Re: The speech that Barnes should have given

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis,

    Quixotic as some of this may seem to some people, I think it is
important to point out that, in fact, the SWP HAD STARTED TO MOVE in the
direction you indicate in this fictitious mid-70s speech. Jack Barnes today
likes to falsify history, but the facts are that the 1978 turn to industry
was the *negation* of the turn towards working class communities and
organizations generally (including industrial and other unions) that the SWP
made in the mid-1970s.

    By happenstance, the most recent Militant (just web-posted) has yet
another reiteration by Barnes that the orientation adopted in the mid-70s is
the same one they're carrying out today. That's because Barnes doesn't want
to admit there was a different way and road to becoming rooted among the
working people, especially the most oppressed and exploited layers, than the
one that's turned the SWP and its youth group from a movement of a couple of
thousand people into one that today is perhaps 20% of what it was then.

    Although that orientation "hoped," so to speak, for a mass working class
radicalization in the next immediate period, it was not dependent on it
taking place right away nor on it taking some specific form in a given
sector, as the industrial turn was.

    Accompanying that shift in orientation was a conscious broadening, or
loosening, of the SWP's organizational norms and (I insist, pseudo-)
Leninist
homogeneity. It may have been limited and even extremely timid, but
nonetheless it was in the right direction and, by and large, for the right
reason. Which was, quite simply, that a party dominated by the ambiance of
the superactivist student milieus was inhospitable to workers.

    And at least some of the party branches were AHEAD of the official
line (which is, of course, inevitable: a party that had no local units whose
practice goes BEYOND leadership projections or the "party line" is dead).

    I think you are right on the money when you say the SWP THEN had a
chance to become a REAL (albeit a very small) party, a movement that was the
organized expression of actual social forces in U.S. society, which you
express citing the traditional SWP "magic figure" of 10,000 members
(inherited from the 1946 convention banner, "On to the Party of 10,000,"
which was the "American Theses" reduced to a slogan).  But whether in real
life that would have actually meant 5,000 or 15,000 members, you are
absolutely correct: the SWP was on the verge of going beyond being a
propaganda league (let's just call it that to avoid less complimentary
terms, like sect) to the beginnings of a real party.

    For a group that had broken with a sect existence only in part and only
around some specific issues and struggles, and still remained overwhelmingly
a sect in its ideological outlook, this was a tremendous accomplishment, and
a tremendous challenge.

    You mentioned Peter, and I think it must be recognized that precisely
Peter Camejo was in the vanguard of prodding the party towards
de-sectarianization in 1975 and
1976, especially through his presidential candidacy. He set a very different
tone and stance for the party, because implicit in the idea of running the
biggest socialist campaign since Debs was ALSO the idea of projecting the
SWP as the kind of party Debs wanted, not a narrow sect, but a broad,
militant, activist party of revolutionary socialism. And in fact as the
party semi-drifted in those years it was becoming broader, just from people
getting older, going into different kinds of jobs, a handful had begun to
raise families. The party's own initiatives (the suit against the FBI et al)
and its participation in broader campaigns (Boston busing, against la migra,
in support of farmworkers, etc.) was gradually drawing around more people,
creating a certain periphery.

    This was not an accident or just some slogan that a few people got
carried away with; it was conscious policy, at least enough to give that
1976
campaign a very different character than the efforts that the SWP had
previously engaged in. When the old SP abandoned that name and became the
Democratic Socialists of America, Peter was conscious enough of where we
OUGHT to go to suggest that the SWP should change its name to the Socialist
Party, and consciously seek to link itself up with the tradition of Debs's
party. (I remember it well because out of all the "buzz" around West Street
from the idea came one of the headlines I remember most fondly writing for
the Militant. It was something like, "Not Socialist, Not a Party." The
"kicker" the smaller headline above the main one explained, "Social
Democrats meet.")

     This was well BEFORE Nicaragua and well before the SWP had embarked on
the discussion of the Cuban revolution that played such a big role in the
party's internal life three or four years later. The IDEA behind "Not
Socialist. Not a Party" was simply that those who had been (fraudulently or
mistakenly, take your pick) claiming to be the US Socialist Party had
finally admitted they WERE NOT IT, making it EASIER for the real socialists
to organize themselves into a party.

    It was the logical conclusion of the radicalization of the late 60s and
early 70s, that the activists who had been involved in (at least) a few
years of mass movement activity and had consciously become socialists,
rejected Stalinism and gone beyond the simplism and ultraleftism that often
manifests itself among young revolutionists, should draw together and begin
developing a real socialist party, i.e., a real workers party. There was a
certain amount of fluidity in the left then, as the best of the tens or
hundreds of thousands of people who had become activists in the 60s looked
for ways to continue their participation in movements for social change.

