Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May Day Facebook Page website. Occupy May Day has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
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Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year since 1886 by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars! Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan (and the residuals from Iraq)! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation for all!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
• Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
•
•
• Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
•
• Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
•
• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
•
• Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
•
• We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
•
• These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
•
• Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
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• It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Friday, April 20, 2012
The Latest From The “Occupy May Day" Facebook Page- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Work Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
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Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
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OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights around hours, wages and working conditions that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the heric Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins it is high time that the hard-pressed American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organizationally affiliated radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). The working group has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its less than militant recent labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Group discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive pro-immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps for the working group therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. This was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day action movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the endemic massive political voiceless-ness of the vast majority, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight-hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist and communist and organized trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement the general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Tentatively planned, as of this writing, for the early hours on May 1st is for working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party is scheduled to start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a number of speakers from different groups at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do so, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
Pick up the spirit of the general slogans for May 1st now- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies producing goods and services really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
Thursday, April 19, 2012
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pen Of American Communist Leader (CP And SWP) James P. Cannon At The End (1974)-"Questions of American Radical History"
Markin comment on this series:
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 this article:
Anytime you have person who has been through the key left-wing movements of his century (IWW, Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party) as a militant and leader you had best listen up-listen up closely
****
Questions of American Radical History
The following interview was conducted at James P. Cannon's home in Los Angeles July 16.
Sidney Lens is a labor historian who was active hi the anti-Vietnam war movement He is also an editor of Liberation magazine.
Lens: I interviewed Earl Browder before he died. What was your reaction to him personally?
Cannon: Well, that's quite a story, because I knew him for many years.
Lens: Yes, I know, but did you like him personally?
Cannon: For a long time we worked together.
Lens: He never joined the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World — IWW), did he?
Cannon: I don't think so. He became a disciple of Foster. 2 Foster came through Kansas City, I think it was in 1913. He had been a Wobbly who had gone to France and had become converted to syndicalism. He came back and made a tour of the IWW locals, trying to convince them of his ideas of 'boring from within' the AFL (American Federation of Labor). Browder was one of his converts from Kansas City.
Lens: Did he try to convert you?
1.Earl Browder was general secretary
of the American Communist Party from
1930 to 1945.
2. William Z. Foster was the most im
portant trade-union figure to join the early
Communist Party.
Cannon: No.
Lens: Why not?
Cannon: I didn't run into him personally. I don't know whether Browder had been a Wobbly or not. I had been traveling around the country shortly before that and had been out of Kansas City. I knew he was a radical.
Lens: What made Browder become a Stalinist?
Cannon: That's a long story. What made all the others become Stalinists?
Lens: Was it a matter of just belonging to something big?
Cannon: Yes.
Lens: He told me that he disliked Trotsky personally. He was quite senile when I saw him, and he spoke very cryptically. He gave the impres-
sion that the biggest basis for not joining with Trotsky was that he considered Trotsky a show-off and very egotistical.
Cannon: When the first world war broke out for this country in 1917, Browder had been working in the (food and farm) cooperative movement. He was an accountant by profession. I think he was impressed by the cooperative movement, which at that tune there was quite a sentiment for.
He had been to New York. He may have been influenced by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's demonstrations of opposition to the war. He came back to Kansas City. He and his two brothers and his brother-in-law, Bob Sullivan, made an open demonstration against the entry into the war with leaflets. They were promptly arrested. He got a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. They got out about 1918.
Recruited Browder
By that time I had become a communist. I saw them immediately after they came out. They had no inclination toward the communist movement because it was harebrained. There was some truth in that. There was a large element of harebrains in the new communist movement. But I think it's safe to say that I convinced him there was fundamental merit in it. And he became a communist.
In the fall of 1918 we decided to start a paper in Kansas City. It had no political allegiance at its start, but it was an exponent of the Russian revolution and defense of class-war prisoners and so on. Browder was the first editor and I worked very closely with him, promoting the idea of the paper and then getting started on it.
Along about early summer of 1919 he and his brothers had to go back to serve a federal sentence in Leaven-worth, Kans., and I had to take over the paper as editor.
We remained close associates while he was in prison. I became rather prominent in the new communist movement. I was elected to the central committee at the first Bridgeman, Mich., convention in the spring of 1920 and became organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois coal district for the party. A few months after that I was moved to Cleveland to become editor of a paper called the Toiler, which was a continuation of the Ohio Socialist
(Alfred) Wagenknecht and his group had control of the state (Socialist Party) organization and they took the paper along with them when the split came (the split of the left wing from the SP). A few months later they decided to move the paper to New York and change the name to the Worker and I went along with that. That would be in the late fall of 1920. Eventually it became the Daily Worker. So if you want to have a record of my sins, you can say I was the original editor of the Daily Worker.
Lens: Yes, I know that record.
Cannon: Browder was in prison till the spring of 1921. He wasn't known to the leadership of the party. It was on my recommendation that he was brought to New York. He became right away the assistant of Foster, who had also at that time decided to join the party clandestinely.
They decided to start a monthly magazine, the Labor Monthly, in Chicago, with Foster as editor and Browder as managing editor. We were close together all that time up until Foster and I had a falling out —in 1925, I think it was.
Lens: What was that all about?
Cannon: I tell the story in my book The First Ten Years of American Communism in reply to some of (Theodore) Draper's questions. The split took place rather dramatically at a plenary meeting, right down the middle of the Foster-Cannon group. People like Bill Dunne, Arne Swabeck, and others came with me. Browder and (Jack) Johnstone and others went with Foster in this split, which* was never fully healed, although we had relations later. That amounted to a personal falling out to 1925. That would be about 12 years after I first met him.
Lens: Would you consider Browder a creative person to that period, independent?
Cannon: No.
Lens: Did he always have to attach himself to somebody, like to Foster or you?
Cannon: He wasn't by nature a leader or a politician. There was never such a thing as a Browder group in the party. There was a Foster group, and a Cannon group, and a Ruthenberg group. But he was a very energetic and intelligent, capable worker.
Lens: Was there anything in the twenties similar to the present counter-culture amongst the youth?
Cannon: Not to my knowledge.
Lens: What were the main reasons for the failure of the Communist Party (CP) to take off? I know that's a big story, but do you think they were mainly subjective reasons?
Cannon: Well, of course, first there were the persecutions, quite severe in the first few years. The party was driven underground. Next there was a sharp economic depression and then an ascending boom that continued throughout the twenties. That wasn't a very fertile field for communism to expand. And it was a new movement with a lot to learn.
Lens: Did you anticipate the depression of 1929?
Cannon: Well, we kept forecasting it.
Lens: Yes, you kept forecasting it from about 1922 on.
Cannon: So we were eventually vindicated in 1929.
Lens: But did you anticipate that particular depression and that it would come through the stock market crash?
Cannon: I wouldn't say specifically so, but the Lovestoneites3 wrote a document on American exception-alism. The Comintern (Communist International) was just beginning its left turn. They wrote a document on American exceptionalism. That's what they called it. Sort of exempting America from the world trend for the time being.
And we wrote a counter-document in collaboration with the Fosterites that we presented at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was called "The Right Danger in the American Party." There you'll see that we took a rather radical approach to the whole question, including the economy.
Lens: When the depression came, what were your personal reactions? Did you feel that America was moving close to an actual revolution?
Cannon: I can't say that I did. Lens: Then what was your reaction?
Cannon: Like most everybody else, stunned.
Lens: Stunned?
Workers atomized
Cannon: Yes, it was so severe. It was hard to see an immediate revolution. The workers were atomized. The organized labor movement had lost ground in the twenties. The unions had fewer than three million members at the time of the crash and they began losing more after that.
Lens: Did the CP really believe that a revolution impended?
Cannon: At that time they were in the midst of the "third period."4 So they were running hog-wild for a while, but they weren't getting much response to that appeal.
3. Jay Lovestone was secretary of the CP in the 1920s. He headed a rightist faction in the party that was aligned internationally with Bukharin. In 1928, Love-stone carried out the expulsion of the American Trotskyists from the CP. When Stalin turned on his rightist allies in 1929, Lovestone was demoted from his post and expelled.
The Lovestone group maintained itself until the outbreak of World War II and then dissolved. Lovestone subsequently became an anticommunist expert for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
Lens: Was your organization called the Communist League of America at first, or was it called Communist Party Majority or Left Opposition?
Cannon: Communist League of America (Opposition). The Lovestoneites called themselves Communist Party (Majority Group).5
Lens: Then you dropped the word "opposition" eventually.
Cannon: Eventually, yes. But for four years we continued to direct our agitation mainly to the Communist Party.
Lens: Were you disappointed in the results?
Cannon: Well, we were trying to recruit our primary cadre and we recruited more than a hundred people to begin with. I guess we had a couple of hundred or a little more by 1934 and then we got into the Minneapolis strike and that gave us a big boost. It identified us as workers in the mass movement.
Then came the fusion with the Muste-ites6 in the same year. So it was sort of a period of expansion in the later thirties.
4The "third period" was a schema pro
claimed by the Stalinists in 1928 accord
ing to which capitalism was in its final
period of collapse. Following from this
schema, the Comintern's tactics during
the next six years were marked by ultra-
leftism, adventurism, sectarian "red"
unions, and opposition to forming united
fronts with other working-class organiza
tions.
5The Communist League of America
(Opposition) was the organization formed
by Cannon and others who were expelled
from the Communist Party in 1928 for
supporting the program of the Left Op
position in the Soviet CP, led by Leon
Trotsky.
6In December 1934 the Communist
League of America fused with the Ameri
can Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste,
to form the Workers Party of the United
States.
Lens: What happened then in the relalively large mass movement before World War II and during World War II? Did you feel that there was something impeding your development or your progress, or were you going too slow, or what?
Cannon: Do you mean our organization?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Our big obstacle was the Communist Party. It had complete domination of what there was of the radical movement. The SP was an empty shell. And we were isolated. The membership of the Communist Party largely identified Stalin with the Comintern. And whatever the Comintern said was the law. But we kept recruiting one here and one there until we'd built up quite a cadre of capable people.
Lens: Why didn't you take over the Communist Party? Why didn't the majority come over to your point of view? Must a radical party have the support of a government in some foreign country to survive or prosper?
Cannon: The Comintern represented the Russian revolution in the minds of the American communists. The Comintern said we were counterrevolutionaries and that Trotsky was a fascist, a traitor, and everything else; and they accepted that.
Lens: From a theoretical point of view, though, Marxism is supposed to be the science of revolution, and your estimate of events was more lucid than Browder's, say and yet here were ten or twenty thousand communists to whom you couldn't get through. Their emotions were much stronger than their intellectual probing.
Cannon: That's true; it took a long time for us to break through.
Lens: Is that a handicap that the left can always expect, that emotion plays a bigger role than science of revolution?
Cannon: The pull of a radical organization that is dominant in the field is almost gravitational. The average worker and activist doesn't want to be connected with some little sect on the sidelines. He wants to be where the action is.
Muste group
Lens: Did the Muste group make any sensational spurt in its early days, or was it growing about like your group?
Cannon: It was growing about like ours. Muste was a remarkable personal character. He was a preacher, you know, to start with.
In 1917, as a minister in Boston, he went to Lawrence, Mass., and got into the textile strike there and became the head of it Next, if I'm correct, he became the head of the textile workers union, or what was left of it.
Then he started the Brookwood Labor College in New York State, which quite a number of people attended, and he recruited some of them. Out of that he developed the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and recruited people here and there. Then this organization developed an unemployed movement of its own.
The Communist Party dominated the main unemployment movement in the big cities, the Unemployed Councils. The Musteites organized around the fringes rather effectively, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other places. The Unemployed Leagues, they called them. Through all these operations Muste accumulated a cadre.
We were greatly impressed with their actions in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934, at the same time that we were occupied with the Teamsters' fight in Minneapolis. They had done an unprecedented thing. Their leaders there
— Sam Pollock, Ted Selander, and Art Preis — were in the unemployment movement, the Unemployed League of the Musteites. And they organized to support the strike.
Contrary to the custom of the unemployed being recruited as strikebreakers, they became the most militant supporters of the strike. They practically led the strike. We were tremendously impressed by that, and it led to our negotiations with them for fusion. Meanwhile Muste was turning to the left politically, so there wasn't much trouble in bringing about a unification.
Some of the people that Muste had attracted —such as (J. B. S.) Hardman and (Louis) Budenz and a few others wouldn't go along with it, but Muste
decided to do it and he brought along a majority of his people and it gave
the movement quite a boost.
Lens: Did you expect a revolution in the 1930s —that capitalism would collapse?
Cannon: I can't say that I expected it, but looking back on it now, as I have said many times, anything was possible in the thirties. After the workers recovered from their paralysis. In the first four or five years they were simply stunned, they didn't know what to do. But beginning with Minneapolis in 1934, three strikes —Minneapolis, the San Francisco general strike, and the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo — seemed to give the impetus needed for a new movement. And it began to develop by leaps and bounds.
Lens: What stopped it?
Tremendous upheaval
Cannon: The American Communist Party.
The industrial union movement developed millions of members and John L. Lewis, recognizing the tide, turned toward it and gave quite effective leadership for a time. The sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., and the organization of General Motors and Ford represented a tremendous upheaval. That was accomplished in a few years.
Lens: When you say the Communist Party stopped it, in what way?
Cannon: The Communist Party was the dominant force in the radical movement. They dominated the unemployed movement and by that time there developed a radical movement on the campuses, which they also dominated. And they trained some cadres in the unemployment and student movements who took part in various actions.
You know, the average worker is afraid to stand up and make a motion in a meeting. They aren't accustomed to that. The CP trained a whole cadre of people who could stand up and make motions and parliamentary moves, and run meetings, and things of this sort.
In the mid-thirties there was a certain upsurge out of the depression. Not a real economic recovery, but a revival. They began to open factories and take some people back to work. And the Communist Party colonized a lot of their people in the strategic industries and their radical talk appealed widely. They were competitors for control of the auto workers union for a while.
Right in the middle of this came the turn of the Comintern toward the right. The "third period" had passed and the Kremlin began turning over toward conservatism and naturally the Communist Party just carried it out here in the United States to the letter.
I believe that if the Communist Party had remained a revolutionary party, it could have made great things out of that mass movement of the thirties.
Lens: If you go back to the Russian revolution, you also had a Menshevik group, and the Bolsheviks were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks, and yet they were able to pull people away from them. Why weren't the Trotskyists able to pull people from the Stalinists here? You also had capable people, you also knew how to make motions in meetings and all the rest of that, and probably were more dedicated.
Excluded
Cannon: Unquestionably. But we didn't have the numbers. The Communist Party excluded us from every movement they controlled, like the unemployed movement. A hungry unemployed member of the Trotskyist organization couldn't get into the Unemployed Councils because the Stalinists branded him a "counterrevolutionary."
The CP formed alliances with other radicals and socialists in the League Against War and Fascism, but we were not admitted to it. So although we expanded somewhat with the success of the Minneapolis strikes, the fusion with the Musteites, and the entry into the Socialist Party, ? which gained us quite a group of new members, we were still a small minority in comparison to the Communist Party.
Lens: You expected quite a bit more from the entry in the Socialist Party, didn't you, than you eventually got?
Cannon: We won over the majority of the Young People's Socialist League.
Lens: I know, but you really expected to become an important mass party.
Cannon: We expected the Socialist Party itself to grow and that we would grow with it.
Lens: Why didn't it?
Cannon: The competition of the Communist Party, and partly the inadequacy of its leadership, I guess.
Lens: Of the Communist or Socialist leadership?
Cannon: Of the Socialist Party leadership.
Lens: But you were playing an important role in it by then. Weren't you in the Socialist leadership?
Cannon: I came out to California during that period. We soon got a majority in the state executive committee of the Socialist Party and published a weekly paper in San Francisco. The right-wingers remaining in the Socialist Party got alarmed about that and began expelling our people. And we had nothing to do but fight it out and come to a break.
Lens: Had you expected a break? Cannon: No, we tried to prevent it.
Lens: You had hoped to remain in the Socialist Party?
Cannon: Yes, we were not ready to bring things to a head yet. But we had no choice.
