Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House.
Markin comment:
White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders. Many are Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some are pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some are rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some are, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed, and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly.
All, I say all, show the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, mainly, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
*From The Archives Of The American Communist Party-James Cannon On The Early Days Of The Party -On The 1926 Passiac Strike
Markin comment:
In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:
“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 that 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. Deb’s 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…..”
I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin
A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
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James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party
Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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The Passaic Strike
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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June 9, 1955
Dear Sir:
I remember the December 1925 Plenum of the CP of the US I was allied with the Ruthenberg faction at this particular Plenum and took a very active part in the debate on the trade-union question. It probably marked the tentative beginning of resistance to AFL fetishism, although the details of the specific issues in dispute at the Plenum have not remained in my memory.
According to my recollection, the Passaic issue came up at the Plenum, but it did not originate there. It was rather thrust upon the party by the cyclonic activities of Weisbord, who had gone into the field and actually begun to organize the unorganized textile workers. Looking back on it now, we deserve censure, not for giving conditional support to the organizing work of Weisbord, but for failing to go all-out in such support and to make the issue of AFL fetishism clear-cut.
The “United Front Committee” under which the organizing campaign in Passaic proceeded, instead of under the auspices of a new union, which the situation really called for, was a concession to the party’s prevailing policy of AFL-ism. To be sure, the recruitment of individual members to the “United Front Committee” twisted the conception of the united front, as an alliance of organizations, out of shape. But the real problem at Passaic was to organize the unorganized, unskilled and low-paid workers neglected by the AFL.
The Fosterite opposition to the recruitment of individual members to this “United Front Committee” showed up the bankruptcy of the ultra-AFL policy in a clear light for the first time. It could have had no other effect than to paralyze the organization of the textile workers in Passaic for fear of committing the sin of “dual unionism” – for which the Fosterites had a real phobia.
The Passaic strike started in the spring of 1926 while we were still in Moscow attending the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern. I don’t know or remember any of the immediate circumstances attending it. It is my definite impression, however, that the strike was not precipitated by the party leadership. Rather it was dumped in its lap as a result of Weisbord’s successes in organizing the textile workers there.
Gitlow’s pretensions about masterminding the Passaic situation, as related in his compendium of distortions and fabrications entitled I Confess, should be taken with a grain of salt. All his stories which are not outright inventions are slanted to enlarge his own role in party affairs and to denigrate others – in this case, Weisbord.
The organization of the workers in Passaic and the effective leadership of the strike itself, were pre-eminently Weisbord’s work. I had a chance to see that on the ground after we returned from Moscow. I, myself, had nothing to do with the Passaic strike, but I spent a little time there and had a good chance to see Weisbord in action. As a strike leader he was first class, no mistake about it. It is true that he worked under the close supervision and direction of a party committee in New York appointed by the national party leadership in Chicago. But it’s a long way from committee meetings in a closed room, off the scene, to the actual leadership of a strike on the ground. The full credit for that belongs to Weisbord.
There was an apparent contradiction between the decision of the Sixth Plenum of the CI to confirm Foster’s faction – with its pro-AFL policy – in its hegemony over party trade-union work and the concurrent conduct of the Passaic strike under the auspices of a “United Front Committee” outside the AFL. That was not due to factional manipulation. It happened that way because life intruded into the internal affairs of the party.
It happened because Weisbord – a brash young egocentric fresh out of college, and in general an unattractive specimen at close range, but a powerful mass orator and a human dynamo if there ever was one – stirred up a lot of workers and organized them into the “United Front Committee.” The sense of strength that came from their organization emboldened them to call a strike without waiting for the sanction of the AFL union. The strike soon exploded into violent clashes with the police which were splashed all over the front pages of the metropolitan press. The Passaic strike was the Number One labor news story for a long time.
This action at Passaic did indeed violate both the letter and the spirit of Fosterite trade-union policy, which the party had followed for years and which had been implicitly supported once again in Moscow. But that didn’t change the fact that the party had a big strike on its hands. And the party certainly made the most of its opportunity.
The Passaic strike really put the party on the labor map. In my opinion it deserves a chapter in party history all by itself. It revealed the Communists as the dynamic force in the radical labor movement and the organizing center of the unorganized workers disregarded by the AFL unions – displacing the IWW in this field. The Passaic strike was well organized and expertly led, and under all ordinary circumstances should have resulted in a resounding victory. The only trouble was that the bosses were too strong, had too many financial resources and were too determined to prevent the consolidation of a radical union organization. The strikers, isolated in one locality, were simply worn out and starved out and there was nothing to be done about it.
A poor settlement was the best that could be squeezed out of the deadlock. Such experiences were to be repeated many times before the unionization drive in the Thirties gained sufficient scope and power to break the employers’ resistance.
* * *
The Passaic strike was destined to have an influence on party trade-union policy which in the long run was far more important than the strike itself. The genesis of the drastic change in trade-union policy a few years later can probably be traced to it. There was a belated reaction to the party’s attempt to outwit the textile bosses and the AFL fakers by yielding to their principal demand – the elimination of the strike leader, Weisbord.
When it became clear that the strike was sagging, and that the bosses would not make a settlement with the “United Front Committee,” negotiations were opened up with the AFL Textile Union. The AFL was invited to take over the organization and try to negotiate a settlement. These accommodating fakers agreed – on one small condition, which turned out to be the same as that of the bosses, namely, that Weisbord, the communist strike leader, should walk the plank.
I do not know who first proposed the acceptance of this monstrous condition. What stands out in my memory most distinctly is the fact that both factions in the party leadership agreed with it, and that there was no conflict on the issue whatever. The fateful decision to sacrifice the strike leader was made unanimously by the party leadership and eventually carried out by the strike committee.
Such questions cannot be viewed abstractly. Perhaps those who, in their experience, have been faced with the agonizing problem of trying to save something from the wreckage of a defeated strike have a right to pass judgment on this decision. Others are hardly qualified. The main consideration in the Passaic situation was the fact that the strike had passed its peak. Real victory was already out of the question and the general feeling was that a poor settlement would be better than none. Other strikes have been settled under even more humiliating conditions. Workers have been compelled time and time again to “agree” to the victimization and blacklisting of the best militants in their ranks as a condition for getting back to work with a scrap of an agreement.
But what stands out in retrospect in the Passaic settlement – and what is painful even now to recall – was the alacrity with which the party leadership agreed to it, the general feeling that it was a clever “maneuver,” and its falsely grounded motivations.
The decision to sacrifice the strike leader and to disband the “United Front Committee,” implied recognition that the moth-eaten, reactionary, good-for-nothing AFL set-up in the textile industry at that time was the “legitimate” union in that field; and that the “United Front Committee” was only a holding operation and recruiting agency for the AFL union.
All that was wrong from start to finish. The “United Front Committee” should have been regarded as the starting point for an independent union of textile workers. For that it would have been far better to “lose” the strike than to end it with a disgraceful settlement. Independent unionism was the only prescription for the textile industry, and had been ever since the great days of the IWW. “Boring from within” the AFL union in that field, as an exclusive policy, never had a realistic basis.
The Passaic settlement and the motivations for it carried the AFL fetishism of Foster, with which all the others in the party leadership had gone along more or less uneasily, to the point of absurdity. It brought a kickback which was to result, a couple of years later, in a complete reversal of party policy on the trade union question.
When the Comintern got ready for its wild “left turn” toward “red trade unions” in 1928, Losovsky singled out the Passaic capitulation as the horrible example of the party’s policy of “dancing quadrilles around the AFL.” The party then embarked on an adventurous course, going to the other extreme of building independent communist unions all up and down the line.
The disastrous results of this experiment with the Trade Union Unity League, as the organizing center of a separate communist labor movement, were in part a punishment for the sin of the Passaic settlement.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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After 1925
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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July 14, 1955
Dear Sir:
The three-year period following the 1925 Convention of the Communist Party must present far more difficulties for the inquiring student than all the preceding years put together. The party entered into a uniquely different situation, without parallel in all the previous history of American radicalism, and the seeds of all the future troubles were sown then. It was a time when factionalism without principle in the internal party conflict prepared and conditioned many people for the eventual abandonment and betrayal of all principle in the broader class struggle of the workers, which the party had been organized to express.
The printed record alone obscures more than it explains about the real causes of the party troubles in these bleak years. The important thing, as I see it, is not the specific disputes and squabbles over party policy, as they are recorded in print, but the general situation in which all the factions were caught – and which none of them fully understood – and their blind, or half-blind, attempts to find a way out.
Prior to that time the factional struggles, with all their excesses and occasional absurdities, had revolved around basic issues which remain fully comprehensible; and settlement of the disputes had been followed by the dissolution of the factions. From the 1925 Convention onward, the evolution of party life took a radically different turn. The old differences had become largely outlived or narrowed down to nuances, but the factions remained and became hardened into permanent formations.
After 1925 the factional gang-fights for power predominated over whatever the rival factions wanted – or thought they wanted – the power for. That, and not the differences over party policy, real or ostensible, was the dominating feature of this period. The details of the various skirmishes are important mainly as they relate to that.
The factional struggle became bankrupt for lack of real political justification for the existence of the factions. For that reason nothing could be solved by the victory of one faction, giving it the opportunity to execute its policy, since the policies of the others were basically the same. There were differences of implicit tendency, to be sure, but further experience was required to show where they might lead. The factions lived on exaggerations and distortions of each others’ positions and the anticipation of future differences.
At any rate, the, real differences on questions of national policy, in and of themselves, insofar as they were clearly manifested at the time, were not serious enough to justify hard and fast factions. The factions in that period were simply fighting to keep in trim, holding on and waiting, without knowing it, for their futile struggle to fill itself with a serious political content.
The factions were driving blindly toward the two explosions of 1928-1929, when the latent tendencies of each faction were to find expression and formulation in real political issues of international scope, issues destined to bring about a three-way split beyond the possibility of any further reconciliation. But that outcome was not foreseen by any of the participants in the futile struggles of those days. These struggles, for all their intensity and fury, were merely anticipations of a future conflict over far more serious questions.
* * *
I began to recognize the bankruptcy of factional struggle without a clearly defined principled basis as early as 1925, and began to look for a way out of it. That still did not go to the root of the problem – the basic causes out of which the unprincipled factionalism had flourished – but it was a step forward. It set me somewhat apart from the central leaders of both factions, and was a handicap in the immediate conflict. Blind factionalists have more zeal than those who reflect too much. But the reflections of 1925 eventually helped me to find my way to higher ground.
The experiences of the conflict in the Foster-Cannon caucus at the 1925 Convention had revealed the Fosterites’ basic conception of the faction as that of a permanent gang, claiming prior loyalty of its members in a fight for supremacy and the extermination of the opposing faction. I couldn’t go along with that, and the disagreement brought us to a parting of the ways.
The definitive split of the Foster-Cannon faction took place, not at the 1925 Convention, where the first big conflict over the “Comintern cable” arose, but some weeks later, after numerous attempts to patch up the rift. When Foster and Bittelman insisted on their conception of the faction, and tried to press me into line for the sake of factional loyalty, I, and others of the same mind, had no choice but to break with them.
It was a deep split; the cadres of the faction divided right down the middle along the same lines as the division in the caucus at the Convention. Prominent in support of my position were the following: William F. Dunne, and with him the whole local leadership of the Minnesota movement; Arne Swabeck and Martin Abern in Chicago; the principal leaders of the youth organization – Shachtman, Williamson, Schneiderman and several others who later became prominent in the party: Hathaway, Tom O’Flaherty, Gomez; Fisher and his group in the South Slavic Federation; Bud Reynolds of Detroit; Gebert, the Pole, later to become District Organizer in Detroit before his departure for Poland; and several District Organizers of the party.
The conception of the central leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was basically the same as Foster’s, as was soon demonstrated in a brief and futile experiment in cooperation with them. I didn’t agree with the claim of either group to party domination and could see no solution of the party conflict along that line. This left no room for me in either faction as a full-time, all-out participant, which is the only way I can function anywhere.
The simple fact of the matter, as we came to see it in 1925, was that the party crisis could not be solved by the victory of one faction over the other. Each was weak where the other was strong. The two groups supplemented each other and were necessary to each other and to the party.
While I considered that the Foster group as a whole was more proletarian, nearer to the workers and for that reason the “better” group, I had begun to recognize all too clearly its trade union one-sideness. In this respect I was nearer to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. But the latter, although more “political” than the Fosterite trade unionists, was too intellectualistic to suit me. I thought that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group by itself could not lead the party and build it as a genuine workers’ organization, and nothing ever happened in the ensuing years to change that opinion.
The cadres of both groups were too strong numerically, and had too many talented people, to be eliminated from the party leadership. The two groups, united and working together, would have been many times stronger and more effective than either one alone. We thought the time had come to move toward the liquidation of the factions and the unification of the party under a collective leadership.
In relating this I do not mean to intimate that I had suddenly become a pacifist in internal party affairs. I was as much a factionalist as the others, when factional struggle was the order of the day, and I have never seen any reason to deny it or apologize for it. Those pious souls who were not factionalists didn’t count in the days when the party life was dominated by internal struggle, and have nothing to report. It is true that factionalism can be carried to extremes and become a disease – as was the case in the CP after 1925. But professional abstainers, as is always the case, only made the game easier for the others who were not restrained by qualms and scruples.
I was not against factions when there was something serious to fight about. But I was already then dead set against the idea of permanent factions, after the issues which had brought them about had been decided or outlived. I never got so deeply involved in any factional struggle as to permit it to become an end in itself. In this I was perhaps different from most of the other factional leaders, and it eventually led me on a far different path.
This was a deliberate policy on my part; the result of much reflection on the whole problem of the party and the revolution. I was determined above all not to forget what I had started out to fight for, and this basic motivation sustained me in that dark, unhappy time. I felt that I had not committed myself in early youth to the struggle for the socialist reorganization of society in order to settle for membership in a permanent faction, to say nothing of a factional gang. I tried always to keep an over-all party point of view and to see the party always as a part of the working class.
