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

*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-Birth Control, Abortion Rights and Women’s Oppression-Fifty Years After the Pill: Still a Long Way to Go

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter and Spring 1975-76, 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.
************
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
Birth Control, Abortion Rights and Women’s Oppression


Fifty Years After the Pill: Still a Long Way to Go


For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!


(Women and Revolution pages)

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” crooned the old Virginia Slims commercials on TV in the late 1960s, and the bourgeois media has picked up the tune again on this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill (no further definition necessary—everyone knows you are talking about s-e-x). And everyone knows the Pill is all about sex. When in 1975 Loretta Lynn sang, “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house ’cause now I’ve got the pill,” the hearts of millions of women across America beat in time to the rhythm of her song, which dozens of radio stations tried to censor—until it made the hit charts.

The Pill was the first reliable contraceptive that gave women control over their own reproduction. This tremendous medical advance enabled women to separate sexual enjoyment from fear of pregnancy, freeing them from the now excessive fertility with which evolution has endowed our species. But birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist world by the state, by the institution of the family, and by organized religion, which all serve to enforce women’s oppression. As long as the capitalist order exists, the benefits of science will be limited by the exploitation and oppression of this class system. Marxists look forward to the day when science can be “applied with full understanding to all the fields of human activity,” to quote the words of German socialist leader August Bebel, whose 1879 work Woman and Socialism was one of the first major Marxist works on the woman question.

Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, underlined that birth control and abortion are among woman’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). We fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. We call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all and for free, 24-hour childcare to address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including their abortions, while myriad anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control target young, working-class and poor women, who can’t afford quality health care, childcare and housing.

At the time of its first release by the pharmaceutical company Searle, big predictions were made about the effect that the Pill would have on society. Moral bigots wailed that it would promote female promiscuity and the decline of religion and the patriarchal family, while birth control advocates believed it would save the family, create happy marriages and end the world population explosion. The Pill was even hailed as the solution to the “Red Menace.” In her book America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010), historian Elaine May speaks of how some Cold Warriors believed that the Pill “would alleviate the conditions of poverty and unrest that might lead developing nations to embrace communism, and instead promote the growth of markets for consumer goods and the embrace of capitalism.”

In fact, the “sexual revolution” that is often credited to the Pill was the result, in one way or another, of the convulsive social struggles of the civil rights movement, which broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese Revolution. The major social upheavals of the 1960s that broke up the reactionary Cold War consensus also led to substantial advances in access to higher education and professional jobs for women. At the same time, the civil rights movement could not eradicate the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of American capitalism, just as the institution of the family, the main source of women’s oppression in capitalist society, is a bulwark of the bourgeois order.

Abortion Rights Under Attack

While U.S. bourgeois pundits celebrate the reproductive freedom that the Pill has given women, it is striking that most do not mention the precipitous decline in women’s access to abortion. The assault on women’s right to abortion continues unabated in the courts and halls of government, especially on the state level. As of June, some 370 bills to restrict abortion rights had been introduced this year alone in state legislatures across the country, and many have already passed. These range from Oklahoma’s cruel requirement that a doctor show the woman an ultrasound of the fetus, to Nebraska’s ban on all abortions after 20 weeks based on the claim that the fetus can feel pain. Perhaps the most barbarous is Utah’s new law. Passed after a desperate 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort to induce a miscarriage, the law now allows homicide charges against women in similar cases! Meanwhile, the lies that abortion causes depression and breast cancer continue to circulate, and some recent polls show that for the first time more Americans call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”

The arsenal of legal measures on the federal as well as the state level has already made abortion virtually inaccessible to a large number of women. Thirty-eight states prohibit abortions after a specified point in pregnancy. Fully 35 states require one or both parents of women under 18 to be notified and/or consent to an abortion. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services.

In May 2009, the “pro-life” war on women claimed yet another life. Dr. George Tiller—one of only three doctors whose clinics provide late-term abortions in the United States—was assassinated while attending his church in Wichita, Kansas, by a right-wing anti-abortion bigot. Tiller, a main target of the anti-woman God squad for decades, was the eighth person murdered in this anti-abortion, “family values” onslaught since 1993. In an article titled “The New Abortion Providers,” the New York Times (18 July) details the long decline in the number of doctors trained in performing abortions and tells the story of young doctors in groups like Medical Students for Choice fighting to make abortion part of a doctor’s regular practice. Abortion is a medical procedure, now one of the safest in the world, that does not need to be carried out in isolated clinics, where doctors and their families, friends and co-workers can easily be subjected to harassment, violence and death by anti-abortion fanatics.

Ever since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the basic democratic right of legal abortion has been under attack. The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family.

Access to contraception, too, is limited by cost and lack of basic information, while “conscience clauses” allow pharmacies to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. To all this can be added anti-woman moralizing, which rants that a girl shouldn’t want to have sex. The argument goes that while any unwed mother is a bad girl, if she can claim she got carried away, maybe the sin is not quite as great (as long as she doesn’t have an abortion). But having birth control implies premeditation. Precisely! In the words of the late comedian George Carlin, “Not every ejaculation deserves a name.”

Today sex education in schools is increasingly under attack, while abstinence remains the focus of government-funded programs like the State Personal Responsibility Education Program, established by Barack Obama’s recent health care “reform” act. Abortion clinics are overwhelmingly outnumbered by “pregnancy crisis centers”—fake clinics set up by anti-abortion groups with the purpose of subjecting pregnant women to anti-abortion propaganda and otherwise pressuring them to carry the fetus to term. According to the Nation, some 4,000 of these centers have received over $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. As a result of the ignorance and miseducation produced by this tangle of social reaction, almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. every year are unplanned, according to the most recent government survey.

While U.S. newspapers headline “The Pill: Making Motherhood Better for 50 Years” (Washington Post, 9 May), the masses of working-class, minority and poor women have missed the celebration. The Great Recession rages on; union-busting is destroying what good union jobs remain; homes are in foreclosure; millions of working people cannot get jobs and their children cannot get a decent education or affordable health care. Except for the women at the very top of society, where the rich are certainly getting richer, the decades-long assault on the working class and the poor has more than canceled out the important improvements in women’s legal status over the last 50 years.

In times of substantial class and social struggle, the capitalist class may be forced to cede some reforms. But as long as the capitalist order remains, the ruling class will seek to overturn these gains, as it is now doing, when such struggles are at an ebb. As revolutionary communists, we defend every gain that’s been won for the exploited and oppressed, such as the gains wrested during the hard struggles of the civil rights movement. But these reforms have a fundamentally token quality to them because they leave untouched the capitalist system. The source of black oppression and anti-woman bigotry is not the particular capitalist party in power—whether Democratic or Republican—but the capitalist order that breeds oppression and bigotry as a necessary corollary to its system of exploitation.

Sex and Social Control

The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world. Only then can we undertake the profound changes in the fabric of everyday life where the institution of the family is replaced by socialized childcare and housework, enabling women to fully participate in social and political life.

