From The Archives Of The International Communist League-For a Labor-Socialist Ticket in 1968 (In The U.S.)

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:

Note: The commentary below addresses my thoughts on the concept of the labor-socialist party slogan as a general proposition. The thrust of the article centers on running presidential and vice-presidential candidates through such a vehicle. Since that time the International Communist League has rejected the then common (1968) view among Trotskyists, including orthodox Trotskyists like the Spartacist League, that it was principled to run for the executive offices of the bourgeois state. That newer understanding of the role of the bourgeois state would now preclude presidential candidacies (although not the possibility for critical support to other working class formations). My comment should be taken in that context although today such propaganda would center on running for legislative offices as “tribunes of the people.”
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In hindsight, given the muddle of left-wing politics in 1968, the notion of a broad labor-socialist presidential campaign based on the trade unions, black liberation fighters, and radicalized youth seems very appealing today. Even as a propaganda slogan. With the highly symbolic nature of the Tet offensive in Vietnam in exposing the military quagmire there for all to see, the disintegration of tradition ties and turmoil in the left-wing of the Democratic Party (and among their fellow-travelers) in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection after Senator Eugene McCarthy’s good showing in New Hampshire, the entry of, and subsequent assassination, of left-wing bourgeois icon, Robert Kennedy, and the various futile Peace and Freedom-type lash-ups organized to rein in the discontent this was a politically timely slogan.

Of course that is hindsight for a now pristine communist propagandist. Back then, back then in the mud of bourgeois politics that this writer was neck-deep into, the notion, the far out notion, that some non-Democratic Party operation would be formed to siphon off votes from the Democratic presidential candidate would have incurred my ire. Didn’t you know that the main enemy in the world, the “real” world, brothers and sisters, was one Richard Milhous Nixon, one time President of the United States and a common criminal. Save your labor-socialist slogan for 1972 when one Hubert Horatio Humphrey was up for re-election and the stakes were not so high.

Yes, it was that bad, bourgeois democratic politics bad. I started the year with my beloved bad boy, badass Irish boy, Robert Kennedy- the last time that I was mad for a bourgeois candidate as I have mentioned previously. But due to that man, that Nixon man, and the need to beat him at all costs (and to begin to make my way in the maze of upwardly mobile bourgeois politics) I worked, and worked hard by the way, for HHH.
Of course that was a time, a time out of joint if you will, when my politics, my politics on the ground, were out of synch, way out of synch, with my organizational affiliations. I was no crypto-communist, no question, but neither was I a Democratic Party hack. So it is possible to learn something in this wicked old world. And that something is that in the “real world” we desperately need to fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government. See, easy.
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For a Labor-Socialist Ticket in 1968
Spartacist number 11, March-April 1968

The 1968 elections come at a time of enormous discontent over the Vietnam war, deeply-felt and violent outbursts of disillusionment among the Negro masses, and an upsurge in labor militancy and rash of hard-fought strikes. The exposure of the Democratic Party as the party of savage racist oppression in the American cities and imperialist intervention in Vietnam sharply poses the necessity of a break with the two capitalist parties in favor of a Freedom-Labor Party based on a working-class program which can link up the issues of the war, the ghetto and the labor struggle. The 1968 Presidential elections offer the best opportunity in 20 years for the intervention of radicals in the electoral arena through the form of a labor-socialist ticket—to consist for example of a local trade union leader and a socialist, one of whom might well be black—which could build wide support for a decisive break with capitalist politics and lay the basis for a movement to struggle for a Freedom-Labor Party.

Need for a Working-Class Party

The United States is the only advanced capitalist country which does not have some kind of mass party of the working class. The need for such a party of working-class struggle has long been recognized by Marxists and was included as one of the basic points of the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. The increasing recognition of the role of the Democratic Party in the maintenance of the capitalist status quo poses this question sharply as the necessary consequence not only of the objective situation but of needs which are becoming widely subjectively felt by broad sections of the population—student radicals, ghetto militants and now, following a period of relative labor quiescence, sections of the working class.

Yet the American Left, faced with such immense possibilities for the intervention of a radical program, exhibits increasingly its lack of any perspective for this period and turns more and more to passive enthusing and mindless activism combined with an essential cynicism toward a relevant perspective for social change.