Lens: Why do you think the Comintern got rid of Browder?8 Or, to put it a different way, why didn't he adjust to the Comintern? He had been adjusting to it all his life.
7 In 1936 the Trotskyists joined the So
cialist Party in order to win over the
growing left wing to revolutionary poli
tics. •
8 Browder was deposed as secretary of
the CP in 1945 and expelled from the
party in 1946. Except for his first few
years in office (the end of the ultraleft
"third period") and the brief interlude of
the Stalin-Hitler pact, his regime coincided
with those years in which the CP engaged
in blatant class collaboration of the peo
ple's front variety.
During the World War II alliance of the U. S. and the Soviet Union, Browder ardently supported U. S. imperialism and publicly urged that the wartime no-strike pledge be continued after the war ended.
Cannon: It began with his appointment as secretary. Foster was a far more publicly prominent and able man than Browder. That was his trouble. You might say he was the logical man to succeed Lovestone when they got rid of Lovestone. But by that time Stalin didn't want any able people heading national parties.
I think Browder's defects were his merits. His lack of leadership capacity was just what they wanted from him — somebody to do what they told him to do. I don't say Foster wouldn't have done it, but Foster had ideas and initiative of his own.
Lens: Did you like Foster personally?
Cannon: At first I did. I was associated with him in the political fights. But I didn't like his character.
Lens: Why?
Cannon: Why don't you like somebody? He was terribly self-centered and dishonest, when it served his purpose, and disloyal in personal relations. All the kinds of things that I especially don't like.
Lens: Getting back to Browder. He had shifted gears with the Comintern all along, and then 1946 comes along and he refuses to shift gears. How do you account for that?
Cannon: I think he was taken by surprise. He carried the conciliationism of the Kremlin bureaucracy to an extreme that they were not prepared to go to after the war ended. They were getting ready for the outbreak of the cold war, while Browder was going ahead as before.
You remember his famous statement, when he said something like, "I'm ready
to shake hands with J. Pierpont Morgan on this —to have peace, no strikes during thewar, speedup, incentive pay, and all the rest."
Out of favor
It's remarkable how easily the Stalinists disposed of him. They didn't even have to send any message directly from Moscow. All they had to do was to have somebody in France, Duclos (Jacques Duclos, longtime leader of the French Communist Party), write a piece in the French CP magazine criticizing Browder. And all the hacks in the party took that as a sign that this fellow was out of favor with the big power.
Lens: Why do you feel the Lovestone-ites fell apart?
Cannon: What stages do you mean?
Lens: When they dissolved, about 1937 or 1938 (actually, 1939).
Cannon: In 1929 they took a hundred or more with them out of the Communist Party. That in itself was an indication of the tremendous power of Stalin over the party. The CP had just had a convention where the Love-stoneites had a big majority, or so they thought, because the party wasn't aware that Stalin was getting ready to dump him.
The Lovestoneites claimed to be the champions of the Comintern above all others. But the Comintern had two representatives here at the CP's 1929 convention early in the year, and the campaign against Bukharin was beginning already in Moscow. Bukharin had been their mentor and their protector, and Lovestone didn't get the signal quickly enough.
Lens: Then they survived for about 10 years. And they did have some influence in the auto workers and the ladies garment workers unions.
Cannon: As late as 1934 one of the big events in the radical movement in New York was a debate between me and Lovestone at Irving Plaza on the question of whether we should build a new international or support the Communist International. At that time he strongly supported the Comintern of Stalin. He was still, I think, hoping to convince them that he was their boy. And probably still had some idea that the Communist movement had a future here.
Some people don't have to believe things out of conviction; if they believe something is going to be a success, that's enough for them. I think that was the case with Lovestone. I think he was a careerist from the very beginning.
Lens: Let me sidetrack to another issue. The emergence of the New Left after World War II, or quite a long time after World War II, was accompanied by a tremendous counterculture movement. Why wasn't there one in the 1930s?
Cannon: This counter-culture movement of the recent past was an intellectual student movement, wasn't it?
Lens: Yes, but you had a growing student movement hi the thirties too.
Cannon: Yes, but the real power that asserted itself was a workers uprising in the 1930s. We don't have anything like that today. Nothing comparable.
Lens: In other words you feel that the students were pretty much secondary to the workers.
Cannon: In the thirties, yes.
Lens: And therefore they didn't take on characteristics of their own?
Cannon: I just don't recall them making any special mark for themselves in the thirties.
Lens: How do you account for that?
Cannon: There was a student movement, but it was mainly composed of groups affiliated to the two radical parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
I don't know whether you've heard this story, I've told it a hundred tunes: Among the big events on the campuses of New York in the thirties were the debates between the Draper brothers. Have you heard of that?
Lens: No. Theodore and Hal?
Cannon: Theodore Draper was an ardent Stalinist. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist. And they had a number of debates. I didn't attend any of them, but I heard about them.
The left wing of the Socialist Party didn't develop as a counter-cultural nut movement, but as a radical, Leninist movement. I heard Gus Tyler debate with Gil Green —who later became head of the Young Communist League —on the question of policy toward war. Green took the peaceful coexistence position of the Comintern and Tyler defended the Leninist policy.
Tyler, who's now an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) leader, simply cut him to pieces, in my judgment.
This whole counter-culture business expressed in this New Left phenomenon seems to me like it sprang out of nowhere. And it disappeared almost as rapidly.
New Left
Lens: How do you account for the emergence of the New Left? Why didn't all those young people come into the Socialist Workers Party?
Cannon: It started with the League for Industrial Democracy, didn't it?
Lens: But that was pretty much of a dead organization.
Cannon: But they had a "Port Huron Statement" that seemed to just catch fire. It took most everybody by surprise. I certainly didn't anticipate it.
Lens: Why? Here was the SWP. Eighteen of your comrades had gone to jail for opposing World War II. You had an unsullied personal record. You had worked throughout the war rather consistently against the Stalin-Hitler pact, and then against Mc-Carthyism. And yet, when the youth began to choose sides, they bypassed the CP and they bypassed you.
Cannon: You mustn't forget that the 1950s were a period of terrible reaction in the labor movement. In the cold war period the union bureaucrats were able with the help of the government to clean out all the Stalinists and all the other radicals from the CIO. And everything was dead on the campus. They called it the "silent generation."
We had counted greatly in the postwar period on young veterans being a natural recruiting ground for a big expansion. Instead, the soldiers came back and got the GI Bill of Rights. They went to school and they were studying to get degrees and get jobs. There was no response to radical ideas.
Lens: Did you expect a depression after the war like the depression of 1929?
Cannon: No, we were taken by surprise.
Lens: But you didn't expect an economic slump in 1946-47 like Eugene Dennis did.9
Cannon: We expected it, but we didn't put a time limit on it. We suffered terrible reverses. We lost a lot of members in the fifties.
Lens: To what, the persecutions?
Cold war period
Cannon: The persecution, the lack of response, the inactivity of the workers. People began falling away. Our biggest struggle in the whole cold war period of the fifties was to hold our nucleus together.
Lens: How big was the SWP?
Cannon: I would say we came out of the fifties with about 500 members.
Lens: And how many members did you have in 1945?
Cannon: In 1945 we had about 3,000, I guess, because at the 1946 convention I recall we made a ceremony of initiating 1,000 new members who had been recruited since the 1944 convention. During the latter years of the war there was considerable radicaliza-tion in anticipation of the war's end and labor struggles.
But there was no sign of radicaliza-tion in the fifties, and no sign of action in the labor unions to speak of. The campuses were dead. It was the civil rights movement that sparked the rebirth of a radical movement. We oriented ourselves as much as we could to that, and we recruited some people from the campuses, and we started a youth organization again, the Young Socialist Alliance. It began to attract a cadre. In general we've been advancing ever since, not spectacularly, but rather steadily.
Lens: But my question is why did all the energy go into the organizations of the New Left? And although you've made some gains, you never made a
9. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPin the 1950s.
Lens: Why? Was it something you did that was wrong?
Cannon: No, I don't know of anything we did that was wrong. In the late fifties the Khrushchev revelations opened up the Communist Party periphery.
We plunged into that very determinedly. We recruited some members out of the CP itself after the Khrushchev revelations especially in Los Angeles. And since then we have confronted the Communist Party in mass movements of various kinds virtually as equals. They can't brush us aside any more.
Lens: But you never were able to become the dominant force on the left.
Cannon: No.
Lens: When I asked Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden why they joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) rather than the CP or the SWP, they said they felt that there was no magnetism there.
Recruited women
Cannon: We did recruit fairly substantially, and some excellent cadres. And we have recruited women comrades on a scale never before in the radical movement. Forty percent of our members are women. And I think about 40 percent of our staff members are women. This takes place not as a quota policy but just naturally. So many talented women have come forward to fill this and that position.
Lens: But even with all the work you've done in the antiwar movement, you're not back to your 1945 strength yet.
Cannon: We're much stronger in the cadre sense.
Lens: Having influence.
Cannon: But I don't think we're much stronger numerically. A large number of the people we recruited during that period at the end of the war were Blacks as well as industrial workers. There was a big turnover as soon as the climate in the country turned conservative with the cold war. Then they dropped out because they expected more immediate advantages than we could offer. But this membership we have today is a pretty solid membership both in the YSA and in the SWP.
Lens: Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?
Cannon: -It depends on what you mean by near.
Lens: Next 10 or 15 years.
Anything possible
Cannon: I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years.
Lens: But you don't sound very optimistic.
Cannon: I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end.
Lens: Didn't you say that in the thirties?
Cannon: I did, yes.
Lens: And in the forties? Cannon: And in the forties.
Lens: I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade.
Cannon: But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race.
Lens: What do you see in the near future for the capitalist system?
Cannon: I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both poltically and economically. _,
Lens: Yet the average man is living well compared to 40 years ago.
Cannon: Materially, you mean?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Yes, but they got used to the new standard and now they see
the beginning of the decline and they don't like that.
One phenomenon that interests me greatly is the extraordinary development of union action among public workers. It's an entirely new phenomenon. And very widespread, very militant, and continuing.
Lens: You have two separate groups outside the CP and SWP that are radical, the New American Movement and the People's Party, which believe in the idea of a mass party. And then you have the Maoist parties, like the Revolutionary Union and the October League. Can you see the Trotskyists uniting with either of those forces?
Cannon: No.
Lens: You don't think that either one of them has a future?
Cannon: They have a future. I think this New American Movement or something like it can easily develop and have a temporary existence. But I don't think we can ever be isolated again. We will be in the midst of any kind of public mass movement that begins, and we will recruit out of it.
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 this article:
Anytime you have person who has been through the key left-wing movements of his century (IWW, Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party) as a militant and leader you had best listen up-listen up closely
****
Questions of American Radical History
The following interview was conducted at James P. Cannon's home in Los Angeles July 16.
Sidney Lens is a labor historian who was active hi the anti-Vietnam war movement He is also an editor of Liberation magazine.
Lens: I interviewed Earl Browder before he died. What was your reaction to him personally?
Cannon: Well, that's quite a story, because I knew him for many years.
Lens: Yes, I know, but did you like him personally?
Cannon: For a long time we worked together.
Lens: He never joined the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World — IWW), did he?
Cannon: I don't think so. He became a disciple of Foster. 2 Foster came through Kansas City, I think it was in 1913. He had been a Wobbly who had gone to France and had become converted to syndicalism. He came back and made a tour of the IWW locals, trying to convince them of his ideas of 'boring from within' the AFL (American Federation of Labor). Browder was one of his converts from Kansas City.
Lens: Did he try to convert you?
1.Earl Browder was general secretary
of the American Communist Party from
1930 to 1945.
2. William Z. Foster was the most im
portant trade-union figure to join the early
Communist Party.
Cannon: No.
Lens: Why not?
Cannon: I didn't run into him personally. I don't know whether Browder had been a Wobbly or not. I had been traveling around the country shortly before that and had been out of Kansas City. I knew he was a radical.
Lens: What made Browder become a Stalinist?
Cannon: That's a long story. What made all the others become Stalinists?
Lens: Was it a matter of just belonging to something big?
Cannon: Yes.
Lens: He told me that he disliked Trotsky personally. He was quite senile when I saw him, and he spoke very cryptically. He gave the impres-
sion that the biggest basis for not joining with Trotsky was that he considered Trotsky a show-off and very egotistical.
Cannon: When the first world war broke out for this country in 1917, Browder had been working in the (food and farm) cooperative movement. He was an accountant by profession. I think he was impressed by the cooperative movement, which at that tune there was quite a sentiment for.
He had been to New York. He may have been influenced by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's demonstrations of opposition to the war. He came back to Kansas City. He and his two brothers and his brother-in-law, Bob Sullivan, made an open demonstration against the entry into the war with leaflets. They were promptly arrested. He got a year in the Missouri State Penitentiary. They got out about 1918.
Recruited Browder
By that time I had become a communist. I saw them immediately after they came out. They had no inclination toward the communist movement because it was harebrained. There was some truth in that. There was a large element of harebrains in the new communist movement. But I think it's safe to say that I convinced him there was fundamental merit in it. And he became a communist.
In the fall of 1918 we decided to start a paper in Kansas City. It had no political allegiance at its start, but it was an exponent of the Russian revolution and defense of class-war prisoners and so on. Browder was the first editor and I worked very closely with him, promoting the idea of the paper and then getting started on it.
Along about early summer of 1919 he and his brothers had to go back to serve a federal sentence in Leaven-worth, Kans., and I had to take over the paper as editor.
We remained close associates while he was in prison. I became rather prominent in the new communist movement. I was elected to the central committee at the first Bridgeman, Mich., convention in the spring of 1920 and became organizer of the St. Louis-Southern Illinois coal district for the party. A few months after that I was moved to Cleveland to become editor of a paper called the Toiler, which was a continuation of the Ohio Socialist
(Alfred) Wagenknecht and his group had control of the state (Socialist Party) organization and they took the paper along with them when the split came (the split of the left wing from the SP). A few months later they decided to move the paper to New York and change the name to the Worker and I went along with that. That would be in the late fall of 1920. Eventually it became the Daily Worker. So if you want to have a record of my sins, you can say I was the original editor of the Daily Worker.
Lens: Yes, I know that record.
Cannon: Browder was in prison till the spring of 1921. He wasn't known to the leadership of the party. It was on my recommendation that he was brought to New York. He became right away the assistant of Foster, who had also at that time decided to join the party clandestinely.
They decided to start a monthly magazine, the Labor Monthly, in Chicago, with Foster as editor and Browder as managing editor. We were close together all that time up until Foster and I had a falling out —in 1925, I think it was.
Lens: What was that all about?
Cannon: I tell the story in my book The First Ten Years of American Communism in reply to some of (Theodore) Draper's questions. The split took place rather dramatically at a plenary meeting, right down the middle of the Foster-Cannon group. People like Bill Dunne, Arne Swabeck, and others came with me. Browder and (Jack) Johnstone and others went with Foster in this split, which* was never fully healed, although we had relations later. That amounted to a personal falling out to 1925. That would be about 12 years after I first met him.
Lens: Would you consider Browder a creative person to that period, independent?
Cannon: No.
Lens: Did he always have to attach himself to somebody, like to Foster or you?
Cannon: He wasn't by nature a leader or a politician. There was never such a thing as a Browder group in the party. There was a Foster group, and a Cannon group, and a Ruthenberg group. But he was a very energetic and intelligent, capable worker.
Lens: Was there anything in the twenties similar to the present counter-culture amongst the youth?
Cannon: Not to my knowledge.
Lens: What were the main reasons for the failure of the Communist Party (CP) to take off? I know that's a big story, but do you think they were mainly subjective reasons?
Cannon: Well, of course, first there were the persecutions, quite severe in the first few years. The party was driven underground. Next there was a sharp economic depression and then an ascending boom that continued throughout the twenties. That wasn't a very fertile field for communism to expand. And it was a new movement with a lot to learn.
Lens: Did you anticipate the depression of 1929?
Cannon: Well, we kept forecasting it.
Lens: Yes, you kept forecasting it from about 1922 on.
Cannon: So we were eventually vindicated in 1929.
Lens: But did you anticipate that particular depression and that it would come through the stock market crash?