The family is not an immutable, timeless institution, but a social relation subject to historical change. In his classic 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels traced the origin of the family and the state to the division of society into classes. The development of agriculture allowed the creation of a social surplus. In turn, that surplus gave impetus to the development of a leisured ruling class, thus moving human society away from the primitive egalitarianism of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic). The centrality of the family began with its role in ensuring “legitimate heirs” for the patriarchal inheritance of property, which required women’s sexual monogamy and social subordination. In the 10,000 years since the advent of class society, the family has taken many forms—including polygamous, extended and nuclear—reflecting different political economies and their cultures and religions. But the oppression of women is a fundamental feature of all class societies.

The family is a socially conservatizing force that imposes certain behavioral norms. For example, in this country the definition of “manhood” is, besides getting a girl pregnant, the ability to support a wife and children. But that is becoming ever more difficult given the lack of decent-paying union jobs. If not for wives entering the workforce, the entire bottom 60 percent of the U.S. population would have had real income losses since 1979. At the same time, the institution of the family serves the capitalist rulers by placing the burden of raising a new generation of proletarians on working men and women. Indeed, the “family values” crowd (which encompasses Democrats as well as the Republicans) wails about the so-called “crisis of the family” and insists that it is both right and proper that parents should be wholly responsible for the upbringing of their children.

Even the most cursory examination of laws regulating abortion, contraception and the like that go back thousands of years shows that they are integrally related to the maintenance of the family. Some of the first documented legal measures to strengthen the patriarchal family were enacted in ancient Rome under Augustus Caesar. These included prohibitions against adultery, incentives for widows to remarry, “sin” taxes on bachelors 30 years and older, and incentives for fathers of three or more children. The concern of the government was to have enough Roman citizens to fill the ranks of the army and maintain the city of Rome as the core of the Empire.

Modern abortion laws show how social and legal institutions have changed to reflect the interests of the capitalist class. In 1803 the British Ellenborough Act marked the advent of abortion as a statutory crime in the English-speaking world. The interest of the ruling class in this law and others following it was to protect the male’s right to heirs, punish (especially single) women for illicit sex and encourage population growth for the newly forged capitalist nation-state, its army and labor pool.

Alongside legal prohibition stands religion, the strongest ideological force against birth control and abortion, especially the Roman Catholic church. The claims by the Pope and other clergy about the “souls” of unborn children are revealed as so much superstition by the science of human development. Yet thanks to the reactionary influence of religion, tens of thousands of women die each year from illegal abortions—lives that would have been saved with access to birth control and abortion. A brief look at Catholic doctrine shows that the church has changed its mind several times about when the nonexistent “soul” enters into the conceptus. For most of the existence of the church, this was considered to be the time of “quickening,” at about the fourth month, when the pregnant woman can feel the movement of the fetus. John XXI, who became pope in 1276, was the author of a book called Treasury of Medicines for the Poor, which is the greatest single source of information about the practical means of birth control and abortion that was known in the Middle Ages. It was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX declared that abortion “from conception” was a sin. This was a political calculation carried out in exchange for recognition of “papal infallibility” by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was seeking to stem France’s decades-long decline in the birth rate.

The woman-hating strictures against birth control and abortion, the poisonous bigotry against homosexuals, the witchhunting of “deviant” sex (who defines that?), the relentless pressure on youth to somehow refrain from giving in to their raging hormones—all these are corollaries of the institution of the family and the social control that it gives the ruling class. As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed so-called “norms.” Government out of the bedroom! The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. All consensual relations are purely the concern of the individuals involved, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.

Some History of Birth Control

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1994), John M. Riddle explores the ways that pre-industrial people might have tried to enjoy sex without the consequence of procreation. Nobody knows if the methods he documents had much effect on the birth rates, but they certainly show intent. One city in Northern Africa, Cyrene, is believed to have made its name and its fortune from a wild giant fennel that grew nearby, which people believed to have abortifacient effects. Its use became so widespread that it was harvested to extinction.

Peter Fryer, in his witty and erudite book The Birth Controllers, documents that ancient Egyptians used crocodile-dung pessaries (vaginal suppositories) and other dubious methods to control fertility. The Christian Bible’s story of Onan is only the most well known of a long-practiced method (withdrawal), a story used for centuries to put the terror of hell into countless adolescents for masturbation. Some historians believe that the tens of thousands of women who were executed as witches in early modern Europe may have been abortionists and birth control practitioners. In 20th-century America, before the Pill, housewives often resorted to the dangerous practice of douching with Lysol.

In the 1830s, a Massachusetts doctor named Charles Knowlton was the first person in the history of birth control to be sent to prison for advocating it. The United States also has the dubious honor of passing the first nationwide laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth-control methods. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, named for its sponsor, Postmaster General Anthony Comstock. It outlawed the circulation of contraceptive information and devices through the U.S. postal service as “pornography.” In 1915 Comstock boasted that he had convicted enough people of “sexual misconduct” to fill a 60-car passenger train.

One of Comstock’s prominent targets in later years was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, who would go on to found Planned Parenthood, began her political life as a member of the Socialist Party, working on the party’s women’s committee. She was working as a nurse, visiting immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side, where she saw firsthand the suffering of women whose health had been ruined by too many pregnancies, who were struggling to feed children they could not afford to support, who all too often ended up butchered by some back-alley abortionist. Soon she began writing about sex education and health for the party’s women’s page under the heading, “What Every Girl Should Know.” In early 1913 Comstock banned the column, and the paper ran in its place a box titled “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”

Sanger soon left the Socialist Party to focus single-mindedly on fighting for birth control, a term that she herself invented. A courageous woman, Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the country and endured arrests and imprisonment as she sought to overturn the Comstock Law and to educate women and doctors in birth control methods. She traveled to Europe to research the latest techniques and wrote a sex manual in 1926 where she describes the act of sex in ecstatic, uplifting terms. Seeking to promote the cause of birth control among the wealthy and influential, she steered her movement away from the socialist movement. Sanger, a bourgeois feminist, was willing to make any political compromise she saw as necessary to win advocates to her side and thus embraced some ugly arguments popular among bourgeois reformers of the time, such as endorsing eugenics, including the call to bar immigration for the “feebleminded.” While the eugenics movement, which stigmatized the poor for their own oppression, was at the time not yet associated with the genocidal movement that would emerge in Nazi Germany, it was widely opposed by socialists. American socialist and birth control pioneer Antoinette Konikow denounced the presence of eugenicists at a 1921 New York City conference on birth control, declaring that the working-class mothers she represented “are often considered to be not fit” by such forces.

The “Population Bomb”

Behind the scenes (or not), people have always struggled to control fertility for their own private reasons. But there is also a longstanding chain of argument in favor of population control on the part of bourgeois ideologues. The most notorious of these was made by Church of England parson Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population predicted unrelenting misery on account of population growth that would, he claimed, inevitably outstrip available resources. Writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Malthus proposed two solutions: leave the poor to die of their misery (he opposed poor relief) and postpone the age of marriage so as to reduce the number of children per couple (that is, “abstinence” as birth control).