    Of necessity, that party would have had to stop having a position on
every theoretical and historical question under the sun, as well as on the
correct strategy and tactics for every single other country. It would have
had to "make do" with "only" concrete positions around what working people
in the U.S. should do, and the leadership would have had to accept that
members weren't necessarily going to clear it with New York every time they
crossed the street. The center would have had to respect a certain degree of
autonomy and initiative by members and local units; it would have had to
tolerate a certain diversity of voices and points of view in the party's own
press, and in other publishing efforts some party members might have been
associated with; and would have had to rely much more than the SWP did on
leading and inspiring comrades around national campaigns, instead of on an
exaggerated idea of "Bolshevik discipline" and all sorts of organizational
devices like goals and quotas.

    In informal discussions with comrades of ideas that went in this sort of
direction in the mid-70s, we tended to fool ourselves thinking that, yes, of
course, as we got larger we'd need to get loser, there was no way to run a
significant organization with real roots and thousands of regular working
people as members the way you could run a "cadre" organization made up to a
large degree of fairly bohemian and rootless young rebels with no other
responsibilities and priorities in life than their political activity. But
for now, we thought back then, this level of super-activism allows us to
have much more of an "impact."

    But, of course, it was precisely that level of super activism that was
one of the factors that made the SWP less hospitable for regular working
people and that in the case of my branch at the time, the Lower East Side,
led us to lose the tiny base and the few members we had won in the community
as increasingly we placed our emphasis on industrial unions.

    Unfortunately, by the time the Nicaraguan revolution happened, the SWP
had decidedly changed course. The downturn in mass movement activity of the
second half of the 70's contradicted the very rosy projections of our 1975
convention. And instead of facing up to reality, that the radicalization of
the 60s had crested years before, that the political pendulum was now
swinging the other way, we quite naturally preferred to believe Jack
Barnes's crystal ball, and the idea that this was just the lull before the
proletarian storm broke out in force.

    The "industrial proletariat" orientation became increasingly prominent
after the 1976 election campaign ended, and was codified, ratified and
transformed into the "industrial proletariat ONLY and everything else be
damned" orientation as the "turn to industry" at the February, 1978, plenum
of the SWP National Committee. This "turn" superseded, replaced, and in fact
REVOKED the 1975 orientation to the poorer working class communities
(especially Black and Hispanics) and the organizations through which the
resistance of working people to capitalist exploitation and oppression
expressed itself (whether unions, the NAACP, CLUW, NOW or whatever). That
"negation" of the mid-70's turn was not just implicit, but said explicitly,
although mildly. And so we turned out back not just on the struggles in
local communities and the contacts and friends we had developed there, but
also on unions like the teachers, AFSCME, and so on, where we had begun to
develop fractions and were doing some effective work, and where there were
layers of people who had been or were still active in movements for social
change that could have been attracted to the SWP.

This was not "the turn" of the mid-70s and the Prospects for Socialism in
America resolution, which people now tend to mix up with the 1978 "turn to
industry," and which even now literally dozens of the SWP{'s remaining
cadres are trying to implement (see the very latest Militant,
http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6435/643553.html).

    Unlike the first mid-70's "turn," the 1978 one meant TIGHTENING, not
loosening organizational norms and increasing, not decreasing, the degree to
which members were expected to subordinate their life to whatever it was
that the SWP was trying to do. Sure, IN THEORY, if you were a young Puerto
Rican single mother no one was going to expel you (at least not back then).
But you'd have to be pretty masochistic to want to belong to one more group
that was going to treat you like dirt.

    There was not then, nor was there ever, as far as I know, even a single
vote cast at a plenum, convention, branch or fraction meeting against that
1978 "turn" in defense of its predecessor.

    But that was what was required and called for. It was the actual "turn
to industry," carrying it out in practice month after month and year after
year (and now, decade after decade), and doing so blindly, on faith, because
we WANTED the projection it was based on (a second edition of the 1930s,
amplified and corrected by the radicalization of the 1960s) to be true, that
actually destroyed the possibility (however small) of the SWP breaking
decisively from being a propaganda league, an orientation that I believe was
correct  in the 30s and perhaps for a few years later, but definitively
shown to be a historical anachronism by the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese,
Algerian and Cuba revolutions, as well as by the whole world political
situation in the cold war.* [see footnote]


    But to return to the 1978 "turn to industry."

    It was our insistence on holding on to this imaginary mass
proletarian radicalization, or at least pretending to, even on the part of
comrades who were in opposition to the leadership, that, quite literally, as
a collective, thinking organism, drove the party mad. It was, frankly,
totally bonkers to insist, AFTER the Carter presidency and the first year or
so of Reagan, with the humiliating, demoralizing, crushing defeat of the
PATCO (air traffic controllers) strike, that the heavy tank divisions of
the proletarian armored corps were mustering just beyond the next ridge of
the class struggle.

