The U.S. SWP's TWO DIFFERENT "turns" in the 1970s

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

[I am not sure what led me NOT to post this a week or two ago, when I first
drafted it. Probably, I just got distracted by something else, and there was
some additional point I wanted to add, but what that might have been I have
no clue now. So with the caveat that this is not, or at least not fully,
what I would have written on this, but only what I did write on it, and
asking for Louis's forbearance for flogging a dead horse with a rather limp
whip, I want to present this footnote on the discussion around the SWP. By
the way, the original title of Philip Ferguson's post was: "Re: Barnesites
deepen the madness (was SWP deepens turn)." The quote that begins the post
is from a recent issue of the Militant reporting on an early September
National Committee meeting.]

>>"If we follow the course we have discussed and reaffirmed at this National
Committee meeting," Barnes said, "if we follow the course our union
fractions and more and more branches and branch organizing committees have
already begun to blaze--then by the end of the year 2000 we will once again
be building a party like the one whose proletarianization we set out to
deepen with the turn to industry some quarter century ago."<<

    It should be noted that the reference to the turn to industry a quarter
of a century ago is misleading and an attempt to rewrite history.

    The original political reorientation the SWP called "the turn" was to
working class communities and organizations generally, including the unions.
It was not the exclusive, monomaniacal industrial unions and industrial
unions only policy the SWP later adopted and continues to implement to this
day.

    A major component of the original, mid-1970s "turn" was an orientation
toward the Black and Latino communities and their struggles, seeking to
apply the same kind of united-front coalition tactics that had proved
largely successful in the antiwar movement. Thus two of the major campaigns
of the SWP at the time were in support of OSCAR, a coalition built to
support Boston's embattled Black community, in which Malik Miah played a
central role, and building a Chicano-Latino conference against la migra and
deportations, sparked by opposition to a Carter administration plan to build
a fence along parts of the border and a series of other attacks on
undocumented workers, in which Peter Camejo and --I think, but am not sure--
Olga Rodríguez were the real spark plugs behind the SWP's participation.

    This changed with the February, 1978, SWP National Committee plenum,
where the political committee proposed, and the plenum adopted, making the
party's immediate and overriding priority the colonization of a majority of
our leadership and membership in basic industry. This was motivated by an
analysis that the ruling class had no choice but to engage in ever-sharper
attacks against the rights and standard of living of working people; that
these more and more were focused on the industrial proletariat; and that
this would provoke what would be essentially a second edition of the
radicalization of the 1930s, amplified and corrected by the social movements
of the 60s and 70s.

    This second "turn" was projected as a radical and sharp maneuver (in the
military
sense, i.e., a redeployment of forces) not as a therapeutic measure nor a
permanent orientation. The leadership's opinion then was that in a few
years' time the SWP would be overwhelmingly proletarian due to recruitment
from these big battles, not from hothousing ersatz proles from student
cadre.

    If a visitor from the year 2000 would have time traveled into that
plenum and told us what had actually taken place over the next two decades,
we would scarcely have believed the person, and if we had, the turn would
have been defeated overwhelmingly. For the comrades who voted for it and
others who were present there and would have voted for it if we'd been
formal members of the NC were for the turn out of a belief that capitalism
was entering a crisis unprecedented since the 1930s, the kind of thing that
comes along once in a lifetime or so. The post-World War II boom had
finally, completely and irretrievably exhausted itself, there was no going
back to the good times of constantly rising wages and living standards which
America's working people were used to.

    But the fact is that neither was the crisis as severe as what we
imagined (in the U.S., the third world is another story entirely) nor was
the reaction of the working people AT ALL what we expected, even adjusting
for a much less drastic economic situation than we projected.

    I remember around that time, after the adoption of the turn, reading an
interview with Fidel I think by Barbara Walters. And I forget the how the
question was phrased, but it had to do with perspectives for a revolution in
the U.S. And Fidel said he didn't think there would be a revolution in the
U.S. for 300 years, although perhaps the American revolutionaries would
disagree with him. I remember joking about it with Jack and Mary-Alice at
the time, we were so confident, so utterly convinced that we would prove him
wrong. Even if we did not succeed in achieving our ultimate aims in this
coming storm, it would be of such force and magnitude that in the future no
one would be left with any illusions about the stability of American
capitalism.

    Of course, we all understood that Fidel didn't mean for his offhand
remark to be taken literally. But the point was unmistakable, a revolution
in the U.S. was so far off over the horizon you could not see it from here.
Whereas we saw the gathering clouds of the coming tempest in all directions.