And by and large I succeeded, although it was not easy in the atmosphere of that time. Many good militants succumbed to factionalism and lost their bearings altogether. It is only a short step from cynicism to renegacy. Betrayal of principle in little things easily leads to betrayal in bigger things. I have lived to see many who were first-class revolutionists in the early days turn into traitors to the working class. Some even became professional informers against former comrades. Cynical factionalism was the starting point of this moral and political degeneration.
We could see that the factional struggle was degenerating into a gang fight, and we set out to resist it. Being serious about it, we did not disperse our forces and hope for luck. On the contrary, we promptly organized a “third group” to fight for unity and the liquidation of all factions. This may appear as a quixotic enterprise – and so it turned out to be – but it took a long struggle for us to prove it to ourselves.
The international factor, which had frustrated all our efforts, eventually came to our aid and showed us a new road. When I got access to the enlightening documents of Trotsky in 1928, I began to fit the American troubles into their international framework. But that came only after three years of fighting in the dark, on purely national grounds.
No one can fight in the dark without stumbling now and then. We did our share of that, and I am far from contending that every move we made was correct. No political course can be correct when its basic premise is wrong. Our premise was that our party troubles were a purely American affair and that they could somehow be straightened out with the help of the Comintern, particularly of the Russian leaders, as had been done in earlier difficulties.
That was wrong on both counts. The objective situation in the country was against us, and we all contributed our own faults of ignorance and inadequacy to the bedevilment of the party situation. But the chief source of our difficulties this time was the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern; and the chief mischief-makers in our party, as in every other party of the Comintern, were these same people whom we trustingly looked to for help and guidance.
It took me a long time to get that straight in my head. In the meantime I fumbled and stumbled in the dark like all the others. My basic approach to the problem was different, however, and it eventually led me to an understanding of the puzzle and a drastic new orientation.
* * *
In the objective circumstances of the time, with the booming prosperity of the late Twenties sapping the foundations of radicalism, with the trade-union movement stagnating and declining, feverish activity in the factional struggle in the party became for many a substitute for participation in the class struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. This sickness particularly infected those who were most isolated from the daily life of the workers. They did not take kindly to our formula for party peace and party unity through the liquidation of the factions. They didn’t understand it, and above all they didn’t believe in it.
In the underworld of present-day society, with which I have had contact at various times in jail and prison, there is a widespread sentiment that there is no such thing as an honest man who is also intelligent. The human race is made up of honest suckers and smart crooks, and that’s all there is to it; the smartest crooks are those who pretend to be honest, the confidence men. Professional factionalism, unrelated to the living issues of the class struggle of the workers, is also a sort of underworld, and the psychology of its practitioners approaches that of the other underworld.
In the eyes of such people, for whom the internal struggle of the Communist Party had become the breath of life, an end in itself, anyone who proposed peace and unity was either a well. meaning fool or a hypocrite with an axe to grind. In our case the first possibility was rejected out of hand by the esteemed colleagues with whom we had been associated in numerous struggles, and that left only the second. A third possible reason or motivation for our position was excluded.
Our formula for party unity and party peace was not taken at face value by the leaders of the Foster-Bittelman and Ruthenberg-Lovestone groups. We were regarded as trouble-making anarchists, violating the rules of the game by forming a “third group” when the rules called for two and only two.
The Fosterites waged an especially vicious campaign against me as a “traitor,” as if I had been born into this world as a member of a family and clan and was required by blood relationship to have no truck with the feuding opponents on the other side of the mountain. That was a complete misunderstanding on their part; they had my birth certificate all mixed up.
As for the Lovestoneites, they even introduced motions in the party branches specifically condemning the formation of a “third group.” For them two groups belonged to the accepted order of things; a third group was unnatural. This dictum, however, was not binding on us for the simple reason that we did not accept it.
It was evident from the start that our program could not be achieved by persuasion. Some force and pressure would be required, and this could be effectively asserted only by an organized independent group. We set out to build such a group as a balance of power, and thus to prevent either of the major factions from monopolizing party control.
Despite the all-consuming factionalism of the top and secondary leaders, our stand for unity undoubtedly reflected a wide sentiment in the ranks of both factions. Many of the rank and file comrades were sick of the senseless internal struggle and eager for unity and all-around cooperation in constructive party work. This was strikingly demonstrated when Weinstone, secretary of the New York District, and a group around him, came out for the same position in 1926.
That broke up the Ruthenberg “majority,” as our earlier revolt had broken up Foster’s. Weinstone soon came to an agreement with us, and the new combination constituted a balance of power grouping in the leadership. It didn’t stop the factional struggle-far from it-but it did prevent the monopolistic domination of the party by one faction and the exclusion of the other, and created conditions in the party for the leading activists in all factions to function freely in party work.
* * *
I had been closely associated with Weinstone in the old struggle for the legalization of the party – 1921-1923 – and knew him fairly well. We always got along well together and had remained friendly to each other, even though we were in opposing camps in the new factional line-up and struggle which began in 1923. He had gone along with the Ruthenberg-Pepper-Lovestone faction and was its outstanding representative in New York while the national center was located in Chicago.
In the course of the new developments I came to know Weinstone better and to form a more definitive judgment of him. He was one of that outstanding trio – Lovestone, Weinstone and Wolfe – who were known among us as the “City College boys.” They were still in school when they were attracted to the left-wing movement in the upsurge following the Russian Revolution, but they were thrust forward in the movement by their exceptional qualities and their educational advantages.
They came into prominent positions of leadership without having had any previous experience with the workers in the daily class struggle. All three of them bore the mark of this gap in their education, and Lovestone and Wolfe never showed any disposition to overcome it. They always impressed me as aliens, with a purely intellectualistic interest in the workers’ movement. Weinstone had at least a feeling for the workers, although in the time that I knew him, he never seemed to be really at home with them.
All three were articulate, Wolfe being the best and most prolific writer and Weinstone the most gifted speaker among them. Lovestone, who had indifferent talents both as writer and speaker, was the strongest personality of the three, the one who made by far the deepest impression on the movement at all times, arid most times to its detriment.
It was everybody’s opinion that Lovestone was unscrupulous in his ceaseless machinations and intrigues; and in my opinion everybody was right on that point, although the word “unscrupulous” somehow or other seems to be too mild a word to describe his operations. Lovestone was downright crooked, like Foster-but in a different way. Foster was in and of the workers’ movement and had a sense of responsibility to it; and he could be moderately honest when there was no need to cheat or lie. Foster’s crookedness was purposeful and utilitarian, nonchalantly resorted to in a pinch to serve an end. Lovestone, the sinister stranger in our midst, seemed to practice skulduggery maliciously, for its own sake.
It was a queer twist of fate that brought such a perverse character into a movement dedicated to the service of the noblest ideal of human relationships. Never was a man more destructively alien to the cause in which he sought a career; he was like an anarchistic cancer cell running wild in the party organism. The party has meaning and justification only as the conscious expression of the austere process of history in which the working class strives for emancipation, with all the strict moral obligations such a mission imposes on its members. But Lovestone seemed to see the party as an object of manipulation in a personal game he was playing, with an unnatural instinct to foul things up.
In this game, which he played with an almost pathological frenzy, he was not restrained by any recognized norms of conduct in human relations, to say nothing of the effects his methods might have on the morale and solidarity of the workers’ movement. For him the class struggle of the workers, with its awesome significance for the future of the human race, was at best an intellectual concept; the factional struggle for “control” of the party was the real thing, the real stuff of life. His chief enemy was always the factional opponent in the party rather than the capitalist class and the system of exploitation they represent.
Lovestone’s factional method and practice were systematic miseducation of the party; whispered gossip to set comrades against each other; misrepresentation and distortion of opponents’ positions; unrestrained demagogy and incitement of factional supporters until they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. He had other tricks, but they were all on the same order.
The party leaders’ opinions of each other in those days varied widely and were not always complimentary; but at bottom, despite the bitterness of the conflicts, I think they respected each other as comrades in a common cause, in spite of all. Lovestone, however, was distrusted and his devotion to the cause was widely doubted. In intimate circles Foster remarked more than once that if Lovestone were not a Jew, he would be the most likely candidate for leadership of a fascist movement. That was a fairly common opinion.
Wolfe, better educated and probably more intelligent than Lovestone, but weaker, was Lovestone’s first assistant and supporter in all his devious maneuvers. He was different from Lovestone mainly in his less passionate concentration on the intrigues of the moment and less desperate concern about the outcome.
A prime example of Lovestone’s factional method is his 1929 pamphlet, Pages from Party History. He makes an impressive “case” against his factional opponents by quoting, with a liberal admixture of falsification, only that which is compromising to them and leaving out entirely a still more impressive documentation which he could have cited against himself. Wolfe’s factional writing was on the same order, crooked all the way through. His 1929 pamphlet against “Trotskyism” shows Wolfe for what he is worth. These two people in particular had little or nothing to learn from Stalin. In their practices in the factional struggles they were Stalinists before Stalin’s own method was fully disclosed to the Americans.
* * *
Weinstone was different in many ways. He was not as shrewd and cunning, and he lacked Lovestone’s driving will. But he was more honest than Lovestone and Wolfe, more party-minded, and in those days he was undoubtedly devoted to the cause of communism. Also, in my opinion, Weinstone was more broadly intelligent, more flexible and objective in his thinking, than any of the other leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group.
Weinstone never got completely swamped in the factional struggle. That was the starting point for his independent course in 1926-1927. He recognized the merits of the comrades in the other camp. More clearly than others in his group, he saw the blind alley into which the factional struggle had entered at that time, and was honestly seeking to find a way out in the higher interest of the party.
Weinstone was perhaps dazzled for a time by the phony brilliance of Pepper, but he was never a personal follower of either Ruthenberg or Lovestone. His criticisms of both, in numerous conversations with me, were penetrating and objective; at least so they seemed to me. He was revolted by the Ruthenbergian claim to party “hegemony” – they actually proposed the formula of “unity of the party under the hegemony of the Ruthenberg group“! That sounded something like the unity of colonies in an imperialist empire, and that is really the way it was meant. Weinstone feared, with good reason, that encouragement of such an unrealistic and untenable pretension would lead to a party stalemate which could only culminate in a split.
Already in 1926, before the death of Ruthenberg, Weinstone began to take a stand within the faction for unity, through the dissolution of the factions and the establishment of a “collective leadership” of the most capable and influential people, without factional barriers to their free collaboration. This naturally brought him into consultation and eventually into close collaboration with us, since we had evolved the same position out of our own experiences in the Foster faction.
The Lovestoneites, who proceeded from the a priori judgment that everything that happens is the result of a conspiracy, and that nothing is ever done through good will and the exercise of independent intelligence, were dead sure that I had cooked up Weinstone’s defection and talked him into his factional heresy. That’s the way Gitlow tells it in his sorry memoirs; but that’s not the way I remember it.
When Weinstone became secretary of the New York District, as a result of the overturn manipulated by the Comintern in 1925, the bigger half of the effective militants in the New York District, who only yesterday had been the duly elected majority, became an artificially created minority. Weinstone recognized their value as party workers and deliberately instituted a policy in the New York District, on his own account, of conciliation and cooperation.
Most of the New York Fosterites, after a period of suspicious reservation, responded to Weinstone’s conciliatory policy, and a considerable measure of cooperation with them in party work was effected. This favorable result of local experience induced Weinstone to extend his thoughts to the party problem on a national scale. That soon brought him to virtually the same position that we had worked out in Chicago.
I doubt whether I personally had much to do with shaping his thoughts along this line – at least in the early stage. The fact that he came to substantially the same position that we had already worked out gave us a certain reassurance that we had sized things up correctly; and it naturally followed that we came into closer and closer relations with Weinstone.
We came to a definite agreement to work together already before the sudden and unexpected death of Ruthenberg in March 1927. We often speculated how things might have worked out if Ruthenberg had lived. Ruthenberg was a factionalist like the rest, but he was not so insane about it as Lovestone was. He was far more constructive and responsible, more concerned for the general welfare of the party and for his own position as a leader of a party rather than of a fragmented assembly of factions. Moreover, he was far more popular and influential, more respected in the party ranks, and strong enough to veto Lovestone’s factional excesses if he wanted to.
It is quite possible that an uneasy peace, gradually leading to the dissolution of factions, might have been worked out with him. His sudden death in March 1927 put a stop to all such possibilities. The Ruthenberg faction then became the Lovestone faction, and the internal party situation changed for the worse accordingly.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:
“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 that 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. Deb’s 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…..”
I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin
A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
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James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party
Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
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James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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The Passaic Strike
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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June 9, 1955
Dear Sir:
I remember the December 1925 Plenum of the CP of the US I was allied with the Ruthenberg faction at this particular Plenum and took a very active part in the debate on the trade-union question. It probably marked the tentative beginning of resistance to AFL fetishism, although the details of the specific issues in dispute at the Plenum have not remained in my memory.
According to my recollection, the Passaic issue came up at the Plenum, but it did not originate there. It was rather thrust upon the party by the cyclonic activities of Weisbord, who had gone into the field and actually begun to organize the unorganized textile workers. Looking back on it now, we deserve censure, not for giving conditional support to the organizing work of Weisbord, but for failing to go all-out in such support and to make the issue of AFL fetishism clear-cut.
The “United Front Committee” under which the organizing campaign in Passaic proceeded, instead of under the auspices of a new union, which the situation really called for, was a concession to the party’s prevailing policy of AFL-ism. To be sure, the recruitment of individual members to the “United Front Committee” twisted the conception of the united front, as an alliance of organizations, out of shape. But the real problem at Passaic was to organize the unorganized, unskilled and low-paid workers neglected by the AFL.
