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The collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorships of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s have been hailed by defenders of the capitalist system as the collapse of socialism and definitive proof that the Bolshevik revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 constituted “the road to nowhere.” All attempts to establish the rule of the working class over society will lead to chaos and tyranny, we are told. Even many people who sympathize with socialist ideals are presently inclined to question the value of revolutionary Marxism, feeling that the strategic and organizational perspectives of Lenin and the Bolsheviks may indeed be responsible for the subsequent totalitarian nightmare during the reign of Joseph Stalin, followed by the stagnation and ultimate disintegration of bureaucratic “socialism.” In the United States, this is certainly heightened by the fact that the so-called “Leninist left”—not only the Communist Party, but also what used to be its relatively substantial “Trotskyist” competitor the Socialist Workers Party—has been suffering a serious decline even before the recent collapse of so-called communism.
It may well be, however, that these years will come to be seen as a renewal period of the socialist movement—involving the clarification of the actual meaning of the revolutionary socialist tradition, as bureaucratic and authoritarian crusts fall away under the impact of critical examination and the especially ruthless criticism of reality itself. Those who identify with the socialist tradition, and especially with the Marxism represented by such 20th-century revolutionaries as Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, etc., have no right to be taken seriously unless they are able to explain and help others learn the lessons of this complex experience. How did something that represented the most radical working-class democracy become so undemocratic and so alien to the actually existing working class—not simply in the Soviet Union, but also in the left wing of the labor and social movements of the United States?
It is certainly not the case that no work has been done on these questions. The decline of the USSR and other such regimes has been the subject of a number of important studies—from Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed to Ernest Mandel’s Beyond Perestroika and an important anthology edited by Marilyn Vogt-Downey, Marxism and the USSR. In the United States, the decline of the U.S. Communist Party has been documented by various participants from James P. Cannon in The First Ten Years of American Communism down to Howard Fast in Being Red, as well as by such historians as Theodore Draper, Harvey Klehr, Maurice Isserman, Paul Buhle, and others. [1]
The crisis of American Trotskyism, which became manifest in the early 1980s, poses a more complicated problem. After all, the Trotskyists had always denounced the antidemocratic practices of Stalinism as being alien to the very essence of the revolutionary perspectives of the early Communist movement that had been led by Lenin and Trotsky. The foremost organizational representative of the Trotskyist tradition in the United States—the Socialist Workers Party—came out of the 1960s and early ’70s as a very strong and vital group, with close to 2,000 adherents and an even wider sphere of influence in the radical movement. In less than a decade, however, it took its distance from the perspectives of Trotsky, aligning itself more closely with the perspectives (or a stilted understanding of the perspectives) of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Communist Party. In the course of carrying out this change, the new SWP leadership greatly tightened the organizational norms of their organization, creating what many would agree was a profoundly undemocratic internal life, and forcing hundreds of members out of the organization—especially through a dramatic wave of expulsions in 1983-84. All of this was done in the name of implementing “Leninist” norms. The present work represents part of a larger effort to provide an account and understanding of this development.
This book is part of a three-volume series, “In Defense of American Trotskyism.” The first volume, conceptually and logically, is The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party, edited by Sarah Lovell, focusing on events of 1979 through 1983. Materials from 1983 through 1990, focusing on developments after the fragmentation of the Socialist Workers Party, are presented in the volume entitled Rebuilding the Revolutionary Party, edited by myself. The focus of the present book, Revolutionary Principles and Working-Class Democracy, is on the actual fragmentation of the SWP—the waves of expulsions which wracked the organization in 1983-84; this is, logically, the middle volume in the series.[2]
The bulk of the materials here consists of the testimony of dissident members of the SWP who were driven out as they resisted what they perceived as a wrecking operation directed against the revolutionary program and democratic norms of the organization to which they had devoted their lives. Some of the precedents facilitating this “wrecking operation” had developed in the 1960s, and were warned against at the time by the party’s founding leader, James P. Cannon, in materials reprinted here. A thorough report from a leading body of the world Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, is also reproduced in its entirety, along with a critical analysis of the purge by Steve Bloom. Some of the political issues, which are dealt with at length in the other volumes of this series, are addressed here also, in various passionate voices that echo throughout these pages. In addition, there are retrospective evaluations of “what went wrong” by George Breitman, Evelyn Sell, and Paul Le Blanc. A major report by National Secretary Jack Barnes, providing an extensive presentation of “the other side of the story” is appended to this volume as well.
The SWP formally severed all ties with the world Trotskyist movement, represented by the Fourth International, in 1990—although a fundamental programmatic break began much earlier, as documented by the books in this series. Yet the American Trotskyist tradition continues to be reflected in three groups that still identify with the Fourth International: Socialist Action, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, and the Fourth International Caucus of Solidarity. Each group has strengths and weaknesses, and together they represent less than 500 people. Obviously, if they were able to unify (in a manner accentuating their strengths and transcending at least some of their weaknesses), they could be a far more effective force. While still a small group, they would have a greater capacity to play a vital role in many struggles through the resurgent wave rising within the unions and in important social movements (against war and imperialism, against racism and sexism, against ecological and social deterioration), carry out serious socialist educational work, and contribute to the growth of an independent political movement of the working class capable of transforming society along the lines of a genuine socialist democracy.
As of this writing (January 1992), the fragmentation of revolutionary socialists in the United States is the predominant reality. The purpose of this book, and of the others in this series, is to help provide an understanding of our recent experience in order to contribute to establishing a basis for revolutionary socialist unity in the 1990s and beyond.
For some time to come, as students and practitioners of American radicalism seek to do their work, the question of what happened to the Socialist Workers Party will be something to wrestle with and learn from. These materials will be helpful in that process. Some of my own efforts to “wrestle and learn” make up the remainder of this essay.
One of the products of the struggle inside the SWP was a book I wrote at the request of George Breitman, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. That study attempted to establish what was the actual historical experience of the original “Leninist party” as it became a powerful force for working-class revolution in Russia leading up to 1917. In this essay, as a kind of follow-up to that study, I want to suggest what are some of the lessons of the U.S. “Leninist” experience of the SWP. It should be borne in mind that the Trotskyist movement shuns `official’ histories, and that the expression of a range of interpretation and opinion regarding historical questions is encouraged in order to facilitate the development of insights that will be valuable to revolutionary activists.
Here we will explore a number of questions—from essential aspects of the Russian Bolshevik tradition to ways this was applied by revolutionaries in the United States, from the great changes taking place in our world and in 20th-century America to internal organizational developments taking place in a fairly small left-wing group—in an effort to comprehend and learn from what was, for the Trotskyist movement (and for more than just that), a catastrophe. Hopefully this essay will be of some use to those who want to draw from the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition in advancing the cause of the working class and the oppressed.
It is impossible to understand the meaning of historical Bolshevism - the revolutionary wing of the Russian socialist movement—unless it is under stood that it was a working-class current. This is so easy to say, and to forget, that it is absolutely necessary to give it special stress. In order to do this, I will list six memoirs by veteran Bolsheviks that will—if read—make this clear (also providing a fascinating inside view of the history of Bolshevism): Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia; Cecilia Bobrovskaya, Twenty Years in Underground Russia; Osip Piatnitsky, Memoirs of a Bolshevik; Aleksei E. Badayev, TheBolsheviks in the TsaristDuma; Alexander Shlyapnikov, On the Eve of 1917; Fyodor E Raskolnikov, Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917.[3]
Eyewitness accounts of the Bolshevik revolution, such as John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, have been fully corroborated by more recent work of social historians—Leopold Haimson, Alexander Rabinowitch, Victoria Bonnell, Diane Koenker, David Mandel, and many others: the Bolshevik party was deeply rooted in the working class, and it had become the predominant political current in the Russian workers’ movement just before World War I and, after a fairly brief interruption, again by the late summer of 1917. The Bolshevik revolution of October/November 1917 was, in fact, a deeply democratic phenomenon, a proletarian revolution in terms of goals, participants, and popular support.[4]
Lenin sought to explain this reality to foreign revolutionaries at the World Congress of the Communist International in 1921, warning them against the illusion that a left-wing minority could simply seize power in the name of the working class in order to impose its own benevolent rule: “In Europe ... we must win the majority of the working class, and anyone who fails to understand this is lost to the communist movement.. . .We were victorious in Russia not only because the undisputed majority of the working class was on our side (during the elections in 1917 the overwhelming majority of the workers were with us against the Mensheviks), but also because half the army, immediately after our seizure of power, and nine-tenths of the peasants, in the course of some weeks, came over to our side.”[5]
This revolutionary democratic orientation of the Bolsheviks was in harmony with Lenin’s explanation of the history and success of Bolshevism, which he offered in Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (1920). “Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up and maintain, under the most difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the proletariat,” Lenin wrote. Many hostile commentators as well as would-be imitators have become fixated on this “iron discipline” as the key to Bolshevik success, but Lenin warned that without certain conditions being met, “all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.”[6]
The prerequisites for such discipline, in Lenin’s opinion, were three: (1) the class consciousness and devotion to revolution of significant elements of the working class (whom Lenin termed “the revolutionary vanguard”); (2) the ability of this vanguard layer of the proletariat to link up “and—if you wish—merge, in a certain measure, with the broadest masses of working people,” as Lenin put it; and (3) the correctness of the political leadership of the revolutionary vanguard, and the understanding of this by the broad masses on the basis of their own experience. There is no question that Lenin believed that revolutionary intellectuals were also vitally important to the revolutionary vanguard party—but he didn’t assume that intellectuals could only come from the “upper classes,” and he placed a high priority on assisting in the development of highly developed working-class intellectuals from among the layer of class-conscious workers developing in Russia. In any event, for Lenin a party of the revolutionary vanguard meant a substantial, “conscious” layer of the working class—not an elite of radical intellectuals who would do the workers’ thinking for them.
“Without these conditions,” Lenin insisted, “discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved.” He cautioned: “On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once.” Here Lenin’s belief in the central importance of Marxism, and his open and creative approach to Marxist theory, becomes evident: “Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.”[7]
Sometimes this is referred to as the program of the revolutionary party. “It goes without saying that `every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs,’ as Karl Marx said,” Lenin acknowledged in 1899. “But neither Marx nor any other theoretician or practical worker in the socialist movement has ever denied the tremendous importance of a program for the consolidation and consistent activity of a political party.”[8] Program involves an analysis of the realities one faces, a conception of what changes are desirable, and a perspective on how to change those realities. It involves utilizing theory (the accumulation of analyses of history and society, especially accumulated lessons from the class struggle) in order to work out general strategies leading to the socialist goal, and specific tactics that will advance those strategies.
There were three fundamentals at the heart of the program to which Lenin was committed: (1) socialism must become rooted in the struggles and consciousness of the working class in order to be relevant; (2) the working class must win its own freedom through its own efforts; and (3) the working class must become socialist if it is to bring about its own liberation and the forward movement of all society. Other essential aspects of the revolutionary program flow from this:
* The working class must form its own perspectives on all major issues and problems of society.