    We now know who was right, or at least righter. Fidel was. He did not
live in the U.S., could not possibly have known as much about political,
social and economic conditions and trends as the leaders of a workers party
in the U.S., and yet it is undeniable, I think, that he saw further, and
more clearly and thought about what he saw with a much more level head than
we did.

    Now at that February 1978 plenum, no specific timetables for the
projected explosion in the class struggle was presented, on the contrary,
they were specifically disclaimed. But it was discussed and understood that
what we were talking about was a matter of a few years, at most, and
conceivably even a year or less, which is why there was absolutely no time
to lose.

    Although the industrial turn was projected at first as a continuation
and extension of the earlier 1975 turn, over the next couple of years this
NEW "turn to industry" launched in 1988 was broadened politically and
deepened organizationally, and clearly became a negation of the earlier
orientation and an abandonment of the kind of united front tactics and
campaigns that had been the party's stock-in-trade and projected to continue
under the 1975 turn.

    It was broadened politically by the idea that the turn would be the
"framework" for all of the SWP's activities. What this turned into in
practice was adopting a workerist, sectarian and abstentionist line towards
the movements through which the political struggle between the contending
classes on a world scale found expression: the solidarity and
anti-intervention movement and the nuclear freeze campaign. It also meant
dismantling most of the SWP's work in Black and Hispanic communities and
organizations, and in women's groups. We also abandoned cultivating and
working with the significant periphery the SWP had begun to develop in
radical and socialist-minded circles. Under the impact of the ruling class
offensive, the SWP believed, these layers were now moving to the right. We
said there was a Mariel going on in the radical movement, and even in the
SWP (the reference was to the Cuban port where about 100,000 Cubans embarked
for Florida in 1980, so it was an extremely venomous characterization). This
did not happen all at once, but it did all happen.

    On the organizational plane, the turn was said to require a
"reconquering" of "proletarian norms of functioning." A nasty, coercive,
vindictive internal atmosphere was promoted by the leadership, where all
sorts of real or imagined transgressions, no matter how petty, were met with
ruthless punishment, usually expulsion. Needless to say the first victims of
these measures were the opposition currents in the SWP. Although presented
as a "reconquering" of norms that had been prevalent in the 30s, in fact,
the opposite was the case. In the handling of political differences the old
SWP had tried to follow Trotsky's advice to try to minimize organizational
frictions and disputes for the sake of clarity in the political discussion.

    The results of the first turn had been a definite improvement in the
internal atmosphere of the party, which had become quite factional as a
result of the international debate in the USFI, of which the SWP was the
"except-for-the-reactionary-Voorhis-act" American component and leader of
the minority current. The split with those who sympathized with the
International Majority's positions was beginning to be healed, and there was
also a fusion with a group of about 50 comrades mostly in Detroit who were
called the Revolutionary Marxist Committee. This fusion was the result of a
convergence between the RMC and the SWP around the approach of the first
turn, and was successfully consummated despite the fact that the RMC was a
state capitalist group. The party continued to grow in membership, albeit
more slowly than earlier, and to consolidate its influence and prestige
among
a broad layer of radicals due to its stability, its level-headedness, and
its capacity to do good practical work around specific campaigns as they
arose, as well as to carry out general socialist propaganda.

    After 1978 and throughout the period I remained in the SWP (until 1985)
when people talked about "the turn" with statements like, "the turn is the
framework for our solidarity work" and things like that, the meant
specifically and exclusively the second one launched in February of 1978,
NOT the earlier one from the mid-70s. That was viewed as merely a transitory
stage in groping our way towards the "real" turn, at most, an extremely
rough and provisional first approximation that, as it turned out, had to be
completely overhauled. As things were viewed then, the positive side of the
first turn had been largely to get us into a position where we could see
that the turn to industry was the real turn.

    The reason why Jack Barnes NOW tries to mush the two together, and
predates the industrial turn by a few years, is that the generation of
comrades that came into the movement in the 1960s and early 70s, i.e., the
SWP's most experienced cadres and leaders as well as the bulk of the
periphery that keeps the national office afloat financially and Pathfinder
Press in business, tend to view the mid-70s period as the SWP's golden age,
at least in the past half century. The party was sizable and extremely
effective; no one had more "striking power" on the left than it had although
the CP had substantially more members. It had begun the process of sinking
some real roots in the working class, recruiting a few activists in the
Black and Hispanic communities and a few in the labor movement, a promising
beginning of a new stage in the party's development because for 15 years it
had recruited almost exclusively from the student movement. Many hundreds of
those comrades recruited from the student movement had gotten jobs in
sectors the party had targeted where unions functioned. The YSA continued
to recruit on the campuses and serve as a training ground for young rebels,
promising the party hundreds more young members it could assign to union
situations or other priorities in the coming years. The SWP had considerably
enhanced its standing with the general radical public, especially through
its suit against the FBI and other political police agencies. The worst of
the factionalism in the international seemed to be behind us; collaboration
was slowly being reknit. The atmosphere on the American left in general
(including, but not only, some of OUR OWN attitudes in the SWP) seemed to be
improving as activists became older and developed a better sense of balance
and perspective.

    I do not know when the SWP leadership switched from radically
differentiating the two turns to mushing them together. I do know that this
was effective enough so that, for example, when I wrote a little more than a
year ago my long post about "The decline and fall of American Trotskyism,"
which I did exclusively from "memory" without consulting any documents, I
also predated the INDUSTRIAL turn, the second one, to the mid-70s, and in my
recollection the first turn had become just a brief prelude of a few months
or a year to the "real" one. I wasn't conscious of it, but from having
sporadically followed the party press over the years, and especially since I
had gotten access to it over the Internet three or four years before, I had
obviously adjusted what I remembered to what the Militant had been
suggesting.

    In that post I talked about remembering, for example, discussing things
like loosening the party's norms in terms of level of activity and financial
commitment to make membership less daunting for working people with family
responsibilities and other commitments, but had completely forgotten that
this had become SWP policy, codified in the organization report that Barry
Sheppard gave to the 1975 convention where we adopted the sweeping
"Prospects for Socialism in America" resolution which both summed up the
central programmatic conquests of the previous 15 years of activity and
reoriented the party towards the working class.

    What Jack Barnes is doing today is to try to identify the generalized
sentiment in the party in those years of the mid-70s that we were on the
right track, that we were making progress, that we were making useful and
genuine and sometimes quite significant contributions to our side in
important battles, that we were starting to become integrated into working
class communities and organizations, that we were beginning to recruit some
genuine grass roots leaders from those communities and the labor movement,
that we had succeeded in establishing relations of collaborations and
respect with many others, that we had a solid party organizationally and
financially, with a good and skilled propaganda apparatus, that we were well
poised to become the dominant force on the left, he's trying to identify all
those accomplishments, which many of us remember and place in the
mid-to-late 70s, with the turn to industry.

    But the truth is the turn to industry represented the reversal of many
of those advances, and ushered in the unraveling of the organization, which
many of us tend to remember as beginning around 1980 or so, and continuing
pretty steadily thereafter.

    There is even a false memory among some comrades that from the mid or
late 70s until recently (and I fervently hope I'm not kidding myself in
saying things are NOW changing), mass movements and struggles have been in a
continuing and pretty much uninterrupted decline (with whatever momentary
blips up). We discount the big movement around the nuclear freeze idea,
because we took such a radically sectarian stance towards it, and we
minimize the size of the solidarity and anti-intervention movement around
Central America and the Caribbean for the same reason (in fact the SWP
probably lost more people to the solidarity movement than it recruited from
it).

    What the SWP was looking for --the big class fightback in steel, in
auto, in the mines, and so on-- simply never happened, and because what we
were focused on didn't happen, we tend to think nothing else happened
either. That's just not true. It may not have been on the scale of the 60s,
but the solidarity and anti-intervention movement was quite substantial, and
would have been even more so with a counterbalance to some of the narrowness
and one-sidedness of some of the groups and individuals who played major
roles in it.

    There can be little doubt that this bit of convenient historical
obfuscation is entirely conscious and deliberate on the part of the current
SWP leadership. They constantly reprint snippets of the old documents,
re-edit the books that collect them, write new introductions for them. Those
of us who were in the SWP of old would have little motive or reason to
reread old resolutions and reports; that's not where the real life of the
SWP was, they are not the things we remember. I happened to look at the
stuff last fall only because I unpacked, after 15 years in storage, the
boxes I taped shut when I was preparing to move to Managua in 1984. And
having just run into the remnants of the party who happened to hold a
national meeting of their fractions at CNN Center where I work, I did start
to look at the old stuff again. And it was only then that I realized the
swindle Jack, M-A and Steve were pulling, why they always mushed together
what were in fact two very different stages in party history.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip Ferguson" <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 1:56 AM
Subject: Barnesites deepen the madness (was SWP deepens turn)