The Fosterite opposition to the recruitment of individual members to this “United Front Committee” showed up the bankruptcy of the ultra-AFL policy in a clear light for the first time. It could have had no other effect than to paralyze the organization of the textile workers in Passaic for fear of committing the sin of “dual unionism” – for which the Fosterites had a real phobia.
The Passaic strike started in the spring of 1926 while we were still in Moscow attending the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern. I don’t know or remember any of the immediate circumstances attending it. It is my definite impression, however, that the strike was not precipitated by the party leadership. Rather it was dumped in its lap as a result of Weisbord’s successes in organizing the textile workers there.
Gitlow’s pretensions about masterminding the Passaic situation, as related in his compendium of distortions and fabrications entitled I Confess, should be taken with a grain of salt. All his stories which are not outright inventions are slanted to enlarge his own role in party affairs and to denigrate others – in this case, Weisbord.
The organization of the workers in Passaic and the effective leadership of the strike itself, were pre-eminently Weisbord’s work. I had a chance to see that on the ground after we returned from Moscow. I, myself, had nothing to do with the Passaic strike, but I spent a little time there and had a good chance to see Weisbord in action. As a strike leader he was first class, no mistake about it. It is true that he worked under the close supervision and direction of a party committee in New York appointed by the national party leadership in Chicago. But it’s a long way from committee meetings in a closed room, off the scene, to the actual leadership of a strike on the ground. The full credit for that belongs to Weisbord.
There was an apparent contradiction between the decision of the Sixth Plenum of the CI to confirm Foster’s faction – with its pro-AFL policy – in its hegemony over party trade-union work and the concurrent conduct of the Passaic strike under the auspices of a “United Front Committee” outside the AFL. That was not due to factional manipulation. It happened that way because life intruded into the internal affairs of the party.
It happened because Weisbord – a brash young egocentric fresh out of college, and in general an unattractive specimen at close range, but a powerful mass orator and a human dynamo if there ever was one – stirred up a lot of workers and organized them into the “United Front Committee.” The sense of strength that came from their organization emboldened them to call a strike without waiting for the sanction of the AFL union. The strike soon exploded into violent clashes with the police which were splashed all over the front pages of the metropolitan press. The Passaic strike was the Number One labor news story for a long time.
This action at Passaic did indeed violate both the letter and the spirit of Fosterite trade-union policy, which the party had followed for years and which had been implicitly supported once again in Moscow. But that didn’t change the fact that the party had a big strike on its hands. And the party certainly made the most of its opportunity.
The Passaic strike really put the party on the labor map. In my opinion it deserves a chapter in party history all by itself. It revealed the Communists as the dynamic force in the radical labor movement and the organizing center of the unorganized workers disregarded by the AFL unions – displacing the IWW in this field. The Passaic strike was well organized and expertly led, and under all ordinary circumstances should have resulted in a resounding victory. The only trouble was that the bosses were too strong, had too many financial resources and were too determined to prevent the consolidation of a radical union organization. The strikers, isolated in one locality, were simply worn out and starved out and there was nothing to be done about it.
A poor settlement was the best that could be squeezed out of the deadlock. Such experiences were to be repeated many times before the unionization drive in the Thirties gained sufficient scope and power to break the employers’ resistance.
* * *
The Passaic strike was destined to have an influence on party trade-union policy which in the long run was far more important than the strike itself. The genesis of the drastic change in trade-union policy a few years later can probably be traced to it. There was a belated reaction to the party’s attempt to outwit the textile bosses and the AFL fakers by yielding to their principal demand – the elimination of the strike leader, Weisbord.
When it became clear that the strike was sagging, and that the bosses would not make a settlement with the “United Front Committee,” negotiations were opened up with the AFL Textile Union. The AFL was invited to take over the organization and try to negotiate a settlement. These accommodating fakers agreed – on one small condition, which turned out to be the same as that of the bosses, namely, that Weisbord, the communist strike leader, should walk the plank.
I do not know who first proposed the acceptance of this monstrous condition. What stands out in my memory most distinctly is the fact that both factions in the party leadership agreed with it, and that there was no conflict on the issue whatever. The fateful decision to sacrifice the strike leader was made unanimously by the party leadership and eventually carried out by the strike committee.
Such questions cannot be viewed abstractly. Perhaps those who, in their experience, have been faced with the agonizing problem of trying to save something from the wreckage of a defeated strike have a right to pass judgment on this decision. Others are hardly qualified. The main consideration in the Passaic situation was the fact that the strike had passed its peak. Real victory was already out of the question and the general feeling was that a poor settlement would be better than none. Other strikes have been settled under even more humiliating conditions. Workers have been compelled time and time again to “agree” to the victimization and blacklisting of the best militants in their ranks as a condition for getting back to work with a scrap of an agreement.
But what stands out in retrospect in the Passaic settlement – and what is painful even now to recall – was the alacrity with which the party leadership agreed to it, the general feeling that it was a clever “maneuver,” and its falsely grounded motivations.
The decision to sacrifice the strike leader and to disband the “United Front Committee,” implied recognition that the moth-eaten, reactionary, good-for-nothing AFL set-up in the textile industry at that time was the “legitimate” union in that field; and that the “United Front Committee” was only a holding operation and recruiting agency for the AFL union.
All that was wrong from start to finish. The “United Front Committee” should have been regarded as the starting point for an independent union of textile workers. For that it would have been far better to “lose” the strike than to end it with a disgraceful settlement. Independent unionism was the only prescription for the textile industry, and had been ever since the great days of the IWW. “Boring from within” the AFL union in that field, as an exclusive policy, never had a realistic basis.
The Passaic settlement and the motivations for it carried the AFL fetishism of Foster, with which all the others in the party leadership had gone along more or less uneasily, to the point of absurdity. It brought a kickback which was to result, a couple of years later, in a complete reversal of party policy on the trade union question.
When the Comintern got ready for its wild “left turn” toward “red trade unions” in 1928, Losovsky singled out the Passaic capitulation as the horrible example of the party’s policy of “dancing quadrilles around the AFL.” The party then embarked on an adventurous course, going to the other extreme of building independent communist unions all up and down the line.
The disastrous results of this experiment with the Trade Union Unity League, as the organizing center of a separate communist labor movement, were in part a punishment for the sin of the Passaic settlement.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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After 1925
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.17 No.2, Spring 1956, pp.50-51.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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July 14, 1955
Dear Sir:
The three-year period following the 1925 Convention of the Communist Party must present far more difficulties for the inquiring student than all the preceding years put together. The party entered into a uniquely different situation, without parallel in all the previous history of American radicalism, and the seeds of all the future troubles were sown then. It was a time when factionalism without principle in the internal party conflict prepared and conditioned many people for the eventual abandonment and betrayal of all principle in the broader class struggle of the workers, which the party had been organized to express.
The printed record alone obscures more than it explains about the real causes of the party troubles in these bleak years. The important thing, as I see it, is not the specific disputes and squabbles over party policy, as they are recorded in print, but the general situation in which all the factions were caught – and which none of them fully understood – and their blind, or half-blind, attempts to find a way out.
Prior to that time the factional struggles, with all their excesses and occasional absurdities, had revolved around basic issues which remain fully comprehensible; and settlement of the disputes had been followed by the dissolution of the factions. From the 1925 Convention onward, the evolution of party life took a radically different turn. The old differences had become largely outlived or narrowed down to nuances, but the factions remained and became hardened into permanent formations.
After 1925 the factional gang-fights for power predominated over whatever the rival factions wanted – or thought they wanted – the power for. That, and not the differences over party policy, real or ostensible, was the dominating feature of this period. The details of the various skirmishes are important mainly as they relate to that.
The factional struggle became bankrupt for lack of real political justification for the existence of the factions. For that reason nothing could be solved by the victory of one faction, giving it the opportunity to execute its policy, since the policies of the others were basically the same. There were differences of implicit tendency, to be sure, but further experience was required to show where they might lead. The factions lived on exaggerations and distortions of each others’ positions and the anticipation of future differences.
At any rate, the, real differences on questions of national policy, in and of themselves, insofar as they were clearly manifested at the time, were not serious enough to justify hard and fast factions. The factions in that period were simply fighting to keep in trim, holding on and waiting, without knowing it, for their futile struggle to fill itself with a serious political content.
The factions were driving blindly toward the two explosions of 1928-1929, when the latent tendencies of each faction were to find expression and formulation in real political issues of international scope, issues destined to bring about a three-way split beyond the possibility of any further reconciliation. But that outcome was not foreseen by any of the participants in the futile struggles of those days. These struggles, for all their intensity and fury, were merely anticipations of a future conflict over far more serious questions.
* * *
I began to recognize the bankruptcy of factional struggle without a clearly defined principled basis as early as 1925, and began to look for a way out of it. That still did not go to the root of the problem – the basic causes out of which the unprincipled factionalism had flourished – but it was a step forward. It set me somewhat apart from the central leaders of both factions, and was a handicap in the immediate conflict. Blind factionalists have more zeal than those who reflect too much. But the reflections of 1925 eventually helped me to find my way to higher ground.
The experiences of the conflict in the Foster-Cannon caucus at the 1925 Convention had revealed the Fosterites’ basic conception of the faction as that of a permanent gang, claiming prior loyalty of its members in a fight for supremacy and the extermination of the opposing faction. I couldn’t go along with that, and the disagreement brought us to a parting of the ways.
The definitive split of the Foster-Cannon faction took place, not at the 1925 Convention, where the first big conflict over the “Comintern cable” arose, but some weeks later, after numerous attempts to patch up the rift. When Foster and Bittelman insisted on their conception of the faction, and tried to press me into line for the sake of factional loyalty, I, and others of the same mind, had no choice but to break with them.
It was a deep split; the cadres of the faction divided right down the middle along the same lines as the division in the caucus at the Convention. Prominent in support of my position were the following: William F. Dunne, and with him the whole local leadership of the Minnesota movement; Arne Swabeck and Martin Abern in Chicago; the principal leaders of the youth organization – Shachtman, Williamson, Schneiderman and several others who later became prominent in the party: Hathaway, Tom O’Flaherty, Gomez; Fisher and his group in the South Slavic Federation; Bud Reynolds of Detroit; Gebert, the Pole, later to become District Organizer in Detroit before his departure for Poland; and several District Organizers of the party.
The conception of the central leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was basically the same as Foster’s, as was soon demonstrated in a brief and futile experiment in cooperation with them. I didn’t agree with the claim of either group to party domination and could see no solution of the party conflict along that line. This left no room for me in either faction as a full-time, all-out participant, which is the only way I can function anywhere.
The simple fact of the matter, as we came to see it in 1925, was that the party crisis could not be solved by the victory of one faction over the other. Each was weak where the other was strong. The two groups supplemented each other and were necessary to each other and to the party.
While I considered that the Foster group as a whole was more proletarian, nearer to the workers and for that reason the “better” group, I had begun to recognize all too clearly its trade union one-sideness. In this respect I was nearer to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. But the latter, although more “political” than the Fosterite trade unionists, was too intellectualistic to suit me. I thought that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group by itself could not lead the party and build it as a genuine workers’ organization, and nothing ever happened in the ensuing years to change that opinion.
The cadres of both groups were too strong numerically, and had too many talented people, to be eliminated from the party leadership. The two groups, united and working together, would have been many times stronger and more effective than either one alone. We thought the time had come to move toward the liquidation of the factions and the unification of the party under a collective leadership.
In relating this I do not mean to intimate that I had suddenly become a pacifist in internal party affairs. I was as much a factionalist as the others, when factional struggle was the order of the day, and I have never seen any reason to deny it or apologize for it. Those pious souls who were not factionalists didn’t count in the days when the party life was dominated by internal struggle, and have nothing to report. It is true that factionalism can be carried to extremes and become a disease – as was the case in the CP after 1925. But professional abstainers, as is always the case, only made the game easier for the others who were not restrained by qualms and scruples.
I was not against factions when there was something serious to fight about. But I was already then dead set against the idea of permanent factions, after the issues which had brought them about had been decided or outlived. I never got so deeply involved in any factional struggle as to permit it to become an end in itself. In this I was perhaps different from most of the other factional leaders, and it eventually led me on a far different path.
This was a deliberate policy on my part; the result of much reflection on the whole problem of the party and the revolution. I was determined above all not to forget what I had started out to fight for, and this basic motivation sustained me in that dark, unhappy time. I felt that I had not committed myself in early youth to the struggle for the socialist reorganization of society in order to settle for membership in a permanent faction, to say nothing of a factional gang. I tried always to keep an over-all party point of view and to see the party always as a part of the working class.
And by and large I succeeded, although it was not easy in the atmosphere of that time. Many good militants succumbed to factionalism and lost their bearings altogether. It is only a short step from cynicism to renegacy. Betrayal of principle in little things easily leads to betrayal in bigger things. I have lived to see many who were first-class revolutionists in the early days turn into traitors to the working class. Some even became professional informers against former comrades. Cynical factionalism was the starting point of this moral and political degeneration.
We could see that the factional struggle was degenerating into a gang fight, and we set out to resist it. Being serious about it, we did not disperse our forces and hope for luck. On the contrary, we promptly organized a “third group” to fight for unity and the liquidation of all factions. This may appear as a quixotic enterprise – and so it turned out to be – but it took a long struggle for us to prove it to ourselves.
The international factor, which had frustrated all our efforts, eventually came to our aid and showed us a new road. When I got access to the enlightening documents of Trotsky in 1928, I began to fit the American troubles into their international framework. But that came only after three years of fighting in the dark, on purely national grounds.
No one can fight in the dark without stumbling now and then. We did our share of that, and I am far from contending that every move we made was correct. No political course can be correct when its basic premise is wrong. Our premise was that our party troubles were a purely American affair and that they could somehow be straightened out with the help of the Comintern, particularly of the Russian leaders, as had been done in earlier difficulties.
That was wrong on both counts. The objective situation in the country was against us, and we all contributed our own faults of ignorance and inadequacy to the bedevilment of the party situation. But the chief source of our difficulties this time was the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern; and the chief mischief-makers in our party, as in every other party of the Comintern, were these same people whom we trustingly looked to for help and guidance.