* The more “privileged” workers (those who are more skilled, better paid, with less exhausting work and more leisure time, more education, etc.) must concern themselves with the interests and needs of the more oppressed workers, not allowing themselves to be seduced into being an “aristocracy of labor” satisfied, for example, simply with bread-and-butter trade union gains.
* The working class must concern itself with the plight of all oppressed groups in society—forging alliances and linking their struggles to the general struggle for the triumph of the working class; thus the oppression of women, of subject nationalities, of racial and religious minorities, of dissident intellectuals and students, of impoverished peasants, etc. should be matters of intense concern to the workers’ movement.
* International solidarity of the working class is crucial, and socialism can only advance and be won as a worldwide process. This is especially true given the global (imperialist) character of capitalist production and economic organization.
* Practical struggles for democratic and economic reforms, to defend the immediate interests of working people and the oppressed, are essential, but such struggles must be integrated into a strategic orientation which advances the political independence and hegemony of the working class.
* If the political independence and hegemony of the working class is achieved on a significant scale, the result can be socialist revolution.
The programmatic orientation sketched here will not be realized automatically or spontaneously, but only through a considerable amount of serious work. Under normal circumstances, most people won’t do that work. Those who are prepared to do the work must organize themselves as effectively as possible—in a democratic, cohesive, coherent political collective: a revolutionary activist organization. Obviously, to the extent that more and more people can be drawn into doing such work, it will become effective. But the creation of a revolutionary socialist majority in society is a process which can only be advanced if the present-day revolutionary minority organizes itself to bring this about.
This indicates—if somewhat schematically—the meaning of the revolutionary vanguard party to which Lenin was committed. The internal functioning of such a party has been defined as democratic centralism, a term which has been subject to considerable distortion—including in the Socialist Workers Party during the 1970s and ’80s.
The term democratic centralism was first introduced into the Russian socialist movement in 1905 by Lenin’s factional adversaries, the Mensheviks, but Lenin embraced it and summarized it as “freedom of discussion, unity of action.” In Lenin’s opinion, the revolutionary party “must be united, but in these united organizations there must be wide and free discussion of Party questions, free comradely criticism and assessment of events in Party life.” This would include, he stressed in 1906, “guarantees for the rights of all minorities and for all loyal opposition,... recognizing that all Party functionaries must be elected, accountable to the Party and subject to recall.”[9]
In this period Lenin argued: “The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticize so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.”[10] Some interpreters have asserted that Lenin didn’t really mean this, and that he functioned differently, that he really sought to subject all discussion and activity in the vanguard party to his own control. Others interpret it as meaning: you can say, write, publish and do whatever you please, whenever you please, however you please—just so it doesn’t disrupt a (narrowly defined) action, such as a demonstration, an insurrection, etc.
The historical evidence contradicts both interpretations. The Bolshevik party did indeed allow a very substantial degree of freedom for its members to express themselves to each other, to the party as a whole, to those not in the party, even if they held dissident views. Individual activists as well as local organizations also were encouraged to exercise a considerable amount of initiative in carrying out their activities. At the same time, there was an expectation that a significant degree of loyalty to the party, its program and its organizational statutes would guide these activities. In addition, there was provision that democratically elected leadership bodies would seek to ensure the functioning of the organization in a manner consistent with its democratically established program and organizational principles.
Democratic centralism was seen as involving a dynamic interaction between the individual and the collective, and as a means for generating the maximum amount of participation by the membership in deciding and carrying out the work of the organization. It was also viewed as a means of enabling the organization to be effective in carrying out and evaluating its work. Once a majority came to a decision, a minority which disagreed was to do nothing to undermine the decision. The decision would be tested in practice. The critical perspectives of the loyal minority, far from undermining party unity, would help the organization as a whole to clarify its orientation, learn from its experiences, stay in touch with complex realities, and correct its mistakes.
As if anticipating the danger of bureaucratic-authoritarian degeneration that occurred under the Stalin regime, a resolution on democratic centralism adopted by the 1921 World Congress of the Communist International warned against “formal or mechanical centralization [which] would mean the centralization of `power’ in the hands of the Party bureaucracy, allowing it to dominate the other members of the Party or the proletarian masses which are outside the Party.” Instead democratic centralism was to be “a real synthesis, a fusion of centralism and proletarian democracy” that would facilitate “the active participation of working people” in the ongoing class struggle, in an eventual working-class revolution, and in the effort to create a socialist society.[11]
It may be helpful, at this point, to sum up the essential aspects of Lenin’s organizational perspectives. As a Marxist, we have seen, Lenin believed that the revolutionary organization must be a working-class party. Beyond this fundamental starting-point, Leninist organizational perspectives can be summarized in the following eight points:
1. The workers’ party must, first of all, be based on a revolutionary Marxist program and must exist to apply that program to reality in a way that will advance the struggle for socialism.
2. The members of that party must be activists who agree with the basic program, who are committed to collectively developing and implementing the program, and who collectively control the organization as a whole.
3. To the extent that it is possible (given tsarist repression, for example), the party should function openly and democratically, with the elective principle operating from top to bottom.
4. The highest decision-making body of the party is the party congress or convention, made up of delegates democratically elected by each party unit. The congress should meet at least every two years and should be preceded by a full discussion throughout the party of all questions that party members deem important.
5. Between congresses, a central committee—elected by and answerable to the congress—should ensure the cohesion and coordinate the work of the party on the basis of the party program and the decisions of the congress. (It may set up subordinate, interim bodies to help oversee the daily functioning of the organization.) In addition, the central committee has a responsibility to keep all local units of the party informed of these various units’ individual experiences and activities. Under conditions of severe political repression and in the midst of major struggles, the authority of the central party leadership may assume much greater weight than at other times; yet that leadership is always bound by the revolutionary Marxist program of the party, by the decisions of the party congress, and by a responsibility (and accountability) to the membership as a whole.
6. It is assumed that within the general framework of the revolutionary program there will be shades of difference on various programmatic, tactical, and practical questions. These should be openly discussed and debated, particularly (but not necessarily exclusively) before party congresses. Within limits—which vary depending on time, place, and circumstance—such differences can be aired publicly. All members should be encouraged to participate in this discussion process and should have an opportunity to make their views known to the party as a whole. It is assumed that, at times, groupings will form around one or another viewpoint or even around a full-fledged platform that certain members believe the party should adopt. This (as opposed to groupings based on personal likes and dislikes, and ill-defined moods and biases) provides a basis for ongoing political clarity and programmatic development, which are essential to the health and growth of the party.
7. All questions should be decided on the basis of democratic vote (majority rule), after which the minority is expected to function loyally in the party, and particularly to avoid undermining the specific actions decided on. The organization as a whole learns through the success, partial success, or failure of policies that are adopted and tested in practice.
8. Local units of the party must operate within the framework of the party program and of the decisions of the party as a whole, but within that framework they must operate under the autonomous and democratic control of the local membership.
These eight points describe a revolutionary vanguard organization functioning according to the principle of democratic centralism. They also describe the way in which Lenin thought an organization should function, and they also describe—more or less—the way that the Bolsheviks functioned from 1903 until the early 1920s.
In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, however, Russia suffered a foreign military intervention and economic blockade, a violent and brutalizing civil war, and the devastating collapse of the economy. Consequently, increasingly authoritarian expedients and bureaucratic distortions began to crop up in the practice of the Bolshevik party, as well as in the Communist International that had been established to assist revolutionaries around the world in working for socialist revolutions in their own countries. These distortions helped to lay the basis for the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist movement in the new Soviet Republic and throughout the world. The most clear-sighted and dedicated Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself, in the last years of his life, struggled against this degeneration—but they were overwhelmed.
The Russian Revolution had a profound impact on the left wing of the U.S. labor movement. As Philip Foner demonstrates in his excellent documentary study The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals, and Labor, the Bolshevik victory was embraced by the overwhelming majority of the substantial Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Labor Party, and also the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Seattle Labor Council, and others.[12]
Eugene V. Debs, the deeply loved and immensely popular spokesman of working-class socialism in the United States, expressed the feelings of many: “Lenin and Trotsky were the men of the hour and under their fearless, incorruptible and uncompromising leadership the Russian proletariat has held the fort against the combined assaults of all the ruling powers of earth....So far as the Russian proletariat is concerned, the day of the people has arrived.... They are setting the heroic example of a world-wide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death. From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.” The leader of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), “Big Bill” Haywood, responded similarly: “Here is the IWW all feathered out.... The Russian Revolution is the greatest event in our lives .... It represents all that we have been dreaming of and fighting for all our lives. It is the dawn of freedom and industrial democracy. If we can’t trust Lenin, we can’t trust anybody.”[13]
Yet there was not a clear notion among the would-be American Bolsheviks about what, precisely, Bolshevism meant. One of the first conscious “Leninists” in the U.S. was the left-wing Socialist Louis Fraina—later known as Lewis Corey—who edited the first English-language anthology of writing by Lenin and Trotsky, under the title of The Proletarian Revolution in Russia (1918). In his introductory essays interspersed throughout the collection, he sought to communicate what was distinctive in the Bolshevik-Leninist perspective in this way: “The epoch of Marx developed the theory of Socialism, the epoch of Lenin is developing its practice: and this is precisely the great fact in Russia—the fact of Socialism and the revolutionary proletariat in action... The Bolsheviki constituted the party of the revolutionary proletariat; in the words of Lenin, `the class conscious workers, day laborers, and the poorer classes of the peasantry, who are classed with them (semiproletariat).’... Representing the interests and ideology of the industrial masses, and in continual active contact with them, the Bolsheviki developed that general, creative and dynamic mass action out of which revolutions arise and develop uncompromisingly.... The Bolsheviki constituted a practical revolutionary movement, not a group of theoreticians and mongers of dogmas. They worked out a program, a practical program of action in accord with the immediate problems of the Revolution and out of which would necessarily arise the struggle and power for the larger, ultimate objectives....”[14]
All of this was fine as far as it went, but it was also rather vague. In the first left-wing accounts by U.S. eyewitnesses there was almost nothing that went beyond this. “The Mensheviki and the Bolsheviki are branches of the same party, and until 1903 they worked together,” wrote Louise Bryant in Six Months in Red Russia (1918). “They still have precisely the same program, but they differ as to tactics .... The Bolsheviki are in power because they bow to the will of the masses.” In the same year, Bessie Beatty’s The Red Heart of Russia explained: “The Bolshevik believes in the shortest cut to socialism.” John Reed’s 1919 classic Ten Days That Shook the World offered a similar definition: “Bolsheviki. Now call themselves the Communist Party, in order to emphasize their complete separation from the tradition of `moderate’ or `parliamentary’ Socialism, which dominates the Mensheviki and the so-called Majority Socialists in all countries. The Bolsheviki proposed immediate proletarian insurrection, and seizure of the reins of Government, in order to hasten the coming of Socialism by forcibly taking over industry, land, natural resources and financial institutions.” [15]
Albert Rhys Williams, in Lenin, The Man and His Work (1919), did make frequent references to Lenin’s “iron discipline” and offered this suggestive passage: “The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was organized in 1898. At the Second Congress held at Brussels and London in 1903 came the famous breach in the Party. Lenin fought for a centralized party with a central body directing all activities. On this and other points he was bitterly opposed by a determined minority. Agreement was impossible, and the congress split into two factions: the Mensheviki, which means literally `members of the minority,’ and the Bolsheviki, `members of the majority.’”[16]
The earliest years of the American Communist movement, from 1919 through 1921, such fragments of information as this—plus a sectarian notion by some activists that a truly Bolshevik party must function underground, as did the Bolsheviks in tsarist Russia—constituted the essence of “Leninism” in the United States. Made up of substantial yet ragged splits from the Socialist Party, the IWW, some of the anarchist groups, etc., with numerous egos and factional currents vying for recognition from revolutionary Moscow, the pioneer Communists found it difficult to strike a balance that would allow them to play a significant role in U.S. labor and social struggles. The inclination of many historians has been to portray the Communist Party of the entire 1920s decade—quite inaccurately—as simply a bizarre sect with no connection to American life.