Malthusianism was, as Friedrich Engels characterized it in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, “the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat.” Lenin, too, denounced Malthusianism in a short 1913 article, “The Working Class and Neomalthusianism.” At the same time, he noted, “It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.” Lenin called for “freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women.”

The corollary of Malthusianism, eugenics, with its calls for compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, has its contemporary advocates, including Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren. In 1977, Holdren co-authored Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with the (now largely discredited) population “experts” Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Dripping with contempt, Holdren et al. wrote: “If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children…they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.” Such “reproductive responsibility” laws could include “compulsory abortion,” “adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods,” “sterilizing women after their second or third child” and other “involuntary fertility control” methods that would be implemented by a “Planetary Regime,” which “might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world.” The ravings of Holdren and the Ehrlichs are worthy of the genocidal Nazi eugenics movement.

Marxists are of course not indifferent to the problem of rapid population growth. But our starting point is the fight for socialist revolution to open the widest vista of human freedom. As we wrote in part two of “Capitalism and Global Warming” (WV No. 966, 8 October):

“Only a society that can raise the standard of living worldwide can provide the conditions for a natural decline in reproductive rates….

“Under communism, human beings will have far greater mastery over their natural and social environments. Both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will be overcome. The time when people were compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land or to care for the elderly will have long passed.”

Genesis of the Pill

Margaret Sanger first had the idea of a “magic pill” to prevent conception in 1912, but the scientific knowledge to create it did not exist. By the end of World War II, decades of research into human reproductive biology had revealed the crucial role of hormones in conception and pregnancy. In 1953 Sanger, accompanied by International Harvester heiress Katherine McCormick, paid a visit to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where Gregory Pincus, who in the 1930s engineered the first in vitro fertilization (a rabbit embryo), conducted his privately funded research. Pincus’s early work had been cited as a great scientific achievement, but the storm of media condemnation over “babies in test tubes” led to him being denied tenure by Harvard University and all but driven from mainstream research as a “mad scientist.” Another maverick scientist, chemist Russell Marker, had developed a technique, later refined by Carl Djerassi, to extract massive, cheap amounts of a synthetic progestin from a species of enormous yam that grew only in Mexico. The research to create an oral contraceptive was funded almost entirely out of McCormick’s private fortune; the pharmaceutical companies would not touch research into contraception at that time.

The post-World War II years were hard for American women. The outbreak of the Cold War, the purge of communists and other militants from the unions and the rise of McCarthyism also included a wholesale campaign to put women back into the kitchen and nursery. Many women had escaped from such drudgery during World War II, when their labor was necessary for the war economy. As the government investigated “subversives,” there was an unprecedented state intrusion into family life and the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life. A “normal” family and a vigilant mother were supposed to be the front line of defense against treason, while anti-Communists linked “deviant” family or sexual behavior to sedition. Most women were married by age 19; the birth rate became the highest in U.S. history.

At the same time, the groundbreaking reports by Alfred C. Kinsey documented what Americans really did behind the bedroom door (and in some other places, too). And women wanted better contraception. The Pill was first marketed in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders. When word circulated that it suppressed ovulation and prevented pregnancy, doctors across the country were besieged by hundreds of thousands of women asking for prescriptions to treat their suddenly discovered menstrual problems.

The leap to respectability and mainstream medicine for the Pill came through Harvard gynecologist John Rock, a fertility specialist, who had the medical practice and experience in working with women patients that enabled the first clinical trials to be conducted. A devout Roman Catholic, Rock later wrote a book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control, trying to garner public support in a fruitless campaign to make the Catholic church change its denunciation of birth control as a sin.

In its first incarnation, the Pill had doses of progesterone and estrogen far higher than it does today, leading to serious side effects in some users. These dangers were seized upon by anti-woman bigots, including in the Senate, which in 1970 held a series of hearings to “investigate” the matter. Over the years the Pill has been massively tested in many combinations. While risks remain regarding breast cancer and stroke for some, the Pill in fact helps to protect women from ovarian and uterine cancer. Because it reduces or eliminates the menstrual flow, it also reduces the risk of anemia, a serious problem in poor countries. The experience of millions of women, researchers and doctors working to improve the safety of the Pill has provided the basis for the clinical trials and testing now routinely used by the Food and Drug Administration.

From Carter to Reagan: Resurgence of the Religious Right

By 1960 the Pill was available by prescription as a contraceptive, but laws against contraception remained on the books in many states. Until 1965, it was illegal for married people in Connecticut to use birth control. Until 1972, it was illegal for single people to use birth control in Massachusetts and many other states as well. Bill Baird, a heroic fighter for women’s right to abortion and contraception, spent three months in jail in Massachusetts for giving a package of contraceptive foam and a condom to a Boston University student as a challenge to the law. His case later went to the Supreme Court and helped lay the basis for the right to privacy—the main legal argument behind Roe v. Wade, which established legal abortion in the United States in 1973.

The legalization of abortion was itself a product of the explosive struggles of the 1960s. For the American bourgeoisie, the all-sided social turmoil and defiance of authority of that period were deeply disturbing. U.S. imperialism was suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnam’s heroic workers and peasants. In the late 1970s, a major bourgeois ideological assault was launched to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—popular hostility to direct U.S. military intervention abroad—and to instill an unquestioning acceptance of “free enterprise,” God and the family among the population, which included the desirability of dying for one’s country. Coming to office in 1977, the Democratic Carter administration brought “born again” religious fundamentalism front and center into the White House as it kicked off a renewal of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet degenerated workers state, garbed in the call for “human rights.”

This was the backdrop for the decades-long anti-sex witchhunt against abortion rights, pornography, gay rights and teen sex as well as for the vicious persecution of AIDS patients and day-care workers, who were targeted and jailed as “child molesters” amid hysterical allegations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Beginning in the 1980s, scientific research into new contraceptive methods virtually screeched to a halt as Reagan slashed funding for family planning internationally, including for abortion and birth control, leaving many Third World women with not much to turn to. While Obama has reversed this particular policy, he explicitly disavowed defending the rights of women as well as immigrants in his health care proposal, proclaiming that “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally” and that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Obama pledged to uphold the Hyde Amendment, which outlaws Medicaid funding for abortions.

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Birth control methods like the Pill, medical knowledge, understanding of women’s health—these things have indeed taken giant leaps forward in the last 50 years. But exploitation, poverty and religious and cultural strictures deprive most women on the planet of these benefits. For them, daily life is little more than that of a beast of burden. Across vast regions of the globe, in the backward neocolonial capitalist countries oppressed by imperialism, women are swathed in the veil, sold into marriage against their will, or subjected to barbaric punishments like death sentences for “adultery” in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. Poverty and backwardness, buttressed by imperialist domination, mean that much of the basic infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions.