It took me a long time to get that straight in my head. In the meantime I fumbled and stumbled in the dark like all the others. My basic approach to the problem was different, however, and it eventually led me to an understanding of the puzzle and a drastic new orientation.
* * *
In the objective circumstances of the time, with the booming prosperity of the late Twenties sapping the foundations of radicalism, with the trade-union movement stagnating and declining, feverish activity in the factional struggle in the party became for many a substitute for participation in the class struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. This sickness particularly infected those who were most isolated from the daily life of the workers. They did not take kindly to our formula for party peace and party unity through the liquidation of the factions. They didn’t understand it, and above all they didn’t believe in it.
In the underworld of present-day society, with which I have had contact at various times in jail and prison, there is a widespread sentiment that there is no such thing as an honest man who is also intelligent. The human race is made up of honest suckers and smart crooks, and that’s all there is to it; the smartest crooks are those who pretend to be honest, the confidence men. Professional factionalism, unrelated to the living issues of the class struggle of the workers, is also a sort of underworld, and the psychology of its practitioners approaches that of the other underworld.
In the eyes of such people, for whom the internal struggle of the Communist Party had become the breath of life, an end in itself, anyone who proposed peace and unity was either a well. meaning fool or a hypocrite with an axe to grind. In our case the first possibility was rejected out of hand by the esteemed colleagues with whom we had been associated in numerous struggles, and that left only the second. A third possible reason or motivation for our position was excluded.
Our formula for party unity and party peace was not taken at face value by the leaders of the Foster-Bittelman and Ruthenberg-Lovestone groups. We were regarded as trouble-making anarchists, violating the rules of the game by forming a “third group” when the rules called for two and only two.
The Fosterites waged an especially vicious campaign against me as a “traitor,” as if I had been born into this world as a member of a family and clan and was required by blood relationship to have no truck with the feuding opponents on the other side of the mountain. That was a complete misunderstanding on their part; they had my birth certificate all mixed up.
As for the Lovestoneites, they even introduced motions in the party branches specifically condemning the formation of a “third group.” For them two groups belonged to the accepted order of things; a third group was unnatural. This dictum, however, was not binding on us for the simple reason that we did not accept it.
It was evident from the start that our program could not be achieved by persuasion. Some force and pressure would be required, and this could be effectively asserted only by an organized independent group. We set out to build such a group as a balance of power, and thus to prevent either of the major factions from monopolizing party control.
Despite the all-consuming factionalism of the top and secondary leaders, our stand for unity undoubtedly reflected a wide sentiment in the ranks of both factions. Many of the rank and file comrades were sick of the senseless internal struggle and eager for unity and all-around cooperation in constructive party work. This was strikingly demonstrated when Weinstone, secretary of the New York District, and a group around him, came out for the same position in 1926.
That broke up the Ruthenberg “majority,” as our earlier revolt had broken up Foster’s. Weinstone soon came to an agreement with us, and the new combination constituted a balance of power grouping in the leadership. It didn’t stop the factional struggle-far from it-but it did prevent the monopolistic domination of the party by one faction and the exclusion of the other, and created conditions in the party for the leading activists in all factions to function freely in party work.
* * *
I had been closely associated with Weinstone in the old struggle for the legalization of the party – 1921-1923 – and knew him fairly well. We always got along well together and had remained friendly to each other, even though we were in opposing camps in the new factional line-up and struggle which began in 1923. He had gone along with the Ruthenberg-Pepper-Lovestone faction and was its outstanding representative in New York while the national center was located in Chicago.
In the course of the new developments I came to know Weinstone better and to form a more definitive judgment of him. He was one of that outstanding trio – Lovestone, Weinstone and Wolfe – who were known among us as the “City College boys.” They were still in school when they were attracted to the left-wing movement in the upsurge following the Russian Revolution, but they were thrust forward in the movement by their exceptional qualities and their educational advantages.
They came into prominent positions of leadership without having had any previous experience with the workers in the daily class struggle. All three of them bore the mark of this gap in their education, and Lovestone and Wolfe never showed any disposition to overcome it. They always impressed me as aliens, with a purely intellectualistic interest in the workers’ movement. Weinstone had at least a feeling for the workers, although in the time that I knew him, he never seemed to be really at home with them.
All three were articulate, Wolfe being the best and most prolific writer and Weinstone the most gifted speaker among them. Lovestone, who had indifferent talents both as writer and speaker, was the strongest personality of the three, the one who made by far the deepest impression on the movement at all times, arid most times to its detriment.
It was everybody’s opinion that Lovestone was unscrupulous in his ceaseless machinations and intrigues; and in my opinion everybody was right on that point, although the word “unscrupulous” somehow or other seems to be too mild a word to describe his operations. Lovestone was downright crooked, like Foster-but in a different way. Foster was in and of the workers’ movement and had a sense of responsibility to it; and he could be moderately honest when there was no need to cheat or lie. Foster’s crookedness was purposeful and utilitarian, nonchalantly resorted to in a pinch to serve an end. Lovestone, the sinister stranger in our midst, seemed to practice skulduggery maliciously, for its own sake.
It was a queer twist of fate that brought such a perverse character into a movement dedicated to the service of the noblest ideal of human relationships. Never was a man more destructively alien to the cause in which he sought a career; he was like an anarchistic cancer cell running wild in the party organism. The party has meaning and justification only as the conscious expression of the austere process of history in which the working class strives for emancipation, with all the strict moral obligations such a mission imposes on its members. But Lovestone seemed to see the party as an object of manipulation in a personal game he was playing, with an unnatural instinct to foul things up.
In this game, which he played with an almost pathological frenzy, he was not restrained by any recognized norms of conduct in human relations, to say nothing of the effects his methods might have on the morale and solidarity of the workers’ movement. For him the class struggle of the workers, with its awesome significance for the future of the human race, was at best an intellectual concept; the factional struggle for “control” of the party was the real thing, the real stuff of life. His chief enemy was always the factional opponent in the party rather than the capitalist class and the system of exploitation they represent.
Lovestone’s factional method and practice were systematic miseducation of the party; whispered gossip to set comrades against each other; misrepresentation and distortion of opponents’ positions; unrestrained demagogy and incitement of factional supporters until they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. He had other tricks, but they were all on the same order.
The party leaders’ opinions of each other in those days varied widely and were not always complimentary; but at bottom, despite the bitterness of the conflicts, I think they respected each other as comrades in a common cause, in spite of all. Lovestone, however, was distrusted and his devotion to the cause was widely doubted. In intimate circles Foster remarked more than once that if Lovestone were not a Jew, he would be the most likely candidate for leadership of a fascist movement. That was a fairly common opinion.
Wolfe, better educated and probably more intelligent than Lovestone, but weaker, was Lovestone’s first assistant and supporter in all his devious maneuvers. He was different from Lovestone mainly in his less passionate concentration on the intrigues of the moment and less desperate concern about the outcome.
A prime example of Lovestone’s factional method is his 1929 pamphlet, Pages from Party History. He makes an impressive “case” against his factional opponents by quoting, with a liberal admixture of falsification, only that which is compromising to them and leaving out entirely a still more impressive documentation which he could have cited against himself. Wolfe’s factional writing was on the same order, crooked all the way through. His 1929 pamphlet against “Trotskyism” shows Wolfe for what he is worth. These two people in particular had little or nothing to learn from Stalin. In their practices in the factional struggles they were Stalinists before Stalin’s own method was fully disclosed to the Americans.
* * *
Weinstone was different in many ways. He was not as shrewd and cunning, and he lacked Lovestone’s driving will. But he was more honest than Lovestone and Wolfe, more party-minded, and in those days he was undoubtedly devoted to the cause of communism. Also, in my opinion, Weinstone was more broadly intelligent, more flexible and objective in his thinking, than any of the other leaders of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group.
Weinstone never got completely swamped in the factional struggle. That was the starting point for his independent course in 1926-1927. He recognized the merits of the comrades in the other camp. More clearly than others in his group, he saw the blind alley into which the factional struggle had entered at that time, and was honestly seeking to find a way out in the higher interest of the party.
Weinstone was perhaps dazzled for a time by the phony brilliance of Pepper, but he was never a personal follower of either Ruthenberg or Lovestone. His criticisms of both, in numerous conversations with me, were penetrating and objective; at least so they seemed to me. He was revolted by the Ruthenbergian claim to party “hegemony” – they actually proposed the formula of “unity of the party under the hegemony of the Ruthenberg group“! That sounded something like the unity of colonies in an imperialist empire, and that is really the way it was meant. Weinstone feared, with good reason, that encouragement of such an unrealistic and untenable pretension would lead to a party stalemate which could only culminate in a split.
Already in 1926, before the death of Ruthenberg, Weinstone began to take a stand within the faction for unity, through the dissolution of the factions and the establishment of a “collective leadership” of the most capable and influential people, without factional barriers to their free collaboration. This naturally brought him into consultation and eventually into close collaboration with us, since we had evolved the same position out of our own experiences in the Foster faction.
The Lovestoneites, who proceeded from the a priori judgment that everything that happens is the result of a conspiracy, and that nothing is ever done through good will and the exercise of independent intelligence, were dead sure that I had cooked up Weinstone’s defection and talked him into his factional heresy. That’s the way Gitlow tells it in his sorry memoirs; but that’s not the way I remember it.
When Weinstone became secretary of the New York District, as a result of the overturn manipulated by the Comintern in 1925, the bigger half of the effective militants in the New York District, who only yesterday had been the duly elected majority, became an artificially created minority. Weinstone recognized their value as party workers and deliberately instituted a policy in the New York District, on his own account, of conciliation and cooperation.
Most of the New York Fosterites, after a period of suspicious reservation, responded to Weinstone’s conciliatory policy, and a considerable measure of cooperation with them in party work was effected. This favorable result of local experience induced Weinstone to extend his thoughts to the party problem on a national scale. That soon brought him to virtually the same position that we had worked out in Chicago.
I doubt whether I personally had much to do with shaping his thoughts along this line – at least in the early stage. The fact that he came to substantially the same position that we had already worked out gave us a certain reassurance that we had sized things up correctly; and it naturally followed that we came into closer and closer relations with Weinstone.
We came to a definite agreement to work together already before the sudden and unexpected death of Ruthenberg in March 1927. We often speculated how things might have worked out if Ruthenberg had lived. Ruthenberg was a factionalist like the rest, but he was not so insane about it as Lovestone was. He was far more constructive and responsible, more concerned for the general welfare of the party and for his own position as a leader of a party rather than of a fragmented assembly of factions. Moreover, he was far more popular and influential, more respected in the party ranks, and strong enough to veto Lovestone’s factional excesses if he wanted to.
It is quite possible that an uneasy peace, gradually leading to the dissolution of factions, might have been worked out with him. His sudden death in March 1927 put a stop to all such possibilities. The Ruthenberg faction then became the Lovestone faction, and the internal party situation changed for the worse accordingly.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
*From The Partisan Defense Committee- The 25th Holiday Appeal In Support Of Class-War Prisoners
Markin comment:
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
December 2, 2010
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class struggle defense in the late 1960s (although I may have not used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 969
19 November 2010
Free the Class-War Prisoners!
25th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
“The mills of capitalist justice grind out victims for the penitentiary....
“In one sense of the word the whole of capitalist society is a prison. For the great mass of people who do the hard, useful work there is no such word as freedom. They come and go at the order of a few. Their lives are regulated according to the needs and wishes of a few. A censorship is put upon their words and deeds. The fruits of their labor are taken from them. And if, by chance, they have the instinct and spirit to rebel, if they take their place in the vanguard of the fight for justice, the prisons are waiting.”
—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison” (Labor Defender, September 1926)
Following in the tradition of Cannon’s International Labor Defense (ILD), the Partisan Defense Committee honors the class-war prisoners—those brave men and women railroaded to prison for standing up to racist capitalist oppression—irrespective of their particular political views or affiliation. Twenty-five years ago, the PDC revived the ILD program of providing monthly stipends to class-war prisoners and additional funds for their birthdays as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. We raise money for this unique and necessary program during the holiday season. Fund-raising efforts will include benefits in Chicago on December 18, New York City on January 21 and Toronto on January 28.
The $25 monthly stipends help ease a little bit the horrors of “life” in capitalist dungeons. More importantly, they are a necessary expression of solidarity with these prisoners—a message that they are not forgotten. In letters to the PDC before last year’s Holiday Appeal, the prisoners gave a glimpse of what the program means to them:
Hugo Pinell: “Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well. I am with you, in life and struggle.”
Janine Africa: “I want to thank everybody for yalls support all of these years. I’m not just talking about the holiday donations, I’m talking about the work yall do for the release of political prisoners from prison.”
Jaan Laaman: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”
Tom Manning, Laaman’s Ohio 7 comrade: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.”
The struggle to free all class-war prisoners is critical to educating a new generation of fighters for the oppressed. This is given added meaning as we build for this Holiday Appeal. Persecution of those imprisoned for their political views and actions has not only continued unabated, but Obama and his top cop, Attorney General Eric Holder, are making reservations for many more to join them. The Obama administration has launched an ominous escalation of state repression, accelerating the repressive measures adopted during the Clinton/Bush years that will be wielded against those who propelled him to office—labor, blacks, immigrants and leftist youth.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose case will again be a focus of the Holiday Appeal, is threatened with the reinstitution of the death sentence (see article, page 12). Seventy-one-year-old leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart has been resentenced to ten years in prison for the “crime” of representing her client. The PDC has added Stewart to the stipend recipients. In Chicago and Minneapolis, the FBI recently raided the homes of leftists, antiwar activists and unionists under the rubric of the “war on terrorism.” Among those targeted were members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and others, who have run afoul of Washington for their open support to leftist rebels in Colombia opposed to the U.S. puppet regime, the secular-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah.