Cannon: I wouldn't say specifically so, but the Lovestoneites3 wrote a document on American exception-alism. The Comintern (Communist International) was just beginning its left turn. They wrote a document on American exceptionalism. That's what they called it. Sort of exempting America from the world trend for the time being.
And we wrote a counter-document in collaboration with the Fosterites that we presented at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. It was called "The Right Danger in the American Party." There you'll see that we took a rather radical approach to the whole question, including the economy.
Lens: When the depression came, what were your personal reactions? Did you feel that America was moving close to an actual revolution?
Cannon: I can't say that I did. Lens: Then what was your reaction?
Cannon: Like most everybody else, stunned.
Lens: Stunned?
Workers atomized
Cannon: Yes, it was so severe. It was hard to see an immediate revolution. The workers were atomized. The organized labor movement had lost ground in the twenties. The unions had fewer than three million members at the time of the crash and they began losing more after that.
Lens: Did the CP really believe that a revolution impended?
Cannon: At that time they were in the midst of the "third period."4 So they were running hog-wild for a while, but they weren't getting much response to that appeal.
3. Jay Lovestone was secretary of the CP in the 1920s. He headed a rightist faction in the party that was aligned internationally with Bukharin. In 1928, Love-stone carried out the expulsion of the American Trotskyists from the CP. When Stalin turned on his rightist allies in 1929, Lovestone was demoted from his post and expelled.
The Lovestone group maintained itself until the outbreak of World War II and then dissolved. Lovestone subsequently became an anticommunist expert for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy.
Lens: Was your organization called the Communist League of America at first, or was it called Communist Party Majority or Left Opposition?
Cannon: Communist League of America (Opposition). The Lovestoneites called themselves Communist Party (Majority Group).5
Lens: Then you dropped the word "opposition" eventually.
Cannon: Eventually, yes. But for four years we continued to direct our agitation mainly to the Communist Party.
Lens: Were you disappointed in the results?
Cannon: Well, we were trying to recruit our primary cadre and we recruited more than a hundred people to begin with. I guess we had a couple of hundred or a little more by 1934 and then we got into the Minneapolis strike and that gave us a big boost. It identified us as workers in the mass movement.
Then came the fusion with the Muste-ites6 in the same year. So it was sort of a period of expansion in the later thirties.
4The "third period" was a schema pro
claimed by the Stalinists in 1928 accord
ing to which capitalism was in its final
period of collapse. Following from this
schema, the Comintern's tactics during
the next six years were marked by ultra-
leftism, adventurism, sectarian "red"
unions, and opposition to forming united
fronts with other working-class organiza
tions.
5The Communist League of America
(Opposition) was the organization formed
by Cannon and others who were expelled
from the Communist Party in 1928 for
supporting the program of the Left Op
position in the Soviet CP, led by Leon
Trotsky.
6In December 1934 the Communist
League of America fused with the Ameri
can Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste,
to form the Workers Party of the United
States.
Lens: What happened then in the relalively large mass movement before World War II and during World War II? Did you feel that there was something impeding your development or your progress, or were you going too slow, or what?
Cannon: Do you mean our organization?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Our big obstacle was the Communist Party. It had complete domination of what there was of the radical movement. The SP was an empty shell. And we were isolated. The membership of the Communist Party largely identified Stalin with the Comintern. And whatever the Comintern said was the law. But we kept recruiting one here and one there until we'd built up quite a cadre of capable people.
Lens: Why didn't you take over the Communist Party? Why didn't the majority come over to your point of view? Must a radical party have the support of a government in some foreign country to survive or prosper?
Cannon: The Comintern represented the Russian revolution in the minds of the American communists. The Comintern said we were counterrevolutionaries and that Trotsky was a fascist, a traitor, and everything else; and they accepted that.
Lens: From a theoretical point of view, though, Marxism is supposed to be the science of revolution, and your estimate of events was more lucid than Browder's, say and yet here were ten or twenty thousand communists to whom you couldn't get through. Their emotions were much stronger than their intellectual probing.
Cannon: That's true; it took a long time for us to break through.
Lens: Is that a handicap that the left can always expect, that emotion plays a bigger role than science of revolution?
Cannon: The pull of a radical organization that is dominant in the field is almost gravitational. The average worker and activist doesn't want to be connected with some little sect on the sidelines. He wants to be where the action is.
Muste group
Lens: Did the Muste group make any sensational spurt in its early days, or was it growing about like your group?
Cannon: It was growing about like ours. Muste was a remarkable personal character. He was a preacher, you know, to start with.
In 1917, as a minister in Boston, he went to Lawrence, Mass., and got into the textile strike there and became the head of it Next, if I'm correct, he became the head of the textile workers union, or what was left of it.
Then he started the Brookwood Labor College in New York State, which quite a number of people attended, and he recruited some of them. Out of that he developed the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and recruited people here and there. Then this organization developed an unemployed movement of its own.
The Communist Party dominated the main unemployment movement in the big cities, the Unemployed Councils. The Musteites organized around the fringes rather effectively, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other places. The Unemployed Leagues, they called them. Through all these operations Muste accumulated a cadre.
We were greatly impressed with their actions in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934, at the same time that we were occupied with the Teamsters' fight in Minneapolis. They had done an unprecedented thing. Their leaders there
— Sam Pollock, Ted Selander, and Art Preis — were in the unemployment movement, the Unemployed League of the Musteites. And they organized to support the strike.
Contrary to the custom of the unemployed being recruited as strikebreakers, they became the most militant supporters of the strike. They practically led the strike. We were tremendously impressed by that, and it led to our negotiations with them for fusion. Meanwhile Muste was turning to the left politically, so there wasn't much trouble in bringing about a unification.
Some of the people that Muste had attracted —such as (J. B. S.) Hardman and (Louis) Budenz and a few others wouldn't go along with it, but Muste
decided to do it and he brought along a majority of his people and it gave
the movement quite a boost.
Lens: Did you expect a revolution in the 1930s —that capitalism would collapse?
Cannon: I can't say that I expected it, but looking back on it now, as I have said many times, anything was possible in the thirties. After the workers recovered from their paralysis. In the first four or five years they were simply stunned, they didn't know what to do. But beginning with Minneapolis in 1934, three strikes —Minneapolis, the San Francisco general strike, and the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo — seemed to give the impetus needed for a new movement. And it began to develop by leaps and bounds.
Lens: What stopped it?
Tremendous upheaval
Cannon: The American Communist Party.
The industrial union movement developed millions of members and John L. Lewis, recognizing the tide, turned toward it and gave quite effective leadership for a time. The sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., and the organization of General Motors and Ford represented a tremendous upheaval. That was accomplished in a few years.
Lens: When you say the Communist Party stopped it, in what way?
Cannon: The Communist Party was the dominant force in the radical movement. They dominated the unemployed movement and by that time there developed a radical movement on the campuses, which they also dominated. And they trained some cadres in the unemployment and student movements who took part in various actions.
You know, the average worker is afraid to stand up and make a motion in a meeting. They aren't accustomed to that. The CP trained a whole cadre of people who could stand up and make motions and parliamentary moves, and run meetings, and things of this sort.
In the mid-thirties there was a certain upsurge out of the depression. Not a real economic recovery, but a revival. They began to open factories and take some people back to work. And the Communist Party colonized a lot of their people in the strategic industries and their radical talk appealed widely. They were competitors for control of the auto workers union for a while.
Right in the middle of this came the turn of the Comintern toward the right. The "third period" had passed and the Kremlin began turning over toward conservatism and naturally the Communist Party just carried it out here in the United States to the letter.
I believe that if the Communist Party had remained a revolutionary party, it could have made great things out of that mass movement of the thirties.
Lens: If you go back to the Russian revolution, you also had a Menshevik group, and the Bolsheviks were a minority in relation to the Mensheviks, and yet they were able to pull people away from them. Why weren't the Trotskyists able to pull people from the Stalinists here? You also had capable people, you also knew how to make motions in meetings and all the rest of that, and probably were more dedicated.
Excluded
Cannon: Unquestionably. But we didn't have the numbers. The Communist Party excluded us from every movement they controlled, like the unemployed movement. A hungry unemployed member of the Trotskyist organization couldn't get into the Unemployed Councils because the Stalinists branded him a "counterrevolutionary."
The CP formed alliances with other radicals and socialists in the League Against War and Fascism, but we were not admitted to it. So although we expanded somewhat with the success of the Minneapolis strikes, the fusion with the Musteites, and the entry into the Socialist Party, ? which gained us quite a group of new members, we were still a small minority in comparison to the Communist Party.
Lens: You expected quite a bit more from the entry in the Socialist Party, didn't you, than you eventually got?
Cannon: We won over the majority of the Young People's Socialist League.
Lens: I know, but you really expected to become an important mass party.
Cannon: We expected the Socialist Party itself to grow and that we would grow with it.
Lens: Why didn't it?
Cannon: The competition of the Communist Party, and partly the inadequacy of its leadership, I guess.
Lens: Of the Communist or Socialist leadership?
Cannon: Of the Socialist Party leadership.
Lens: But you were playing an important role in it by then. Weren't you in the Socialist leadership?
Cannon: I came out to California during that period. We soon got a majority in the state executive committee of the Socialist Party and published a weekly paper in San Francisco. The right-wingers remaining in the Socialist Party got alarmed about that and began expelling our people. And we had nothing to do but fight it out and come to a break.
Lens: Had you expected a break? Cannon: No, we tried to prevent it.
Lens: You had hoped to remain in the Socialist Party?
Cannon: Yes, we were not ready to bring things to a head yet. But we had no choice.
Lens: Why do you think the Comintern got rid of Browder?8 Or, to put it a different way, why didn't he adjust to the Comintern? He had been adjusting to it all his life.
7 In 1936 the Trotskyists joined the So
cialist Party in order to win over the
growing left wing to revolutionary poli
tics. •
8 Browder was deposed as secretary of
the CP in 1945 and expelled from the
party in 1946. Except for his first few
years in office (the end of the ultraleft
"third period") and the brief interlude of
the Stalin-Hitler pact, his regime coincided
with those years in which the CP engaged
in blatant class collaboration of the peo
ple's front variety.
During the World War II alliance of the U. S. and the Soviet Union, Browder ardently supported U. S. imperialism and publicly urged that the wartime no-strike pledge be continued after the war ended.
Cannon: It began with his appointment as secretary. Foster was a far more publicly prominent and able man than Browder. That was his trouble. You might say he was the logical man to succeed Lovestone when they got rid of Lovestone. But by that time Stalin didn't want any able people heading national parties.
I think Browder's defects were his merits. His lack of leadership capacity was just what they wanted from him — somebody to do what they told him to do. I don't say Foster wouldn't have done it, but Foster had ideas and initiative of his own.
Lens: Did you like Foster personally?
Cannon: At first I did. I was associated with him in the political fights. But I didn't like his character.
Lens: Why?
Cannon: Why don't you like somebody? He was terribly self-centered and dishonest, when it served his purpose, and disloyal in personal relations. All the kinds of things that I especially don't like.
Lens: Getting back to Browder. He had shifted gears with the Comintern all along, and then 1946 comes along and he refuses to shift gears. How do you account for that?
Cannon: I think he was taken by surprise. He carried the conciliationism of the Kremlin bureaucracy to an extreme that they were not prepared to go to after the war ended. They were getting ready for the outbreak of the cold war, while Browder was going ahead as before.
You remember his famous statement, when he said something like, "I'm ready
to shake hands with J. Pierpont Morgan on this —to have peace, no strikes during thewar, speedup, incentive pay, and all the rest."
Out of favor
It's remarkable how easily the Stalinists disposed of him. They didn't even have to send any message directly from Moscow. All they had to do was to have somebody in France, Duclos (Jacques Duclos, longtime leader of the French Communist Party), write a piece in the French CP magazine criticizing Browder. And all the hacks in the party took that as a sign that this fellow was out of favor with the big power.
Lens: Why do you feel the Lovestone-ites fell apart?
Cannon: What stages do you mean?
Lens: When they dissolved, about 1937 or 1938 (actually, 1939).
Cannon: In 1929 they took a hundred or more with them out of the Communist Party. That in itself was an indication of the tremendous power of Stalin over the party. The CP had just had a convention where the Love-stoneites had a big majority, or so they thought, because the party wasn't aware that Stalin was getting ready to dump him.
The Lovestoneites claimed to be the champions of the Comintern above all others. But the Comintern had two representatives here at the CP's 1929 convention early in the year, and the campaign against Bukharin was beginning already in Moscow. Bukharin had been their mentor and their protector, and Lovestone didn't get the signal quickly enough.
Lens: Then they survived for about 10 years. And they did have some influence in the auto workers and the ladies garment workers unions.
Cannon: As late as 1934 one of the big events in the radical movement in New York was a debate between me and Lovestone at Irving Plaza on the question of whether we should build a new international or support the Communist International. At that time he strongly supported the Comintern of Stalin. He was still, I think, hoping to convince them that he was their boy. And probably still had some idea that the Communist movement had a future here.
Some people don't have to believe things out of conviction; if they believe something is going to be a success, that's enough for them. I think that was the case with Lovestone. I think he was a careerist from the very beginning.
Lens: Let me sidetrack to another issue. The emergence of the New Left after World War II, or quite a long time after World War II, was accompanied by a tremendous counterculture movement. Why wasn't there one in the 1930s?
Cannon: This counter-culture movement of the recent past was an intellectual student movement, wasn't it?
Lens: Yes, but you had a growing student movement hi the thirties too.
Cannon: Yes, but the real power that asserted itself was a workers uprising in the 1930s. We don't have anything like that today. Nothing comparable.
Lens: In other words you feel that the students were pretty much secondary to the workers.
Cannon: In the thirties, yes.
Lens: And therefore they didn't take on characteristics of their own?
Cannon: I just don't recall them making any special mark for themselves in the thirties.
Lens: How do you account for that?
Cannon: There was a student movement, but it was mainly composed of groups affiliated to the two radical parties, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
I don't know whether you've heard this story, I've told it a hundred tunes: Among the big events on the campuses of New York in the thirties were the debates between the Draper brothers. Have you heard of that?
Lens: No. Theodore and Hal?
Cannon: Theodore Draper was an ardent Stalinist. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist. And they had a number of debates. I didn't attend any of them, but I heard about them.
The left wing of the Socialist Party didn't develop as a counter-cultural nut movement, but as a radical, Leninist movement. I heard Gus Tyler debate with Gil Green —who later became head of the Young Communist League —on the question of policy toward war. Green took the peaceful coexistence position of the Comintern and Tyler defended the Leninist policy.
Tyler, who's now an ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) leader, simply cut him to pieces, in my judgment.
This whole counter-culture business expressed in this New Left phenomenon seems to me like it sprang out of nowhere. And it disappeared almost as rapidly.
New Left
Lens: How do you account for the emergence of the New Left? Why didn't all those young people come into the Socialist Workers Party?
Cannon: It started with the League for Industrial Democracy, didn't it?
Lens: But that was pretty much of a dead organization.
Cannon: But they had a "Port Huron Statement" that seemed to just catch fire. It took most everybody by surprise. I certainly didn't anticipate it.
Lens: Why? Here was the SWP. Eighteen of your comrades had gone to jail for opposing World War II. You had an unsullied personal record. You had worked throughout the war rather consistently against the Stalin-Hitler pact, and then against Mc-Carthyism. And yet, when the youth began to choose sides, they bypassed the CP and they bypassed you.
Cannon: You mustn't forget that the 1950s were a period of terrible reaction in the labor movement. In the cold war period the union bureaucrats were able with the help of the government to clean out all the Stalinists and all the other radicals from the CIO. And everything was dead on the campus. They called it the "silent generation."
We had counted greatly in the postwar period on young veterans being a natural recruiting ground for a big expansion. Instead, the soldiers came back and got the GI Bill of Rights. They went to school and they were studying to get degrees and get jobs. There was no response to radical ideas.
Lens: Did you expect a depression after the war like the depression of 1929?
Cannon: No, we were taken by surprise.
Lens: But you didn't expect an economic slump in 1946-47 like Eugene Dennis did.9
Cannon: We expected it, but we didn't put a time limit on it. We suffered terrible reverses. We lost a lot of members in the fifties.
