Click on the headine to link to a Wikipedia entry for 17th century English communist, Gerrard Winstanley.
Markin comment:
On a day when there has been a full-court press media blitz (with endless blitzes 24/7/365 to come ) over the engagement of British heir to the throne Prince Williams and his Kate
I feel compelled to reach back the mid-17th century for a little wisdom about kings, kingships and the struggle for human progress. True Leveller (Digger) Gerrard Winstanley came immediately to mind (although Levelers John Lilburne and Robert Overton also received my consideration). Abolish the British monarchy now! Fight for Workers Republics (and keep them)!
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The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Gerrard Winstanley (1652)
CHAP. VI. - The Kings’ old laws cannot govern a free Commonwealth.
They cannot govern in times of bondage and in times of freedom too: they have indeed served many masters, popish and protestant. They are like old soldiers, that will but change their name, and turn about, and as they were; and the reason is, because they are the prerogative will of those, under any religion, that count it no freedom to them unless they be lords over the minds, persons and labours of their brethren.
They are called the kings’ laws because they are made by the kings. If any say they were made by the commoners, it is answered, They were not made by the commoners as the commoners of a free commonwealth are to make laws.
For in the days of the kings, none were to choose nor be chosen Parliament-men, or law-makers, but lords of manors and freeholders, such as held title to their enclosures of land or charters for their liberties in trades under the king, who called the land his as he was the conqueror, or his successor.
All inferior people were neither to choose, nor to be chosen; and the reason was because all freeholders of land, and such as held their liberties by charter, were all of the kings’ interest; and the inferior people were successively of the rank of the conquered ones, and servants and slaves from the time of the conquest.
And further, when a Parliament was chosen in that manner, yet if any Parliament-man in the uprightness of his heart did endeavour to promote any freedom, contrary to the king’s will or former customs Tom the conquest, he was either committed to prison by the king or by his House of Lords, who were his ancient Norman successive council of war; or else the Parliament was dissolved and broke up by the king.
So that the old laws were made in times under kingly slavery, not under the liberty of commonwealth’s freedom, because Parliament-men must have regard to the king’s prerogative interest, to hold his conquest, or else endanger themselves.
As sometimes it is in these days: some officers dare not speak against the minds of those men who are the chief in power, nor a private soldier against the mind of his officer, lest they be cashiered their places and livelihood.
And so long as the promoting of the kings’ will and prerogative was to be in the eye of the law-makers, the oppressed commoners could never enjoy commonwealth’s freedom thereby.
Yet by the wisdom, courage, faithfulness and industry of some Parliament-men, the commoners have received here a line and there a line of freedom inserted into their laws; as those good lines of freedom in Magna Charta were obtained by much hardship and industry.
Secondly, they were the kings’ laws, because the kings’ own creatures made the laws; or lords of manors, freeholders, etc., were successors of the Norman soldiers from the conquest, therefore they could do no other but maintain their own and their kings’ interest.
And do we not see that all laws were made in the days of the kings to ease the rich landlord? But the poor labourers were left under bondage still; they were to have no freedom in the earth by those Pharisaical laws. For when laws were made and Parliaments broke up, the poor oppressed commoners had no relief; but the power of lords of manors, withholding the free use of the common land from them, remained still: for none durst make use of any common land but at the lord’s leave according to the will and law of-the conqueror; therefore the old laws were called the kings’ laws.
And these old laws cannot govern a free commonwealth, because the land now is to be set free from the slavery of the Norman conquest; and the power of lords of manors and Norman freeholders is to be taken away, or else the commoners are but where they were, if not fallen lower into straits than they were: and the old laws cannot look with any other face than they did. Though they be washed with commonwealth’s water, their countenance is still withered. Therefore it was not for nothing that the kings would have all their laws written in French and Latin and not in English, partly in honour to the Norman race, and partly to keep the common people ignorant of their creation-freedoms, lest they should rise to redeem themselves: and if those laws should be writ in English, yet if the same kingly principles remain in them, the English language would not advantage us anything, but rather increase our sorrow by our knowledge of our bondage.
What is law in general?
Law is a rule whereby man and other creatures are governed in their actions, for the preservation of the common peace. And this law is twofold:
First, it is the power of life (called the law of nature within the creatures) which does move both man and beast in their actions; or that causes grass, trees, corn and all plants to grow in their several seasons; and whatsoever any body does, he does it as he is moved by this inward law. And this law of nature moves twofold, viz. unrationally or rationally.
A man by this inward law is guided to actions of generation and present content, rashly, through a greedy self-love, without any consideration, like foolish children, or like the brute beasts; by reason whereof much hurt many times follows the body. And this is called the law in the members warring against the law of the mind.
Or when there is an inward watchful oversight of all motions to action, considering the end and effects of those actions, that there be no excess in diet, in speech or in action break forth to the prejudice of a man’s self or others. And this is called the light in man, the reasonable power, or the v law of the mind.
And this rises up in the heart, by an experimental observation of that peace and trouble which such and such words, thoughts and actions bring the man into. And this is called the record on high; for it is a record in a man’s heart above the former unreasonable power. And it is called the witness or testimony of a man’s own conscience.
And it is said, to the law and to the testimony etc., for this moderate watchfulness is still the law of nature in a higher resurrection than the former: it hath many terms which for brevity sake I let pass.
And this twofold work of the law within man strives to bring forth themselves in writing to beget numbers of bodies on their sides. And that power that begets the biggest number always rules as king and lord in the creature and in the creation, till the other part overtop him, even as light and darkness strive in day and night to succeed each other; or as it is said, the strong man armed keeps the heart of man, till a stronger than he come, and cast him out.
And this written law, proceeding either from reason or unreasonableness, is called the letter; whereby the creation of mankind, beasts and earth is governed according to the will of that power which rules. And it is called by his opposite, the letter that kills, and by those of the same nature with it, it is called the word of life.
As for example, if the experienced, wise and strong man bears rule, then he writes down his mind to curb the unreasonable law of covetousness and pride in unexperienced men, to preserve peace in the commonwealth. And this is called the historical or traditional law, because it is conveyed from one generation to another by writing; as the laws of Israel’s commonwealth were writ in a book by Moses, and so conveyed to posterity.
And this outward law is a bridle to unreasonableness, or as Solomon writ, it is a whip for the fool’s back, for whom only it was added.
Secondly, since Moses’s time, the power of unreasonable covetousness and pride hath sometimes rise up and corrupted that traditional law.
For since the power of the sword rise up in nations to conquer, the written law hath not been to advance common freedom and to beat down the unreasonable self-will in mankind, but it hath been framed to uphold that self-will of the conqueror, right or wrong; not respecting the freedom of the commonwealth, but the freedom of the conqueror and his friends only. By reason whereof much slavery hath been laid upon the backs of the plain-dealing man; and men of public spirits, as Moses was, have been crushed, and their spirits damped thereby; which hath bred, first discontents, and then more wars in the nations.
And those who have been favourites about the conqueror, have by hypocrisy and flattery pleased their king, that they might get what they can of the earth into their possession; and thereby have increased the bondage of the painful labourer, if they could but catch him to act contrary to the conqueror’s will, called law. And now the city mourns: and do we not see that the laws of kings have been always made against such actions as the common people were most inclinable to, on purpose to ensnare them into their sessions and courts, that the lawyers and clergy, who were the kings’ supporters, might get money thereby, and live in fulness by other men’s labours?
But hereby the true nature of a well-governed commonwealth hath been ruined, and the will of kings set up for a law, and the law of righteousness, law of liberty, trod under foot and killed.
This traditional law of kings is that letter at this day which kills true freedom, and it is the fomenter of wars and persecution.
This is the soldier who cut Christ’s garment into pieces, which was to have remained uncut and without seam; this law moves the people to fight one against another for those pieces, viz. for the several enclosures of the earth, who shall possess the earth, and who shall be ruler over others.
But the true ancient law of God is a covenant of peace to whole mankind; this sets the earth free to all; this unites both Jew and Gentile into one brotherhood, and rejects none: this makes Christ’s garment whole again, and makes the kingdoms of the world to become commonwealths again. It is the inward power of right understanding, which is the true law that teaches people, in action as well as in words, to do as they would be done unto.
But thus much in general, what law is: hereafter follows what those particular laws may be, whereby a commonwealth may be governed in peace and all burdens removed; which is a breaking forth of that law of liberty which will be the joy of all nations when he arises up and is established in his brightness.
Short and pithy laws are best to govern a commonwealth.
The laws of Israel’s commonwealth were few, short and pithy; and the government thereof was established in peace, so long as officers and people were obedient thereunto.
But those many laws in the days of the kings of England, which were made, some in times of popery, and some in times of protestantism, and the proceedings of the law being in French and Latin, hath produced two great evils in England.
First, it hath occasioned much ignorance among the people, and much contention; and the people have mightily erred through want of knowledge, and thereby they have run into great expense of money by suits of law, or else many have been imprisoned, whipped, banished, lost their estates and lives by that law which they were ignorant of, till the scourge thereof was upon their backs. This is a sore evil among the people.
Secondly, the people’s ignorance of the laws hath bred many sons of contention: for when any difference falls out between man and man, they neither of them know which offends the other; therefore both of them thinking their cause is good, they delight to make use of the law; and then they go and give a lawyer money to tell them which of them was the offender. The lawyer, being glad to maintain their own trade, sets them together by the ears, till all their monies be near spent; and then bids them refer the business to their neighbours, to make them friends; which might have been done at the first.
So that the course of the law and lawyers hath been a mere snare to entrap the people, and to pull their estates from them by craft; for the lawyers do uphold the conqueror’s interest and the people’s slavery: so that the king, seeing that, did put all the affairs of judicature into their hands. And all this must be called justice, but it is a sore evil.
But now if the laws were few and short, and often read, it would prevent those evils; and everyone, knowing when they did well and when ill, would be very cautious of their words and actions; and this would escape the lawyers’ craft.
As Moses’s laws in Israel’s commonwealth: The people did talk of them when they lay down and when they rose up, and as they walked by the way; and bound them as bracelets upon their hands: so that they were an understanding people in the laws wherein their peace did depend.
But it is a sign that England is a blinded and a snared generation; their leaders through pride and covetousness have caused them to err, yea and perish too, for want of the knowledge of the laws, which hath the power of life and death, freedom and bondage, in its hand. But I hope better things hereafter.
What may be those particular laws, or such a method of laws, whereby a commonwealth may be governed.
1. The bare letter of the law established by act of Parliament shall be the rule for officer and people, and the chief judge of all actions.
2. He or they who add or diminish from the law, excepting in the court of Parliament, shall be cashiered his office, and never bear office more.
3. No man shall administer the law for money or reward; he that doth shall die as a traitor to the commonwealth: for when money must buy and sell justice and bear all the sway, there is nothing but oppression to be expected.
4. The laws shall be read by the minister to the people four times in the year, viz. every quarter, that everyone may know whereunto they are to yield obedience; then none may die for want of knowledge.
5. No accusation shall be taken against any man, unless it be proved by two or three witnesses or his own confession.
6. No man shall suffer any punishment but for matter of fact, or reviling words: but no man shall be troubled for his judgment or practice in the things of his God, so he live quiet in the land.
7. The accuser and accused shall always appear face to face before any officer, that both sides may be heard, and no wrong to either party.
8. If any judge or officer execute his own will contrary to the law, or which there is no law to warrant him in, he shall be cashiered, and never bear office more.
9. He who raises an accusation against any man, and cannot prove it, shall suffer the same punishment the other should, if proved. An accusation is when one man complains of another to an officer, all other accusations the law takes no notice of.
10. He who strikes his neighbour shall be struck himself by the executioner, blow for blow, and shall lose eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb, life for life; and the reason is that men may be tender of one another’s bodies, doing as they would be done by.
11. If any man strike an officer, he shall be made a servant under the task-master for a whole year.
12. He who endeavours to stir up contention among neighbours, by tale-bearing or false reports, shall the first time be reproved openly by the overseers among all the people; the second time shall be whipped; the third time shall be a servant under the task-master for three months; and if he continues, he shall be a servant for ever, and lose his freedom in the commonwealth.
13. If any give reviling and provoking words whereby his neighbour’s spirit is burdened, if complaint be made to the overseers, they shall admonish the offender privately to forbear; if he continues to offend his neighbour, the next time he shall be openly reproved and admonished before the congregation, when met together; if he continue, the third time he shall be whipped; the fourth time, if proof be made by witnesses, he shall be a servant under the task-master for twelve months.
14. He who will rule as a lord over his brother, unless he be an officer commanding obedience to the law, he shall be admonished as aforesaid, and receive like punishment if he continue.
Laws for the planting of the earth, etc.
15. Every household shall keep all instruments and tools fit for the tillage of the earth, either for planting, reaping or threshing. Some households, which have many men in them, shall keep ploughs, carts, harrows and such like: other households shall keep spades, pick-axes, axes, pruning hooks and such like, according as every family is furnished with men to work therewith.
And if any master or father of a family be negligent herein, the overseer for that circuit shall admonish him between them two; if he continue negligent, the overseers shall reprove him before all the people: and if he utterly refuse, then the ordering of that family shall be given to another, and he shall be a servant under the task-master till he conform.
16. Every family shall come into the field, with sufficient assistance, at seed-time to plough, dig and plant, and at harvest-time to reap the fruits of the earth and carry them into the store-houses, as the overseers order the work and the number of workmen. And if any refuse to assist in this work, the overseers shall ask the reason; and if it be sickness or any distemper that hinders them they are freed from such service; if mere idleness keep them back, they are to suffer punishment according to the laws against idleness.
Laws against idleness.
17. If any refuse to learn a trade, or refuse to work in seedtime or harvest, or refuse to be a waiter in store-houses, and yet will feed and clothe himself with other men’s labours: the overseers shall first admonish him privately; if he continue idle, he shall be reproved openly before all the people by the overseers; and shall be forbore with a month after this reproof. If he still continues idle, he shall then be whipped, and be let go at liberty for a month longer; if still he continue idle, he shall be delivered into the task-master’s hand, who shall set him to work for twelve months, or till he submit to right order. And the reason why every young man shall be trained up in some work or other is to prevent pride and contention, it is for the health of their bodies, it is a pleasure to the mind to be free in labours one with another; and it provides plenty of food and all necessaries for the commonwealth.
Laws for store-houses.
18. In every town and city shall be appointed store-houses for flax, wool, leather, cloth and for all such commodities as come from beyond seas, and these shall be called general store-houses; from whence every particular family may fetch such commodities as they want, either for their use in their house, or for to work in their trades; or to carry into the country store-houses.
19. Every particular house and shop in a town or city shall be a particular store-house or shop, as now they be; and these shops shall either be furnished by the particular labour of that family according to the trade that family is of, or by the labour of other lesser families of the same trade, as all shops in every town are now furnished.
20. The waiters in store-houses shall deliver the goods under their charge, without receiving any money, as they shall receive in their goods without paying any money.
21. If any waiter in a store-house neglect his office, upon a just complaint the overseers shall acquaint the judge’s court therewith, and from thence he shall receive his sentence to be discharged that house and office; and to be appointed some other labouring work under the task-master; and another shall have his place. For he who may live in freedom, and will not, is to taste of servitude.
Laws for overseers.
22. The only work of every overseer is to see the laws executed; for the law is the true magistracy of the land.
23. If any overseer favour any in their idleness, and neglect the execution of the laws, he shall be reproved the first time by the judge’s court; the second time cashiered his office, and shall never bear office more, but fall back into the rank of young people and servants to be a worker.
24. New overseers shall at their first entrance into their office look back upon the actions of the old overseers of the last year, to see if they have been faithful in their places, and consented to no breach of law, whereby kingly bondage should any ways be brought in.
25. The overseers for trades shall see every family to-lend assistance to plant and reap the fruits of the earth, to work in their trades and to furnish the store-houses; and to see that the waiters in store-houses be diligent to receive in and deliver out any goods, without buying and selling, to any man whatsoever.
26. While any overseer is in the performance of his place, everyone shall assist him, upon pain of open reproof (or cashiered if he be another officer) or forfeiture of freedom, according to the nature of the business in hand in which he refused his assistance.
Laws against buying and selling.
27. If any man entice another to buy and sell, and he who is enticed doth not yield but makes it known to the overseer, the enticer shall lose his freedom for twelve months and the overseer shall give words [in] commendation of him that refused the enticement, before all the congregation, for his faithfulness to the commonwealth’s peace.
28. If any do buy and sell the earth or quits thereof, unless it be to or with strangers of another nation, according to the law of navigation, they shall be both put to death as traitors to the peace of the commonwealth, because it brings in kingly bondage again and is the occasion of all quarrels and oppressions.
29. He or she who calls the earth his and not his brother’s shall be set upon a stool, with those words written in his forehead, before all the congregation; and afterwards be made a servant for twelve months under the task-master. If he quarrel, or seek by secret persuasion, or open rising in arms, to set up such a kingly property, he shall be put to death.
30. The store-houses shall be every man’s substance, and not any one’s.
31. No man shall either give hire or take hire for his work; for this brings in kingly bondage. If any freemen want help, there are young people, or such as are common servants, to do it, by the overseer’s appointment. He that gives and he that takes hire for work, shall both lose their freedom, and become servants for twelve months under the taskmaster.
Laws for navigation.
32. Because other nations as yet own monarchy, and will buy and sell, therefore it is convenient, for the peace of our commonwealth, that our ships do transport our English goods and exchange for theirs, and conform to the customs of other nations in buying and selling: always provided that what goods our ships carry out, they shall be the commonwealth’s goods; and all their trading with other nations shall be upon the common stock, to enrich the store-houses.
Laws for silver and gold.
33. As silver and gold is either found out in mines in our own land, or brought by shipping from beyond sea, it shall not be coined with a conqueror’s stamp upon it, to set up buying and selling under his name or by his leave; for there shall be no other use of it in the commonwealth than to make dishes and other necessaries for the ornament of houses, as now there is use made of brass, pewter and iron, or any other metal in their use.
But if in case other nations, whose commodities we want, will not exchange with us unless we give them money, then pieces of silver and gold may-be stamped with the commonwealth’s arms upon it, for the same use, and no otherwise.
For where money bears all the sway, there is no regard of that golden rule, Do as you would be done by. Justice is bought and sold: nay, injustice is sometimes bought and sold for money: and it is the cause of all wars and oppressions. And certainly the righteous spirit of the whole creation did never enact such a law, that unless his weak and simple men did go from England to the East Indies, and fetch silver and gold to bring in their hands to their brethren, and give it them for their good-will to let them plant the earth, and live and enjoy their livelihood therein. [16]
Laws to choose officers..
34. All overseers and state officers shall be chosen new every year, to prevent the rise of ambition and covetousness; for the nations have smarted sufficiently by suffering officers to continue long in an office, or to remain in an office by hereditary succession.
35. A man that is of a turbulent spirit, given to quarrelling and provoking words to his neighbour, shall not be chosen any officer while he so continues.
36. All men from twenty years of age upwards shall have freedom of voice to choose officers, unless they be such as lie under the sentence of the law.
37. Such shall be chosen officers as are rational men of moderate conversation, and who have experience in the laws of the commonwealth.
38. All men from forty years of age upwards shall be capable to be chosen state officers, and none younger, unless anyone by his industry and moderate conversation doth move the people to choose him.
39. If any man make suit to move the people to choose him an officer, that man shall not be chose[n] at all that time. If another man persuade the people to choose him who makes suit for himself, they shall both lose their freedom at that time, viz. they shall neither have a voice to choose another, nor be chosen themselves.
Laws against treachery.
40. He who professes the service of a righteous God by preaching and prayer, and makes a trade to get the possessions of the earth, shall be put to death for a witch and a cheater.
41. He who pretends one thing in words, and his actions declare his intent was another thing, shall never bear office in the commonwealth
What is freedom?
Every freeman shall have a freedom in the earth, to plant or build, to fetch from the store-houses anything he wants, and shall enjoy the fruits of his labours without restraint from any; he shall not pay rent to any landlord, and he shall be capable to be chosen any officer, so he be above forty years of age, and he shall have a voice to choose officers though he be under forty years of age. If he want any young men to be assistance to him in his trade or household employment, the overseers shall appoint him young men or maids to be his servants in his family.
Laws for such as have lost their freedom.
42. All those who have lost their freedom shall be clothed in white woollen cloth, that they may be distinguished from others.
43. They shall be under the government of a task-master, who shall appoint them to be porters or labourers, to do any work that any freeman wants to be done.
44. They shall do all kind of labour without exception, but their constant work shall be [that of] carriers or carters, to carry corn or other provision from store-house to storehouse, from country to cities, and from thence to countries, etc.
45. If any of these refuse to do such work, the task-master shall see them whipped, and shall feed them with coarse diet. And what hardship is this? For freemen work the easiest work, and these shall work the hardest work. And to what end is this, but to kill their pride and unreasonableness, that they may become useful men in the commonwealth?
46. The wife or children of such as have lost their freedom shall not be as slaves till they have lost their freedom, as their parents and husbands have done.
47. He who breaks any laws shall be the first time reproved in words in private or in public, as is shewed before; the next time whipped, the third time lose his freedom, either for a time or for ever, and not to be any officer.
48. He who hath lost his freedom shall be a common servant to any freeman who comes to the task-masters and requires one to do any work for him; always provided, that after one freeman hath by the consent of the task-master appointed him his work, another freeman shall not call him thence till that work be done.
49. If any of these offenders revile the laws by words, they shall be soundly whipped, and fed with coarse diet; if they raise weapons against the laws, they shall die as traitors.
Laws to restore slaves to freedom.
50. When any slaves give open testimony of their humility and diligence, and their care to observe the laws of the commonwealth, they are then capable to be restored to their freedom, when the time of servitude is expired according to the judge’s sentence; but if they remain opposite to the laws, they shall continue slaves still another term of time.
51. None shall be restored to freedom till they have been a twelve month labouring servants to the commonwealth, for they shall winter and summer in that condition.
52. When any is restored to freedom, the judge at the senators’ court shall pronounce his freedom, and give liberty to him to be clothed in what other coloured cloth he will.
53. If any persons be sick or wounded, the chirurgeons, who are trained up in the knowledge of herbs and minerals and know how to apply plasters or physic, shall go when they are sent for to any who need their help, but require no reward, because the common stock is the public pay for every man’s labour.
54. When a dead person is to be buried, the officers of the parish and neighbours shall go along with the corpse to the grave, and see it laid therein, in a civil manner; but the public minister nor any other shall have any hand in reading or exhortation.
55. When a man hath learned his trade, and the time of his seven years’ apprenticeship is expired, he shall have his freedom to become master of a family, and the overseers shall appoint him such young people to be his servants as they think fit, whether he marry or live a single life.
Laws for marriage.
56. Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love, if they can obtain the love and liking of that party whom they would marry; and neither birth nor portion shall hinder the match, for we are all of one blood, mankind; and for portion, the common store-houses are every man[’s] and maid’s portion, as free to one as to another.
57. If any man lie with a maid and beget a child, he shall marry her.
58. If a man lie with a woman forcibly, and she cry out and give no consent; if this be proved by two witneses, or the man’s confession, he shall be put to death, and the woman let go free; it is robbery of a woman[’s] bodily freedom.
59. If any man by violence endeavour to take away another man’s wife, the first time of such violent offer he shall be reproved before the congregation by the peace-maker; the second time he shall be made a servant under the task-master for twelve months; and if he forcibly lie with another man’s wife, and she cry out, as in the case when a maid is forced, the man shall be put to death.
60. When any man or woman are consented to live together in marriage, they shall acquaint all the overseers in their circuit therewith, and some other neighbours- and being all met together, the man shall declare by his own mouth before them all that he takes that woman to be his wife, and the woman shall say the same, and desire the overseers to be witnesses.
61. No master of a family shall suffer more meat to be dressed at a dinner or supper than what will be spent and eaten by his household or company present, or within such a time after, before it be spoiled. If there be any spoil constantly made in a family of the food of man, the overseer shall reprove the master for it privately; if that abuse be continued in his family, through his neglect of family government, he shall be openly reproved by the peace-maker before all the people, and ashamed for his folly; the third time he shall be made a servant for twelve months under the task-master, that he may know what it is to get food, and another shall have the oversight of his house for the time.
62. No man shall be suffered to keep house, and have servants under him, till he hath served seven years under command to a master himself; the reason is, that a man may be of age and of rational carriage before he be a governor of a family, that the peace of the commonwealth may be preserved.
Here is the righteous law; man wilt thou it maintain?
It may be, is, as hath still, in the world been slain.
Truth appears in light, falsehood rules in power;
To see these things to be is cause of grief each hour.
Knowledge, why didst thou comes to wound and not to cure?
I sent not for thee, thou didst me inlure.
Where knowledge does increase, there sorrows multiply,
To see the great deceit which in the world doth lie:
Man saying one thing now, unsaying it anon,
Breaking all’s engagements, when deeds for him are done.
O power where art thou, that must mend things amiss?
Come change the heart of man, and make him truth to kiss.
O death where art thou? Wilt thou not tidings send?
I fear thee not, thou art my loving friend.
Come take this body, and scatter it in the four, [17]
That I may dwell in one, and rest in peace once more. [18]
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
**From The Pen Of 17th Century English Communist Gerrard Winstanley-The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.(1649)
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for 17th English English communist, Gerrard Winstanley.
Markin comment:
On a day when there has been a full-court press media blitz (with endless blitzes 24/7/365 to come ) over the engagement of British heir to the throne Prince Williams and his Kate I feel compelled to reach back the mid-17th century for a little wisdom about kings, kingships and the struggle for human progress. True Leveller (Digger) Gerrard Winstanley came immediately to mind (although Levelers John Lilburne and Robert Overton also received my consideration). Abolish the British monarchy now! Fight for Workers Republics (and keep them)!
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Gerrard Winstanley (1649)
The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.
Source: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/Hill.htm.
A Declaration to the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World, shewing the Cause why the Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up, Manure, and Sow Corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by those that have Subscribed, and thousands more that gives Consent.
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.
But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more then in the Spirit Reason and Righteosness, who manifests himself to be the indweller in the Five Sences, of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling; then he fell into blindness of mind and weakness of heart, and runs abroad for a Teacher and Ruler: And so selfish imaginations taking possession of the Five Sences, and ruling as King in the room of Reason therein, and working with Covetousnesse, did set up one man to teach and rule over another; and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage, and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, then the Beasts of the field were to him.
And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting int he comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
But this coming in of Bondage, is called "A-dam", because this ruling and teaching power without, doth "dam" up the Spirit of Peace and Liberty; First within the heart, by filling it with slavish fears of others. Secondly without, by giving the bodies of one to be imprisoned, punished and oppressed by the outward power of another. And this evil was brought upon us through his own Covetousnesse, whereby he is blinded and made weak, and sees not the Law of Righteousnesse in his heart, which is the pure light of Reason, but looks abroad for it, and thereby the Creation is cast under bondage and curse, and the creator is sleighted; First by the Teachers and Rulers that sets themselves down in the Spirits room, to teach and rule, where he himself is only King. Secondly by the other, that refuses the Spirit, to be taught and governed by fellow Creatures, and this was called Israels Sin, in casting off the Lord and chusing Saul, one like themselves to be their King, when as they had the same Spirit of Reason and government in themselves, as he had, if they were but subject. And Israels rejecting of outward teachers and rulers to embrace the Lord, and to be all taught and ruled by that righteous King, that Jeremiah Prophesied shall rule in the new Heavens and new Earth in the latter dayes, will be their Restauration from bondage, Jer. 23.5, 6.
But for the present state of the old World that is running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away, we see proud Imaginary flesh, which is the wise Serpent, rises up in flesh and gets dominion in some to rule over others, and so forces one part of the Creation man, to be a slave to another; and thereby the Spirit is killed in both. The one looks upon himself as a teacher and ruler, and so is lifted up in pride over his fellow Creature: The other looks upon himself as imperfect, and so is dejected in his spirit, and looks upon his fellow Creature of his own Image, as a Lord above him.