In February, Obama signed into law yet another extension of the USA Patriot Act with its provisions of indefinite detention, expansion of secret FBI searches of homes and offices and elimination of formal restrictions on domestic spying, wiretapping and Internet surveillance. The message to all who would fight against the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis, war and racist repression: This is what’s in store for you if you step out of line.
The PDC initiated the stipend program at the height of the reactionary Reagan years, defining features of which included the destruction of the PATCO air traffic controllers union, the bombing of the Philadelphia MOVE commune and efforts to classify leftists and union militants as terrorists and criminals. It was an important component of fighting efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent—and it remains so today, as the “war on terror” has given the government repressive powers that Reagan could only dream of.
We have provided stipends to over 30 prisoners, including eight union militants, on three continents. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been there from nearly the beginning of our stipends program. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its determination to make sure they die behind bars from old age or medical neglect—or in the case of Mumia, by legal lynching. In fighting for their freedom, we are dedicated to searing the injustice of these cases into the consciousness of the working masses—today and for generations to come. Regular features of the Holiday Appeal are presentations by PDC representatives to union locals in cities across the country. As Cannon noted, “The victory of the class-war prisoners is possible only when they are inseparably united with the living labor movement.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
The 17 class-war prisoners described below receive monthly stipends from the PDC.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step toward the legal lynching of this innocent man. The Court vacated a March 2008 decision of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. The high court in essence gave marching orders to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the death penalty. A hearing was held in Philadelphia on November 9.
This December marks the 29th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have been submitted to the courts. But to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.
While others plead with President Obama and his attorney general to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s “civil rights,” the PDC says that Mumia’s fate cannot be left in the hands of the government of the capitalists. The racist rulers hate Mumia because they see in him the spectre of black revolt. The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia’s freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man for more than half his life.
Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial, for the 1975 deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation, shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 66-year-old Peltier is still locked away. Last year, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down Peltier’s parole request and shockingly declared they would not reconsider his case for another 15 years.
Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 33rd year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. This year, again, after more than three decades of unjust incarceration, nearly all of these innocent prisoners had parole hearings, but none were released.
Lynne Stewart is a radical lawyer incarcerated for zealously defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. On July 15 she was resentenced to ten years—more than quadrupling her original sentence—in a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no let-up in the massive attack on democratic rights under the “war on terror.” Stewart, now 71 years old and suffering from breast cancer, is known for her defense of Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state.
Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.
The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. They should not have served a day in prison.
Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now served more than 40 years in jail. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audiotape long-suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.
Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole last year. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.
Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 151/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania law, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal law. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition, and he has faced myriad bureaucratic obstacles and racist targeting throughout his incarceration.
Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.
*On The Question Of The Use Of Civil Disobedience In Political Struggle- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House, December 16, 2010, protesting his Afghan and Iraq war policies.
Markin comment:
Recently, as I have noted in other entries over the past few days, I attended (along with comrades from our local anti-imperialist committee) the veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House, December 16, 2010, protesting his Afghan and Iraq war policies. At that action, once we got to the fence area, a restricted area, in front of the White House (called the postcard photo area for the direct frontal view of the place) the question was put point blank- seek arrest or not? The pros and cons of that question is the subject of this short note.
Civil disobedience has a long and proud history in leftist politics (although others, including right-wingers, have used the tactic) in America, and elsewhere. And its use as a tactic is where I want position the argument. Professional civil disobedience activists and others who use this not as a tactic but as their exclusive action process are now excused. Respected, but excused. Almost every tactic can be over-used and that is where I would place such reliance.
Normally I, frankly, don’t like the idea of “courting” arrest in order to make a political point. I have faced arrest, and been arrested, for taking part in actions like strikes, sit-ins, and even mass demonstrations where the police made an issue of where I, and my kindred, were standing, sitting, walking, etc. Under those conditions one takes the arrest as part of doing left-wing political business. But to start an action in order to “court” arrest is generally not my style, and I would not advocate it.
That brings us to the December 16th action mentioned above. The Veterans For Peace and their supporters called this action in order to “court” arrest and make a point about Obama’s imperial wars. And to start a civil resistance movement by example. They also called the action for that restricted area in front of the White House. Now call me Jesuitical, a hair-splitter, a gray area aficionado, or whatever but courting arrest or not, an action in front of the White House is just part of doing left-wing political business in this country, at least for now. Whether someone wants to hold onto the fence, their damn holy of holies White House fence even, while protesting Obama’s imperial wars should be seen in that light. So I will leave it to you to guess whether we (my group and I) "courted" arrest, or not, in this action. But, mainly think about when, and when not to, take the kind of action that places you in that situation. The resistance, in any case, has begun.
Markin comment:
Recently, as I have noted in other entries over the past few days, I attended (along with comrades from our local anti-imperialist committee) the veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House, December 16, 2010, protesting his Afghan and Iraq war policies. At that action, once we got to the fence area, a restricted area, in front of the White House (called the postcard photo area for the direct frontal view of the place) the question was put point blank- seek arrest or not? The pros and cons of that question is the subject of this short note.
Civil disobedience has a long and proud history in leftist politics (although others, including right-wingers, have used the tactic) in America, and elsewhere. And its use as a tactic is where I want position the argument. Professional civil disobedience activists and others who use this not as a tactic but as their exclusive action process are now excused. Respected, but excused. Almost every tactic can be over-used and that is where I would place such reliance.
Normally I, frankly, don’t like the idea of “courting” arrest in order to make a political point. I have faced arrest, and been arrested, for taking part in actions like strikes, sit-ins, and even mass demonstrations where the police made an issue of where I, and my kindred, were standing, sitting, walking, etc. Under those conditions one takes the arrest as part of doing left-wing political business. But to start an action in order to “court” arrest is generally not my style, and I would not advocate it.
That brings us to the December 16th action mentioned above. The Veterans For Peace and their supporters called this action in order to “court” arrest and make a point about Obama’s imperial wars. And to start a civil resistance movement by example. They also called the action for that restricted area in front of the White House. Now call me Jesuitical, a hair-splitter, a gray area aficionado, or whatever but courting arrest or not, an action in front of the White House is just part of doing left-wing political business in this country, at least for now. Whether someone wants to hold onto the fence, their damn holy of holies White House fence even, while protesting Obama’s imperial wars should be seen in that light. So I will leave it to you to guess whether we (my group and I) "courted" arrest, or not, in this action. But, mainly think about when, and when not to, take the kind of action that places you in that situation. The resistance, in any case, has begun.
*Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- A Fragment Of Working Class Culture-When Frankie Roamed The Teenage Dance Clubs
Markin comment:
In a recent series of entries that I did in the form of scenes, scenes from the hitchhike road in search of the great American West night in the late 1960s, a time later than the time of Frankie’s early 1960s old working class neighborhood kingly time, I noted that I had about a thousand truck stop diner stories left over from those hitchhike road days. On reflection though, I realized that I really had about three diner stories with many variations. Not so with Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories. I have got a thousand of them, or so it seems, all different. Hey, you already, if you have been attentive to this space, know a few Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories (okay, I will stop, or try to stop, using that full designation and just call him plain, old, ordinary, vanilla Frankie just like everybody else alright).
Ya, you already know the Frankie (see I told you I could do it) story about how he lazily spent a hot late August 1960 summer before entering high school day working his way up the streets of the old neighborhood to get some potato salad (and other stuff too) for his family’s Labor Day picnic. And he got a cameo appearance in the tear jerk heart-rendering saga of my first day of high school in that same year where I, vicariously, attempted to overthrow his lordship with the nubiles (girls, for those not from the old neighborhood, although there were plenty of other terms of art to designate the fair sex then, most of them getting their start in local teenage social usage from Frankie’s mouth). That effort, that attempt at copping his “style” like many things associated with one-of-a-kind Frankie proved unsuccessful as it turned out.
But as this story will demonstrate old Frankie, Frankie from (oops, I forgot I ‘m not doing that anymore) was not only the king of the old neighborhood but roamed, or tried to roam far afield, especially if the word "girls" was involved. So this will be another Frankie and the girls story, at least part way. The milieu though will be somewhat different for those who only know Frankie in his usual haunts; the pizza parlor, the drugstore, or hanging around the corner of one of several mom and pop variety stores. This time, in a way, Frankie goes “uptown.”
One of the other places where Frankie tried to extend his kingdom was the local teen night club (although we did not call it that then but that was the idea). You know a place where kids, late teenage kids, could dance to live music from some cover band and drink…sodas. Ya, the idea was to keep kids off the streets, out of the cars, and under a watchful eye on Friday and Saturday night so they didn’t drink booze and get all crazy and messed up. Of course, anyone with half a wit, if they wanted to get booze, had no real problem as long as there was some desperate wino to make your purchase for you. But, at least, the idea was no booze on the premises and that was pretty much the case.
Now this club, this teen dance club, that Frankie has his eye on, was the primo such place around. Sure, there were other smaller venues, but that was kids stuff, young teen stuff, no account, no matter stuff. If you had dreams of kingship then the Sea ‘n’ Surf Club was the place to place your throne. But, see, this club was several miles away from the old neighborhood, and that meant several miles of other guys who were kings of their neighborhoods, but also several miles of all kinds of different girls that Frankie (and I, as well) had no clue about. And the beauty of this, the real beauty for Frankie was that it was doable. Why? Old ball and chain girlfriend forever, girlfriend, main squeeze, Joanne was not allowed by her parents to go to teen dance clubs, period. And period meant period, to old Frankie’s smiles.
This club had the added advantage, as its name gives away, of being by the sea, by the ocean so that if the dancing got too hot, or it was too crowded, or if you got lucky then there you were handy to a ready-made romantic venue. Now American Great Plains prairie guys and dolls may not appreciate this convenience (although I am sure you had your own local lovers’ lane "hot spots") but to have the sea as a companion in the great boy meets girl struggle was pure magic. See, and everybody knew this or found out about it fast enough, if a girl wanted to catch some "fresh air" and agreed to go with you then you were “in like flint” for the night. That also meant though that, when intermission ended, or when the steamed-up couple came up for air that nobody else was suppose to cut in on their scene. This may all sound complicated but, come on now, you were all teens once, and you figured it out easily enough, right? This in any case is what Frankie wanted to be king of. The scene that is.
This club, by the way, this hallowed memory club, could not stand the light of day, although at night it was like the enchanted castle. By day it looked just like another faux Coney Island low-rent carnival, bad trip place ready for the demolition ball ballroom. But the night, oh, the night was all we cared about. And for weeks before Frankie was ready to make his big move the conquest of this place thing, the imagining of it, took on something like the quest for a holy grail.
Finally, Friday finally, summertime Friday night finally, came (he had a date with his ever lovin’ big flame Joanne for Saturday that week) and he was ready to make his move. Let me outline the plan as he told it to me. The idea, if Tommy 40 Winks (I did not make that name up; I don’t have that kind of imagination. That was his nickname, hell, mine, was, for a while, Boyo, go figure), showed up was to make the scene with whatever girl he was dancing with, at least that was the idea. 40 Winks, for lack of a better term was the “king” of the club, although by default because no one had messed with him, or his crowd before. And also he was the “boss” dancer of the universe and the girls were all kind of swoony, or at least, semi-swoony over his moves, especially when he got his Elvis thing going. Ya, now that I think about it he did seem to make the girls sweat. Sure, 40 Winks was going to be there. See Frankie was going to upset that fresh air “rule” and since nobody, not even me, ever accused Frankie of not being in love with himself, his “projects”, or his “style” he figured it was a cinch. Now, forty or fifty years later I can see where there was a certain flaw in the plan.
Why? Well, let me cut to the chase here, a little anyway. When we showed up at the club everything was fine. Everybody kind of conceded that this was “neutral” ground, at least inside, and the management of the place had employed more college football player-types than one could shake a stick at to enforce the peace. So any “turf” wars will have to be fought out on the dance floor, or elsewhere. Tonight the music, live music from a local cover band that is trying to move up in the pecking order is “hot”. They get the joint, 40 Winks, and old Frankie fired up right away with a big sound version of Good Rockin’ Tonight. Now 40 Winks eyes this one sneeze (girl, blame Frankie) from our school, although none of us, including Frankie, had even come with fifty paces of her, here or in school. Her name was Anna, but let’s just call her a Grace Kelley-wannabe, or could-be or something, and be done with it. In any case when she had finished dancing that Good Rockin’ Tonight with some goof (meaning non-Frankie friend or associate) the temperature in the place went up a collective bunch of degrees. Even I was thinking of getting closer than 50 paces from her. Okay this is going to be the prize, boys
40 Winks and Frankie both approach Ms. Wonderful for the next dance (and, hopefully, for the full dance card), a slow one it seems from the way the band is tuning up. Ya, it is, The Platters, Stand By Me. 40 Winks gets the nod. Oh, boy. First round 40 Winks. They start dancing and other couples are giving them some room because they are putting on something of a show now. I don’t tell Frankie this but he, his plans, and his crown are doomed. His look kind of says the same thing. But here is where you can never tell about Frankie. After that dance he goes back for another ask. Again, no go. And no go all the way to intermission.
Christ, Francis Xavier Riley, purebred Irish man is red, red as a Dublin rose. He is done for, especially as this national treasure of a girl takes the air, the fresh air with 40 Winks. And makes a big deal out of it in front of half the couples attending, and more importantly, in front of Frankie. Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood but not of the wide teen kingdom. For one of the few times in our middle school and high school careers together I saw Frankie throw in the towel. It wasn’t pretty. He didn’t show up at that club for a long time afterward, and I don’t blame him.
