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An ex-Trotskyist of many years standing, looking down on the revolutionary movement from the Olympian height of social democracy, nonetheless confessed to feeling “just a little sadness” over events in the SWP. He recalled that in the organization of Trotsky and Cannon “what caught my fancy the most was a certain spirit of open debate.” The prohibition of this, the abandonment of old programmatic principles, and the expulsions of those who disagreed made him feel that “it is a sad spectacle: old-timers who have devoted a lifetime to their beliefs, expelled from a 'Trotskyist' organization for being undeviating Trotskyists.” (Emanuel Geltman, “Sclerosis of a Sect,” Dissent, Summer 1984, pp. 361-362)
Far more than victims, however, these expelled “old-timers” were proud revolutionary militants reaffirming their beliefs and their life's work, and waging a struggle for political ideas, values, and practices which they were convinced must be the bedrock of any socialist workers' party capable of transforming the United States. Some of them had been half-persuaded that it was their duty—in the interests of renewing the SWP, allowing for a transition to a younger leadership, etc.—to allow the Barnes leadership to move forward unimpeded, repressing any critical thoughts they might have, and getting out of the way if they couldn't lend a hand. When they finally came to the conclusion that the new leadership was betraying a trust, through destructive manipulations and bullying, and that Barnes was intent on breaking with the revolutionary Marxist program of the Fourth International, they came to life as an opposition. They consequently inspired and were joined by some comrades of a younger generation who had concluded that the spirit of the above-quoted verse of Bob Dylan's song is neither the beginning nor the end of political wisdom.
In the aftermath of the California expulsions, as we have seen, the SWP conducted a systematic purge of all known oppositionists, including the four veteran revolutionaries whose writings are offered in the following section of this book.
As has been documented in The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party, the central leader of one oppositional current was George Breitman (1916-1986). This current had been represented by Frank Lovell and Steve Bloom on the SWP National Committee, and eventually it would be forced to reconstitute itself outside the SWP as the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. Breitman had been part of the Trotskyist movement since 1935 and had been a national leader since the 1940s. Best known as the editor of Trotsky's writings and as a pioneering editor and interpreter of Malcolm X's work, Breitman's integrity shines through in the appeal of his expulsion. Additional biographical information can be found in Naomi Allen and Sarah Lovell, ed., A Tribute to George Breitman, Writer, Organizer, Revolutionary (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1987).
Jean Tussey (1918- ), a union organizer and member of the Socialist Party's left wing at the beginning of World War II, joined the Trotskyist movement in 1942 and became a member of the SWP's National Committee in 1952. At various times she was a part of the Newspaper Guild, the International Association of Machinists, the United Steelworkers, and the International Typographical Union—for many years serving as an organizer for this last organization in the Cleveland area, where she was also an energetic and well-respected builder of the SWP and of numerous social struggles. Active as a labor historian, she may be best known to some as the editor of the popular collection Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). After her expulsion, described in her letter of appeal that is reprinted here, she joined the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.
George Lavan Weissman (1916-1985), whose substantial contributions to the Trotskyist movement encompass almost fifty years, is described in an obituary reprinted in this section. An intellectual of high caliber, he served as the U.S. literary representative of the Leon Trotsky estate. Under the name George Lavan he edited the widely read collection Che Guevara Speaks (New York: Merit Publishers, 1967; Evergreen Black Cat Edition, 1968); he also edited a collection of Trotsky's war correspondence, The Balkan Wars, 1912-13 (New York: Monad Press, 1980), which has a more obvious relevance in the 1990s as nationalist and ethnic conflicts once again erupt in Eastern Europe.
Larry Stewart (1921-1984) was a working-class intellectual and party activist whose roots in the African-American community moved him to give special attention to the “the national question” in relation to the Black liberation struggle in the United States. The two articles reprinted here—“Permanent Revolution and Black Liberation in the U.S.” and “Black Liberation and the Comintern in Lenin's Time”—are polemics against the Barnes leadership which focus on these issues; he died while still working on them, and they were edited after his death by George Breitman for inclusion in the pamphlet Permanent Revolution, Combined Revolution, and Black Liberation in the United States (New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1985). These and similar concerns are also voiced in his open letter to Mel Mason, the 1984 SWP candidate for president (originally published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, June 1984).
New York City
April 13, 1984
National Committee, SWP
Dear Comrades:
I appeal to you against my expulsion for “disloyalty” by the Political Committee on January 4. I ask you to reverse the PC action and reinstate me to membership with full rights to participate in the coming preconvention discussion. If you sustain my appeal, I urge you to also reinstate the many other members who were expelled on the same basis that I was expelled. I don't make that a precondition for my appeal, but it obviously would be inconsistent to reinstate one or some of us without reinstating others who are equally innocent of the PC's “disloyalty” and “splitters” charges.
It is a difficult thing for the NC to reverse an action of the PC, which is your subcommittee. That is why it happens so rarely. But sometimes such a reversal is advisable, even necessary. I think this is one of those unusual occasions.
Unusual steps are justified by crisis situations, and the party certainly is in a crisis now. The morale of the members has been badly shaken by developments in the party since the 1981 convention. The size of the party is around half of what it was in 1977; the decline since the 1981 convention has been close to 30 percent, and the hemorrhaging did not stop with the January purge—members are still being expelled or pressured to resign because of real or potential political differences. Several branches built with such difficulty in the last decade are being dissolved. Many sympathizers or active supporters are aghast at the purges. Our influence in other movements is at its lowest point since the early 1960s. The SWP has never been so isolated in the Fourth International.
The PC, and the smaller “central leadership team” that dominates it, deny that the party is in crisis, but even they concede it has many problems today. And the cause of these problems (or crisis)? According to the central leadership team, they (or it) are the result of a disloyal secret faction that conducted a split operation against the party. But this is a fairy tale. There was no secret faction: there were different oppositional tendencies in the party, and two of them formed an opposition bloc in the NC at the May 1983 NC plenum. The central leadership team designated them a faction although they said they were a bloc of tendencies and not a faction. But what was “secret” about them? They announced their bloc openly, presented you with their platform in writing, and asked you to inform the party members about their formation and platform. The central leadership team persuaded you to deny this reasonable request and—even worse—to decree that the members could not be informed in plenum reports of the very existence of the Opposition Bloc. So the only thing “secret” about it was your action to prevent the members from knowing that it had come into being in accord with the party's organizational norms. It was neither a faction (as defined by the central leadership team) nor secret.
Equally fictional are the charges about disloyalty and a split operation. The central leadership team began to abuse the whole concept of loyalty/disloyalty in 1980. Some of you who were on the PC then will recall that I protested against this at plenums in 1980 and 1981, when I was still on the NC. After a temporary retreat, the central leadership team has resumed these abuses, making the mere holding of political differences with the team the equivalent of disloyalty to the party. I feel embarrassed at the thought of having to prove my loyalty to the party—my record speaks for itself. If I was a loyal member up to the 1981 convention, when the nominating commission tried to force me into accepting reelection to the NC against my wishes, when did I become disloyal? And why? When Stalin accused the Old Bolsheviks of having become agents of the Nazis, Trotsky replied that such a thing was impossible for lifelong revolutionists psychologically as well as politically. I think a similar statement would be applicable to the many founders of the SWP who have been purged in recent months. Call them what you wish—behind the times, outdated, too rigid, resistant to change, senile, etc.—but the last thing they can rightly be accused of is disloyalty to their party. I hope that the party members and a majority of the NC will recognize this charge as fraudulent, not only in my case, not only in the case of other founding members, but of all those who were expelled because they refused to “repudiate” things allegedly said or not said at the California state convention. You know very well that if the same demand had been presented to all the members of the party, not just oppositionists or critics of the central leadership team but many other loyal members, including supporters of the team, would in self-respect have done the same thing we did—that is, refuse to repudiate other members on the basis of inadequate information. That was why only oppositionists or critics, real or presumed, were asked to answer the fatal repudiation query.
There was a split operation, but not on the part of oppositionists. The central leadership team began talking about a split the day after the last convention in August 1981. In September 1981, two of its representatives, Ken Shilman and Mac Warren, told Les Evans in Minnesota, who was then a supporter of the majority group, that the leadership in New York expected the party membership (then near 1,300) to be thinned down to 850 before the next convention. This was a remarkably accurate forecast, which most of you present members of the NC must have heard at the time. The reason it was accurate was that the central leadership team has been busy ever since trying to make it accurate by driving people out of the party. Another name for such an operation is “split.”
The reason why the central leadership team organized a split is perfectly obvious. Prior to the 1981 convention it decided that the SWP should distance itself from Trotskyism, permanent revolution, political revolution, etc., because these and related programmatic concepts were unacceptable to the Castroist currents to whom the team thought the party should orient and adapt. Instead of presenting this fateful proposal to the party in the 1981 preconvention period, so that the members could consider, discuss, and decide it, the central leadership team kept it from the membership and even from the NC before the convention, where a large number of NC members were not reelected merely because they could not be counted on to go along with the new anti-Trotskyism orientation. It was not until after the convention that the central leadership team began to implement the new orientation, taking one step at a time while vehemently denying any new orientation was intended. The first open step was at an expanded PC meeting two days after the convention when it was decided to organize “Lenin classes” whose main purpose was to lay the basis for downgrading Trotsky, Trotskyism, and the Fl. Two months later came the first Doug Jenness article in the ISR publicly signalling the repudiation of Trotskyism and permanent revolution, which Jack Barnes made explicit 14 months later in his speech to the YSA convention at the end of 1982.
