Re: [Marxism] The "turn to industry" of the 70s and 80s

[David McDonald <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I belonged to a group that joined the SWP in August, 1977. The "turn" 
had been announced at a plenum meeting of the National Committee of the 
SWP to which the leadership of my little group was invited. Their 
response was overwhelmingly positive.

Many of us had despised the SWP for its refusal to have anything to do 
with the actual working class during the period 1970-1976, as we moved 
from the International Socialists (newspaper then: IS) to the 
Revolutionary Socialist League (newspaper then: The Torch) to the 
Revolutionary Marxist Committee (no newspaper, too small).

It's important to remember the context. We radicalized in the immediate 
wake of the Kent State massacre, and a bunch of us for rather funny and 
bizarre reasons wound up doing strike support for a Teamster wildcat 
then unfolding in Los Angeles and Cleveland. That fall there was a 
gigantic auto strike which we were actually able to intervene it 
locally, believe it or not. The Miners for Democracy was a very live 
organization at that time. Although we considered the union movement 
quiescent in genral and unbelievably backward, the truth is that those 
times were the last of any generalized labor unrest. We got involved in 
theTeamster wildcat strike, for instance, because the workers SOUGHT US 
OUT to help them walk their picket lines since they were enjoined from 
doing so. Anybody had that experience recentlySo those of us in the RMC 
got pretty excited about the , like anytime in the last thirty years?

To us, it seemed as if the SWP had layers and layers of blinders on. Why 
couldn't they see this and get into it? I got an answer from someone no 
less authoritative than Fred Halstead when I attended a meeting at his 
house called to formulate a broad left response to the Teamster scabbing 
on the United Farm Workers. He knew nothing of me, and all I knew of him 
was that he was the guy always typing in the SWP headquarters whenever I 
went to their heavily fortified bookstore to buy books and bait them. At 
that meeting, Halstead dismissed a bunch of the Teamsters we had been 
working with because they had bad politics (read: no interest) in the 
antiwar movement, which was the lodestone of the SWP at the time. And 
Halstead was no slouch, no receiver of the party line, but a genuine 
revolutionary thinker pretty much unafraid to speak his mind, Jack 
Barnes notwithstanding.

So those of us from the RMC got pretty excited about the "Turn to 
Industry." But let me back up for a moment and describe the SWP as it 
looked to a very recently recruited outsider. First, the SWP was at the 
height of its membership. There were over 2,000 members when the 1977 
convention was held in August. The party had many many branches, five in 
Chicago, I believe 7 in New York -- all in the wake of a "turn" to 
communities of color, prompted, I believe, by the fight in the teachers 
union in New York. Others with a deeper history in the party than myself 
could tell that part of the story better than I. In any case, just as I 
moved to Chicago in the wake of the 1977 convention, the SWP was 
dramatically reducing the number of branches and began to bleed the new 
members who had joined on the basis of having a party branch in their 
community. It got to be pretty widely known that the SWP had decided it 
didn't really want those people in the party anyway, not sufficiently 
committed.

So the turn to industry was the "next thing" following the turn to 
communities. It was much tighter than the turn to communities, which I 
SUSPECT got out of hand because the SWP just did not have the cadre to 
force all those new branches into the old mold.  As a rail worker in 
Chicago, for instance, I could not call up a pal in Minneapolis and ask 
what they were doing and how it had worked. I couldn't even see the 
minutes of their fraction. Those went directly to New York, so that the 
only people who knew what was going on on a national or even regional 
scale was the national trade union leadership, which was pretty much the 
national leadership. The net effect of this was to keep local industrial 
fractions in any given industry from taking any initiative on their own. 
Everything had to be led from the top. Of course, whatever got proposed 
was always proposed by one or another rank-and-filer or local leader 
from this or that of the other branch, so it never appeared to be what 
it was: a national stranglehold. Naturally, the ability to participate 
in your workplace, figure things out, take them to the branch, start 
something up, was just totally worthless to the SWP, which just hated 
people who could do this and who went around doing it. The SWP just did 
not want to be part of things that unfolded organically from ongoing 
struggles in the working class. So it was not so much a turn as a golem 
of a turn, a sui generis endeavor designed not to immerse the party in 
the struggles of the oppressed, but to use the trade union movement as a 
way to fragment to party further and leave the national leadership as 
the only grouping within the party with any cohesion.

In just a few years what little activity issued from the turn was choked 
off by the "talking socialism to your co-workers" permanent campaign, 
which had the effect of turning party members into industrial talking 
heads -- just what our co-workers needed, right? But the net effect of 
this, which was repeated in all arenas of activity, was to remove 
members further and further from the real life of their co-workers, to 
make us weirdos. It was a process not really dissimilar from what the 
Spartacists did to their new members, which they called "creaturizing."

Well, enough from me on this for now. I can get into more detail if 
anyone is interested. All this really belongs under the heading of How 
the SWP was Transformed Into a Cult.

David McDonald

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu