Re: [Marxism] The SWP (USA) and its continuing significance

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I tend to agree with Walter more than Louis on this, but my reasons for
submitting the article had nothing to do with the policies, size ,
overall significance, or character of the SWP.

It had to do with the important bit of news submitted by the Militant
about the actions of the union and the workers fighting for a union in
this garment plant.

I knew that what those workers did would be a little controversial on
the list, and I hoped to start clearing up some exaggerated hostility
toward the demands of Gis for better protection and so on.  We have our
own answer to this problem -- Out Now! -- but I see these demands as
steps in our direction, not a prowar manifestation, and I think the Gis
have every right to be outraged and to insist that their safety be a
priority.

But it is a fact that there is one area where the Militant is still a
source of real information that appears almost nowhere else in a regular
way in the radical press -- except on the rare occasions when it hits
the bourgeois media nationally and is picked up from there by the left.
That is the specific industrial union situations where they are
implanted, and some of the manifestations of class struggle that they
directly observe.  My experience is that, while stories may be
politically hyped to provide oxygen for the thesis that the US working
class has been at center stage in politics for about three decades, the
factual coverage is basically accurate.

The struggle to organize by coal miners, including SWP supporters, in
Utah (which the Militant reports on weekly) really is one of the more
important union struggles in the country right now and it deserves more
attention.  The Militant is just about the only national source of
coverage on this. (It does rate fairly frequent mention in the bourgeois
press in Utah.)

The lack of coverage, including on the left, reflects reality -- the
weakness of the labor movement, the atomization of the labor movement,
the low level of struggle, and the relative political backwardness. The
fact is that this stratum, important though I believe it will be in the
long run, does not provide the basis TODAY for building a revolutionary
organization.

Revolutionists who work in industry have to turn a very substantial part
of their attention elsewhere, as they did in the 50s and early 60s, in
order to advance this course.  Right now, as an exclusive base and
orientation, the industrial workers are largely a depoliticized and
depoliticizing milieu, which is part of the reason why the permanent SWP
central leadership -- which has no factory or union experience whatever
but imperiously commands the industrial workers -- has been able to
shift to the right in practice without opposition.

Nonetheless, the facts in this story were important, significant for
antiwar fighters, and were almost certain to appear nowhere else.

In terms of SWP political line, I think this incident in the Garment
union forced the leadership to reconsider their attitude toward protests
around this, and reorienting the response is one of the purposes of the
article and editorial.  In the past, I think SWP leaders and most
membersw would have had no hesitation condemning this kind of
manifestation among Gis as "patriotic" and even possibly
"rightward-moving" and reflecting the success of the Rumsfeldian New
Model Army in enthusing the ranks for effective combat.

This relatively rare instance active political pressure of the workers
who represent their exclusive milieu, to the extent that they have any
milieu at all, has pressed them to shift their propaganda around the war
slightly to the left politically on this issue. Of course, the
generalities about "war profiteering," correct but good for all seasons
in modern imperialism, help obscure the fact that this incident is a
response not to capitalism in general but to the war Washington is
waging right now in Iraq.

Fred Feldman


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