It was inevitable that changes of such scope and depth, made piecemeal without any discussion or decision by the party, would create indignation or consternation in the party and demands that they be discussed. But the central leadership team did not want them discussed—it wanted to change the party's positions without a discussion because it feared that it could not get the membership's consent through a democratic discussion. The same lack of self-confidence and mistrust of the membership led the central leadership to decide that opponents of the new undiscussed orientation had to be discredited and ousted before the next preconvention discussion period would open in the spring of 1983.
So when Frank Lovell asked the November 1981 NC meeting, shortly after the first Jenness article, to open a literary discussion in the party about Leninism and its relation to Trotskyism, he was maligned as an opponent of the study of Lenin and his motion was defeated. The very idea of a discussion was denounced as a ruse to reopen questions decided at the convention, although the Leninism dispute had not even been mentioned at the convention. When Lovell and Steve Bloom one month later set up the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the NC, again calling for a literary discussion of Leninism and Trotskyism, they asked the PC to make their five-point platform available to the members; the PC rejected this as a trick to “reopen the party internal discussion bulletin,” which they had not even mentioned. (The falsity of this claim was exposed nine months later when the PC did circulate the F.I.C. platform to the members without reopening any internal discussion bulletin.) When Lovell dared to show the F.I.C. platform to a member who asked him about it, the NC plenum of February-March 1982 ruled that he and other NC oppositionists had “forfeited” their membership in the party, and adopted a series of 27 motions establishing “new norms” that would make it easier to expel oppositionists or critics. From then on the internal situation deteriorated drastically month by month and expulsions became commonplace. That is the origin of the party crisis—it was created by the central leadership team, not by a nonexistent secret faction.
Whenever critics of the new orientation tried to say anything at branch or district meetings, they were declared out of order and were 'told, repeatedly, that they would have a chance to present their views at the “proper” time—when the preconvention discussion would be opened in the spring of 1983. But the central leadership team had no intention of letting oppositionists discuss the new orientation in 1983, or any other time. It voted down the Opposition Bloc motion to have the convention in August 1983, two years after the previous convention. Then it voted in August 1983 to postpone the convention for a full year, to August 1984, and simultaneously ousted all four oppositionists in the NC from both the NC and the party on the flimsiest of charges (cynically accusing them of conducting a split operation). The central leadership team had hoped that the ouster of the four NC members would provoke a split, which could be blamed on the oppositionists. When that didn't happen, it was forced to resort to the clumsy and transparent mass purge at the beginning of 1984. Bad as that looked to the members of the SWP and other sections of the Fl, it was considered necessary by the central leadership team, which was determined to get rid of all oppositionists before your plenum this month opened the preconvention discussion.
That brings us to the present situation, which is absolutely unprecedented in the long history of our party. Never before has our NC opened a preconvention discussion after expelling all members known to have or suspected of having differences with the leadership. What kind of discussion can it be when the remaining members are all acutely aware of what happened to those who were going to defend political positions the party has had since its inception? Such a discussion cannot impart genuine authority to any leaders elected by such a process, and it can only discredit the party in the eyes of revolutionary workers everywhere.
How can you get the party out of the impasse to which the central leadership team has led it? There is only one way, the one proposed by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in its March 26 letter to you: Reinstate the members expelled for political reasons since the last convention if they pledge to abide by the decisions of the convention and let them participate in the preconvention discussion on the same basis as other members. This alone will make a real discussion possible; this alone will enable the party membership to hear all sides of the dispute over the central leadership team's new orientation away from Trotskyism and to pass judgment on it in a democratic and definitive way; this alone can lead the party out of its present crisis. If we oppositionists actually are splitters and disloyal, that will be demonstrated to the members in the discussion, and you will be able to expel us again after that with their approval. If on the other hand the discussion disproves the charges against us by the central leadership team, that too would benefit the party.
It will be difficult for you to make such a move, as I said earlier. But you can do it without necessarily passing judgment on the PC or the central leadership team. All you have to decide and say is: “It would be in the best interests of the party to have a democratic discussion of all the issues confronting us, but that isn't possible when the defenders of the positions challenged by the central leadership team are excluded from the discussion. Therefore, in the best interests of the party, and without prejudice to charges that the central leadership team may want to bring against oppositionists at the end of the political discussion culminating in the convention, we hereby grant the appeals of members expelled since the last convention who agree to abide by the decisions of the convention and of the leadership it elects, and reinstate them to membership at once so that they can participate fully in the preconvention discussion and other work of the party.”
I think the party members would support such a move by you with enthusiasm and gratitude. I think it would also have a healthy impact on those expellees whose unjust expulsions have had disorienting or demoralizing effects on them.
Comradely,
/s/George Breitman
January 23, 1984
National Committee Socialist Workers Party
Dear Comrades:
On January 10, 1984, I received a letter dated January 5, 1984, informing me that the Political Committee had voted to expel me from the Socialist Workers Party, and calling my attention to the provisions for appeal of such disciplinary actions in Article VIII, Section 5 of the SWP constitution.
Accordingly, I am hereby appealing my expulsion to you, as members of “the next higher body” of the party, to reverse the decision of the Political Committee.
Enclosed for your information are copies of: (1) the charges against me dated 1/1/84 signed by Mac Warren and handed to me by him; (2) my 1/3/84 Mailgram to the Political Committee requesting dismissal of the charges; and (3) the 1/5/84 letter from Craig Gannon, National Organization Secretary, informing me of my expulsion.
In addition, since I do not know and can only speculate as to what considerations led to the change in the basis for my expulsion from Mac Warren's original charges, I propose to give you a brief report of the conditions under which I was charged with disloyalty, and why I believe the action of the Political Committee was incorrect.
On Sunday, January 1, I received a phone call from Comrade Omari Musa from St. Louis asking whether I could meet his plane that evening and give him a ride from the airport. This was not an unusual personal request and I readily agreed to do so.
When I picked him up at the airport, Comrades Mac Warren and Pedro Vasquez were with him and he asked that I drive to the branch headquarters rather than to his home, since they wanted to meet with me. I had no indication of the purpose of the meeting and only learned on our arrival at the hall that Mac and Pedro were a subcommittee of the PC delegated to meet with me.
On the basis of a summary account by Comrade Warren of a California State Convention, which I heard for the first time, and his report of the actions of nameless minority delegates and of their subsequent expulsion by the State Committee for failing to repudiate remarks of a reporter concerning relations with Socialist Action, I was asked to repudiate their failure to repudiate.
Never in my 44 years in the socialist and labor movement have I been asked to make such a political judgment under such peculiar circumstances. I explained that one thing I have learned in the Socialist Workers Party is the importance of making serious political decisions as objectively as possible, on the basis of documented factual information and time to think about it. I could not repudiate something I did not know enough about.
I asked why I, in Ohio, should be asked to repudiate the actions, whatever they were, of a minority delegation in California. I could just as well be asked to repudiate actions of any comrade in any branch in the country, of which I have no knowledge.
Mac explained that the Political Committee had decided to ask all supporters of the Weinstein-Bloom-Lovell minorities to repudiate the actions of the California minority delegates. I asked whether that included me because I had supported the Breitman amendments in the 1981 convention. Mac said yes, supporters in the past three years.
He repeatedly asked whether I was clear about what I was being asked to repudiate—the actions of the minority delegates to the California State Convention in failing to repudiate the comments of their reporter.
I replied that I could not repudiate something I don't know enough about and I could not understand the reason for this extraordinary procedure, which was the opposite of the views of the National Committee as described by Comrade Barry Sheppard in his November 28 plenum report to the Cleveland Branch about the political differences which exist in the party.
(Comrade Sheppard had said that no general re-registration of the party was proposed; that those who boycott party finances or activities would be brought up on charges; and cautioned the comrades against falling into factional stances. He also indicated that discussion of political differences would be opened not later than April in preparation for our August convention. Comrade Warren was present as the reporter on the discussion on the setback in Grenada, and heard the report and discussion at the November 28 meeting in Cleveland.)
As I explained to Comrade Vasquez, I have been on different sides of many discussions in the party in the past 42 years, sometimes voting with the majority and sometimes with a minority. I consider it my obligation to vote honestly on the basis of my judgment at the time; to let further experience demonstrate whether I was right or wrong; and to change my position if convinced by additional facts or reasoning that I had been incorrect. My loyalty had never been questioned on the basis of my political opinions or my actions.
When Comrade Warren declared the meeting ended, and handed me the piece of paper charging me with disloyalty, nothing in our previous discussion had indicated any basis for the second charge. I asked, “Are you charging me with 'violation of the National Committee decision concerning relations of party members with Socialist Action'?” He replied that the meeting was over and if I wanted to make any further statements I could do so to the Political Committee which would be considering the charges on Wednesday, January 4.
As you can see by the January 4, 1984, motion, the Political Committee revised the failure-to-repudiate charge from the one with which Comrade Warren presented me, and dropped the totally unexplained and unexplainable charge of “violation of the National Committee decision concerning relations of party members with Socialist Action.”
In view of all this, it appears to me that the action of the Political Committee is an incorrect application of the decision of the National Committee, and a serious infringement of the rights that go with the obligations of membership and responsible leadership in the Socialist Workers Party.
I request that you reverse the decision of the Political Committee to expel me, and that you restore my membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
I also urge that you reject the entire procedure of the Political Committee for finding me or any other comrade disloyal, as a dangerous innovation and incorrect method for dealing with political differences in a Leninist party.
Comradely,
/s/Jean Y. Tussey
February 24, 1984
National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
14 Charles Lane
New York, N.Y. 10014
Comrades:
In a note of January 31, 1984, I notified you that I wished to appeal my expulsion and that I would send you a detailed appeal. Receipt of this notification was made to me by Rob Cahalane for the SWP National Office on February 14. Here is an account of how I was expelled and my appeal.