Lens: To what, the persecutions?
Cold war period
Cannon: The persecution, the lack of response, the inactivity of the workers. People began falling away. Our biggest struggle in the whole cold war period of the fifties was to hold our nucleus together.
Lens: How big was the SWP?
Cannon: I would say we came out of the fifties with about 500 members.
Lens: And how many members did you have in 1945?
Cannon: In 1945 we had about 3,000, I guess, because at the 1946 convention I recall we made a ceremony of initiating 1,000 new members who had been recruited since the 1944 convention. During the latter years of the war there was considerable radicaliza-tion in anticipation of the war's end and labor struggles.
But there was no sign of radicaliza-tion in the fifties, and no sign of action in the labor unions to speak of. The campuses were dead. It was the civil rights movement that sparked the rebirth of a radical movement. We oriented ourselves as much as we could to that, and we recruited some people from the campuses, and we started a youth organization again, the Young Socialist Alliance. It began to attract a cadre. In general we've been advancing ever since, not spectacularly, but rather steadily.
Lens: But my question is why did all the energy go into the organizations of the New Left? And although you've made some gains, you never made a
9. Eugene Dennis was general secretary of the CPin the 1950s.
Lens: Why? Was it something you did that was wrong?
Cannon: No, I don't know of anything we did that was wrong. In the late fifties the Khrushchev revelations opened up the Communist Party periphery.
We plunged into that very determinedly. We recruited some members out of the CP itself after the Khrushchev revelations especially in Los Angeles. And since then we have confronted the Communist Party in mass movements of various kinds virtually as equals. They can't brush us aside any more.
Lens: But you never were able to become the dominant force on the left.
Cannon: No.
Lens: When I asked Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden why they joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) rather than the CP or the SWP, they said they felt that there was no magnetism there.
Recruited women
Cannon: We did recruit fairly substantially, and some excellent cadres. And we have recruited women comrades on a scale never before in the radical movement. Forty percent of our members are women. And I think about 40 percent of our staff members are women. This takes place not as a quota policy but just naturally. So many talented women have come forward to fill this and that position.
Lens: But even with all the work you've done in the antiwar movement, you're not back to your 1945 strength yet.
Cannon: We're much stronger in the cadre sense.
Lens: Having influence.
Cannon: But I don't think we're much stronger numerically. A large number of the people we recruited during that period at the end of the war were Blacks as well as industrial workers. There was a big turnover as soon as the climate in the country turned conservative with the cold war. Then they dropped out because they expected more immediate advantages than we could offer. But this membership we have today is a pretty solid membership both in the YSA and in the SWP.
Lens: Do you anticipate a revolution in America in the near future?
Cannon: -It depends on what you mean by near.
Lens: Next 10 or 15 years.
Anything possible
Cannon: I say anything is possible in this century in the years that are left of it. That's 26 years.
Lens: But you don't sound very optimistic.
Cannon: I don't want to make any categorical statements, but I say we're living in a time when capitalism is plunging toward its climactic end.
Lens: Didn't you say that in the thirties?
Cannon: I did, yes.
Lens: And in the forties? Cannon: And in the forties.
Lens: I mean, that must sound like something peculiar when you say it every decade.
Cannon: But when you stop to think, the history of humanity is a very long one, isn't it? And a quarter of a century is only an instant in the history of the human race.
Lens: What do you see in the near future for the capitalist system?
Cannon: I see one crisis piling upon another. I don't think the capitalists have ever been in such a jam in this country as they are right now, both poltically and economically. _,
Lens: Yet the average man is living well compared to 40 years ago.
Cannon: Materially, you mean?
Lens: Yes.
Cannon: Yes, but they got used to the new standard and now they see
the beginning of the decline and they don't like that.
One phenomenon that interests me greatly is the extraordinary development of union action among public workers. It's an entirely new phenomenon. And very widespread, very militant, and continuing.
Lens: You have two separate groups outside the CP and SWP that are radical, the New American Movement and the People's Party, which believe in the idea of a mass party. And then you have the Maoist parties, like the Revolutionary Union and the October League. Can you see the Trotskyists uniting with either of those forces?
Cannon: No.
Lens: You don't think that either one of them has a future?
Cannon: They have a future. I think this New American Movement or something like it can easily develop and have a temporary existence. But I don't think we can ever be isolated again. We will be in the midst of any kind of public mass movement that begins, and we will recruit out of it.
Tax Day Activities In Boston-April 17th 2012- Report And Pictures
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From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-"Remember Jackson State"-"Workers Vanguard" (April 5, 1985)
Markin comment on this series:
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.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State
Atlanta, GA 16 February
Editor, Workers Vanguard
Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly thoroughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of students were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropriately mentioned, we should remember that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, February 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).
Comradely, Joe Vetter
P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.
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.
*************
letter reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985
Remember Jackson State
Atlanta, GA 16 February
Editor, Workers Vanguard
Unfortunately, in the article "Blacks Hated the Vietnam War," Workers Vanguard left out some of the atrocities committed against black people during the late '60s and early '70s (which were fairly thoroughly covered up by the media): "...hundreds of thousands of students were marching against the war, driving army recruiters off campus, even being shot down by the National Guard at Kent State." While the murders at Kent State are appropriately mentioned, we should remember that murders and attempted murders of blacks on black campuses were all too common. At Texas Southern University, May 16, 1967, police fired several thousand rounds into the dorms; at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, February 7, 1968, 33 students were shot with three dead at the hands of state troopers backed by the National Guard. In this regard, within ten days of the Kent State murders, there was a similar event at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Kirkpatrick Sale in the book SDS says the following: "On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students at Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was more subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black" (p. 638).
Comradely, Joe Vetter
P.S. To my knowledge, the only GI ever successfully court-martialed for a fragging was black and then he had to be brought to California for trial.
From The Pages Of The International Communist League-Le Bolchévik nº 199-Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Le Bolchévik nº 199
Mars 2012
Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire multiethnique !
21 février – Le président de la République française est le chef de l’exécutif, c’est-à-dire le dirigeant exécutif de l’Etat capitaliste, responsable en chef pour défendre les intérêts des capitalistes dans leur ensemble. Doté de pouvoirs exorbitants selon la Constitution issue du coup d’Etat gaulliste de 1958, le « chef de l’Etat » peut à volonté décréter la loi martiale, dissoudre le parlement, etc. Il est officiellement chef des armées, celles qui ont tué directement ou indirectement, rien que l’année dernière, peut-être des milliers de personnes en Côte d’Ivoire, en Libye, en Afghanistan et ailleurs. L’Etat est le comité exécutif de la classe dirigeante ; en son cœur il consiste en des bandes d’hommes armés (flics, armée, prisons, tribunaux) chargés de maintenir, grâce à leur monopole de la violence, le système de production basé sur l’esclavage salarié.
Comme le montre toute l’expérience chèrement acquise par le prolétariat international depuis les révolutions de 1848, la classe ouvrière, qui produit les richesses et surtout les profits qu’empochent les capitalistes, ne peut pas simplement mettre la main sur l’Etat capitaliste et l’utiliser pour son propre compte. Elle devra pour s’affranchir, et affranchir du même coup l’ensemble des opprimés, détruire l’Etat capitaliste et le remplacer par sa propre machine de répression des capitalistes récalcitrants : la dictature du prolétariat. Karl Marx avait tiré avec force cette leçon de la Commune de Paris, et Lénine l’avait confirmée avec la victoire de la Révolution russe d’octobre 1917. Nous luttons pour construire un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire du type de celui des bolchéviks de Lénine, indispensable à la victoire de la révolution.
Le prolétariat fait directement tourner les moyens de production : usines, mines, moyens de transport, etc. Aussi, lui seul a la puissance sociale, et l’intérêt objectif, pour prendre la tête de tous les opprimés et balayer le système capitaliste, ici et dans le monde entier. La révolution socialiste jettera les bases d’une économie planifiée rationnellement pour satisfaire les besoins et non pour fournir des profits. Un développement énorme des forces productives permettra d’avancer vers l’élimination de la pauvreté et de la pénurie et vers la création d’une société socialiste égalitaire.
Il découle de notre position révolutionnaire que nous marxistes refusons par principe d’occuper des postes exécutifs de l’Etat, car cela reviendrait à prendre la responsabilité pour mettre en œuvre l’appareil de répression capitaliste. Nous le refusons à tous les niveaux : depuis celui du président de la République en passant par les membres du gouvernement capitaliste, les préfets et jusqu’aux maires de villages, qui représentent l’Etat capitaliste au niveau des municipalités et disposent pour cela d’une série de pouvoirs, y compris des pouvoirs de police. Et il en découle aussi que nous refusons par principe de présenter des candidats à l’élection de tels postes. En effet, s’y présenter implique, qu’on le veuille ou non, que l’on est prêt à accepter de telles responsabilités, quels que soient les démentis que l’on puisse faire par avance. Cela ne peut que conférer une légitimité aux conceptions réformistes les plus répandues sur l’Etat, en donnant à penser que l’élection d’un « révolutionnaire » à la tête de l’Etat pourrait faire avancer les intérêts des travailleurs, voire nous faire l’économie d’une révolution (voir notre article « A bas les postes exécutifs de l’Etat capitaliste ! Principes marxistes et tactiques électorales », paru dans Spartacist édition française n° 39, été 2009).
Pour l’indépendance de classe du prolétariat ! A bas le front populaire !
Les marxistes peuvent toutefois envisager de donner un soutien critique à une autre organisation, même dans des élections présidentielles, du moment que cela peut faire avancer d’une manière ou d’une autre la conscience de classe du prolétariat. Mais dans les élections présentes, il n’y a personne à qui les marxistes puissent ne serait-ce qu’envisager de donner un soutien critique, car tous les candidats se réclamant peu ou prou du mouvement ouvrier sont dans le meilleur des cas une caution de gauche au candidat du PS et contribuent ainsi à alimenter des illusions dans le « changement » qu’il apporterait.
Tout ce que celui-ci, François Hollande, a promis, c’est de faire du sarkozysme « normal », sans bling-bling. En ouverture de sa campagne électorale, il s’est prononcé contre la tactique de l’« essuie-glace » (débat sur France 2, 26 janvier), c’est-à-dire qu’il n’effacera pas les attaques qu’a subies la classe ouvrière en dix ans de pouvoir de la droite. Hollande s’est engagé à priver de leurs droits à la retraite à taux plein tous ceux qui n’ont pas effectivement travaillé au moins 41 ans. Toute une partie de la bourgeoisie est excédée par Sarkozy – non pas tant par sa vulgarité tape-à-l’œil de nouveau riche que par le fait qu’il n’a pas rempli ses promesses de casser le mouvement ouvrier et spectaculairement gonfler le taux de profit des capitalistes. L’impérialisme français continuant de perdre du terrain par rapport à son rival allemand, il est impératif pour lui que son prochain commandant en chef mette en œuvre des attaques encore plus radicales contre la classe ouvrière et les opprimés. Hollande aurait l’avantage pour les capitalistes de bénéficier du soutien des bureaucrates syndicaux, qu’il a promis de « consulter » et de flatter en tant que « partenaires sociaux » pour diriger l’impérialisme français. Aucun vote pour François Hollande !
Hollande a aussi promis une lutte « implacable » contre les sans-papiers. Il a promis une « solution » pour les Roms en les mettant dans des « camps » pour « éviter que nous connaissions cette circulation encore et encore » (le Monde, 18 février). Une « solution finale » ? Il a promis d’embaucher plus de flics, attaquant de la droite Sarkozy sur un bilan « sécuritaire » insuffisant. Il a promis d’embaucher 60 000 personnes dans l’éducation – en les prenant sur d’autres postes dans la fonction publique et en pérennisant ainsi le tiers des 90 000 suppressions d’emplois pratiquées dans l’éducation par la droite ces dernières années.
S’il a promis de retirer les troupes françaises d’Afghanistan – que le gouvernement Jospin-Mélenchon avait envoyées il y a dix ans, avec Hollande comme chef du PS ! – c’est du point de vue des intérêts bien compris de l’impérialisme français : les pertes militaires subies ne justifient plus l’« avantage » de pouvoir entraîner les troupes à tuer de vraies personnes et de pouvoir négocier des contreparties avec les USA pour ses propres capitalistes. D’ailleurs Hollande a personnellement exprimé son soutien aux interventions militaires sanglantes de l’impérialisme français, organisées par Sarkozy, en Côte d’Ivoire et en Libye. Troupes françaises, hors d’Afghanistan, hors d’Afrique, hors du Liban, hors des Balkans, hors de la péninsule arabique !
François Hollande se présente de plus comme le candidat commun du PS et du Parti radical de gauche, un parti bourgeois. Ce genre de coalition est un « front populaire », un bloc entre partis ouvriers-bourgeois (des partis comme le PS ou le PCF ayant des liens avec le mouvement ouvrier et se réclamant d’une façon ou d’une autre de celui-ci, bien que leur direction et leur programme soient complètement bourgeois) et partis de la classe dominante, où ce sont inévitablement ces derniers qui donnent le caractère de classe de l’alliance, servant de garantie à la bourgeoisie que la coalition servira loyalement les capitalistes.
Les partis bourgeois servent aussi d’alibi aux réformistes pour leur propre programme bourgeois ; ainsi, le PCF prétendait encore en 1936 qu’il était pour des soviets (dans un avenir indéfini), mais concrètement il prônait un programme ultra modéré afin de préserver à tout prix l’alliance avec les « radicaux-socialistes » d’Edouard Herriot, le parti capitaliste par excellence de la Troisième République. Aujourd’hui le PS ne cache pas son programme bourgeois derrière les Radicaux, mais ceux-ci, ainsi que le parti bourgeois soi-disant « progressiste » des Verts avec qui le PS a déjà passé des accords électoraux pour les législatives, peuvent lui servir d’assurance en cas de soulèvement ouvrier, comme en Juin 36. Depuis cent ans, les partis ouvriers réformistes en France n’ont jamais gouverné sans faire un bloc de ce type avec des partis bourgeois.
En enchaînant les travailleurs à leur ennemi de classe, les alliances de front populaire pavent toujours la voie à la défaite, et c’est pourquoi c’est une question de principe pour les marxistes de s’y opposer. Le Front populaire de Juin 36 avait fini avec Pétain, celui d’Espagne la même année avec la dictature franquiste pendant près de quarante ans, celui du Chili avec le coup d’Etat de Pinochet en 1973. Dans le cycle ouvert par Mitterrand en 1981, le front populaire s’est chaque fois terminé par un retour en force de la réaction cinq ans plus tard, avec l’enracinement des fascistes du Front national.
Nous refusons également de donner le moindre soutien aux candidats de la « gauche de la gauche ». Les sociaux-démocrates du Parti communiste (PC) et du Parti de gauche (PG) se sont unis derrière Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ancien cadre de longue date du Parti socialiste qui avait occupé y compris un strapontin ministériel dans les dernières années du gouvernement Jospin, celui qui s’était vanté d’avoir effectué plus de privatisations que tous les gouvernements de droite précédents. Le PC et le PG se sont engagés avec force et inconditionnellement à « battre la droite » au deuxième tour, c’est-à-dire en clair à voter Hollande. Ils servent ainsi de simples rabatteurs de voix pour le front populaire.
C’est également le rôle du NPA d’Olivier Besancenot et Philippe Poutou ; d’ailleurs une bonne partie du NPA est en train de passer avec armes et bagages chez Mélenchon pour soutenir d’encore plus près le front populaire (et se rapprocher des sinécures que promet une victoire de la « gauche » aux élections). Quant à la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, Nathalie Arthaud, elle refuse pour le moment de s’opposer au vote Hollande – ces opportunistes avaient appelé au soir du premier tour des élections de 2007 à voter pour Ségolène Royal. Nous appelons les travailleurs à ne pas voter aux élections présidentielles, ni au premier ni au deuxième tour.