And thus Esau, the man of flesh, which is Covetousness and Pride, hath killed Jacob, the Spirit of meeknesse, and righteous government in the light of Reason, and rules over him: And so the Earth that was made a common Treasury for all to live comfortably upon, is become through mans unrighteous actions one over another, to be a place, wherein one torments another.
Now the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason, suffered himself thus to be rejected, and troden underfoot by the covetous proud flesh, for a certain time limited; therefore saith he, The Seed out of whom the Creation did proceed, which is my Self, shall bruise this Serpents head, and restore my Creation again from this curse and bondage; and when I the King of Righteousnesse raigns in every man, I will be the blessing of the Earth and the joy of all Nations.
And since the coming in of the stoppage, or the A-dam the Earth hath been inclosed and given to the Elder brother Esau, or man of flesh, and hath been bought and sold from one to another; and Jacob, or the younger brother, that is to succeed or come forth next, who is the universal spreading power of righteousnesse that gives liberty to the whole Creation, is made a servant.
And this Elder Son, or man of bondage, hath held the Earth in bondage to himself, not by a meek Law of Righteousnesse, But by subtle selfish Councels, and by open and violent force; for wherefore is it that there is such Wars and rumours of Wars in the Nations of the Earth? and wherefore are men so mad to destroy one another? But only to uphold Civil propriety of Honor, Dominion and Riches one over another, which is the curse the Creation groans under, waiting for deliverance.
But when once the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again, as it must, for all the Prophesies of Scriptures and Reason are Circled here in this Community, and mankind must have the Law of Righteousness once more writ in his heart, and all must be made of one heart, and one mind.
Then this Enmity in all Lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a Dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the Earth then another; for he that will rule over, imprison, oppresse, and kill his fellow Creatures, under what pretence soever, is a destroyer of the Creation, and an actor of the Curse, and walks contrary to the rule of righteousnesse: (Do, as you would have others do to you; and love your Enemies, not in words, but in actions).
Therefore you powers of the Earth, or Lord Esau, the Elder brother, because youy have appeared to rule the Creation, first take notice, That the powere that sets you to work, is selvish Covetousness, and an aspiring Pride, to live in glory and ease over Jacob, the meek Spirit; that is, the Seed that lies hid, in & among the poor Common People, or younger Brother, out of whom the blessing of Deliverance is to rise and spring up to all Nations.
And Reason, the living king of righteousnesse, doth only look on, and lets thee alone, That whereas thou counts thy self an Angel of Light, thou shalt appear in the light of the Sun, to be a Devil, A-dam, and the Curse that the Creation groans under; and the time is now come for thy downfal, and Jacob must rise, who is the universal Spirit of love and righteousnesse, that fils, and will fill all the Earth.
Thou teaching and ruling power of flesh, thou hast had three periods of time, to vaunt thy self over thy Brother; the first was from the time of thy coming in, called A-dam, or a stoppage, till Moses came; and there thou that wast a self-lover in Cain, killed thy brother Abel, a plain-hearted man that loved righteousnesse: And thou by thy wisdom and beastly government, made the whole Earth to stinck, till Noah came, which was a time of the world, like the coming in of the watery Seed into the womb, towards the bringing forth of the man child.
And from Noah till Moses came, thou still hast ruled in vaunting, pride, and cruel oppression; Ishmael against Isaac, Esau against Jacob; for thou hast still been the man of flesh that hath ever persecuted the man of righteousnesse, the Spirit Reason.
And Secondly, from Moses till the Son of Man came, which was time of the world, that the man child could not speak like a man, but lisping, making signs to shew his meaning; as we see many Creatures that cannot speak do. For Moses Law was a Language lapped up in Types, Sacrifices, Forms, and Customs, which was weak time. And in this time likewise, O thou teaching and ruling power, thou wast an oppressor; for look into Scriptures and see if Aaron and the Priests were not the first that deceived the people; and the Rulers, as Kings and Governors, were continually the Ocean-head, out of whose power, Burdens, Oppressions, and Poverty did flow out upon the Earth: and these two Powers still hath been the Curse, that hath led the Earth, mankind, into confusion and death by their imaginary and selvish teaching and ruling, and it could be no otherwise; for while man looks upon himself, as an imperfect Creation, and seeks and runs abroad for a teacher and a rule, he is all this time a stranger to the Spirit that is within himself.
But though the Earth hath been generally thus in darknesse, since the A-dam rise up, and hath owned a Light, and a Law without them to walk by, yet some have been found as watchmen, in this night time of the world, that have been taught by the Spirit within them, and not by any flesh without them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Prophets: And these, and such as these, have still been the Butt, at whom, the powers of the Earth in all ages of the world, by their selvish Laws, have shot their fury.
And then Thirdly, from the time of the Son of man, which was time that the man-child began to speak like a child growing upward to manhood, till now, that the Spirit is rising up in strength. O thou teaching and ruling power of the earthly man, thou has been an oppressor, by imprisonment, impoverishing, and martyrdom; and all thy power and wit, hath been to make Laws, and execute thm against such as stand for universal Liberty, which is the rising up of Jacob: as by those ancient enslaving Laws not yet blotted out, but held up as weapons against the man-child.
O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing.
First, Thou hast made the people to take a Covenant and Oaths to endeavour a Reformation, and to bring in Liberty every man in his place; and yet while a man is in pursuing of that Covenant, he is imprisoned and oppressed by thy Officers, Courts, and Justices, so called.
Thou hast made Ordinances to cast down Oppressing, Popish, Episcopal, Self-willed and Prerogative Laws; yet we see, That Self-wil and Prerogative power, is the great standing Law, that rules all in action, and others in words.
Thou hast made many promises and protestations to make the Land a Free Nation: And yet at this very day, the same people, to whom thou hast made such Protestatins of Liberty, are oppressed by thy Courts, Sizes, Sessions, by thy Justices and Clarks of the Peace, so called, Bayliffs, Committees, are imprisoned, and forced to spend that bread, that should save their lives from Famine.
And all this, Because they stand to maintain an universal Liberty and Freedom, which not only is our Birthright, which our Maker gave us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us, from under the former oppressing Powers that are gone before, and which likewise we have bought with our Money, in Taxes, Free-quarter, and Bloud-shed; all which Sums thou hast received at our hands, and yet thou hast not given us our bargain.
O thou A-dam, thu Esau, thou Cain, thou Hypocritical man of flesh, when wilt thou cease to kill thy younger Brother? Surely thou must not do this great work of advancing the Creation out of Bondage; for thou art lost extremely, and drowned in the Sea of Covetousnesse, Pride, and hardness of heart. The blessing shall rise out of the dust which thou treadest under foot, Even the poor despised People, and they shall hold up Salvation to this Land, and to all Lands, and thou shalt be ashamed.
Our bodies as yet are in thy hand, our Spirit waits in quiet and peace, upon our Father for Deliverance; and if he give our Bloud into thy hand, for thee to spill, know this, That he is our Almighty Captain: And if some of you will not dare to shed your bloud, to maintain Tyranny and Oppression upon the Creation, know this, That our Bloud and Life shall not be unwilling to be delivered up in meekness to maintain universal Liberty, that so the Curse on our part may be taken off the Creation.
And we shall not do this by force of Arms, we abhorre it, For that is the work of the Midianites, to kill one another; But by obeying the Lord of Hosts, who hath Revealed himself in us, and to us, by labouring the Earth in righteousness together, to eate our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one man, or as one house of Israel restored from Bondage; and so by the power of Reason, the Law of righteousness in us, we endeavour to lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civil Propriety, which it groans under.
We are made to hold forth this Declaration to you that are the Great Councel, and to you the Great Army of the Land of England, that you may know what we would have, and what you are bound to give us by your Covenants and Promises; and that you may joyn with us in this Work, and so find Peace. Or else, if you do oppose us, we have peace in our Work, and in declaring this Report: And you shall be left without excuse.
The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows.
And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation; so that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see, he is no respecter of Persons, but equally loves his whole Creation, and hates nothing but the Serpent, which is Covetousness, branching forth into selvish Imagination, Pride, Envie, Hypocrisie, Uncleanness; all seeking the ease and honor of flesh, and fighting against the Spirit Reason that made the Creation; for that is the Corruption, the Curse, the Devil, the Father of Lies; Death and Bondage that Serpent and Dragon that the Creation is to be delivered from.
And we have moved hereunto for that Reason, and other which hath been shewed us, both by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation.
For it is shewed us, That so long as we, That so long as we, or any other, doth own the Earth to be the peculier Interest of Lords and Landlords, and not common to others as well as them, we own the Curse, and holds the Creation under bondage; and so long as we or any other doth own Landlords and Tennants, for one to call the Land his, or another to hire it of him, or for one to give hire, and for another to work for hire; this is to dishonour the work of Creation; as if the righteous Creator should have respect to persons, and therefore made the Earth for some, and not for all: And so long as we, or any other maintain this Civil Propriety, we consent still to hold the Creation down under that bondage it groans under, and so we should hinder the work of Restoration, and sin against Light that is given into us, and so through fear of the flesh man, lose our peace.
And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill.
First by their Oppression. They have by their subtle imaginary and covetous wit, got the plain-hearted poor, or yonger Brethren to work for them, for small wages, and by their work have got a great increase; for the poor by their labour lifts up Tyrants to rule over them; or else by their covetous wit, they have out-reached the plain-hearted in Buying and Selling, and thereby inriched themselves, but impoverished others: or else by their subtile wit, having been a lifter up into places of Trust, have inforced people to pay Money for a Publick use, but have divided much of it into their private purses; and so have got it by Oppression.
Then Secondly for Murther; They have by subtile wit and power, pretended to preserve a people in safety by the power of the Sword; and what by large Pay, much Free-quarter, and other Booties, which they call their own, they get much Monies, and with this they buy Land, and become landlords; and if once Landlords, then they rise to be Justices, Rulers, and State Governours, as experience shewes: But all this is but a bloudy and subtile Theevery, countenanced by a Law that Covetousness made; and is a breach of the Seventh Commandement, Thou shalt not kill.
And likewise Thirdly a breach of the Eighth Commandement, Thou shalt not steal; but these landlords have thus stoln the Earth from their fellow Creatures, that have an equal share with them, by the Law of Reason and Creation, as well as they.
And such as these rise up to be rich in the objects of the Earth; then by their plausible words of flattery to the plain-hearted people, whom they deceive, and that lies under confusion and blindness: They are lifted up to be Teachers, Rulers, and Law makers over them that lifted them up; as if the Earth were made peculiarly for them, and not for other weal: If you cast your eye a little backward, you shall see, That this outward Teaching and Ruling power, is the Babylonish yoke laid upon Israel of old, under Nebuchadnezzar; and so Successively from that time, the Conquering Enemy, have still laid these yokes upon Israel to keep Jacob down: And the last enslaving Conquest which the Enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England; and from that time, Kings, Lords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and the violent bitter people that are Free-holders, are and have been Successively. The Norman Bastard William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferiour Officers, and Common souldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuite of that victory, Imprisoning, Robbing, and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites.
And this appears cleer, For when any Trustee or State Officer is to be Chosen, The Free-holders or Landlords must be the Chusers, who are the Norman Common Souldiers, spread abroad in the Land; And who must be Chosen: but some very rich man, who is the Successor of the Norman Colonels or high Officers. And to what end have they been thus Chosen? but to Establish that Norman power the more forcibly over the enslaved English, and to beat them down again, when as they gather heart to seek for Liberty.
For what are all those Binding and Restraining Laws that have been made from one Age to another since that Conquest, and are still upheld by Furie over the People? I say, What are they? but the Cords, Bands, Manacles, and Yokes that the enslaved English, like Newgate Prisoners, wears upn their hands and legs as they walk the streets; by which those Norman Oppressors, and these their Successors from Age to Age have enslaved the poor People by, killed their younger Brother, and would not suffer Jacob to arise.
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants; but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened, and the Poor peoples hearts comforted by an universal Consent of making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.
If you look through the Earth, you shall see, That the landlords, Teachers and Rulers, are Oppressors, Murtherers, and Theeves in this manner; But it was not thus from the Beginning. And this is one Reason of our digging and labouring the Earth one with another; That we might work in righteousness, and lift up the Creation from bondage: For so long as we own Landlords in this Corrupt Settlement, we cannot work in righteousness; for we should still lift up the Curse, and tread down the Creation, dishonour the Spirit of universal Liberty, and hinder the work of Restauration.
Secondly, In that we begin to Digge upon George-Hill, to eate our Bread together by righteous labour, and sweat of our browes, It was shewed us by Vision in Dreams, and out of Dreams, That that should be the Place we should begin upon; And though that Earth in view of Flesh, be very barren, yet we should trust the Spirit for a blessing. And that not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England, and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.
Thirdly, It is shewed us, That all the Prophecies, Visions, and Revelations of Scriptures, of Prophets, and Apostles, concerning the calling of the Jews, the Restauration of Israel; and making of that People, the Inheritors of the whole Earth; doth all seat themselves in this Work of making the Earth a Common Treasury; as you may read, Ezek. 24.26, 27, &c. Jer. 33.7 to 12. Esay. 49.17, 18, &c. Zach. 8. from 4, to 12, Dan. 2.44, 45, Dan. 7.27. Hos. 14.5, 6,7. Joel 2.26, 27. Amos 9. from 8 to the end, Obad. 17.18.21. Mic. 5. from 7 to the end, Hab. 2.6, 7, 8, 13, 14. Gen. 18.18. Rom. 11.15. Zeph. 3. &c. Zech. 14.9.
And when the Son of man , was gone from the Apostles, his Spirit descended upon the Apostles and Brethren, as they were waiting at Jerusalem; and Rich men sold their Possessions, and gave part to the Poor; and no man said, That ought that he possessed was his own, for they had all things Common, Act. 4.32.
Now this Community was supprest by covetous proud flesh, which was the powers that ruled the world; and the righteous Father suffered himself thus to be suppressed for a time, times and dividing of time, or for 42 months, or for three days and half, which are all but one and the same term of time: And the world is now come to the half day; and the Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of universal Community and Freedom is risen, and is rising, and will rise higher and higher, till those pure waters of Shiloe, the Well Springs of Life and Liberty to the whole Creation, do over-run A-dam, and drown those banks of Bondage, Curse and Slavery.
Fourthly, This work to make the Earth a Common Treasury, was shewed us by Voice in Trance, and out of Trance, which which words were these,
Work together, Eate Bread together, Declare this all abroad.
Which Voice was heard Three times: And in Obedience to the Spirit, We have Declared this by Word of mouth, as occasion was offered. Secondly, We have declared it by writing, which others may reade. Thirdly, We have now begun to declare it by Action, in Diging up the Common Land, and casting in Seed that we may eat our Bread together in righteousness. And every one that comes to work, shall eate the Fruit of their own labours, one having as much Freedom in the Fruit of the Earth as another. Another Voice that was heard was this,
Israel shall neither take Hire, nor give Hire.
And if so, then certainly none shall say, This is my Land, work for me, and IÕle give you Wages. For, The Earth is the Lords, that is, Mans, who is Lord of the Creation, in every branch of mankind; perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind; and mankind living in the light and obedience to Reason, the King of righteousness, is thereby made a fit and compleat Lord of the Creation. And the whole Earth is this Lords Man, subject to the Spirit. And not the Inheritance of covetous proud Flesh, that is selvish, and enmity to the Spirit.
And if the Earth be not peculiar to any one branch, or branches of manking, but the Inheritance of all; Then is it Free and Common for all, to work together, and eate together.
And truly, you Counsellors and Powers of the Earth, know this, That wheresoever there is a People, thus united by Common Community of livelihood into Oneness, it will become the strongest Land in the World, for then they will be as one man to defend their Inheritance; and Salvation (which is Liberty and Peace) is the Walls and Bulwarks of that Land or City.
Whereas on the otherside, pleading for Propriety and single Interst, divides the People of a land, and the whole world into Parties, and is the cause of all Wars and Bloud-shed, and Contention every where.
Another Voice that was heard in a Trance, was this,
Whosoever labours the Earth for any Person or Persons, that are lifted up to rule over others, and doth not look upon themselves, as Equal to others in the Creation: The hand of the Lord shall be upon that Laborer: I the Lord have spoke it, and I will do it.
This Declares likewise to all Laborers, or such as are called Poor people, that they shall not dare to work for Hire, for any Landlord, or for any that is lifted up above others; for by their labours, they have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny; and by denying to labor for Hire, they shall pull them down again. He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse.
Fiftly, That which does incourage us to go on in this work, is this; we find the streaming out of Love in our hearts towards all; to enemies as well as friends; we would have none live in Beggery, Poverty, or Sorrow, but that everyone might enjoy the benefit of his creation: we have peace in our hearts, and quiet rejoycing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.
And we are assured, that in the strength of this Spirit that hath manifested himself to us, we shall not be startled, neither at Prison nor Death, while we are about his work; and we have bin made to sit down and count what it may cost us in undertaking such a work, and we know the full sum, and are resolved to give all that we have to buy this Pearl which we see in the Field.
For by this work we are assured, and Reason makes it appear to others, that Bondage shall be removed, Tears wiped away, and all poor People by their righteous Labours shall be relieved, and freed from Poverty and Straits; For is this work of Restoration there will be no begger in Israel: For surely, if there was no Begger in literal Israel, there shall be no Begger in Spiritual Israel the Anti-type, much more.
Sixtly, We have another encouragement that this work shall prosper, Because we see it to be the fulness of Time: For whereas The Son of Man, the Lamb, came in the Fulness of Time, that is, when the Powers of the World made the Earth stink every where, by oppressing others, under pretense of worshipping the Spirit rightly, by the Types and Sacrifices of Moses law; the Priests were grown so abominably Covetous and Proud, that they made the People to loathe the Sacrifices and to groan under the Burden of their Oppressing Pride.
Even so now in this Age of the World, that the Spirit is upon his Resurrection, it is likewise the Fulness of Time in a higher measure. For whereas the People generally in former times did rest upon the very observation of the Sacrifices and Types, but persecuted the very name of the Spirit; Even so now, Professors do rest upn the bare observatin of Forms and Customs, and pretend to the Spirit, and yet persecutes, grudges, and hates the power of the Spirit; and as it was then, so it is now: All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers. For do not I see that everyone Preacheth for money, Counsels for money, and fights for money to maintain particular Interests? And none of these three, that pretend to give liberty to the Creation, do give liberty to the Creation; neither can they, for they are enemies to universal liberty; So that the earth stinks with their Hypocrisie, Covetousness, Envie, sottish Ignorance, and Pride.
The common People are filled with good words from Pulpits and Councel Tables, but no good Deeds; For they wait and wait for good, and for deliverances, but none comes; While they wait for liberty, behold greater bondage comes insteed of it, and burdens, oppressions, taskmasters, from Sessions, Lawyers, Bayliffs of Hundreds, Committees, Impropriators, Clerks of Peace, and Courts of Justice, so called, does whip the People by old Popish weather-beaten Laws, that were excommunicate long age by Covenants, Oaths, and Ordinances; but as yet are not cast out, but rather taken in again, to be standing pricks in our eys, and thorns in our side; Beside Free-quartering, Plundering by some rude Souldiers, and the abounding of Taxes; which if they were equally divided among the Souldiery, and not too much bagd up in the hands of particulars Officers and Trustees, there would be less complaining: Besides the horrible cheating that is in Buying and Selling, and the cruel Oppression of Landlords, and Lords of Mannours, and quarter Sessions; Many that have bin good Souldiers, and so to fight to uphold the Curse, or else live in great straits and beggery: O you A-dams of the Earth, you have right Clothing, full Bellies, have your Honors and Ease, and you puffe at this; But know thous stout-hearted Pharoah, that the day of Judgement is begun, and it will reach to thee ere long; Jacob hath bin very low, but he is rising, and will rise, do the worst thou canst; and the poor people whom thou oppresses, shall be the Saviours of the land; For the blessing is rising up in them, and thou shalt be ashamed.
And thus, you Powers of England, and of the whole World, we have declared our Reasons, why we have begun to dug upon George hill in Surrey. One thing I must tell you more, in the close, which I received in voce likewise at another time; and when I received it, my ey was set towards you. The words were these:
Let Israel go free.
Surely, as Israel lay 430. years under Pharoahs bondage, before Moses was sent to fetch them out: even so Israel (the Elect Spirit spread in Sons and Daughters) hath lain three times so long already, which is the Anti-type, under your Bondage, and cruel Taskmasters: But now the time of Deliverance is come, and thou proud Esau, and stout-hearted Covetousness, thou must come down, and be lord of the Creation no longer. For now the King of Righteousness is rising to Rule In, and Over the Earth.
Therefore, if thou wilt find Mercy, Let Israel go Free; break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Propriety, dis-own this oppressing Murder, Oppressin and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land, owning of landlords, and paying of Rents, and give thy Free Consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury, without grumbling; That the younger Brethren may live comfortably upon Earth, as well as the Elder: That all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.
And hereby thou wilt Honour thy Father, and thy Mother. Thy Father, which is the Spirit of Community, that made all, and that dwels in all. Thy Mother, which is the Earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her Children. Therefore do not thou hinder the Mother Earth, from giving all her Children such, by thy Inclosing it into particular hands, and holding up that cursed Bondage of Inclosure by thy Power.
And then thou wilt repent of thy Theft, in maintaining the breach of the eight Commandment, by Stealing the Land as I say from thy fellow-creatures, or younger Brothers: which thou and all thy landlords have, and do live in the breach of that Commandment.
Then thou wilt Own no other God, or Ruling Power, but One, which is the King of Righteousness, ruling and dwelling in every one, and in the whole; whereas now thou hast many gods: For Covetousness is thy God, Pride, and an Envious murdering Humor (to kill one by Prison or Gallows, that crosses thee, though their cause be pure, sound, and good reason) is thy God, Self-love, and slavish Fear (lest others serve thee as thou hast served them) is thy god, Hypocrisie, Fleshly Imagination, that keeps no Promise, Covenant, nor Protestation, is thy God: love of Money, Honor, and Ease, is thy God: And all these, and the like Ruling Powers, makes thee Blind, and hard-hearted, that thou does not, nor cannot lay to heart the affliction of others, though they dy for want of bread, in that rich City, undone under your eys.
Therefore once more, Let Israel go Free, that the poor may labour the Waste land, and such the Brests of their mother Earth, that they starve not: And in so doing, thou wilt keep the Sabbath day, which is a day of Rest; sweetly enjoying the Peace of the Spirit of Righteousness; and find Peace, by living among a people that live in peace; this will be a day of Rest which thou never knew yet.
But I do not entreat thee, for thous art not to be intreated, but in the Name of the lord, that hath drawn me forth to speak to thee; I, yea I say, I Command thee, to let Israel go Free, and quietly to gather together into the place where I shall appoint; and hold them no longer in bondage.
And thou A-dam that holds the Earth in slavery under the Curse: If thou wilt not let Israel go Free; for thou being the Antitype, will be more stout and lusty then the Egyptian Paroah of old, who was thy Type; Then know, That whereas I brought Ten Plagues upon him, I will Multiply may Plagues upon thee, till I make thee weary, and miserably ashamed: And I will bring out my People with a strong hand, and stretched out arme.
Thus we have discharged our Souls in declaring the Cause of our Digging upon George-Hill in Surrey, that the Great Councel and Army of the Land may take notice of it, That there is no intent of Tumult or Fighting, but only to get Bread to eat, with the sweat of our brows; working together in righteousness, and eating the blessings of the Earth in peace.
And if any of you that are the great Ones of the Earth, that have been bred tenderly, and cannot word, do bring in your Stock into this Commond Treasury as an Offering to the work of Righteousness; we will work for you, and you shall receive as we receive. But if you will not, but Paroah like cry, Who is the Lord that we should obey him? and endeavour to Oppose, then know, That he that delivered Israel from Pharoah of old, is the same Power still, in whom we trust, and whom we serve; for this Conquest over thee shall be got, not by Sword or Weapon, but by my Spirit saith the Lord of Hosts.
Markin comment:
On a day when there has been a full-court press media blitz (with endless blitzes 24/7/365 to come ) over the engagement of British heir to the throne Prince Williams and his Kate I feel compelled to reach back the mid-17th century for a little wisdom about kings, kingships and the struggle for human progress. True Leveller (Digger) Gerrard Winstanley came immediately to mind (although Levelers John Lilburne and Robert Overton also received my consideration). Abolish the British monarchy now! Fight for Workers Republics (and keep them)!
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Gerrard Winstanley (1649)
The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.
Source: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/Hill.htm.
A Declaration to the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World, shewing the Cause why the Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up, Manure, and Sow Corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by those that have Subscribed, and thousands more that gives Consent.
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.
But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more then in the Spirit Reason and Righteosness, who manifests himself to be the indweller in the Five Sences, of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling; then he fell into blindness of mind and weakness of heart, and runs abroad for a Teacher and Ruler: And so selfish imaginations taking possession of the Five Sences, and ruling as King in the room of Reason therein, and working with Covetousnesse, did set up one man to teach and rule over another; and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage, and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, then the Beasts of the field were to him.
And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting int he comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
But this coming in of Bondage, is called "A-dam", because this ruling and teaching power without, doth "dam" up the Spirit of Peace and Liberty; First within the heart, by filling it with slavish fears of others. Secondly without, by giving the bodies of one to be imprisoned, punished and oppressed by the outward power of another. And this evil was brought upon us through his own Covetousnesse, whereby he is blinded and made weak, and sees not the Law of Righteousnesse in his heart, which is the pure light of Reason, but looks abroad for it, and thereby the Creation is cast under bondage and curse, and the creator is sleighted; First by the Teachers and Rulers that sets themselves down in the Spirits room, to teach and rule, where he himself is only King. Secondly by the other, that refuses the Spirit, to be taught and governed by fellow Creatures, and this was called Israels Sin, in casting off the Lord and chusing Saul, one like themselves to be their King, when as they had the same Spirit of Reason and government in themselves, as he had, if they were but subject. And Israels rejecting of outward teachers and rulers to embrace the Lord, and to be all taught and ruled by that righteous King, that Jeremiah Prophesied shall rule in the new Heavens and new Earth in the latter dayes, will be their Restauration from bondage, Jer. 23.5, 6.
But for the present state of the old World that is running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away, we see proud Imaginary flesh, which is the wise Serpent, rises up in flesh and gets dominion in some to rule over others, and so forces one part of the Creation man, to be a slave to another; and thereby the Spirit is killed in both. The one looks upon himself as a teacher and ruler, and so is lifted up in pride over his fellow Creature: The other looks upon himself as imperfect, and so is dejected in his spirit, and looks upon his fellow Creature of his own Image, as a Lord above him.
And thus Esau, the man of flesh, which is Covetousness and Pride, hath killed Jacob, the Spirit of meeknesse, and righteous government in the light of Reason, and rules over him: And so the Earth that was made a common Treasury for all to live comfortably upon, is become through mans unrighteous actions one over another, to be a place, wherein one torments another.
Now the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason, suffered himself thus to be rejected, and troden underfoot by the covetous proud flesh, for a certain time limited; therefore saith he, The Seed out of whom the Creation did proceed, which is my Self, shall bruise this Serpents head, and restore my Creation again from this curse and bondage; and when I the King of Righteousnesse raigns in every man, I will be the blessing of the Earth and the joy of all Nations.
And since the coming in of the stoppage, or the A-dam the Earth hath been inclosed and given to the Elder brother Esau, or man of flesh, and hath been bought and sold from one to another; and Jacob, or the younger brother, that is to succeed or come forth next, who is the universal spreading power of righteousnesse that gives liberty to the whole Creation, is made a servant.
And this Elder Son, or man of bondage, hath held the Earth in bondage to himself, not by a meek Law of Righteousnesse, But by subtle selfish Councels, and by open and violent force; for wherefore is it that there is such Wars and rumours of Wars in the Nations of the Earth? and wherefore are men so mad to destroy one another? But only to uphold Civil propriety of Honor, Dominion and Riches one over another, which is the curse the Creation groans under, waiting for deliverance.
But when once the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again, as it must, for all the Prophesies of Scriptures and Reason are Circled here in this Community, and mankind must have the Law of Righteousness once more writ in his heart, and all must be made of one heart, and one mind.