Closer to the truth is the observation of radical scholar Michael Goldfield, in a survey of literature on the history of American Communism, that “the most dynamic activists and leaders of the [Socialist Party] in 1919 left to form the core of the new Communist Party. Within a few years of its formation, the Communist movement, its chaotic and often unrealistic romantic expectations notwithstanding, attracted and absorbed many of the more radical elements of the IWW, the small black socialist milieu, and the bulk of left-wing trade union activists.” Paul Buhle, in his uneven but interesting book Marxism in the United States, has also pointed to important trade union work done by Communists in the 1920s, and especially the base developed within many immigrant working-class communities: “The Party encouraged the uncertain relationship between revolutionary politics and ethnic culture, providing the immigrants with essential services: labor defense, propaganda, English-language spokesmen and organizational contacts. The groups in return gave the bulk of funds for the Party’s operation, produced enthusiastic crowds, and formed an authentic radical proletariat. And by the thousands these immigrants proved doggedly loyal, unlike the [native-born] American recruits who had few social settings in which to operate collectively.” [17]
Yet this also understates the importance of a layer of native-born U.S. radicals that became an essential component of American Communism. One of these was the midwestern veteran IWW activist, James P. Cannon. He was one of the first new leaders of the Communist Party, remembered by another early CP leader, Alexander Bittelman, for “his very skillful championing of the cause of Communist reorientation towards the daily struggles of the masses and to active participation in the trade unions of the American Federation of Labor.” In a 1924 talk to a CP conference of coal miners, Cannon commented: “The revolutionary aspirations of our Party comrades generate the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice that give the Party its driving power. Woe to us if we become so `practical’ as to forget this for one moment. All our work must lead toward the proletarian revolution. If we keep this always in mind and measure all our daily work by this standard we will keep on the right road.”[18] Yet Cannon’s idealism was tempered by a seriousness in regard to practical-organizational questions. Bittelman’s comments are worth quoting at length:
As I became better acquainted with Jim, I began to notice and appreciate his skills in internal party politics. Because of this skill, he was able to play a very effective part in helping to bring unity into the warring groups of the Jewish Communist and left wing movements. He managed, by his political skill as well as charming personality, when he chose to be charming, to win the respect and also confidence of our group—the Jewish section of the Communist party—as well as of the Olgin-Salutsky group—formerly the Jewish part of the Workers’ Council [that split from the Socialist Party to join the Communists slightly later]. He seemed fully aware, not alone of the political differences between the two groups, but also of the individual and personal friction and incompatibilities between, say, Salutsky and myself, or between O1gin and Schachno Epstein, by way of example.
These skills in intra-party politics, the playing of which he obviously enjoyed very much, were unquestionably a source of strength to Jim himself as well as to our party.... I remember a certain image of him that I acquired after a while. It was the image of a caretaker of a large experimental institution or laboratory, moving about the various machines, tools, gadgets, testing tubes, etc., making sure they operate properly, oiling, fixing, changing, improving and adjusting. That was Jim’s main contribution to our party; and, for the particular phase in its development, a very important contribution. His humor and wit played no small part in all of that.[19]
This blend of revolutionary socialist commitment and very practical, down-to-earth organizational seriousness, plus a genuine involvement in the practical struggles of the multifaceted, multiethnic U.S. working class—this represented an extremely promising start for American Leninism. The influence of the Russian Communists, within the framework of the Communist International (or Comintern), was quite important, of course. Cannon later recalled that he and his comrades “learned to do away forever with the idea that a revolutionary socialist movement, aiming at power, can be led by people who practice socialism as an avocation.... Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin—these were our teachers. We began to be educated in an entirely different spirit from the old lackadaisical Socialist Party—in the spirit of revolutionists who take ideas and program very seriously.” Another of the early Communists, Bertram D. Wolfe, noted that before 1925 it was not the case that “all important decisions for the American Communist Party were being made in Moscow.” Communications from Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Comintern leaders “were intended only as helpful suggestions, often exciting ones, and as successful examples to imitate after adapting them to American conditions, but not as categorical commands.”[20]
Indeed, as Paul Buhle comments, in this period there was considerable autonomy for local Communist Party activists: “Decentralization of political initiative, with the inevitable persistence of old habits [from a heterogeneous Debsian-era radicalism], encouraged a wide experimentation at the local level that remained largely invisible to [national] Party leaders—and has so remained for most historians.” Writing about his own experiences in California, where the Party was remote from the CP national office but “had close linkage with the more progressive section of organized labor,” Bertram Wolfe later recalled: “If we agreed with an order from the high command, we tried to carry it out zealously and explain it carefully to our growing body of sympathizers and increasingly friendly progressive trade unions.... But if the instructions were unpalatable, poorly justified, or late in reaching us, we simply paid no attention to them and continued working as we had been working.” Nor were they ever called to account for it.[21]
As time went on, there was concern among U.S. Communist leaders and activists to develop a more cohesive revolutionary organization, and more attention was given to educating the ranks in Leninist organizational norms. In a 1924 pamphlet for the party youth group, for example, Max Shachtman explained the birth of Bolshevism this way: “It became apparent that a split [among the Russian Marxists] was to take place, Lenin insisting that every comrade must be an active member subject to the discipline of the party, while Martov was ready to leave the door open for vague elements which threatened to liquidate the revolutionary soul of the party.” In 1926 a volume of more than 200 pages was published by the CP national office, Lenin on Organization, gathering together much of Lenin’s writing on this question, along with an authoritative thirty-nine page essay by an old Bolshevik named Vikenti Mitzkovitch-Kapsukas. This essay, hardly the work of a bureaucratic hack, nonetheless projected an image of “Leninism” that was already marred by authoritarian elements that had developed during the Russian civil war, creating dangerous preconditions for Stalinist degeneration, such as the banning of dissident factions and tendencies in the party. The conception of a monolithic party was advanced in the Comintern under the leadership of Gregory Zinoviev, who influenced Cannon’s own formulations in the early 1920s: “It [a Bolshevik party] must be a centralized party prohibiting factions, tendencies, and groups. It must be a monolithic party hewn of one piece.” Cannon was attempting to use this conception to combat the unhealthy situation inside the U.S. Communist Party: “At least one-half of the energy of the party has been expended in factional struggles, one after another. We have even grown into the habit of accepting this state of affairs.” He was to learn, however, that the prohibition of factions, tendencies, and groups not only runs counter to the historical model of pre-1921 Bolshevism, but that it fatally undercuts the possibility of democracy inside the organization.[22]
In fact, a policy of “Bolshevization”[23] was being implemented throughout the Comintern, supervised by the old worker-Bolshevik Osip Piatnitsky, but increasingly distorted by the reactionary bureaucracy that was bringing the Russian Communist Party, the Soviet state, and the Communist International under its authoritarian control. A warped version of democratic centralism was established, designed to bring the activity of members under the control of party leaders, and to bring the leaderships of the various national parties under the control of the Moscow bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin. Revolutionaries like James P. Cannon, who perceived a growing discrepancy between the triumph of Stalinism and the revolutionary ideals to which they had committed “the whole of their lives,” found themselves in opposition, followed by quick expulsion.
Of course, the Stalinized Communist Party continued to project itself as the only truly Leninist organization, and later would-be Leninists—especially those following the special Chinese version of Stalinism, the various Maoist groups arising in the U.S.—made similar claims. I have touched on these in my study Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, indicating that, despite their claims and rhetoric, their practice diverged dramatically from that of Lenin’s party. For our purposes here, it makes sense only to focus on those who did not subscribe to the Stalinist mutilation of the Bolshevik tradition.[24]
Cannon and others who were committed to the goal of creating an authentic American Leninism established the Communist League of America in 1929, following the lead of the exiled revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was a rallying point for those committed to the original goals and methods of the Russian Revolution and the early Communist movement. His U.S. cothinkers were active in union struggles, the unemployed movement, anti-racist activities, opposition to war and imperialism, the fight against fascism, and also the defense of revolutionary Marxism against the distortions and vicious assaults of Stalinism. Through a series of organizational developments, involving a succession of complex splits and fusions, the Trotskyists in the United States grew from about 100 in 1928 to more than 1,000 in 1938, when they established the Socialist Workers Party.[25]
The SWP was predominantly a working-class party. George Breitman, in a discussion of its founding convention, has offered this description in the valuable book he edited, The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party:
Our chief union stronghold was Minneapolis, where our comrades in the Teamsters union led by [Vincent Raymond] Dunne, [Carl] Skoglund, and Farrell Dobbs, were showing the whole country what a union led by revolutionaries could do. It was our aspiration in Newark [where Breitman lived at the time], and I am sure elsewhere, to meet the high standards they were setting. The story of their activity can now be read in Dobbs’ books about the Teamsters.
Another gain of that time was the organization of our fraction in the maritime industry, starting on the West Coast. Although he was not at the founding convention, Tom Kerry was elected to the National Committee at this convention, partly in recognition of his work in this fraction, which also served as a model for the party.
Most of our other activity was centered in the new CIO unions that were being born at the time—steel, auto, electrical, and so on. We helped to sign up workers to join the unions, both in the plants and in their homes; we participated in strikes to win recognition and bargaining rights; we joined forces with others to gain, extend, or preserve democracy inside the unions.
The main difference was that the unions then were less bureaucratized and the workers had a greater interest in their unions than they do today [in 1978]. That made it easier for militants to get a hearing from the members in those days.[26]
There were also left-wing intellectuals in the SWP from non-working-class backgrounds, and they were able to make important contributions to the work of the Trotskyist movement. But the working-class roots and commitments of the SWP were unambiguous from the time of its founding until the 1960s (which will be touched on in the next section of this essay).