Ni, de même, aux législatives qui suivront. Lénine décrivait ainsi le parlementarisme :
« Décider périodiquement, pour un certain nombre d’années, quel membre de la classe dirigeante foulera aux pieds, écrasera le peuple au Parlement, telle est l’essence véritable du parlementarisme bourgeois, non seulement dans les monarchies constitutionnelles parlementaires, mais encore dans les républiques les plus démocratiques. »
– l’Etat et la révolution (1917)
Toutefois, à la différence des présidentielles, les marxistes peuvent envisager de se présenter aux législatives pour utiliser la campagne électorale et, s’ils sont élus, la tribune du parlement pour faire de la propagande en tant qu’oppositionnels, c’est-à-dire opposés à l’exécutif capitaliste quels qu’en soient les détenteurs. Il s’agit de faire de la propagande révolutionnaire, agissant comme des tribuns de la classe ouvrière et des opprimés.
A bas l’Union européenne capitaliste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
On peut voir très clairement sur l’Union européenne combien le programme du PS est chauvin et anti-ouvrier. L’Union européenne est une formation entièrement réactionnaire, un consortium d’Etats impérialistes et d’Etats plus faibles, dirigé par l’Allemagne. L’objectif initial de ses prédécesseurs, la Communauté européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier, l’Europe des Six, etc., était de renforcer la cohésion économique de l’Europe occidentale, essentiellement la France et l’Allemagne, pour garantir la solidité de l’OTAN, le bloc militaire capitaliste contre l’Union soviétique. Le PS de Mitterrand-Mélenchon n’a pas peu contribué dans les années 1980 à la victoire de la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, alors que nous, trotskystes, étions pour la défense militaire inconditionnelle de l’URSS. Pendant que la gauche en général, du PS à Lutte ouvrière, se réjouissait de la perspective d’une réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, nous avions lutté en 1989-1990 contre l’absorption de l’Etat ouvrier déformé est-allemand par l’Allemagne de l’Ouest capitaliste et pour une réunification révolutionnaire de l’Allemagne, au moyen d’une révolution politique prolétarienne contre la bureaucratie stalinienne parasitaire est-allemande, et d’une révolution socialiste à l’Ouest pour renverser et exproprier la bourgeoisie allemande.
L’URSS maintenant détruite, l’Union européenne (UE) est un simple bloc commercial entre des puissances impérialistes concurrentes, essentiellement l’Allemagne, la France et la Grande-Bretagne, qui se sont fait deux fois la guerre entre elles rien qu’au siècle dernier pour la suprématie en Europe et pour arracher à leurs rivales des parts de marché au niveau mondial. Le seul objet de l’UE est de soi-disant promouvoir la « concurrence libre et non faussée » (alors que le capitalisme a atteint depuis plus de cent ans l’ère des cartels et des monopoles). C’est une couverture idéologique pour des attaques croissantes contre les acquis que les travailleurs avaient pu arracher par leurs luttes à l’époque où l’Union soviétique existait encore. Ainsi, la directive antisyndicale Bolkestein visait à mettre davantage en concurrence les travailleurs des différents pays d’Europe les uns contre les autres ; comme nous l’écrivions dans un tract (reproduit dans le Bolchévik n° 175, mars 2006), « la directive Bolkestein va droit au cœur de ce qu’est l’Union européenne ». Plus récemment, nous soulignions dans le dernier Bolchévik (décembre 2011) :
« L’UE est une construction fragile, exposée aux tensions constamment engendrées par la divergence des intérêts nationaux des impérialistes européens ; ces tensions menacent constamment de la faire éclater. Il ne peut en être autrement. Les forces productives ont depuis longtemps débordé du cadre national, et pourtant le capitalisme est un système qui repose fondamentalement sur les Etats-nations : chacune des différentes classes capitalistes nationales a besoin d’avoir son propre Etat pour promouvoir et défendre ses intérêts à l’intérieur et à l’étranger. De ce fait, sous le capitalisme, une union politique, ou un super-Etat européen, est un objectif nécessairement réactionnaire en même temps qu’une utopie fumeuse. »
Aussi, la Ligue communiste internationale s’est toujours opposée à l’Union européenne et son instrument monétaire, l’euro. En mai 1997, alors que se finalisaient les négociations interimpérialistes pour la création de l’euro, nous écrivions dans un tract qui appelait à ne pas voter pour le front populaire Jospin-PCF : « Si demain, face aux luttes ouvrières, l’“union monétaire” était abandonnée ou repoussée aux calendes grecques, ce serait une victoire pour les travailleurs, qui dans toute l’Europe, opposent une résistance acharnée à l’offensive capitaliste. » Nous expliquions à l’époque qu’une monnaie unique n’est pas viable en l’absence d’un gouvernement européen unique, et celui-ci « ne peut être réalisé que par les méthodes d’Adolf Hitler, et non par celles de Jacques Delors, l’architecte social-démocrate français de Maastricht » – et père de Martine Aubry, aujourd’hui dirigeante du PS (voir le Bolchévik n° 143, été 1997).
Si Hollande s’oppose à Sarkozy sur la question de l’Europe, c’est uniquement du point de vue des intérêts de l’impérialisme français, pas ceux des travailleurs. Hollande reproche à Sarkozy de s’être couché devant les rivaux allemands de la France ; il est allé à Londres pour non seulement rassurer les financiers de la City qu’ils n’avaient rien à craindre de ses discours contre « le monde de la finance », mais aussi pour plaider pour un resserrement des liens franco-britanniques face à l’Allemagne. Hollande n’a par exemple nullement l’intention de revenir sur les conditions imposées par Merkel et Sarkozy à la Grèce, menant celle-ci à l’asphyxie et plongeant son peuple littéralement dans la misère – et jetant les bases pour aggraver les attaques contre les travailleurs dans le reste de l’Europe, y compris en Allemagne et en France.
En France, l’Union européenne et l’euro sont une affaire où les sociaux-démocrates ont toujours joué un rôle décisif. Pour essayer de garder des leviers sur l’Allemagne, Mitterrand avait négocié avec le chancelier Kohl en décembre 1989 une monnaie commune en échange de son accord pour la réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, qui allait inévitablement à terme renforcer la puissance de l’Allemagne par rapport à la France. Il avait fait voter par référendum en 1992 le traité de Maastricht instituant l’euro (le « oui » ne l’avait emporté que de justesse, grâce notamment au vote de Mélenchon et à l’abstention de Lutte ouvrière). L’euro lui-même a été introduit sous le gouvernement PS-PC-Verts de Jospin, auquel prit part Mélenchon entre 2000 et 2002. Le PS de Hollande a plus tard fait campagne pour le traité de Lisbonne (repoussé par référendum en 2005 mais tout de même adopté en 2008 grâce à l’abstention ou au vote favorable de plus de 150 parlementaires PS). Avec sa décision de s’abstenir au parlement, le PS vient de sauver la dernière trouvaille merkozyste pour asphyxier la Grèce, dite « mécanisme européen de stabilité ».
Voici le bilan de l’UE pour l’impérialisme français. Grâce à la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, et à la destruction des acquis sociaux et au laminage des salaires qui l’y ont accompagnée, la bourgeoisie allemande notamment a pu délocaliser une part croissante des intrants de ses produits industriels vers ces pays qui constituent de plus en plus son hinterland (arrière-pays) économique ; la force de l’euro par rapport aux monnaies locales a encore abaissé le coût de ces produits pour les capitalistes allemands. La réduction des salaires en Allemagne même, notamment sous les gouvernements sociaux-démocrates présidés par Gerhard Schröder dans les années 2000, s’y est ajoutée pour donner un avantage compétitif croissant aux capitalistes allemands par rapport aux français. Les réformistes français, qui avaient soutenu la contre-révolution (au nom de l’avènement de la « démocratie ») et l’Union européenne sont maintenant fort déçus du résultat : c’est leur propre bourgeoisie qui coule.
En fait, aucun candidat du mouvement ouvrier dans ces élections ne s’oppose ni de près ni de loin à l’Union européenne. Mélenchon et le PCF voudraient que la Banque centrale européenne distribue de l’argent aux pauvres (le tout payé en fin de compte par les capitalistes allemands via une dépréciation de l’euro et/ou via des « eurobonds »), propageant ainsi l’illusion que l’UE et son institution monétaire pourraient se mettre au service des opprimés. Tant qu’ils y sont, pourquoi ne pas demander à Le Pen de défendre les immigrés ?
Mais le reste de la « gauche de la gauche » n’est pas en reste. Cela fait des années que le NPA, à la suite de son prédécesseur la Ligue « communiste révolutionnaire », se fait le chantre d’une Europe « démocratique et sociale », c’est-à-dire qu’il prétend qu’il pourrait y avoir une Europe capitaliste qui soit plus humaine que celle d’aujourd’hui. Le NPA détourne ainsi la classe ouvrière de la lutte pour renverser le système capitaliste tout entier et pour fonder sur cette base révolutionnaire internationaliste des Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe. Ces larbins de leur propre impérialisme tancent les travailleurs grecs et français qu’ils doivent rester prisonniers du carcan de l’euro, que le NPA présente comme un cadre protecteur face à leur propre bourgeoisie nationale. Ainsi l’éditorial de TOUT est à nous ! LA REVUE du NPA de janvier, signé Yvan Lemaitre, déclare à propos du retour aux monnaies nationales :
« Un tel retour en arrière enfermerait les travailleurs dans le carcan national à la merci de bourgeoisies nationales acharnées à défendre leur maigre place au sein de la nouvelle division internationale du travail. Il y a une autre issue, démocratique et progressiste, au sein de cette Europe devenue la nouvelle arène des luttes des travailleurs et des peuples. »
Comme Lemaitre est opposé à la révolution socialiste, il ne peut concevoir l’opposition à l’Union européenne capitaliste et à l’euro que d’un point de vue nationaliste de droite. Il a le cynisme de condamner « la propagande réactionnaire, chauvine et nationaliste qui prône le retour aux monnaies nationales et le repli derrière les frontières ». En fait c’est la faillite de la gauche, apôtre de l’Europe capitaliste « démocratique et sociale », qui gonfle les voiles de la démagogie des fascistes : elle leur laisse le monopole de l’opposition à l’Union européenne au nom de laquelle sont saccagés les acquis des travailleurs – et notamment des travailleurs allemands, qui ont été parmi les principales victimes des mesures de « compétitivité » en Europe. Les deux seuls candidats déclarés dans ces élections qui soient contre l’euro sont Marine Le Pen et Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, un vieux-gaulliste d’extrême droite.
(Le « Parti ouvrier indépendant » (POI) a sa propre ligne ultra-chauvine délirante franco-française ; lors du rassemblement du 13 février à Paris à propos de la Grèce, ses militants scandaient des slogans contre l’Union européenne, « agence américaine », et demandaient le départ de la troïka UE-FMI-BCE… de Paris, peut-être pour protéger la belle France des méfaits de celle-ci. Ils masquent ainsi le rôle de l’impérialisme français dans l’oppression de la Grèce.)
Le protectionnisme, une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes
Partout en Europe monte le nationalisme, expression idéologique de l’aiguisement des rivalités entre les bourgeoisies capitalistes sur le continent. Pour le combattre il faut rompre ouvertement avec la fiction réactionnaire d’une unification capitaliste de l’Europe et lutter au contraire pour l’internationalisme prolétarien révolutionnaire, et notamment aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères de classe grecs qui étouffent sous le joug de la BNP, de la Deutsche Bank et de la BCE. Il faut s’opposer aux campagnes protectionnistes pour taxer les produits d’importation, « produire français » ou « produire en France », qu’elles viennent de Sarkozy, de Hollande ou de Mélenchon (voir notamment notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre dernier, « PS, PCF, PG, NPA prônent l’alliance avec leur propre bourgeoisie contre les travailleurs d’autres pays – Le protectionnisme : une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes »). Il faut s’opposer au poison chauvin des rares idéologues « de gauche », comme Jacques Sapir (Faut-il sortir de l’euro ?) ou Jacques Nikonoff (Sortons de l’euro !), qui s’opposent à l’euro pour mieux préconiser le protectionnisme. Comme nous le disions à propos d’un article paru dans la revue Inprecor (juillet-août-septembre 2011) de Michel Husson, économiste fétiche du NPA (article où Husson défendait aussi l’euro) : « Le NPA veut faire croire qu’on peut réformer à bon compte le capitalisme, et en faisant la promotion d’un “bon” protectionnisme il donne de la légitimité au protectionnisme du Front national » (le Bolchévik n° 197, septembre 2011).
Et de même le PCF avec son « produisons français » qu’il vient de ressortir il y a quelques mois, et que reprend le FN. Aujourd’hui le FN demeure essentiellement une enveloppe parlementaire, mais sur le fond le fascisme, ce sont des nervis paramilitaires qui pratiquent la terreur raciste et dont la cible est au fond la classe ouvrière. Le système capitaliste décadent constitue le terreau dont se nourrissent les fascistes. En cas de crise aiguë la bourgeoisie les mobilise contre la classe ouvrière, comme en Allemagne en 1933. C’est pourquoi la lutte contre les fascistes est inséparable de la lutte pour la révolution socialiste. Pour les écraser il faut mobiliser la classe ouvrière en défense des musulmans, des immigrés, des homosexuels et de toutes les victimes désignées de cette racaille et lutter pour renverser le capitalisme – une perspective à laquelle les bureaucrates syndicaux sont hostiles, car ils cherchent à maintenir les syndicats enchaînés à l’ordre capitaliste.
Il faut combattre les licenciements qui menacent les travailleurs dans les usines que délocalisent les capitalistes à la recherche d’un profit maximal. Mais le protectionnisme signifie chercher un accord avec les capitalistes français pour maintenir la production ici contre les travailleurs des autres pays. C’est tout le contraire d’un programme internationaliste prolétarien, basé sur une lutte de classe commune par-delà les frontières contre ces mêmes capitalistes pour défendre et étendre les acquis des travailleurs. Pour lutter contre les manœuvres de la bourgeoisie pour diviser les travailleurs internationalement, il faut lutter pour des augmentations de salaires y compris dans les filiales et chez les sous-traitants dans d’autres pays. Il faut lutter pied à pied contre les licenciements en revendiquant le partage du travail entre toutes les mains, avec réduction du temps de travail correspondante sans perte de salaire. Il faut lutter pour l’embauche en CDI de tous les intérimaires et contrats précaires. A travail égal, salaire égal !
Cela exige de lutter pour des syndicats industriels regroupant dans une même organisation de lutte tous les travailleurs sur un site donné, y compris s’il s’agit de sous-traitants, d’entreprises françaises ou étrangères. Et cela en retour exige de lutter pour une nouvelle direction dans les syndicats, une direction révolutionnaire internationaliste remplaçant des bureaucrates qui se satisfont de la division des travailleurs syndiqués entre plusieurs syndicats concurrents, qui se satisfont même du faible nombre de syndiqués étant donné que c’est pour l’essentiel les patrons et l’Etat qui financent leur appareil.
La division de la classe ouvrière selon les frontières, avec le protectionnisme, va de pair avec la division des travailleurs à l’intérieur du pays selon des lignes ethniques, raciales ou sexuelles. Mélenchon, le plus clair avocat du protectionnisme parmi les candidats du mouvement ouvrier, n’a pratiquement rien à dire contre les campagnes racistes du gouvernement dans sa plaquette-programme de 96 pages. Il en va pourtant de l’unité du prolétariat multiethnique et multiracial de ce pays. Pleins droits de citoyenneté pour tous ceux qui sont ici ! A bas les expulsions de sans-papiers ! Le mouvement ouvrier doit défendre les jeunes de banlieue ! A bas la campagne raciste contre les femmes voilées !
LO se présente comme la vraie candidature PCF
Par rapport à ce marais, Nathalie Arthaud, la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, se présente comme la seule « candidature communiste ». Elle cherche à tirer profit des réticences initiales d’une partie significative des militants PCF à soutenir la candidature du jauressiste Mélenchon. (Jean Jaurès, qu’Engels traitait fort à propos de « phraseur », était à l’origine un radical bourgeois et sa politique n’évolua guère même quand il se déclara « socialiste ».) Mais le programme d’Arthaud n’a rien à voir avec le communisme. D’ailleurs l’UE, l’euro, LO a toujours été pour ; dans leur dernier document de conférence (Lutte de Classe n° 140, décembre 2011-janvier 2012) ils se lamentent que ces derniers temps « les quelques pas en avant faits par les bourgeoisies pour surmonter les rivalités nationales, comme dans le domaine de l’unification monétaire, sont aujourd’hui menacés ». Ils ont toujours célébré la soi-disant « ouverture des frontières » à l’intérieur de l’espace Schengen, alors qu’à tout moment il y a selon les estimations environ 100 000 personnes dans l’Union européenne qui sont en prison pour défaut de papiers, et 140 000 sont expulsées chaque année – et environ 15 000 personnes sont mortes en vingt ans en essayant de pénétrer cette forteresse raciste.