Then this Enmity in all Lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a Dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the Earth then another; for he that will rule over, imprison, oppresse, and kill his fellow Creatures, under what pretence soever, is a destroyer of the Creation, and an actor of the Curse, and walks contrary to the rule of righteousnesse: (Do, as you would have others do to you; and love your Enemies, not in words, but in actions).
Therefore you powers of the Earth, or Lord Esau, the Elder brother, because youy have appeared to rule the Creation, first take notice, That the powere that sets you to work, is selvish Covetousness, and an aspiring Pride, to live in glory and ease over Jacob, the meek Spirit; that is, the Seed that lies hid, in & among the poor Common People, or younger Brother, out of whom the blessing of Deliverance is to rise and spring up to all Nations.
And Reason, the living king of righteousnesse, doth only look on, and lets thee alone, That whereas thou counts thy self an Angel of Light, thou shalt appear in the light of the Sun, to be a Devil, A-dam, and the Curse that the Creation groans under; and the time is now come for thy downfal, and Jacob must rise, who is the universal Spirit of love and righteousnesse, that fils, and will fill all the Earth.
Thou teaching and ruling power of flesh, thou hast had three periods of time, to vaunt thy self over thy Brother; the first was from the time of thy coming in, called A-dam, or a stoppage, till Moses came; and there thou that wast a self-lover in Cain, killed thy brother Abel, a plain-hearted man that loved righteousnesse: And thou by thy wisdom and beastly government, made the whole Earth to stinck, till Noah came, which was a time of the world, like the coming in of the watery Seed into the womb, towards the bringing forth of the man child.
And from Noah till Moses came, thou still hast ruled in vaunting, pride, and cruel oppression; Ishmael against Isaac, Esau against Jacob; for thou hast still been the man of flesh that hath ever persecuted the man of righteousnesse, the Spirit Reason.
And Secondly, from Moses till the Son of Man came, which was time of the world, that the man child could not speak like a man, but lisping, making signs to shew his meaning; as we see many Creatures that cannot speak do. For Moses Law was a Language lapped up in Types, Sacrifices, Forms, and Customs, which was weak time. And in this time likewise, O thou teaching and ruling power, thou wast an oppressor; for look into Scriptures and see if Aaron and the Priests were not the first that deceived the people; and the Rulers, as Kings and Governors, were continually the Ocean-head, out of whose power, Burdens, Oppressions, and Poverty did flow out upon the Earth: and these two Powers still hath been the Curse, that hath led the Earth, mankind, into confusion and death by their imaginary and selvish teaching and ruling, and it could be no otherwise; for while man looks upon himself, as an imperfect Creation, and seeks and runs abroad for a teacher and a rule, he is all this time a stranger to the Spirit that is within himself.
But though the Earth hath been generally thus in darknesse, since the A-dam rise up, and hath owned a Light, and a Law without them to walk by, yet some have been found as watchmen, in this night time of the world, that have been taught by the Spirit within them, and not by any flesh without them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Prophets: And these, and such as these, have still been the Butt, at whom, the powers of the Earth in all ages of the world, by their selvish Laws, have shot their fury.
And then Thirdly, from the time of the Son of man, which was time that the man-child began to speak like a child growing upward to manhood, till now, that the Spirit is rising up in strength. O thou teaching and ruling power of the earthly man, thou has been an oppressor, by imprisonment, impoverishing, and martyrdom; and all thy power and wit, hath been to make Laws, and execute thm against such as stand for universal Liberty, which is the rising up of Jacob: as by those ancient enslaving Laws not yet blotted out, but held up as weapons against the man-child.
O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing.
First, Thou hast made the people to take a Covenant and Oaths to endeavour a Reformation, and to bring in Liberty every man in his place; and yet while a man is in pursuing of that Covenant, he is imprisoned and oppressed by thy Officers, Courts, and Justices, so called.
Thou hast made Ordinances to cast down Oppressing, Popish, Episcopal, Self-willed and Prerogative Laws; yet we see, That Self-wil and Prerogative power, is the great standing Law, that rules all in action, and others in words.
Thou hast made many promises and protestations to make the Land a Free Nation: And yet at this very day, the same people, to whom thou hast made such Protestatins of Liberty, are oppressed by thy Courts, Sizes, Sessions, by thy Justices and Clarks of the Peace, so called, Bayliffs, Committees, are imprisoned, and forced to spend that bread, that should save their lives from Famine.
And all this, Because they stand to maintain an universal Liberty and Freedom, which not only is our Birthright, which our Maker gave us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us, from under the former oppressing Powers that are gone before, and which likewise we have bought with our Money, in Taxes, Free-quarter, and Bloud-shed; all which Sums thou hast received at our hands, and yet thou hast not given us our bargain.
O thou A-dam, thu Esau, thou Cain, thou Hypocritical man of flesh, when wilt thou cease to kill thy younger Brother? Surely thou must not do this great work of advancing the Creation out of Bondage; for thou art lost extremely, and drowned in the Sea of Covetousnesse, Pride, and hardness of heart. The blessing shall rise out of the dust which thou treadest under foot, Even the poor despised People, and they shall hold up Salvation to this Land, and to all Lands, and thou shalt be ashamed.
Our bodies as yet are in thy hand, our Spirit waits in quiet and peace, upon our Father for Deliverance; and if he give our Bloud into thy hand, for thee to spill, know this, That he is our Almighty Captain: And if some of you will not dare to shed your bloud, to maintain Tyranny and Oppression upon the Creation, know this, That our Bloud and Life shall not be unwilling to be delivered up in meekness to maintain universal Liberty, that so the Curse on our part may be taken off the Creation.
And we shall not do this by force of Arms, we abhorre it, For that is the work of the Midianites, to kill one another; But by obeying the Lord of Hosts, who hath Revealed himself in us, and to us, by labouring the Earth in righteousness together, to eate our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one man, or as one house of Israel restored from Bondage; and so by the power of Reason, the Law of righteousness in us, we endeavour to lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civil Propriety, which it groans under.
We are made to hold forth this Declaration to you that are the Great Councel, and to you the Great Army of the Land of England, that you may know what we would have, and what you are bound to give us by your Covenants and Promises; and that you may joyn with us in this Work, and so find Peace. Or else, if you do oppose us, we have peace in our Work, and in declaring this Report: And you shall be left without excuse.
The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows.
And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation; so that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see, he is no respecter of Persons, but equally loves his whole Creation, and hates nothing but the Serpent, which is Covetousness, branching forth into selvish Imagination, Pride, Envie, Hypocrisie, Uncleanness; all seeking the ease and honor of flesh, and fighting against the Spirit Reason that made the Creation; for that is the Corruption, the Curse, the Devil, the Father of Lies; Death and Bondage that Serpent and Dragon that the Creation is to be delivered from.
And we have moved hereunto for that Reason, and other which hath been shewed us, both by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation.
For it is shewed us, That so long as we, That so long as we, or any other, doth own the Earth to be the peculier Interest of Lords and Landlords, and not common to others as well as them, we own the Curse, and holds the Creation under bondage; and so long as we or any other doth own Landlords and Tennants, for one to call the Land his, or another to hire it of him, or for one to give hire, and for another to work for hire; this is to dishonour the work of Creation; as if the righteous Creator should have respect to persons, and therefore made the Earth for some, and not for all: And so long as we, or any other maintain this Civil Propriety, we consent still to hold the Creation down under that bondage it groans under, and so we should hinder the work of Restoration, and sin against Light that is given into us, and so through fear of the flesh man, lose our peace.
And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill.
First by their Oppression. They have by their subtle imaginary and covetous wit, got the plain-hearted poor, or yonger Brethren to work for them, for small wages, and by their work have got a great increase; for the poor by their labour lifts up Tyrants to rule over them; or else by their covetous wit, they have out-reached the plain-hearted in Buying and Selling, and thereby inriched themselves, but impoverished others: or else by their subtile wit, having been a lifter up into places of Trust, have inforced people to pay Money for a Publick use, but have divided much of it into their private purses; and so have got it by Oppression.
Then Secondly for Murther; They have by subtile wit and power, pretended to preserve a people in safety by the power of the Sword; and what by large Pay, much Free-quarter, and other Booties, which they call their own, they get much Monies, and with this they buy Land, and become landlords; and if once Landlords, then they rise to be Justices, Rulers, and State Governours, as experience shewes: But all this is but a bloudy and subtile Theevery, countenanced by a Law that Covetousness made; and is a breach of the Seventh Commandement, Thou shalt not kill.
And likewise Thirdly a breach of the Eighth Commandement, Thou shalt not steal; but these landlords have thus stoln the Earth from their fellow Creatures, that have an equal share with them, by the Law of Reason and Creation, as well as they.
And such as these rise up to be rich in the objects of the Earth; then by their plausible words of flattery to the plain-hearted people, whom they deceive, and that lies under confusion and blindness: They are lifted up to be Teachers, Rulers, and Law makers over them that lifted them up; as if the Earth were made peculiarly for them, and not for other weal: If you cast your eye a little backward, you shall see, That this outward Teaching and Ruling power, is the Babylonish yoke laid upon Israel of old, under Nebuchadnezzar; and so Successively from that time, the Conquering Enemy, have still laid these yokes upon Israel to keep Jacob down: And the last enslaving Conquest which the Enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England; and from that time, Kings, Lords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and the violent bitter people that are Free-holders, are and have been Successively. The Norman Bastard William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferiour Officers, and Common souldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuite of that victory, Imprisoning, Robbing, and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites.
And this appears cleer, For when any Trustee or State Officer is to be Chosen, The Free-holders or Landlords must be the Chusers, who are the Norman Common Souldiers, spread abroad in the Land; And who must be Chosen: but some very rich man, who is the Successor of the Norman Colonels or high Officers. And to what end have they been thus Chosen? but to Establish that Norman power the more forcibly over the enslaved English, and to beat them down again, when as they gather heart to seek for Liberty.
For what are all those Binding and Restraining Laws that have been made from one Age to another since that Conquest, and are still upheld by Furie over the People? I say, What are they? but the Cords, Bands, Manacles, and Yokes that the enslaved English, like Newgate Prisoners, wears upn their hands and legs as they walk the streets; by which those Norman Oppressors, and these their Successors from Age to Age have enslaved the poor People by, killed their younger Brother, and would not suffer Jacob to arise.
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants; but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened, and the Poor peoples hearts comforted by an universal Consent of making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.
If you look through the Earth, you shall see, That the landlords, Teachers and Rulers, are Oppressors, Murtherers, and Theeves in this manner; But it was not thus from the Beginning. And this is one Reason of our digging and labouring the Earth one with another; That we might work in righteousness, and lift up the Creation from bondage: For so long as we own Landlords in this Corrupt Settlement, we cannot work in righteousness; for we should still lift up the Curse, and tread down the Creation, dishonour the Spirit of universal Liberty, and hinder the work of Restauration.
Secondly, In that we begin to Digge upon George-Hill, to eate our Bread together by righteous labour, and sweat of our browes, It was shewed us by Vision in Dreams, and out of Dreams, That that should be the Place we should begin upon; And though that Earth in view of Flesh, be very barren, yet we should trust the Spirit for a blessing. And that not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England, and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.
Thirdly, It is shewed us, That all the Prophecies, Visions, and Revelations of Scriptures, of Prophets, and Apostles, concerning the calling of the Jews, the Restauration of Israel; and making of that People, the Inheritors of the whole Earth; doth all seat themselves in this Work of making the Earth a Common Treasury; as you may read, Ezek. 24.26, 27, &c. Jer. 33.7 to 12. Esay. 49.17, 18, &c. Zach. 8. from 4, to 12, Dan. 2.44, 45, Dan. 7.27. Hos. 14.5, 6,7. Joel 2.26, 27. Amos 9. from 8 to the end, Obad. 17.18.21. Mic. 5. from 7 to the end, Hab. 2.6, 7, 8, 13, 14. Gen. 18.18. Rom. 11.15. Zeph. 3. &c. Zech. 14.9.
And when the Son of man , was gone from the Apostles, his Spirit descended upon the Apostles and Brethren, as they were waiting at Jerusalem; and Rich men sold their Possessions, and gave part to the Poor; and no man said, That ought that he possessed was his own, for they had all things Common, Act. 4.32.
Now this Community was supprest by covetous proud flesh, which was the powers that ruled the world; and the righteous Father suffered himself thus to be suppressed for a time, times and dividing of time, or for 42 months, or for three days and half, which are all but one and the same term of time: And the world is now come to the half day; and the Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of universal Community and Freedom is risen, and is rising, and will rise higher and higher, till those pure waters of Shiloe, the Well Springs of Life and Liberty to the whole Creation, do over-run A-dam, and drown those banks of Bondage, Curse and Slavery.
Fourthly, This work to make the Earth a Common Treasury, was shewed us by Voice in Trance, and out of Trance, which which words were these,
Work together, Eate Bread together, Declare this all abroad.
Which Voice was heard Three times: And in Obedience to the Spirit, We have Declared this by Word of mouth, as occasion was offered. Secondly, We have declared it by writing, which others may reade. Thirdly, We have now begun to declare it by Action, in Diging up the Common Land, and casting in Seed that we may eat our Bread together in righteousness. And every one that comes to work, shall eate the Fruit of their own labours, one having as much Freedom in the Fruit of the Earth as another. Another Voice that was heard was this,
Israel shall neither take Hire, nor give Hire.
And if so, then certainly none shall say, This is my Land, work for me, and IÕle give you Wages. For, The Earth is the Lords, that is, Mans, who is Lord of the Creation, in every branch of mankind; perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind; and mankind living in the light and obedience to Reason, the King of righteousness, is thereby made a fit and compleat Lord of the Creation. And the whole Earth is this Lords Man, subject to the Spirit. And not the Inheritance of covetous proud Flesh, that is selvish, and enmity to the Spirit.
And if the Earth be not peculiar to any one branch, or branches of manking, but the Inheritance of all; Then is it Free and Common for all, to work together, and eate together.
And truly, you Counsellors and Powers of the Earth, know this, That wheresoever there is a People, thus united by Common Community of livelihood into Oneness, it will become the strongest Land in the World, for then they will be as one man to defend their Inheritance; and Salvation (which is Liberty and Peace) is the Walls and Bulwarks of that Land or City.
Whereas on the otherside, pleading for Propriety and single Interst, divides the People of a land, and the whole world into Parties, and is the cause of all Wars and Bloud-shed, and Contention every where.
Another Voice that was heard in a Trance, was this,
Whosoever labours the Earth for any Person or Persons, that are lifted up to rule over others, and doth not look upon themselves, as Equal to others in the Creation: The hand of the Lord shall be upon that Laborer: I the Lord have spoke it, and I will do it.
This Declares likewise to all Laborers, or such as are called Poor people, that they shall not dare to work for Hire, for any Landlord, or for any that is lifted up above others; for by their labours, they have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny; and by denying to labor for Hire, they shall pull them down again. He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse.
Fiftly, That which does incourage us to go on in this work, is this; we find the streaming out of Love in our hearts towards all; to enemies as well as friends; we would have none live in Beggery, Poverty, or Sorrow, but that everyone might enjoy the benefit of his creation: we have peace in our hearts, and quiet rejoycing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.
And we are assured, that in the strength of this Spirit that hath manifested himself to us, we shall not be startled, neither at Prison nor Death, while we are about his work; and we have bin made to sit down and count what it may cost us in undertaking such a work, and we know the full sum, and are resolved to give all that we have to buy this Pearl which we see in the Field.
For by this work we are assured, and Reason makes it appear to others, that Bondage shall be removed, Tears wiped away, and all poor People by their righteous Labours shall be relieved, and freed from Poverty and Straits; For is this work of Restoration there will be no begger in Israel: For surely, if there was no Begger in literal Israel, there shall be no Begger in Spiritual Israel the Anti-type, much more.
Sixtly, We have another encouragement that this work shall prosper, Because we see it to be the fulness of Time: For whereas The Son of Man, the Lamb, came in the Fulness of Time, that is, when the Powers of the World made the Earth stink every where, by oppressing others, under pretense of worshipping the Spirit rightly, by the Types and Sacrifices of Moses law; the Priests were grown so abominably Covetous and Proud, that they made the People to loathe the Sacrifices and to groan under the Burden of their Oppressing Pride.
Even so now in this Age of the World, that the Spirit is upon his Resurrection, it is likewise the Fulness of Time in a higher measure. For whereas the People generally in former times did rest upon the very observation of the Sacrifices and Types, but persecuted the very name of the Spirit; Even so now, Professors do rest upn the bare observatin of Forms and Customs, and pretend to the Spirit, and yet persecutes, grudges, and hates the power of the Spirit; and as it was then, so it is now: All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers. For do not I see that everyone Preacheth for money, Counsels for money, and fights for money to maintain particular Interests? And none of these three, that pretend to give liberty to the Creation, do give liberty to the Creation; neither can they, for they are enemies to universal liberty; So that the earth stinks with their Hypocrisie, Covetousness, Envie, sottish Ignorance, and Pride.
The common People are filled with good words from Pulpits and Councel Tables, but no good Deeds; For they wait and wait for good, and for deliverances, but none comes; While they wait for liberty, behold greater bondage comes insteed of it, and burdens, oppressions, taskmasters, from Sessions, Lawyers, Bayliffs of Hundreds, Committees, Impropriators, Clerks of Peace, and Courts of Justice, so called, does whip the People by old Popish weather-beaten Laws, that were excommunicate long age by Covenants, Oaths, and Ordinances; but as yet are not cast out, but rather taken in again, to be standing pricks in our eys, and thorns in our side; Beside Free-quartering, Plundering by some rude Souldiers, and the abounding of Taxes; which if they were equally divided among the Souldiery, and not too much bagd up in the hands of particulars Officers and Trustees, there would be less complaining: Besides the horrible cheating that is in Buying and Selling, and the cruel Oppression of Landlords, and Lords of Mannours, and quarter Sessions; Many that have bin good Souldiers, and so to fight to uphold the Curse, or else live in great straits and beggery: O you A-dams of the Earth, you have right Clothing, full Bellies, have your Honors and Ease, and you puffe at this; But know thous stout-hearted Pharoah, that the day of Judgement is begun, and it will reach to thee ere long; Jacob hath bin very low, but he is rising, and will rise, do the worst thou canst; and the poor people whom thou oppresses, shall be the Saviours of the land; For the blessing is rising up in them, and thou shalt be ashamed.
And thus, you Powers of England, and of the whole World, we have declared our Reasons, why we have begun to dug upon George hill in Surrey. One thing I must tell you more, in the close, which I received in voce likewise at another time; and when I received it, my ey was set towards you. The words were these:
Let Israel go free.
Surely, as Israel lay 430. years under Pharoahs bondage, before Moses was sent to fetch them out: even so Israel (the Elect Spirit spread in Sons and Daughters) hath lain three times so long already, which is the Anti-type, under your Bondage, and cruel Taskmasters: But now the time of Deliverance is come, and thou proud Esau, and stout-hearted Covetousness, thou must come down, and be lord of the Creation no longer. For now the King of Righteousness is rising to Rule In, and Over the Earth.
Therefore, if thou wilt find Mercy, Let Israel go Free; break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Propriety, dis-own this oppressing Murder, Oppressin and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land, owning of landlords, and paying of Rents, and give thy Free Consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury, without grumbling; That the younger Brethren may live comfortably upon Earth, as well as the Elder: That all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.
And hereby thou wilt Honour thy Father, and thy Mother. Thy Father, which is the Spirit of Community, that made all, and that dwels in all. Thy Mother, which is the Earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her Children. Therefore do not thou hinder the Mother Earth, from giving all her Children such, by thy Inclosing it into particular hands, and holding up that cursed Bondage of Inclosure by thy Power.
And then thou wilt repent of thy Theft, in maintaining the breach of the eight Commandment, by Stealing the Land as I say from thy fellow-creatures, or younger Brothers: which thou and all thy landlords have, and do live in the breach of that Commandment.
Then thou wilt Own no other God, or Ruling Power, but One, which is the King of Righteousness, ruling and dwelling in every one, and in the whole; whereas now thou hast many gods: For Covetousness is thy God, Pride, and an Envious murdering Humor (to kill one by Prison or Gallows, that crosses thee, though their cause be pure, sound, and good reason) is thy God, Self-love, and slavish Fear (lest others serve thee as thou hast served them) is thy god, Hypocrisie, Fleshly Imagination, that keeps no Promise, Covenant, nor Protestation, is thy God: love of Money, Honor, and Ease, is thy God: And all these, and the like Ruling Powers, makes thee Blind, and hard-hearted, that thou does not, nor cannot lay to heart the affliction of others, though they dy for want of bread, in that rich City, undone under your eys.
Therefore once more, Let Israel go Free, that the poor may labour the Waste land, and such the Brests of their mother Earth, that they starve not: And in so doing, thou wilt keep the Sabbath day, which is a day of Rest; sweetly enjoying the Peace of the Spirit of Righteousness; and find Peace, by living among a people that live in peace; this will be a day of Rest which thou never knew yet.
But I do not entreat thee, for thous art not to be intreated, but in the Name of the lord, that hath drawn me forth to speak to thee; I, yea I say, I Command thee, to let Israel go Free, and quietly to gather together into the place where I shall appoint; and hold them no longer in bondage.
And thou A-dam that holds the Earth in slavery under the Curse: If thou wilt not let Israel go Free; for thou being the Antitype, will be more stout and lusty then the Egyptian Paroah of old, who was thy Type; Then know, That whereas I brought Ten Plagues upon him, I will Multiply may Plagues upon thee, till I make thee weary, and miserably ashamed: And I will bring out my People with a strong hand, and stretched out arme.
Thus we have discharged our Souls in declaring the Cause of our Digging upon George-Hill in Surrey, that the Great Councel and Army of the Land may take notice of it, That there is no intent of Tumult or Fighting, but only to get Bread to eat, with the sweat of our brows; working together in righteousness, and eating the blessings of the Earth in peace.
And if any of you that are the great Ones of the Earth, that have been bred tenderly, and cannot word, do bring in your Stock into this Commond Treasury as an Offering to the work of Righteousness; we will work for you, and you shall receive as we receive. But if you will not, but Paroah like cry, Who is the Lord that we should obey him? and endeavour to Oppose, then know, That he that delivered Israel from Pharoah of old, is the same Power still, in whom we trust, and whom we serve; for this Conquest over thee shall be got, not by Sword or Weapon, but by my Spirit saith the Lord of Hosts.
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"The World Turned Upside Down"-In Honor Of Gerrard Winstanley And The Diggers of St. George Hill (1649)
Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg performing his cover of The World Turned Upside Down.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*******
Markin comment:
On a day when there has been a full-court press media blitz (with endless blitzes 24/7/365 to come ) over the engagement of British heir to the throne Prince Williams and his Kate I feel compelled to reach back the mid-17th century for a little wisdom about kings, kingships and the struggle for human progress. True Leveller (Digger) Gerrard Winstanley (and his Diggers)came immediately to mind (although Levelers John Lilburne and Robert Overton also received my consideration). Abolish the British monarchy now! Fight for Workers Republics (and keep them)!
********
The World Turned Upside Down Lyrics
Billy Bragg
In 1649
To St. George’s Hill,
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Came to show the people’s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the laws
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs
We come in peace they said
To dig and sow
We come to work the lands in common
And to make the waste ground grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it will be
A common treasury for all
The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Spring up at their command
They make the laws
To chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven
Or they damn us into hell
We will not worship
The God they serve
The God of greed who feed the rich
While poor folk starve
We work we eat together
We need no swords
We will not bow to the masters
Or pay rent to the lords
Still we are free
Though we are poor
You Diggers all stand up for glory
Stand up now
From the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed
But still the vision lingers on
You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share
All things in common
All people one
We come in peace
The orders came to cut them down
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
*******
Markin comment:
On a day when there has been a full-court press media blitz (with endless blitzes 24/7/365 to come ) over the engagement of British heir to the throne Prince Williams and his Kate I feel compelled to reach back the mid-17th century for a little wisdom about kings, kingships and the struggle for human progress. True Leveller (Digger) Gerrard Winstanley (and his Diggers)came immediately to mind (although Levelers John Lilburne and Robert Overton also received my consideration). Abolish the British monarchy now! Fight for Workers Republics (and keep them)!
********
The World Turned Upside Down Lyrics
Billy Bragg
In 1649
To St. George’s Hill,
A ragged band they called the Diggers
Came to show the people’s will
They defied the landlords
They defied the laws
They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs
We come in peace they said
To dig and sow
We come to work the lands in common
And to make the waste ground grow
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it will be
A common treasury for all
The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain
By theft and murder
They took the land
Now everywhere the walls
Spring up at their command
They make the laws
To chain us well
The clergy dazzle us with heaven
Or they damn us into hell
We will not worship
The God they serve
The God of greed who feed the rich
While poor folk starve
We work we eat together
We need no swords
We will not bow to the masters
Or pay rent to the lords
Still we are free
Though we are poor
You Diggers all stand up for glory
Stand up now
From the men of property
The orders came
They sent the hired men and troopers
To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
Tear down their cottages
Destroy their corn
They were dispersed
But still the vision lingers on
You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share
All things in common
All people one
We come in peace
The orders came to cut them down
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Logic Of Petty-Bourgeois Moralism: Weather Underground Splits
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*************
Markin comment on W&R article:
Note: Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (along with then companion, Bill Ayers, yes that Bill Ayers of Obama-consorting-with-terrorists during the 2008 American presidential elections fame, Mark Rudd and others) is much quoted and cited in this article as an exemplar of what went wrong politically (and seemingly psychologically) in the later stages of the New Left in the early 1970s. Any commentary on her personal and political dilemmas (then, or now), however, is beyond the scope of what I am trying to draw attention to here.
*******
If one were a realistic extra-parliamentary left-wing political operative (radical, revolutionary or just plain, ordinary, vanilla anti-imperialist) one could have reasonable projected that out of the turmoil in American society in the 1960s, especially the late 1960s, that at least a solid long-lasting anti-imperialist movement was in the cards. I, and a number of other left-wing politicos, certainly had that expectation, and worked, worked like crazy, from that premise. Obviously the intense level of struggles of the 1960s, especially when the Vietnam War was at its height, could not be infinitely maintained, as American involvement in that war wound down, the fighting of the war went through a Vietnamization process, and importantly, the military draft was ended. However, by the mid-1970s, if not earlier, the potential for that long term anti-imperialist movement had evaporated almost without a trance. From that point on those who had led, or seriously participated in, the previous movements had packed their bags and gone back to bourgeois politics (mainly Democratic Party politics), retreated to their particular oppressed sectors (blacks, women, gays and lesbians, etc.), or, and this was the greatest part, had been so burned out by the experiences that they dropped comfortably back into their interrupted bourgeois career paths and said the hell with politics. Only a relatively few made the lifetime commitment to radical social change, and fewer still those who looked to the potential of the American working class to lead that change.
I mentioned above that there were some objective reasons for the decline of anti-imperialist struggle in the later stages of the Vietnam War but there was also, as the article below notes as well, a subjective factor that aided and abetted that decline. Let us call it for convenience sake, incorrect politics, and the consequences of those incorrect politics. There were literally tens of thousands of people, mainly young and mainly students at first, in this country who, without embarrassment or bravado, declared themselves revolutionaries in those days. And there were plenty of people, many times the number of actual revolutionaries, who were ready to move heaven and earth to support them, to form an organized infrastructure in aid of the fight against the “monster”.
The predicate for that support, however, was a reasonable expectation, that those who were ready to fight the “beast” right then and there, the vanguard knew what they were doing. And, for a while, for the period of time leaders and others were seeking to pursue serious political strategies, that support held. When the movement turned inward, and toward the strategic process of sectorization of the oppressed ( those blacks, women, Native Americans, and others mentioned above) developed and exclusiveness and personal worthiness took “command” there was no reason, no reason at all, for other militants to go down that path.