American radicalism has long been confronted by the seemingly permanent situation of a working class which has shown itself, even in periods of great militancy and willingness to fight for economic demands, politically pragmatic and complacent, with an explicit philosophy, on the political scene, which is essentially passive—"rewarding the (so-called) friends of labor and punishing its enemies." Such a situation, of course, is not an abstract and a priori phenomenon, but exists in the context of the historic betrayals and misleaderships of the working class by those who presumed to speak in the name of radicalism. One of the healthy features of the New Left movement, and certainly one of the formative factors of its ideology, has been the rejection of the example of the old Communist Party—the New Left generalizes this to "the Old Left"—with its history of capitulationist politicking which found its clearest expression in the support of Roosevelt and the New Deal and continues today as the "Reform Democrat" orientation.

Political Struggle, Not Abstentionism

But the New Left, while presuming to have rejected this approach to radical politics, has actually taken over one of the basic underlying conceptions of this outlook—the equating of struggle on the political front with cynical maneuvering toward the various enemies of the working class. The New Left has instead embraced a concept of non-political and even anti-political militancy and activism. It mindlessly throws its energies into self-destructive physical "confrontation" with the "war-makers" and passively and enthusiastically applauds the directionless and programless ghetto outbursts which leave the situation of the black masses unchanged. The New Left rejects out of hand the possibility for working-class struggle, viewing the political passivity of the workers as given, rather than the result of the absence of a revolutionary leadership. By rejecting an orientation to revolutionary political struggle, the New Left dooms its efforts to failure, and its cadres to disillusionment and disorganization. Impatience and cynicism do not make a program.

The result of this rejection of any kind of political struggle by the radicals is the continuation of the reformist status quo. The recognition of the need for political struggle and the utilization of this recognition remains in the hands of the reformist fakers, best exemplified by Irving Howe and his ilk, to whom politics is synonymous with "coalitionism." The demonstrated militancy of the trade unions remains tied to the liberal trade union bureaucracies; the black ghetto, despite its deep disgust with and rejection of the liberal establishment, still votes Democratic at election time. All opportunity for political struggle remains the monopoly of those whose only concept of politics is maneuvering within the capitalist system.

Failure of the CNP

The spectacular failure of the Conference for New Politics only serves to demonstrate this lack of a political perspective for the radical movement. The participants at the Conference were unable to distinguish between independent working-class politics and the use of the forms of independence to further the aims of coalition politics within the system. Common to all the competing political alternatives was the attempt to build an outside base of a temporary sort from which to exert pressure within the existing framework. With the limits of such a perspective, the radicals were unable to break from those whose aims are an admittedly temporary break with the Democratic Party because its naked exposure as the primary tool of racist brutality and imperialist slaughter is an embarrassment and a threat to the maintenance of capitalist rule. Those at the Conference who were perhaps opposed to this underlying conception of political action could see no alternative but the diffuse and unrewarding perspective of "community organizing" without a program.

SWP’s Opportunism

The announced presidential campaign of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1968 elections must be seen in this context. The whole role of the SWP in radical politics has been to reinforce the fragmentation of current struggles into isolated compartments of militancy, without a perspective for linking up these struggles into an anti-capitalist one. While the SWP gives lip service to some acceptable demands and even includes in its formal program the call for a labor party, it accepts the present vacuum on the left as given and, instead of intervening to change it, actually seeks to head off the development of a broader perspective by jumping into the ring a year early in order to "cop the field" for its own candidates.

Towards a Labor Party!

The Spartacist League, at this juncture, calls for the formation of a broadly-based labor and socialist ticket, as a concrete step in the building of a political party of the U.S. working class. Such a campaign, which would link up the anti-war sentiment to which the SWP seeks to appeal with the broader felt needs of the masses, would transcend the sterile concept of a "protest vote" in posing the need for independent working-class political action on a real scale. The fight to build such a campaign would provide a focal point for rank-and-file struggle in the unions around the issues of the Vietnam war, the rights of black workers, union demands and strike struggles, rank-and-file control of the unions, the fight to break the unions’ reliance on and ties with the capitalist state, a fundamental break with the Democratic and Republican parties and the enfranchisement of the working people in a political party to fight for their needs. Out of this struggle could come the forerunner committees to a Labor Party.

Thus the Spartacist League does not at this point endorse any of the essentially defective variants, rather seeking to help shape a real alternative to capitalist politics. If this fuller perspective has not materialized by the summer of 1968, it would then be necessary to choose from among whatever supportable possibilities exist at that time. In the interim, we will seek to assist the SWP, as we might any tendency within the working-class movement, to meet the technicalities of ballot entry, while calling upon them to indicate their willingness to withdraw at least part of their ticket in favor of a labor-socialist one and to work for the formation of such a ticket.

FOR A LABOR-SOCIALIST TICKET IN ’68!