Voilà des gens qui se réclament soi-disant du « communisme », mais qui foulent aux pieds les principes les plus élémentaires de la lutte de classe en refusant de montrer à la classe ouvrière qu’on ne vote pas pour qui s’allie avec l’ennemi de classe bourgeois : LO a décidé lors de son récent congrès, en décembre dernier, de ne pas s’opposer à Hollande, en tout cas pas avant le soir du premier tour des élections. La candidature de LO n’est dès lors qu’une candidature pour faire pression sur le front populaire pour infléchir un peu à gauche sa politique une fois au pouvoir : « Même ceux qui, dans l’électorat populaire, par dégoût de Sarkozy, choisiront de voter pour Hollande au deuxième tour, ont intérêt à exprimer au premier tour qu’ils ne lui font pas confiance, qu’ils le garderont à l’œil et que, même avec la gauche au pouvoir, ils sauront imposer leurs exigences » (programme électoral de Nathalie Arthaud).
Quelle que puisse être la déclaration de Nathalie Arthaud le soir du premier tour à 20 heures, celle qu’avait faite dans les mêmes conditions Arlette Laguiller lors des élections de 2007 (appel à voter Ségolène Royal « sans réserve mais sans illusion ») laisse présager du pire. Même si LO s’avisait brusquement de préconiser l’abstention, leur participation continue depuis 2008 aux blocs municipaux de front populaire pour gérer le capitalisme localement, sous l’autorité de maires PCF ou chevènementistes, montre que LO ne s’oppose en rien à la collaboration de classes (y compris ils votent le budget). Aucun vote pour Nathalie Arthaud !
LO n’a jamais fait mystère du caractère réformiste de son municipalisme et de son syndicalisme. Ils écrivaient dans leur revue Lutte de Classe (février 2008) : « Par définition, l’activité municipale comme l’activité syndicale ne peuvent être révolutionnaires, mais sont réformistes. » Encore le mois dernier Jean-Pierre Mercier, porte-parole de Nathalie Arthaud et membre de la majorité municipale de Bagnolet, a signé une déclaration spéciale de solidarité politique avec le maire PCF, Marc Everbecq. Cette déclaration prenait la défense du « “vivre ensemble” et les solidarités », ainsi que de la « construction citoyenne », le soi-disant mode de gouvernement d’Everbecq. « Construction citoyenne » ou démolition raciste ? Les habitants d’un squat de travailleurs africains démoli à la tractopelle il y a deux ans par les services du maire apprécieront (voir notre article « Expulsions racistes à Bagnolet – LO se solidarise avec les expulsés… pour redorer le blason de la municipalité PCF », le Bolchévik n° 192, juin 2010). Voter le budget du maire, comme le fait Mercier depuis des années, cela veut dire justement lui payer sa tractopelle.
LO défend son réformisme municipal en argumentant que c’est là une longue tradition du mouvement ouvrier. Du mouvement ouvrier français, malheureusement oui, mais pas de Lénine. Celui-ci avait lutté avec acharnement en 1917 contre ses propres camarades qui voulaient précisément continuer les pratiques réformistes de la Deuxième Internationale au niveau de la gestion municipale (voir notre article dans Spartacist n° 39 sur les postes exécutifs). Ce n’est pas un hasard si la Constitution française exige depuis cinquante ans que le candidat au poste exécutif suprême soit parrainé par un certain nombre d’élus, dans leur immense majorité des maires qui justement exercent au quotidien un mandat exécutif.
Mercier est par ailleurs bureaucrate syndical à l’usine PSA d’Aulnay (voir notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre 2011). Face aux menaces de fermeture de cette usine, la CGT qu’il dirige vient d’organiser le 18 février une manifestation commune dans la ville avec le maire PS... et avec le SIA, le syndicat-maison de PSA (ex-CSL, des briseurs de grève de sinistre mémoire) ! En faisant ainsi l’unité avec les jaunes, LO pave la voie à la paralysie de la lutte et à la défaite face aux patrons. Le SIA a non sans raison cosigné une lettre de la CGT de décembre dernier à Sarkozy le suppliant de s’engager « par écrit » pour sauvegarder l’usine – après tout, ce ne serait pas sa première promesse de ce genre. Mercier lui-même croit-il qu’on peut défendre les emplois avec des bouts de papier de ce genre ?
On a malheureusement vu LO en action lors de la lutte en défense des retraites fin 2010. A l’époque ils se sont félicités de l’action des bureaucrates syndicaux, prétendant que cela « ne s’est pas fait au détriment des travailleurs » – pas étonnant, vu que leur propre rôle était d’« essayer d’être les meilleurs militants d’un mouvement déclenché et dirigé par les appareils bureaucratiques » (document adopté par la conférence de Lutte ouvrière, Lutte de Classe, décembre 2010-janvier 2011). En effet, ils sont maintenant eux-mêmes les bureaucrates syndicaux au niveau de nombreuses entreprises. Un an plus tard, ils ont subrepticement révisé leur bulletin de victoire en glissant dans un nouveau document de conférence que « le constat n’est évidemment pas le même un an après » (Lutte de Classe, décembre 2011-janvier 2012). Quant à réexaminer leur rôle dans cette défaite, LO en est loin ; mieux vaudra se référer à notre article « Leçons des grèves de l’automne en défense des retraites » (le Bolchévik n° 194, décembre 2010).
Au fond, le programme électoral de LO se résume à vouloir « imposer au grand patronat l’interdiction des licenciements », « imposer à l’Etat d’embaucher » et « imposer le contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires », le tout avec des augmentations de salaires et alignement automatique des salaires sur les prix. Tout cela, ils veulent l’« imposer aux possédants et aux gouvernants, quels qu’ils soient ». Le malheur, c’est qu’imposer aux capitalistes l’« interdiction » des licenciements, etc., ce serait leur imposer qu’ils cessent de faire fonctionner leur économie pour la production de profits, leur imposer de cesser d’être eux-mêmes.
LO pense que les exigences vitales des travailleurs peuvent « être imposées […] par une lutte collective des travailleurs, suffisamment massive, suffisamment explosive, pour menacer réellement la classe capitaliste. […] la classe capitaliste ne lâchera rien sans sentir la colère ouvrière et la menace sur ses profits et sur sa fortune. » Mais si une telle lutte explosive se produit, ce n’est pas là que les choses sérieuses se terminent, c’est là qu’elles commencent : ou bien on se satisfait d’avoir obtenu ces « exigences vitales » sous la menace, ou bien l’on va de l’avant pour renverser le capitalisme. LO se limite manifestement à la première perspective, promettant ainsi de réitérer les trahisons du PCF en Juin 36 ou en Mai 68, où le PCF avait fait retourner les ouvriers au travail après quelques concessions économiques de la bourgeoisie, trahissant ainsi la possibilité d’une révolution socialiste. Comme toujours dans ces cas-là, les concessions obtenues sont immédiatement minées par les capitalistes qui n’auront de cesse qu’elles ne soient vidées de tout contenu.
De même, le « contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires » ne peut être qu’une phase de la lutte des travailleurs pour imposer leurs propres organes de pouvoir, au niveau de l’usine et au niveau de l’ensemble de la société et pour liquider la propriété capitaliste pour de bon. Si l’on ne pose pas la perspective ainsi, d’un point de vue révolutionnaire, et LO ne le fait pas, il s’agit simplement de la cogestion où les bureaucrates syndicaux prennent part aux décisions des actionnaires pour mieux accroître le taux de profit des capitaux de ces derniers – et, en cette période de crise aiguë du capitalisme, « accompagner » les licenciements et les fermetures d’usines. Les mots suivants de Trotsky sont ici intégralement pertinents vis-à-vis de LO :
« La social-démocratie classique, qui développa son action à l’époque où le capitalisme était progressiste, divisait son programme en deux parties indépendantes l’une de l’autre : le PROGRAMME MINIMUM, qui se bornait à des réformes dans le cadre de la société bourgeoise, et le PROGRAMME MAXIMUM, qui promettait pour un avenir indéterminé le remplacement du capitalisme par le socialisme. Entre le programme minimum et le programme maximum, il n’y avait aucun pont. La social-démocratie n’en avait nul besoin, car de socialisme, elle ne parlait que les jours de fête. […]
« Dans la mesure où les vieilles revendications partielles “minimum” des masses se heurtent aux tendances destructives et dégradantes du capitalisme décadent – et cela se produit à chaque pas –, la IVe Internationale met en avant un système de REVENDICATIONS TRANSITOIRES dont le sens est de se diriger de plus en plus ouvertement et résolument contre les bases mêmes du régime bourgeois. Le vieux “programme minimum” est constamment dépassé par le PROGRAMME DE TRANSITION dont la tâche consiste en une mobilisation systématique des masses pour la révolution prolétarienne. »
– Programme de transition (1938)
La démoralisation frappe le mouvement ouvrier depuis vingt ans, avec la contre-révolution en Union soviétique et la campagne sur la soi-disant « mort du communisme ». Cette démoralisation ne rend la contradiction que plus criante entre les tâches objectives auxquelles fait face le prolétariat et le niveau de conscience de celui-ci, mais elle ne change rien au fait que la seule manière de résoudre cette contradiction, c’est de lutter pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire. Au cours de la lutte de classe, ce n’est pas spontanément que la classe ouvrière se dotera d’une conscience socialiste, comme veut le faire croire LO « les jours de fête », mais par l’intervention d’un parti léniniste.
Dans ces élections, il n’y a aucun choix pour les travailleurs. Il n’y a aucune candidature qui présente, même au premier tour, même d’une façon grossière, une ligne d’indépendance de classe contre Hollande et Sarkozy, les deux principaux candidats considérés par la bourgeoisie pour diriger l’impérialisme français dans la période à venir. Quel que soit l’élu, la classe ouvrière va faire face à un renforcement de l’offensive capitaliste contre ses acquis. Elle sera d’autant mieux préparée à y faire face qu’elle aura refusé d’écouter les sirènes du front populaire et de lui accorder ses suffrages. Surtout, elle a besoin d’une nouvelle direction, une direction révolutionnaire. Nous luttons pour construire le parti léniniste qui un jour la conduira à la victoire et au renversement du capitalisme. Pour reforger la Quatrième Internationale, parti mondial de la révolution socialiste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
Le Bolchévik nº 199
Mars 2012
Elections 2012 : aucun choix pour les travailleurs
Pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire multiethnique !
21 février – Le président de la République française est le chef de l’exécutif, c’est-à-dire le dirigeant exécutif de l’Etat capitaliste, responsable en chef pour défendre les intérêts des capitalistes dans leur ensemble. Doté de pouvoirs exorbitants selon la Constitution issue du coup d’Etat gaulliste de 1958, le « chef de l’Etat » peut à volonté décréter la loi martiale, dissoudre le parlement, etc. Il est officiellement chef des armées, celles qui ont tué directement ou indirectement, rien que l’année dernière, peut-être des milliers de personnes en Côte d’Ivoire, en Libye, en Afghanistan et ailleurs. L’Etat est le comité exécutif de la classe dirigeante ; en son cœur il consiste en des bandes d’hommes armés (flics, armée, prisons, tribunaux) chargés de maintenir, grâce à leur monopole de la violence, le système de production basé sur l’esclavage salarié.
Comme le montre toute l’expérience chèrement acquise par le prolétariat international depuis les révolutions de 1848, la classe ouvrière, qui produit les richesses et surtout les profits qu’empochent les capitalistes, ne peut pas simplement mettre la main sur l’Etat capitaliste et l’utiliser pour son propre compte. Elle devra pour s’affranchir, et affranchir du même coup l’ensemble des opprimés, détruire l’Etat capitaliste et le remplacer par sa propre machine de répression des capitalistes récalcitrants : la dictature du prolétariat. Karl Marx avait tiré avec force cette leçon de la Commune de Paris, et Lénine l’avait confirmée avec la victoire de la Révolution russe d’octobre 1917. Nous luttons pour construire un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire du type de celui des bolchéviks de Lénine, indispensable à la victoire de la révolution.
Le prolétariat fait directement tourner les moyens de production : usines, mines, moyens de transport, etc. Aussi, lui seul a la puissance sociale, et l’intérêt objectif, pour prendre la tête de tous les opprimés et balayer le système capitaliste, ici et dans le monde entier. La révolution socialiste jettera les bases d’une économie planifiée rationnellement pour satisfaire les besoins et non pour fournir des profits. Un développement énorme des forces productives permettra d’avancer vers l’élimination de la pauvreté et de la pénurie et vers la création d’une société socialiste égalitaire.
Il découle de notre position révolutionnaire que nous marxistes refusons par principe d’occuper des postes exécutifs de l’Etat, car cela reviendrait à prendre la responsabilité pour mettre en œuvre l’appareil de répression capitaliste. Nous le refusons à tous les niveaux : depuis celui du président de la République en passant par les membres du gouvernement capitaliste, les préfets et jusqu’aux maires de villages, qui représentent l’Etat capitaliste au niveau des municipalités et disposent pour cela d’une série de pouvoirs, y compris des pouvoirs de police. Et il en découle aussi que nous refusons par principe de présenter des candidats à l’élection de tels postes. En effet, s’y présenter implique, qu’on le veuille ou non, que l’on est prêt à accepter de telles responsabilités, quels que soient les démentis que l’on puisse faire par avance. Cela ne peut que conférer une légitimité aux conceptions réformistes les plus répandues sur l’Etat, en donnant à penser que l’élection d’un « révolutionnaire » à la tête de l’Etat pourrait faire avancer les intérêts des travailleurs, voire nous faire l’économie d’une révolution (voir notre article « A bas les postes exécutifs de l’Etat capitaliste ! Principes marxistes et tactiques électorales », paru dans Spartacist édition française n° 39, été 2009).
Pour l’indépendance de classe du prolétariat ! A bas le front populaire !
Les marxistes peuvent toutefois envisager de donner un soutien critique à une autre organisation, même dans des élections présidentielles, du moment que cela peut faire avancer d’une manière ou d’une autre la conscience de classe du prolétariat. Mais dans les élections présentes, il n’y a personne à qui les marxistes puissent ne serait-ce qu’envisager de donner un soutien critique, car tous les candidats se réclamant peu ou prou du mouvement ouvrier sont dans le meilleur des cas une caution de gauche au candidat du PS et contribuent ainsi à alimenter des illusions dans le « changement » qu’il apporterait.
Tout ce que celui-ci, François Hollande, a promis, c’est de faire du sarkozysme « normal », sans bling-bling. En ouverture de sa campagne électorale, il s’est prononcé contre la tactique de l’« essuie-glace » (débat sur France 2, 26 janvier), c’est-à-dire qu’il n’effacera pas les attaques qu’a subies la classe ouvrière en dix ans de pouvoir de la droite. Hollande s’est engagé à priver de leurs droits à la retraite à taux plein tous ceux qui n’ont pas effectivement travaillé au moins 41 ans. Toute une partie de la bourgeoisie est excédée par Sarkozy – non pas tant par sa vulgarité tape-à-l’œil de nouveau riche que par le fait qu’il n’a pas rempli ses promesses de casser le mouvement ouvrier et spectaculairement gonfler le taux de profit des capitalistes. L’impérialisme français continuant de perdre du terrain par rapport à son rival allemand, il est impératif pour lui que son prochain commandant en chef mette en œuvre des attaques encore plus radicales contre la classe ouvrière et les opprimés. Hollande aurait l’avantage pour les capitalistes de bénéficier du soutien des bureaucrates syndicaux, qu’il a promis de « consulter » et de flatter en tant que « partenaires sociaux » pour diriger l’impérialisme français. Aucun vote pour François Hollande !