Look, let me made it plain, in the late stages of the Vietnam War there were many, including those who were associated with the various configurations of the Weather organizations, who were very committed to the idea establishing a “second front” in America in support of the DRV/NLF struggles. The Weather Underground took it one way, the Black Panthers another. Others of us worked trying to get that same idea in motion by getting to the American soldiers into the struggle, and others took other more symbolic forms of action. All acted, in any case, with the serious idea of taking the incredible and vicious American military pressure off the Vietnamese. As it turns out they, the Vietnamese that is, already had the damn thing in hand.
At a great price, greater than necessary if we had done our part better.
The important point here is that very few of us who believed in the “second front” idea gave any thought that the American working class could, or should, lead that struggle. It might be the Panthers, it might be radical women, and it might be, well, you name it, whoever was your candidate of the day for the most oppressed, for the role of vanguard. Moreover, the common thread, the main theoretical concepts that held the various strategies together, were very much in the tradition of some variant of urban guerrilla warfare. The idea here was to create some kind of elite formation whose actions would act as a catalyst to awaken the masses. In short work underground, not out in mass struggles. Of course no one at the time, at least that I knew of, had read about the Narodniks in the 19th century Russian revolutionary movement. As that movement pointed out the problem is that the underground is debilitating, especially when fruitful work can be done in the open. The early American Communist Party, if any of us had bothered to read a little American radical history either, was also paralyzed unnecessarily by just that framework. Moreover, the capacity for such an organization (as noted in the article) to turn on itself is greater even than the squabbles that develop when revolutionaries are forced into exile communities (think of those exile Bolshevik/Menshevik squabbles in the Russian revolutionary movement). That point is what the article below is really addressing. The substitution of a vanguard for the action of the masses. And that point is also where the fault line of the subjective factor in the decline of the anti-imperialist movement lies. Who has the greatest degree of revolutionary purity, and who has done the greatest self-purging in order to measure up to some mystical standard. Whee!
One final point directly related to the “sector” that the Weather Underground was trying to organize. Those who are not familiar with the 1969 “Days Of Rage” can look it up on Wikipedia or some other source. At that time, being a virtually all white organization by choice and by the terms of the “political correctness” of the day (one did not presume to speak for, or for that matter even intermingle much with, other oppressed sectors) the leadership decided to go to the white working class. No, not the guys and gals on the factory floor, not the people on the auto assembly line, not even the white collar service workers. No, the short cut to revolution was through alienated lumpen white gangs. Street kids, jack-rollers, bikers, corner boys, and so on. As things turned out this lot, as Marx, any Paris Communard, Trotsky, or hell, even Jean Genet, could have told them these elements are more likely to form the advanced guard for fascist movements, or just plain apolitical criminal sprees, than left-wing political action. This is why during that period, the period of building the “second front” the Weather People’s strategy never appealed to me. Hey, I knew, knew to my very bones, those kinds of kids for my own poor working class neighborhood. Only a mass working class party, if that, could galvanize such elements, and that would be a close thing. I looked elsewhere then, rightly and gladly.
*********
The Logic of Petty-Bourgeois Moralism
Weather Underground Splits
Since at least last November rumors of bitter internal argument among the leadership collective of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) have been in circulation, and on February 3 the bitterness exploded into public print in the Madison New4.eft paper Take Over:
"This is Bernardine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate and denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather Underground Organization We led the entire organization to abandon the principles of anti-imperialism, liquidated the Black nation and the leading role of national liberation struggles, and heightened our attacks on the women's movement. I repudiate and denounce the Central Committee of the WUO, myself included, who bear particular responsibility for the criminal consequences of having led the WUO into full-blown opportunism.
"...this organization refused to seek out or recruit revolutionary women fugitives. We characterized these women as anti-men, anti-communist, anti-Marxist-Leninist. Actually, the central committee feared their effect on women in the organization and was threatened by their criticisms of central committee leadership for male supremacy. We attacked and defeated a tentative proposal for a woman's underground, to carry out anti-imperialist and revolutionary feminist armed struggle. This is another example of using the solidarity relationships to keep control of the weapons—keeping them out of the hands of revolutionary women as well as national liberation movements.
"While denying support to Third World Liberation, to revolutionary armed struggle forces and to revolutionary women fugitives, we used resources and cadre's efforts to support opportunist and bourgeois men fugitives. The most glaring example of this is our support in the form of time, money, cadres, of Abbie Hoffman, a relationship which produced media attention for us, through the articles in New Times and his TV program.
"...For seven years, I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed the struggle of women for liberation."...Why did we do this? I don't really know. We followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sell out the revolution."
Dohrn and other former Weather Undergrounders, now organized as the "Revolutionary Committee," analyze the WUO's "betrayals" as due to "white and male supremacist- policies," demonstrated through two main issues: their economist and opportunist turn to the "white working class" and their tentative plans for resurfacing.
The importance of the split lies not in the size and strength of the WUO, which has always been vastly exaggerated and mythologized in the bourgeois press, but in the fact that it reveals, in a remarkably pure form, the fatal dilemma of American petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Guerrillas" Without a Following
The Weathermen uniquely attempted to carry to logical conclusion the ideology of petty-bourgeois radicalism. They did not become orthodox Maoists, Stalinists or Trotskyists, or, in fact, Marxists of any variety, as did many other New Leftists, but rejected all the "bearded prophets" of the old left, refusing as a matter of principle to study the classics of socialist thought. Nor did they sink back into simple liberalism, as did Tom Hayden and many of the older SDSers, or become religious mystics, organic gardeners or "save the whales" fanatics, as did so many demoralized New Leftists (who undoubtedly feel more at home with their various gods, fruits and animals, which at least have the virtue of not being prone to turn on their supporters with ungrateful accusations of being white, middle-class or male chauvinist).
The Weathermen, like the rest of the petty-bourgeois New Left, accepted unquestioningly the rhetoric of militant nationalism, whether of the "third world" or the American black variety, including the dangerously complacent viewpoint that it is "racist" or at best "sectarian" to attempt to directly intervene in or criticize nationalist movements. But rather than becoming simply sideline cheerleaders for "other peoples' struggles," the Weathermen viewed themselves as a legitimate, independent force for revolution in their own right. Rejecting Marxism and deeply committed to the legitimacy of separatism, they turned to the white youth of America—to white' "lumpen rage"—as their base.
At the same time they turned inward, moving into communes in poor, run-down neighborhoods "smashing monogamy" through enforced sexual promiscuity and exhaustive "criticism/self-criticism" sessions seeking to root out "bourgeois individuality" and produce the ideal Weatherperson: a tough street fighter ready to "kick ass." Confident that the American empire was on its last legs and needed only a slight push to topple, they boasted of their "overwhelming strength" and really believed that a few bombings, slogans painted on campus walls and militant "trashings" would spark a mass upheaval of the oppressed.
But these self-styled "urban guerrillas" lacked the mass base in the peasantry which the "third world" guerrillas they idolized had. Their attempts to impress white street gangs got them only bloody noses. A mere handful of middle-class white ex-students, they tried to substitute sheer emotional energy and the rhetoric of "pure rage" for social weight. The Spartacist League alone on the left defended them against the bourgeois state, as we recognized their subjective commitment to overthrow the American imperialist state despite their mistaken political program and pathetically incompetent tactics.
Since 1970, student radicalism has dissipated as the Vietnam War ended, the draft was abolished and the Black Panthers split and disintegrated. Today a sullen torpor hangs over American society, despite the continuing intense privation and exploitation of the masses. In this context, it is not surprising that the Weather Underground has finally shattered. The various attempts by the WUO to break out of its self-imposed isolation, culminating in the debacle of the Chicago Hard Times Conference in the winter of 1975, illustrate the fatal limitations of its petty-bourgeois worldview. The shopworn rhetoric of Dohrn's accusations of "white and male supremacy" are part and parcel of the guilt-tripping and self-contempt of white petty-bourgeois radicalism, driven to a frenzy by a reality that it cannot comprehend or seemingly affect. While Dohrn sees her new-found feminist consciousness as a fundamental break from the Weather Underground, in fact she is simply perpetuating the same ideology which led to the formation of the Weather Underground in the first place. The pervasive belief that "only the oppressed can understand and act upon their own oppression" led to the splintering and diffusion of the New Left into separatist groups. The Weatherpeople chose white lumpen youth to identify with, and it didn't work. So now Dohrn has decided to take the splintering process a logical step further and identify with white radical women and thus rehabilitate herself by locating herself within her "proper place" in the schismatic, individualistic panoply of "the oppressed."
Smashing Monogamy
Although Dohrn today insists that the Weathermen were always "male supremacist," the truth is much more complex. The Weathermen felt a real compulsion to struggle against women's oppression in a purely personalist and subjective way and many of them ripped apart their psyches and personal lives trying to carry it out". The intense "criticism/self-criticism" sessions mandatory for all Weatherpeople focused on wiping out all traces of the members' former "bourgeois life styles. They focused, in particular, on "smashing monogamy," which was believed to be inherently sexually repressive, mainly for women, but for men as well, encouraging selfishness, protective-ness and the placing of another individual's needs above those of the collective.
Much of the expressed motivation for "smashing monogamy" was that women in couples were being held back by their male partners. And, in fact, in the early days of the collectives, many women separated from their partners did experience a sense of "liberation" and became much more vocal and aggressive. Coming out of, the New-Left SDS, where male chauvinism was rampant and many women did, indeed, do all the "shit work," the Weatherman life style had a temporarily exhilarating effect. But the price paid for this "liberation" was heavy. Many women and men became quivering nervous wrecks, forced into feeling themselves worthless for being unable to beat out of themselves their personal needs and desires and become pure "tools of the revolution."
In retrospect, it is pathetically easy to condemn the dangerous naiveté and idealism of the "smash monogamy" campaign. Sad tales of bitter disillusionment and personal tragedy have become all too common these days, as aging ex-Weatherpeople and other ex-radicals recount the errors of their youthful ways while settling into comfortable middle-class academic and liberal milieus. Pointing out that the Weathermen's "New Nation" of revolutionary human beings was doomed to evaporate like the idealistic daydream it was seems almost to be beating a dead horse. But, as Dohrn's statements and the 1975 Hard Times Conference so graphically demonstrate, yesteryear's radicals have been unable, on their own, to draw the lessons of their failures.
One of the most embarrassing New-Left spectacles occurred at the Hard Times Conference, perfectly illustrating the self-hatred and guilt that finally drove many white radicals out of politics entirely. After several hours of vicious race-baiting of the entire assembly by the subreformist Republic of New Africa (whose demand was that Cush County, Mississippi be immediately handed over to blacks), "Queen Mother" Moore, a black demagogue swathed in purple acetate took the floor for a rambling, religious, race-baiting monologue (including an off-key rendition of "America the Beautiful" with new words)—following which a young white male clad only in a pair of overalls leaped the stage to fervently embrace her, screaming "I love you Queen Mother Moore!"
Such self-abasement was a strong tendency in the Weatherman ideology, as well. Weathermen could accept themselves—as opposed to the rest of "racist honky dog" white America—only by literally trying to jump out of their own skins. The sick self-hatred encouraged at the Hard Times Conference was only the logical culmination of those attempts. Dohrn's latest "self-criticism" is a continuation of the same individualistic policies which assert that sheer will power is sufficient to overthrow the state. If it didn't work, it must have been because that will power wasn't strong enough. But why not? Obviously, because the individuals-were flawed—"racist," "sexist" or whatever.
But will power alone cannot make a revolution. This ideology of petty-bourgeois terrorism has been proved futile over and over again. The Weathermen failed because of their individualistic petty-bourgeois approach to revolution, not because of lack of revolutionary will.
Radical feminist groupings are likely to be a haven for aging Weatherwomen, since they, too, cling to radical life-stylism, cloistered and rigid separatism and Utopian daydreaming about the "power and beauty" of "pure (women's) rage" which characterized the Weather Underground, as well as assuaging any guilty pangs about "leeching" off other peoples' oppression, since for feminists their own oppression is the only legitimate area of concern.
White Guilt and Separatism
Unfortunately, the problems wracking American society are far deeper than the simple solutions which the New Leftists preached. The poisonous hatreds generated by oppression cannot be dissolved by moralistic exhortations to "love one another," by self-abasement or by feeding the (already hotly burning) fires of separatism. This oppression and the divisions which it creates within the working class are part and parcel of capitalist society and must be overcome not merely in the mind but in the real world. While racism and sexism, which retard the working class's ability to wage a struggle against the bourgeoisie, must be opposed now, they will be rooted out only with the destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution.
But the working class, the only force in society with the social power to smash capitalism, is by itself unable to transcend trade-union economism. Revolutionary consciousness must be brought to the workers by a party of professional revolutionists embodying a program of relentless class struggle. Infused with revolutionary class consciousness, the working class becomes the decisive force in history.
There are no short cuts. No amount of subjective revolutionary will or personal heroism can substitute for the class-conscious proletariat. Until and unless the radicals of the 1%0's can assimilate this fundamental premise of Leninism, they are doomed to wander futilely from one dead-end to another, ending like the Weather Underground, in either a pathetic display of impotence and cringing before the bourgeois state or locked into self-isolated and shrinking separatist circles, helpless before the increasing barbarism of decaying imperialist society."
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Markin comment on W&R article:
Note: Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (along with then companion, Bill Ayers, yes that Bill Ayers of Obama-consorting-with-terrorists during the 2008 American presidential elections fame, Mark Rudd and others) is much quoted and cited in this article as an exemplar of what went wrong politically (and seemingly psychologically) in the later stages of the New Left in the early 1970s. Any commentary on her personal and political dilemmas (then, or now), however, is beyond the scope of what I am trying to draw attention to here.
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If one were a realistic extra-parliamentary left-wing political operative (radical, revolutionary or just plain, ordinary, vanilla anti-imperialist) one could have reasonable projected that out of the turmoil in American society in the 1960s, especially the late 1960s, that at least a solid long-lasting anti-imperialist movement was in the cards. I, and a number of other left-wing politicos, certainly had that expectation, and worked, worked like crazy, from that premise. Obviously the intense level of struggles of the 1960s, especially when the Vietnam War was at its height, could not be infinitely maintained, as American involvement in that war wound down, the fighting of the war went through a Vietnamization process, and importantly, the military draft was ended. However, by the mid-1970s, if not earlier, the potential for that long term anti-imperialist movement had evaporated almost without a trance. From that point on those who had led, or seriously participated in, the previous movements had packed their bags and gone back to bourgeois politics (mainly Democratic Party politics), retreated to their particular oppressed sectors (blacks, women, gays and lesbians, etc.), or, and this was the greatest part, had been so burned out by the experiences that they dropped comfortably back into their interrupted bourgeois career paths and said the hell with politics. Only a relatively few made the lifetime commitment to radical social change, and fewer still those who looked to the potential of the American working class to lead that change.
I mentioned above that there were some objective reasons for the decline of anti-imperialist struggle in the later stages of the Vietnam War but there was also, as the article below notes as well, a subjective factor that aided and abetted that decline. Let us call it for convenience sake, incorrect politics, and the consequences of those incorrect politics. There were literally tens of thousands of people, mainly young and mainly students at first, in this country who, without embarrassment or bravado, declared themselves revolutionaries in those days. And there were plenty of people, many times the number of actual revolutionaries, who were ready to move heaven and earth to support them, to form an organized infrastructure in aid of the fight against the “monster”.
The predicate for that support, however, was a reasonable expectation, that those who were ready to fight the “beast” right then and there, the vanguard knew what they were doing. And, for a while, for the period of time leaders and others were seeking to pursue serious political strategies, that support held. When the movement turned inward, and toward the strategic process of sectorization of the oppressed ( those blacks, women, Native Americans, and others mentioned above) developed and exclusiveness and personal worthiness took “command” there was no reason, no reason at all, for other militants to go down that path.
Look, let me made it plain, in the late stages of the Vietnam War there were many, including those who were associated with the various configurations of the Weather organizations, who were very committed to the idea establishing a “second front” in America in support of the DRV/NLF struggles. The Weather Underground took it one way, the Black Panthers another. Others of us worked trying to get that same idea in motion by getting to the American soldiers into the struggle, and others took other more symbolic forms of action. All acted, in any case, with the serious idea of taking the incredible and vicious American military pressure off the Vietnamese. As it turns out they, the Vietnamese that is, already had the damn thing in hand.
At a great price, greater than necessary if we had done our part better.
The important point here is that very few of us who believed in the “second front” idea gave any thought that the American working class could, or should, lead that struggle. It might be the Panthers, it might be radical women, and it might be, well, you name it, whoever was your candidate of the day for the most oppressed, for the role of vanguard. Moreover, the common thread, the main theoretical concepts that held the various strategies together, were very much in the tradition of some variant of urban guerrilla warfare. The idea here was to create some kind of elite formation whose actions would act as a catalyst to awaken the masses. In short work underground, not out in mass struggles. Of course no one at the time, at least that I knew of, had read about the Narodniks in the 19th century Russian revolutionary movement. As that movement pointed out the problem is that the underground is debilitating, especially when fruitful work can be done in the open. The early American Communist Party, if any of us had bothered to read a little American radical history either, was also paralyzed unnecessarily by just that framework. Moreover, the capacity for such an organization (as noted in the article) to turn on itself is greater even than the squabbles that develop when revolutionaries are forced into exile communities (think of those exile Bolshevik/Menshevik squabbles in the Russian revolutionary movement). That point is what the article below is really addressing. The substitution of a vanguard for the action of the masses. And that point is also where the fault line of the subjective factor in the decline of the anti-imperialist movement lies. Who has the greatest degree of revolutionary purity, and who has done the greatest self-purging in order to measure up to some mystical standard. Whee!
One final point directly related to the “sector” that the Weather Underground was trying to organize. Those who are not familiar with the 1969 “Days Of Rage” can look it up on Wikipedia or some other source. At that time, being a virtually all white organization by choice and by the terms of the “political correctness” of the day (one did not presume to speak for, or for that matter even intermingle much with, other oppressed sectors) the leadership decided to go to the white working class. No, not the guys and gals on the factory floor, not the people on the auto assembly line, not even the white collar service workers. No, the short cut to revolution was through alienated lumpen white gangs. Street kids, jack-rollers, bikers, corner boys, and so on. As things turned out this lot, as Marx, any Paris Communard, Trotsky, or hell, even Jean Genet, could have told them these elements are more likely to form the advanced guard for fascist movements, or just plain apolitical criminal sprees, than left-wing political action. This is why during that period, the period of building the “second front” the Weather People’s strategy never appealed to me. Hey, I knew, knew to my very bones, those kinds of kids for my own poor working class neighborhood. Only a mass working class party, if that, could galvanize such elements, and that would be a close thing. I looked elsewhere then, rightly and gladly.
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The Logic of Petty-Bourgeois Moralism
Weather Underground Splits
Since at least last November rumors of bitter internal argument among the leadership collective of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) have been in circulation, and on February 3 the bitterness exploded into public print in the Madison New4.eft paper Take Over:
"This is Bernardine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate and denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather Underground Organization We led the entire organization to abandon the principles of anti-imperialism, liquidated the Black nation and the leading role of national liberation struggles, and heightened our attacks on the women's movement. I repudiate and denounce the Central Committee of the WUO, myself included, who bear particular responsibility for the criminal consequences of having led the WUO into full-blown opportunism.
"...this organization refused to seek out or recruit revolutionary women fugitives. We characterized these women as anti-men, anti-communist, anti-Marxist-Leninist. Actually, the central committee feared their effect on women in the organization and was threatened by their criticisms of central committee leadership for male supremacy. We attacked and defeated a tentative proposal for a woman's underground, to carry out anti-imperialist and revolutionary feminist armed struggle. This is another example of using the solidarity relationships to keep control of the weapons—keeping them out of the hands of revolutionary women as well as national liberation movements.
"While denying support to Third World Liberation, to revolutionary armed struggle forces and to revolutionary women fugitives, we used resources and cadre's efforts to support opportunist and bourgeois men fugitives. The most glaring example of this is our support in the form of time, money, cadres, of Abbie Hoffman, a relationship which produced media attention for us, through the articles in New Times and his TV program.
"...For seven years, I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed the struggle of women for liberation."...Why did we do this? I don't really know. We followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sell out the revolution."
Dohrn and other former Weather Undergrounders, now organized as the "Revolutionary Committee," analyze the WUO's "betrayals" as due to "white and male supremacist- policies," demonstrated through two main issues: their economist and opportunist turn to the "white working class" and their tentative plans for resurfacing.
The importance of the split lies not in the size and strength of the WUO, which has always been vastly exaggerated and mythologized in the bourgeois press, but in the fact that it reveals, in a remarkably pure form, the fatal dilemma of American petty-bourgeois radicalism.
Guerrillas" Without a Following
The Weathermen uniquely attempted to carry to logical conclusion the ideology of petty-bourgeois radicalism. They did not become orthodox Maoists, Stalinists or Trotskyists, or, in fact, Marxists of any variety, as did many other New Leftists, but rejected all the "bearded prophets" of the old left, refusing as a matter of principle to study the classics of socialist thought. Nor did they sink back into simple liberalism, as did Tom Hayden and many of the older SDSers, or become religious mystics, organic gardeners or "save the whales" fanatics, as did so many demoralized New Leftists (who undoubtedly feel more at home with their various gods, fruits and animals, which at least have the virtue of not being prone to turn on their supporters with ungrateful accusations of being white, middle-class or male chauvinist).
The Weathermen, like the rest of the petty-bourgeois New Left, accepted unquestioningly the rhetoric of militant nationalism, whether of the "third world" or the American black variety, including the dangerously complacent viewpoint that it is "racist" or at best "sectarian" to attempt to directly intervene in or criticize nationalist movements. But rather than becoming simply sideline cheerleaders for "other peoples' struggles," the Weathermen viewed themselves as a legitimate, independent force for revolution in their own right. Rejecting Marxism and deeply committed to the legitimacy of separatism, they turned to the white youth of America—to white' "lumpen rage"—as their base.
At the same time they turned inward, moving into communes in poor, run-down neighborhoods "smashing monogamy" through enforced sexual promiscuity and exhaustive "criticism/self-criticism" sessions seeking to root out "bourgeois individuality" and produce the ideal Weatherperson: a tough street fighter ready to "kick ass." Confident that the American empire was on its last legs and needed only a slight push to topple, they boasted of their "overwhelming strength" and really believed that a few bombings, slogans painted on campus walls and militant "trashings" would spark a mass upheaval of the oppressed.
But these self-styled "urban guerrillas" lacked the mass base in the peasantry which the "third world" guerrillas they idolized had. Their attempts to impress white street gangs got them only bloody noses. A mere handful of middle-class white ex-students, they tried to substitute sheer emotional energy and the rhetoric of "pure rage" for social weight. The Spartacist League alone on the left defended them against the bourgeois state, as we recognized their subjective commitment to overthrow the American imperialist state despite their mistaken political program and pathetically incompetent tactics.
Since 1970, student radicalism has dissipated as the Vietnam War ended, the draft was abolished and the Black Panthers split and disintegrated. Today a sullen torpor hangs over American society, despite the continuing intense privation and exploitation of the masses. In this context, it is not surprising that the Weather Underground has finally shattered. The various attempts by the WUO to break out of its self-imposed isolation, culminating in the debacle of the Chicago Hard Times Conference in the winter of 1975, illustrate the fatal limitations of its petty-bourgeois worldview. The shopworn rhetoric of Dohrn's accusations of "white and male supremacy" are part and parcel of the guilt-tripping and self-contempt of white petty-bourgeois radicalism, driven to a frenzy by a reality that it cannot comprehend or seemingly affect. While Dohrn sees her new-found feminist consciousness as a fundamental break from the Weather Underground, in fact she is simply perpetuating the same ideology which led to the formation of the Weather Underground in the first place. The pervasive belief that "only the oppressed can understand and act upon their own oppression" led to the splintering and diffusion of the New Left into separatist groups. The Weatherpeople chose white lumpen youth to identify with, and it didn't work. So now Dohrn has decided to take the splintering process a logical step further and identify with white radical women and thus rehabilitate herself by locating herself within her "proper place" in the schismatic, individualistic panoply of "the oppressed."
Smashing Monogamy
Although Dohrn today insists that the Weathermen were always "male supremacist," the truth is much more complex. The Weathermen felt a real compulsion to struggle against women's oppression in a purely personalist and subjective way and many of them ripped apart their psyches and personal lives trying to carry it out". The intense "criticism/self-criticism" sessions mandatory for all Weatherpeople focused on wiping out all traces of the members' former "bourgeois life styles. They focused, in particular, on "smashing monogamy," which was believed to be inherently sexually repressive, mainly for women, but for men as well, encouraging selfishness, protective-ness and the placing of another individual's needs above those of the collective.
Much of the expressed motivation for "smashing monogamy" was that women in couples were being held back by their male partners. And, in fact, in the early days of the collectives, many women separated from their partners did experience a sense of "liberation" and became much more vocal and aggressive. Coming out of, the New-Left SDS, where male chauvinism was rampant and many women did, indeed, do all the "shit work," the Weatherman life style had a temporarily exhilarating effect. But the price paid for this "liberation" was heavy. Many women and men became quivering nervous wrecks, forced into feeling themselves worthless for being unable to beat out of themselves their personal needs and desires and become pure "tools of the revolution."
In retrospect, it is pathetically easy to condemn the dangerous naiveté and idealism of the "smash monogamy" campaign. Sad tales of bitter disillusionment and personal tragedy have become all too common these days, as aging ex-Weatherpeople and other ex-radicals recount the errors of their youthful ways while settling into comfortable middle-class academic and liberal milieus. Pointing out that the Weathermen's "New Nation" of revolutionary human beings was doomed to evaporate like the idealistic daydream it was seems almost to be beating a dead horse. But, as Dohrn's statements and the 1975 Hard Times Conference so graphically demonstrate, yesteryear's radicals have been unable, on their own, to draw the lessons of their failures.
One of the most embarrassing New-Left spectacles occurred at the Hard Times Conference, perfectly illustrating the self-hatred and guilt that finally drove many white radicals out of politics entirely. After several hours of vicious race-baiting of the entire assembly by the subreformist Republic of New Africa (whose demand was that Cush County, Mississippi be immediately handed over to blacks), "Queen Mother" Moore, a black demagogue swathed in purple acetate took the floor for a rambling, religious, race-baiting monologue (including an off-key rendition of "America the Beautiful" with new words)—following which a young white male clad only in a pair of overalls leaped the stage to fervently embrace her, screaming "I love you Queen Mother Moore!"
Such self-abasement was a strong tendency in the Weatherman ideology, as well. Weathermen could accept themselves—as opposed to the rest of "racist honky dog" white America—only by literally trying to jump out of their own skins. The sick self-hatred encouraged at the Hard Times Conference was only the logical culmination of those attempts. Dohrn's latest "self-criticism" is a continuation of the same individualistic policies which assert that sheer will power is sufficient to overthrow the state. If it didn't work, it must have been because that will power wasn't strong enough. But why not? Obviously, because the individuals-were flawed—"racist," "sexist" or whatever.
But will power alone cannot make a revolution. This ideology of petty-bourgeois terrorism has been proved futile over and over again. The Weathermen failed because of their individualistic petty-bourgeois approach to revolution, not because of lack of revolutionary will.
Radical feminist groupings are likely to be a haven for aging Weatherwomen, since they, too, cling to radical life-stylism, cloistered and rigid separatism and Utopian daydreaming about the "power and beauty" of "pure (women's) rage" which characterized the Weather Underground, as well as assuaging any guilty pangs about "leeching" off other peoples' oppression, since for feminists their own oppression is the only legitimate area of concern.
White Guilt and Separatism
Unfortunately, the problems wracking American society are far deeper than the simple solutions which the New Leftists preached. The poisonous hatreds generated by oppression cannot be dissolved by moralistic exhortations to "love one another," by self-abasement or by feeding the (already hotly burning) fires of separatism. This oppression and the divisions which it creates within the working class are part and parcel of capitalist society and must be overcome not merely in the mind but in the real world. While racism and sexism, which retard the working class's ability to wage a struggle against the bourgeoisie, must be opposed now, they will be rooted out only with the destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution.