But here is where life, teenage life is funny sometimes. My brother, my home’s, my be-bop buddy Frankie was set up, and set up bad. How? Well, Anna, old sweet Grace Kelley wannabe Anna (and now that I think about could be), actually was smitten, or whatever you want to call it, by Frankie from seeing him around school. Yes, Frankie. But, and this is the way Frankie told me the story some time later after the event, Anna and firebrand Joanne, sweet Frankie girlfriend Joanne, had classes together and, moreover, were related to each other distantly like a lot of kids were related to each other in the old neighborhood. Anna knew that Frankie was Joanne’s honey so they talked it out and Anna passed on old Frankie. But, see, Joanne got wind of Frankie’s no Joanne teen dance club scheme and she and Anna patched this deal up to keep Frankie out of harm’s way. Women!
In a recent series of entries that I did in the form of scenes, scenes from the hitchhike road in search of the great American West night in the late 1960s, a time later than the time of Frankie’s early 1960s old working class neighborhood kingly time, I noted that I had about a thousand truck stop diner stories left over from those hitchhike road days. On reflection though, I realized that I really had about three diner stories with many variations. Not so with Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories. I have got a thousand of them, or so it seems, all different. Hey, you already, if you have been attentive to this space, know a few Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories (okay, I will stop, or try to stop, using that full designation and just call him plain, old, ordinary, vanilla Frankie just like everybody else alright).
Ya, you already know the Frankie (see I told you I could do it) story about how he lazily spent a hot late August 1960 summer before entering high school day working his way up the streets of the old neighborhood to get some potato salad (and other stuff too) for his family’s Labor Day picnic. And he got a cameo appearance in the tear jerk heart-rendering saga of my first day of high school in that same year where I, vicariously, attempted to overthrow his lordship with the nubiles (girls, for those not from the old neighborhood, although there were plenty of other terms of art to designate the fair sex then, most of them getting their start in local teenage social usage from Frankie’s mouth). That effort, that attempt at copping his “style” like many things associated with one-of-a-kind Frankie proved unsuccessful as it turned out.
But as this story will demonstrate old Frankie, Frankie from (oops, I forgot I ‘m not doing that anymore) was not only the king of the old neighborhood but roamed, or tried to roam far afield, especially if the word "girls" was involved. So this will be another Frankie and the girls story, at least part way. The milieu though will be somewhat different for those who only know Frankie in his usual haunts; the pizza parlor, the drugstore, or hanging around the corner of one of several mom and pop variety stores. This time, in a way, Frankie goes “uptown.”
One of the other places where Frankie tried to extend his kingdom was the local teen night club (although we did not call it that then but that was the idea). You know a place where kids, late teenage kids, could dance to live music from some cover band and drink…sodas. Ya, the idea was to keep kids off the streets, out of the cars, and under a watchful eye on Friday and Saturday night so they didn’t drink booze and get all crazy and messed up. Of course, anyone with half a wit, if they wanted to get booze, had no real problem as long as there was some desperate wino to make your purchase for you. But, at least, the idea was no booze on the premises and that was pretty much the case.
Now this club, this teen dance club, that Frankie has his eye on, was the primo such place around. Sure, there were other smaller venues, but that was kids stuff, young teen stuff, no account, no matter stuff. If you had dreams of kingship then the Sea ‘n’ Surf Club was the place to place your throne. But, see, this club was several miles away from the old neighborhood, and that meant several miles of other guys who were kings of their neighborhoods, but also several miles of all kinds of different girls that Frankie (and I, as well) had no clue about. And the beauty of this, the real beauty for Frankie was that it was doable. Why? Old ball and chain girlfriend forever, girlfriend, main squeeze, Joanne was not allowed by her parents to go to teen dance clubs, period. And period meant period, to old Frankie’s smiles.
This club had the added advantage, as its name gives away, of being by the sea, by the ocean so that if the dancing got too hot, or it was too crowded, or if you got lucky then there you were handy to a ready-made romantic venue. Now American Great Plains prairie guys and dolls may not appreciate this convenience (although I am sure you had your own local lovers’ lane "hot spots") but to have the sea as a companion in the great boy meets girl struggle was pure magic. See, and everybody knew this or found out about it fast enough, if a girl wanted to catch some "fresh air" and agreed to go with you then you were “in like flint” for the night. That also meant though that, when intermission ended, or when the steamed-up couple came up for air that nobody else was suppose to cut in on their scene. This may all sound complicated but, come on now, you were all teens once, and you figured it out easily enough, right? This in any case is what Frankie wanted to be king of. The scene that is.
This club, by the way, this hallowed memory club, could not stand the light of day, although at night it was like the enchanted castle. By day it looked just like another faux Coney Island low-rent carnival, bad trip place ready for the demolition ball ballroom. But the night, oh, the night was all we cared about. And for weeks before Frankie was ready to make his big move the conquest of this place thing, the imagining of it, took on something like the quest for a holy grail.
Finally, Friday finally, summertime Friday night finally, came (he had a date with his ever lovin’ big flame Joanne for Saturday that week) and he was ready to make his move. Let me outline the plan as he told it to me. The idea, if Tommy 40 Winks (I did not make that name up; I don’t have that kind of imagination. That was his nickname, hell, mine, was, for a while, Boyo, go figure), showed up was to make the scene with whatever girl he was dancing with, at least that was the idea. 40 Winks, for lack of a better term was the “king” of the club, although by default because no one had messed with him, or his crowd before. And also he was the “boss” dancer of the universe and the girls were all kind of swoony, or at least, semi-swoony over his moves, especially when he got his Elvis thing going. Ya, now that I think about it he did seem to make the girls sweat. Sure, 40 Winks was going to be there. See Frankie was going to upset that fresh air “rule” and since nobody, not even me, ever accused Frankie of not being in love with himself, his “projects”, or his “style” he figured it was a cinch. Now, forty or fifty years later I can see where there was a certain flaw in the plan.
Why? Well, let me cut to the chase here, a little anyway. When we showed up at the club everything was fine. Everybody kind of conceded that this was “neutral” ground, at least inside, and the management of the place had employed more college football player-types than one could shake a stick at to enforce the peace. So any “turf” wars will have to be fought out on the dance floor, or elsewhere. Tonight the music, live music from a local cover band that is trying to move up in the pecking order is “hot”. They get the joint, 40 Winks, and old Frankie fired up right away with a big sound version of Good Rockin’ Tonight. Now 40 Winks eyes this one sneeze (girl, blame Frankie) from our school, although none of us, including Frankie, had even come with fifty paces of her, here or in school. Her name was Anna, but let’s just call her a Grace Kelley-wannabe, or could-be or something, and be done with it. In any case when she had finished dancing that Good Rockin’ Tonight with some goof (meaning non-Frankie friend or associate) the temperature in the place went up a collective bunch of degrees. Even I was thinking of getting closer than 50 paces from her. Okay this is going to be the prize, boys
40 Winks and Frankie both approach Ms. Wonderful for the next dance (and, hopefully, for the full dance card), a slow one it seems from the way the band is tuning up. Ya, it is, The Platters, Stand By Me. 40 Winks gets the nod. Oh, boy. First round 40 Winks. They start dancing and other couples are giving them some room because they are putting on something of a show now. I don’t tell Frankie this but he, his plans, and his crown are doomed. His look kind of says the same thing. But here is where you can never tell about Frankie. After that dance he goes back for another ask. Again, no go. And no go all the way to intermission.
Christ, Francis Xavier Riley, purebred Irish man is red, red as a Dublin rose. He is done for, especially as this national treasure of a girl takes the air, the fresh air with 40 Winks. And makes a big deal out of it in front of half the couples attending, and more importantly, in front of Frankie. Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood but not of the wide teen kingdom. For one of the few times in our middle school and high school careers together I saw Frankie throw in the towel. It wasn’t pretty. He didn’t show up at that club for a long time afterward, and I don’t blame him.
But here is where life, teenage life is funny sometimes. My brother, my home’s, my be-bop buddy Frankie was set up, and set up bad. How? Well, Anna, old sweet Grace Kelley wannabe Anna (and now that I think about could be), actually was smitten, or whatever you want to call it, by Frankie from seeing him around school. Yes, Frankie. But, and this is the way Frankie told me the story some time later after the event, Anna and firebrand Joanne, sweet Frankie girlfriend Joanne, had classes together and, moreover, were related to each other distantly like a lot of kids were related to each other in the old neighborhood. Anna knew that Frankie was Joanne’s honey so they talked it out and Anna passed on old Frankie. But, see, Joanne got wind of Frankie’s no Joanne teen dance club scheme and she and Anna patched this deal up to keep Frankie out of harm’s way. Women!
* “Workers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”- The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-"How the Fourth International Was Conceived" (1944)
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
How the Fourth International Was Conceived
by Jean van Heijenoort
This article was first published in the August 1944 issue of Fourth International.
[Jean van Heijenoort (1912-1986) was Trotsky's secretary in 1932 in Prinkipo, and followed him to France, Norway and Mexico. As a leader of the Fourth International he headed a provisional international centre in the United States during World War Two and left politics shortly thereafter.]
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Our movement has the right to consider itself the representative and the historical standard bearer of revolutionary socialism. It is at the end of a chain whose links were the Communist League of Marx and Engels, the International Working Men's Association (First International), the Second International, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, and the Communist International. But in order to establish the specific beginnings of our movement it is necessary to begin with the year 1923 in the USSR.
The Left Opposition
The October revolution established the first Workers' State, but remained isolated. "Without revolution in Europe," said Lenin repeatedly "we shall perish." History verified the truth of his words, but in its own manner. Degeneration appeared in the apparatus itself of the new regime--the party that led the revolution to victory.
The resistance to corruption of the party came from Trotsky. The struggle began in the fall of 1923. On October 8th, he sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission denouncing the stifling of the right of criticism on the part of party members. This is the first document of our movement. It can be compared to what had been for Bolshevism the famous vote on the statutes of the party in 1902.
Beginning with the question of the internal regime of the party, the struggle grew progressively to include all problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. Outside of the USSR, opposition groups appeared in most of the sections of the Communist International. The connections of these groups among themselves, and with the Russian Opposition, remained precarious. Many of the groups arose in opposition to one of the aspects of Stalinist policy. Their political solidarity was far from complete. One group that proved of great importance for the future of our movement, the Left Opposition in the American communist party, appeared belatedly on the scene in 1928.
The organizational cohesion of the International Left Opposition was not seriously undertaken until the time of Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR and his arrival in Turkey, in February 1929. The first international conference of the Left Opposition took place in Paris in 1930.
The policy of the Opposition in relation to the Communist International, both in its entirety as well as its various sections, had remained the same since 1923. In one word it was--reform. Although expelled by the faction in power, the Trotskyist groups considered themselves part of the International, its left faction, exactly as in each country each group considered itself a faction of the national Communist Party. Their objective was to convince the party membership of the correctness of their views, to win over the majority, and to set the organization on the correct course. Toward the Bolshevik Party in the USSR the policy was essentially the same as toward any other section of the International. The name of the movement, Opposition, expressed and symbolized this policy.
A political document of a programmatic character, entitled The International Left Opposition--Its Tasks and Methods, was written by Trotsky, in December 1932, immediately after his return to Prinkipo from Copenhagen, where he had the opportunity of meeting about thirty of the most important leaders of the International Opposition. One chapter of this document was entitled "Faction--Not a Party." The perspective outlined there was the same as in the preceding years, namely, the reform of the Communist International and of each of its sections. Nevertheless, a warning was sounded:
"Such an historical catastrophe as the fall of the Soviet State would surely drag along the Third International. Similarly, a victory of fascism in Germany and the crushing of the German proletariat would hardly allow the Comintern to survive the consequences of its ruinous policy."
One of these two warnings was soon to become a terrible reality. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg, the constitutional head of the Weimar Republic, elected with the votes of the Social Democracy, called on Hitler to form a new cabinet.
For three years the Left Opposition had sounded the alarm at the rise of German fascism. In a series of articles and pamphlets, which in their clarity and revolutionary passion rank among the best products of his pen, Trotsky revealed the nature of fascism and showed the consequences of a fascist victory to the German workers, to the international labor movement, to the USSR, to Europe, and to the whole world. He also pointed to the means of combatting this danger: the united front of the workers' parties, Communist and Social Democratic, for the active defence of workers' organizations against the Nazi vermin, a defensive struggle which, when successful, would become an offensive.
The Collapse of the German Communist Party
The leaders of the two official workers' parties vied with each other in their impotence in the face of the fascist menace. The Social Democratic leadership desperately grasped at a democracy which, in the midst of economic chaos and the sharpened social and political conflicts, was disowning itself. The Stalinists acted in line with the "genial" theory of their leader, that it was necessary to crush the Social Democrats before fighting fascism. They had made common cause with the Nazis in the famous plebiscite in Prussia in August 1931. When the fascist menace became imminent, they clamored with braggadocio: "After them will be our turn!"
When Hitler formed his government on January 30, 1933, not all was lost. The workers' organizations were still intact. In the following weeks the Nazis acted very cautiously. In February, Trotsky stated in a conversation: "The situation in Germany is similar to that of a man at the bottom of an abyss facing a stone wall. To get out it is necessary to clutch at the rocks with bare and bloody hands. It is necessary to have courage and will, but it is possible. Not all is lost."
The official leadership of the workers' parties allowed the last chance to slip by. In the face of their passivity, Hitler became more brazen. He had never hoped to win such an easy victory. At the beginning of March, the crude provocation of the Reichstag fire allowed him to definitely entrench his regime. The workers' organizations were swept away.
Trotsky's reaction was not long in coming. He wrote an article entitled The Tragedy of the German Proletariat. It was dated March 14, 1933 and had, as a sub-title, "The German Workers Will Rise, Stalinism--Never!" The gist of the article was that, in Germany, the Communist Party failed in its historic mission, that it was doomed as a revolutionary organization. Thus, there was no choice but to give up the policy of its reform and to proceed to build a new German Communist Party. When Trotsky wrote that Stalinism would not rise again, he meant Stalinism in Germany. As to the Communist Parties in other lands, especially the Russian Bolshevik Party, and the Communist International viewed in its entirety, the line remained as before, that of reform.