Hollande a aussi promis une lutte « implacable » contre les sans-papiers. Il a promis une « solution » pour les Roms en les mettant dans des « camps » pour « éviter que nous connaissions cette circulation encore et encore » (le Monde, 18 février). Une « solution finale » ? Il a promis d’embaucher plus de flics, attaquant de la droite Sarkozy sur un bilan « sécuritaire » insuffisant. Il a promis d’embaucher 60 000 personnes dans l’éducation – en les prenant sur d’autres postes dans la fonction publique et en pérennisant ainsi le tiers des 90 000 suppressions d’emplois pratiquées dans l’éducation par la droite ces dernières années.
S’il a promis de retirer les troupes françaises d’Afghanistan – que le gouvernement Jospin-Mélenchon avait envoyées il y a dix ans, avec Hollande comme chef du PS ! – c’est du point de vue des intérêts bien compris de l’impérialisme français : les pertes militaires subies ne justifient plus l’« avantage » de pouvoir entraîner les troupes à tuer de vraies personnes et de pouvoir négocier des contreparties avec les USA pour ses propres capitalistes. D’ailleurs Hollande a personnellement exprimé son soutien aux interventions militaires sanglantes de l’impérialisme français, organisées par Sarkozy, en Côte d’Ivoire et en Libye. Troupes françaises, hors d’Afghanistan, hors d’Afrique, hors du Liban, hors des Balkans, hors de la péninsule arabique !
François Hollande se présente de plus comme le candidat commun du PS et du Parti radical de gauche, un parti bourgeois. Ce genre de coalition est un « front populaire », un bloc entre partis ouvriers-bourgeois (des partis comme le PS ou le PCF ayant des liens avec le mouvement ouvrier et se réclamant d’une façon ou d’une autre de celui-ci, bien que leur direction et leur programme soient complètement bourgeois) et partis de la classe dominante, où ce sont inévitablement ces derniers qui donnent le caractère de classe de l’alliance, servant de garantie à la bourgeoisie que la coalition servira loyalement les capitalistes.
Les partis bourgeois servent aussi d’alibi aux réformistes pour leur propre programme bourgeois ; ainsi, le PCF prétendait encore en 1936 qu’il était pour des soviets (dans un avenir indéfini), mais concrètement il prônait un programme ultra modéré afin de préserver à tout prix l’alliance avec les « radicaux-socialistes » d’Edouard Herriot, le parti capitaliste par excellence de la Troisième République. Aujourd’hui le PS ne cache pas son programme bourgeois derrière les Radicaux, mais ceux-ci, ainsi que le parti bourgeois soi-disant « progressiste » des Verts avec qui le PS a déjà passé des accords électoraux pour les législatives, peuvent lui servir d’assurance en cas de soulèvement ouvrier, comme en Juin 36. Depuis cent ans, les partis ouvriers réformistes en France n’ont jamais gouverné sans faire un bloc de ce type avec des partis bourgeois.
En enchaînant les travailleurs à leur ennemi de classe, les alliances de front populaire pavent toujours la voie à la défaite, et c’est pourquoi c’est une question de principe pour les marxistes de s’y opposer. Le Front populaire de Juin 36 avait fini avec Pétain, celui d’Espagne la même année avec la dictature franquiste pendant près de quarante ans, celui du Chili avec le coup d’Etat de Pinochet en 1973. Dans le cycle ouvert par Mitterrand en 1981, le front populaire s’est chaque fois terminé par un retour en force de la réaction cinq ans plus tard, avec l’enracinement des fascistes du Front national.
Nous refusons également de donner le moindre soutien aux candidats de la « gauche de la gauche ». Les sociaux-démocrates du Parti communiste (PC) et du Parti de gauche (PG) se sont unis derrière Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ancien cadre de longue date du Parti socialiste qui avait occupé y compris un strapontin ministériel dans les dernières années du gouvernement Jospin, celui qui s’était vanté d’avoir effectué plus de privatisations que tous les gouvernements de droite précédents. Le PC et le PG se sont engagés avec force et inconditionnellement à « battre la droite » au deuxième tour, c’est-à-dire en clair à voter Hollande. Ils servent ainsi de simples rabatteurs de voix pour le front populaire.
C’est également le rôle du NPA d’Olivier Besancenot et Philippe Poutou ; d’ailleurs une bonne partie du NPA est en train de passer avec armes et bagages chez Mélenchon pour soutenir d’encore plus près le front populaire (et se rapprocher des sinécures que promet une victoire de la « gauche » aux élections). Quant à la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, Nathalie Arthaud, elle refuse pour le moment de s’opposer au vote Hollande – ces opportunistes avaient appelé au soir du premier tour des élections de 2007 à voter pour Ségolène Royal. Nous appelons les travailleurs à ne pas voter aux élections présidentielles, ni au premier ni au deuxième tour.
Ni, de même, aux législatives qui suivront. Lénine décrivait ainsi le parlementarisme :
« Décider périodiquement, pour un certain nombre d’années, quel membre de la classe dirigeante foulera aux pieds, écrasera le peuple au Parlement, telle est l’essence véritable du parlementarisme bourgeois, non seulement dans les monarchies constitutionnelles parlementaires, mais encore dans les républiques les plus démocratiques. »
– l’Etat et la révolution (1917)
Toutefois, à la différence des présidentielles, les marxistes peuvent envisager de se présenter aux législatives pour utiliser la campagne électorale et, s’ils sont élus, la tribune du parlement pour faire de la propagande en tant qu’oppositionnels, c’est-à-dire opposés à l’exécutif capitaliste quels qu’en soient les détenteurs. Il s’agit de faire de la propagande révolutionnaire, agissant comme des tribuns de la classe ouvrière et des opprimés.
A bas l’Union européenne capitaliste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
On peut voir très clairement sur l’Union européenne combien le programme du PS est chauvin et anti-ouvrier. L’Union européenne est une formation entièrement réactionnaire, un consortium d’Etats impérialistes et d’Etats plus faibles, dirigé par l’Allemagne. L’objectif initial de ses prédécesseurs, la Communauté européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier, l’Europe des Six, etc., était de renforcer la cohésion économique de l’Europe occidentale, essentiellement la France et l’Allemagne, pour garantir la solidité de l’OTAN, le bloc militaire capitaliste contre l’Union soviétique. Le PS de Mitterrand-Mélenchon n’a pas peu contribué dans les années 1980 à la victoire de la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, alors que nous, trotskystes, étions pour la défense militaire inconditionnelle de l’URSS. Pendant que la gauche en général, du PS à Lutte ouvrière, se réjouissait de la perspective d’une réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, nous avions lutté en 1989-1990 contre l’absorption de l’Etat ouvrier déformé est-allemand par l’Allemagne de l’Ouest capitaliste et pour une réunification révolutionnaire de l’Allemagne, au moyen d’une révolution politique prolétarienne contre la bureaucratie stalinienne parasitaire est-allemande, et d’une révolution socialiste à l’Ouest pour renverser et exproprier la bourgeoisie allemande.
L’URSS maintenant détruite, l’Union européenne (UE) est un simple bloc commercial entre des puissances impérialistes concurrentes, essentiellement l’Allemagne, la France et la Grande-Bretagne, qui se sont fait deux fois la guerre entre elles rien qu’au siècle dernier pour la suprématie en Europe et pour arracher à leurs rivales des parts de marché au niveau mondial. Le seul objet de l’UE est de soi-disant promouvoir la « concurrence libre et non faussée » (alors que le capitalisme a atteint depuis plus de cent ans l’ère des cartels et des monopoles). C’est une couverture idéologique pour des attaques croissantes contre les acquis que les travailleurs avaient pu arracher par leurs luttes à l’époque où l’Union soviétique existait encore. Ainsi, la directive antisyndicale Bolkestein visait à mettre davantage en concurrence les travailleurs des différents pays d’Europe les uns contre les autres ; comme nous l’écrivions dans un tract (reproduit dans le Bolchévik n° 175, mars 2006), « la directive Bolkestein va droit au cœur de ce qu’est l’Union européenne ». Plus récemment, nous soulignions dans le dernier Bolchévik (décembre 2011) :
« L’UE est une construction fragile, exposée aux tensions constamment engendrées par la divergence des intérêts nationaux des impérialistes européens ; ces tensions menacent constamment de la faire éclater. Il ne peut en être autrement. Les forces productives ont depuis longtemps débordé du cadre national, et pourtant le capitalisme est un système qui repose fondamentalement sur les Etats-nations : chacune des différentes classes capitalistes nationales a besoin d’avoir son propre Etat pour promouvoir et défendre ses intérêts à l’intérieur et à l’étranger. De ce fait, sous le capitalisme, une union politique, ou un super-Etat européen, est un objectif nécessairement réactionnaire en même temps qu’une utopie fumeuse. »
Aussi, la Ligue communiste internationale s’est toujours opposée à l’Union européenne et son instrument monétaire, l’euro. En mai 1997, alors que se finalisaient les négociations interimpérialistes pour la création de l’euro, nous écrivions dans un tract qui appelait à ne pas voter pour le front populaire Jospin-PCF : « Si demain, face aux luttes ouvrières, l’“union monétaire” était abandonnée ou repoussée aux calendes grecques, ce serait une victoire pour les travailleurs, qui dans toute l’Europe, opposent une résistance acharnée à l’offensive capitaliste. » Nous expliquions à l’époque qu’une monnaie unique n’est pas viable en l’absence d’un gouvernement européen unique, et celui-ci « ne peut être réalisé que par les méthodes d’Adolf Hitler, et non par celles de Jacques Delors, l’architecte social-démocrate français de Maastricht » – et père de Martine Aubry, aujourd’hui dirigeante du PS (voir le Bolchévik n° 143, été 1997).
Si Hollande s’oppose à Sarkozy sur la question de l’Europe, c’est uniquement du point de vue des intérêts de l’impérialisme français, pas ceux des travailleurs. Hollande reproche à Sarkozy de s’être couché devant les rivaux allemands de la France ; il est allé à Londres pour non seulement rassurer les financiers de la City qu’ils n’avaient rien à craindre de ses discours contre « le monde de la finance », mais aussi pour plaider pour un resserrement des liens franco-britanniques face à l’Allemagne. Hollande n’a par exemple nullement l’intention de revenir sur les conditions imposées par Merkel et Sarkozy à la Grèce, menant celle-ci à l’asphyxie et plongeant son peuple littéralement dans la misère – et jetant les bases pour aggraver les attaques contre les travailleurs dans le reste de l’Europe, y compris en Allemagne et en France.
En France, l’Union européenne et l’euro sont une affaire où les sociaux-démocrates ont toujours joué un rôle décisif. Pour essayer de garder des leviers sur l’Allemagne, Mitterrand avait négocié avec le chancelier Kohl en décembre 1989 une monnaie commune en échange de son accord pour la réunification capitaliste de l’Allemagne, qui allait inévitablement à terme renforcer la puissance de l’Allemagne par rapport à la France. Il avait fait voter par référendum en 1992 le traité de Maastricht instituant l’euro (le « oui » ne l’avait emporté que de justesse, grâce notamment au vote de Mélenchon et à l’abstention de Lutte ouvrière). L’euro lui-même a été introduit sous le gouvernement PS-PC-Verts de Jospin, auquel prit part Mélenchon entre 2000 et 2002. Le PS de Hollande a plus tard fait campagne pour le traité de Lisbonne (repoussé par référendum en 2005 mais tout de même adopté en 2008 grâce à l’abstention ou au vote favorable de plus de 150 parlementaires PS). Avec sa décision de s’abstenir au parlement, le PS vient de sauver la dernière trouvaille merkozyste pour asphyxier la Grèce, dite « mécanisme européen de stabilité ».
Voici le bilan de l’UE pour l’impérialisme français. Grâce à la contre-révolution capitaliste en Europe de l’Est, et à la destruction des acquis sociaux et au laminage des salaires qui l’y ont accompagnée, la bourgeoisie allemande notamment a pu délocaliser une part croissante des intrants de ses produits industriels vers ces pays qui constituent de plus en plus son hinterland (arrière-pays) économique ; la force de l’euro par rapport aux monnaies locales a encore abaissé le coût de ces produits pour les capitalistes allemands. La réduction des salaires en Allemagne même, notamment sous les gouvernements sociaux-démocrates présidés par Gerhard Schröder dans les années 2000, s’y est ajoutée pour donner un avantage compétitif croissant aux capitalistes allemands par rapport aux français. Les réformistes français, qui avaient soutenu la contre-révolution (au nom de l’avènement de la « démocratie ») et l’Union européenne sont maintenant fort déçus du résultat : c’est leur propre bourgeoisie qui coule.
En fait, aucun candidat du mouvement ouvrier dans ces élections ne s’oppose ni de près ni de loin à l’Union européenne. Mélenchon et le PCF voudraient que la Banque centrale européenne distribue de l’argent aux pauvres (le tout payé en fin de compte par les capitalistes allemands via une dépréciation de l’euro et/ou via des « eurobonds »), propageant ainsi l’illusion que l’UE et son institution monétaire pourraient se mettre au service des opprimés. Tant qu’ils y sont, pourquoi ne pas demander à Le Pen de défendre les immigrés ?
Mais le reste de la « gauche de la gauche » n’est pas en reste. Cela fait des années que le NPA, à la suite de son prédécesseur la Ligue « communiste révolutionnaire », se fait le chantre d’une Europe « démocratique et sociale », c’est-à-dire qu’il prétend qu’il pourrait y avoir une Europe capitaliste qui soit plus humaine que celle d’aujourd’hui. Le NPA détourne ainsi la classe ouvrière de la lutte pour renverser le système capitaliste tout entier et pour fonder sur cette base révolutionnaire internationaliste des Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe. Ces larbins de leur propre impérialisme tancent les travailleurs grecs et français qu’ils doivent rester prisonniers du carcan de l’euro, que le NPA présente comme un cadre protecteur face à leur propre bourgeoisie nationale. Ainsi l’éditorial de TOUT est à nous ! LA REVUE du NPA de janvier, signé Yvan Lemaitre, déclare à propos du retour aux monnaies nationales :
« Un tel retour en arrière enfermerait les travailleurs dans le carcan national à la merci de bourgeoisies nationales acharnées à défendre leur maigre place au sein de la nouvelle division internationale du travail. Il y a une autre issue, démocratique et progressiste, au sein de cette Europe devenue la nouvelle arène des luttes des travailleurs et des peuples. »
Comme Lemaitre est opposé à la révolution socialiste, il ne peut concevoir l’opposition à l’Union européenne capitaliste et à l’euro que d’un point de vue nationaliste de droite. Il a le cynisme de condamner « la propagande réactionnaire, chauvine et nationaliste qui prône le retour aux monnaies nationales et le repli derrière les frontières ». En fait c’est la faillite de la gauche, apôtre de l’Europe capitaliste « démocratique et sociale », qui gonfle les voiles de la démagogie des fascistes : elle leur laisse le monopole de l’opposition à l’Union européenne au nom de laquelle sont saccagés les acquis des travailleurs – et notamment des travailleurs allemands, qui ont été parmi les principales victimes des mesures de « compétitivité » en Europe. Les deux seuls candidats déclarés dans ces élections qui soient contre l’euro sont Marine Le Pen et Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, un vieux-gaulliste d’extrême droite.
(Le « Parti ouvrier indépendant » (POI) a sa propre ligne ultra-chauvine délirante franco-française ; lors du rassemblement du 13 février à Paris à propos de la Grèce, ses militants scandaient des slogans contre l’Union européenne, « agence américaine », et demandaient le départ de la troïka UE-FMI-BCE… de Paris, peut-être pour protéger la belle France des méfaits de celle-ci. Ils masquent ainsi le rôle de l’impérialisme français dans l’oppression de la Grèce.)