But the working class, the only force in society with the social power to smash capitalism, is by itself unable to transcend trade-union economism. Revolutionary consciousness must be brought to the workers by a party of professional revolutionists embodying a program of relentless class struggle. Infused with revolutionary class consciousness, the working class becomes the decisive force in history.
There are no short cuts. No amount of subjective revolutionary will or personal heroism can substitute for the class-conscious proletariat. Until and unless the radicals of the 1%0's can assimilate this fundamental premise of Leninism, they are doomed to wander futilely from one dead-end to another, ending like the Weather Underground, in either a pathetic display of impotence and cringing before the bourgeois state or locked into self-isolated and shrinking separatist circles, helpless before the increasing barbarism of decaying imperialist society."
Monday, November 15, 2010
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-The SWP—A Strangled Party (1986)
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement 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. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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The SWP—A Strangled Party
from Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986
Written: 1986
Source: Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
The American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) decisively shed the formal ideological connection to its once revolutionary past when National Secretary Jack Barnes explicitly denounced the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution in a speech at the convention of the party’s youth organization on 31 December 1982. In the months preceding and following this speech, Barnes and his gang of fellow epigones ruthlessly purged the SWP of all opponents of the new line, including virtually every remaining long-time member of the party (see “Barnes-town, U.S.A.,” Workers Vanguard No. 320, 31 December 1982). The expelled oppositionists eventually constituted themselves into three separate organizations—Socialist Action (SA), Socialist Unity (SU) and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT)—with the older cadre tending to group around the FIT.
In February 1986 the FIT and SU (which latter has since merged with some Shachtmanite remnants to form a new reformist outfit dubbed “Solidarity”) co-published the pamphlet, “Don’t Strangle the Party.” The pamphlet contains three letters and a speech by SWP founding leader James P. Cannon, all from his last years, plus an introduction by FIT leader George Breitman. Breitman’s introduction purports to show, among other things, that the SWP’s organizational practice remained unchanged from the founding of American Trotskyism in 1928 until far past Cannon’s death in 1974—until Jack Barnes and his friends suddenly changed the rules in 1980.
During our preparation of this review of the FIT/SU pamphlet, we were saddened to learn of the death of George Breitman on April 19. In bringing out Cannon’s last known thoughts, feelings and opinions on a question with which he was pre-eminently familiar—the prerequisites for building a revolutionary Marxist party—comrade Breitman performed another valuable service for the Marxist movement.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Yet Breitman’s view of the Barnes clique as a sudden aberration in a party with an otherwise unbroken revolutionary continuity is flat out wrong: the SWP is today a fundamentally reformist party and the roots of its degeneration go back much further than Breitman could admit or understand. The SWP opted for class collaborationism over class struggle 20 years ago when it subordinated a revolutionary program in order to build a popular-frontist coalition against the Vietnam War. The party’s departure from erstwhile working-class politics began around 1960, using the Cuban Revolution as a springboard.
Cold War Stagnation
The rapid degeneration of the once revolutionary SWP, going through centrism into reformism, necessarily had an evolution. The party had endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the postwar McCarthy era. Concomitant with the emergence of the U.S. as the pre-eminent capitalist world power, the SWP recruited a substantial layer of proletarian militants, including many black workers, and then lost the bulk of them with the onset of the witchhunt. In the 1950s, the aging SWP cadre, seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of world imperialism, no doubt thought life was passing them by, as did the Cochranite wing which split from the party in 1953. The SWP correctly adopted a perspective of regroupment following the crisis in the Stalinist movement (the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations) and achieved some gains. But a tendency to “get rich quick” schemes led to opportunist bulges. In early 1957 the party adopted a fully principled and comprehensive 12-point program for regroupment, but this program remained a dead letter. Failing to find elements moving to the left out of the Communist Party (CP), the SWP briefly flirted with the rightward-moving Gatesite wing of the CP and then courted the National Guardian and the New York remnants of the Progressive Party with a “United Socialist Ticket” in the 1958 elections.
The SWP in the postwar period no longer understood the world very well. As the Second World War approached, Trotsky had understood the urgency of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. He correctly foresaw that world war would bring social convulsions and the possibility for proletarian revolutions, as the first inter-imperialist war had led to the Russian October. In 1938 the Trotskyists founded the Fourth International and Trotsky sought to gear its nascent sections up for the challenge. Trotsky predicted that successful proletarian revolutions against capitalism would also sweep away Stalinism, itself a product of a global stalemate between the isolated Soviet Union and world imperialism after the defeat, particularly in Germany, of the revolutionary wave.
However, the mainly tiny sections of the FI were in effect militarily defeated. Under conditions of great repression, the groups fragmented to carry out diverging policies, some of them quite heroic. Insulated in the U.S. from the carnage in Europe and the colonial countries, the SWP emerged from the war with its cadre intact. But internationally, virtually all the young and older cadres were killed by war and by fascist and Stalinist repression. Those would-be Trotskyists who after the war became the impressionistic leadership of the decimated FI were mainly youth who had learned their “Trotskyism” from books. Trotsky, himself murdered, did not live to see the restabilization of capitalism in Western Europe—with the active complicity of the Stalinist and other reformist parties whose participation in “national” governments was required to restabilize bourgeois rule in Italy and Greece and, to a lesser extent, in France and even Britain.
In exchange, in the countries of Eastern Europe where the smashing of the Nazi occupation by the Soviet Red Army had left rather a vacuum of power, the Russians retained control; a series of deformed workers states ensued by social transformations from the top down. Something different occurred in Yugoslavia when Tito’s guerrilla bands (and later Mao’s peasant army in China) brought about a deformed social revolution. In Yugoslavia and China, national Stalinist formations made revolutions in the interests of their own survival despite Moscow’s counterrevolutionary line. In the absence of the proletariat in its own right as a contender for power, these revolutions have confirmed in the negative the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, in that they were unable to establish any “middle” course or petty-bourgeois state—deformed workers states were consolidated.
In the postwar period, the SWP retreated into an increasingly formal “orthodoxy.” They had a hard time for a couple of years trying to figure out how the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe had been created. The SWP and FI were disoriented by Tito’s revolution, the first break in the formerly apparently monolithic Stalinist “camp”—the American party was quick to hail the Titoists as “left centrists.” On the other hand the SWP took until 1955 to categorize Mao’s China as a deformed workers state. That the party made opposite, symmetrical errors over these two qualitatively identical revolutions was a telling measure of its disorientation.
Then in 1959 Cannon himself was led into a brief flirtation with the Chinese regime which he had labeled Stalinist four years earlier. Cannon, along with several other Los Angeles National Committee (NC) members including Arne Swabeck, submitted resolutions on the question of the Chinese peasant communes in opposition to the Political Committee (PC) majority of Farrell Dobbs and Murry Weiss. The Los Angeles resolutions came but a hair’s breadth from declaring workers democracy to be alive and well in China. Cannon pulled back and Swabeck’s position was smashed at a subsequent NC plenum. In this case, and in general, restorative forces (usually seen as Cannon) operated and the party program was kept within nominally orthodox limits. But over Cuba this restorative “spring” snapped.
In the case of both China and Yugoslavia the SWP eventually came to the correct position that the states which issued out of the revolutions were structurally identical to the end-product of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, where workers democracy had been usurped by a bureaucratic political counterrevolution. Trotskyists fight for the program of political revolution against the nationalistic bureaucratic caste. This was a program which Trotsky had laid out as necessary to open the road to socialist development in the case of the degenerated USSR:
“In any case, the bureaucracy can be removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as always, there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack. To prepare this and stand at the head of the masses in a favorable historic situation—that is the task of the Soviet section of the Fourth International
“The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms
“It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings—palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways—will be crowded out in favor of workers’ dwellings. ‘Bourgeois norms of distribution’ will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of decorations will go into the melting pot. The youth will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains. And, finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism.”
—Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936
Cuba—The Acid Test
By 1960 the SWP was looking for something, and they found it in Cuba. Dropping the qualitative distinction between a deformed workers state and a healthy workers state, the SWP dropped its program on the need for a Trotskyist party leading the working class, in response to the Cuban Revolution, where a petty-bourgeois guerrilla formation overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista regime and nationalized large sections of the economy under imperialist pressure. The SWP took the fact that a social revolution had occurred in Cuba to mean that the Cuban leadership was on a par with that of the Bolshevik Revolution. Morris Stein spoke for a whole layer of the SWP when he proclaimed, at the 1961 convention, that the Cuban Revolution was the greatest thing since the Russian October. Hooray, they said, we’ve lived to see it. However much the FIT wants to deny it, they were part of an SWP which began to abandon Trotskyism in 1960, two decades before Barnes and his gang dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.
In January 1961 the SWP NC adopted Joseph Hansen’s “Theses on the Cuban Revolution” which declared that Cuba had “entered the transitional phase of a workers state, although one lacking as yet the forms of democratic proletarian rule.” These theses were adopted following the explicit objections made in the document, “The Cuban Revolution and Marxist Theory,” which three leaders of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA)—Shane Mage, Jim Robertson and Tim Wohlforth—had submitted in August 1960 to oppose the party’s tendency to characterize Cuba as a “workers state.” It was at this plenum that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT—forerunner of the Spartacist League) was formed out of the opposition of Mage, Robertson and Wohlforth to the SWP’s liquidationism over Cuba.
The RT’s resolution, “The Cuban Revolution,” submitted to the 1961 YSA Convention, was in sharp counterposition to the SWP majority not only in its analysis of the emerging deformed workers state in Cuba, and the necessity to oppose the growing bureaucratism, but fundamentally on the role of Trotskyists:
“The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.”
The minority’s warning applied no less to the SWP itself. In abandoning the fight for a revolutionary Trotskyist party in Cuba, the SWP was well down the road to its own liquidation as a revolutionary instrument: a party whose leadership looked to alien class forces “only 90 miles away” didn’t have a very good prognosis.
The SWP Adopts Breitman’s Black Nationalism
Lenin described centrists as “revolutionaries in word and reformists in deed”—a good capsule description of the SWP in the early 1960s. The SWP’s rightward-moving centrism expressed itself not just over Cuba, but domestically as well. The Southern civil rights movement offered an excellent opportunity for the SWP to break out of isolation and intersect a new generation of plebeian black militants. Since 1955 there had been an ongoing discussion in the SWP on orientation to the civil rights movement. The two poles of the discussion were George Breitman, who advocated the demand of “self-determination” for the black masses, and Richard Kirk (Dick Fraser) who put forward a program of revolutionary integrationism. Throughout the 1950s the party continued to intervene in the struggle against black oppression with an integrationist perspective. Though the 1957 convention resolution, “The Class Struggle Road to Negro Equality,” envisioned support to separatist demands “if they should reflect the mass will,” it was adopted by the convention with significant reservations expressed on this question. But by 1963 the SWP leadership was ready to fully embrace Breitman’s long-standing support to black nationalism, with the concomitant policy of abstention from the civil rights struggle—they were ready to become sideline cheerleaders for black radicals who would supposedly acquire revolutionary consciousness without the intervention of a revolutionary party. Richard Kirk was in fullblown opposition to the SWP leadership by this time, and his tendency, which otherwise advocated a weird brand of sectoralist politics, submitted a resolution to the 1963 convention upholding the program of revolutionary integrationism. The RT supported the Kirk resolution with the following statement:
“I. Our support to the basic line of the 1963 Kirk-Kaye resolution, ‘Revolutionary Integration,’ is centered upon the following proposition:
“The Negro people are not a nation; rather they are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. From this condition the consequence has come that the Negro struggle for freedom has had, historically, the aim of integration into an equalitarian society.
“II. Our minority is most concerned with the political conclusions stemming from the theoretical failures of the P.C.’s draft, ‘Freedom Now.’ This concern found expression in the recent individual discussion article, ‘For Black Trotskyism.’ The systematic abstentionism and the accompanying attitude of acquiescence which accepts as inevitable that ‘ours is a white party,’ are most profound threats to the revolutionary capacity of the party on the American scene.”
The RT’s one-page amendment to the perspectives document at the 1963 convention was dismissed by the SWP leadership as ridiculous and wildly adventuristic because it demanded the party initiate modest trade-union work in a few carefully chosen places and seek some involvement in the mass civil rights struggles in the South:
“As regards the South today, we are witnessing from afar a great mass struggle for equality. Our separation from this arena is intolerable. The party should be prepared to expend significant material resources in overcoming our isolation from Southern struggles. In helping to build a revolutionary movement in the South, our forces should work directly with and through the developing left-wing formations in the movement there. A successful outcome to our action would lead to an historic breakthrough for the Trotskyist movement. Expressed organizationally, it would mean the creation of several party branches in the South for the first time—for example, in Atlanta, Birmingham or New Orleans.”
Kirk had lost favor with the SWP leadership when he fought against the party’s adoption in 1955, under Breitman’s urging, of the slogan, “Federal Troops to Mississippi.” Not only did this slogan pose a fundamental revision of the Marxist understanding of the nature of the bourgeois state, but it prompted the party to support Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops into Little Rock in 1957—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. The policy of painting U.S. imperialist troops as reliable defenders of black people had engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, but by 1964 the party adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” And this wasn’t the only sign that in the SWP’s mind the bourgeois state was no longer an instrument of class oppression. Following the November 1963 Kennedy assassination, SWP party administrator Farrell Dobbs sent a sniveling telegram of condolence to the widow of the imperialist chief who ordered the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba!
Despite the SWP’s deepening reformist practice, the party remained committed to some kind of formal Trotskyism on paper. The leadership had the able services of Joseph Hansen to cover over the deviations with numerous caveats and paragraphs of ritual orthodoxy. Hansen was careful—you had to read between the lines to see the real line. This was important because it allowed the older cadre to carry out their opportunist appetites while still maintaining—often sincerely—the formal adherence to the revolutionary principles of their youth.
The SWP didn’t have to look hard to find cothinkers for their revisionism on Cuba: they entered into negotiations to reunify with the International Secretariat (IS), which was led by one Michel Pablo. By 1951 Pablo, a leader of the devastated Fourth International (FI), had reacted to the postwar overturns of capitalism in Eastern Europe by claiming that the imminence of World War III would “force” the Stalinist parties to play a generally revolutionary role. Pablo’s line demanded liquidationist conclusions: Trotskyist nuclei should dissolve into the Stalinist parties and become left pressure groups. This perspective of “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties led to the destruction of the FI.
From afar and in the face of an escalating witchhunt which hindered full international collaboration (it was a U.S. felony, for example, for an American Communist or ex-Communist to apply for a passport), Cannon had originally acquiesced to Pablo’s blatant, and in some cases suicidal, revisionism. Only when the Cochran-Clarke faction emerged in support of Pablo in the U.S. did Cannon take up the fight. Yet Cannon had great difficulty in getting the central SWP cadre to go along with him against Cochran-Clarke. The New York leadership of Dobbs, Kerry, Hansen and Morris Stein only belatedly came over to Cannon and Los Angeles SWP leader Murry Weiss, and the internal disputes in the SWP of the mid-1950s reflected the reality of this heavily nuanced bloc.
Cannon’s SWP did eventually raise the banner of orthodox Trotskyism, aligning itself with the former majority of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste and with Gerry Healy’s faction in the fragmented British Trotskyist movement to form the “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC). But in the case of the Cuban Revolution the SWP adopted the fundamental premise of Pabloism and opted for looking toward some other, non-Leninist, non-proletarian force, to make the revolution. The SWP’s line converged with that of Pablo. The RT opposed reunification and was in general political agreement with the IC majority led by Gerry Healy, who at that time espoused at least a literary defense of orthodox Trotskyism (see especially the 1961 document “The World Prospect for Socialism” of Healy’s Socialist Labour League). The SWP voted for reunification with the Pabloites in 1963, giving birth to the United Secretariat (USec) which explicitly espoused a petty-bourgeois, guerrilla “road to socialism” in the colonial countries. The RT’s resolution on the world movement, “Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International,” submitted to the SWP’s 1963 convention, upheld the Leninist road:
“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerrilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”
The Purge of the RT
The RT’s fight against the SWP leadership’s precipitous surrender of a working-class perspective occurred at a time when the SWP was seething with internal oppositions. We have already mentioned the Kirk-Kaye tendency, but there were others, totaling perhaps a third of the SWP’s membership. Some were dissident branches, others were national tendencies but they all had one thing in common: in a few years they would find themselves outside of the SWP. In the early 1960s it certainly wasn’t excluded in advance that the RT could win over a chunk of the cadre. Despite the leadership’s right-centrism, the SWP had not lost all of its revolutionary juices. At the same time, the RT had few illusions on how long they would be allowed to carry out the fight inside the party. The tired, aging Dobbs was growing increasingly irritable at the presence of critics, and he had the majority.
The RT was dealt a real blow when the miserable Tim Wohlforth, acting as Gerry Healy’s tool, provoked an unprincipled split in the tendency in 1962. Evidently the despicable Healy thought he still had a chance to keep the SWP in the IC, so he ordered the RT majority to recant their view that the SWP had become centrist. (Healy demanded the recantation despite his own July 1962 polemic against the SWP, “Trotskyism Betrayed.”) When the majority of the RT refused, Wohlforth and his partner Philips split from the RT. This was a crime on two counts: it not only demoralized and drove away some tendency supporters, it also made the RT look like a bunch of unserious, juvenile, professional factionalists in the eyes of many SWP members.
Wohlforth’s next service to Dobbs was to falsely accuse the RT of having a “split perspective” by selectively quoting from intra-tendency discussion drafts in a document submitted to the SWP internal bulletin. Dobbs, annoyed by the RT’s having managed to elect two delegates to the 1963 convention, found Wohlforth’s frame-up useful as a pretext. After a farcical Control Commission “investigation”—which only one elected member of the Control Commission, a hard majorityite, participated in—the outcome was hardly in doubt. In December 1963, five leaders of the RT were expelled for having a “hostile and disloyal attitude” toward the SWP. Dobbs summed up the majority’s own attitude in his arrogant declaration to the New York branch that “the majority is the party.”
Dobbs’ purge of the RT had been preceded by numerous other organizational abuses—the bureaucratic removal of the YSA leadership, provocative factional raids into minority tendency meetings, and the like, all documented in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 4, Parts I and II. The RT consciously and deliberately abided by the then-existing SWP organizational rules, forcing Dobbs to change the statutes in order to justify his purge. Thus our abiding by the formal organizational rules pushed the Dobbsite majority to bring the rules into line with the evolving new rightward-moving political practices.
The 1965 Organizational Resolution
According to Breitman’s introduction, “the PC decided to submit a resolution on organizational principles to the 1965 convention....” But the PC didn’t just “decide” out of the blue: the National Committee authorized the drafting of this resolution in the same motion which expelled the leading RTers. The resolution (“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”) was discussed and voted by the 1965 convention on the same agenda point which denied the expelled RT members even the right to appeal their expulsion. Fully one-third of the content of the 1965 organizational resolution is taken up with an explicit ex post facto justification of the RT’s expulsion. Breitman ignores these overwhelming facts. The SWP leadership decided to codify its bureaucratic treatment of the RT: this is what organizationally consummated the strangling of the party.
Stripped of the jumbles of paragraphs taken here and there from past SWP organizational resolutions, Dobbs’ document amounted to the destruction of the rights of any minority. Opposition to the majority line was equated with “disloyalty” to the party. In essence, the 1965 rules boil down to the following syllogism: (1) factions are permitted in the SWP; (2) factionalists are disloyal people; (3) disloyal people are expelled from the SWP. Needless to say, this document was to prove quite useful to Dobbs’ successors.
A party dedicated to proletarian revolution must demand discipline in action from its members as well as provide a fully democratic internal life. This allows cohesiveness while insuring that the organization’s line and tactics can be adjusted, in the light of past experience, to new situations. But when the party abandons a revolutionary program—as the SWP did around 1960—then the coupling between the two components of democratic centralism changes as well. When Dobbs purged the RT, it meant the eclipse of internal democracy by unbridled centralism. Indeed, the SWP after 1965 had tighter rules than the Bolsheviks during the Civil War.
That certainly wasn’t the historic norm—before 1963 a disciplined minority such as the RT could easily have been tolerated and in fact become part of a new generation of party leadership. The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. had a long experience with internal oppositions, uneven to be sure, but nothing like the later monolithic conception of Dobbs. The “textbook” case was the 1939-1940 fight with the Shachtmanites, who wanted to abandon the military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. This was a fight on fundamental principles; but despite the positions of the minority, Cannon did not move organizationally until the political issues were fully brought out and the minority had de facto split. At other times the leadership had been hard, as in 1935 with the uncontrollable Oehlerites who issued their own bulletin and refused to stop fighting again after the party had made its decision to enter the Socialist Party’s emerging left wing. In the mid-1940s on the other hand, in the case of the Goldman-Morrow group, the SWP leadership was very soft. Morrow was given a second chance to mend his ways even after he was caught openly giving verbal reports of SWP PC meetings to the Shachtmanites at a time when they were a significant opponent organization to the SWP.
Party case law, and its codification into resolutions, developed in the course of struggle, with the ups and downs of a living revolutionary movement. But the bottom line was that at each juncture, the party sought revolutionary solutions to the disputes—i.e., it stuck to its program. Centrally, it saw its task as constructing the revolutionary vanguard in the light of essential international and domestic experience. In that regard Cannon, as he points out repeatedly in the letters reprinted in “Don’t Strangle the Party,” had a great advantage—he was able to directly benefit from the example of the Bolshevik Revolution and from the internationalism of the Comintern in Lenin’s time, as well as his later collaboration with Trotsky.
The material assembled in “Don’t Strangle the Party” helps to round out Cannon’s literary legacy and it sheds some light on what has been a very shadowy matter—friction in the preceding period between Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs took over the day-to-day administration of the SWP when Cannon moved to Los Angeles in 1952. Cannon was rumored to be unhappy with the SWP’s trajectory under Dobbs, who moved only very late to join the fight against the Pabloite revisionism of Cochran-Clarke. In the following period Cannon reportedly gave backhanded support to the grouping around Murry Weiss as against Dobbs and Tom Kerry. But by 1965, by Breitman’s account, Cannon didn’t even bother to raise his objections to the important, Dobbs-authored organizational resolution; by 1968 he had stopped writing to the party center at all.
Breitman buttresses his argument that the 1965 resolution meant no fundamental change in party democracy chiefly by what Cannon didn’t say on the subject. But Cannon in his later years of semi-retirement got pretty shaky politically (e.g., his early support for Swabeck on China) and in 1965 he was 75 years old. This dimension has to be taken into account when discussing a resolution to which, by Breitman’s own account, Cannon basically only acquiesced. While Cannon stood by, objecting once in a while as these letters show, the party he had led from its founding degenerated into a reformist, and correspondingly bureaucratic, shell.
Into the Abyss
In 1965, the rising ferment over the escalating U.S. imperialist military involvement in Vietnam presented the SWP leadership with the “mass movement” which would provide a full outlet for their accumulated reformist appetites. The SWP’s definitive overt leap from centrism to reformism came around the November 1965 antiwar conference in Washington, D.C., where the SWP attempted an (unsuccessful) organizational grab. In doing so, the SWP threw overboard the last remnants of class-struggle opposition to the war in favor of the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop the imperialist intervention in Vietnam. Richard Kirk, then still a member of the SWP NC, condemned the SWP’s wretched role at the November conference in a letter to the PC dated 13 December 1965:
“Here the party and youth carried on an unprincipled, disruptive and politically reformist struggle against the entire left wing of the antiwar movement. They disrupted the conference around tertiary organizational demands and ended in isolation and national disgrace. They established an indelible and deserved record for political conservatism and dead-end factionalism.”
Kirk had copies of his letter sent to his supporters on and off the NC, as well as to several majority supporters, including Larry Trainor. For this violation of “committee discipline” (which Cannon called a “non-existent law”) Kirk was censured by the February 1966 NC plenum. Breitman says in his preface that the “whole question” of discipline was “dropped” at this plenum. But Kirk’s criticisms, unlike Swabeck’s, cut too close to the SWP’s actual reformist practice. After the censure of Kirk the SWP leadership opened up an “investigation” of the entire Kirk-Kaye tendency, sending the bully Asher Harer to Seattle where the Fraserites had the majority. This action precipitated the resignation of the entire tendency.
It is clear that Dobbs felt much earlier that taking political disputes outside the NC was a violation of “normal party procedures” warranting disciplinary action. In early 1962—four years before Cannon opposed disciplining Arne Swabeck—Dobbs went after Tim Wohlforth for violating this norm. This was before Wohlforth split the RT, and he was the only minorityite on the Political Committee. When the RT submitted a document signed by Wohlforth and another member of the NC, plus ten other well-known comrades, Wohlforth was treated to a real browbeating by Dobbs, as recorded in the minutes of the 11 April 1962 PC meeting.
The whole notion of “committee discipline” is hardly new, as Cannon notes in his 8 February 1966 letter. In the early American CP it was mostly honored in the breach. But breach of such a norm cannot become the occasion for disciplinary action in a revolutionary party, which must allow for free political discourse between its leading members and the rank and file if the party convention is to make an informed decision on the disputed issues. We note that even Stalin’s guilt-ridden defense in Pravda did not invoke “committee discipline” against the Central Committee members who signed the Left Opposition’s “Platform of the 46” in October 1923.
The SWP’s qualitative descent into reformism occurred alongside the emergence of a new leadership configuration. Cannon was “promoted” to advisory status in 1965, and his agent Carl Feingold was eliminated forthwith. The Dobbs-Kerry leadership which had been administering the party since 1952 didn’t last much longer—they were old and tired. The intermediate layer—40-year-olds like Nat Weinstein, Ed Shaw and Clifton DeBerry—were mediocre at very best. And the SWP had purged their layer of revolutionary-minded youth when they booted out the RT. So they were pretty much stuck with Barnes, Barry Sheppard, Doug and Linda Jenness, Larry Seigle, Mary-Alice Waters, Peter Camejo, et al. These were political animals of quite another sort—unlike even the lackluster 40-year-olds who at least had some experience with the old SWP and its trade-union work, the Barnesites had no organic connection to the party’s revolutionary past. They had come to the SWP during the period of its centrist degeneration and were recruited from the petty-bourgeois student milieu. Further, their first taste of power came during the RT fight when Dobbs seized control of the YSA, and Barnes, Sheppard and Camejo were dropped into the youth leadership. The Barnes clique certainly didn’t learn Trotskyist politics—but Dobbs did give them the tools to “deal” with oppositionists.
The Barnesite Conspiracy
Early on the Barnesites had a sense of us vs. them regarding the older SWP cadre who retained at least a sentimental attachment to Trotskyism, albeit diluted. Joseph Hansen was the quintessential old-timer—he had been Trotsky’s personal secretary from 1937-1940 and the living link between Cannon and Trotsky. An able polemicist, Hansen was the SWP’s principal international spokesman during and after the 1963 reunification with the Pabloites (in this role he had earned the psychotic enmity of Gerry Healy who later waged an international slander campaign against Hansen as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky and an agent of the GPU, FBI, etc.). Hansen had a real base of support among the cadre he had trained on the staff of the SWP’s journal, Intercontinental Press. So Barnes & Co. simply eased the older cadre out of power by shunting them into “advisory” status on the party’s leading committees. By the mid-1970s, the Barnesites had secured control and the advisory bodies were dissolved. Later, the Barnesites would gloat over how easily and adroitly they eased out the old-timers. Mary-Alice Waters in a May 1985 report to the SWP NC enthused:
“Because of the strengths of the party leadership, we made it through the decade of the 1970s and into the 1980s before any section of older cadres tried to claim the mantle of age to justify refusal to be disciplined.... The split that came to a head in 1982-83 was, in part, a split we had prevented year after year throughout the 1970s as we made the transition.... When some individuals who left the party last year tried to turn it into an ‘old timers’ revolt, it was too late
—SWP Information Bulletin No. 2, June 1985, quoted in FIT’s Bulletin in Defense of Marxism No. 22, September 1985
Hansen’s death in early 1979 was very convenient for the Barnes clique: it rid them of a formidable potential internal opponent at a time when their leadership was more than a little vulnerable to attack. Party membership was on the wane—the antiwar movement from which the SWP had recruited significantly had long since petered out. Barnes’ forays into other areas had been a disaster. “Consistent feminism” hadn’t led to socialism—instead the SWP experienced the hardly unforeseeable redbaiting of its fraction in the bourgeois-feminist National Organization for Women. The much-vaunted “turn” to industry fared no better—it recruited next to no workers while simultaneously driving out many of the petty-bourgeois recruits from the 1960s and 1970s.