Feminism, a worldview counterposed to Marxism, is not capable of generating a program for the liberation of women. Feminism analyzes society as gender-based rather than class-based. It views anti-woman ideology as just bad thinking and puts forward that what is needed is to spread correct ideas and then maybe people will catch on and stop being bigots. Feminism is an anti-egalitarian ideology of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who support the capitalist system and seek their own power and privilege within it. Indeed, for women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, the good life will only continue to get better. But for working-class, poor and minority women, jobs disappear, wages plummet and life only continues to get harder. The fundamental source of women’s oppression is not bad laws or male chauvinist attitudes—these are but reflections of the subordination of women in the institution of the family and the capitalist system that requires it.

The liberation of women can be realized only with the victory of proletarian revolution, which will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The family cannot simply be abolished; rather, its social functions like housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. This perspective requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. The International Communist League fights to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the world to lead the struggle for working-class power. Inscribed on the banners of these parties will be the struggle for women’s liberation, which is an integral part of the emancipating goals of communism. As we wrote in “In Defense of Science and Technology” (WV No. 843, 4 March 2005):

“Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited.”

For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

** Out In The Be-Bop Night- First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes X With a Baby Carriage-In Honor Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Pill

This comment  can act as my commentary on today's other entry from Women and Revolution in honor of the 50th anniversary of The Pill. 

Markin comment:

This year, as many of you may be aware, marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the Pill. (If you need any further explanation for that term then perhaps you should skip this little piece.) The Pill that heralded in the s-xual revolution of the 1960s to the joy (and relief) of many, the yawns of a few, and the fervent scorn of those with traditional religious or philosophical scruples on the matter of human reproduction. In short though, s-x now no longer had to be absolutely tied in with procreation, and with fear and loathing. That said, I am trying to offend no one's sensibilities here, although I make no apologies for being glad, glad as hell, for the Pill and would encourage as many scientific breakthroughs as possible to make it even safer and easier. This little screed rather is more, since we are children of the 1960's and came of age, most of us anyway, by 1960, about our woeful ignorance of sex, the actual acts of sex and their consequences. (There I said it. Sex. Sensitive souls can take shelter elsewhere.)    

Someone recently told me a story that placed this notion in stark relief, and hit a nerve that required me to make, no, impelled me to make this commentary. On a trip, some kind of group social outing up into New Hampshire, a state that has a younger marriage eligibility age than Massachusetts, a young teenage couple, deeply in love, in love its seems the old-fashioned 1940s movies way that way it was described to me, but probably too young for marriage anyway, decided on a whim to get married. Off they go to some Podunk town up there seeking a Justice of the Peace. They find him and fill in the paperwork. Before the ceremony the "been through it all before" JP asked whether the young couple were "expecting," you know, in the family way. Here is the kicker though, their reply, "Expecting what?" On reflection, once they got the gist of what the JP meant, they, innocently I am sure, also said, "we don't know about that stuff." The laughing, but wise, old JP told the kids to come back in a year, or so, and he would be more than happy to marry them.  

Ya, that's a cute story and I still chuckle over but, my friends, I will argue that you and I could tell such stories as well. Well, maybe not about getting all the way to the altar clueless but nevertheless filled with every kind of misinformation, every kind of fear tactic and every kind of prohibition. All while our hormones were raging, raging to the point of distraction, out of control. I will make my own public disclosure here. Did I learn about sex from my parents giving me careful information about the birds and the bees, seeing that they had plenty of experience having given birth to three sons? No. Did I learn about the do's and don't of sex from the Roman Catholic Church of my youth. Hell no, well, about the do part anyway. No, I learned about it "on the streets" (and in the locker rooms) just like most of you. And later, much later and more interestingly, from some women friends (and the Karma Sutra). Whoa. Let's just put it this way, I thank a disapproving god for the Pill back in those young and careless days. Ya, that The Pill.   

*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Roots Of Bolshevism: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition"-A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a Wikipedia entry for the heroic 19th century early Russian revolutionary, Vera Figner, mentioned in the article below.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Summer/Autumn 1992 issue of Women and Revolution that has some historical interest for all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during this Women's History Month.
**********
Markin comment on this article:

Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for today’s militants to think about these questions that are not directed related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle. I have placed some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.

A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
*******

The Roots Of Bolshevism:The Russian Revolutionary Tradition

W&R is pleased to present the edited transcript of a talk given by a member of our editorial board, Joseph Seymour, at an educational conference of the Spartacist League/US, held in the Bay Area on 2 May 1992.

The origins of this talk go back a few years to conversations I had with two comrades who were most directly and actively involved in seeking to build a section of the International Communist League in the Soviet Union. We talked about how wretched the present-day Russian intelligentsia was, both the pro-Wall Street self-styled "democrats" and the Stalinist self-described "patriots." Particularly disturbing was the depth of women's oppression and the pervasive¬ness of male chauvinism, not only in Soviet societyat large but even amongpeople who considered themselves communists, Leninists, would-be Trotskyists.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that the present-day Russian intelligentsia is not only profoundly alienated from Bolshevism, but from the many generations of Russian revolutionaries who preceded and culminated in Bolshevism. If the ghost of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was the greatest Russian socialist of the pre-Marxist era—a man who had a profound influence on Lenin—could return to his old intellectual haunts in the universities and editorial offices of Russia today, he would not be able to understand how anyone who called himself a democrat could want to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism. For him, to be a democrat meant to be for social equality. It meant to be for the rule of the lower classes in society. The Russian revolutionaries despised the bourgeoisie, both the Russian version and the Western version.

Chernyshevsky would be even more uncomprehending about how anyone could call himself a communist and yet be a Russian nationalist, a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. Because to be a communist meant by definition that you were an internationalist, you were an extreme partisan of women's equality and liberation, and you welcomed Jews as equals and as comrades. From the 1870s onward, Jews played a prominent role in all of the Russian radical movements, all of the wings of populism and later all wings of Marxism.

And women played a far more prominent role in the Russian revolutionary movement than they did in any other country in the world. Women like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Bardina of Land and Liberty, which was the principal populist organization, were hard, tough, dedicated revolutionaries. From the shooting of the police commandant Trepov in 1878 to the assassination of the tsarist general Luzhenovsky by Maria Spiridonova in 1906, Russian women carried out some of the most spectacular acts of terrorism. After the
Revolution of 1905 a tsarist prison official in his own way recognized the equality of women: "Experience shows that women, in terms of criminality, ability, and possession of the urge to escape, are hardly distinguishable from men."

If we could get into a time machine and go back to the world of Chernyshevsky and Land and Liberty, we would have big fights about peasant socialism and the efficacy of terrorism. But at a deeper level we would feel ourselves among comrades. So what we are trying to do is to reinstill in Russia today its own great revolutionary tradition, a tradition which has been perverted and degraded or simply forgotten after decades of Stalinist rule and the pressure of Western imperialism on the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

French Jacobins and Russian Decembrists

That tradition begins with the Decembrists, a group of revolutionary democratic military officers who sought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. But the Decembrists themselves begin with the French Revolution, which is the fountainhead of radicalism in the modern world. It is one of the ironies of history that the Russian army which the tsar sent into West Europe to crush the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase became a transmission belt back into Russia for the ideals of that revolution. One of the Decembrists later wrote:

"During the campaigns through Germany and France our young men became acquainted with European civilization, which produced upon them the strongest impression. They were able to compare all that they had seen abroad with what confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny."

