignores the fact that blacks (and the other racial ethnic minorities) are thoroughly integrated into the U.S. economy although overwhelmingly at the bottom levels, have no common territory, special language or culture. Garveyite "back to Africa movements, the theory of a black nation and all other forms of black separatism have the principal effect of dividing the proletariat and isolating the most exploited and potentially most revolutionary section in separate organizations fighting for separate goals. Both the SWP, with its enthusiasm for community control, and Maoists like Davidson's October League and the Communist League with their reactionary-utopian concepts of a black nation, serve to disunite the working class and tie it to the bourgeoisie. The SWP's enthusiasm for a black political party lead it to enthuse over clambakes of black Democrats (such as the 1971 Gary convention), while black-nation separatism aids bourgeois nationalist demagogues like Newark's Ford Foundation-backed Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones).

In part the capitulation to black nationalism by wide sectors of the U.S. left is a distorted recognition that this most exploited sector of the working class will indeed play a key role in an American socialist revolution. Black workers are potentially the leading section of the proletariat. But this requires the integration of its most conscious elements into the single vanguard party and a relentless struggle for the program of united working-class struggle among black workers. Conscious of the need for special methods of work among doubly-oppressed sectors of the proletariat, the SL has called for a transitional black organization not as a concession to black separatism but precisely in order to better combat nationalism among the black masses. ("Black and Red--Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartacist, May-June 1967).

Leninism vs. Workerism

Since the demise of the Weatherman-RYM II section of SDS in late 1969, black nationalism and feminism have been joined by a crude workerism as the dominant forms of petty-bourgeois ideology in the socialist movement. Adapting to the present backward consciousness of the working class, workerists have sought to gain instant popularity and influence by organizing on the level of militant trade unionism. Failing to heed (and in some cases denying) Lenin's dictum that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class from the outside, by the revolutionary party, the radical workerists today carry out trade-union work which is in no way distinguishable from that of the reformist Communist party in the 1930's and 1940's. Falling in behind every militant-talking out-bureaucrat, and not a few in-bureaucrats as well, they fail to wage a political struggle in the unions, saving their support for the NLF, Mao, etc., for the campuses.

Among ostensible Trotskyist groups, workerism has taken the form of denying the need to struggle for the whole of the Transitional Program in the trade unions. Some fake-Trotskyists argue that wage demands alone are revolutionary (Workers league), others that the Transitional Program must be served to the workers in bits and pieces, one course at a time (Class Struggle league); still others verbally proclaim the Transitional Program in their documents, but see the strategy for power as based on giving "critical support" to every available out-bureaucrat (Revolutionary Socialist League). The SWP, for its part, does almost no trade-union work at all and in its press gives uncritical support to liberal bureaucrats, both in power and out.

The Spartacist League, in contrast, calls for the formation of caucuses based on the Transitional Program to struggle for leadership of the unions. While willing to form united fronts in specific struggles, the SL sees the fundamental task as the creation of a communist opposition--not just militant trade unionism. Together with Trotsky we affirm that the Transitional Program is the program for struggle in the unions. This does not mean that every caucus program must be a carbon copy of the SL Declaration of Principles--it is necessary to choose those demands which best serve to raise socialist consciousness in the particular situation. What is essential is that the caucus program of transitional demands not be limited to militant reformism, but contain the political perspective of socialist revolution.

Davidson quotes from Trotsky's 1940 conversations with SWP leaders to claim that Trotskyist trade union work amounted to "anti-communism." We have recently published a series of articles on "Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions" (WV No. 25-28) detailing our criticisms of the SWP's policy of one-sided emphasis on blocs with "progressive" bureaucrats and its failure to build a communist pole 'in the unions. However, it was perfectly correct during the late 1930's to concentrate the Trotskyists' trade-union work on opposition to the Stalinists: these were the agents of Roosevelt in the labor movement, the authors and enforcers of the no-strike pledge during World War II. Of course, no one can accuse Davidson's friends in the October League or Revolutionary Union of attacking the Communist Party (or for that matter any militant reformist bureaucrat) in their trade-union work. Rather they uniformly support left bureaucrats in office (such as Chavez of the Farmworkers) and form blocs with-out-bureaucrats when the incumbent leadership is too conservative to awaken any illusions at all among the workers.

Consistent with his pattern of distortion of Trotsky's positions in the earlier articles of the series, Davidson seeks to create the impression that Trotsky endorsed the SWP's practice of blocking with "progressive" bureaucrats against the Stalinists. Not so! In 1940 Trotsky explicitly criticized the SWP for softness toward pro-Roosevelt unionists and insisted on an orientation toward the ranks of the CP.