The Barnesite epigones moved into high gear in 1980: they were the “secret factionalists” and they certainly were part of a conspiracy. The FIT is right on that score. The inside story of the SWP in the early 1980s is certainly one of corridor gossip, the lining up of traitors, the marking of those who didn’t sneer at Trotsky in private. The Barnes gang engaged in provocations designed to push the old cadre into opposition—Doug Jenness’ Militant articles attacking Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution are an example. When Breitman, Steve Bloom, Frank Lovell, Nat Weinstein and Lynn Henderson timidly voiced their objections, Barnes & Co. framed them up and blackjacked them with the 1965 organizational rules—for which incidentally Breitman, Lovell and Weinstein had all voted. Those now grouped in the FIT, SU and SA were the victims of a calculated purge—it is very difficult to believe that the enormous, fine-print “List of Splitters” in the January 1984 Party Organizer hadn’t been drawn up long, long before. In classic Stalinist fashion, Barnes first purged, then submitted the planned line change to the remaining faithful hand-raisers.
The Two-Tier Conception of Party Membership
After reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” one would believe that in the period after Swabeck’s expulsion the SWP was virtually opposition free—until the Barnes gang suddenly decided to junk Trotskyism in 1980. But this is far from the case. The RT expulsion had not rid the SWP of all leftist elements and at least some of the recruits gained after 1965 believed that the SWP had something to do with revolutionary socialism.
In the early 1970s a myriad of often overlapping oppositions arose in the SWP—the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT), the Leninist Faction (LF), the Communist Tendency, the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (RIT), the Internationalist Tendency (IT)—and none of them got the kid-gloves treatment reserved for old-time NCers like Arne Swabeck (see “Memories of a 1970s SWP Oppositionist,” page 30). All of these oppositions consisted for the most part of relatively newer members and they were viewed as unruly kids who were disloyal and didn’t belong in the party anyway.
Breitman and the FIT do not see the systematic brutalization of every SWP opposition after 1963. Implicit in both Cannon’s material and the Breitman introduction is the actual two-tier conception of party membership which operated in the SWP from 1960 to 1980. There was, in fact, one set of rules for those people with standing—those who had been around and on the NC for a while—and quite another set for the people who hadn’t. Among the mass of oppositions in the 1963 SWP the RT was singled out for expulsion because its fight for the historic revolutionary program of the SWP was an extreme embarrassment to Dobbs.
In 1974 the SWP expelled 115 members of the Internationalist Tendency from the party and the YSA— the largest “split” in the SWP since 1953. At the time, the SWP was embroiled in a desultory faction fight with the Mandel-led tendency in the USec. One of the hot issues was guerrilla warfare, one of the points of unity in 1963. The SWP had abandoned its brief pro-guerrilla enthusing in favor of abject social-democratic reformism, but Mandel remained a vicarious “guerrilla,” and the IT supported him. The United States government, in the form of the House Internal Security Subcommittee, targeted Mandel’s USec and the IT in particular as “terrorists.” To the Barnesites this was the kiss of death for the IT. The SWP’s “Watersuit” against the U.S. imperialist spy agencies’ decades-long surveillance of the SWP was then under way and the last thing Barnes wanted was a clot inside the SWP tainted with the suggestion of “terrorism.” So the IT was declared to be a “separate rival party” by PC diktat and summarily expelled—on the Fourth of July 1974! The SWP’s own internal bulletins on the purge (including a list of ITers’ pseudonyms) showed up in court as the showpiece of the SWP’s attempt to demonstrate its “respectability” before the bourgeoisie. The significance of this patriotic purge was not lost on the federal judge:
“There was never anything, in my view, beyond the most tenuous suggestion of a possible implication of violence in the United States. In view of the ouster of the minority faction, I believe that tenuous suggestion has been basically eliminated.”
The IT was offered up to the government by Barnes & Co. on the specious hope that the federal court would recognize the SWP’s right to practice its weird brand of reformism without the interference, infiltration and intrusion of the FBI. Years later the judge has yet to announce his verdict, but the verdict of history is clear: Barnes’ SWP is a party which the U.S. capitalist class has truly no reason to fear.
In the “Watersuit” trial, the SWP underscored its vindictive hatred for the remnants of the leftist IT when, in 1981, it slandered ex-ITer Hedda Garza as a government fink, based on an FBI claim that Garza had met privately with a government attorney. The SWP aggressively retailed this disgraceful lie in the Militant and tried to silence the few who protested inside the SWP by making the ludicrous claim that “district attorneys don’t lie.” The Spartacist League protested this gratuitous slander of a socialist comrade in our detailed press coverage of the “Watersuit” (see especially “Reformism on Trial,” Workers Vanguard No. 286, 31 July 1981). Our press documented the SWP’s reformist assurances that the party’s legalism was in no way “contravened” by anything Lenin or Trotsky might have written, the suggestions that Nicaraguan pluralism or even American “checks and balances” rather than the Russian Revolution were the SWP’s model, the vicious slander of Garza solely because she used to sometimes hang around with USec leaders. We protested the violation of SWP members’ rights, facilitated by the panicky incompetence of the SWP, which in a touching display of faith in the government handed over party members’ names and international comrades’ pseudonyms, then turned around and in response to demands for financial information claimed the party had destroyed its own financial records. We wrote that the “Watersuit” fully displayed not only the SWP’s quirky reformist politics but the organizational consequences of having driven out of party influence the experienced cadres who, despite the political erosion, would still have known how to competently administer a legal case. The same lack was evident again in the SWP’s initial public non-response to the dangerous Gelfand suit (where a Healyite agent appealed to the government to intervene in the SWP’s internal life to restore him to membership), which the SWP treated like a guilty secret until the SL press exposed the Healyites’ organization-busting gambit and called for anti-sectarian support to the SWP against Gelfand.
Cannon’s 1966 speech refers to the SWP’s “capacity to attract the young” as a sign of its vitality. But from 1963 on, the SWP under Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry (and later under Barnes & Co.) systematically purged those youth who thought they were joining some kind of revolutionary Trotskyist party. The Spartacist League won some of these elements out of the RIT, LF and IT on the basis of the Trotskyist program for which it had fought since its inception as the RT. By 1980 all that was left of the revolutionary SWP was its initials—and those few old-timers whom Barnes expelled when he repudiated Trotskyism.
We wonder whether the concern Cannon expresses in his letter to Reba Hansen about “any possible proposal to weaken the constitutional provision about the absolute right of suspended or expelled members to appeal to the convention” reflected support to SWP PC member George Weissman’s fight to hear the RT’s appeal at the 1965 convention. Weissman’s motion to give the RT members time to present their case was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 32 to 24. In any case the attempt to uphold the RT’s formal rights to appeal in 1965 was a gesture. While every oppositional current in the SWP had opposed the expulsion, the majority of the cadre—including Weissman and Cannon—supported it. Weissman, who wrote a powerful protest against his own expulsion from the SWP, was a member of the FIT at the time of his death last year (see our obituary in Workers Vanguard No. 382, 28 June 1985).
Yet the letters and speech in “Don’t Strangle the Party” carry the clear implication that Cannon didn’t much like where the SWP was going in the mid-1960s. We mentioned earlier the rumored friction between Cannon and Dobbs. We have to say here that Dobbs and Tom Kerry, after groping around, groomed Barnes and his cohorts as their replacements. Breitman says nothing about that. Cannon’s last letters certainly strongly support our contention that the SWP’s renunciation of Trotskyism didn’t just fall from the skies in 1982. We recall that by the 1981 SWP convention Tom Kerry was screaming in impotent rage at Barnes and his crew of hacks. How much did Kerry reflect the views of his former partner, Dobbs? It’s hard to tell. In a democratic party the disputes are all in the internal bulletins. In the bureaucratic post-1963 SWP the real stuff of party internal life happened behind the scenes.
FIT—Blinded by Centrism
After their expulsions, the veteran comrades of the ex-SWP milieu found themselves unceremoniously ejected from the party’s public events and slandered as “disrupters.” Indignant at being deprived of their democratic rights as members of the socialist public, by a party to which many had devoted decades of service, the FIT protested publicly, including claiming that this was the first time in the SWP’s history that people had been excluded from its “public” events because of their political views. Yet the FIT knows different. Indeed, in the mid-70s, FIT leader Frank Lovell had prevented the SWP San Francisco branch from excluding Spartacists from a Militant Forum. Informed that the exclusion of Spartacists was standard SWP policy, Lovell retorted that after all his years of addressing democratically organized public meetings he wasn’t about to start excluding people now. This defense of workers democracy should be a source of pride for Lovell and the FIT, but instead they are constrained to forget it since the incident points clearly to the decisive break in the SWP’s revolutionary continuity having occurred much earlier than the FIT is willing to look. The FIT’s view that Barnes’ party remained the revolutionary SWP until very lately in fact plays into the hands of currents among the ex-SWP oppositionists like Alan Wald, who uses atrocities of Barnes’ party over two decades to buttress his case that Trotskyism itself has failed and should be dumped in favor of regroupments with “state capitalist” formations.
The omissions in Breitman’s introduction are not the result of cynicism or willful disingenuousness. Breitman and the FIT literally can’t see what happened to the SWP because they are blinded by their centrist politics. They long for a return to the SWP of the 1960s and 1970s, when their popular-frontist antiwar work garnered a wave of recruits and Joe Hansen wrote so beautifully, proving that the SWP’s support to Castro was consistent with this or that Comintern resolution. To anyone who at the time doubted the SWP’s attachment to Trotsky, the old-timers could proudly point to the party’s efforts in collecting, editing and publishing Trotsky’s and Cannon’s writings.
Breitman certainly deserves central credit in that effort, the results of which today educationally arm the members of the Spartacist tendency. Yet it was Breitman himself who proposed dropping the SWP’s designation as “Trotskyist” in a letter to the NC dated 6 April 1965:
“On the whole, the label ‘Trotskyist’ is a handicap, not an asset. To new people it gives the impression that we are some kind of cult, creating unnecessary obstacles to reaching them with our program, especially rebellious youth who are suspicious of cults.”
This proposal was a resurrection of one made by Cannon in 1951, but Cannon scrapped it during the Cochran-Clarke fight when the minority came out with the slogan, “Junk the Old Trotskyism.” Breitman was undoubtedly more comfortable with Cannon’s 1951 rightist flinch than with other thoughts of Cannon. Cannon never excluded the possibility that the American workers would bypass a reformist labor party dominated by the conservative trade-union tops and come directly to revolutionary consciousness in the heat of struggle. Such an idea is literally inconceivable to both today’s SWP and the FIT.
The FIT sees the crux of the problem in Barnes’ supposedly “new” orientation to Castroism, beginning in 1979. As we have shown, the SWP’s decisive adaptation to Castro began much earlier than that. But something did happen in 1979—the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. This prompted Barnes to offer the idiotic thought that the SWP could make the big time internationally by cutting a deal with Managua. All that allegedly stood in the way was the old baggage of Trotskyism and its aged centrist supporters still in the SWP. And the Barnesites weren’t part of the “old guard” who tacitly understood, however wrongly, that the 1965 organizational rules wouldn’t be used against them.
Breitman’s failure to associate himself with a revolutionary program left him incapable of effectively combating the Barnesite epigones during his brief internal opposition, or even understanding his subsequent expulsion. His tragic end—kicked out of the party which he had loyally served for close to half a century—is reminiscent of others who, lacking a sufficient program, couldn’t understand what hit them. Leopold Trepper, the heroic Polish Communist who led the Soviet intelligence network in Nazi-occupied Belgium and France during World War II, spoke movingly as one of the many who saw the flame of Bolshevik Revolution smothered by Stalin:
“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”
—The Great Game, 1977
Breitman noted that, in opposing disciplinary action against Swabeck, Cannon may have looked “a little farther ahead than most of the NC members.” Cannon also foretold the possibility that the SWP would not be capable of meeting its revolutionary obligations:
“We know that our party, as at present constituted, is not ordained. We are human, and therefore capable of error and of failure. But if we fail; if we ossify into sectarianism, or degenerate along the lines of opportunism, or succumb to the pressures of our times and let history pass us by—it would simply mean that others, picking up the program and taking hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, would have to create another party of the same type as the SWP.”
—“Concluding Speech at the May Plenum,” 31 May 1953
Cannon clung to the SWP through its degeneration, but the Revolutionary Tendency took hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, based on the heritage of Cannon and the revolutionary SWP. As opposed to the sentimental looking-back, with centrist blinders, of the FIT, we look forward with the confidence that we are the continuators of revolutionary Marxism in the United States, and internationally.
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Memories of a 1960s SWP Oppositionist
While preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Al Nelson, who was a young member of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Comrade Nelson’s letter has been edited for publication.
When I joined the SWP in February 1962 the New York Organizer, Carl Feingold, cautioned me that I had a “major difference” with the SWP (the nature of the Cuban Revolution) and that of course I would not be expected to speak in public or do other work where Cuba was involved. This projected RT supporters as second-class members and implied an inability to abide by discipline. The SWP soon moved to keep known RT supporters in the youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), out of the SWP. When Dave K. was kept out of the SWP, the reason cited was that he was not “active enough.” Jim Robertson, a leader of the RT, was a member of the New York local Executive Committee later in 1962 and he objected to this policy.
When I joined the YSA in the fall of 1961 there was a general policy of social ostracism toward minority supporters that extended to brand-new YSA members, who were lined up against the minority immediately—they were warned to avoid us. The leadership, especially the more factionally-crazed New York YSA leadership, tried as much as possible to prevent RT members from working in public arenas. We were criticized as “free agents” when we took part in pickets or demonstrations without “consultation” with the branch leadership. RT supporter Roger A. was eventually expelled in February 1964 for taking part in picketing the Greek Queen because, in so doing, he “consciously and arrogantly violate[d] party discipline.” Shirley Stoute, a black RT member, was forbidden to work in the civil rights movement in the South in the summer of 1962. She then received a personal invitation from SNCC leader James Forman, which the SWP could not refuse. Shirley and Steve Fox went to the South, followed by Pete Camejo and Ken Schulman specifically to spy on Shirley and report back to New York.
Shirley was eventually told to return to New York for a YSA National Committee (NC) plenum in September 1962. Then she was told that she could not return to the South and was under discipline not to reveal the reasons why to SNCC! She was merely to send for her belongings.
On 28 January 1963, in an obvious factional provocation, two young members of the majority “raided” a private RT discussion meeting. I made an informal protest the next day to the National Organization Secretary Tom Kerry, who seemed surprised. But the PC decided to cover for Carl Feingold, who had engineered the raid, and on 2 February 1963 passed a motion by Dobbs and Kerry endorsing Kerry’s statement at the New York branch meeting that the RT was violating party discussion procedures by having meetings at all before the formal pre-conference discussion period. Thus the majority leadership eliminated the distinction between private and party discussion. In response we wrote, “For the Right of Organized Tendencies to Exist Within the Party.”
Wohlforth published accusations against us as splitters in the party discussion bulletin in June 1963; two days later we replied to his lies with “Discipline and Truth,” submitting it just under the bulletin deadline. Nearly one-third of the SWP was in political opposition on the eve of the 1963 convention. Barry Sheppard, Camejo and others predicted gleefully that the ax would fall on the RT at the convention. We heard later that Myra Tanner Weiss warned Cannon not to expel us at the convention or she would go public. Tom Kerry denounced us on the floor of the convention for being “disloyal.” This was cited later as evidence of “suspicion” to warrant our expulsions. Robertson was kept off the National Committee and the Political Committee, which became basically majority bodies.
The Control Commission convened in August, following the convention, to investigate Wohlforth’s charges against us. All RT supporters in New York were called for tape-recorded interrogations. Robertson, Mage, White, Harper and Ireland were suspended by the PC in October and expelled at an NC plenum in December for “disloyal conduct” though no violations of discipline were alleged or proved.
On 9 January 1964, a plenum report centering on the expulsions was made to the New York branch. The report included some self-criticism on the public positions of the SWP when Kennedy was killed—these were called “errors in formulation.” The expulsions were described as a big step, aimed not only at the Robertson tendency. “Wild” branch meetings were cited. “Loyalty” to the party was now to be a prerequisite for party membership. The expulsions were intended to affirm what kind of party the SWP was. This internal situation was allowed to develop so long, the report said, because the SWP was just coming out of isolation—it had become lax. Now the party was making a turn; no more leaning over backwards. It was time to tighten up.
When Doug Gorden (Swabeckite) denounced the “frame-up charges” from the floor, Nat Weinstein, the New York organizer, said that the party would no longer permit the NC to be attacked in that way. He said this was a final warning and proposed that Doug be censured by the Executive Committee—reaffirming Dobbs’ statement that “the majority is the party.” Various minorities objected during the discussion. In his summary remarks Weinstein stated that this was an “information report” and that NC decisions could not be changed until the next convention.
On 20 February 1964, the first issue of Spartacist was sold outside the Thursday night New York branch meeting by Jim Robertson. It seemed that nearly everyone in the meeting was reading a copy. A furious Weinstein took the floor and stated that with the publication of Spartacist the Robertson group had become an “enemy of the party” and that no collaboration by any party member with Spartacist would be permitted, nor would any expression of sympathy for their ideas be tolerated (this “sympathy for ideas” clause was deleted from the later formal charges against the remaining RT supporters). Sympathizers of those expelled were to be viewed with suspicion and closely scrutinized. They would be “on trial.”
Weinstein’s report was put to a vote: 31 were for, 5 against (all RT supporters) and 6 abstained (that was the Weissites and Swabeck supporters). Following the vote Weinstein declared that he wanted to know why these comrades voted against, and said that there would be an investigation.
As I recall, this was a particularly hysterical meeting. After the meeting adjourned various comrades were screaming at each other. Fred Halstead was screaming at me, “If you don’t like it why don’t you just leave!” To which I and others would reply, “No! You’d like that. We intend to stay and continue to fight for our positions.”
In general, the tenor in the New York SWP branch meetings after the report on the December expulsions was “love it or leave it.” But we acted as model members, doing more than our share of the work, paying dues promptly, etc. It drove them mad.
On 25 February 1964 I and the other four RT supporters received a formal notice of charges based on our vote against Weinstein’s report. We were notified that the trial was set for March 2. The “trial” was conducted by an expanded New York branch Executive Committee composed entirely of majority supporters. On March 5 the conclusions of this all-majority “trial body” were reported to the branch by Nat Weinstein. He tried to insist that the expulsions were “absolutely not for ideas.” We expel people for acts, he claimed, and then cited three “acts”: the intra-tendency discussion document cited by Wohlforth; our vote against Weinstein’s report to the branch; the publication of attacks on the SWP (i.e., Spartacist) and the “approval” of this by the remaining RTers.
There were about 60 people at this meeting, a large turnout. The Weissites were particularly incensed. Myra Weiss gave an eloquent speech in defense of the right of organized tendencies to exist. She defended the publication of Spartacist, blamed the majority for the whole situation, and admitted that she had given her PC motion against RT expulsions (reprinted in Spartacist No. 1) to the leading RTers when they were still party members. She intended to vote “No” on Weinstein’s report. A number of majority speakers warned Myra to stay out of this and go back to the PC where she belonged.
Tim Wohlforth was at this meeting. He said he opposed expulsion for ideas—and then went on to declare that the RT’s ideas were “alien,” that we were “destroying Trotskyism,” and attacked us for accepting support for our democratic rights in the party from the Weissites and Swabeckites.
The vote to expel the five of us was: 44 for, 14 against with one abstention and one not voting. These expulsions cleaned the RT out of the SWP in New York. However, seven RTers including some of those just expelled from the SWP were still members of the New York YSA. Some of us were very visible active Spartacists and all of us were open supporters of Spartacist views. We worked with Progressive Labor (PL) and in the Congress of Racial Equality (rent strike work). RT member Shirley Stoute was on the YSA NC and a member of the SWP in Philadelphia.
This situation in the YSA wasn’t going to last long. But the dual membership was permitted by a provision (which Jim Robertson had opposed at the founding YSA Convention) that permitted YSAers to be members of “any adult socialist party.” Barry Sheppard was YSA national chairman and Peter Camejo was the national secretary. Jack Barnes was New York YSA Organizer. A lovely crew.
Their method of seeking our expulsion was very clumsy. On 2 May 1964 several of us were part of a joint defense guard with PL for a demonstration. The YSA was nominally taking part in this. Before the march Barry Sheppard approached three of us to carry YSA signs. We declined, stating that we already had assignments as Spartacist supporters on the defense guard. Several days later we received notification of charges that we had “deliberately violated discipline” by refusing assignments given out the morning of May 2 at a YSA meeting (not true). A trial before the NY YSA local was scheduled for May 30. In addition, as an NC member, I would be tried by the National Executive Committee (NEC) following the local trial. It was all very contrived—individual acts of indiscipline. Nothing to do with political purges in the SWP of course!
Before the trial I wrote up and mimeoed a “Trial Circular” which blew their case out of the water. This was distributed to the local members, many of whom were very new. It gave a history of the origins of the RT and the political expulsions from the SWP. It denounced the fraudulent charges against us as part of a continuing attempt to turn the YSA into an instrument of the SWP majority in violation of the historical norms of youth-party relations as described by the SWP itself (see Murry Weiss’ letter in Marxist Bulletin No. 7, “The Leninist Position on Youth-Party Relations”).
A number of new members objected to the proceedings and wanted to know if what was in the “Circular” was true. It wasn’t going over. Barnes got up and denounced the circular itself for claiming that the YSA was controlled by the SWP. He said the circular was a “fink” document and these people are “objective agents” of the FBI! Then the despicable Freddy Mazelis—Wohlforth’s lieutenant—came to the rescue of the majority leadership. He proceeded to offer a rationale for political expulsions, arguing that since we had major differences with the SWP and YSA there was no way we could be disciplined members of the YSA. The expulsions carried.
On 5 September 1964 we appealed to a YSA NC plenum. The plenum upheld our expulsions and furthermore expelled five other RTers including Shirley Stoute. The only “charges” against the five new expellees was their “support to Spartacist.” It was simply a summary political expulsion of a whole group. Shirley was criticized for going to Cuba “without permission”! Following the plenum Shirley had to return to Philadelphia, where Dobbs had instructed the SWP branch to put her on trial (the “charges” are in Spartacist No. 3). She was expelled. It bothers me that after all these years comrade Breitman cannot admit the truth: that the expulsions of the RT marked the crossroads for the SWP; that it was wrong to have gone along with all this crap. After all, in defending our tendency we defended Breitman’s rights too, then and in the future. The majority is not the party! Democratic centralism is the organizational method of the revolutionary (insurrectionary) party. It serves only the revolutionary program. And there’s the rub.
—Originally dated 18 March 1986
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Memories of a 1970s Oppositionist
White preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Sam H., a former member of the Leninist Faction of the Socialist Workers Party, now a supporter of the Spartacist League. Comrade Sam’s letter has been edited for publication.
I became a contact of the SWP in 1969 during my four-year hitch in the Air Force, and joined the Madison Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in June 1970, one month after I was discharged. My decision to join was based on reading Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, a selected works by Trotsky, and on my understanding of the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. The Madison YSA was a left-talking Mandelite [i.e., followers of United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel] branch that was essentially led by the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT).
So while I thought I was joining the SWP of 1938 I began wondering why there were no trade-union fractions. Why was I one of the few union members in the local organization? I began pressing the branch leaders on this and one day I was led into one of their apartments to read the POT’s 1969 document, “On Sending Young Comrades into the Trade Unions.” I then realized that there was an impending faction fight inside the SWP and I quickly sided with the POT.
The 1971 SWP Convention turned out to be the POT’s only coordinated fight and I’m sorry I wasn’t there. The pre-conference discussion produced 30 or more bulletins and my most vivid memory from the returning Madison delegates was Barry Sheppard’s admonition at the end of the convention. The POT delegates were roundly defeated vote-wise. Since 1961 the party members functioned as a fraction within the youth so Sheppard’s admonition at the final Session was, “And there will be no wrecking job in the youth, comrades!”
Sheppard was calling POT supporters to task: they had better obey the party statutes or else. The POT challenged the party’s orientation but had no counterposed political program, so their intervention suffered dramatically. The POT essentially agreed with the SWP majority’s resolutions on the antiwar movement, black question, feminism, etc. So they were politically disarmed from engaging in political combat with the reformist Barnes clique.
The Mandelite POT was never a programmatically counterposed faction. They saw themselves as a dissident “tendency”—loyal, but with differences. I remember the first internal class I gave was on “democratic centralism.” The POT leaders who helped me to prepare this class were in political solidarity with the 1965 org rules [“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”] and the RT expulsion. The Spartacist League (SL) was not in Madison at that time so I had never seen us in action before. I dutifully repeated the common SWP refrain that the “Robertsonites” were expelled for “double-recruiting” and the Madison YSA branch simply accepted this as orthodox SWP history.
The POT leaders never challenged these 1965 org rules so they were condemned to live under them. We actually believed that you only discuss major political questions for three months every two years (the pre-conference discussion period). We skirted this in Madison on a number of occasions but I remember attending branch meetings in Chicago where, whenever a well-intentioned POTer would raise tactical differences with the SWP’s wretched pacifist line on the Vietnam War, a majorityite hack would quickly take the floor and say, “This discussion is taking on the character of a pre-conference discussion and this is not the proper time nor place for this.” I heard this over and over again!
The bottom line is that the POT leadership thought we could bring the reformist SWP line to the working class and that would make a difference. So while bemoaning the Barnes leadership’s undemocratic functioning they never challenged the political program that the organizational abuses flowed from. The American POT was an example of the wretched Mandelites’ refusal to build any serious opposition to Barnes’ SWP.
How rotten the POT was became clear to me at the 1971 Houston YSA Convention. I was one of the few pro-POT delegates, elected by the Milwaukee YSA. The big issue at the convention was the removal of a POT YSAer from the youth National Committee. It was clear that this guy was being dumped because the Barnesites were starting to clean house in the youth. This was one of the rare periods that you could raise differences, but the POT was acting in complete accordance with Sheppard’s warning against monkeying around with the youth. Not only was I instructed not to raise political differences on the convention floor but I was also instructed not to fight the purge on the basis of the comrade’s political views. I was given the unenviable task of taking the floor and simply asserting that the Nominating Commission had not provided a convincing enough case that this comrade’s functioning had gone downhill. I did place the POT YSAer’s name in nomination and was later congratulated by POTers as being the first person to ever challenge a YSA nominating slate. I don’t know if that’s true; I certainly didn’t feel proud. I felt that we ducked the political fight on the right of minorities to exist and maintain their political views. Luckily for me the SL had a table up at the convention so I got to read Workers Vanguard and took home with me a collection of Marxist Bulletins. It was my first contact with the SL.
On the last day of the convention I did get to talk to a comrade from Boston who couldn’t help but notice how pissed off I was at the POT. This became my first contact with the developing Leninist Faction (LF) which I quickly joined. The history of the LF is well documented in Spartacist No. 21. My resignation letter from the LF (co-signed by Dave E., Pam E. and Tom T.) appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 14.
Reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” and thinking about this letter has certainly jogged my memory and put these events in a clearer light. In the POT we had to put up with discussion only three months every two years regardless of what was happening in the world. A tendency was a “temporary” formation that was supposed to disband after you got your ass kicked at a convention. Factions were disloyal. To be an oppositionist during this time you had to deal with a good dose of paranoia and get nothing but crap from the Barnes leadership. When I returned from the Houston YSA convention a Barnesite hack was virtually sitting on the doorstep ordering the local Executive Committee (all of whom were POT supporters) to pack their bags and leave town. Branches like Milwaukee were destroyed while Barnes supporters were moved around the country to achieve mechanical branch majorities.