Not only the proletarian composition of the party, but also the program and structure unambiguously conformed to the Leninist model that has been described here. “The Socialist Workers Party is a revolutionary Marxian party, based on a definite program, whose aim is the organization of the working class in the struggle for power and the transformation of the existing social order,” one of the founding documents of the SWP explained. “All of its activities, its methods, and its internal regime are subordinated to this aim and designed to serve it.” The very next sentence of this document is instructive: “Only a self-acting and critical-minded membership is capable of forging and consolidating such a party and of solving its problems by collective thought, discussion, and experience.” The document, entitled “The Internal Situation and the Character of the Party,” goes on to describe a Leninist party, functioning according to the principle of democratic centralism, as understood by its authors, Cannon and Max Shachtman, the SWP’s central leaders. It is worth reading in full.
There is sometimes a distinction to be made, of course, between how an organization will function ideally and how people are actually able to live up to the ideal. In 1940 Cannon commented that “our party has not been a homogeneous Bolshevik party,... but an organization struggling to attain the standard of Bolshevism, and beset all the time by internal contradictions.”[27]
Cannon’s own background in the early Communist Party had left its imprint on him, as we have noted, although there were negative as well as positive aspects to this. “I was raised the hard way in politics,” he noted. “I was raised in the Communist Party from 1919-28—you know that is nine years of uninterrupted factional struggle. That is, unless you call an interruption a peace to catch your breath and reorganize your forces. Nine years that devoured the energy of the party.” Joseph Hansen commented that in this period “the Communist Party was something of a jungle—that is, as far as the internal struggles were concerned. At first, the Communist International under Lenin and Trotsky could play a role in ameliorating the situation and helping the comrades to learn the correct lessons from their mistakes. But later on the Comintern degenerated and itself became a real jungle, in which Jim was one of the best of the jungle fighters. He made errors from which he later learned and never forgot.” Hansen added a significant point: “The main difference between Jim and some of the others who also had talents along this line was that Jim operated within the framework of principles, the principles of revolutionary socialism.” Comradely pressure and assistance from Trotsky helped Cannon go some distance in allowing mature revolutionary qualities to transcend the factionalist aspect of his political background.[28]
Nonetheless, the supposedly undemocratic “Cannon regime” became a target of dissident currents in the U.S. Trotskyist movement. In the mid-1930s an ultraleft oppositionist going by the name George Marlen complained: “An unusually subtle, calculating demagogue, Cannon, without the backing of the world-famous figure [Trotsky], would have been an inconspicuous, average political adventurer seeking a field of action in a workers’ organization.” Adding that “Cannon’s record in the Communist Party is as filthy as that of any of the Stalinist careerists,” he concluded that “Cannon practices a spurious `democracy’ within the organization, exercising a factual control through his bureaucratic machine.”[29]
A minority led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham in the bitter factional fight that wracked the SWP in 1939-40 advanced the same accusation: “For the Cannon faction, Trotsky’s politics function precisely as substitute for politics of their own. As a bureaucratic-conservative group, they merely utilize Trotsky’s politics as they utilize politics in general, as an instrument of their regime.... Politics, programs, are more or less routine matters for others to take care of; the business of the `real Bolshevik’ is—to cinch up the majority and retain party control.” Even an ostensibly sympathetic (though somewhat factional) account by a later radical asserts: “Cannon was content to take his basic political line as something given to him from abroad, and devoted his energies to building an organization around that political line.” Another latter-day commentator -the 1960s radical personality Tariq Ali, reminiscing about the years in which he was attracted to Trotskyism -writes that Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party “had shocked my sensibilities” because it documented “the single-minded and relentless pursuit of an oppositional current within the same organization until it was defeated, demoralized, and expelled.” Ali doesn’t know what he’s talking about here: while Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Martin Abern, and the others Cannon argued against were defeated, none of them were expelled—they split and set up their own rival party, taking many of the resources of the SWP with them. (Giving as good as they got in this tough factional fight, they were hardly the tender idealists and persecuted victims Ali seems to imagine: Shachtman and Abern were experienced political in-fighters from the early days of the Communist Party; the well-to-do Burnham quickly split from the new group and soon found a comfortable new role in the CIA and on the editorial board of the right-wing National Review)[30]
The denigration of Cannon’s own abilities as a political thinker is belied by the impressive quality of his many writings and speeches. While his special talent lay in the extremely important area of effectively popularizing Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyist ideas, he also demonstrated a genuine ability for developing down-to-earth, insightful, sophisticated political analyses on a variety of international, national, internal organizational, historical, and more abstractly theoretical questions. While making no pretense about being an original theoretician, he produced a body of work that holds up far better than that of many seemingly more intellectual left-wing leaders of his time. More than this, a strong case can be made for the proposition that his contributions to building a revolutionary organization were of extremely high quality, involving considerable internal democracy, despite the complaints of his factional adversaries. It is worth noting the judgment of C.L.R. James—the prominent Black Marxist theorist who had been part of the Shachtman faction—that “the existing documents of both the Majority and the Minority in 1940 prove that there was not the slightest basis for the charge being made today [in 1947] that the Minority of 1940 had been bureaucratically mishandled by the Cannon-led majority.”[31]
It is necessary to go beyond the personality of Cannon, however, to take an accurate measure of the SWP which survived the 1940 split. The Shachtmanites listed those they considered the most prominent members of the Cannon faction in 1940: Morris Lewit, Sam Gordon, V .R. Dunne, Carl Skoglund, Jack Weber, Larry Trainor, George Clarke, Bert Cochran, Felix Morrow, John G. Wright, Murry Weiss.[32] Other “Cannonites” of the 1940s could be listed: Milt Alvin, Sylvia Bleeker, Harry Braverman, Dorothea Breitman, George Breitman, Arthur Burch, Kay Burch, Grace Carlson, Anne Chester, Bob Chester, Charles Curtiss, Lillian Curtiss, Farrell Dobbs, Duncan Ferguson, Albert Goldman, Laura Gray, Joseph Hansen, Reba Hansen, Rose Karsner, Karolyn Kerry, Tom Kerry, Antoinette Konikow, Frank Lovell, Sarah Lovell, George Novack, Ruth Querio, Evelyn Reed, Ray Sparrow, Arne Swabeck, Augusta Trainor, David Weiss, Myra Tanner Weiss, Connie Weissman, George Weissman, and more. It would be necessary to produce a collective portrait of this cluster of revolutionaries to get a living sense of the reality that was the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s. Even this would not be adequate, of course: one would have to trace the connections between their individual lives and the lives of the other comrades, the internal life of the various branches of the party, the cultural and occupational contexts of the membership, the involvement in trade union and community struggles, the SWP’s theoretical and educational work, the interpenetration of the party and the larger social and political environment. Much could be learned from such a study.
Of course, not all of the “Cannonites” continued to agree with Cannon in the course of the complex realities arising with World War II and afterward (some of which are touched on in the next section of this essay). In 1945-46 a small grouping around Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow—deeply concerned about the postwar resiliency of Stalinism and affected by the “democratic capitalist” stabilization in Western Europe and the U.S.—developed sharp political differences with the SWP majority, and they articulated a critique of “Stalinist germs in the SWP” that should be critically examined.
Goldman, explaining his defection from the SWP to Shachtman’s rival Workers Party, wrote that “the leadership of the SWP was turning away from a Leninist-Trotskyist conception of a revolutionary party and toward a Zinovievist conception.” We have noted that in the early 1920s Cannon, along with other pioneers of American Communism, was influenced by supercentralist organizational conceptions propagated in the Comintem under Gregory Zinoviev. “It was Zinoviev who introduced the idea of a monolithic party,” Goldman wrote. “Stalin developed that idea. In the days when Cannon was a member of the Communist Party, Cannon was an ardent defender of the monolithic party. He is far more careful now; he does not say that he wants a monolithic party as in his early days, but actually he is working to create just such a party. Some of his followers substitute the word `homogeneous’ for that of `monolithic.”’ Yet Goldman’s own description of the actions of his own faction suggest that it was playing fast and loose with the democratic-centralist norms of the SWP: “Four members of the SWP were censured for organizing a discussion on the Russian question with some members of the WP.... The Minority openly declared its intention to fraternize politically with the WP. It organized socials and classes, inviting members of the WP to participate. I spoke at meetings of the WP members.... Under the circumstances, the Minority decided to continue political fraternization with the WP regardless of the policy of the Majority.” In defense of such behavior, Goldman offered this theoretical rationale:
Our party must be a disciplined party but its discipline is not based on rules and regulations. It is the discipline of comrades devoted to a great cause and conscious of the fact that without discipline in action they can achieve nothing. It is a discipline based primarily on the correctness of the leadership and not on the ability of the leaders to order people.[33]
There are elements of truth in Goldman’s argument. We have seen that Lenin insisted on a form of discipline “in action” that is based on comrades being devoted to a common cause, not on arbitrary orders from leaders or formalistic rules and regulations. On the other hand, Lenin didn’t counterpose such self-discipline to organizational rules and regulations—in fact, he took rules and regulations quite seriously. Nor did Lenin ever argue that the decisions of an elected leadership should simply be ignored or flouted if an individual comrade or a minority in the party believed such decisions to be incorrect. Whenever such things developed between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, or within the Bolshevik party, they constituted not any kind of normal democratic functioning but instead an impending organizational split. The political decisions, and the organizational rules and regulations, democratically established by the party membership, provided the framework within which disciplined comrades were expected to function. The approach of Cannon reflected something more akin to the Leninist tradition:
Our conception of the functioning of the party is the Leninist conception, that not only do members have rights of free discussion in the party, but they have duties. And one duty is this: that all their political activity has to be carried on under the supervision and control of the party. Does that mean that they cannot talk to members of other parties, as has been alleged against us; that they cannot fraternize with them; that they cannot collaborate with them? Not at all. Our comrades in the trade unions are talking, fraternizing, and collaborating every day. Work could not be carried on without it. It is not the prohibition of talking, fraternizing, collaborating that has ever been at issue in our ranks. It is that the collaboration with other political elements—either Shachtmanites, or Socialists, or progressives, or labor partyites—that the collaboration, which is absolutely indispensable for the development of our work in many instances, has to be done as a party task.[34]
The Goldman-Morrow group was not able to win, according to Goldman, because the SWP majority were “Cannonite cliquists to whom prestige is more important than political ideas.” Yet Cannon and his cothinkers developed an innovative application of Bolshevik perspectives to the mid-20th century United States, the “Theses on the American Revolution,” whose ideas are eloquently articulated in Cannon’s “The Coming American Revolution.” A clear analysis of key developments in 20th-century capitalism and a bold vision of the possibilities of revolutionary working-class struggles in the United States, the American Theses sought to underline the relevance of Leninist-Trotskyist conceptions in the most powerful capitalist country. Cannon insisted upon the central importance for the entire world of a socialist revolution in the United States, the nature of the U.S. working class and its capacity to make such a revolution, and the vital role of the Socialist Workers Party in this process. “At the bottom of all our conceptions was the basic idea that the proletarian revolution is a realistic proposition in this country, and not merely a far-off `ultimate goal,’ to be referred to on ceremonial occasions,” Cannon explained. “Our part is to build up this party which believes in the unlimited power and resources of the American workers, and believes no less in its own capacity to organize and lead them to storm and victorys.[35]
Unfortunately, the SWP failed to realize this promise. Various shortcomings of individuals, party perspectives, policies, and practices can be listed as contributing to this failure. Allegedly fatal flaws of “Cannonism” have sometimes been given the dubious credit for the subsequent development of new factional tensions in the SWP, and the party’s partial fragmentation during the fifteen years following World War II: the split of the Goldman-Morrow group in 1946, the split of the Johnson-Forest group (C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya) in 1951, the split of the Cochran group in 1953. But this is a superficial view, giving both too much and too little credit to Cannon and those around him. While there can be debates about the imperfections of Cannon, there is no controversy over the fact that he had imperfections. Yet none of these were of a nature that would wreck the effort to build a working-class revolutionary vanguard party. In fact, Cannon’s great strengths were ideally suited to facilitate the development of such an organization. Great as his strengths were, however, and great as were the strengths of his comrades, the SWP found itself up against a larger reality that would necessarily overwhelm the labors of the most dedicated, farsighted, flexible, and effective revolutionaries that one might imagine.