On January 2,1984, I received a phone call from Comrade Louise Goodman, organizer of my branch (Brooklyn), saying it was urgent that she see me the next day on behalf of the Political Committee. We set the time for the afternoon of January 3.
At the appointed time Comrade Goodman arrived accompanied by two others—Comrade Norton Sandler and a comrade whose face was familiar to me but whose name I do not know. No introduction was made other than that the Political Committee had authorized them as a subcommittee to ask me questions about a matter that had arisen at the state convention in California during a report on Socialist Action.
I replied that I had nothing to do with Socialist Action and did not intend to have anything to do with it; that I had received a copy of it in the mail only that day and had not read it as yet but that it was only to be expected that people expelled from the party would publish something and that they had a right to do so. Comrade Sandler said that while that might be true for those expelled from the party it was a question of the political attitude of people still in the SWP towards Socialist Action. To this I responded that in my opinion they should abide by whatever the party directed on the subject—if it chose to lay down any such guideline.
I then asked why I had been selected for a visit by the subcommittee or whether all party members were receiving such visits. Comrade Goodman said that not everyone was but only those who, it was thought, had an affinity for the position of the minority delegates at the California convention.
When I asked what made the subcommittee think I had any such “affinity,” she responded: “You voted for the Breitman amendment in 1981.” I was surprised by this answer and replied that this was absolutely not so. After a moment's silence she resumed by saying she would now describe what had happened in California and began an account of how a statement had been made by a spokesperson for the minority at that convention which the other minority delegates had failed to repudiate and were consequently expelled and how those whom they represented had failed to repudiate that failure to repudiate and had also been expelled; and that now I was being called upon to repudiate the failure, etc.
This complicated account was delivered in a rapid and often indistinct fashion. When I attempted to interrupt with a question, Comrade Goodman asserted: “You can assume that what I am saying is accurate.” “How can I assume that,” I asked, “when I know what you told me just a minute ago about my voting for the Breitman amendment was false.”
I added: “If what happened in California is so crucial, I'm not going to decide on the basis of a hurried, mumbled explanation. Give me something in writing, let me see a transcript of the proceedings there.”
The angry reply was: “You'll get no transcript from us!”
“Then you'll get nothing from me,” I said, “so you had better leave,” and, getting up, I showed them to the door.
Comrade Sandler tried to hand me a previously typed sheet of paper (with my name written in) charging me with disloyalty to the SWP. I refused to accept it and declared: “Look, I'll make a full confession right here and now: I'm a Trotskyist, I still believe in permanent revolution and I refuse to regress to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” He then tried to leave the paper on a table, but I picked it up, crumpled it into a ball and threw it after them as they went down the front steps. I told them: “If you understand what this purge of the party means you are no longer revolutionists but cynics; if you are unknowing tools you are nonetheless contributing to the degeneration of the party.”
Finally, as they made their way down the block towards their parked car, I called out, “You're taking part in a dirty and dishonorable business!”
Trying to look back calmly on the episode I feel regret if I made the three comrades who came to interview me feel that my anger was against them personally and would appreciate it if you would convey that fact to them. I do not think that they displayed any animus towards me nor indicated in any way that they really thought I was disloyal. I think they are well-meaning, devoted comrades who, out of ignorance and the effects of deliberate miseducation about how democratic centralism functions and what past practices in the SWP have been, believed that they were carrying out an unpleasant but necessary task for the advancement of the party.
To explain my conduct let me point out that I became infuriated upon hearing I was under suspicion of disloyalty to the Socialist Workers Party. I have been a member of the American Trotskyist movement uninterruptedly for 48 years—since 1936, two years before the founding of the SWP. In that time I have been entrusted with posts of responsibility and confidence, among them branch organizer in Boston and Youngstown, member of the National Committee and Political Committee, staff member of the Militant for almost two decades and finally its editor. I declined renomination to the National Committee to allow the election to it of more younger comrades and was quite satisfied to remain an ordinary branch member. Heretofore there had never been a whisper, let alone any charge, against my devotion and loyalty to the party.
Now, I found that all this did not weigh as a feather in the scales, but I was being subjected to a shotgun procedure to brand me as disloyal if I failed immediately and without adequate information to condemn some comrades in California for their failure to disavow an alleged statement of some alleged spokesperson at a state convention about which I knew practically nothing.
This, moreover, was confirmation of what I had already begun to sense—that I was on some sort of “enemies list” or list of suspects kept by the party leadership and that there probably was a dossier on me. And that as with most dossiers it contained erroneous and false information, such as my alleged voting for the Breitman amendment. (It so happened that I did not participate either on the branch floor or in the Internal Bulletin in the 1981 preconvention discussion or voting because of ill health and absence from New York.)
But consider for a moment what it signifies for freedom of thought and voting within the party if, under the new type of regime we are now witnessing, positions taken in preconvention discussions are to be used years later as a basis for loyalty investigations.
It is true that in the past two years I have come to hold views critical of those of the leadership. I have been greatly disturbed by the attempt to belittle the importance of Trotsky's contributions to revolutionary theory and practice, particularly to the preparations to jettison the theory of permanent revolution. I consider this a form of opportunism embarked upon in the illusory expectation of making the SWP more acceptable and attractive to the leaderships of the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions and a hoped-for new international to be set up by them.
I watched with dismay as legitimate attempts by comrades to voice disagreements with the new line, which was being imposed by the leadership without the sanction of a convention, were squelched and as trials and expulsions of individual comrades—often with great injustice and on the flimsiest charges—reached figures exceeding the total of all such trials and expulsions in the party's entire prior history. Despite my critical views I kept silent, not because I wanted to conceal my views but because no opportunity was afforded to express them—a measure of how different things are under the new type of regime in the party from the way they used to be.
As a loyal and disciplined party member I submitted to all the strictures and multifarious new ordinances against “factional” activity or discussion outside of preconvention periods. I paid my dues and pledges, increased my pledge on request, contributed to all fund drives and special funds, brought substantial financial contributions from a sympathizer to the National Office and, when asked, signed over my shares in the ownership of the West Street building to Jack Barnes.
I was determined to wait until the opening of the preconvention discussion period to air my disagreements. To be sure the postponement and unconstitutional cancellation of the convention made me wonder whether a leadership capable of such actions would not “discover” or invent some pretext to purge the party of all suspected and potential critics before allowing a discussion period bulletin. Nonetheless, I persisted in my determination to hold my tongue until one was allowed to speak.
I say that I had already sensed that I was on some sort of list of suspects. I believe that the principal cause of this was that I had maintained close personal friendships with comrades with whom I had long worked in the party and who apparently have been for some time marked out for expulsion—particularly George Breitman and James Kutcher. But that I was on such a list was confirmed for me by the remarkable runaround I got when I attempted to obtain some personal files at Pathfinder Press. When I had been editor there and had a small office I kept a file folder of personal correspondence as well as several folders of correspondence containing materials about Trotsky's literary estate. (In 1965 Trotsky's grandson, who had inherited the Old Man's literary estate from Natalia, gave me a power-of-attorney to deal with those commercial publishers in the U.S. who still had contractual rights to books by Trotsky. This required some correspondence and efforts on my part to make them pay up delinquent royalties.)
After I left Pathfinder the file cabinets were moved and after several drastic reductions in Pathfinder's floor space the cabinets and/or their contents were not to be found when I went into the office to consult them. I asked that my folder and those for the Trotsky literary estate be located and given to me to keep at home. After repeated requests Comrade Bruce at Pathfinder found them. But then a hitch developed. He was “too busy” to hand them over to me. I suggested that he or some other comrade there take five or ten minutes to look through the contents of the folders and to take out anything pertaining to Pathfinder that might have wandered into them. But he remained “too busy” and couldn't find anyone else who wasn't “too busy” to do it. It became apparent to me that he was reluctant to assume the responsibility so I suggested that he take the files to the NO and have Jack Barnes or Barry Sheppard go through them, that they could photocopy anything or everything in them if they wished, but to send me what was properly mine. When I called some days later I was informed that I could not get the file folders because the Political Bureau had discussed my request and had ruled that no documents could be taken out of the building but had to be retained there for “historical purposes.”
I then demanded by phone to be allowed to speak to Jack Barnes or Barry Sheppard. Repeatedly I was told that they were in meetings and could not be disturbed. I left messages asking that either one of them call me when their meetings were over. I never received a call.
I was unable to attend the Memorial Meeting for Farrell Dobbs in New York so I went to the one held in Boston. Barry Sheppard was the principal speaker there. My wife and I had arrived early and Barry came over to me and said that as soon as he got back to New York he would see to it that I got the files I had been seeking for the past six months.
I am still waiting.
I hereby formally request the National Committee to reverse the verdict of the Political Committee or Political Bureau on January 4,1984, expelling me from the Socialist Workers Party for disloyalty. If reinstated in the party I shall continue to support and build it to the best of my ability and I shall also attempt to make my voice heard at the appropriate times to reform the party to a democratic internal regime and to a correct revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist political line.
With revolutionary greetings,
/s/George Lavan Weissman
by the Editorial Board
Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, May 1985
George Lavan Weissman died of a heart attack in Concord, New Hampshire, on March 28, after almost half a century of service to the cause of revolutionary socialism. He had suffered from emphysema for some years but remained politically active until he had a stroke in January.
He will be remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International in 1938 and as a founder of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1984. He worked on the Militant editorial staff from 1948 to 1967 and was a member of the editorial board of our Bulletin in Defense of Marxism at the time of his death.
Weissman was born in Chicago in 1916, the only child in a petty-bourgeois family. He grew up in Boston, where he was educated at prestigious schools—Boston Latin School and Harvard College. His father, of a Jewish background although not religious, had belonged to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society at Yale before World War I. His mother came from an Irish-American background and a family that was deeply involved in trade union activity.
He became a Marxist during the Great Depression while he was at Harvard, and at the age of twenty joined the Young People's Socialist League and the Socialist Party in Boston. In the SP he met Trotskyists, including Dr. Antoinette Konikow and the Trainor brothers (Larry and Frank), who influenced his continuing evolution to the left. When they were expelled from the SP in 1937, he went with them and helped found the SWP.
While still in college, Weissman became a volunteer organizer for several unions in New England. In this capacity he was active in a rank-and-file seamen's strike in Boston in 1937, a textile workers' organizing drive in Rhode Island, a shoe workers' strike in Maine, etc. He himself was a member of the CIO National Maritime Union and the AFL Retail Clerks when he worked briefly in those industries.
But he had decided to devote most of his time and energy to building the revolutionary workers' party, and that is how he utilized his many talents from then on. Despite his petty-bourgeois origins, he spent his adult life reaching, organizing, and educating revolutionary workers. This was true even during World War II when he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private and emerged as a captain of artillery (1941-46).
After the war he was what he called a “party functionary,” an elastic term covering a broad variety of functions which the SWP assigned him to. He was a local or branch organizer in Boston (1939-41) and Youngstown (1946). At the SWP national center in New York he was director and editor of Pioneer Publishers and Pathfinder Press (1947-81); organizer for the American Committee for European Workers' Relief after World War II; manager of Mountain Spring Camp in New Jersey (1948-62); as well as editor and writer for the Militant and other party publications. He was also a member of the SWP's National and Political committees for many years and a regular or fraternal delegate to most of its national conventions before the 1970s.
Weissman and another SWP member, Constance Fox Harding, were married in 1943, and they became an exemplary team of party workers. Together they worked in all kinds of defense and solidarity cases, and together they broke new ground for the SWP by getting its presidential ticket on the ballot in several states where there were no SWP members or branches. Over the years hundreds of people in the movement were guests at “Connie and George's place” in Manhattan—some overnight, others for months at a time. Their warmth and hospitality to people in need, both party members and non-members, were almost legendary. Connie Weissman died in 1972.
Among the many organizations Weissman belonged to were the Boston youth branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the American Student Union at Harvard; the NAACP in New York; the American Veterans Committee in the Bronx, NY; the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice (in the Monroe, NC, “kissing case”), of which he was secretary; the Civil Rights Defense Committee during the period when it defended Carl Skoglund, a revolutionary leader whom the government repeatedly tried to deport to Sweden, and James Kutcher, the legless veteran purged from the Veterans Administration in Newark; and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Weissman was East Coast regional organizer.
In addition, he found time to be literary representative in this country of the Leon Trotsky estate, and to write hundreds of articles for the party press. The subjects that evoked his best writing were the Black struggle in the U.S. and American history. Perhaps a collection of these will be published some day.
Because of poor health Weissman did not play any role in the internal debates over Castroism and Trotskyism that divided SWP members prior to their 1981 national convention. Nevertheless, the SWP leadership sensed that he would never support its efforts to revise the party's program, and included him among more than 100 members purged for “disloyalty” in 1983-84.
In February 1984 he joined with other expellees in forming the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and became a member of the Bulletin IDOM editorial board. He attended the FIT's first national conference in Minneapolis last October and planned to attend the second in May 1985.
When the SWP convention in August 1984 rejected the appeals of Weissman and the others who sought reinstatement, they turned to the Fourth International and asked its recent world congress (February 1985) to intercede on their behalf. The congress responded with an overwhelming majority vote to demand that the appellants be reinstated in the SWP.
Although by this time Weissman was hospitalized after his stroke, he was exhilarated by the reports of the congress's action on this and other issues. In a message to our editorial board, he said:
I hope you won't forget to let the congress delegates know somehow how grateful we are for their support to our fight for reintegration into the party. Of course they were only doing their duty, given the facts about the purge. But not everybody does it when it is needed, or does it as effectively as it was done in this case, and I for one would like our comrades to know how much we appreciate their adherence to the principles of our International.
Surviving Weissman are Muriel McAvoy, his second wife; three stepchildren from his first marriage—James Harding of Manhattan, Dorothea Lobsenz of Los Angeles, and Timothy Harding of Los Angeles; and six grandchildren. We extend our condolences to them and to his many friends here and in Mexico.
The revolutionary movement has lost a tireless builder and a wise counselor. We honor him by continuing the struggle he conducted for forty-nine years and by seeking to recruit and educate others in his mold. Young revolutionaries will not find a better model.
Newark, NJ February 4, 1984
National Committee
Socialist Workers Party
I appeal my expulsion from the party on the false charge of disloyalty. I deeply resent such a charge because there is absolutely no valid reason for it.
On January 4, I was the subject of a hearing which consisted of a single question asked by Wendy Lyons accompanied by John Studer. She demanded that I “just answer yes or no” to a statement she had, at my insistence, written: “I repudiate the disloyal action of the minority delegates to the California state convention in not repudiating the reporter's refusal to abide by the NC motion governing relations with Socialist Action.”
My written reply: “I am/was not privy to minority delegation response and have no way of knowing what occurred, other than Wendy's account. Will not pass judgment.”
A pre-prepared charge of disloyalty and a notice of trial, my name on both, were whipped out immediately. The trial was held the same day “late afternoon or early evening” without me. I was in fact on a granted leave of absence at the time.
It was a farcical, kangaroo court proceeding: “give 'em a fair trial, then hang 'em.” No transcript of what was said, nor by whom. It was demanded that I fink, condemn, and “repudiate” comrades in a situation about which I knew nothing. All on the say-so of two members of the PC.
I do repudiate! I repudiate the unprincipled conduct of a leadership that resorts to such shameful methods of silencing political opposition by framing up and kicking out people from the party in secret. These so-called trials violate the near fifty years' long tradition of Lenin and Trotsky's concept of democratic centralism in the Socialist Workers Party.
The present leadership is embarked upon a changing course in respect to the validity of the permanent revolution, Trotsky's transitional program, and “repudiation” of Trotsky himself. The public disavowal of Trotskyism by Barnes in his YSA speech and then in the first edition of New International presages a break with the Fourth International.
My appeal stems from the belief that the SWP has not yet (though well on its way) become just another of the many pseudo-Marxist/Leninist parties that now abound. It is still a revolutionary party.
My appeal for reacceptance comes from a willingness to loyally help in a reversal of direction. I don't believe the members will allow the Barnes leadership to continue passing itself off as the party.
/s/Larry Stewart
May 26, 1984
Dear Comrade Mason:
This letter is directed to you as a fighter for Black liberation and leader in the working-class struggle for justice in this country. It comes from a Black worker who for many years was a loyal member of the SWP and who supports your presidential candidacy and the SWP's overall political platform without any reservation.
I have voiced that support to all my friends and everyone I know. By letter to the SWP and vocally I have volunteered to work for your campaign in any way that I can. These offers have received no response—until last Sunday night, May 20, when I was physically barred from attending your campaign rally in Newark.
I was one of many members undemocratically expelled from the SWP early this year under the guise of “disloyalty.” The real reason we were expelled was that we hold political perspectives different from the current leadership and possibly a majority of the membership. When we protested and asked to be reinstated, the leadership took a step to prevent any kind of collaboration, fraternization, or discussion between us and the SWP membership: it instructed all branches to ban us from all public activities of the party, including its forums, bookstores, and election rallies. The pretext given is that we are disrupters linked to anti-party enemy groups and possibly government Cointelpro operations.
I shall not dwell at length on the mingled feelings of outrage and resentment I experienced in the May 20 incident. I found it necessary to state and restate the truth that I only wanted to attend the public election rally and had no intention of trying to force my way in. I had to repeat a number of times that I wasn't there to cause any disturbance or provocation. Surely you can understand the intensity of my feelings at being confronted and barred from participating in a party event by comrades, including some I've known for many years—at the same time that members of actual opponent and hostile groups, like Stalinists and Social Democrats as well as Republicans and Democrats, were free to enter the rally from which I was barred.
Later I learned that racists had made a death threat against you that very day. What a bitter irony that the defense guard that day spent time and vigilance in excluding a supporter of your campaign!
But it is necessary to subordinate subjective feelings and to pose the problem politically. That is the main reason I am writing to you now.
An election campaign is an opportunity for the revolutionary party to reach many more people with its message than it normally does. This is doubly true of presidential campaigns, which usually result in the SWP and YSA getting more new contacts, friends, and recruits than at other times.
For this to happen the party of course has to have an open and outgoing policy and attitude toward the non-party forces it encounters during the election campaign. That has traditionally been the course followed by the SWP since its first presidential campaign in 1948, as I can personally testify. We reached out to non-party members, invited them to participate actively in the campaign work, even if they did not fully agree with our platform. We did not bar anyone from petitioning or campaigning with us merely because they did not measure up to our internal standards for party membership. As a result, there were thousands of workers over the years who regarded Farrell Dobbs as their candidate and the SWP as their party even though they did not join it.
This year the SWP has invited all who support your campaign to participate actively in it—by collecting petitions to get on the ballot, by circulating our literature, by helping to finance the campaign, by joining the SWP or YSA, etc. This is unquestionably a correct non-exclusionary policy in full accord with our best traditions and methods.
But how effectively can it work if simultaneously the non-party elements we are reaching can see other Mason-Gonzalez supporters excluded from election rallies simply because of some internal party difference that really has nothing to do with the campaign? Won't that make the SWP look sectarian and hypocritical? Won't that antagonize and alienate the forces we are trying to attract through the campaign?
This is a point that Frank Lovell made recently at the end of his article about the 1984 election campaign, in the May issue of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (No. 7): “Significant new forces cannot be won in an atmosphere which demands total agreement with the SWP leadership on every point as a condition for participating in the Mason-Gonzalez campaign.”