The Struggle for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International

The degeneration of the SWP from Bolshevism to centrism did not simply occur one day in 1961, but was the result of a process of programmatic (and ultimately organizational) degeneration of the Fourth International after World War It. The critical point came with the split of the FI in 1953 which signified the organizational demise of the unified world party of socialist revolution. At the heart of the split was the program put forward by Michel Pablo, head of the International Secretariat of the FI, of "deep entry" into the reformist Stalinist parties, redubbed centrist in order to justify the new line. Pablo, no longer saw the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the key roadblock to revolution and the construction of the Fourth International as the solution. Instead he adopted the objectivist theory that the overwhelming crisis of capitalism (his "war-revolution thesis") would force the Stalinists to undertake at least deformed revolutions. Thus Pablo's "Theses on International Perspectives" of the Third Congress of the FI (1951) state:

"The objective conditions determine in the long run the character and dynamic of the mass movement which, taken to a certain level, can overcome all the subjective obstacles in the path of the revolution."
--Quatrieme Internationale, August-September 1951

When it became clear that the implication of Pablo's line was the organizational liquidation of the FI into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties, and when this was brought home by a liquidationist pro-Pablo faction (headed by Cochran and Clarke) in the SWP itself, the party majority reacted sharply. James Cannon wrote:

"The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part--the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party."
--"Factional Struggle and Party Leadership," November 1953

The organizational destruction of the FI by Pabloist revisionism in 1953 had come about as the result of a number of factors affecting the entire Trotskyist movement after World War II, but particularly the European sections. For one thing, virtually their entire pre-war leadership had been murdered either by the Nazi Gestapo or the Stalinist GPU. The living continuity with Trotsky had virtually been broken. Furthermore the sections had been decimated and largely isolated from the working class, while the Stalinists had been able to expand their influence through leadership of anti-Hitler partisan struggles. At the same time Stalinist regimes were set up under the protection of the Russian Army in Eastern Europe, and peasant-based insurrection in China led to the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a deformed workers state. Faced with these unexpected developments the initial response of the Trotskyist movement was to maintain that the Eastern European Stalinist regimes were still capitalist. Not until 1955 did the SWP, for instance, decide that China had become a deformed workers state. Having unwittingly vulgarized Trotsky's dialectical understanding of Stalinism, the orthodox Trotskyists stressed Stalinism's counterrevolutionary side until their theories no longer squared with reality. This disorientation enabled the revisionist current around Pablo to justify its opportunist appetites by concluding from the limited social transformations in Eastern Europe that non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces can lead any form of social revolution.

The SWP had been least affected by this process, having emerged from the war with its leadership intact, its membership and ties to the working class increased and the Stalinists still relatively weak compared to Europe. It was natural that in 1953 the SWP should lead the fight for orthodox Trotskyism. But in fact the party waged only a half-struggle, virtually withdrawing from any international work until the late 1950's. The "International Committee" which it formed with the French and British majorities who opposed Pablo hardly functioned at all. As the party lost virtually its entire trade-union cadre in the Cochran-Clarke fight, and as the greater part of its entire membership left during the McCarthy years, the leadership began moving to the right in the late 1950's in search of some force or movement it, could latch onto in order to regain mass influence.

It found this in the Cuban revolution, which evoked a wave of sympathy throughout Latin America and in the U.S. The party leadership declared that Cuba was basically a healthy workers state, although not yet possessing the forms of workers democracy (!) and that Fidel Castro was a natural Marxist (i.e., he supposedly acted like a Trotskyist even though he talked first as a bourgeois nationalist and later as a Stalinist).

Not surprisingly, this was the same line taken by the Pabloists in Europe. If the petty-bourgeois Stalinist bureaucracies could carry out a social revolution in Eastern Europe, they reasoned, why not also a petty-bourgeois nationalist like Castro. Thus in practice the SWP was coming over to the Pabloist line. At the same time an opposition was formed inside the SWP (the Revolutionary Tendency, predecessor of the Spartacist League) which considered Cuba a deformed workers state and criticized the SWP leadership's capitulation to Castro and the European Pabloists. The RT in 1963 proposed a counter thesis ("Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International") to the majority's document which was the basis for the SWP's reunification with the European Pabloists to form the "United Secretariat." While the party majority supported a peasant-based "guerrilla road to power" the RT upheld the orthodox Trotskyist position that only the proletariat could lead the struggle for agrarian revolution and national liberation.

The RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963 for its revolutionary opposition to the majority's Pabloist tailing after petty-bourgeois forces. Subsequently the gap between the SWP's policies and the Trotskyism of the Spartacist group continued to widen. The ex-Trotskyist SWP capitulated in turn to black nationalism, bourgeois pacifism and feminism, to the point where today it is a hardened reformist organization with appetites to become the dominant social democratic party of the U.S.

We must learn from this history of defeats that revisionism leads to the same consequences whether it comes from Stalinist origins or from erstwhile Trotskyists. The Maoist line defended by the Guardian in no way offers a proletarian alternative to the reformism of the SWP. Instead of the SWP's single issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (NPAC, WONAAC), the Maoists propose multi-issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (PCPJ). The only road to socialist revolution is to make a sharp break with Stalinist and Pabloist revisionism and return to the Marxist program of proletarian class independence, uniquely embodied in the U.S. by the Spartacist League. Internationally this means an unrelenting struggle for the creation of a democratic-centralist programmatically-united Trotskyist tendency to carry out the task of reconstruction of the FI.

Down with Pabloism!
For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!