We have noted that the existence of a class-conscious layer of the working class is an essential precondition for the kind of party that Lenin insisted was necessary for a socialist revolution. The Marxist concept of workers’ class consciousness involves not simply whatever notions happen to be in the minds of various members of the working class at any particular point in time. It involves an understanding of the insight that was contained in the preamble of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 to 1955: “A struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world, between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer, which grows in intensity from year to year, and will work disastrous results to the toiling millions, if they are not combined for mutual protection and benefit.” Not all workers have absorbed this insight into their consciousness, but those who have done so can be said to possess at least an elementary form of class consciousness.[36]
Class consciousness, from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxists, embraces a range of perceptions and commitments including: an understanding that there is a distinct working class that one is part of, whose interests are counterposed to the capitalist class; a sense of solidarity with other members of one’s class; a belief in the need for and the possibility of successful struggles—political as well as economic—to advance the interests of one’s class; a conviction that the working-class majority can and should become the dominant political force in society (“winning the battle of democracy,” as Marx and Engels put it), reconstructing the economy so that it is collectively owned by all, democratically controlled by all, and operated in the interests of all—making possible the dignity and free development of each person in society.[37]
Such consciousness does not exist automatically in one’s brain simply because one sells his or her labor power for wages or a salary. But in the United States, from the period spanning the end of the Civil War in 1865 down through the Depression decade of the 1930s, a vibrant working-class subculture had developed throughout much of the United States. Often this “subculture” was more like a network of subcultures having very distinctive ethnic attributes, but these different ethnic currents were at various times connected by left-wing political structures (such as the old Knights of Labor, Socialist Party, IWW, Communist Party, etc.) and also, to an extent, by trade union frameworks. Within this context flourished the class consciousness that is essential to the success of Leninism. Cannon and many of his comrades were a product of this radical workers’ subculture. And they sought to make their own revolutionary contributions to it, and to help it become a revolutionary socialist force capable of transforming society.[38]
The “patriotic” hysteria and repression accompanying U.S. entry into the First World War, followed by the economic and cultural changes of the 1920s, represented a serious assault on this subculture—the effects of which were felt as many children of the radicals sought to assimilate into the seemingly more attractive “modern” culture of the American mainstream.[39] Nonetheless, the shock of the Great Depression gave new life to working-class radicalism. With the Second World War and its aftermath, however, the distinctive realities that had sustained a proletarian class consciousness within a sizeable minority of the American working class eroded dramatically and seemed to pass out of existence.
The realities generating this dilemma posed an almost insoluble problem for the American Trotskyists. This brings us, first of all, to a question that has so far been given too little attention here but is, in fact, central to any serious discussion of Leninism—revolutionary internationalism. More than this, we must touch on the interplay between world events and unfolding realities inside the United States, and the impact of this on the consciousness of the American working class and on the membership base of the SWP.
The development of American capitalism has always been intimately bound up with international developments: from the first European explorers representing the tentative probe of a rising merchant-capitalism, to the establishment in the Americas of the European great powers’ rival colonial mercantile empires, to the development of the slave trade that was a key element, as well, in the triumph of the Industrial Revolution (slave-based cotton plantations supplying the English textile industry’s “dark Satanic mills”). Both the American Revolution of 1775-83 and the American Civil War of 1861-65 were part of the global sweep of “bourgeois-democratic” revolutions. Industrialization and trade connected and transformed increasing numbers of peoples and cultures on all inhabited continents. The American working class was composed, and periodically recomposed, of immigrant waves generated by the “push-and-pull” dynamics of the world capitalist economy. Capitalist developments and class struggles in British Isles, France, Germany, and elsewhere had impact on and found reflection in what was happening in the United States. And the United States, as it grew into the foremost industrial and imperial power, itself had profound impact on international developments.
The understanding of such international dynamics resulted in the creation of the first three working-class internationals—the International Workingmen’s Association (1864-1876) led by Karl Marx, the Socialist International (1889-1914), and the Communist International (1919-43). In each case, momentous developments of international importance provoked crises that resulted in decline but also created the basis for new advances. The revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, and the brutal repression generated by this heroic but ill-fated workers’ government, frightened away trade union moderates and led to a furious split between anarchists and socialists in the First International. On the other hand, a self-consciously socialist Second International, representing mass parties and left-wing trade unions, soon took shape. The weaknesses and divisions within this increasingly reformist-dominated Second International became evident when the eruption of the First World War literally tore it apart. But revolutionary Marxists and working-class militants, in the wake of the devastating world war, and deeply inspired by the creation of a Soviet Republic in Russia, built the Third International.[40]
These three internationals—and also the world historic events with which they were connected—had a profound impact on the development of the left wing of the workers’ movement, and on the development of class consciousness, in the United States. The degeneration and collapse of the Third International as a revolutionary force, and the realities with which this was connected, had no less of an effect. The accumulation of working-class defeats in Europe (Italy, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain) and in China, coupled with the rise of fascism and Nazism, combined with the murderous, totalitarian corruption of Stalinism in the USSR and the world Communist movement, and the approach of a new, more massive round of imperialist slaughter that was the Second World War—all of this necessarily undermined the strength of the U.S. working-class left, just as surely as revolutionary victories of the Chinese, German, or Spanish workers’ movements would have generated soaring morale and renewed self-confidence.[41]
The seeming collapse of capitalism in the 1930s did not result in the working class coming to power in any country of the world, but the Great Depression did generate working-class upsurges in many countries—in some cases forcing through important social reforms beneficial to working people (such as the right to form unions, the winning of higher wages and other employment benefits, as well as unemployment insurance, social security, etc.). It also helped the more powerful capitalists to eliminate less efficient practices and competitors—resulting in a strengthened capitalism. More than this, it encouraged the competing capitalist classes to expand their overseas operations, compelling them to harmonize their different interests—or, when this proved impossible, to turn to militarism and war. The Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships of the labor movements in the “democratic capitalist” countries of Western Europe and North America led the workers’ organizations into a far-reaching alliance with their countries’ capitalist classes during World War II. [42]
Small groups of workers and intellectuals throughout the world sought to preserve perspectives that had infused the revolutionary wing of the young Second International and the original founders of the Third International. They joined with Trotsky to form the Fourth International, which was formally proclaimed in 1938. Four years earlier Trotsky had expressed his hopes and fears regarding the future Fourth International: “It may be constituted in the process of the struggle against fascism and the victory gained over it. But it may also be formed considerably later, in a number of years, in the midst of the ruins and the accumulation of debris following upon the victory of fascism and war.” After the founding of this “world party of socialist revolution,” Trotsky optimistically predicted that the coming Second World War would generate an even greater wave of militant working-class insurgency than had been the case with the First World War. Working-class revolutions would sweep away Stalinism in the USSR and would also break the power of the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries. “The new generation of workers whom the war will impel onto the road of revolution will take their place under our banner,” he asserted on the eve of his death in 1940.[43]
The devastation of World War II did generate revolutionary upsurges throughout the colonial and semicolonial countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But Stalinism took a renewed hold on life in the postwar period. It seemed as solid as ever in the USSR, given the immense authority gained through “the Great Patriotic War” which drove back and destroyed the Nazi aggressor. Stalinism also took advantage of radical ferment in Eastern Europe to establish its hold on this area, setting up Communist Party dictatorships loyal to the USSR, to form a buffer zone between the USSR and its erstwhile wartime allies of the capitalist West. In the capitalist countries of Western Europe, devastated by war, masses of workers flocked to the already existing Communist, Social Democratic, and Labor parties.
To prevent the “loss” of these lands, the unquestioned new world power—the United States of America—established the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economies of Europe on a firm capitalist basis; a North Atlantic Treaty Organization was fashioned to prevent the Soviet Red Army from expanding further westward, but also—and no less important—to prevent indigenous revolutionaries from replacing weakened bourgeois regimes with new workers’ republics. The reformist Social Democratic and Labor parties still loyal to a reconstituted Second International decided to forge a firm alliance with what was left of their own capitalist classes, and with U.S. imperialism, as the Cold War set in. The world seemed divided between capitalist versus “Communist” superpowers: the “Free World” bloc (which included many right-wing dictatorships) led by the U.S. versus the “Iron Curtain” countries (with Stalinist dictatorships but postcapitalist economies) led by the USSR.
Anti-imperialist and anti-colonial ferment in the “third world” countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America created an equivocal and more-or-less left-nationalist “neutralist” bloc. The revolutionary stirrings in the third world and the renewed power of Social Democratic and Labor parties in Western Europe (not to mention massive Communist parties in Italy and France) gave many hope that positive possibilities existed to move beyond capitalism. But this was largely overshadowed by the fact that world politics appeared to be locked into a grim “superpower” confrontation that threatened to spiral into a new world war—an especially devastating prospect since both sides had developed nuclear weapons.[44]
This complex situation—combined with the obvious incorrectness of Trotsky’s prediction regarding postwar realities—generated a sharp controversy inside the Fourth International. Some of the European leaders of the FI (the central one being Michel Pablo) predicted a third world war, with the Stalinist-led labor movement and bureaucratized workers’ states on one side and U.S. imperialism on the other. In such a situation, they believed, the Fourth International must critically support the Stalinists. Trotskyists should recognize, they asserted, that the path to socialism would probably lie through an extended period of Stalinist-led “deformed workers’ states” which would eventually become democratized partly through the work, on the “inside,” of the Trotskyists. They argued that Trotskyists should not maintain an independent, “sectarian” small-group existence, but instead should carry out a “deep entry” into the mass workers’ movements led by either the Stalinists or the Social Democrats. Seeking to impose a fairly rigid conception of “international democratic centralism,” some of these leaders attempted to bring all the parties of the Fourth International into line with this general outlook.