I am not trying to embarrass you or put you on the spot. I am not asking you to agree with everything said above. What I want is to urge you, as the party's chief banner-bearer in this year's campaign, as the party member having major responsibility for the effectiveness of the campaign, to try to persuade the party leadership that the best interests of the party will be served by cancelling the present exclusion policy. Nobody should be barred from SWP events merely because they are on some blacklist compiled by the SWP leadership. Such blacklisting may serve temporary factional purposes but only at the expense of the SWP's public standing and authority.
The party leadership will listen to you if you raise this question with them because they know that you will do it only out of concern for the best interests of the campaign. The party membership will breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of this exclusionary millstone around their necks. And non-party workers reached in this campaign will have an additional reason to come closer to the campaign and the SWP.
Comradely,
/s/Larry Stewart
Before he was hospitalized, Larry Stewart wrote the first draft of an appeal to the 1985 World Congress of the Fourth International.
Newark, NJ., U.S.A.
November 7, 1984
To the 1985 World Congress of the Fourth International
Comrades:
In 1939 I joined the Fourth International and the Socialist Workers Party simultaneously (at that time, before the Voorhis Act prohibited such affiliations, the SWP was a section of the FI). The FI was then a few months old, the SWP a little over a year old. So I have been a Fourth Internationalist for over forty-five years—in good times and bad, in wartime and in peacetime. Similarly, I was a loyal and disciplined member of the SWP for more than forty-four years—until I was condemned as a “secret factionalist” and “splitter” last January and was expelled without a chance to confront my accusers at a trial.
But my appeal to you—to reject my expulsion and to help me and others expelled to be reinstated in the SWP—is not based on the length of my membership or “seniority.” It is based, first of all, on the elementary requirements of proletarian justice. I am innocent of all the charges against me (like the other victims of the recent SWP purge). I am the victim of a frame-up. You owe it to me and to all the other members of the International to defend me and to clear my name of the muck that the SWP leadership tried to drown us in. This is not something I ask as a special favor—I demand it as the right of every honest member of the International.
The second basis for my appeal is that it serves the best interests of the movement as a whole—the interests of the SWP and the interests of the FI. What both need, in order to strengthen our movement for its great liberating tasks, is the reunification of all Fourth Internationalists in the U.S. inside the SWP and under the banner of the SWP But this cannot be achieved as long as some of us bear the stigma of “splitters,” “secret factionalists” and participants in “disruption campaigns against the SWP.” That is why you have to uphold the appeals of the expelled SWP members as the first step on the road to a solution of the crisis of SWP-FI relations.
I do not make the error of thinking that our appeals are the most important point on the agenda of your Congress. Far more important and decisive is the need for the International to reject the various liquidationist schemes, proposals, and moods that have surfaced since the 1979 Congress; and, within that context, to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted splits. But there is no contradiction between these major tasks and favorable action on our appeals. In fact, they fit together quite harmoniously.
In conclusion, I hope that your Congress will be successful in maintaining and preserving the revolutionary character the FI has always had, and I subscribe to the words of Leon Trotsky in 1938, shortly before I joined: “Long live the Socialist Workers Party of the United States! Long live the Fourth International!”
Comradely,
/s/Larry Stewart
At its meeting in February 1985, the World Congress of the Fourth International decided by an overwhelming majority that Stewart and his comrades had been unjustly expelled and demanded their reinstatement in the SWP.
Larry Stewart was still working on this article when he died in November 1984. His notes were edited by George Breitman, with whom he collaborated throughout his 45 years of activity in the Marxists Black, and labor movements.
Jack Barnes and his group in the SWP leadership decided, before the party's August 1981 convention, that the SWP should junk the theory of permanent revolution and other aspects of the traditional Trotskyist program that are repugnant to Fidel Castro and the current he represents. But instead of saying this openly at the convention and letting the delegates decide what to do about it, the Barnes group denied that they had any intention of changing the party's position on permanent revolution, and waited until two days after the convention before taking the first open steps to disassociate themselves from Trotskyism and principal parts of the SWP program.
This was done in a one-step-at-a-time fashion during the next 17 months, partly in the party's public press and partly through an internal reeducation program centered around carefully selected writings of Lenin. When some party members asked for an internal literary discussion to discuss changes of such magnitude before they were made publicly, they were assailed as disrupters, factionalists, and petty-bourgeois capitulators to the pressures of capitalism, and they were warned they would be expelled if they tried to organize any unauthorized discussion.
But finally, on December 31, 1982, in a speech at a Young Socialist Alliance convention in Chicago, Jack Barnes dropped the other shoe with a public declaration that the theory of permanent revolution must be “discarded.”
When opponents of this position protested such a public change without approval by any SWP convention, or even any discussion by the membership, they were told they would be able to discuss the Barnes speech during the next preconvention discussion period (then slated for the summer of 1983) and that they were prohibited from discussing it before then. But the Barnes group postponed the convention until August 1984, and in the meantime used phony charges to expel each and every member who they thought might object in the preconvention discussion to the rejection of permanent revolution.
In this way the members of the SWP were deprived of their democratic right to hear a two-sided discussion of the correctness or incorrectness of the program and policies that have guided the SWP and FI since they were founded in 1938. And that is why I and other advocates of permanent revolution never had a chance inside the SWP to explain what we thought was wrong and dangerous in the Barnes position (printed in the Fall 1983 New International under the title “Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today”).
Other expelled members and some members of the FI outside of the U.S. have written effective replies to Barnes. It is not my intention here to repeat their arguments, which the Barnes group has never bothered to answer. All I want to raise are some questions about a single aspect of the new position which I haven't seen discussed by others and which I would have raised inside the SWP if I hadn't been expelled.
To buttress his position that our movement must “discard” the theory or strategy of permanent revolution, Barnes painted a very negative picture of the effects it has had on our movement since 1928.
“Especially in relation to the class struggle in the oppressed nations,” and “especially in this hemisphere since 1959,” he said in the NI article, the weaknesses in Trotsky's theory have opened the door to “leftist biases and sectarian political errors.” He doesn't prove that such errors result from adherence to permanent revolution, he only asserts that they do. For more than a century all kinds of stupid and criminal things have been done by people who call themselves and consider themselves to be Marxists. Barnes wouldn't propose discarding Marxism on that basis, so how can he pretend it is valid to discard permanent revolution merely because errors or sins are committed by people who think or say they stand for that strategy?
Permanent revolution, Barnes continued, has nothing to offer us and in fact can only be an “obstacle.” It “does not contribute today to arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist revolution.” It is an obstacle to “reknitting our political continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the first four congresses of the Communist Intemational.” It has been an obstacle in our movement to “an objective reading of the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin.” It will be an obstacle to “our own progress toward a deeper integration into the organizations and struggles of the working class and its oppressed and exploited allies.”
If these claims are true, or even only half-true, why did it take Barnes and his group more than 20 years to discover them? Can it be that he is distorting not only the real meaning of permanent revolution but also its effects on our movement?
It certainly can. As most SWP members in the 1960s could testify, permanent revolution has had highly beneficial effects on the SWP and was a major source of its strength and attractiveness in the 1960s, when Barnes was recruited. The two issues that won most of the new members to the SWP at that time—the Cuban revolution and the Black struggle in this country—were both linked inextricably to the strategy of permanent revolution, in reality and in the minds of SWP members, new and old.
Contrary to Barnes's implications (about “this hemisphere” and “since 1959”), the SWP played a thoroughly revolutionary role in relation to the Cuban revolution, in its practice as well as in its theory. In fact, it was this combination of the SWP's correct practice and correct theory regarding the Cuban revolution that drew Barnes and others like him to Marxism in the first place.
Until a few years ago nobody in the SWP questioned the link between permanent revolution and the SWP's position on Cuba. As recently as 1978, Barnes took the initiative in collecting Joseph Hansen's writings on Cuba in book form as Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution. From start to finish that book is an exposition and defense of Trotsky's theory, which Hansen held had been fully confirmed by the Cuban experience. It is a book that cries out against the new positions of the Barnes group since 1979, when Hansen died. Whatever “weaknesses” they now profess to see in permanent revolution, the SWP's record on Cuba is evidence of the healthy and fruitful effects it had for decades in “arming ... revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power.”
Barnes pretends to review the ways in which permanent revolution “has actually been used by us” since 1928; he even specifies the number of ways (three). One of these ways he pronounces harmless, but unnecessary, and the other two he condemns as harmful. Despite his attempt to seem objective, what the uninformed reader will “actually” get from this is a misleading concept of the place and centrality of permanent revolution in the life and thought of our movement. I will try to demonstrate this through the SWP's relation to the Black struggle in the U.S. I am compelled to do this because Barnes completely ignores the connection between the SWP's position on Black liberation and permanent revolution—a connection that happens to be a major hallmark of the SWP since its foundation.
The Black struggle presents a challenge and test for every organization seeking to play a revolutionary role in this country. The way in which the SWP responded was always a source of pride and inspiration to its members, white as well as Black. Barnes and most of his generation in the SWP acknowledged and reflected these feelings hundreds of times in the 1960s and 70s. A thick book could be filled with their statements and writings on the SWP's special and unique understanding of the Black struggle and its dynamics.
As a matter of fact, the SWP's position was so exceptional that it was given a special name: “combined revolution” (or “combined character” of the coming American revolution). This name was coined in 1969, in preparation for the SWP's 23rd national convention, where Barnes and members of his generation first assumed political leadership status in our party.
“Combined revolution” was not a new concept in the SWP in the 1960s. It referred to the combination of the Black struggle against racist oppression and for self-determination with the workers' struggle against capitalist exploitation and for socialism, and said that this combination was indispensable for the victory of both these struggles. This idea was adopted at the SWP's 1963 convention (in the resolution called “Freedom Now”). What it got at the 1969 convention was a new and more effective expression, thanks to the development of Black nationalism and the rich experience of the entire decade.
But the lineage or continuity of the combined revolution idea goes back further than 1963. It goes back to the 1930s and Leon Trotsky, who introduced it to our movement at a time when we had a correct understanding of the class character of the Black struggle but an incorrect understanding of its national character. And the name used then for the idea of combining the democratic struggles of the Blacks with the anticapitalist struggles of the workers was—permanent revolution.
The first one who seems to have said that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was applicable to the Black struggle in this country was Albert Weisbord, an ex-CP member briefly on the fringes of the Left Opposition. When Trotsky was told about this at a discussion on self-determination in 1933, he said, “Weisbord is correct in a certain sense that the self-determination of the Negroes belongs to the question of the permanent revolution in America.” [1]
Trotsky reiterated this thought in 1939 during a discussion with members of the newly founded SWP, and the party itself, in a 1939 convention resolution influenced by Trotsky's views, said: “The SWP must recognize that its attitude to the Negro question is crucial for its future development. Hitherto the party has been based mainly on privileged workers and groups of isolated intellectuals. Unless it can find its way to the great masses of the underprivileged, of whom the Negroes constitute so important a section, the broad perspectives of the permanent revolution will remain only a fiction and the party is bound to degenerate.” [2]
If combined revolution is permanent revolution applied to a particular problem, was a new name really needed? Why not continue to call it by its original name? My personal opinion is that the new name was better than the old—it made it easier for us to communicate the idea to people we wanted to introduce it to. Also, every generation has the right to its own terminology and vocabulary. When I was young, we used to speak of “Negroes” and “colored people,” but later generations prefer other names. If young revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s felt more comfortable with their own name for the revolutionary strategy based on the necessity to combine democratic and socialist tasks and struggles, there was nothing wrong with that. The important thing was the political content behind the names, which was essentially the same in both cases.
This is not just my opinion, it was the opinion of the whole party. The main political resolution adopted by the 1969 convention contained an excellent presentation of the combined revolution concept. I will quote a few passages from it to illustrate how its content and language were interchangeable with those used in our writings about permanent revolution:
The movement for Black liberation is a complex and contradictory fusion of two explosive trends. One is an irrepressible and powerful democratic thrust for self-determination as a distinctive national minority. This is combined with a proletarian struggle against the capitalist rulers. All those who fail to understand the dual character of the Afro-American movement and combined characteristics of the coming American revolution are bound to go astray in comprehending its development and orienting correctly toward it.
The problem of winning full democratic rights and national emancipation for Black Americans is a task that was unsolved by the American bourgeois revolutionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been handed down for solution to the socialist revolution of the twentieth century....
The Afro American struggle for liberation is the most formidable expression of the logic of permanent revolution in American life today. It has begun on the basis of a fight for national emancipation. But this democratic objective cannot be obtained except through all-out combat against the entire capitalist system, which holds down the Black masses for its own profiteering reasons. Thus, regardless of the prevailing ideas of its participants, the thrust toward national liberation inexorably tends to merge with the broader class struggle against capitalist domination ...
The combined character of the mass Afro-American movement to gain power to have control over their own future precludes any separation of stages in the struggle for its nationalist demands and socialist objectives. There cannot first be a successfully concluded struggle for national independence and democratic rights and afterwards a struggle for social liberation. The two must be indissolubly combined and will, in fact, reciprocally reinforce each other. The nationalist demands must be tied in with working-class demands in order to obtain either. [3]
At that 1969 convention Jack Barnes was the Political Committee reporter in behalf of the political resolution, and he did a good job in presenting its main lines, especially on the Black struggle. Among other things, he said:
The basic characteristic of the Afro-American struggle is the struggle by an oppressed nationality for self-determination: the struggle to accomplish the historically deferred tasks that the American bourgeoisie proved incapable of accomplishing in their second revolution and that they turned away from as the United States became an imperialist power ...
The alliance between the struggle by the Afro-Americans and the other oppressed national minorities or nationalities in this country and the struggle of the workers is the key to the success of the American revolution .... It is basically a question not of morality but of necessity. If there is no alliance, the American revolution will be impossible ...
The third American revolution will have a combined character. It will be a workers' struggle for power and a struggle by the oppressed nationalities for liberation and for self-determination. It will be a struggle that only a workers' government established in the United States will be able to bring to a successful conclusion. And through it, not only will all the democratic rights of the oppressed minorities and nationalities finally be brought into being and guaranteed, but also the proletarian demands of the workers of all sections of the country will be met. The problem that has bothered, confused and stood somewhat in the way of American radicalism for many, many years (and outside of our movement it still does) is clearly seeing the independent character of the Afro-American struggle for self-determination and the combined character of the coming struggle for power in the United States.
This struggle is the clearest manifestation in the United States of the permanent revolution. By this we mean that there will be no division of this struggle into separate stages; there will be no middle solution. There will be no solution to the national-democratic demands of the Black masses apart from the solution of the exploitation by capitalism of the workers themselves. The revolution will be combined, or it will not take place ...
This key question of the American revolution is one that is hopeless to solve without the tools of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism and the experience of the last period as revolutionists. [4]
If I had room, I could cite dozens of other quotations by members and supporters of the Barnes group showing that until recently they considered combined revolution to be an application or manifestation or expression of the logic of permanent revolution and that they consistently interpreted and explained combined revolution along the lines that Trotsky had done with permanent revolution. But I think it will be adequate to submit the testimony of just two people whom I have not quoted up to now.
One is George Novack, who was interested in the Black struggle ever since he joined our party in the 1930s and who participated in the writing or editing of most of the SWP's major resolutions on Black liberation. In 1971 he gave lectures on the Transitional Program at Oberlin, in the course of which he traced the development of the SWP's assessment of the successive stages of Black nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s and its theoretical analysis of its motive forces, principal features, and aims:
They [American Trotskyists] were greatly aided in this task by the method of Marxism, the positions worked out by Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the national question in our era, and by the acute previsions of Trotsky contained in the pamphlet Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination ...
We can claim a certain amount of success in this theoretical-political work. It is widely recognized in radical circles, black and white, that the Socialist Workers Party outstripped all other tendencies in grasping the importance of black nationalism ...
All this indicates the capacity of our cadres to recognize what is new in a mass ferment and adjust our views, strategy, and tactics accordingly. That would not have been possible without the aid of the theory of the permanent revolution and the law of uneven and combined development, taken from Trotsky's teachings. [5]
The second witness I will cite is Gus Horowitz, who is no longer a member of the SWP. In the late 1960s and 70s he was a leader of the party's educational and publishing work, assigned among other things to promoting understanding and literature about the national question.
Between the 1969 and 1974 world congresses of the FI, sharp factional debates took place in our International over a great many political and theoretical issues. One of these was about the national question and its application in imperialist countries. Ernest Mandel, a leading member of the United Secretariat, said in a criticism of SWP positions in 1973: “The whole notion of applying the formula of permanent revolution to imperialist countries is extremely dubious in the best of cases. It can only be done with the utmost circumspection, and in the form of an analogy.” [6]
The SWP leadership assigned Horowitz to rebut Mandel. I don't know what either Mandel or Horowitz thinks about this question today, but here is what Horowitz said on behalf of the SWP leadership in 1973:
Circumspection is always desirable, of course, but Comrade [Mandel] is simply wrong. The permanent revolution can indeed be applied to the advanced capitalist countries, and the Trotskyist movement has been doing so for a long time (particularly in regard to the national question). And a revolutionist in Canada, in Spain, or in Ireland who does not know how to apply it will be in deep trouble....
Trotsky developed the theory of permanent revolution, an extension of the Marxist understanding of the law of uneven and combined development, in relation to the problems of the Russian revolution. The specific features of that situation were quite different than, say, the problems of the revolution in Black Africa today. But using the method of the permanent revolution, we can apply it there. The problems of the revolution in advanced capitalist countries are much more different, but it remains essential for Marxists to tackle the problems there that stem from uneven and combined development—for example, the still-existing uncompleted national tasks in the framework of an advanced capitalist economy. That is why the revolution in Canada, for example, will most likely be a combined revolution—combining the Quebecois national independence struggle with the proletarian socialist revolution in Quebec and in all of Canada. [7]
Barnes, as I have noted, alleged that he was reviewing the different ways we have used the concept of permanent revolution since 1928. Why then did he omit all the material showing the numerous links between permanent revolution and the SWP's position on Black liberation in the U.S.?
It wasn't because he was unaware of this material. And it wasn't because he was ignorant about the weight and centrality of combined revolution in the SWP's total program. So what was the reason?
Thus far, I am unable to offer an answer. But I am very concerned about the Barnes omissions on this point whatever the answer may be. Because it seems to me that they place a question mark over the party's hard-won and precious analysis and program for the Black struggle. Is the Barnes group preparing to change that too?
I am not saying that they are preparing to do so, I am asking—are they preparing? If raising such a question gives the impression that I am “too suspicious,” I must have got that way as a result of recent party history. If anybody had told me five years ago that the SWP leadership would repudiate permanent revolution, and would do it in such a dishonest and undemocratic way, I would have considered the teller a nut of some kind. The Barnes group committed those offenses against proletarian politics and morality without ever announcing in advance what they were up to. That is why my question is in order now, before it may be too late. At the very least, the Barnes group should be watched closely and pressured to disclose their real aims whenever they are ambiguous or diplomatically silent.
The question I ask is not based only on the omissions by Barnes. Even more it is induced by things the SWP leadership has been saying and doing (or not saying and not doing) in relation to the Black struggle itself during the last three or four years. To discuss this adequately will take another article, but I will mention aspects of the problem because it is part of the background to my question about whether the party's position on the Black struggle is being changed without discussion.
It is obvious, first of all, that the Black struggle no longer receives the kind or amount of attention—politically, theoretically, practically, educationally—that it used to command in the SWP. It is not the central question it used to be for the party. The level of writing on the subject, which used to be one of our chief assets, is now embarrassingly low. New members get more of agitation than of education in the ideas of combined revolution. They are encouraged to talk to each other rather than trained how to participate effectively in the Black movement.
It has been several years since party resolutions have made any serious analysis of the Black community and the trends in it or provided any guide to action for our Black cadres. The exception is in relation to the National Black Independent Political Party, a very small group that tried to establish a new political pole in the Black community.
It was correct for us to join NBIPP, explore its potential, and aid in its development toward independent politics. But within a year it was absolutely clear that NBIPP was incapable of playing any serious role in the community, that its leaders were leaning toward the Black Democrats, that they were energetic only about expelling Marxists, and that most of the founding members had quit. NBIPP not only never led a single action among Blacks anywhere in the country, but it was incapable of even producing any literature to educate anybody about politics. Some of its leaders found their way to Jesse Jackson in the Democratic Party, and through Jackson to Mondale. After several years it remains a tiny sect, self-isolated and unknown in the community.
Yet the SWP leadership persists in shutting its eyes to this reality and continues to view this hopeless shell as the center of the Black struggle, devoting more time and attention to it than to all other Black forces and trends. And whenever questions arise about NBIPP's viability, it defends this obtuseness by pointing to, praising, and reprinting the radical-sounding sections of the charter that NBIPP adopted when it was founded. Nobody else in NBIPP ever considered the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist paragraphs in the charter as anything but rhetoric, and NBIPP itself never even printed the charter. [8] But the SWP leaders were obsessed by what I can only call “charter fetishism” and invoked it to ward off facing reality.
All this is a sign of acute disorientation on the part of the Barnes group. They could not commit such errors if their thinking about the Black struggle was still firmly rooted in combined revolution. This reinforces, for me, the urgency of my question, and the need for the whole SWP membership to seek an unambiguous answer:
Does the repudiation of permanent revolution signify or imply any alteration in the SWP's theory and practice of combined revolution?
1. Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, Pathfinder Press, 1978, p. 25.
2. The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, Monad Press, 1982, p. 357.
3. Towards an American Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1970, pp. 164-6. (My emphasis — L.S.)
4. Ibid., pp. 143-5. (My emphasis — L.S.)
5. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1977, pp. 43-4. (My emphasis—LS.)
6. International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 4, 4/73, p. 34.
7. IIDB, Vol. 10, No. 10, 7/73, p. 7. (My emphasis—LS.)
8. This was true at the time Stewart died, in November 1984. Since then, a split in NBIPP, following the witch-hunt of SWP members and sympathizers, resulted in the emergence of two factions, each calling itself NBIPP. One of these published the 4-year-old charter.
This article was originally written as part of “Permanent Revolution and Black Liberation in the U.S.,” which Larry Stewart was still working on when he died in November 1984. George Breitman divided it into two separate articles when he edited the unfinished manuscript after Stewart's death. The first was published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism No. 17, April 1985.
More than any other person, Leon Trotsky shaped the SWP's thinking about the nature of the Black struggle in the U.S. Despite his considerable influence and prestige among us, he wasn't able to accomplish this all at once.
In 1933, when Trotsky was exiled in Turkey, he tried to convince the leaders of our movement that they should support the right of self-determination for Blacks in this country. But they didn't understand his arguments and they didn't agree.
It was not until 1939, when Trotsky was living in Mexico, that he persuaded us of the progressive character of Black nationalism and helped the SWP to adopt our first resolution having a fully Leninist approach to self-determination. (Both episodes are documented in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, Pathfinder Press, 1978.)
This, plus the development of the Black struggle itself and the lessons we learned from that during the next 30 years, enabled us to work out our policy of “combined revolution.” An application of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution to a particular American reality, this policy combines the democratic struggle of Blacks against racism with the workers' struggle against capitalism. For a long time it gave the SWP a definite theoretical and practical advantage over all other tendencies in the radical movement.
But now the Barnes group in the SWP leadership has set itself the goal of fusion with the Castroist current and puts this goal ahead of everything else. It has repudiated the policy of permanent revolution (without explaining what effect that repudiation has on the policy of combined revolution) and it is trying in other ways to indicate that the SWP should no longer be considered “Trotskyist.”
One of the ways of doing this is to demote Trotsky from the highest level of revolutionary authority and stature, next to Lenin, to a secondary level, alongside Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, etc.
Demoting Trotsky doesn't necessarily involve belittling him directly or denying that he was a good revolutionary (except with regard to permanent revolution, political revolution, etc.). Often it only involves assertions or hints that when Trotsky was doing certain good things, these were not exceptional contributions because he was only acting in accord with decisions made by the Communist International in Lenin's time.
Efforts along this line are being made by the Barnes group especially in relation to Trotsky's views and record on the U.S. Black struggle. They can't attack him on these matters—yet—but they can and do try to whittle down his place in the history of our party's long fight to achieve a correct policy and correct practice in that struggle.
Here, for example, is what Jack Barnes said in his most famous speech (“Their Trotsky and Ours,” Dec. 31, 1982) when he was listing the things Trotsky had done in the 1930s that Barnes approved: “Trotsky also carried on the Comintern's work of educating revolutionists in the United States about the centrality of the struggle for Black self-determination and of the vanguard role of Black workers in the class struggle.” v[9]
Carrying on the Comintern's work—how can anyone object to Barnes saying that? What's wrong with putting Trotsky's contributions in their historic context? Nothing at all, if the Comintern's work is assessed correctly and if Trotsky only continued it and did not add to it significantly.
Operation-Cut-Trotsky-Down-to-Size started two days after the SWP's August 1981 convention, at an expanded meeting of the Political Committee where the Barnes group introduced a new educational-reorientation program focused on carefully selected portions of Lenin's writings. Two reading lists were introduced to show SWP members what to read. The second, entitled “Reading List on the Communist International Under Lenin,” is relevant here because of its last section, which we are reprinting from Party Organizer, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 1982, p. 3:
VII. The Black struggle
* Lenin on the United States, New World Publishers, pp. 123-131 and pp. 303-306; Progress Publishers, pp. 124-132 and 301-304 (also in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 22, pp. 24-31; Vol. 23, pp. 271-273).
In 1915 in his study of agriculture in the United States, Lenin took up the question of Black oppression. In early 1917 in an article on the national question inside the advanced capitalist countries Lenin says that Blacks, “should be classed as an oppressed nation....”
* The National Liberation Movement in the East, Lenin, p. 272.
In the “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” presented to the second congress Blacks are again characterized by Lenin as an oppressed nation.
* The Second Congress of the Communist International, Vol. I, pp. 120-124.
In his remarks at the second congress on the Black struggle in the United States John Reed argues that the key question facing Blacks is class exploitation rather than national oppression.
* Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos, “The Black Question,” pp. 328-331 (also in The Communist International Documents 1919-1943, Degras, Vol. I, pp. 398-401).
This resolution, adopted at the fourth congress, took up the struggle of Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.
* First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. II, Trotsky, “A Letter to Claude McKay,” pp. 354-356.
Lenin was the greatest revolutionary that the human race has produced so far. His teachings and example are precious and irreplaceable for revolutionaries of our time. As a Pathfinder Press note puts it, he “restored Marxism as the theory and practice of revolution in the imperialist epoch after it had been debased by the opportunists, revisionists, and fatalists of the Second International.” Where would we be today if he had not been on the scene then?
But Lenin was only one man, with limited time and capacity. He could not solve all problems for his and later generations. He did make very valuable contributions to the revolutionary comprehension of the far-off U.S. Black struggle, but he did not have the time or opportunity to study the question deeply, and it would be foolish of us to expect or pretend otherwise.
First of all, Lenin's comments on the Black struggle in the U.S. are quite brief, and are usually made in the course of broader discussion of other questions. Because of their brevity, almost anyone can look them all up in a few hours if you have access to a good library.
The library I went to has the 45 volumes of the latest English translation of Lenin's Collected Works plus a two-volume index, all published in Moscow. In the subject index you can find all the places where Lenin ever mentioned Negroes, slaves, Africans, etc. It doesn't take long because there are only 30 to 40 such places. Most of the references are quite insignificant—sometimes only a word or a sentence. Some are very important and suggestive, despite their brevity.
“Lenin took up the question of Black oppression” in his 1915 study of U.S. agriculture, the SWP reading list says. Yes, but unfortunately only in passing. In this 85-page pamphlet he said:
There is no need to elaborate on the degraded social status of the Negroes; the American bourgeoisie is in no way better in this respect than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Having “freed” the Negroes, it took good care, under “free,” republican-democratic capitalism, to restore everything possible and impossible for the most shameless and despicable oppression of the Negroes.
Later in the pamphlet he refers to “the existence of still-unparcelled slaveholding plantations in the South, with its downtrodden and oppressed Negro population ... [10]
These passages show that in 1915 Lenin unquestionably considered U.S. Blacks to be oppressed, but they say nothing about the specific nature of that oppression. It would have been difficult for most people reading that pamphlet in 1915 to conclude that Lenin was referring to national oppression.