In the weeks that followed other articles elaborated this position and answered the objections raised against it. In the ranks of the Left Opposition, these objections were minimal. They came mostly from certain comrades in the German section, the one most directly concerned. These objections remained secondary or sentimental in character: maybe it would be better to wait before speaking about a new party while the official one is under the blows of bloody repressions, etc. But the lesson of events was so clear that the need of a change in the old policy was not questioned seriously.
Yet, when one's memory turns to that month of March 1933, it cannot be denied that the new policy was a surprise to the members of the Left Opposition. The daily activity of each of the sections was centred exclusively around the Communist Party; and to develop a new line, even if it were for only one of our sections, was to break with a tradition of ten years standing. The great authority of Trotsky made it possible to bring about the change in line rapidly and with cohesion. Without him, the lessons of the events in Germany would have surely been learned in our ranks, but after how many months of discussion?
The problem of the Third International in its totality could not fail to be posed. After the collapse of the German Communist Party, the executive committee of the International passed in April a resolution which declared that the policy followed by the German Communist Party "up to and at the time of Hitler's coup d'etat was fully correct."
This is not astonishing: the executive committee under the orders of Stalin merely covered Stalin, who imposed his fatal political line on the German Communist Party. But the decisive fact was that all the sections of the International accepted the Moscow resolution and thus became equally responsible for the historical catastrophe in Germany. The members who denounced the line that had been followed, or merely questioned it, were expelled. The policy of reform was losing all reality.
On July 15, 1933, Trotsky, under the pen-name of G. Gurov, addressed to the sections of the Opposition an article entitled, It is necessary to build new Communist parties and a new International. Here the perspective of reform was definitely abandoned. After the lessons of the events, the turn was decisive: "Talk of 'reform' and the demand of readmission of the oppositionists into the official parties must be definitely given up, as utopian and reactionary," he wrote. And he took this opportunity to give general and valuable advice: "The most dangerous thing in politics is to become a prisoner of your own formula, which was appropriate yesterday, but is deprived of any content today."
On July 20th a second article entitled, "It is no longer possible to stay in the `International' with Stalin, Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Co.", answered possible arguments against the new position.
The change in policy coincided with the change in Trotsky's residence. On July 17th, he left Istanbul and on the 24th he landed in Marseilles. Next day he settled himself near Saint-Palais, on the Atlantic seaboard. It was a big change in his personal life. While on the island of Prinkipo, the arrival of a visitor was a little event every four or six months; in France, Trotsky was able in the following weeks to meet with practically all leading members of the European opposition groups, and with quite a few from overseas.
When Trotsky landed in Marseilles, the translation of his first article on the need of a new International had hardly reached the leadership of the various sections. The leading Trotskyists of France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, etc., soon took the road to Saint-Palais, and there in Trotsky's study, or under the trees of his garden, participated in lengthy discussions. Opposition to the new orientation was practically non-existent. The turn to a new party in Germany three months before, had broken with a long tradition and opened new perspectives. The discussions did not deal so much with the need of a new International, but rather with the ways and means of bringing it about: how to build it, how to build new parties?
The New International
A few voices raised the question: haven't we waited too long? Shouldn't we have recognized the need of a new International much sooner? To this Trotsky answered: "This is a question we may well leave to the historians." He was undoubtedly profoundly convinced that the change in the policy would have been incorrect several years sooner, but he refused to discuss this question because it was no longer of practical and immediate interest.
One question that took up a large share of the discussion was that of the USSR. It is worthwhile examining how it was posed then. The document of December 1932 that we have already mentioned, and which still followed the line of reform, had stated:
"Sharper and brighter is the question [of reform] in the USSR. The policy of the second party there would imply the policy of armed insurrection and a new revolution. The policy of the faction implies the line of inner reform of the party and the workers' state."
In the article of April 1933 which pointed out the need of a new party in Germany, but at the same time retained the policy of reform in the Communist International, Trotsky wrote:
"If the Stalinist bureaucracy will bring the USSR to collapse, then.... it will be necessary to build a Fourth International."
The problem was: how to discard the policy of reform of the Bolshevik Party and at the same time retain the perspective of reforming the workers' state? How to proclaim the Fourth International before the Stalinist bureaucracy has led the USSR to its collapse?
The problem of the USSR was the greatest obstacle in Trotsky's mind before reaching the conclusion that there remained no other alternative than to form a Fourth International. Shortly before his article of July 15, he said in a conversation at Prinkipo: "Since April, we have been for reform in all countries except Germany, where we are for a new party. Now we can take a symmetrical position, i.e., in favor of a new party in every country except the USSR, where we will be for reform of the Bolshevik Party." (This position, as far as I know, was never put into writing.) But it was clear to his listeners that his ideas on this matter were only in the process of formation and that they had not yet reached their conclusion.
The solution of this problem is, as is well known now, the distinction between a social revolution and a political revolution. This solution was already outlined in the first documents, in July, which speak about the need of a new International.
On the other hand, in the summer of 1933, the discussions around the nature of the USSR were numerous: not only was Stalinism bankrupt in Germany, but the first economic experiences of Hitler, Roosevelt, as well as the Italian corporate state, gave rise on all sides to theories of "State capitalism."
Trotsky then clarified his position toward the USSR in a long article entitled, The Class Nature of the Soviet State, dated October 1, 1933. This article definitely eliminates the perspective of a peaceful removal of the bureaucracy, and clarifies the formulas in the documents on the new International. In the main this is the position we have maintained to the present. (On the question of an historical analogy with Thermidor, a correction was made in February 1935.)
Another question required a good deal of attention in the discussions at Saint-Palais: that of our relation toward other organizations. The Left Opposition had its attention focused exclusively on the various Communist parties. Our organization was made up, with a few rare exceptions, only of expelled members of Communist parties or Young Communist leagues. All our activity was subordinated to the perspective of reform. As early as June 15, 1933, that is, before the turn toward a New International, Trotsky addressed to the sections of the Left Opposition an article, Left Socialist Organizations and Our Tasks, in which he pointed out a new field of activity: The victory of German fascism had brought a crisis to the Social Democracy. The Comintern was losing its power of attraction. We could expect that the centrist organizations of the left would turn towards us. It was therefore necessary to turn our attention and our efforts in this direction.
In fact, the whole political atmosphere, our orientation towards a new International, the arrival of Trotsky in France, actually attracted towards us the eyes of organizations which, in different periods and under different circumstances, had broken with the Second and Third Internationals. Numerous were the visits in Saint-Palais of leaders of these organizations (German S.A.P., English I.L.P., Dutch O.S.P. and R.S.P., etc.). The Dutch party of Sneevliet (R.S.P.) declared itself ready to join our ranks immediately.
The excitement provoked by the shameful bankruptcy of the two Internationals in Germany was so great that not less than fourteen organizations, belonging to neither of the two Internationals, decided to unite. Nevertheless, they were far from having a common program. To complain about the old official organizations in articles and speeches is one thing. To undertake to build a new International is another. Our organization decided to participate in the conference of the fourteen groups held in Paris at the end of August 1933. Our policy was clear: to draw our conclusions from events to the end, to propose our program of creating a new International, to denounce those who wanted to remain equivocal and ambiguous. Together with a few organizations which recognized the immediate necessity of a new International (S.A.P., R.S.P., O.S.P.), our organization signed a programmatic document known under the name of Declaration of the Four. Some months later the S.A.P. was to deny its signature.
The conference in Paris proved to be the maximum effort of which the centrist groups were capable. It remained without results. All the perspectives gradually revealed themselves to be empty, unrealistic, with the exception of one: to create a new International. The formal founding of the Fourth International took place five years later, in 1938.
Eleven years have passed since that summer of 1933 when the Fourth International was conceived. Its progress has been slow, always too slow for our hopes. It was born amidst the defeats provoked by the old official organizations of the working class. While a defeat will stir the best elements of the vanguard to examine its causes and to build a better organization, its effect on the class as a whole is one of disorientation, discouragement and passivity. It takes years and years to eradicate its marks; a new generation which has not known cynicism must raise its head.
We have found in our path the putrid corpse of the Comintern, an organization which has utilized the immense prestige of the victorious Russian Revolution precisely to disorientate, disorganize and crush, where necessary, the revolutionary emancipation of the working class.
Following defeats in a series of countries, a catastrophe has descended upon the peoples--a new world war. For five years now, hundreds of millions of men have been confronted with the terrors of war, but today the sound of the cannon can no longer drown out the melody of revolt. Throughout all Europe fists are clenching. Tomorrow tens and hundreds of millions will rise to demand an accounting from the old order which generated oppression, misery and wars. Gaining consciousness of their strength, they will cast aside their false leaders, the perfidious agents of the enemy. They will need a stainless banner. There is only one: ours, the banner of the Fourth International, of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
********
How the Fourth International Was Conceived
by Jean van Heijenoort
This article was first published in the August 1944 issue of Fourth International.
[Jean van Heijenoort (1912-1986) was Trotsky's secretary in 1932 in Prinkipo, and followed him to France, Norway and Mexico. As a leader of the Fourth International he headed a provisional international centre in the United States during World War Two and left politics shortly thereafter.]
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Our movement has the right to consider itself the representative and the historical standard bearer of revolutionary socialism. It is at the end of a chain whose links were the Communist League of Marx and Engels, the International Working Men's Association (First International), the Second International, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, and the Communist International. But in order to establish the specific beginnings of our movement it is necessary to begin with the year 1923 in the USSR.
The Left Opposition
The October revolution established the first Workers' State, but remained isolated. "Without revolution in Europe," said Lenin repeatedly "we shall perish." History verified the truth of his words, but in its own manner. Degeneration appeared in the apparatus itself of the new regime--the party that led the revolution to victory.
The resistance to corruption of the party came from Trotsky. The struggle began in the fall of 1923. On October 8th, he sent a letter to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission denouncing the stifling of the right of criticism on the part of party members. This is the first document of our movement. It can be compared to what had been for Bolshevism the famous vote on the statutes of the party in 1902.
Beginning with the question of the internal regime of the party, the struggle grew progressively to include all problems of revolutionary tactics and strategy. Outside of the USSR, opposition groups appeared in most of the sections of the Communist International. The connections of these groups among themselves, and with the Russian Opposition, remained precarious. Many of the groups arose in opposition to one of the aspects of Stalinist policy. Their political solidarity was far from complete. One group that proved of great importance for the future of our movement, the Left Opposition in the American communist party, appeared belatedly on the scene in 1928.
The organizational cohesion of the International Left Opposition was not seriously undertaken until the time of Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR and his arrival in Turkey, in February 1929. The first international conference of the Left Opposition took place in Paris in 1930.
The policy of the Opposition in relation to the Communist International, both in its entirety as well as its various sections, had remained the same since 1923. In one word it was--reform. Although expelled by the faction in power, the Trotskyist groups considered themselves part of the International, its left faction, exactly as in each country each group considered itself a faction of the national Communist Party. Their objective was to convince the party membership of the correctness of their views, to win over the majority, and to set the organization on the correct course. Toward the Bolshevik Party in the USSR the policy was essentially the same as toward any other section of the International. The name of the movement, Opposition, expressed and symbolized this policy.
A political document of a programmatic character, entitled The International Left Opposition--Its Tasks and Methods, was written by Trotsky, in December 1932, immediately after his return to Prinkipo from Copenhagen, where he had the opportunity of meeting about thirty of the most important leaders of the International Opposition. One chapter of this document was entitled "Faction--Not a Party." The perspective outlined there was the same as in the preceding years, namely, the reform of the Communist International and of each of its sections. Nevertheless, a warning was sounded:
"Such an historical catastrophe as the fall of the Soviet State would surely drag along the Third International. Similarly, a victory of fascism in Germany and the crushing of the German proletariat would hardly allow the Comintern to survive the consequences of its ruinous policy."
One of these two warnings was soon to become a terrible reality. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg, the constitutional head of the Weimar Republic, elected with the votes of the Social Democracy, called on Hitler to form a new cabinet.
For three years the Left Opposition had sounded the alarm at the rise of German fascism. In a series of articles and pamphlets, which in their clarity and revolutionary passion rank among the best products of his pen, Trotsky revealed the nature of fascism and showed the consequences of a fascist victory to the German workers, to the international labor movement, to the USSR, to Europe, and to the whole world. He also pointed to the means of combatting this danger: the united front of the workers' parties, Communist and Social Democratic, for the active defence of workers' organizations against the Nazi vermin, a defensive struggle which, when successful, would become an offensive.
The Collapse of the German Communist Party
The leaders of the two official workers' parties vied with each other in their impotence in the face of the fascist menace. The Social Democratic leadership desperately grasped at a democracy which, in the midst of economic chaos and the sharpened social and political conflicts, was disowning itself. The Stalinists acted in line with the "genial" theory of their leader, that it was necessary to crush the Social Democrats before fighting fascism. They had made common cause with the Nazis in the famous plebiscite in Prussia in August 1931. When the fascist menace became imminent, they clamored with braggadocio: "After them will be our turn!"
When Hitler formed his government on January 30, 1933, not all was lost. The workers' organizations were still intact. In the following weeks the Nazis acted very cautiously. In February, Trotsky stated in a conversation: "The situation in Germany is similar to that of a man at the bottom of an abyss facing a stone wall. To get out it is necessary to clutch at the rocks with bare and bloody hands. It is necessary to have courage and will, but it is possible. Not all is lost."
The official leadership of the workers' parties allowed the last chance to slip by. In the face of their passivity, Hitler became more brazen. He had never hoped to win such an easy victory. At the beginning of March, the crude provocation of the Reichstag fire allowed him to definitely entrench his regime. The workers' organizations were swept away.