The world Trotskyist movement was split by this issue. A minority in the SWP—in part agreeing with Pablo’s perspectives, but in part feeling deeply demoralized by the disappointment of earlier revolutionary expectations—initiated a factional struggle in the U.S. which resulted in a large section of the party’s trade unionists and other valuable cadres leaving the organization. The SWP majority, led by Cannon, helped to spearhead a struggle inside the Fourth International against what they saw as Pablo’s adaptation to Stalinism and tendency to liquidate the program and organization of the world Trotskyist movement. This crisis and the 1953 fissure in the Fourth Internationalist forces—both in the U.S. and worldwide—greatly weakened the morale and capacity for effective political action by U.S. Trotskyists. Even after the reunification of the Fourth International in 1963, scars and partly unhealed wounds remained from the 1953 split.[45]
There were additional problems that undermined the ability of the U.S. Trotskyists to realize much of the potential for American Leninism that had been evident in the 1930s and ’40s. One obvious reflection of the Cold War was the development of a far-reaching campaign of domestic anticommunism. During the Second World War, Social Democratic and Stalinist currents in the U.S., both of which enjoyed substantial influence in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), had helped to rally militant and socially conscious working people to a broad patriotic, class-collaborationist war effort against an expansionist “foreign menace” of German fascism and Japanese imperialism; this was facilitated by the earlier support which both had given to the Democratic Party’s “New Deal” coalition for social reform headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Any notion that U.S. capitalism was also imperialist and expansionistic, fostering a foreign policy counterposed to the interests of the workers, was not consistently voiced by any organized force in the workers’ movement except for the small number of Trotskyists.
The mind-set fostered during the New Deal and the Second World War facilitated the enlistment of the bulk of organized labor into a “bipartisan” crusade against a new “foreign menace,” the USSR and the world Communist “conspiracy.” The moderates and Social Democrats inside the labor movement took the lead in advancing this perspective, while the trade unionists of the Communist Party—which for more than a decade had failed to build a working-class socialist base politically independent from the (now fiercely anticommunist) Democratic Party liberals—suddenly found themselves isolated. Anticommunist hysteria and purges swept the labor movement, workplaces, educational institutions, and cultural life throughout American society, wrecking the organizations and obliterating the influence not only of the Communist Party but also of other left-wing currents, including the Trotskyists. Working people were intimidated, in many different ways, from giving serious consideration to any and all left-wing perspectives. [46]
This dovetailed with a double erosion of the radical working-class base that was also taking place. One aspect of the erosion was the fading out of immigrant radicalism, and of the vibrant working-class ethnic subcultures, that had been so important to labor’s left wing since the mid-19th century. The closing off of immigration in the 1920s combined with powerful cultural-assimilationist dynamics. This, in turn, combined with another significant change—the fact that the working-class struggles which had been led by radicals helped to make capitalist society a better place to live for many workers so that, in fact, they came to have much more to lose than simply the “chains” of capitalist oppression. A Communist Party organizer with significant experience among foreign-born workers, Steve Nelson, described the realities he found in the late 1940s in a way that merits substantial quotation:
We asked ourselves what was happening to the foreign-born in this country. Were they becoming integrated into American society? ... It was a fact of life—the older generation was not pulling the younger into the [Communist] movement. Increasingly, first and second generations not only spoke different languages but also opted for different lifestyles.... World War II was a watershed. Sons who went to high school and then served in the armed forces thought in far different terms than their fathers. Daughters who worked in the shipyards and electrical plants were a world away from their mothers’ experiences with domestic service and boarders. Industrial workers after the war were no longer just pick and shovel men. Machine tenders who enjoyed the security provided by unions with established channels for collective bargaining could not appreciate the chronic insecurity of the pre-CIO era. Life was changing, and we had to urge the old ones to understand and accept it.
But despite our recognition of these changing cultural patterns, we were limited in what we could offer, for we were still trying to present a socialist vision based on the model of the Soviet Union. The sons and daughters of immigrants, often far better-educated than their parents, couldn’t accept our claim that the Soviet [i.e, Stalinist] model represented a better life....
Although I experienced the changes in working-class values and culture primarily in terms of the foreign-born community and their children, I can see now that the entire American working class was undergoing a transformation during and after the war. I was to learn this with a vengeance during the [anti-Communist hysteria of the nineteen] fifties. The Party, which had historically been rooted in a heavily immigrant working-class culture characterized by economic insecurity and political alienation, was unable to adjust to these changes. We could not evaluate the significance of the changing composition of the work force and its new patterns of community life and consumption. In a sense the activities of the Left were undercutting the role of the [left-wing] fraternal groups in the ethnic community. Gains such as unemployment compensation and social security as well as the greatly enhanced sense of security brought by the CIO unions made the fraternal organization less necessary in meeting the needs of working people. At the same time, participation in the labor movement and especially the war effort ... eased the process of acceptance [into the “mainstream” of U.S. culture] of the foreign-born and their children.[47]
While Nelson’s focus here centers on how the Communist Party was affected, this has obvious significance beyond that. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” Marx and Engels had argued.[48] The description above traces the erosion of the material basis of class consciousness for an important sector of the American working class. It is also described in this 1953 discussion by James P. Cannon of developments within the once left-wing United Auto Workers union, led by the ex-socialist Walter Reuther:
It is now sixteen years since the sit-down strikes made the new CIO unions secure by the seniority clause. These sixteen years of union security, and thirteen years of uninterrupted war and postwar prosperity, have wrought a great transformation in the unprivileged workers who made the CIO....
The pioneer militants of the CIO unions are sixteen years older than they were in 1937. They are better off than the ragged and hungry sit-down strikers of 1937; and many of them are sixteen times softer and more conservative. This privileged section of the unions, formerly the backbone of the left wing, is today the main social base of the conservative Reuther bureaucracy. They are convinced far less by Reuther’s clever demagogy than by the fact that he really articulates their own conservatized moods and patterns of thought....
Some of the best militants, the best stalwarts of the party in the old times, have been affected by their new environment. They see the old militants in the unions, who formerly cooperated with them, growing slower, more satisfied, more conservative. They still mix with these ex-militants socially, and are infected by them. They develop a pessimistic outlook from the reactions they get on every side from these old-timers, and unknown to themselves, acquire an element of that same conservatism. [49]
“A new middle class arose which included a large number of young people of working-class background,” wrote one radical sociologist, John C. Leggett, a few years later, noting that many prospering working people had moved out of traditional working-class communities to become homeowners in the suburbs. “The class struggle abated with the end of the post-World War II strikes, although repeated flare-ups between management and workers occurred during and after the Korean War,” he added in his description of the same auto workers discussed by Cannon. “At the same time, another trend pointed up this harmony. Governmental boards and labor unions often helped minimize class conflict as unions grew more friendly toward companies which were willing to bargain with, and make major concessions to, labor organizations. Prosperity reached almost everyone. Even working-class minority groups [e.g., some African-Americans] improved their standard of living and sent sons and daughters into the middle class.” A Black auto worker named James Boggs, who had passed through the Trotskyist movement in earlier years, asserted in 1963: “Today the working class is so dispersed and transformed by the very nature of the changes in production that it is almost impossible to select out any single bloc of workers as working class in the old sense.” By this “old sense” he meant class-conscious workers: “The working class is growing, as Marx predicted, but it is not the old working class which the radicals persist in believing will create the revolution and establish control over production. That old working class is the vanishing herd. “[50]
Similar developments were taking place in all of the “capitalist democracies,” of course. “Fear of revolution and a desire for social appeasement stimulated the governments of Western Europe,” explained one French scholar, Maurice Crouzet, in 1970, to “set themselves the aim of creating prosperity and expanding a prosperity which would benefit all classes” in the post-World War II period, through policies providing “higher wages, shorter working hours, paid holidays, full employment and the virtual disappearance of unemployment, construction of wholesome and cheap housing, social security protection against sickness, loss of work, and old age.” The dramatic development of the welfare state after 1945—in large measure won through the pressure of labor movements led by Social Democratic and Labor parties—did not fully live up to this idealized picture, let alone reform all capitalist oppression out of existence. The same writer offers some clues as to its limitations: “Generally speaking, the standard of living has risen in all European countries. Working conditions have improved—first, through the growing importance of mechanization which requires, on the whole, less muscular effort (though it increases nervous tension); and then through the reduction of working hours and through paid vacations.” The mechanization of labor under capitalism, it should be stressed, involves the degradation of labor—introducing greater control by the employer over the labor process, not only increasing nervous tension among those keeping up with assembly lines, but also eroding their skills and power in their daily work. More than this, there are some sectors of the working class—especially foreigners and non-whites—for whom more traditional forms of working-class oppression were maintained: “use [of] foreign labor ... has become so important that the expansion of certain industries is closely dependent on it. Immigrant workers provoke grave problems, even in Great Britain where a liberal attitude towards foreigners and the absence of racialism have been traditional... .These immigrants constitute a proletariat, often leading a wretched type of life.”[51]
In the United States, too, there developed an increasingly severe stratification within the workforce, with African-Americans, Hispanics, and many Asian-Americans being pushed into substandard living conditions, more strenuous and lower-paying occupations, higher rates of unemployment, etc., this institutionalized racism being reinforced by cultural and psychological biases on the most personal level. (This had obvious implications for the rise of civil rights and Black nationalist struggles but that brought to the fore a consciousness of race far more than of class.) [52]
And for white workers as well as Black, technological developments imposed by the employers created increasing on-the-job alienation, undermining working-class power at the point of production. With little difficulty, astute social critics such as Harvey Swados were able to puncture the “myth of the happy worker” and the “myth of the powerful worker.” The myth that the working class was simply evaporating altogether, being absorbed into a nebulous middle class, was also effectively refuted with ample facts and figures by more than one critical-minded writer. There was also abundant evidence that the American working class had a sense of being different from other classes—even though many working people referred to themselves as “middle class” (certainly not “lower class”!). Distinctive patterns of culture and consciousness continued to distinguish it in the larger society.[53]
On the other hand, there is something to the assertion of Stanley Aronowitz that there has been a tendency “toward the replacement of all the traditional forms of proletarian culture and everyday life—which gave working-class communities their coherence and provided the underpinnings for the traditional forms of proletarian class consciousness—with a new, manipulated consumer culture which for convenience’s sake we can call mass culture.”[54] Regardless of precisely what one wants to make of this, the fact remains that there had been flattening and fragmentation of much that had sustained the old radical working-class consciousness. This hardly meant that workers’ minds simply turned to mush, or that they simply accepted whatever their bosses or televisions told them. The distinctive philosophy of many disaffected workers, one observer commented, was not any of the traditional left-wing ideologies but cynicism: “Cynicism is a variant of anarchism—anarchism without ideals or ultimate illusions, apathetic, easy-going instead of strenuous, non-sectarian, hence more broadly appealing and far more suitable to the conditions and mentality of contemporary workers than the older tradition of militant idealism and self-sacrifice.” The class-conscious layers of the American working class—the key to understanding the Socialist Party of Debs and the IWW, the early Communist Party, and the pioneer Trotskyists—had, certainly by the end of the 1950s, ceased to exist as a distinctive social force. “The surest way to lose one’s fighting faith is to succumb to one’s immediate environment; to see things only as they are and not as they are changing and must change; to see only what is before one’s eyes and imagine that it is permanent.” This had been Cannon’s appeal to his comrades, and many were able to accept that—but this was only a tiny fragment of the U.S. working class.”
