[Marxism] A comment on Barry Sheppard's "The Party: Volume 1: The Sixties. A political memoir

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is based on a letter I wrote to Barry Sheppard after I received  a
copy of his INDISPENSABLE book on the role of the SWP in the 1960s.
Fred Feldman


I just got the book in the mail.  What a beautiful job.  In the High
Pathfinder tradition, very rare among radical press jobs these days.

I keep thinking of Draper's  comment about the difference between Cannon
and the rest was that "he wanted to remember." That's what you've
accomplished.

I think this is also the only book about this great revolutionary period
overall (aside from Out Now) written from a consistently revolutionary
perspective.

I feel tremendous pride of editorship.  I can't think of anything I'm so
proud of since helping to defeat imperialism in Vietnam.

The great loss that the SWP leadership underwent in the 1980s, a process
registered inituially with the savage, politically unjustified split,
was the loss of the revolutionary perspective that was reinforced by and
came out of the experiences of the 1960s. This exaggerated and
destructively implemented every weakness inherited from the past -- the
one underlying all the other crap. This  revolutionary perspective that
was reinforced for the older cadres and FORGED for the younger ones such
as myself by the experiences of the 1960s. This was embodied for that
time in the party more than any single other place in the US (leaving
aside Malcolm X, who stands as the outstanding voice of the
revolutionary perspective of our generation).

Many, many others had a piece of it or more. Robert Williams. AJ Muste.
ED Nixon. Gloria Richardson. Martin Luther King. James Forman. AJ Muste.
Stokely Carmichael. Clark Kissinger (no kidding!). Bernadine
Dorhn (no kidding!). George Jackson. Ruchelle Magee. H Rap Brown.  Dave
Dellinger. Many others.  But no single political group had as big a
piece of it as the SWP at that time. That is my firm conviction.

That is what our generation of leadership could not successfully
maintain as Cannon's did with the decline of the Russian revolution and
as Cannon and Dobbs did after the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s
faded. This perspective -- not some organizational schema (or as Barnes
says today, "the organization question is the central question") --  was
the real issue in debates over the Theses, whatever imperfections that
document had historically.

 Your book rescues the revolutionary perspective as it came through the
60s more than any other. These are the experiences and lessons that made
me a revolutionary, as the Russian revolution and working-class
opposition to World War I were for Cannon's generation, and as the
battles of the industrial workers were for. It is what I think of when I
consider myself an "unreconstructed 1960s revolutionary."

For me this was expressed in the 1969, 1971, and 1975 resolutions -- and
I'm sure weaknesses can be located in all of this. And this tradition
and approach were also embodied in the turn toward the Cubans,
Nicaraguans, and Grenadians in 1979-80. Yes, it even inspired the
beginnings of the turn although the "limits of the possible" began to
eat away at the perspective that governed the move for me and most other
members.

Unlike the Cannon and Dobbs leadership generations -- allowing for a
million and one inadequacies and inapplicabilities of the SWP as a
"model" (I reject "models" today though good examples certainly come in
handy - our generation was unable to preserve the perspective while
making whatever adjustments (and they would have been major) were needed
to face the difficult reality. If this perspective had been maintained,
the political and organizational problems (including the inadequacies of
the "model" in complex and changing, but hardly purely
counterrevolutionary times) could have been managed.

That's why the SWP is OUTSIDE today's radicalization process today
(though still in the workers' movement, which is also MOSTLY outside the
radicalization at this point).  That's why it will not be part of any
regroupment processes that in the working class or anywhere else that
will point to an American July 26 movement or a version of the
Venezuelan process or even an "American" 1917. Politics, not
organizational rulebooks or "models" (loose, tight, or in the middle)
still decides.


And this was even more in danger of being lost than it was under the
impact of Stalinism under the late 1920s because, since our generation
did not produce a Cannon or Dobbs not to mention a Castro or Chavez (I
think there were objective reasons for all that, including above all the
absence of the working clas from center stage in politics). The
revolutionary meaning of this decade was in grave danger of being lost
through the dispersion of those who still held on to that perspective.

This book is indispensable. You have accomplished something historic.


Hope I can see you all soon.

With revolutionary greetings,

Fred


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