Le protectionnisme, une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes
Partout en Europe monte le nationalisme, expression idéologique de l’aiguisement des rivalités entre les bourgeoisies capitalistes sur le continent. Pour le combattre il faut rompre ouvertement avec la fiction réactionnaire d’une unification capitaliste de l’Europe et lutter au contraire pour l’internationalisme prolétarien révolutionnaire, et notamment aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères de classe grecs qui étouffent sous le joug de la BNP, de la Deutsche Bank et de la BCE. Il faut s’opposer aux campagnes protectionnistes pour taxer les produits d’importation, « produire français » ou « produire en France », qu’elles viennent de Sarkozy, de Hollande ou de Mélenchon (voir notamment notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre dernier, « PS, PCF, PG, NPA prônent l’alliance avec leur propre bourgeoisie contre les travailleurs d’autres pays – Le protectionnisme : une réponse réactionnaire aux attaques capitalistes »). Il faut s’opposer au poison chauvin des rares idéologues « de gauche », comme Jacques Sapir (Faut-il sortir de l’euro ?) ou Jacques Nikonoff (Sortons de l’euro !), qui s’opposent à l’euro pour mieux préconiser le protectionnisme. Comme nous le disions à propos d’un article paru dans la revue Inprecor (juillet-août-septembre 2011) de Michel Husson, économiste fétiche du NPA (article où Husson défendait aussi l’euro) : « Le NPA veut faire croire qu’on peut réformer à bon compte le capitalisme, et en faisant la promotion d’un “bon” protectionnisme il donne de la légitimité au protectionnisme du Front national » (le Bolchévik n° 197, septembre 2011).
Et de même le PCF avec son « produisons français » qu’il vient de ressortir il y a quelques mois, et que reprend le FN. Aujourd’hui le FN demeure essentiellement une enveloppe parlementaire, mais sur le fond le fascisme, ce sont des nervis paramilitaires qui pratiquent la terreur raciste et dont la cible est au fond la classe ouvrière. Le système capitaliste décadent constitue le terreau dont se nourrissent les fascistes. En cas de crise aiguë la bourgeoisie les mobilise contre la classe ouvrière, comme en Allemagne en 1933. C’est pourquoi la lutte contre les fascistes est inséparable de la lutte pour la révolution socialiste. Pour les écraser il faut mobiliser la classe ouvrière en défense des musulmans, des immigrés, des homosexuels et de toutes les victimes désignées de cette racaille et lutter pour renverser le capitalisme – une perspective à laquelle les bureaucrates syndicaux sont hostiles, car ils cherchent à maintenir les syndicats enchaînés à l’ordre capitaliste.
Il faut combattre les licenciements qui menacent les travailleurs dans les usines que délocalisent les capitalistes à la recherche d’un profit maximal. Mais le protectionnisme signifie chercher un accord avec les capitalistes français pour maintenir la production ici contre les travailleurs des autres pays. C’est tout le contraire d’un programme internationaliste prolétarien, basé sur une lutte de classe commune par-delà les frontières contre ces mêmes capitalistes pour défendre et étendre les acquis des travailleurs. Pour lutter contre les manœuvres de la bourgeoisie pour diviser les travailleurs internationalement, il faut lutter pour des augmentations de salaires y compris dans les filiales et chez les sous-traitants dans d’autres pays. Il faut lutter pied à pied contre les licenciements en revendiquant le partage du travail entre toutes les mains, avec réduction du temps de travail correspondante sans perte de salaire. Il faut lutter pour l’embauche en CDI de tous les intérimaires et contrats précaires. A travail égal, salaire égal !
Cela exige de lutter pour des syndicats industriels regroupant dans une même organisation de lutte tous les travailleurs sur un site donné, y compris s’il s’agit de sous-traitants, d’entreprises françaises ou étrangères. Et cela en retour exige de lutter pour une nouvelle direction dans les syndicats, une direction révolutionnaire internationaliste remplaçant des bureaucrates qui se satisfont de la division des travailleurs syndiqués entre plusieurs syndicats concurrents, qui se satisfont même du faible nombre de syndiqués étant donné que c’est pour l’essentiel les patrons et l’Etat qui financent leur appareil.
La division de la classe ouvrière selon les frontières, avec le protectionnisme, va de pair avec la division des travailleurs à l’intérieur du pays selon des lignes ethniques, raciales ou sexuelles. Mélenchon, le plus clair avocat du protectionnisme parmi les candidats du mouvement ouvrier, n’a pratiquement rien à dire contre les campagnes racistes du gouvernement dans sa plaquette-programme de 96 pages. Il en va pourtant de l’unité du prolétariat multiethnique et multiracial de ce pays. Pleins droits de citoyenneté pour tous ceux qui sont ici ! A bas les expulsions de sans-papiers ! Le mouvement ouvrier doit défendre les jeunes de banlieue ! A bas la campagne raciste contre les femmes voilées !
LO se présente comme la vraie candidature PCF
Par rapport à ce marais, Nathalie Arthaud, la candidate de Lutte ouvrière, se présente comme la seule « candidature communiste ». Elle cherche à tirer profit des réticences initiales d’une partie significative des militants PCF à soutenir la candidature du jauressiste Mélenchon. (Jean Jaurès, qu’Engels traitait fort à propos de « phraseur », était à l’origine un radical bourgeois et sa politique n’évolua guère même quand il se déclara « socialiste ».) Mais le programme d’Arthaud n’a rien à voir avec le communisme. D’ailleurs l’UE, l’euro, LO a toujours été pour ; dans leur dernier document de conférence (Lutte de Classe n° 140, décembre 2011-janvier 2012) ils se lamentent que ces derniers temps « les quelques pas en avant faits par les bourgeoisies pour surmonter les rivalités nationales, comme dans le domaine de l’unification monétaire, sont aujourd’hui menacés ». Ils ont toujours célébré la soi-disant « ouverture des frontières » à l’intérieur de l’espace Schengen, alors qu’à tout moment il y a selon les estimations environ 100 000 personnes dans l’Union européenne qui sont en prison pour défaut de papiers, et 140 000 sont expulsées chaque année – et environ 15 000 personnes sont mortes en vingt ans en essayant de pénétrer cette forteresse raciste.
Voilà des gens qui se réclament soi-disant du « communisme », mais qui foulent aux pieds les principes les plus élémentaires de la lutte de classe en refusant de montrer à la classe ouvrière qu’on ne vote pas pour qui s’allie avec l’ennemi de classe bourgeois : LO a décidé lors de son récent congrès, en décembre dernier, de ne pas s’opposer à Hollande, en tout cas pas avant le soir du premier tour des élections. La candidature de LO n’est dès lors qu’une candidature pour faire pression sur le front populaire pour infléchir un peu à gauche sa politique une fois au pouvoir : « Même ceux qui, dans l’électorat populaire, par dégoût de Sarkozy, choisiront de voter pour Hollande au deuxième tour, ont intérêt à exprimer au premier tour qu’ils ne lui font pas confiance, qu’ils le garderont à l’œil et que, même avec la gauche au pouvoir, ils sauront imposer leurs exigences » (programme électoral de Nathalie Arthaud).
Quelle que puisse être la déclaration de Nathalie Arthaud le soir du premier tour à 20 heures, celle qu’avait faite dans les mêmes conditions Arlette Laguiller lors des élections de 2007 (appel à voter Ségolène Royal « sans réserve mais sans illusion ») laisse présager du pire. Même si LO s’avisait brusquement de préconiser l’abstention, leur participation continue depuis 2008 aux blocs municipaux de front populaire pour gérer le capitalisme localement, sous l’autorité de maires PCF ou chevènementistes, montre que LO ne s’oppose en rien à la collaboration de classes (y compris ils votent le budget). Aucun vote pour Nathalie Arthaud !
LO n’a jamais fait mystère du caractère réformiste de son municipalisme et de son syndicalisme. Ils écrivaient dans leur revue Lutte de Classe (février 2008) : « Par définition, l’activité municipale comme l’activité syndicale ne peuvent être révolutionnaires, mais sont réformistes. » Encore le mois dernier Jean-Pierre Mercier, porte-parole de Nathalie Arthaud et membre de la majorité municipale de Bagnolet, a signé une déclaration spéciale de solidarité politique avec le maire PCF, Marc Everbecq. Cette déclaration prenait la défense du « “vivre ensemble” et les solidarités », ainsi que de la « construction citoyenne », le soi-disant mode de gouvernement d’Everbecq. « Construction citoyenne » ou démolition raciste ? Les habitants d’un squat de travailleurs africains démoli à la tractopelle il y a deux ans par les services du maire apprécieront (voir notre article « Expulsions racistes à Bagnolet – LO se solidarise avec les expulsés… pour redorer le blason de la municipalité PCF », le Bolchévik n° 192, juin 2010). Voter le budget du maire, comme le fait Mercier depuis des années, cela veut dire justement lui payer sa tractopelle.
LO défend son réformisme municipal en argumentant que c’est là une longue tradition du mouvement ouvrier. Du mouvement ouvrier français, malheureusement oui, mais pas de Lénine. Celui-ci avait lutté avec acharnement en 1917 contre ses propres camarades qui voulaient précisément continuer les pratiques réformistes de la Deuxième Internationale au niveau de la gestion municipale (voir notre article dans Spartacist n° 39 sur les postes exécutifs). Ce n’est pas un hasard si la Constitution française exige depuis cinquante ans que le candidat au poste exécutif suprême soit parrainé par un certain nombre d’élus, dans leur immense majorité des maires qui justement exercent au quotidien un mandat exécutif.
Mercier est par ailleurs bureaucrate syndical à l’usine PSA d’Aulnay (voir notre article dans le Bolchévik n° 197 de septembre 2011). Face aux menaces de fermeture de cette usine, la CGT qu’il dirige vient d’organiser le 18 février une manifestation commune dans la ville avec le maire PS... et avec le SIA, le syndicat-maison de PSA (ex-CSL, des briseurs de grève de sinistre mémoire) ! En faisant ainsi l’unité avec les jaunes, LO pave la voie à la paralysie de la lutte et à la défaite face aux patrons. Le SIA a non sans raison cosigné une lettre de la CGT de décembre dernier à Sarkozy le suppliant de s’engager « par écrit » pour sauvegarder l’usine – après tout, ce ne serait pas sa première promesse de ce genre. Mercier lui-même croit-il qu’on peut défendre les emplois avec des bouts de papier de ce genre ?
On a malheureusement vu LO en action lors de la lutte en défense des retraites fin 2010. A l’époque ils se sont félicités de l’action des bureaucrates syndicaux, prétendant que cela « ne s’est pas fait au détriment des travailleurs » – pas étonnant, vu que leur propre rôle était d’« essayer d’être les meilleurs militants d’un mouvement déclenché et dirigé par les appareils bureaucratiques » (document adopté par la conférence de Lutte ouvrière, Lutte de Classe, décembre 2010-janvier 2011). En effet, ils sont maintenant eux-mêmes les bureaucrates syndicaux au niveau de nombreuses entreprises. Un an plus tard, ils ont subrepticement révisé leur bulletin de victoire en glissant dans un nouveau document de conférence que « le constat n’est évidemment pas le même un an après » (Lutte de Classe, décembre 2011-janvier 2012). Quant à réexaminer leur rôle dans cette défaite, LO en est loin ; mieux vaudra se référer à notre article « Leçons des grèves de l’automne en défense des retraites » (le Bolchévik n° 194, décembre 2010).
Au fond, le programme électoral de LO se résume à vouloir « imposer au grand patronat l’interdiction des licenciements », « imposer à l’Etat d’embaucher » et « imposer le contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires », le tout avec des augmentations de salaires et alignement automatique des salaires sur les prix. Tout cela, ils veulent l’« imposer aux possédants et aux gouvernants, quels qu’ils soient ». Le malheur, c’est qu’imposer aux capitalistes l’« interdiction » des licenciements, etc., ce serait leur imposer qu’ils cessent de faire fonctionner leur économie pour la production de profits, leur imposer de cesser d’être eux-mêmes.
LO pense que les exigences vitales des travailleurs peuvent « être imposées […] par une lutte collective des travailleurs, suffisamment massive, suffisamment explosive, pour menacer réellement la classe capitaliste. […] la classe capitaliste ne lâchera rien sans sentir la colère ouvrière et la menace sur ses profits et sur sa fortune. » Mais si une telle lutte explosive se produit, ce n’est pas là que les choses sérieuses se terminent, c’est là qu’elles commencent : ou bien on se satisfait d’avoir obtenu ces « exigences vitales » sous la menace, ou bien l’on va de l’avant pour renverser le capitalisme. LO se limite manifestement à la première perspective, promettant ainsi de réitérer les trahisons du PCF en Juin 36 ou en Mai 68, où le PCF avait fait retourner les ouvriers au travail après quelques concessions économiques de la bourgeoisie, trahissant ainsi la possibilité d’une révolution socialiste. Comme toujours dans ces cas-là, les concessions obtenues sont immédiatement minées par les capitalistes qui n’auront de cesse qu’elles ne soient vidées de tout contenu.
De même, le « contrôle des travailleurs sur les entreprises industrielles et bancaires » ne peut être qu’une phase de la lutte des travailleurs pour imposer leurs propres organes de pouvoir, au niveau de l’usine et au niveau de l’ensemble de la société et pour liquider la propriété capitaliste pour de bon. Si l’on ne pose pas la perspective ainsi, d’un point de vue révolutionnaire, et LO ne le fait pas, il s’agit simplement de la cogestion où les bureaucrates syndicaux prennent part aux décisions des actionnaires pour mieux accroître le taux de profit des capitaux de ces derniers – et, en cette période de crise aiguë du capitalisme, « accompagner » les licenciements et les fermetures d’usines. Les mots suivants de Trotsky sont ici intégralement pertinents vis-à-vis de LO :
« La social-démocratie classique, qui développa son action à l’époque où le capitalisme était progressiste, divisait son programme en deux parties indépendantes l’une de l’autre : le PROGRAMME MINIMUM, qui se bornait à des réformes dans le cadre de la société bourgeoise, et le PROGRAMME MAXIMUM, qui promettait pour un avenir indéterminé le remplacement du capitalisme par le socialisme. Entre le programme minimum et le programme maximum, il n’y avait aucun pont. La social-démocratie n’en avait nul besoin, car de socialisme, elle ne parlait que les jours de fête. […]
« Dans la mesure où les vieilles revendications partielles “minimum” des masses se heurtent aux tendances destructives et dégradantes du capitalisme décadent – et cela se produit à chaque pas –, la IVe Internationale met en avant un système de REVENDICATIONS TRANSITOIRES dont le sens est de se diriger de plus en plus ouvertement et résolument contre les bases mêmes du régime bourgeois. Le vieux “programme minimum” est constamment dépassé par le PROGRAMME DE TRANSITION dont la tâche consiste en une mobilisation systématique des masses pour la révolution prolétarienne. »
– Programme de transition (1938)
La démoralisation frappe le mouvement ouvrier depuis vingt ans, avec la contre-révolution en Union soviétique et la campagne sur la soi-disant « mort du communisme ». Cette démoralisation ne rend la contradiction que plus criante entre les tâches objectives auxquelles fait face le prolétariat et le niveau de conscience de celui-ci, mais elle ne change rien au fait que la seule manière de résoudre cette contradiction, c’est de lutter pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire. Au cours de la lutte de classe, ce n’est pas spontanément que la classe ouvrière se dotera d’une conscience socialiste, comme veut le faire croire LO « les jours de fête », mais par l’intervention d’un parti léniniste.
Dans ces élections, il n’y a aucun choix pour les travailleurs. Il n’y a aucune candidature qui présente, même au premier tour, même d’une façon grossière, une ligne d’indépendance de classe contre Hollande et Sarkozy, les deux principaux candidats considérés par la bourgeoisie pour diriger l’impérialisme français dans la période à venir. Quel que soit l’élu, la classe ouvrière va faire face à un renforcement de l’offensive capitaliste contre ses acquis. Elle sera d’autant mieux préparée à y faire face qu’elle aura refusé d’écouter les sirènes du front populaire et de lui accorder ses suffrages. Surtout, elle a besoin d’une nouvelle direction, une direction révolutionnaire. Nous luttons pour construire le parti léniniste qui un jour la conduira à la victoire et au renversement du capitalisme. Pour reforger la Quatrième Internationale, parti mondial de la révolution socialiste ! Pour les Etats-Unis socialistes d’Europe !
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