The social basis for the kind of revolutionary party that Lenin himself discussed in Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder had ceased to exist. All that remained for the stalwart veterans of the SWP in the 1950s was to maintain enough of an organization to keep alive the ideals and general theoretical perspectives of revolutionary Marxism, the understanding of history and the revolutionary tradition. If this could be accomplished, if the SWP could survive until the next radical upsurge that capitalism would inevitably generate, then American Trotskyism would have something to contribute to it, the Leninist-Trotskyist project would be renewed and revitalized, and a Leninist party could finally be built in the United States that would be capable of leading a working-class revolution.
The generation that came to young adulthood in the late 1940s and early ’50s generated a few recruits for the SWP: Fred Halstead, Evelyn Sell, Nat Weinstein, Catarino (Dick) Garza, Al Hansen, Beatrice Hansen, Ed Shaw, Rita Shaw, and a handful of others. But for the most part, this was the “lost generation” in regard to left-wing activity. It was supplemented by a few recruits in the “regroupment” period of the late 1950s, largely from a dissident left-wing of the Shachtmanites’ Young Socialist League and also from the Stalinist milieu—but this hardly made up for the losses of major trade union cadres that the party suffered several years earlier. The hopes for the party lay in the future, although it turned out not to be from the “class-conscious proletariat” that was central to the traditional conceptions of U.S. Marxists.
The 1960s and ’70s saw a new layer of radicalized youth come into the Socialist Workers Party. An interesting description of this phenomenon is given by Ben Stone’s memoir of returning from the San Francisco to the New York branch of the party:
I had resumed my activity in the New York branch of the SWP and in the Painters Union, rejoining my old Local 442. The year was 1960 and I was 48 years old; getting up there, all right. One noticeable difference from the time I had left New York was the age level of the Party members. I remembered when I had come into the Party in 1945, at the age of 33. Most of the comrades were of my generation, most a little younger and some a little older. Now the rank-and-file member was much younger, a generation removed, most of whom I hardly knew. For the first time I began to feel like an old man in the Party, almost a stranger in my own house.
As the next years went by, the Party attracted even younger members, kids in their teens and early twenties. This was due to the fact that its youth organization, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) had been established a short while before. The 60s was a time of radical ferment on the college campuses and the Party attracted some of these youth, certainly in greater numbers than ever before. Within a few years, the YSA began to numerically equal the Party. As these YSA members got older and more politically experienced, most “graduated” into the Party. So it was not very long before almost all of them looked like my son or daughter (or even an earlier [i.e., younger] generation) [55]
This development has been analyzed in Frank Lovell’s invaluable essay “The Meaning of the Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party,” contained in the companion volume to this one, The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party. Some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with this younger layer that became predominant in the SWP membership are also suggested in essays by Evelyn Sell and myself at the end of the present volume.
Here I want to concentrate on two interrelated questions: the social composition and consciousness of the new membership, and the relationship of this to the manner in which Leninist organizational norms came to be understood and practiced.
As I was joining the Trotskyist movement in 1972, I addressed the question of the class composition of the SWP and YSA. What I wrote then was only the beginning of an analysis:
The working class is defined, in Marxist terms, not simply as all manual laborers, but as those who, not owning the means of production, sell their labor power in order to make a living. The capitalist class, on the other hand, is that class which makes its living through the ownership of businesses. The “middle class” has been defined as an intermediate strata of small businessmen, small shopkeepers, independent craftsmen and artisans, and the small layer of professionals and white collar employees (doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers, social workers, government workers, clerical workers, service workers, etc.)—all of whom are sometimes swayed by the workers’ struggles, sometimes swayed by the pressures and influence of the capitalists. But this small layer of professionals and white collar employees has, in advanced capitalist society, grown to immense proportions. In the United States it represents over 40 percent of the labor force. The needs and dynamics of capitalism have resulted in a dramatic expansion and proletarianization of many white collar occupations, making them an important new section of the working class. (Most students are being trained to assume roles in this new section of the working class.) While many white collar workers have little sense of class consciousness (the same being true, by the way, for many blue collar workers), the material conditions for a change in consciousness now exist, and the growth of white collar unionism indicates that a change is taking place. In short, the Trotskyists have a base in an important new sector of the American working class.[56]
All of this was true. But additional points need to be made in order to make sense of what happened to the SWP.
First of all, this was the layer of the SWP that I myself was part of. To a very large degree, although most of us were or had been students, my impression is that a majority of us came from working-class backgrounds. That is to say, our parents were neither big capitalists nor small-time business people (petty bourgeois), but instead sold their labor power to make a living, working for wages and salaries in either blue-collar or white-collar occupations.
On the other hand, this shouldn’t be overstated. One highly questionable—in fact, slanderous—study that was made of several top SWP leaders of the 1960s generation (all of whom came to the movement as student activists) does have the merit of offering occupational information on their parents: a commercial tire salesman, the president of a small private college, a physician-surgeon, a professor of biochemistry, a Congregationalist minister, two lawyers, two dentists, a pharmacist.[57]57 Of course, by itself this means little. Marx’s father was a lawyer, Engels’s was a manufacturer, Lenin’s was a school inspector, Luxemburg’s managed the family timber business, Trotsky’s was a commercial farmer—yet each of these revolutionaries became intimately and very fruitfully involved with the class-conscious workers’ movement.
Here is precisely the rub, however. Even those of us who came from more strictly “working-class” backgrounds, and who ourselves sometimes had to get jobs to support ourselves (which generally involved selling our own labor power to one or another employer)—even we were unable to be part of a class-conscious workers’ movement, because this didn’t exist in the sense that it existed for those from Marx through Trotsky. In terms of our objective class location, it could be said that many of us were indeed part of a broadly defined proletariat. But there are three complications, all relating to the complex question of class consciousness.
First, many of us came from working-class layers that saw themselves as being different, better than other layers of the working class, and as providing an upward mobility for their own kids that would provide permanent positions in well-paying and higher-status “professions” far removed from blue-collar drudgery. Such desired social positions had more in common with what we call the “petty bourgeoisie” than with the proletariat. Most of us who rejected any such careerism still had no real desire (as opposed to romantic impulses) to turn away from our interesting intellectual and cultural pursuits in order to “waste time” (except for brief excursions) in the more mundane working-class reality of our parents or grandparents. The fact that much of this was permeated with illusion and “false consciousness” is less important than the fact that it affected how many of us viewed our world, our own possible futures, and our personal realities.
Second, in this period (i.e., the period in which we were growing up and joining the Trotskyist movement), the working class as a whole—including most of the organized labor movement—did not have a very highly developed sense of class consciousness. It was a time of genuine affluence and opportunity for many working people, and there was a general sense that “the working class” was fading away, that we were all becoming “middle class” now. George Meany, as head of the AFL-CIO, was expressing a common perception among his members when he said precisely that in 1972: “Our members are basically Americans. They basically believe in the American system, and maybe they have a greater stake in the system now than they had fifteen or twenty years ago, because under the system and under our trade union policy, they have become `middle class.’ They have a greater stake.”[58]
Even today, in the early 1990s, a period of declining opportunities and diminishing illusions, many American working people will still more often refer to themselves as “middle class” rather than “working class.” What’s more, from the early 1950s through the late 1980s the bulk of the labor movement was embracing a narrow bread-and-butter unionism combined with an openly class-collaborationist “partners in progress” social vision. “I believe in free, democratic, competitive capitalism,” the president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Sol Chaikin, explained in 1979, concluding that “managers should manage and then workers should sit down with them to collectively bargain for their share of the results of management efficiency and worker productivity.”[59] It would not be stretching things too far to call this “petty-bourgeois ideology”—since it quite explicitly sees organized labor as a junior partner of the capitalist. The fact that “middle class” consciousness and ideology, as opposed to a clear sense of proletarian class consciousness, were predominant in the actually existing labor movement also affected the thinking and practice of many young radicals.
Third, many of us were, for all practical purposes, declasse. We went through an extended period in which we were supported by our parents or by scholarships and financial loans as we went to college. Those of us who dropped out of college to do political work may have supported ourselves through various jobs, but in many cases these jobs (often economically marginal) were peripheral to our “real” lives. Our “real” lives were immersed in a peculiar political subculture of the YSA and SWP that, being composed of “students, petty-bourgeois radicals, a few older workers facing retirement, and functionaries,” as Frank Lovell puts it, had little in common with the actual daily lives of U.S. working people. To the extent that we stepped out of that peculiar subculture, we tended to be involved in the broader student-and-youth-centered radical movement of the time, which was not distinguished by any highly developed sense of class consciousness.
In fact, a pernicious form of elitism developed among many radicals of the 1960s and ’70s in the absence of a powerful, vibrantly class-conscious, self-activated working-class movement. Looking to “third world” revolutions (especially Cuba) where “a small minority of activists did learn to mobilize broad masses,” some of the new student radicals constituted what two perceptive analysts of a similar phenomenon in France described as a “frustrated intellectual elite, the representatives of a modernist petty bourgeoisie whose increasing importance in demographic, economic and cultural terms was in contradiction to its marginalization at the political level.” The vision that they could somehow become Castros and Guevaras of a U.S. revolution—a vision of “Leninism” projecting them as “a small group to lead a potential revolt and harness the energy of the masses”—resulted in a heady combination of idealism and self-interest: “As suffering humanity liberated itself, a minority which was intellectual, dissatisfied and sometimes humiliated would find its own road to success.”[60]
There was a cynical attitude toward people that could be fostered by such an outlook. In 1972, I was told by a young SWP national staff person at the time, a film that fascinated many of the new leaders in the party’s national headquarters was Francis Ford Coppola’s classic “The Godfather,” about the brutal, far-ranging, Machiavellian strategies patiently developed by tight-knit Mafia organizations to outwit, humble, and eliminate their rivals and achieve—by the end of the film—the ultimate victory. There was clearly a note of admiration in the way some of them jokingly repeated the key phrase of the film: “I want to make you an offer that you can’t refuse.” I was later told by another comrade that the new national organization secretary Jack Barnes (viewed by some as an “American Lenin”) commented: “In case you feel bad, just remember what shit Lenin made the Russian Revolution with.”