—Originally dated 19 April 1986
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. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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The SWP—A Strangled Party
from Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986
Written: 1986
Source: Spartacist, No. 37-38, Summer 1986
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
The American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) decisively shed the formal ideological connection to its once revolutionary past when National Secretary Jack Barnes explicitly denounced the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution in a speech at the convention of the party’s youth organization on 31 December 1982. In the months preceding and following this speech, Barnes and his gang of fellow epigones ruthlessly purged the SWP of all opponents of the new line, including virtually every remaining long-time member of the party (see “Barnes-town, U.S.A.,” Workers Vanguard No. 320, 31 December 1982). The expelled oppositionists eventually constituted themselves into three separate organizations—Socialist Action (SA), Socialist Unity (SU) and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT)—with the older cadre tending to group around the FIT.
In February 1986 the FIT and SU (which latter has since merged with some Shachtmanite remnants to form a new reformist outfit dubbed “Solidarity”) co-published the pamphlet, “Don’t Strangle the Party.” The pamphlet contains three letters and a speech by SWP founding leader James P. Cannon, all from his last years, plus an introduction by FIT leader George Breitman. Breitman’s introduction purports to show, among other things, that the SWP’s organizational practice remained unchanged from the founding of American Trotskyism in 1928 until far past Cannon’s death in 1974—until Jack Barnes and his friends suddenly changed the rules in 1980.
During our preparation of this review of the FIT/SU pamphlet, we were saddened to learn of the death of George Breitman on April 19. In bringing out Cannon’s last known thoughts, feelings and opinions on a question with which he was pre-eminently familiar—the prerequisites for building a revolutionary Marxist party—comrade Breitman performed another valuable service for the Marxist movement.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Yet Breitman’s view of the Barnes clique as a sudden aberration in a party with an otherwise unbroken revolutionary continuity is flat out wrong: the SWP is today a fundamentally reformist party and the roots of its degeneration go back much further than Breitman could admit or understand. The SWP opted for class collaborationism over class struggle 20 years ago when it subordinated a revolutionary program in order to build a popular-frontist coalition against the Vietnam War. The party’s departure from erstwhile working-class politics began around 1960, using the Cuban Revolution as a springboard.
Cold War Stagnation
The rapid degeneration of the once revolutionary SWP, going through centrism into reformism, necessarily had an evolution. The party had endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the postwar McCarthy era. Concomitant with the emergence of the U.S. as the pre-eminent capitalist world power, the SWP recruited a substantial layer of proletarian militants, including many black workers, and then lost the bulk of them with the onset of the witchhunt. In the 1950s, the aging SWP cadre, seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of world imperialism, no doubt thought life was passing them by, as did the Cochranite wing which split from the party in 1953. The SWP correctly adopted a perspective of regroupment following the crisis in the Stalinist movement (the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations) and achieved some gains. But a tendency to “get rich quick” schemes led to opportunist bulges. In early 1957 the party adopted a fully principled and comprehensive 12-point program for regroupment, but this program remained a dead letter. Failing to find elements moving to the left out of the Communist Party (CP), the SWP briefly flirted with the rightward-moving Gatesite wing of the CP and then courted the National Guardian and the New York remnants of the Progressive Party with a “United Socialist Ticket” in the 1958 elections.
The SWP in the postwar period no longer understood the world very well. As the Second World War approached, Trotsky had understood the urgency of the crisis of revolutionary leadership. He correctly foresaw that world war would bring social convulsions and the possibility for proletarian revolutions, as the first inter-imperialist war had led to the Russian October. In 1938 the Trotskyists founded the Fourth International and Trotsky sought to gear its nascent sections up for the challenge. Trotsky predicted that successful proletarian revolutions against capitalism would also sweep away Stalinism, itself a product of a global stalemate between the isolated Soviet Union and world imperialism after the defeat, particularly in Germany, of the revolutionary wave.
However, the mainly tiny sections of the FI were in effect militarily defeated. Under conditions of great repression, the groups fragmented to carry out diverging policies, some of them quite heroic. Insulated in the U.S. from the carnage in Europe and the colonial countries, the SWP emerged from the war with its cadre intact. But internationally, virtually all the young and older cadres were killed by war and by fascist and Stalinist repression. Those would-be Trotskyists who after the war became the impressionistic leadership of the decimated FI were mainly youth who had learned their “Trotskyism” from books. Trotsky, himself murdered, did not live to see the restabilization of capitalism in Western Europe—with the active complicity of the Stalinist and other reformist parties whose participation in “national” governments was required to restabilize bourgeois rule in Italy and Greece and, to a lesser extent, in France and even Britain.
In exchange, in the countries of Eastern Europe where the smashing of the Nazi occupation by the Soviet Red Army had left rather a vacuum of power, the Russians retained control; a series of deformed workers states ensued by social transformations from the top down. Something different occurred in Yugoslavia when Tito’s guerrilla bands (and later Mao’s peasant army in China) brought about a deformed social revolution. In Yugoslavia and China, national Stalinist formations made revolutions in the interests of their own survival despite Moscow’s counterrevolutionary line. In the absence of the proletariat in its own right as a contender for power, these revolutions have confirmed in the negative the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, in that they were unable to establish any “middle” course or petty-bourgeois state—deformed workers states were consolidated.
In the postwar period, the SWP retreated into an increasingly formal “orthodoxy.” They had a hard time for a couple of years trying to figure out how the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe had been created. The SWP and FI were disoriented by Tito’s revolution, the first break in the formerly apparently monolithic Stalinist “camp”—the American party was quick to hail the Titoists as “left centrists.” On the other hand the SWP took until 1955 to categorize Mao’s China as a deformed workers state. That the party made opposite, symmetrical errors over these two qualitatively identical revolutions was a telling measure of its disorientation.
Then in 1959 Cannon himself was led into a brief flirtation with the Chinese regime which he had labeled Stalinist four years earlier. Cannon, along with several other Los Angeles National Committee (NC) members including Arne Swabeck, submitted resolutions on the question of the Chinese peasant communes in opposition to the Political Committee (PC) majority of Farrell Dobbs and Murry Weiss. The Los Angeles resolutions came but a hair’s breadth from declaring workers democracy to be alive and well in China. Cannon pulled back and Swabeck’s position was smashed at a subsequent NC plenum. In this case, and in general, restorative forces (usually seen as Cannon) operated and the party program was kept within nominally orthodox limits. But over Cuba this restorative “spring” snapped.
In the case of both China and Yugoslavia the SWP eventually came to the correct position that the states which issued out of the revolutions were structurally identical to the end-product of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution, where workers democracy had been usurped by a bureaucratic political counterrevolution. Trotskyists fight for the program of political revolution against the nationalistic bureaucratic caste. This was a program which Trotsky had laid out as necessary to open the road to socialist development in the case of the degenerated USSR:
“In any case, the bureaucracy can be removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as always, there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack. To prepare this and stand at the head of the masses in a favorable historic situation—that is the task of the Soviet section of the Fourth International
“The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms
“It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings—palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways—will be crowded out in favor of workers’ dwellings. ‘Bourgeois norms of distribution’ will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of decorations will go into the melting pot. The youth will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains. And, finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism.”
—Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936
Cuba—The Acid Test
By 1960 the SWP was looking for something, and they found it in Cuba. Dropping the qualitative distinction between a deformed workers state and a healthy workers state, the SWP dropped its program on the need for a Trotskyist party leading the working class, in response to the Cuban Revolution, where a petty-bourgeois guerrilla formation overthrew the U.S.-supported Batista regime and nationalized large sections of the economy under imperialist pressure. The SWP took the fact that a social revolution had occurred in Cuba to mean that the Cuban leadership was on a par with that of the Bolshevik Revolution. Morris Stein spoke for a whole layer of the SWP when he proclaimed, at the 1961 convention, that the Cuban Revolution was the greatest thing since the Russian October. Hooray, they said, we’ve lived to see it. However much the FIT wants to deny it, they were part of an SWP which began to abandon Trotskyism in 1960, two decades before Barnes and his gang dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.
In January 1961 the SWP NC adopted Joseph Hansen’s “Theses on the Cuban Revolution” which declared that Cuba had “entered the transitional phase of a workers state, although one lacking as yet the forms of democratic proletarian rule.” These theses were adopted following the explicit objections made in the document, “The Cuban Revolution and Marxist Theory,” which three leaders of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA)—Shane Mage, Jim Robertson and Tim Wohlforth—had submitted in August 1960 to oppose the party’s tendency to characterize Cuba as a “workers state.” It was at this plenum that the Revolutionary Tendency (RT—forerunner of the Spartacist League) was formed out of the opposition of Mage, Robertson and Wohlforth to the SWP’s liquidationism over Cuba.
The RT’s resolution, “The Cuban Revolution,” submitted to the 1961 YSA Convention, was in sharp counterposition to the SWP majority not only in its analysis of the emerging deformed workers state in Cuba, and the necessity to oppose the growing bureaucratism, but fundamentally on the role of Trotskyists:
“The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.”
The minority’s warning applied no less to the SWP itself. In abandoning the fight for a revolutionary Trotskyist party in Cuba, the SWP was well down the road to its own liquidation as a revolutionary instrument: a party whose leadership looked to alien class forces “only 90 miles away” didn’t have a very good prognosis.
The SWP Adopts Breitman’s Black Nationalism
Lenin described centrists as “revolutionaries in word and reformists in deed”—a good capsule description of the SWP in the early 1960s. The SWP’s rightward-moving centrism expressed itself not just over Cuba, but domestically as well. The Southern civil rights movement offered an excellent opportunity for the SWP to break out of isolation and intersect a new generation of plebeian black militants. Since 1955 there had been an ongoing discussion in the SWP on orientation to the civil rights movement. The two poles of the discussion were George Breitman, who advocated the demand of “self-determination” for the black masses, and Richard Kirk (Dick Fraser) who put forward a program of revolutionary integrationism. Throughout the 1950s the party continued to intervene in the struggle against black oppression with an integrationist perspective. Though the 1957 convention resolution, “The Class Struggle Road to Negro Equality,” envisioned support to separatist demands “if they should reflect the mass will,” it was adopted by the convention with significant reservations expressed on this question. But by 1963 the SWP leadership was ready to fully embrace Breitman’s long-standing support to black nationalism, with the concomitant policy of abstention from the civil rights struggle—they were ready to become sideline cheerleaders for black radicals who would supposedly acquire revolutionary consciousness without the intervention of a revolutionary party. Richard Kirk was in fullblown opposition to the SWP leadership by this time, and his tendency, which otherwise advocated a weird brand of sectoralist politics, submitted a resolution to the 1963 convention upholding the program of revolutionary integrationism. The RT supported the Kirk resolution with the following statement:
“I. Our support to the basic line of the 1963 Kirk-Kaye resolution, ‘Revolutionary Integration,’ is centered upon the following proposition:
“The Negro people are not a nation; rather they are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. From this condition the consequence has come that the Negro struggle for freedom has had, historically, the aim of integration into an equalitarian society.
“II. Our minority is most concerned with the political conclusions stemming from the theoretical failures of the P.C.’s draft, ‘Freedom Now.’ This concern found expression in the recent individual discussion article, ‘For Black Trotskyism.’ The systematic abstentionism and the accompanying attitude of acquiescence which accepts as inevitable that ‘ours is a white party,’ are most profound threats to the revolutionary capacity of the party on the American scene.”
The RT’s one-page amendment to the perspectives document at the 1963 convention was dismissed by the SWP leadership as ridiculous and wildly adventuristic because it demanded the party initiate modest trade-union work in a few carefully chosen places and seek some involvement in the mass civil rights struggles in the South:
“As regards the South today, we are witnessing from afar a great mass struggle for equality. Our separation from this arena is intolerable. The party should be prepared to expend significant material resources in overcoming our isolation from Southern struggles. In helping to build a revolutionary movement in the South, our forces should work directly with and through the developing left-wing formations in the movement there. A successful outcome to our action would lead to an historic breakthrough for the Trotskyist movement. Expressed organizationally, it would mean the creation of several party branches in the South for the first time—for example, in Atlanta, Birmingham or New Orleans.”
Kirk had lost favor with the SWP leadership when he fought against the party’s adoption in 1955, under Breitman’s urging, of the slogan, “Federal Troops to Mississippi.” Not only did this slogan pose a fundamental revision of the Marxist understanding of the nature of the bourgeois state, but it prompted the party to support Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops into Little Rock in 1957—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. The policy of painting U.S. imperialist troops as reliable defenders of black people had engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, but by 1964 the party adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” And this wasn’t the only sign that in the SWP’s mind the bourgeois state was no longer an instrument of class oppression. Following the November 1963 Kennedy assassination, SWP party administrator Farrell Dobbs sent a sniveling telegram of condolence to the widow of the imperialist chief who ordered the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba!
Despite the SWP’s deepening reformist practice, the party remained committed to some kind of formal Trotskyism on paper. The leadership had the able services of Joseph Hansen to cover over the deviations with numerous caveats and paragraphs of ritual orthodoxy. Hansen was careful—you had to read between the lines to see the real line. This was important because it allowed the older cadre to carry out their opportunist appetites while still maintaining—often sincerely—the formal adherence to the revolutionary principles of their youth.
The SWP didn’t have to look hard to find cothinkers for their revisionism on Cuba: they entered into negotiations to reunify with the International Secretariat (IS), which was led by one Michel Pablo. By 1951 Pablo, a leader of the devastated Fourth International (FI), had reacted to the postwar overturns of capitalism in Eastern Europe by claiming that the imminence of World War III would “force” the Stalinist parties to play a generally revolutionary role. Pablo’s line demanded liquidationist conclusions: Trotskyist nuclei should dissolve into the Stalinist parties and become left pressure groups. This perspective of “deep entry” into the Stalinist parties led to the destruction of the FI.
From afar and in the face of an escalating witchhunt which hindered full international collaboration (it was a U.S. felony, for example, for an American Communist or ex-Communist to apply for a passport), Cannon had originally acquiesced to Pablo’s blatant, and in some cases suicidal, revisionism. Only when the Cochran-Clarke faction emerged in support of Pablo in the U.S. did Cannon take up the fight. Yet Cannon had great difficulty in getting the central SWP cadre to go along with him against Cochran-Clarke. The New York leadership of Dobbs, Kerry, Hansen and Morris Stein only belatedly came over to Cannon and Los Angeles SWP leader Murry Weiss, and the internal disputes in the SWP of the mid-1950s reflected the reality of this heavily nuanced bloc.
Cannon’s SWP did eventually raise the banner of orthodox Trotskyism, aligning itself with the former majority of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste and with Gerry Healy’s faction in the fragmented British Trotskyist movement to form the “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC). But in the case of the Cuban Revolution the SWP adopted the fundamental premise of Pabloism and opted for looking toward some other, non-Leninist, non-proletarian force, to make the revolution. The SWP’s line converged with that of Pablo. The RT opposed reunification and was in general political agreement with the IC majority led by Gerry Healy, who at that time espoused at least a literary defense of orthodox Trotskyism (see especially the 1961 document “The World Prospect for Socialism” of Healy’s Socialist Labour League). The SWP voted for reunification with the Pabloites in 1963, giving birth to the United Secretariat (USec) which explicitly espoused a petty-bourgeois, guerrilla “road to socialism” in the colonial countries. The RT’s resolution on the world movement, “Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International,” submitted to the SWP’s 1963 convention, upheld the Leninist road:
“Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for ‘building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.’ Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerrilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.”
The Purge of the RT
The RT’s fight against the SWP leadership’s precipitous surrender of a working-class perspective occurred at a time when the SWP was seething with internal oppositions. We have already mentioned the Kirk-Kaye tendency, but there were others, totaling perhaps a third of the SWP’s membership. Some were dissident branches, others were national tendencies but they all had one thing in common: in a few years they would find themselves outside of the SWP. In the early 1960s it certainly wasn’t excluded in advance that the RT could win over a chunk of the cadre. Despite the leadership’s right-centrism, the SWP had not lost all of its revolutionary juices. At the same time, the RT had few illusions on how long they would be allowed to carry out the fight inside the party. The tired, aging Dobbs was growing increasingly irritable at the presence of critics, and he had the majority.
The RT was dealt a real blow when the miserable Tim Wohlforth, acting as Gerry Healy’s tool, provoked an unprincipled split in the tendency in 1962. Evidently the despicable Healy thought he still had a chance to keep the SWP in the IC, so he ordered the RT majority to recant their view that the SWP had become centrist. (Healy demanded the recantation despite his own July 1962 polemic against the SWP, “Trotskyism Betrayed.”) When the majority of the RT refused, Wohlforth and his partner Philips split from the RT. This was a crime on two counts: it not only demoralized and drove away some tendency supporters, it also made the RT look like a bunch of unserious, juvenile, professional factionalists in the eyes of many SWP members.
Wohlforth’s next service to Dobbs was to falsely accuse the RT of having a “split perspective” by selectively quoting from intra-tendency discussion drafts in a document submitted to the SWP internal bulletin. Dobbs, annoyed by the RT’s having managed to elect two delegates to the 1963 convention, found Wohlforth’s frame-up useful as a pretext. After a farcical Control Commission “investigation”—which only one elected member of the Control Commission, a hard majorityite, participated in—the outcome was hardly in doubt. In December 1963, five leaders of the RT were expelled for having a “hostile and disloyal attitude” toward the SWP. Dobbs summed up the majority’s own attitude in his arrogant declaration to the New York branch that “the majority is the party.”
Dobbs’ purge of the RT had been preceded by numerous other organizational abuses—the bureaucratic removal of the YSA leadership, provocative factional raids into minority tendency meetings, and the like, all documented in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 4, Parts I and II. The RT consciously and deliberately abided by the then-existing SWP organizational rules, forcing Dobbs to change the statutes in order to justify his purge. Thus our abiding by the formal organizational rules pushed the Dobbsite majority to bring the rules into line with the evolving new rightward-moving political practices.
The 1965 Organizational Resolution
According to Breitman’s introduction, “the PC decided to submit a resolution on organizational principles to the 1965 convention....” But the PC didn’t just “decide” out of the blue: the National Committee authorized the drafting of this resolution in the same motion which expelled the leading RTers. The resolution (“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”) was discussed and voted by the 1965 convention on the same agenda point which denied the expelled RT members even the right to appeal their expulsion. Fully one-third of the content of the 1965 organizational resolution is taken up with an explicit ex post facto justification of the RT’s expulsion. Breitman ignores these overwhelming facts. The SWP leadership decided to codify its bureaucratic treatment of the RT: this is what organizationally consummated the strangling of the party.
Stripped of the jumbles of paragraphs taken here and there from past SWP organizational resolutions, Dobbs’ document amounted to the destruction of the rights of any minority. Opposition to the majority line was equated with “disloyalty” to the party. In essence, the 1965 rules boil down to the following syllogism: (1) factions are permitted in the SWP; (2) factionalists are disloyal people; (3) disloyal people are expelled from the SWP. Needless to say, this document was to prove quite useful to Dobbs’ successors.
A party dedicated to proletarian revolution must demand discipline in action from its members as well as provide a fully democratic internal life. This allows cohesiveness while insuring that the organization’s line and tactics can be adjusted, in the light of past experience, to new situations. But when the party abandons a revolutionary program—as the SWP did around 1960—then the coupling between the two components of democratic centralism changes as well. When Dobbs purged the RT, it meant the eclipse of internal democracy by unbridled centralism. Indeed, the SWP after 1965 had tighter rules than the Bolsheviks during the Civil War.
That certainly wasn’t the historic norm—before 1963 a disciplined minority such as the RT could easily have been tolerated and in fact become part of a new generation of party leadership. The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. had a long experience with internal oppositions, uneven to be sure, but nothing like the later monolithic conception of Dobbs. The “textbook” case was the 1939-1940 fight with the Shachtmanites, who wanted to abandon the military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. This was a fight on fundamental principles; but despite the positions of the minority, Cannon did not move organizationally until the political issues were fully brought out and the minority had de facto split. At other times the leadership had been hard, as in 1935 with the uncontrollable Oehlerites who issued their own bulletin and refused to stop fighting again after the party had made its decision to enter the Socialist Party’s emerging left wing. In the mid-1940s on the other hand, in the case of the Goldman-Morrow group, the SWP leadership was very soft. Morrow was given a second chance to mend his ways even after he was caught openly giving verbal reports of SWP PC meetings to the Shachtmanites at a time when they were a significant opponent organization to the SWP.
Party case law, and its codification into resolutions, developed in the course of struggle, with the ups and downs of a living revolutionary movement. But the bottom line was that at each juncture, the party sought revolutionary solutions to the disputes—i.e., it stuck to its program. Centrally, it saw its task as constructing the revolutionary vanguard in the light of essential international and domestic experience. In that regard Cannon, as he points out repeatedly in the letters reprinted in “Don’t Strangle the Party,” had a great advantage—he was able to directly benefit from the example of the Bolshevik Revolution and from the internationalism of the Comintern in Lenin’s time, as well as his later collaboration with Trotsky.
The material assembled in “Don’t Strangle the Party” helps to round out Cannon’s literary legacy and it sheds some light on what has been a very shadowy matter—friction in the preceding period between Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs took over the day-to-day administration of the SWP when Cannon moved to Los Angeles in 1952. Cannon was rumored to be unhappy with the SWP’s trajectory under Dobbs, who moved only very late to join the fight against the Pabloite revisionism of Cochran-Clarke. In the following period Cannon reportedly gave backhanded support to the grouping around Murry Weiss as against Dobbs and Tom Kerry. But by 1965, by Breitman’s account, Cannon didn’t even bother to raise his objections to the important, Dobbs-authored organizational resolution; by 1968 he had stopped writing to the party center at all.
Breitman buttresses his argument that the 1965 resolution meant no fundamental change in party democracy chiefly by what Cannon didn’t say on the subject. But Cannon in his later years of semi-retirement got pretty shaky politically (e.g., his early support for Swabeck on China) and in 1965 he was 75 years old. This dimension has to be taken into account when discussing a resolution to which, by Breitman’s own account, Cannon basically only acquiesced. While Cannon stood by, objecting once in a while as these letters show, the party he had led from its founding degenerated into a reformist, and correspondingly bureaucratic, shell.
Into the Abyss
In 1965, the rising ferment over the escalating U.S. imperialist military involvement in Vietnam presented the SWP leadership with the “mass movement” which would provide a full outlet for their accumulated reformist appetites. The SWP’s definitive overt leap from centrism to reformism came around the November 1965 antiwar conference in Washington, D.C., where the SWP attempted an (unsuccessful) organizational grab. In doing so, the SWP threw overboard the last remnants of class-struggle opposition to the war in favor of the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop the imperialist intervention in Vietnam. Richard Kirk, then still a member of the SWP NC, condemned the SWP’s wretched role at the November conference in a letter to the PC dated 13 December 1965:
“Here the party and youth carried on an unprincipled, disruptive and politically reformist struggle against the entire left wing of the antiwar movement. They disrupted the conference around tertiary organizational demands and ended in isolation and national disgrace. They established an indelible and deserved record for political conservatism and dead-end factionalism.”
Kirk had copies of his letter sent to his supporters on and off the NC, as well as to several majority supporters, including Larry Trainor. For this violation of “committee discipline” (which Cannon called a “non-existent law”) Kirk was censured by the February 1966 NC plenum. Breitman says in his preface that the “whole question” of discipline was “dropped” at this plenum. But Kirk’s criticisms, unlike Swabeck’s, cut too close to the SWP’s actual reformist practice. After the censure of Kirk the SWP leadership opened up an “investigation” of the entire Kirk-Kaye tendency, sending the bully Asher Harer to Seattle where the Fraserites had the majority. This action precipitated the resignation of the entire tendency.
It is clear that Dobbs felt much earlier that taking political disputes outside the NC was a violation of “normal party procedures” warranting disciplinary action. In early 1962—four years before Cannon opposed disciplining Arne Swabeck—Dobbs went after Tim Wohlforth for violating this norm. This was before Wohlforth split the RT, and he was the only minorityite on the Political Committee. When the RT submitted a document signed by Wohlforth and another member of the NC, plus ten other well-known comrades, Wohlforth was treated to a real browbeating by Dobbs, as recorded in the minutes of the 11 April 1962 PC meeting.
The whole notion of “committee discipline” is hardly new, as Cannon notes in his 8 February 1966 letter. In the early American CP it was mostly honored in the breach. But breach of such a norm cannot become the occasion for disciplinary action in a revolutionary party, which must allow for free political discourse between its leading members and the rank and file if the party convention is to make an informed decision on the disputed issues. We note that even Stalin’s guilt-ridden defense in Pravda did not invoke “committee discipline” against the Central Committee members who signed the Left Opposition’s “Platform of the 46” in October 1923.
The SWP’s qualitative descent into reformism occurred alongside the emergence of a new leadership configuration. Cannon was “promoted” to advisory status in 1965, and his agent Carl Feingold was eliminated forthwith. The Dobbs-Kerry leadership which had been administering the party since 1952 didn’t last much longer—they were old and tired. The intermediate layer—40-year-olds like Nat Weinstein, Ed Shaw and Clifton DeBerry—were mediocre at very best. And the SWP had purged their layer of revolutionary-minded youth when they booted out the RT. So they were pretty much stuck with Barnes, Barry Sheppard, Doug and Linda Jenness, Larry Seigle, Mary-Alice Waters, Peter Camejo, et al. These were political animals of quite another sort—unlike even the lackluster 40-year-olds who at least had some experience with the old SWP and its trade-union work, the Barnesites had no organic connection to the party’s revolutionary past. They had come to the SWP during the period of its centrist degeneration and were recruited from the petty-bourgeois student milieu. Further, their first taste of power came during the RT fight when Dobbs seized control of the YSA, and Barnes, Sheppard and Camejo were dropped into the youth leadership. The Barnes clique certainly didn’t learn Trotskyist politics—but Dobbs did give them the tools to “deal” with oppositionists.
The Barnesite Conspiracy
Early on the Barnesites had a sense of us vs. them regarding the older SWP cadre who retained at least a sentimental attachment to Trotskyism, albeit diluted. Joseph Hansen was the quintessential old-timer—he had been Trotsky’s personal secretary from 1937-1940 and the living link between Cannon and Trotsky. An able polemicist, Hansen was the SWP’s principal international spokesman during and after the 1963 reunification with the Pabloites (in this role he had earned the psychotic enmity of Gerry Healy who later waged an international slander campaign against Hansen as an “accomplice” to the assassination of Trotsky and an agent of the GPU, FBI, etc.). Hansen had a real base of support among the cadre he had trained on the staff of the SWP’s journal, Intercontinental Press. So Barnes & Co. simply eased the older cadre out of power by shunting them into “advisory” status on the party’s leading committees. By the mid-1970s, the Barnesites had secured control and the advisory bodies were dissolved. Later, the Barnesites would gloat over how easily and adroitly they eased out the old-timers. Mary-Alice Waters in a May 1985 report to the SWP NC enthused:
“Because of the strengths of the party leadership, we made it through the decade of the 1970s and into the 1980s before any section of older cadres tried to claim the mantle of age to justify refusal to be disciplined.... The split that came to a head in 1982-83 was, in part, a split we had prevented year after year throughout the 1970s as we made the transition.... When some individuals who left the party last year tried to turn it into an ‘old timers’ revolt, it was too late
—SWP Information Bulletin No. 2, June 1985, quoted in FIT’s Bulletin in Defense of Marxism No. 22, September 1985
Hansen’s death in early 1979 was very convenient for the Barnes clique: it rid them of a formidable potential internal opponent at a time when their leadership was more than a little vulnerable to attack. Party membership was on the wane—the antiwar movement from which the SWP had recruited significantly had long since petered out. Barnes’ forays into other areas had been a disaster. “Consistent feminism” hadn’t led to socialism—instead the SWP experienced the hardly unforeseeable redbaiting of its fraction in the bourgeois-feminist National Organization for Women. The much-vaunted “turn” to industry fared no better—it recruited next to no workers while simultaneously driving out many of the petty-bourgeois recruits from the 1960s and 1970s.
