Re: [Marxism] Robert Des Verney and Peter Camejo (my last post, revised and cleaned up some0

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquin says he did not intend to misrepresent the SWP's history in the
1950s, but nonetheless he definitely did. As far as anyone being introduced
to the SWP record on the Black struggle by his
comments could tell -- and there are many such on the list including
ex-SWPers whose knowledge of the 50s is quite limited -- the SWP had the FSP
position of OBLIGATORY integration for Blacks as part of a socialist
revolution as the only revolutionary solution. 

Contrary to the FSP claims. the SWP did not oppose struggles for
integration, desegregation or equal rights in a non- or multi-racial
framework, nor did they do so in the 1960s, and nor do I do so today.
Contrary to the FSP (and to Joaquin perhaps?) support for such struggles is
a consistent part of a self-determination orientation and struggle. Unlike
the FSP, the SWP did not turn either integration or national independence in
the many possible forms into an ultimatum to the oppressed. 

Joaquin's article clearly creates the impression that
the party rejected the right of self determination FSP-style UNTIL
1963. (This makes it puzzling that the grouping that became the SWP had its
own group in opposition to the SWP course on this question from 1949 until
i966, when they departed under their own steam.) 

In fact the SWP convention in 1939 adopted two resolutions, one on
self-determination, one on the perspective of a Black organization. 

Note that Dave Walters says that there was just "one conversation" with
Trotsky in 1939 and that as soon as they got back from Mexico, the SWP
leaders forgot about it. Whatever one thinks of what they did about it,
Walters' description is inaccurate. Its casual and indifferent inaccuracy is
typical of what I have come to think of as the anti-SWP "state religion."

I pointed out that the SWP majority continued to develop their position in
debates with the pre-FSP leaders (whose position Joaquin said was supposedly
the real party position at the time0 through the 1950s. Thus Joaquin, it
seems without intending to, leftthe impression that the poor put-upon
grouping that became the FSP was simply defending  the party's
long-established position when it opposed the self-determination line in
1963.

I showed the facts are otherwise. Joaquin accepts this (progress) but
insists that the position was not relevant politically and suggests that it
was not reflected in
activity in any way. This is also false. The SWP never became
SEPARATIST per se. nor am I today -- but never became integrationist to the
exclusion of self-determination -- which was the heart of the pre-FSP
group's position. The issue was the right of self-determination, which
Kirk-Kaye rejected from start to finish as a tendency, not opposition to
integration struggles.

The response of the party to school integration, the murder of Emmett Till,
Little Rock,
Montgomery bus boycott, white riots, troops to the South, were not based on
acceptance of "revolutionary integration" (which was founded on explicit
rejection of self-determination and the party's positions since 1939). And
with the Black masses struggling forward on an in struggles that usually had
an integrationist or simple equal-rights or anti-violence character, it was
not the SWP's duty to go into these struggles pushing the right to an
independent state as an issue. 

The emphasis continued, however, on such things as the right
to Black organization, independent Black political action, and even from the
late 1950s on, around the anti-Jim Crow activities led by Robert Williams in
North Carolina, for assertions of the right to self defense, and other Black
rights activities. The fact that nationalism and national self-determination
only began to become more prominent at the end of the 2950s was not the
fault of the SWP, nor were they required to substitute themselves for the
relative absence.

All this activity deepened the differences with Kirk, Kaye, etc. They were
certainly not carried out on their line rather than the one formally adopted
by the party, as Joaquin seems determined to insist.

I nowhere suggested, as Dave W suggests, that there had been no change in
party position in the 1960s. It evolved over a long time in many ways, and
radically in the early znd mid-1960s. But the FSP position
evolved only to get worse on its foundation -- rejection of
self-determination and so on and the perspective that the only radical
change possible in race relations was the socialist revolution.

My main point here was that misrepresenting the "enemy" was never an
intelligent or
revolutionary strategy (leaving aside that the SWP as the "enemy" in any
serious sense at any time is a gross exaggeration). Trying to get the facts
right is not party-pooping
on the joy of exposing the SWP to try to get our facts right.

Joaquin also cites the fact that the SWP always advocated subordination of
the national struggle to the class struggle as supporting his case for what
they were doing and saying in the 1950s, but it is irrelevant. This is
directly part of the Lenin-Trotsky position. Neither of them would have
hesitated to say the same thing.

This is one of the things on which I have evolved. If the national question
is part of the class struggle, to what other class questions is it
subordinate. It seems to me what is subordinate and not subordinate can only
be decided concretely, and that a general formula of subordination, which it
tended to become, becomes a formula for missing the many times when this is
definitely not subordinate.

Remember at a certain point Lenin decided that fighting to prevent the
crushing of Georgian communists who were advancing national rights was key
to saving the revolution. 

Of course from our vantage point, it becomes very easy for us to jump and
down on the heads of Lenin, Trotsky, and the SWP for having entertained such
an idea as the subordination of the national struggle to the class struggle.


But of course the error in this thinking in the long run hoves much more
clearly into view during a period when  national struggles WORLDWIDE are the
main channel through which the class struggle is advancing, and when the
organized working class struggle as such (even in countries like Bolivia or
France, and on quite another level in the USA) is not only massively
disorganized but barely self-conscious. (I personally still don't like
"class for itself" philosophic doo-dah, which sets an idealistic and even
sectarian standard for what the working class has to do to be worth relating
to.)

Finally, Joaquin's attitude to the pre-FSP grouping in the SWP reflects the
tendency to treat all oppositions in the SWP as equally correct, at least
insofar as they disagreed with the SWP leadership (which for some ex-SWPers
seems to play the same role as a permanent Principle of Evil as Al Qaeda
does for Bush et al). 

In addition to the big disagreement between the SWP majority and the pre-FSP
on the national question, where they
were worse than the SWP stance and activity in both the 50s and the 60s,
they were Maoists, hyper-critics of Cuba, and their answer to the "Bring the
Troops Home Now" proposed by the SWP for the antiwar movement was "Drive the
GIs Into the China Sea!" 

I m sure that their tale
of persecution during their 17-year history as an SWP tendency -- 17 years!
They sure don't make SWP tendencies like that anymore! --
and brutal persecution that belongs up there with the Spanish Inquisition.
But politically they were strictly chopped liver.

Two books I suggest reading: The first, a useful antidote to the myth that
the SWP did absolutely nothing to implement the 1939 resolutions, is The
Fight Against Racism in World War II, a Pathfinder book by George Breitman
and others. The second is the collection of George Breitman's writings on
the Black struggle recently issued through the efforts of former supporters
of the Bulletin In Defense of Marxism. Actually studying these, as well as a
look back to the Militants in the 1950s, will put paid the religious dogma
that the SWP resolutions of 1939, 1948, and the reports and documents of the
1950s were a political fantasy which bore no relation whatsoever to anything
the SWP was actually doing.
Fred Feldman




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