On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation

On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation

    

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organizations who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those two organizations then far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)               

So it is always a good thing when somebody comes by and says as part of the reason that he is looking at something like the very mixed early history of the American Communist Party (after the two previously separate communist organizations merged when the serious differences were ironed out in the early 1920s), as here in the book under review, that he is doing so to embrace the legacy of the past of the left-wing movement. If not back then in the 1960s then now as a new wind, maybe a new movement is beginning to take shape after decades of defeats and disaffection, that is a very important reason to take a look at the early history of the American Communist movement. Look back at a time when a generation, or the best part of a generation, at least three generations removed from today‘s young militants tried to bring off a working class revolution in this country under the beacon of the October Revolution in Russia.

Additionally any book like The First Ten Years Of American Communism that features the role of James P. Cannon, who in his time had the desire and the capacity to lead such a revolution, is onto something important because he is one of the few figures who was able to try to build the communist movement through the good offices of the Communist International when that organization was in the business of “fomenting” revolution and to break with the CI when it lost its moorings under Stalin (and a few others, mainly his henchmen in the end) when it became an adjunct of Soviet foreign policy. This book, and the books cited in the article by Theodore Draper and others, including the key letters by Cannon to Draper in the 1950s, is an important addition to those who want to carry on that early tradition and know what it was like when men and women fought for revolution for real. I am not sure we of the older generation would have been able to learn anything from such a book but today’s left-wing militants surely can.