    Even if the working class had massively radicalized a couple of years
later, the SWP's monomaniacal industrial turn would STILL have been bonkers,
because although the pre-turn SWP was a fairly inhospitable environment for
regular working people, the post-turn SWP was, quite simply, unlivable. You
could have had all sorts of strikes and protests and some other more
flexible group would undoubtedly have linked up with them.

    But especially since the working class did not radicalize, and in fact,
it was obvious to everyone else on the planet that it wasn't about to, the
ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to maintain the "line" was through a total, unconscious
suspension of disbelief, entering into a world just as magical and
fantastical as any dreamed of by Tolkein or Shelley or Lewis Carroll.

    So perhaps MORE IMPORTANT than the speech Jack Barnes SHOULD HAVE given
in the mid 1970s, was the speech he SHOULD NOT have given in the late 1970s.
That speech was the main report to the February, 1978, plenum.

    If, despite the downturn in mass movement activity of the late 70s, the
SWP has just "drifted along" for another couple of years, muddling through
as best it could with socialist propaganda, "little" campaigns, such as
the one against the persecution of immigrants and so on, some work, yes, in
the steel and the miners union, but also in AFSCME and the teachers, then in
1979 the party might have been in a flexible enough frame of mind to begin
consciously assimilating at least some of the lessons of the Nicaraguan
victory (which remain valid DESPITE the fact that the Sandinista revolution
was eventually drowned in blood by Reagan). And of course it would not have
had the sectarian workerist schema that led it to cut itself of from the
solidarity and anti-intervention movements.

José

*  [The footnote:

    [I think this (what happened in the world during the first half,
roughly, of the cold war) has a tremendous amount to do with the "Permanent
Revolution" assuming sacramental importance in the Trotskyist movement, and
with our current discussion of this theory.

    [The problem was that it was a very hard thing to believe BOTH that
"Stalinism" was "counterrevolutionary through and through" -- as the SWP
historically insisted -- AND that Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, North
Vietnam (and eventually ALL of Vietnam) had become workers states as the
result of successful socialist revolutions led by "counterrevolutionaries."

    [What was needed was a Deus ex Machina, some magical force capable of
transforming "petty-bourgeois counterrevolutionary Stalinist parties" into
suitable enough substitutes for a genuine "Leninist" (Trotskyist) party.
Thus the Trotskyist movement came up with the idea that --somehow-- the
"logic" of Permanent Revolution IMPOSED itself, not just against the
ignorance or misunderstanding or the leaders of those revolutions, but
against their whole ideological formation and all their conscious, practical
political efforts. In this view, entire mass parties, consciously schooled
and carefully implementing a policy of Stalinist counterrevolutionary
betrayal, quite despite themselves would wake up one morning at the head of
a workers state, the "agents" of the "logic" of permanent revolution.]

    [The POLITICAL point of it was that these "Stalinists" were not to
"blame" for having made socialist revolutions. All the REAL credit belonged
to the Trots, for the Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. The "Stalinists"
were merely unwitting agents, hapless automatons animated by the "logic" of
OUR "theory" of "permanent revolution," which we had patented, copyrighted
and trademarked at the intellectual property office of Plato's cave.

    [THIS *instinctively* and *typically* SECT rationalization, and not
Trotsky's careless formulations or even sectarian mistakes, is what accounts
for the Permanent Revolution assuming a role not unlike the myth of the
virgin birth among Marian sects in the middle ages (and a certain pontifical
throwback to those times at the dawn of the 21st Century).

    [AND the beauty of it was this: IF the revolution was successful, this
PROVED the power of "OUR" ideas against those of everyone else. BUT if the
revolution was defeated, THAT was the fault of our accursed "Stalinist
opponents" who refused to follow the dictates of "OUR" theory of permanent
revolution, thereby proving once again how right we were.]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 12:52 PM
Subject: The speech that Barnes should have given


> (This discussion about the SWP and the DSP reminded me of something I
wrote
> about a year ago but never posted. I wrote a brief version of a speech
that
> Jack Barnes might have given in 1974. I even used his long-winded 'style'.
> I am completely convinced that if the SWP had adopted this kind of
> orientation, it would have at least 10,000 members today. It incorporates
> some of the thinking and discussions I had with Peter Camejo during the
> time we attempted to launch a new left group in 1980 called the North Star
> Network. I stole many of my ideas from Camejo, who stole them from the
FSLN
> and the Cubans. Meanwhile Camejo got bored with politics and turned into a
> 'progressive' stockbroker, curse his eyes. I still keep to my quixotic
ways.)