The Barnesite epigones moved into high gear in 1980: they were the “secret factionalists” and they certainly were part of a conspiracy. The FIT is right on that score. The inside story of the SWP in the early 1980s is certainly one of corridor gossip, the lining up of traitors, the marking of those who didn’t sneer at Trotsky in private. The Barnes gang engaged in provocations designed to push the old cadre into opposition—Doug Jenness’ Militant articles attacking Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution are an example. When Breitman, Steve Bloom, Frank Lovell, Nat Weinstein and Lynn Henderson timidly voiced their objections, Barnes & Co. framed them up and blackjacked them with the 1965 organizational rules—for which incidentally Breitman, Lovell and Weinstein had all voted. Those now grouped in the FIT, SU and SA were the victims of a calculated purge—it is very difficult to believe that the enormous, fine-print “List of Splitters” in the January 1984 Party Organizer hadn’t been drawn up long, long before. In classic Stalinist fashion, Barnes first purged, then submitted the planned line change to the remaining faithful hand-raisers.
The Two-Tier Conception of Party Membership
After reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” one would believe that in the period after Swabeck’s expulsion the SWP was virtually opposition free—until the Barnes gang suddenly decided to junk Trotskyism in 1980. But this is far from the case. The RT expulsion had not rid the SWP of all leftist elements and at least some of the recruits gained after 1965 believed that the SWP had something to do with revolutionary socialism.
In the early 1970s a myriad of often overlapping oppositions arose in the SWP—the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT), the Leninist Faction (LF), the Communist Tendency, the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency (RIT), the Internationalist Tendency (IT)—and none of them got the kid-gloves treatment reserved for old-time NCers like Arne Swabeck (see “Memories of a 1970s SWP Oppositionist,” page 30). All of these oppositions consisted for the most part of relatively newer members and they were viewed as unruly kids who were disloyal and didn’t belong in the party anyway.
Breitman and the FIT do not see the systematic brutalization of every SWP opposition after 1963. Implicit in both Cannon’s material and the Breitman introduction is the actual two-tier conception of party membership which operated in the SWP from 1960 to 1980. There was, in fact, one set of rules for those people with standing—those who had been around and on the NC for a while—and quite another set for the people who hadn’t. Among the mass of oppositions in the 1963 SWP the RT was singled out for expulsion because its fight for the historic revolutionary program of the SWP was an extreme embarrassment to Dobbs.
In 1974 the SWP expelled 115 members of the Internationalist Tendency from the party and the YSA— the largest “split” in the SWP since 1953. At the time, the SWP was embroiled in a desultory faction fight with the Mandel-led tendency in the USec. One of the hot issues was guerrilla warfare, one of the points of unity in 1963. The SWP had abandoned its brief pro-guerrilla enthusing in favor of abject social-democratic reformism, but Mandel remained a vicarious “guerrilla,” and the IT supported him. The United States government, in the form of the House Internal Security Subcommittee, targeted Mandel’s USec and the IT in particular as “terrorists.” To the Barnesites this was the kiss of death for the IT. The SWP’s “Watersuit” against the U.S. imperialist spy agencies’ decades-long surveillance of the SWP was then under way and the last thing Barnes wanted was a clot inside the SWP tainted with the suggestion of “terrorism.” So the IT was declared to be a “separate rival party” by PC diktat and summarily expelled—on the Fourth of July 1974! The SWP’s own internal bulletins on the purge (including a list of ITers’ pseudonyms) showed up in court as the showpiece of the SWP’s attempt to demonstrate its “respectability” before the bourgeoisie. The significance of this patriotic purge was not lost on the federal judge:
“There was never anything, in my view, beyond the most tenuous suggestion of a possible implication of violence in the United States. In view of the ouster of the minority faction, I believe that tenuous suggestion has been basically eliminated.”
The IT was offered up to the government by Barnes & Co. on the specious hope that the federal court would recognize the SWP’s right to practice its weird brand of reformism without the interference, infiltration and intrusion of the FBI. Years later the judge has yet to announce his verdict, but the verdict of history is clear: Barnes’ SWP is a party which the U.S. capitalist class has truly no reason to fear.
In the “Watersuit” trial, the SWP underscored its vindictive hatred for the remnants of the leftist IT when, in 1981, it slandered ex-ITer Hedda Garza as a government fink, based on an FBI claim that Garza had met privately with a government attorney. The SWP aggressively retailed this disgraceful lie in the Militant and tried to silence the few who protested inside the SWP by making the ludicrous claim that “district attorneys don’t lie.” The Spartacist League protested this gratuitous slander of a socialist comrade in our detailed press coverage of the “Watersuit” (see especially “Reformism on Trial,” Workers Vanguard No. 286, 31 July 1981). Our press documented the SWP’s reformist assurances that the party’s legalism was in no way “contravened” by anything Lenin or Trotsky might have written, the suggestions that Nicaraguan pluralism or even American “checks and balances” rather than the Russian Revolution were the SWP’s model, the vicious slander of Garza solely because she used to sometimes hang around with USec leaders. We protested the violation of SWP members’ rights, facilitated by the panicky incompetence of the SWP, which in a touching display of faith in the government handed over party members’ names and international comrades’ pseudonyms, then turned around and in response to demands for financial information claimed the party had destroyed its own financial records. We wrote that the “Watersuit” fully displayed not only the SWP’s quirky reformist politics but the organizational consequences of having driven out of party influence the experienced cadres who, despite the political erosion, would still have known how to competently administer a legal case. The same lack was evident again in the SWP’s initial public non-response to the dangerous Gelfand suit (where a Healyite agent appealed to the government to intervene in the SWP’s internal life to restore him to membership), which the SWP treated like a guilty secret until the SL press exposed the Healyites’ organization-busting gambit and called for anti-sectarian support to the SWP against Gelfand.
Cannon’s 1966 speech refers to the SWP’s “capacity to attract the young” as a sign of its vitality. But from 1963 on, the SWP under Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry (and later under Barnes & Co.) systematically purged those youth who thought they were joining some kind of revolutionary Trotskyist party. The Spartacist League won some of these elements out of the RIT, LF and IT on the basis of the Trotskyist program for which it had fought since its inception as the RT. By 1980 all that was left of the revolutionary SWP was its initials—and those few old-timers whom Barnes expelled when he repudiated Trotskyism.
We wonder whether the concern Cannon expresses in his letter to Reba Hansen about “any possible proposal to weaken the constitutional provision about the absolute right of suspended or expelled members to appeal to the convention” reflected support to SWP PC member George Weissman’s fight to hear the RT’s appeal at the 1965 convention. Weissman’s motion to give the RT members time to present their case was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 32 to 24. In any case the attempt to uphold the RT’s formal rights to appeal in 1965 was a gesture. While every oppositional current in the SWP had opposed the expulsion, the majority of the cadre—including Weissman and Cannon—supported it. Weissman, who wrote a powerful protest against his own expulsion from the SWP, was a member of the FIT at the time of his death last year (see our obituary in Workers Vanguard No. 382, 28 June 1985).
Yet the letters and speech in “Don’t Strangle the Party” carry the clear implication that Cannon didn’t much like where the SWP was going in the mid-1960s. We mentioned earlier the rumored friction between Cannon and Dobbs. We have to say here that Dobbs and Tom Kerry, after groping around, groomed Barnes and his cohorts as their replacements. Breitman says nothing about that. Cannon’s last letters certainly strongly support our contention that the SWP’s renunciation of Trotskyism didn’t just fall from the skies in 1982. We recall that by the 1981 SWP convention Tom Kerry was screaming in impotent rage at Barnes and his crew of hacks. How much did Kerry reflect the views of his former partner, Dobbs? It’s hard to tell. In a democratic party the disputes are all in the internal bulletins. In the bureaucratic post-1963 SWP the real stuff of party internal life happened behind the scenes.
FIT—Blinded by Centrism
After their expulsions, the veteran comrades of the ex-SWP milieu found themselves unceremoniously ejected from the party’s public events and slandered as “disrupters.” Indignant at being deprived of their democratic rights as members of the socialist public, by a party to which many had devoted decades of service, the FIT protested publicly, including claiming that this was the first time in the SWP’s history that people had been excluded from its “public” events because of their political views. Yet the FIT knows different. Indeed, in the mid-70s, FIT leader Frank Lovell had prevented the SWP San Francisco branch from excluding Spartacists from a Militant Forum. Informed that the exclusion of Spartacists was standard SWP policy, Lovell retorted that after all his years of addressing democratically organized public meetings he wasn’t about to start excluding people now. This defense of workers democracy should be a source of pride for Lovell and the FIT, but instead they are constrained to forget it since the incident points clearly to the decisive break in the SWP’s revolutionary continuity having occurred much earlier than the FIT is willing to look. The FIT’s view that Barnes’ party remained the revolutionary SWP until very lately in fact plays into the hands of currents among the ex-SWP oppositionists like Alan Wald, who uses atrocities of Barnes’ party over two decades to buttress his case that Trotskyism itself has failed and should be dumped in favor of regroupments with “state capitalist” formations.
The omissions in Breitman’s introduction are not the result of cynicism or willful disingenuousness. Breitman and the FIT literally can’t see what happened to the SWP because they are blinded by their centrist politics. They long for a return to the SWP of the 1960s and 1970s, when their popular-frontist antiwar work garnered a wave of recruits and Joe Hansen wrote so beautifully, proving that the SWP’s support to Castro was consistent with this or that Comintern resolution. To anyone who at the time doubted the SWP’s attachment to Trotsky, the old-timers could proudly point to the party’s efforts in collecting, editing and publishing Trotsky’s and Cannon’s writings.
Breitman certainly deserves central credit in that effort, the results of which today educationally arm the members of the Spartacist tendency. Yet it was Breitman himself who proposed dropping the SWP’s designation as “Trotskyist” in a letter to the NC dated 6 April 1965:
“On the whole, the label ‘Trotskyist’ is a handicap, not an asset. To new people it gives the impression that we are some kind of cult, creating unnecessary obstacles to reaching them with our program, especially rebellious youth who are suspicious of cults.”
This proposal was a resurrection of one made by Cannon in 1951, but Cannon scrapped it during the Cochran-Clarke fight when the minority came out with the slogan, “Junk the Old Trotskyism.” Breitman was undoubtedly more comfortable with Cannon’s 1951 rightist flinch than with other thoughts of Cannon. Cannon never excluded the possibility that the American workers would bypass a reformist labor party dominated by the conservative trade-union tops and come directly to revolutionary consciousness in the heat of struggle. Such an idea is literally inconceivable to both today’s SWP and the FIT.
The FIT sees the crux of the problem in Barnes’ supposedly “new” orientation to Castroism, beginning in 1979. As we have shown, the SWP’s decisive adaptation to Castro began much earlier than that. But something did happen in 1979—the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. This prompted Barnes to offer the idiotic thought that the SWP could make the big time internationally by cutting a deal with Managua. All that allegedly stood in the way was the old baggage of Trotskyism and its aged centrist supporters still in the SWP. And the Barnesites weren’t part of the “old guard” who tacitly understood, however wrongly, that the 1965 organizational rules wouldn’t be used against them.
Breitman’s failure to associate himself with a revolutionary program left him incapable of effectively combating the Barnesite epigones during his brief internal opposition, or even understanding his subsequent expulsion. His tragic end—kicked out of the party which he had loyally served for close to half a century—is reminiscent of others who, lacking a sufficient program, couldn’t understand what hit them. Leopold Trepper, the heroic Polish Communist who led the Soviet intelligence network in Nazi-occupied Belgium and France during World War II, spoke movingly as one of the many who saw the flame of Bolshevik Revolution smothered by Stalin:
“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess,’ for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”
—The Great Game, 1977
Breitman noted that, in opposing disciplinary action against Swabeck, Cannon may have looked “a little farther ahead than most of the NC members.” Cannon also foretold the possibility that the SWP would not be capable of meeting its revolutionary obligations:
“We know that our party, as at present constituted, is not ordained. We are human, and therefore capable of error and of failure. But if we fail; if we ossify into sectarianism, or degenerate along the lines of opportunism, or succumb to the pressures of our times and let history pass us by—it would simply mean that others, picking up the program and taking hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, would have to create another party of the same type as the SWP.”
—“Concluding Speech at the May Plenum,” 31 May 1953
Cannon clung to the SWP through its degeneration, but the Revolutionary Tendency took hold of the thread of Marxist continuity, based on the heritage of Cannon and the revolutionary SWP. As opposed to the sentimental looking-back, with centrist blinders, of the FIT, we look forward with the confidence that we are the continuators of revolutionary Marxism in the United States, and internationally.
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Memories of a 1960s SWP Oppositionist
While preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Al Nelson, who was a young member of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Comrade Nelson’s letter has been edited for publication.
When I joined the SWP in February 1962 the New York Organizer, Carl Feingold, cautioned me that I had a “major difference” with the SWP (the nature of the Cuban Revolution) and that of course I would not be expected to speak in public or do other work where Cuba was involved. This projected RT supporters as second-class members and implied an inability to abide by discipline. The SWP soon moved to keep known RT supporters in the youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), out of the SWP. When Dave K. was kept out of the SWP, the reason cited was that he was not “active enough.” Jim Robertson, a leader of the RT, was a member of the New York local Executive Committee later in 1962 and he objected to this policy.
When I joined the YSA in the fall of 1961 there was a general policy of social ostracism toward minority supporters that extended to brand-new YSA members, who were lined up against the minority immediately—they were warned to avoid us. The leadership, especially the more factionally-crazed New York YSA leadership, tried as much as possible to prevent RT members from working in public arenas. We were criticized as “free agents” when we took part in pickets or demonstrations without “consultation” with the branch leadership. RT supporter Roger A. was eventually expelled in February 1964 for taking part in picketing the Greek Queen because, in so doing, he “consciously and arrogantly violate[d] party discipline.” Shirley Stoute, a black RT member, was forbidden to work in the civil rights movement in the South in the summer of 1962. She then received a personal invitation from SNCC leader James Forman, which the SWP could not refuse. Shirley and Steve Fox went to the South, followed by Pete Camejo and Ken Schulman specifically to spy on Shirley and report back to New York.
Shirley was eventually told to return to New York for a YSA National Committee (NC) plenum in September 1962. Then she was told that she could not return to the South and was under discipline not to reveal the reasons why to SNCC! She was merely to send for her belongings.
On 28 January 1963, in an obvious factional provocation, two young members of the majority “raided” a private RT discussion meeting. I made an informal protest the next day to the National Organization Secretary Tom Kerry, who seemed surprised. But the PC decided to cover for Carl Feingold, who had engineered the raid, and on 2 February 1963 passed a motion by Dobbs and Kerry endorsing Kerry’s statement at the New York branch meeting that the RT was violating party discussion procedures by having meetings at all before the formal pre-conference discussion period. Thus the majority leadership eliminated the distinction between private and party discussion. In response we wrote, “For the Right of Organized Tendencies to Exist Within the Party.”
Wohlforth published accusations against us as splitters in the party discussion bulletin in June 1963; two days later we replied to his lies with “Discipline and Truth,” submitting it just under the bulletin deadline. Nearly one-third of the SWP was in political opposition on the eve of the 1963 convention. Barry Sheppard, Camejo and others predicted gleefully that the ax would fall on the RT at the convention. We heard later that Myra Tanner Weiss warned Cannon not to expel us at the convention or she would go public. Tom Kerry denounced us on the floor of the convention for being “disloyal.” This was cited later as evidence of “suspicion” to warrant our expulsions. Robertson was kept off the National Committee and the Political Committee, which became basically majority bodies.
The Control Commission convened in August, following the convention, to investigate Wohlforth’s charges against us. All RT supporters in New York were called for tape-recorded interrogations. Robertson, Mage, White, Harper and Ireland were suspended by the PC in October and expelled at an NC plenum in December for “disloyal conduct” though no violations of discipline were alleged or proved.
On 9 January 1964, a plenum report centering on the expulsions was made to the New York branch. The report included some self-criticism on the public positions of the SWP when Kennedy was killed—these were called “errors in formulation.” The expulsions were described as a big step, aimed not only at the Robertson tendency. “Wild” branch meetings were cited. “Loyalty” to the party was now to be a prerequisite for party membership. The expulsions were intended to affirm what kind of party the SWP was. This internal situation was allowed to develop so long, the report said, because the SWP was just coming out of isolation—it had become lax. Now the party was making a turn; no more leaning over backwards. It was time to tighten up.
When Doug Gorden (Swabeckite) denounced the “frame-up charges” from the floor, Nat Weinstein, the New York organizer, said that the party would no longer permit the NC to be attacked in that way. He said this was a final warning and proposed that Doug be censured by the Executive Committee—reaffirming Dobbs’ statement that “the majority is the party.” Various minorities objected during the discussion. In his summary remarks Weinstein stated that this was an “information report” and that NC decisions could not be changed until the next convention.
On 20 February 1964, the first issue of Spartacist was sold outside the Thursday night New York branch meeting by Jim Robertson. It seemed that nearly everyone in the meeting was reading a copy. A furious Weinstein took the floor and stated that with the publication of Spartacist the Robertson group had become an “enemy of the party” and that no collaboration by any party member with Spartacist would be permitted, nor would any expression of sympathy for their ideas be tolerated (this “sympathy for ideas” clause was deleted from the later formal charges against the remaining RT supporters). Sympathizers of those expelled were to be viewed with suspicion and closely scrutinized. They would be “on trial.”
Weinstein’s report was put to a vote: 31 were for, 5 against (all RT supporters) and 6 abstained (that was the Weissites and Swabeck supporters). Following the vote Weinstein declared that he wanted to know why these comrades voted against, and said that there would be an investigation.
As I recall, this was a particularly hysterical meeting. After the meeting adjourned various comrades were screaming at each other. Fred Halstead was screaming at me, “If you don’t like it why don’t you just leave!” To which I and others would reply, “No! You’d like that. We intend to stay and continue to fight for our positions.”
In general, the tenor in the New York SWP branch meetings after the report on the December expulsions was “love it or leave it.” But we acted as model members, doing more than our share of the work, paying dues promptly, etc. It drove them mad.
On 25 February 1964 I and the other four RT supporters received a formal notice of charges based on our vote against Weinstein’s report. We were notified that the trial was set for March 2. The “trial” was conducted by an expanded New York branch Executive Committee composed entirely of majority supporters. On March 5 the conclusions of this all-majority “trial body” were reported to the branch by Nat Weinstein. He tried to insist that the expulsions were “absolutely not for ideas.” We expel people for acts, he claimed, and then cited three “acts”: the intra-tendency discussion document cited by Wohlforth; our vote against Weinstein’s report to the branch; the publication of attacks on the SWP (i.e., Spartacist) and the “approval” of this by the remaining RTers.
There were about 60 people at this meeting, a large turnout. The Weissites were particularly incensed. Myra Weiss gave an eloquent speech in defense of the right of organized tendencies to exist. She defended the publication of Spartacist, blamed the majority for the whole situation, and admitted that she had given her PC motion against RT expulsions (reprinted in Spartacist No. 1) to the leading RTers when they were still party members. She intended to vote “No” on Weinstein’s report. A number of majority speakers warned Myra to stay out of this and go back to the PC where she belonged.
Tim Wohlforth was at this meeting. He said he opposed expulsion for ideas—and then went on to declare that the RT’s ideas were “alien,” that we were “destroying Trotskyism,” and attacked us for accepting support for our democratic rights in the party from the Weissites and Swabeckites.
The vote to expel the five of us was: 44 for, 14 against with one abstention and one not voting. These expulsions cleaned the RT out of the SWP in New York. However, seven RTers including some of those just expelled from the SWP were still members of the New York YSA. Some of us were very visible active Spartacists and all of us were open supporters of Spartacist views. We worked with Progressive Labor (PL) and in the Congress of Racial Equality (rent strike work). RT member Shirley Stoute was on the YSA NC and a member of the SWP in Philadelphia.
This situation in the YSA wasn’t going to last long. But the dual membership was permitted by a provision (which Jim Robertson had opposed at the founding YSA Convention) that permitted YSAers to be members of “any adult socialist party.” Barry Sheppard was YSA national chairman and Peter Camejo was the national secretary. Jack Barnes was New York YSA Organizer. A lovely crew.
Their method of seeking our expulsion was very clumsy. On 2 May 1964 several of us were part of a joint defense guard with PL for a demonstration. The YSA was nominally taking part in this. Before the march Barry Sheppard approached three of us to carry YSA signs. We declined, stating that we already had assignments as Spartacist supporters on the defense guard. Several days later we received notification of charges that we had “deliberately violated discipline” by refusing assignments given out the morning of May 2 at a YSA meeting (not true). A trial before the NY YSA local was scheduled for May 30. In addition, as an NC member, I would be tried by the National Executive Committee (NEC) following the local trial. It was all very contrived—individual acts of indiscipline. Nothing to do with political purges in the SWP of course!
Before the trial I wrote up and mimeoed a “Trial Circular” which blew their case out of the water. This was distributed to the local members, many of whom were very new. It gave a history of the origins of the RT and the political expulsions from the SWP. It denounced the fraudulent charges against us as part of a continuing attempt to turn the YSA into an instrument of the SWP majority in violation of the historical norms of youth-party relations as described by the SWP itself (see Murry Weiss’ letter in Marxist Bulletin No. 7, “The Leninist Position on Youth-Party Relations”).
A number of new members objected to the proceedings and wanted to know if what was in the “Circular” was true. It wasn’t going over. Barnes got up and denounced the circular itself for claiming that the YSA was controlled by the SWP. He said the circular was a “fink” document and these people are “objective agents” of the FBI! Then the despicable Freddy Mazelis—Wohlforth’s lieutenant—came to the rescue of the majority leadership. He proceeded to offer a rationale for political expulsions, arguing that since we had major differences with the SWP and YSA there was no way we could be disciplined members of the YSA. The expulsions carried.
On 5 September 1964 we appealed to a YSA NC plenum. The plenum upheld our expulsions and furthermore expelled five other RTers including Shirley Stoute. The only “charges” against the five new expellees was their “support to Spartacist.” It was simply a summary political expulsion of a whole group. Shirley was criticized for going to Cuba “without permission”! Following the plenum Shirley had to return to Philadelphia, where Dobbs had instructed the SWP branch to put her on trial (the “charges” are in Spartacist No. 3). She was expelled. It bothers me that after all these years comrade Breitman cannot admit the truth: that the expulsions of the RT marked the crossroads for the SWP; that it was wrong to have gone along with all this crap. After all, in defending our tendency we defended Breitman’s rights too, then and in the future. The majority is not the party! Democratic centralism is the organizational method of the revolutionary (insurrectionary) party. It serves only the revolutionary program. And there’s the rub.
—Originally dated 18 March 1986
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Memories of a 1970s Oppositionist
White preparing our review of “Don’t Strangle the Party,” the Spartacist Editorial Board received the following letter from comrade Sam H., a former member of the Leninist Faction of the Socialist Workers Party, now a supporter of the Spartacist League. Comrade Sam’s letter has been edited for publication.
I became a contact of the SWP in 1969 during my four-year hitch in the Air Force, and joined the Madison Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in June 1970, one month after I was discharged. My decision to join was based on reading Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, a selected works by Trotsky, and on my understanding of the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. The Madison YSA was a left-talking Mandelite [i.e., followers of United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel] branch that was essentially led by the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT).
So while I thought I was joining the SWP of 1938 I began wondering why there were no trade-union fractions. Why was I one of the few union members in the local organization? I began pressing the branch leaders on this and one day I was led into one of their apartments to read the POT’s 1969 document, “On Sending Young Comrades into the Trade Unions.” I then realized that there was an impending faction fight inside the SWP and I quickly sided with the POT.
The 1971 SWP Convention turned out to be the POT’s only coordinated fight and I’m sorry I wasn’t there. The pre-conference discussion produced 30 or more bulletins and my most vivid memory from the returning Madison delegates was Barry Sheppard’s admonition at the end of the convention. The POT delegates were roundly defeated vote-wise. Since 1961 the party members functioned as a fraction within the youth so Sheppard’s admonition at the final Session was, “And there will be no wrecking job in the youth, comrades!”
Sheppard was calling POT supporters to task: they had better obey the party statutes or else. The POT challenged the party’s orientation but had no counterposed political program, so their intervention suffered dramatically. The POT essentially agreed with the SWP majority’s resolutions on the antiwar movement, black question, feminism, etc. So they were politically disarmed from engaging in political combat with the reformist Barnes clique.
The Mandelite POT was never a programmatically counterposed faction. They saw themselves as a dissident “tendency”—loyal, but with differences. I remember the first internal class I gave was on “democratic centralism.” The POT leaders who helped me to prepare this class were in political solidarity with the 1965 org rules [“The Organizational Character of the Socialist Workers Party”] and the RT expulsion. The Spartacist League (SL) was not in Madison at that time so I had never seen us in action before. I dutifully repeated the common SWP refrain that the “Robertsonites” were expelled for “double-recruiting” and the Madison YSA branch simply accepted this as orthodox SWP history.
The POT leaders never challenged these 1965 org rules so they were condemned to live under them. We actually believed that you only discuss major political questions for three months every two years (the pre-conference discussion period). We skirted this in Madison on a number of occasions but I remember attending branch meetings in Chicago where, whenever a well-intentioned POTer would raise tactical differences with the SWP’s wretched pacifist line on the Vietnam War, a majorityite hack would quickly take the floor and say, “This discussion is taking on the character of a pre-conference discussion and this is not the proper time nor place for this.” I heard this over and over again!
The bottom line is that the POT leadership thought we could bring the reformist SWP line to the working class and that would make a difference. So while bemoaning the Barnes leadership’s undemocratic functioning they never challenged the political program that the organizational abuses flowed from. The American POT was an example of the wretched Mandelites’ refusal to build any serious opposition to Barnes’ SWP.
How rotten the POT was became clear to me at the 1971 Houston YSA Convention. I was one of the few pro-POT delegates, elected by the Milwaukee YSA. The big issue at the convention was the removal of a POT YSAer from the youth National Committee. It was clear that this guy was being dumped because the Barnesites were starting to clean house in the youth. This was one of the rare periods that you could raise differences, but the POT was acting in complete accordance with Sheppard’s warning against monkeying around with the youth. Not only was I instructed not to raise political differences on the convention floor but I was also instructed not to fight the purge on the basis of the comrade’s political views. I was given the unenviable task of taking the floor and simply asserting that the Nominating Commission had not provided a convincing enough case that this comrade’s functioning had gone downhill. I did place the POT YSAer’s name in nomination and was later congratulated by POTers as being the first person to ever challenge a YSA nominating slate. I don’t know if that’s true; I certainly didn’t feel proud. I felt that we ducked the political fight on the right of minorities to exist and maintain their political views. Luckily for me the SL had a table up at the convention so I got to read Workers Vanguard and took home with me a collection of Marxist Bulletins. It was my first contact with the SL.
On the last day of the convention I did get to talk to a comrade from Boston who couldn’t help but notice how pissed off I was at the POT. This became my first contact with the developing Leninist Faction (LF) which I quickly joined. The history of the LF is well documented in Spartacist No. 21. My resignation letter from the LF (co-signed by Dave E., Pam E. and Tom T.) appeared in Workers Vanguard No. 14.
Reading “Don’t Strangle the Party” and thinking about this letter has certainly jogged my memory and put these events in a clearer light. In the POT we had to put up with discussion only three months every two years regardless of what was happening in the world. A tendency was a “temporary” formation that was supposed to disband after you got your ass kicked at a convention. Factions were disloyal. To be an oppositionist during this time you had to deal with a good dose of paranoia and get nothing but crap from the Barnes leadership. When I returned from the Houston YSA convention a Barnesite hack was virtually sitting on the doorstep ordering the local Executive Committee (all of whom were POT supporters) to pack their bags and leave town. Branches like Milwaukee were destroyed while Barnes supporters were moved around the country to achieve mechanical branch majorities.
—Originally dated 19 April 1986
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