Trotsky's reaction was not long in coming. He wrote an article entitled The Tragedy of the German Proletariat. It was dated March 14, 1933 and had, as a sub-title, "The German Workers Will Rise, Stalinism--Never!" The gist of the article was that, in Germany, the Communist Party failed in its historic mission, that it was doomed as a revolutionary organization. Thus, there was no choice but to give up the policy of its reform and to proceed to build a new German Communist Party. When Trotsky wrote that Stalinism would not rise again, he meant Stalinism in Germany. As to the Communist Parties in other lands, especially the Russian Bolshevik Party, and the Communist International viewed in its entirety, the line remained as before, that of reform.
In the weeks that followed other articles elaborated this position and answered the objections raised against it. In the ranks of the Left Opposition, these objections were minimal. They came mostly from certain comrades in the German section, the one most directly concerned. These objections remained secondary or sentimental in character: maybe it would be better to wait before speaking about a new party while the official one is under the blows of bloody repressions, etc. But the lesson of events was so clear that the need of a change in the old policy was not questioned seriously.
Yet, when one's memory turns to that month of March 1933, it cannot be denied that the new policy was a surprise to the members of the Left Opposition. The daily activity of each of the sections was centred exclusively around the Communist Party; and to develop a new line, even if it were for only one of our sections, was to break with a tradition of ten years standing. The great authority of Trotsky made it possible to bring about the change in line rapidly and with cohesion. Without him, the lessons of the events in Germany would have surely been learned in our ranks, but after how many months of discussion?
The problem of the Third International in its totality could not fail to be posed. After the collapse of the German Communist Party, the executive committee of the International passed in April a resolution which declared that the policy followed by the German Communist Party "up to and at the time of Hitler's coup d'etat was fully correct."
This is not astonishing: the executive committee under the orders of Stalin merely covered Stalin, who imposed his fatal political line on the German Communist Party. But the decisive fact was that all the sections of the International accepted the Moscow resolution and thus became equally responsible for the historical catastrophe in Germany. The members who denounced the line that had been followed, or merely questioned it, were expelled. The policy of reform was losing all reality.
On July 15, 1933, Trotsky, under the pen-name of G. Gurov, addressed to the sections of the Opposition an article entitled, It is necessary to build new Communist parties and a new International. Here the perspective of reform was definitely abandoned. After the lessons of the events, the turn was decisive: "Talk of 'reform' and the demand of readmission of the oppositionists into the official parties must be definitely given up, as utopian and reactionary," he wrote. And he took this opportunity to give general and valuable advice: "The most dangerous thing in politics is to become a prisoner of your own formula, which was appropriate yesterday, but is deprived of any content today."
On July 20th a second article entitled, "It is no longer possible to stay in the `International' with Stalin, Manuilsky, Lozovsky and Co.", answered possible arguments against the new position.
The change in policy coincided with the change in Trotsky's residence. On July 17th, he left Istanbul and on the 24th he landed in Marseilles. Next day he settled himself near Saint-Palais, on the Atlantic seaboard. It was a big change in his personal life. While on the island of Prinkipo, the arrival of a visitor was a little event every four or six months; in France, Trotsky was able in the following weeks to meet with practically all leading members of the European opposition groups, and with quite a few from overseas.
When Trotsky landed in Marseilles, the translation of his first article on the need of a new International had hardly reached the leadership of the various sections. The leading Trotskyists of France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, etc., soon took the road to Saint-Palais, and there in Trotsky's study, or under the trees of his garden, participated in lengthy discussions. Opposition to the new orientation was practically non-existent. The turn to a new party in Germany three months before, had broken with a long tradition and opened new perspectives. The discussions did not deal so much with the need of a new International, but rather with the ways and means of bringing it about: how to build it, how to build new parties?
The New International
A few voices raised the question: haven't we waited too long? Shouldn't we have recognized the need of a new International much sooner? To this Trotsky answered: "This is a question we may well leave to the historians." He was undoubtedly profoundly convinced that the change in the policy would have been incorrect several years sooner, but he refused to discuss this question because it was no longer of practical and immediate interest.
One question that took up a large share of the discussion was that of the USSR. It is worthwhile examining how it was posed then. The document of December 1932 that we have already mentioned, and which still followed the line of reform, had stated:
"Sharper and brighter is the question [of reform] in the USSR. The policy of the second party there would imply the policy of armed insurrection and a new revolution. The policy of the faction implies the line of inner reform of the party and the workers' state."
In the article of April 1933 which pointed out the need of a new party in Germany, but at the same time retained the policy of reform in the Communist International, Trotsky wrote:
"If the Stalinist bureaucracy will bring the USSR to collapse, then.... it will be necessary to build a Fourth International."
The problem was: how to discard the policy of reform of the Bolshevik Party and at the same time retain the perspective of reforming the workers' state? How to proclaim the Fourth International before the Stalinist bureaucracy has led the USSR to its collapse?
The problem of the USSR was the greatest obstacle in Trotsky's mind before reaching the conclusion that there remained no other alternative than to form a Fourth International. Shortly before his article of July 15, he said in a conversation at Prinkipo: "Since April, we have been for reform in all countries except Germany, where we are for a new party. Now we can take a symmetrical position, i.e., in favor of a new party in every country except the USSR, where we will be for reform of the Bolshevik Party." (This position, as far as I know, was never put into writing.) But it was clear to his listeners that his ideas on this matter were only in the process of formation and that they had not yet reached their conclusion.
The solution of this problem is, as is well known now, the distinction between a social revolution and a political revolution. This solution was already outlined in the first documents, in July, which speak about the need of a new International.
On the other hand, in the summer of 1933, the discussions around the nature of the USSR were numerous: not only was Stalinism bankrupt in Germany, but the first economic experiences of Hitler, Roosevelt, as well as the Italian corporate state, gave rise on all sides to theories of "State capitalism."
Trotsky then clarified his position toward the USSR in a long article entitled, The Class Nature of the Soviet State, dated October 1, 1933. This article definitely eliminates the perspective of a peaceful removal of the bureaucracy, and clarifies the formulas in the documents on the new International. In the main this is the position we have maintained to the present. (On the question of an historical analogy with Thermidor, a correction was made in February 1935.)
Another question required a good deal of attention in the discussions at Saint-Palais: that of our relation toward other organizations. The Left Opposition had its attention focused exclusively on the various Communist parties. Our organization was made up, with a few rare exceptions, only of expelled members of Communist parties or Young Communist leagues. All our activity was subordinated to the perspective of reform. As early as June 15, 1933, that is, before the turn toward a New International, Trotsky addressed to the sections of the Left Opposition an article, Left Socialist Organizations and Our Tasks, in which he pointed out a new field of activity: The victory of German fascism had brought a crisis to the Social Democracy. The Comintern was losing its power of attraction. We could expect that the centrist organizations of the left would turn towards us. It was therefore necessary to turn our attention and our efforts in this direction.
In fact, the whole political atmosphere, our orientation towards a new International, the arrival of Trotsky in France, actually attracted towards us the eyes of organizations which, in different periods and under different circumstances, had broken with the Second and Third Internationals. Numerous were the visits in Saint-Palais of leaders of these organizations (German S.A.P., English I.L.P., Dutch O.S.P. and R.S.P., etc.). The Dutch party of Sneevliet (R.S.P.) declared itself ready to join our ranks immediately.
The excitement provoked by the shameful bankruptcy of the two Internationals in Germany was so great that not less than fourteen organizations, belonging to neither of the two Internationals, decided to unite. Nevertheless, they were far from having a common program. To complain about the old official organizations in articles and speeches is one thing. To undertake to build a new International is another. Our organization decided to participate in the conference of the fourteen groups held in Paris at the end of August 1933. Our policy was clear: to draw our conclusions from events to the end, to propose our program of creating a new International, to denounce those who wanted to remain equivocal and ambiguous. Together with a few organizations which recognized the immediate necessity of a new International (S.A.P., R.S.P., O.S.P.), our organization signed a programmatic document known under the name of Declaration of the Four. Some months later the S.A.P. was to deny its signature.
The conference in Paris proved to be the maximum effort of which the centrist groups were capable. It remained without results. All the perspectives gradually revealed themselves to be empty, unrealistic, with the exception of one: to create a new International. The formal founding of the Fourth International took place five years later, in 1938.
Eleven years have passed since that summer of 1933 when the Fourth International was conceived. Its progress has been slow, always too slow for our hopes. It was born amidst the defeats provoked by the old official organizations of the working class. While a defeat will stir the best elements of the vanguard to examine its causes and to build a better organization, its effect on the class as a whole is one of disorientation, discouragement and passivity. It takes years and years to eradicate its marks; a new generation which has not known cynicism must raise its head.
We have found in our path the putrid corpse of the Comintern, an organization which has utilized the immense prestige of the victorious Russian Revolution precisely to disorientate, disorganize and crush, where necessary, the revolutionary emancipation of the working class.
Following defeats in a series of countries, a catastrophe has descended upon the peoples--a new world war. For five years now, hundreds of millions of men have been confronted with the terrors of war, but today the sound of the cannon can no longer drown out the melody of revolt. Throughout all Europe fists are clenching. Tomorrow tens and hundreds of millions will rise to demand an accounting from the old order which generated oppression, misery and wars. Gaining consciousness of their strength, they will cast aside their false leaders, the perfidious agents of the enemy. They will need a stainless banner. There is only one: ours, the banner of the Fourth International, of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
*The Winter Palace, 1917 (Oops!)-The White House, December 16, 2010- The Winter Soldier Resistance-Down With Imperialist War!
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the December 16, 2010 veteran-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House. For pictures of the Winter Palace in Russia in November 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution you are on your own.
Markin comment:
Old Truth: Old white-haired men, well-groomed, well-sated, mainly white-skinned, a few women also white-haired, and also mainly white-skinned now thrown in, their arthritic hands on the throttles on state power send young, virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class men, many brown and black- skinned (and also now young virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class women, many brown and black-skinned) to fight their imperial wars. Their American behemoth, monstrous imperial wars. A current “white” black front man, a conscious and willing front man does not alter that truth. That configuration, that infernal configuration, of who orders and who fights remains in place and no amount of “spin” can alter it.
“Spin”: our vital national security interests demand it: if we don’t stop them there (fill in the blank there) they’ll be at our doorstep next; they need a good dose of democracy, democracy America-style, to cure their ills; we had to burn that village to the ground to save it; the only good “commie” (fill in the blank for the current “axis of evil” enemy) is a dead “commie”; we need to keep our oil (fill in the blank for your favored resource) supplies secure; if we don’t support (fill in the blank) then the next guy will be even worst; we are winning the war by not losing; we can see the light at the end of the tunnel; oh, that, that was strictly “collateral damage” that doesn’t count; we seek no wider war but I will next week sent (fill in the blank) troops just to be on the safe side; America love it, or leave it; my country, right or wrong; and, on and on and on.
New Truth: White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders, many Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of the past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly. All, I say all, showing the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
Markin comment:
Old Truth: Old white-haired men, well-groomed, well-sated, mainly white-skinned, a few women also white-haired, and also mainly white-skinned now thrown in, their arthritic hands on the throttles on state power send young, virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class men, many brown and black- skinned (and also now young virile, half-formed, half-knowing working class women, many brown and black-skinned) to fight their imperial wars. Their American behemoth, monstrous imperial wars. A current “white” black front man, a conscious and willing front man does not alter that truth. That configuration, that infernal configuration, of who orders and who fights remains in place and no amount of “spin” can alter it.
“Spin”: our vital national security interests demand it: if we don’t stop them there (fill in the blank there) they’ll be at our doorstep next; they need a good dose of democracy, democracy America-style, to cure their ills; we had to burn that village to the ground to save it; the only good “commie” (fill in the blank for the current “axis of evil” enemy) is a dead “commie”; we need to keep our oil (fill in the blank for your favored resource) supplies secure; if we don’t support (fill in the blank) then the next guy will be even worst; we are winning the war by not losing; we can see the light at the end of the tunnel; oh, that, that was strictly “collateral damage” that doesn’t count; we seek no wider war but I will next week sent (fill in the blank) troops just to be on the safe side; America love it, or leave it; my country, right or wrong; and, on and on and on.
New Truth: White-haired men, mainly, standing stoically in the snow in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, brushing off the flakes as they accumulate on their weathered shoulders, many Rip Van Winkle-bearded, Gabby Hayes-bearded for those who remember that name out of black and white television child cowboy and Indian dreams and this crowd, this motley group of veterans of the past and present wars of the American imperium know that name, or know those who know that name. Mostly the beards, like the hair, are white as well, some a bit raggedy like times were a little tough and keeping up with appearances had lost some of its glimmer. Some pot-bellied, showing signs of rough battles after youth’s invincibility proved false for another generation. Some rail thin, reflecting the inhuman struggle to keep old age’s weight down. Some, proudly, wearing their old time medal-bedecked, rank-inscribed and name-stitched service uniforms, those awful greens, those awful olive greens to make a man or woman hate the sight of green. Some, who dearly purchased their right to use that uniform as anti-war symbol, “finger” that uniform today, also proudly. All, I say all, showing the scars of war, some in the stoop of their shoulders, some in that deep, inner place where the horrors of war are kept at bay for another day. All show those scars in their gait as they wait, wait for another signal, a signal to march, but this time to a different drummer, to a different drum beat, more Buddhist bong that military tattoo. They harken back, I can see it clearly in their faces as I could have in my own if I had chanced to see a mirror just then, to young manhood, to young manhood’s fears and follies. To their first taste of battle, bullets whirling, cannons booming, bombs sizzling from the death skies. Life was measured, if it was measured at all, in that minute, that soldier’s minute between life and death, no, less than a minute. The “order” is given to move out, move out slowly, single-file, keep some distance between you and the next kindred spirit, white-doved flags fluttering in the snow wind leading the way. These men know the drill, know the pace, and know the mission. Unlike those youthful terrors this is not a day for fear. This is the day when the ante gets raised. And these are the men to meet that clarion call to resistance. No, no need for fear today. These are winter soldiers. The resistance has begun, and let those other white-haired men, those powerful white-haired men with their hands on the throttle of power tremble at the thought.
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