It is hardly a fair generalization that the new layer of Trotskyists admiringly fantasized over the warped operations of murderous gangsters, or that they viewed Lenin’s comrades (and their own) as “shit.” That such attitudes existed, and that they could not have been so much in evidence in an organization infused with a genuine proletarian class consciousness, also seems a fair statement. Such consciousness implies a deep commitment to the struggle against all forms of oppression and to the egalitarian ideals that would permeate the socialist future, a devotion to doing all that is necessary to advance the self-emancipation of the working class, an elementary respect for and honesty among one’s comrades-what Trotsky called “the revolutionary morality of the Bolsheviks.”[61]
The notion of revolutionary morality might have seemed “corny” or “un-Marxist” to some young YSAers and SWPers, but Trotsky believed in the importance among professional revolutionaries of relations which were devoid of “a single reprehensible, contemptible act, a single deception or lie,” an atmosphere that Lenin referred to as “a close and compact body of comrades in which complete, mutual confidence prevails.” Nor had such feelings been alien to those close to Cannon. “The true art of being a socialist consists not merely in recognizing the trend of social evolution from capitalism to socialism, and striving to help it along and hasten on the day,” Cannon had argued. “The true art of being a socialist consists in anticipating the socialist future; in not waiting for its actual realization, but in striving, here and now, insofar as the circumstances of class society permit, to live like a socialist; to live under capitalism according to the higher standards of the socialist future.”[62]
The limitations of the consciousness within the new layers of Trotskyist cadre doesn’t minimize the importance of the objective class location (proletarian or near-proletarian) of a majority of SWP/YSA membership in the 1960s and ’70s, but that has to be balanced with the essentially petty-bourgeois consciousness that was no less a defining characteristic of the membership. In referring to consciousness I mean not just ideas; our ideas, in fact, tended to be strongly influenced by the highly proletarian class consciousness that is intimately associated with Marxism. But these vital ideas coexisted uneasily with assumptions, habits, ways of seeing things and understanding ourselves that could be appropriately referred to with the shorthand term “petty bourgeois.” It should be added that this was not simply the case with the SWP and YSA. It was generally true throughout the “new left” and the younger layers of all the existing left-wing groups. It inevitably affected the manner in which “Leninism” was interpreted and applied—leading to no end of what Lenin had warned against in Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder: “phrasemongering and clowning.”
Elements of the older generation, in various ways, formed a powerful counterinfluence in the SWP to the misinterpretation and misapplication of Leninist norms, and some of these seasoned veterans finally sought—again, in various ways—to organize a resistance, with the support of a minority of the younger comrades, to the increasingly severe distortions of democratic centralism that were becoming an integral part of party life (and that were also intimately associated with the covert programmatic revision being carried out by the new leadership of the SWP). The fact that they found it necessary to carry on that fight, and that they lost, is related to the great weakening of American Trotskyism that took place under the impact of the developments examined above. At the same time, certain very serious organizational mistakes in which some of us who later became oppositionists had acquiesced, or which we failed to challenge, also contributed to our own later defeat.
The meaning of the Cannon tradition is reflected in the comments of Harry Braverman, author of the latter-day Marxist classic Labor and Monopoly Capital, many years after Braverman had broken from the SWP during the Cochran split of 1953:
He spoke to us in the accents of the Russian revolution and of the Leninism which had gone forth from the Soviet Union in the twenties and the thirties. But there was in his voice something more which attracted us. And that was the echoes of the radicalism of the pre-World War I years, the popular radicalism of Debs, Haywood, and John Reed. And he spoke with great force and passion....
Cannon invested the full force of a not inconsiderable personality in his convictions, as if to say that one could not hope to convince others of ideas which inspired in oneself only lukewarm feelings. This, I think, is useful to remember at a time when the ideas of socialism and the critique of capitalism are too often treated as mere mathematical exercises, the outcome of formulas, or the comparison of alternative models. It seems to me that the ruling force of Cannon’s political life, insofar as I know it, was the passion for the political principles spread by the Russian revolution in its early years. He lived by these principles and by these alone, and he became expert at separating every other impulse that plays a role in socialist politics from the thing that mattered most to him-adherence to these principles. Now, I would not pretend that this kind of dedication to principles, taken by itself, and without reference to all other requirements, theoretical and practical, is a sufficient basis for sound socialist politics. It can also be the basis for sectarianism, and usually is. But without it the politics of even the best-meaning people can become a swamp and a tangle.
Cannon’s adherence to the principles that inspired him in his youth was a manifest thing that shaped his whole life and life’s activity. The emphasis that he gave to what he called principled politics was clear in every speech and every article. He tried to have his every political act and association reflect his principles and reflect them clearly and unambiguously.[63]
Cannon’s political principles involve an understanding of socialism that is indistinguishable from a revolutionary approach to the question of democracy. He expressed it in this way in 1957, at a time when Stalinism was wracked with crises:
We will not put the socialist movement of this country on the right track and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class of this country and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did. Until we make it dear that we stand for an ever-expanding workers’ democracy as the only road to socialism. Until we root out every vestige of Stalinist perversion and corruption of the meaning of socialism and democracy, and restate the thoughts and formulations of the authentic Marxist teachers....
Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn’t want to be ruled by a dictatorship. Rather, we should recognize his demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. The Marxists, throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilized them for the education and organization of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether....
In the United States, the struggle for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organization. That is the necessary condition to abolish capitalism and “establish democracy” in the country as a whole.... So the fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory. Workers’ democracy is the only road to socialism, here in the United States and everywhere else, all the way from Moscow to Los Angeles, and from here to Budapest. [64]
These principles come through in Cannon’s orientation toward party building and internal democracy. In one of his letters from the mid-1960s, reprinted in this volume, he notes: “Probably the hardest lesson I had to learn from Trotsky, after ten years of bad schooling through the Communist Party, was to let organizational questions wait until the political questions at issue were fully clarified, not only in the National Committee but also in the ranks of the party.” He added that “our party owes its very existence today to the fact that some of us learned this hard lesson and learned also how to apply it in practice.” This meant discussing differences inside the party—even when a dissident minority might impatiently act in an undisciplined manner—“in an atmosphere free from poisonous personal recriminations and venomous threats of organization discipline.” The maintenance of a democratic atmosphere when there were sharply disputed questions was essential, Cannon felt, for the party to educate its cadres in rich lessons of the past as well as complex new realities. This was especially important as the party sought to renew itself through recruiting new members, and through training these new members in the method of principled politics and democratic centralism. “Our young comrades need above all to learn; and this is the best, in fact the only way, for them to learn what they need to know about the new disputes,” he wrote. “The fact that some of them probably think they already know everything, only makes it more advisable to turn the plenum sessions [of the National Committee] into a school with questions and answers freely and patiently passed back and forth.”
The entire spirit of this letter, as well as the specifics, stand in stark contrast to what we see in the long, grim exposition by Jack Barnes, “The Organizational Norms of a Proletarian Party,” delivered in 1982 and reprinted in this volume. Barnes described the reason why “the organization question” was coming to the fore in the early 1980s. First of all, there was the turn to industry: “our determination to lead the large majority of our leadership and membership in building fractions of the party in industry... [and] in the industrial unions.” Second, there was the primacy of Cuban revolutionary leadership: “our turn to industry was only a year before the victories in Grenada and Nicaragua. That is, only a year away from the extension—after almost two decades—of the Cuban socialist revolution, which had opened the socialist revolution in our hemisphere and brought to power the first genuinely revolutionary leadership... since the Bolshevik Party in the time of Lenin.” It was now necessary to strengthen the “proletarian organizational norms” of the SWP:
Regardless of what any member thinks of the political positions and other decisions of elected leadership bodies of the party, those are the decisions that have full force and effect. All decisions they make are binding on all members unless and until they are changed by that body or overturned by a higher one....
We have ... had [a] series of challenges to our organizational norms [involving whether] an individual party member can unilaterally decide to organize the party’s internal life [by circulating] private polemical discussion articles [among friends in the party] when no discussion has been opened by the [National Committee]....
This now comes to a halt. Totally....
We are a political organization with elected bodies, and we function through those elected bodies, not as individuals and not as groupings of friends and like-minded people....
We don’t need norms for disloyal members... .The party just catches them and throws them out. We have organizational norms for the cadre of the party, because that’s the only way we can build a workers’ party....
There is no absolute right, at any time and under any circumstances, to organize tendencies in our party or in the YSA. A higher right than the rights of tendencies exists: the right of the party, through its elected leadership bodies, to regulate its internal affairs....
[A revolutionary centralist party] ... means a party that does not tolerate private discussions and decisions by self-selected groupings, open to some and closed to others, defined by friendship, past relationships, or other subjective and arbitrary criteria....
At the same time, another new SWP leader, Mary-Alice Waters, misquoted one of Cannon’s comrades, Tom Kerry, making it sound like the revolutionary party is a religious fetish: “Without the party we are nothing; with the party we are all.” Garbling party history and distorting Kerry’s and Cannon’s ideas, she spoke of the way that Kerry allegedly helped lead the SWP, beginning in the late 1950s, to “more disciplined, centralized functioning,” away from functioning “as a discussion circle ... to return to the norms of a politically homogeneous Leninist party.” Waters’s obvious implication was that Kerry (who shortly before his death had, in fact, declared war on the Barnes leadership) was an initiator of the “Bolshevization” process that was now being continued and stepped up by the Barnes leadership’s.[65]
“The worst and most reprehensible single thing about the article, in my opinion, is the myth it concocts about some golden age in SWP history (during the 1940s evidently) when the party functioned through the norms of a politically homogeneous Leninist party, that is, with strong proletarian organizational norms that enabled it to be disciplined and centralized.” This was the irritated reaction of party veteran George Breitman at the time. His criticism of Waters’s historiography intertwined with his anger over what he saw as the authoritarian and bullying policies of the new top SWP leaders in pushing through the “turn to industry” and programmatic revisions:
But there never has been a time in SWP history when our norms were like the ones now being introduced. Not in the 1940s, not in the 1930s, not at any time. We built industrial fractions in the 40s and 30s but we did it through political persuasion and education, not through administrative directives, pressure, castigation of comrades who were slow to go into industry or did not want to go into it at all; nobody was made to feel like a pariah or encouraged to drop out of the party for being unable or refusing to go into industry.
We sold our press at plant gates, in greater numbers than today, but we did it by convincing the members that it was politically necessary, not by administrative rules that make sales mandatory for members. We were a centralized party but not an overcentralized one that is afraid to leave initiative to the branches and fractions or to let them learn through their own experiences. We were a disciplined party, carrying out the decisions of conventions and plenums, but we never had rules that prohibited a loyal member from showing other membe