So the Decembrists were a belated attempt to extend the French Revolution into Russia. One of their principal leaders had been the son of the Russian ambassador to Napoleonic France; he grew up in a milieu shot through with former Jacobin revolutionaries, among them Napo¬leon himself. Another prominent Decembrist, when he was stationed in Paris in 1815, went around to the leading intellectuals, among them Henri Saint-Simon, a pioneer
theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon attempted to convince this young Russian nobleman to introduce socialism into his homeland.

The most radical of the Decembrists, Pavel Pestel, had not personally been to France although he identified himself wholeheartedly with the French revolutionaries. But he went beyond Jacobinism. By the 1820s the ideas of socialism were beginning to gain currency among the European intelligentsia. Pestel attempted to combine a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution with elements of socialism. He proposed that the land be taken from the nobility and given to the peasants—half given to the peasants to farm privately, the other half to farm collectively so that no peasant family would go hungry. And Pestel called this the Russian Law. After the insurrection was suppressed, the tsarist authorities discovered the Russian Law among Pestel's private papers. Instead of publicizing it at his trial, they thought it was so inflammatory and attractive that they buried it in a secret archive. It did not see the light of day for almost 100 years.

An old reactionary general was on his deathbed when he heard of the Decembrist uprising, and it perplexed him. He said: before we have had uprisings of peasants who want to become noblemen; now we have an uprising of noblemen who want to become shoemakers. The Decembrists did not want to become shoemakers; they were not concerned with their future personal status. But this old reactionary understood something: that this was a movement of an elite, isolated from the peasant masses in whose interests they spoke and attempted to act. And this would be true of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia throughout the 19th century. Initially this milieu consisted mainly of the sons of noblemen, later on the sons and daughters of what was called the "middle class," the children of tsarist bureaucrats or like Chernyshevsky, of Russian Orthodox priests. It was only at the end of the century, in the mid-1890s, that the Marxist wing of the intelligentsia acquired a mass base among the rapidly growing industrial proletariat.

The Decembrists were the first revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia. They were also the last such movement. That is, they were the last movement that attempted to overthrow the tsar in order to remodel Russian society along the lines of contemporary West Europe or North America. After that, those people who wanted to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism did not call themselves democrats because they were not democrats; they called themselves liberals. They did not want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Rather they wanted to pressure the tsarist autocracy to modernize Russia from above. Their goal was a constitutional mon¬archy in which the monarch remained strong and the constitution guaranteed the rule of the propertied classes. As Chernyshevsky put it: "The liberals absolutely refuse to allow the lower strata any preponderance in society."

The First Russian Socialist Movement

Following the suppression of the Decembrists it took another generation for a new revolutionary movement to emerge. This was the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of a couple of hundred radicals around Mikhail Petrashevsky. At that time the Russian Orthodox Church was sexually segregated, and in order to show his support for the equality of women and his defiance of the state church, Petrashevsky donned women's clothing and he attended a ceremony of the church exclusive to women. However he had forgotten to shave off his beard! He was approached by a policeman who said, "Madam, I think you are a man." Petrashevsky replied, "Sir, I think you are an old woman." The policeman was so flustered, Petrashevsky made his getaway.

Whereas the Decembrists had viewed West Europe in the afterglow of the French Revolution, a generation later Petrashevsky and his comrades only saw in West Europe an arena of the horrible exploitation of the lower classes by the propertied classes. They identified with the socialist opposition to Western bourgeois society and defined their goal as the application of Western socialism to Russia. In light of everything that's happening in Russia today, it's important to emphasize that this very first Russian socialist movement was implacably opposed to Russian nationalism in all its manifestations. They of course opposed the Slavophiles, who idealized Russia before Peter the Great and counterposed the spirituality of the Russian people to the crass materialism of the bourgeois West. But Petrashevsky and his comrades also opposed radical democrats like Belinsky who argued that the progress of humanity goes through nations, not by transcending nations. Against this view they argued, "Socialism is a cosmopolitan doctrine, which stands higher than nationalities...for socialists differing nations do not exist, there are only people."

The Petrashevsky Circle was the exact contemporary of the German League of the Just, out of which came the Communist League for which Marx wrote the Com¬munist Manifesto. Like Marx, Petrashevsky and his com¬rades believed that the spectre of communism was haunt¬ing Europe. And Russia was part of Europe. They looked forward, in the near future, to a pan-European socialist revolution, predominantly proletarian in the West, predominantly peasant-based in the East. They believed that the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in West Europe was the beginning of that development, and they immediately wanted to get in on the act. They started discussing how they were actually going to overthrow the tsar. But before they got very far, the tsarist authorities simply crushed them. Nicholas I was panicked in his own way by the spectre of communism and moved to destroy its meager reflection among a small section of the Russian intelligentsia.

The Origins of Populism

The revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing counterrevolutions by the combined forces of bourgeois and monarchical reaction are the great historic watershed of 19th century Europe. Among other things they gave rise to Russian populism as a distinct current of European socialism. Petrashevsky and his comrades had believed that socialism would come to Russia as part of a general European revolution. That vision was defeated on the barricades in Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere.

A witness to that defeat was Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen had been a radical democrat who emigrated to West Europe, and he experienced the revolutions of 1848 in France and Italy. But Herzen remained optimistic about the prospects of revolution in Russia. If Russia was going to have a revolution in advance and independently of West Europe, however, it would have to be a predominantly peasant revolution because the industrial proletariat was minute. A German conservative, Baron Haxthausen, who had visited Russia in the 1840s, wrote a book saying that Russia didn't need a socialist revolution, it already had socialism in the form of the traditional peasant commune. After 1848 Herzen accepted this premise and argued that what would require a proletarian revolution in the West could be achieved on the basis of Russian rural institutions if the society were sufficiently democratized.

It is important to emphasize that while the Russian populists saw a different path to socialism in Russia, they had the same goal as Western revolutionaries. Thus Marx was always held in extremely high regard in the Russian populist movement. One of the early under¬ground populist groups wrote to Marx in London and proposed that he represent Russia as well as Germany in the leading council of the First International. The first language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It got through the tsarist censors, who figured that a book so dry and abstract as Capital could not inspire anyone to revolutionary passion, and it became an instant best seller. At the end of his life, Herzen stated that he had always been faithful to the ideas of Saint-Simon, who had an extremely technologically advanced conception of socialism.

Herein lay the fundamental contradiction of Russian populism. The populists projected onto the peasant commune not only economic egalitarianism, but social equality at all levels—the equality of women, a libertarian conception of sexual relations, a belief in materialism and the progress of science. They believed that the tsar-worshipping, priest-ridden, wife-beating Russian peasant could be won to the outlook of a Saint-Simon or a Marx. Such an illusion could survive only as long as the populist movement was exclusively a movement of the intelligentsia. And in fact the "To the People" movement marked the beginning of the end of Russian populism.

Revolutionary populism went through four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by the Crimean War of 1853-55 in which Russia was defeated by England and France. This defeat sent shock waves through the Russian upper classes. Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 (some say he committed suicide out of a sense of shame). His successor, Alexander II, appeared to be a liberal, and in the late 1850s Russia experienced the tsarist version of glasnost and perestroika. Censorship was relaxed very considerably, and the tsarist government began talking about fundamental reforms of the system of serfdom.

Initially populist intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky demanded that the tsar expropriate the landed nobility and give the land to the peasantry. Some believed that the tsarist autocracy would achieve from above what the French Revolution had achieved from below. However, it soon became clear that the legal emancipation of the serfs was going to be done in a way which perpetuated the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the landlords and the absolutist state. In the first years after the abolition of serfdom, the economic conditions of the peasantry were actually worse than they had been. When the Emancipation Edict of 1861 was read, it provoked scattered peasant uprisings; the peasants thought it was a counterfeit document by the local bureaucrats and the landlords. The so:called Emancipation Edict marked the beginning of revolutionary populism. The intelligentsia became convinced that in order to establish peasant-based socialism they would have to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and create a democratic republic.

The "Common Cause":
Women in the Revolutionary Movement

In the 1860s the first underground revolutionary organizations came into existence. These were easily crushed. Chernyshevsky himself was imprisoned and then exiled. Yet the tsarist repression in no way suppressed the revolutionary populist movement. Over the course of the next decade, a group of perhaps two or three hundred intellectuals became a mass movement of the intelligentsia numbering thousands of activists and perhaps ten times as many sympathizers.

A three-sided political struggle developed during this period within the Russian intelligentsia who opposed the existing social and political order to some degree: the Slavophiles, the liberals, and the revolutionary populists. In this struggle the populists won hands down, and by the early 1870s Russian universities were a bastion of revolutionary populism.

Perhaps the decisive reason for the victory of populism is that they were able to mobilize the vast reserves of the women of the educated classes. This movement literally liberated thousands of women from the shackles of the patriarchal family. A woman was not legally allowed to live on her own without the permission of her parents, or her husband if she was married. To circumvent this, the fictitious marriage became a sort of standard activity within the radical movement. Some young male student would be told by a friend that he knew of a woman of advanced views who wanted to go abroad to study medicine (a woman couldn't study medicine in Russia). And they would meet for the first time in front of a church; they would go in, get married; they would come out, and he would hand her her passport, of which he had control, and say, "Now you are free to go and study medicine and do what you like."

During the 1860s the Russian revolutionary movement acquired the participation of women to a far greater degree than their counterparts in Western Europe. These women at the same time consciously rejected Western-style feminism, that is, the idea of building a separate movement predominantly of women in order to pressure the existing government to pass laws in favor of women's equality. They saw women's equality coming about through what was called the "common cause," a total social revolution in which they would participate on an equal footing with male revolutionaries. Vera Figner, who became the principal leader of the terrorist People's Will in its final phase, recounts how she and her fellow Russian radical students at the University of Zurich viewed this question:

"Generally speaking, as a group the female students abroad were not advocates of the woman question and smiled at any mention of it. We came without thought of pioneering or trying to solve the woman question. We didn't think it needed solution. It was a thing of the past; the principle of equality between men and women had been achieved in the sixties."

Now of course what Figner meant was that it had been achieved within the revolutionary movement, not in Russian society at large. The Russian populists, called "Narodniks" in their own language, were acutely aware of the terrible oppression of women. At a mass trial of populists in 1877, the tsarist prosecutors denounced them for undermining the family. Sofia Bardina replied to this:

"As far as the family is concerned...isn't it being destroyed by a social system which forces an impoverished woman to abandon herself to prostitution, and which even sanctifies this prostitution as a legal and necessary element of every civilized state? Or is it we who are destroying the family? we who are trying to root out this poverty—the major cause of all society's ill, including the erosion of the family?"

"To the People"

In the mid-1870s the populist intelligentsia who were organized in Land and Liberty, which was an all-Russian, fairly highly centralized organization of the Narodnik vanguard, made a heroic 'attempt to overthrow what Bardina called the "social system." This was the "To the People" movement. Thousands of revolutionary intellec¬tuals flocked to rural villages trying to incite the peasants to rise up in a radical democratic and social revolution. The response was not favorable. One of the leading veterans of this movement reported:

"I noticed that any sharp sallies against the Tsar or against religion made an extremely disagreeable impression on the peasants; they were just as deeply perplexed by energetic appeals for a rebellion or uprising."

When the Narodnik intellectuals said that the peasants should have the landlords' land, they got a favorable hearing. But the peasants were unwilling to defy the state to achieve this end.

While the main body of Narodnik intellectuals went to the rural villages, some remained in the cities and sought to agitate and organize among factory workers. Here they were distinctly more successful. They were able to win over some advanced workers, such as Stepan Khalturin, who joined the leadership of Land and Liberty and set up small but significant allied organizations of workers.

One of the leading populist intellectuals involved in organizing the workers was Georgi Plekhanov. Initially Plekhanov accepted what could be called the conventional populist line: factory workers are simply peasants doing seasonal vyork in the factories, which had no effect on their sympathies and ties to the rural villages. But Plekhanov's own experience caused him to question this. In 1879 he wrote:

"The question of the city worker is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself, to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decisions of the revolutionary leaders."

The "To the People" movement, which necessarily operated quite openly, exposed the Narodniks to massive state repression. This repression, combined with the frus¬tration that the movement had not achieved its basic aim, paved the way for the last phase of revolutionary populism: the turn toward terrorism.

In 1878 Vera Zasulich heard that one of her comrades had been almost beaten to death in prison. She put on her best clothes, walked to the prison, requested that she present a petition to the head of the prison, and when she went into his office she pulled out a gun and shot him pointblank. She did not however kill him. The tsarist authorities thought this was such an open-and-shut case that instead of trying her for a political crime before a special tribunal, they tried her on an ordinary criminal charge before a jury drawn from the St. Petersburg upper classes. And she was acquitted, because the jury found this a justifiable act of moral outrage!

The acquittal had a far more shocking impact than the shooting. Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, expressed the views of the educated elite when he called Zasulich's acquittal "a harbinger of revolution." The populist leaders drew the same conclusion: that if even an upper-class jury will acquit an overt terrorist, then a cam¬paign of terrorism would have enormous popular support. Marx and Engels in London similarly concluded that in the particular conditions of Russia a campaign of terrorism could incite a popular revolution.

The one populist intellectual who dissented was Plekhanov, who warned that the only effect of shooting Alexander II would be to replace him with another Alexander with another digit after his name. He wanted to continue to propagandize and agitate among the rural had been in prison and then in exile for almost 20 years. The tsarist regime had sufficient respect for the effectiveness of People's Will that they did in fact free the old man of Russian socialism. But in the following years Russian populism was basically broken, not so much by the tsarist repression as by demoralization. Neither mass agitation nor terrorism had seriously affected the tsarist autocracy, which emerged if anything even more reactionary than ever.

From Populism to Marxism

The 1880s were the low point of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1889 a student in St. Petersburg, just ten years earlier a hotbed of revolutionary activism, reported: "There were few self-sacrificing participants who completely consecrated themselves to the cause.... All wanted to finish the course as soon as possible and then to live entirely within the law." Yet just a few years later, a new generation of Russian revolutionaries would enter the scene and finish off the tsarist autocracy
once and for all.

Most accounts of the transition from populism to Marxism within the Russian intelligentsia focus exclusively on Plekhanov and his comrades. It's important, however, to place this transition in its international context. During the 1870s Russia appeared to be the one country on the verge of a radical upheaval. The bomb-throwing Russian Narodnik seemed the model of the European revolutionary. When Zasulich fled to West Europe after being acquitted for shooting Trepov, she was greeted as a heroine not only by socialists, but even by many Western liberals who hated the tsarist autocracy. Yet a decade later the Russian populist movement had almost evaporated. In 1878, the same year that People's Will was formed, the Bismarck regime in Germany passed the so-called Anti-Socialist Laws aimed at breaking the power of the German Marxist movement. The leaders, Bebel and Kautsky, were driven into exile and many activists were imprisoned. Yet unlike the Russian populists, the Marxists became the mass party of the German proletariat despite the repression. So Plekhanov's influence among a new generation of Russian revolutionaries-was not merely because of the intrinsic brilliance of his polemics against populism, but also because he was a cothinker of the strongest, most effective socialist movement in Europe.

After the split in Land and Liberty, Plekhanov attempted to establish a small propaganda group called "Total Redistribution," but the tsarist persecution was so intense that he and his comrades were forced into exile. This compelled them to rethink their basic theoretical premises and strategic perspectives, and in the early 1880s Ple¬khanov made the transition from populism to Marxism. That transition contained two basic elements, one negative, the other positive. Instead of just idealizing it, Plekhanov looked at what was happening to the peasant commune, and he saw that since the emancipation of the serfs, the collective elements of the Russian peasantry were rapidly being undermined. A new layer of rich peas¬ants, known by the insulting term kulaks, or "fists," was increasingly dominating the life of the village because they had the money. That was the negative element. The positive element is that Plekhanov generalized from his own experiences in the 1870s that there was a fundamental difference between workers and peasants, that they were not just part of the narod, the "people," and that only the workers in their mass were receptive to the socialist program. He concluded that a socialist party in Russia must be based centrally on the slowly but steadily growing proletariat.

In rejecting the conception of peasant-based socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia at that point in its economic development could not have a socialist transformation of any kind. He conceived a theory of what later came to be called the "two-stage revolution." In the first stage the working class, guided by the socialist intelligentsia, would lead the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. The liberal bourgeoisie, such as ruled in the West, would then come to power. In turn the workers would gain the political freedom to build a mass proletarian party and allied trade-union movement. Plekhanov also believed that a radical democratic revolution in Russia would enormously accelerate capitalist development, thus increasing the numerical weight of the industrial proletariat and creating the objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution in the future. Thus the program of the Eman¬cipation of Labor group, formed in 1883, stated:

"Present-day Russia is suffering—as Marx once said of the West European continent—not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from insufficiency of that development.

"One of the most harmful consequences of this backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why the socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose immediate task must be to set up free political institutions in our country...."

Plekhanov's two-stage revolutionary schema was accepted within the Marxist movement until the beginnings of the Revolution of 1905, when it was confronted, as Plekhanov would have said, "by life itself." It was then challenged in different ways by Lenin's conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.

"From a Spark a Flame Shall Be Kindled"

In the first decade of its existence, the Emancipation of Labor group was a mere handful of exiles. This reflected both the apolitical mood of the Russian intelligentsia and the continuing dominance of the populists over the diminished radical movement. Slowly Plekhanov began to influence a new younger generation of Russian intellectuals, personified by Vladimir llyich Ulyanov. According to his own account, the future Lenin was an apolitical youth until 1887, when his older brother was executed for participating in one of the last populist attempts to take the tsar's life. Alexander Ulyanov's execution radicalized his younger brother, who, however, did not follow the same path in a programmatic and strategic sense. In the early 1890s the young future Lenin consciously rejected populism in all its contemporary manifestations, and consid¬ered himself a Marxist.

By the mid-1890s, revolutionary populism was a thing of the past and what passed for populism had merged with liberalism. In the 1890s the only people who were calling for a democratic republic were the Marxists, called the Social Democrats. Thus Lenin could write at this time: "All true and consistent democrats in Russia must become Social Democrats." The Russian Marxists had achieved a position in some ways comparable to the revolutionary populists of a generation earlier. They had become the dominant current among that section of the Russian intelligentsia which was fundamentally hostile to the existing social and political order. They had also acquired a small layer of advanced workers. But they had to break outside the narrow circle. This was called the transition from propaganda to agitation. Plekhanov defined propaganda as the explanation of many complex ideas to the few, and agitation as the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many.

The attempt of the Marxist propaganda circle to involve itself in agitation among the workers happened to coincide with a major strike wave. As a result they got a far more favorable hearing and greater influence among the workers than they had initially expected. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of the movement sought to direct the workers' economic resistance to the employer toward the ultimate goal of a radical democratic revolution against the tsarist autocracy. In a popular pamphlet on factory fines written in 1895, for example, Lenin wrote:

"[The workers] will understand that the government and its officials are on the side of the factory owners, and that the laws are drawn up in such a way as to make it easier for the employer to oppress the worker."

The turn toward agitation incurred increased tsarist repression. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of what were called the first generation of Russian Marxist "practicals"—that is, the Russian Marxists who actually organized the workers, as opposed to the older veterans like Plekhanov and Axelrod who provided the theoretical direction from exile—were arrested. The movement passed into the hands of younger people whose formative experience was their involvement in the mass strikes. They became so enthralled with increasing their influence among the workers that they decided to drop the demand for a democratic republic, which they argued was remote from the immediate concerns of the workers and was unpopular among the more backward sections who still had illusions in the tsar's benevolence.

Plekhanov denounced this tendency as "economism," which a colleague of Lenin, Potresov, defined as the Utopian notion of building an effective trade-union move¬ment under tsarist absolutism. Nonetheless in the late 1890s economism became the dominant current within Russian Social Democracy, both the underground circles in Russia and the exile organizations in West Europe.

In 1900 Lenin, Martov and Potresov were released from Siberia, where they had been sent into exile. They joined Plekhanov and his comrades in West Europe to form what was called the Iskra group. "Iskra," meaning "spark," was taken for their journal; it derived from a letter that was written 75 years earlier by the imprisoned and condemned Decembrists to their friend, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In justifying their actions, the Decembrists said: "From a spark a flame shall be kindled." In choosing this name the Iskra group was stating that the proletariat was and must be the heir to the tradition of revolutionary democratic struggle against the tsarist autocracy. The very name was an attack on economism.

Although Plekhanov was one of the towering figures of European socialism, it was Lenin who was the real driving force and principal organizer of the Iskra group. Its immediate goal was to wrest control of the movement from the still dominant economists. The Iskra group won rather rapidly, in part because Russian society was beginning to experience revolutionary ferment at all levels. Factory workers in large numbers spontaneously joined student strikes and protests, thereby giving the lie to the economist notion that workers would take to the streets only when their own personal livelihood was involved—a very narrow and degrading conception. The narrowness of the economist perspective was discredited even among the economists themselves.

For Lenin, the leadership of the movement was only the first step. The second and decisive step was to cohere the localized propaganda circles into a centralized party with a clearly defined program, strategic perspective and leadership. Describing the need for a such a party in his principal work of the Iskra period, What Is To Be Done?, Lenin used a metaphor from construction:

"Pray tell me, when a bricklayer lays bricks in various parts of an enormous structure, the like of which he has never seen, is it not a 'paper line' that he uses to find the correct place to lay each brick and to indicate the ultimate goal of his work as a whole.... And aren't we passing now through a period in our party life, in which we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack a guiding line visible to all?"

To establish such a guiding line and a centralized party, the Iskra group called a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in mid-1903. As is well known, this congress ended in a deep split between the Bolsheviks (the majority, or "hards"), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (the minority, called at the time the "softs"), whose principal leader was Martov. At first it appeared that the split was over narrowly organizational grounds: whether to have a highly centralized party consisting of people who are committed revolutionaries, or, as the Mensheviks wanted, a looser party open to all workers and intellectuals who actively supported the movement in some degree. However, as Russia moved toward a revolutionary crisis it became increasingly clear that the difference over the internal nature of the party was linked to differences over the course of the role it would play in the revolution, in fact differences over the revolution itself.

The Permanent Revolution

In 1904 Russia engaged in a war with Japan over which country would control the Far East. The tsarist autocracy had expected that a wave of popular patriotic solidarity would dampen the growing social discontent. Instead the defeats of the Russian army at the hands of the Japanese further undermined the tsarist autocracy. "Bloody Sunday," the January 1905 massacre of peaceful workers who were petitioning the tsar, ignited a wave of mass workers strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies throughout the year. The Romanov throne tottered wildly, although in the end it did not fall. However, in the early months of 1905 the demise of the autocracy seemed imminent, and therefore the various factions and tendencies of Rus¬sian Social Democracy were forced to spell out much more concretely their conceptions of the course of the revolution and its aftermath.

The Mensheviks translated Plekhanov's initially rather abstract conception of a two-stage revolution into support for the liberal wing of the Russian bourgeoisie, organized in the Constitutional Democratic party or Cadets. The last thing that the Cadets wanted was a popular insurrection to overthrow the tsar. What they aimed at was to use the turmoil from below to pressure the tsarist autocracy to create quasi-parliamentary bodies in which the propertied classes would have the dominant place. In practice the Mensheviks' adherence to a two-stage revolution, in which the first stage meant the workers were supposed to march arm in arm with the democratic bourgeoisie against tsarist reaction, turned out to be a no-stage revolution because there was no democratic bourgeoisie with which to march.

Lenin recognized that all wings of the Russian bourgeoisie were anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary, that a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution therefore would have to occur against and not in alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie. This was the core of his conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. He projected that a workers party, supported by the mass of the peasants, would be able to purge Russia of all the feudal-derived backwardness, the tsarist autocracy, bureaucracy and the state church. It would eliminate the oppression of nationalities as well as of the Jews and end the exploitation of the peasants by the landed nobility.

This conception was clearly influenced by the Jacobin dictatorship in the Great French Revolution. Yet the ques¬tion remained: could the proletariat replay the Jacobin dictatorship in the Russia of 1905; was it possible to take economic actions which would harm the interests of large sections of the propertied class and at the same time not economically expropriate the bourgeoisie? Lenin insisted that this was not a stable form of government, but rather "only a transient, temporary socialist aim." He argued a' the time (although he later changed his view) that in thi absence of proletarian revolutions in West Europe, a rev¬olution in Russia, no matter how radical, could not go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations.

The person who uniquely argued arthe time that th Russian Revolution could and had to go beyond bourgeois economic relations was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had bef one of the younger leaders of the Iskra group; in the split he initially sided with the Mensheviks. He played prominent role in the Revolution of 1905, and in the course of that revolution developed what he called the doctrine of permanent revolution, in part based on Marx's writings in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In a preface which he wrote in 1921 to his writings on the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky summarized the doctrine of permanent revolution:

"This rather high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations....

"The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become the pro¬logue to a world revolution."

In 1905 the permanent revolution did not go further than the beginnings of dual power between the proletariat and the tsarist autocracy. However, Russia's defeats in the first imperialist world war broke the back of the tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the greatest victory of the world pro¬letariat in history. Today that victory is being desperately threatened by the ascendancy of capitalist counterrevo¬lutionary forces.

But I would like to end this talk rather with a story. After the assassination of Alexander II the leadership of People's Will came into the hands of Vera Figner. It was she who negotiated with the tsarist regime for the release of Chernyshevsky, and she managed to hold together an underground group in Russia for the next two years. The police official who finally tracked her down had gained so much respect for her that he requested to kiss her hand before sending her to prison. But sent to prison she was, where she stayed for the next 22 years. She was only released in the amnesty of 1905. When she came out of prison she was a kind of Narodnik Rip Van Winkle; she could not understand or orient to the radically changed political and social conditions.

Nevertheless, she remained active within the left, where she was universally respected.
In 1917 many prominent old populists joined the counterrevolutionary camp and went into exile. Figner, the old Narodnik terrorist, faced with a fundamental choice of political loyalties, chose to stay in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s she devoted herself to writing her memoirs and to an organization called the Society of Former Political Prisoners, who were old populists who considered themselves loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. In that capacity she sought to induce populists who had emigrated to return to Soviet Russia and to serve the interests of the workers state. This eminently worthy organization was disbanded by Stalin in the early '30s.

Figner was still alive and kicking at the age of 89, living in Moscow, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Wehrmacht approached Moscow, the Russian authorities turned to Figner and said, "We will move you to safety further east." She refused, saying, "I am very old. I will die soon anyway. Save your efforts for people who are living, who still have a life to give to the cause." So the last member of the famous Central Committee of the People's Will died the following year in Moscow, a heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary right to the end, and in that sense an inspiration for us all.

*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) as background for the entry below.

Markin comment:


Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.


Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand  about the dark side of the American experience. No question.