*ON THE QUESTION OF CRITICAL SUPPORT TO SOCIALIST ELECTION CAMPAIGNS

Click on the headline to link to a Lenin Internet Archives entry from his Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder-Should we Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

COMMENTARY

WHAT TO DO (OR NOT TO DO) WHEN YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR OWN WORKERS PARTY CANDIDATE TO VOTE FOR IN ELECTIONS

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY


In the run-up to the 2006 midterm elections working people are again being subjected to the "choice" between the dual parties of capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and racist oppression. It is a choice between the justly feared and despised Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Republican cabal in power and a Democratic "opposition" campaigning for a more effective plan for prosecuting the very bipartisan "war on terror" at home and abroad—in particular, how best to cut the losses of U.S. imperialism in the bloody occupation of Iraq in order to more efficiently deploy its forces against the peoples of the world in places like Cuba, Iran, North Korea and China.

It is thus appropriate now that we are in the thick of this downbeat 2006 electoral campaign season to highlight some points concerning what militant leftists can or should do when faced with the above choice while at the same time not having a mass socialist or labor party candidate to support. Unfortunately, the necessity for discussion of the subject matter of this commnetary reflects the continued weakness of the left and of our inability to field a mass socialist or labor party candidate of our own. If militants were strong enough we would not have to worry about supporting other small socialist formations or about the question of political support to them except on our own terms.

Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists make a virtue out of necessity by abstaining on principle from parliamentary elections. Militant leftists do not. I would note, however, that on the basis of my observations on the 2004 election cycle something of the old hard anarchist opposition to parliamentary elections has been blunted- and not for the better. In the old days anarchists seriously opposed such elections and revolutionary socialists could half agree with them on the issue of opposition to electoral cretinism favored by reformist socialist parties as the path to socialism.

In 2004 I ran into any number of anarchists whose anti-parlimentary position was more frivolous and less well thought out. These types argued that parliamentary politics was so silly that it did not matter who one voted for-including capitalist Democratic Party candidate John Forbes Kerry. That is just plain wrong. Revolutionary militant leftists use such periods, when appropriate, to support candidates that at least provide some cutting edge against the heavy weight of capitalist politics. In short, as an elementary question militants must draw a class line in opposition to all capitalist parties. Thus it is important to know under what conditions support to socialist/labor candidates can be given.

While rejecting the notion that the working class can gain power through the vehicle of bourgeois electoralism it is necessary to recognize that there are times when the intervention of revolutionaries into the parliamentary/electoral cycle can provide a useful platform from which to put forward a socialist program and attempt to further socialist goals. Such tactics include revolutionaries standing as candidates, one can think of the heroic Karl Liebknecht in World War I campaigning on an anti-war platform while subject to conscription in the German Army in this regard. Another tactic is offering critical support to such parties as draw even a minimal class line against the capitalist parties.

In his powerful book on communist principles and tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained: "It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise— not lower—the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win." Lenin advised the fledgling British Communists to extend critical support to the British Labour Party in order to expose the Labour traitors' pretensions to "socialism" and to break workers' illusions in them.

On the other hand, at times support for a labor party or socialist party may be precluded for other reasons, such as their participation in a national unity government with other classes (the so-called Popular Front), strikebreaking while governing on behalf of the capitalists (the General Strike in England in 1926 comes to mind) or when other ostensibly socialist formations may better represent the interests of the working class (various Socialist/Communist campaigns).

To give a different but symmetric error from the 'soft' anarchist position noted above in the 2004 campaign season I ran into many, too many leftist, particularly old ex-Communist Party members, who used the Leninist policy in order to "critically" support the Democrat Kerry. As if the the "big tent" Democratic Party was just some garden variety labor party. Wrong. While labor organizations, particularly the labor bureaucracy live by, die by and spend their money on this party neither by program, politics or inclination is it any kind of labor party. No support under any theory, including "lesser evil" politics is warranted by militants. Thus militants need to seek out candidates or organizations who draw the class line. Those who do not do so deserve no support.

As an example of a non-supportable candidate in California the International Socialist Organization is running one of its members for United States Senate on the small-time capitalist Green Party ticket. Aside from some individually supportable democratic demands in the Green Party program, especially on environmental issues, the Green Party is historically one in a long line of capitalist "progressive" third party operations that merely act as pressure groups on the Democratic Party. That precludes any support from militants. That is the clearest example that I know of on the class line question among socialist organizations. Readers may know of others on their local level that I am not aware of. Keep me informed. Enough said.

THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!