That is not the case with the next excerpt in the SWP reading list, a 1917 passage saying that Blacks “should be classed as an oppressed nation....” A part of a paragraph about the national composition of the U.S. and Japan, in a pamphlet entitled “Statistics and Sociology,” here is the passage in its entirety:
In the United States, the Negroes (and also the Mulattos and Indians) account for only 11.1 percent [of the total population]. They should be classed as an oppressed nation, for the equality won in the Civil War of 1861-65 and guaranteed by the Constitution of the republic was in many respects increasingly curtailed in the chief Negro areas (the South) in connection with the transition from the progressive, pre-monopoly capitalism of 1860-70 to the reactionary, monopoly capitalism (imperialism) of the new era, which in America was especially sharply etched out by the Spanish-American imperialist war of 1898 (i.e., a war between two robbers over the division of the booty). [11]
This is very good; despite its brevity, anybody reading it in 1917 could have seen what Lenin's essential position was on the national oppression of U.S. Blacks.
But it did not have this effect on anybody because nobody else read this pamphlet in 1917 or many years after that. As the SWP reading list neglects to mention, Lenin started this pamphlet in January 1917 but never finished it; the Russian revolution broke out a few weeks later, and his new tasks prevented completion of the pamphlet. So no one else saw it at the time, and in fact it was not published, even in its unfinished form, until 1935, 11 years after his death.
This means that nobody in the Comintern “under Lenin” could possibly have been influenced or educated by the contents of “Statistics and Sociology.” It shows what Lenin thought, but not what the Comintern thought.
Now we come to the third and last Lenin citation on the reading list—the “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” which Lenin wrote for the Comintern's second congress in 1920. Thesis 11 said, in part:
It is also necessary ... that all Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies. [12]
The reading list says, correctly, that in that passage “Blacks are again characterized by Lenin as an oppressed nation.” And since Lenin's theses were written for a Comintern congress, a reader might conclude that the Comintern shared Lenin's view, especially since the reading list has nothing to say about this.
But such a conclusion would be altogether wrong. After discussing Lenin's draft theses at the congress, the delegates amended them, and the reference to Ireland and the American Negroes was deleted from the final draft, which now says:
It is also necessary ... to give direct support to the revolutionary movements in dependent nations and those deprived of their rights, through the Communist Parties of the countries in questions. [13]
Why this deletion was made the delegates were not told and we do not know. Perhaps it was because some delegates were opposed to including U.S. Blacks among dependent nations and nations deprived of their rights. John Reed (see the fourth item on the SWP reading list) was not speaking for himself alone when he stressed the class aspects of the struggle over its national aspects; and nobody at the congress got up to rebut his one-sided position.
We don't know why the deletion was made and it's not too important, except for one thing: not only at the second congress but at all the other congresses held in Lenin's lifetime (the third and fourth), the Comintern failed to endorse Lenin's position that U.S. Blacks are an oppressed nation or nationality.
That position was never adopted by the Comintern until 1928, four years after Lenin died, when the Comintern was being strangled by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Until then, the Comintern and the CP in this country rejected the right of self-determination for U.S. Blacks and wrongly counterposed class struggle to national struggle, instead of dialectically combining them.
The fifth item on the reading list says that the Comintern's fourth congress in 1922 adopted “The Black Question,” a resolution that “took up the struggle of Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.” It took them up all right but its main emphasis was on class and democratic demands (“for the racial equality of blacks and whites, for equal wages and equal social and political rights,” campaigns to force the unions to admit Blacks, etc.). There was nothing in the resolution about the national oppression of U.S. Blacks or anything else that John Reed would have objected to.
For what I have written above I may be accused of hostility to the Comintern. There wouldn't be an iota of truth in such a charge. The Comintern in Lenin's time was the most revolutionary organization the world had ever seen. It blazed many of the paths we are following now and will follow until capitalism is banished from this globe.
Its greatest contribution to the U.S. Black struggle was not in charting a correct or complete program for it but in reeducating U.S. and other communists to “shake off their unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.” [14] Its “harsh” and “insistent” work along this line was by itself sufficient cause for us to remember the Comintern in Lenin's time with the highest respect and appreciation.
But the Comintern had weak sides as well as strong ones. It was fallible and it made mistakes. Alongside some of its most inspiring achievements, it unconsciously carried over some harmful notions and practices inherited from the Second International; or it sometimes reacted to opportunism with corrections that were warped by ultraleftism.
This may come as a shock to SWP members who have been disoriented by the Barnes group's recent campaign to set the Comintern and its documents on a pedestal, and to “justify” its current revisions and theoretical retrogressions with poorly read and poorly assimilated citations from Comintern documents of Lenin's time.
The first four congresses of the Comintern are foundation stones of the Fourth International and the SWP. We could not exist, we could not be what we are, without the theoretical and political tools we inherited from them. But because the Comintern was not infallible, because many things in the world have changed since Lenin's time, we cannot find all the answers to today's problems in those documents, and must learn to use the method they used rather than swallow every formulation they contain.
I am not an authority on Comintern literature, but what I have read of its treatment of the Black struggle, the trade unions, and women's liberation convinces me that while most of this literature was valid and progressive at that time, it also contains false starts and errors that can do us big damage today if we do not read it critically—the way Lenin encouraged us to do, the way the Barnes group discourages us from doing.
The SWP reading list does not summarize or explain its sixth and last item, Trotsky's 1923 “Letter to Claude McKay,” a Black intellectual who had been an observer at the fourth congress. In it Trotsky said that revolutionary work among Blacks “is not to be carried out in a spirit of Negro chauvinism, which would then merely form a counterpart of white chauvinism—but in a spirit of solidarity of all exploited without consideration of color.” [15]
Perhaps it was included to show that in 1923 Trotsky had not yet recognized the national aspects of the Black struggle. If that was the reason, it should simultaneously have been noted that in this respect Trotsky was acting in accord with the Comintern line of that time.
In 1928 the now Stalinized Comintern changed its position on U.S. Blacks and pronounced them an oppressed nation, but they did it in a typically bureaucratic and ultimatistic way that made a caricature of Lenin's position.
After that, Trotsky stopped “carrying on” the previous Comintern line, but he also rejected the new Comintern caricature, and began to mobilize support for Lenin's policy, which was different from both the original Comintern position and the distortion introduced in 1928.
Trotsky didn't merely continue the Comintern's work in the 1930s—he revived Lenin's policy on U.S. Blacks and helped to make it part of the program of the SWP and the FI, which it had never been in either the Leninist Comintern or the Stalinized Comintern.
I maintain that it is necessary to recognize this fact, not in order to defend Trotsky's personal stature, but because the full value and richness of the SWP's combined revolution policy get lost or downgraded if you think it is only a continuation of the Comintern's policy.
Trotsky added new things, and after him the SWP did too. Jack Barnes, in the days before he lost confidence in the future of the SWP except as part of the Castroist current, was not afraid to give credit publicly to Trotsky for adding to Lenin. In a political report to the SWP National Committee in February 1970, Barnes said:
What Trotsky began grappling with, what he saw ... in the Black struggles in the United States was a national struggle with characteristics that Lenin had not dealt with....
Trotsky—in his discussions with his American comrades...—stressed the lessons learned from the Bolsheviks on the national question, but also added some things that were new ... [16]
9. New International, Fall 1983, p. 58.
10. Collected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 24-5 and 89.
11.Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 275-6.
12.Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 148.
13. The Second Congress of the Communist International, New Park Publications, 1977, Vol. 1, p.180.
14. James P. Cannon, quoted in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, pp. 10-11.
15. Reprinted in Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination, p. 81.
16. Towards an American Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1971, pp. 198-9.
by the Editorial Board, Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, December 1984
Larry Stewart, of Newark, New Jersey, and a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, died of cancer on November 16 at the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York. He was sixty-three years old, and had been actively engaged in building the revolutionary Marxist, labor, and Black movements since he was eighteen.
His death marks a real loss for those movements. His sober judgment and advice, his rich experience under all kinds of conditions, and his militant example will be sadly missed at a time when the workers and their allies need leadership more than ever before.
Larry Stewart was born to a poor Black working-class family in Milford, Connecticut, and spent part of his youth in foster and orphan homes. His formal education had to stop at high school for economic reasons. In 1939 he joined the Socialist Workers Party in New Haven, after which he moved to Newark because it was easier to find a factory job there. He remained in Newark for the rest of his life except during World War II, when he became a merchant seaman before being drafted into the army.
Among the jobs he held in the following years were steel worker, laborer, electrical worker, and truck driver. He belonged at different times to both CIO, AFL, and independent unions, including the United Steelworkers, United Electrical Workers, and Teamsters. He also experienced plenty of unemployment when the economy turned down after the war, and was on strike several times.
In 1941 he was a leading activist in the Newark contingent of the March on Washington Movement, an all-Black group that fought against racism in industry and the armed forces. After the war he was active in the NAACP and local committees against police brutality, and he defended the Black community against repression during the so-called Newark “riot” of 1967. He also tried to help build the National Black Independent Political Party in New Jersey when it was organized in 1981.
Although Stewart was not a national leader of the SWP, his party had high esteem for his many contributions to party building. It valued his best proletarian traits—his steadfastness, his personification of the party's revolutionary continuity, his modesty, and his sense of proportion. He served several times on the executive committee of the Newark branch and as its delegate to national conventions. He ran for Congress and other local posts on the SWP ticket in New Jersey, represented the party in other campaigns, and, when no one else would do it, wrote articles he thought were needed in the party press.
In 1976 the delegates to the SWP's national convention elected him to the four-member Control Commission, which investigates charges of violations of party discipline. At that time the tradition still existed that only the most responsible, fair, and independent-minded members in the party should be put on the Control Commission. He was reelected to this post at the 1977 convention, and served on it for another two years. He did this job as he did everything else—with concern for the interests of both his party and his comrades, including those who had made mistakes.
Stewart was an enthusiastic supporter of the party's decision in 1978 to send most of its members into industry, but he became troubled by the mechanical and schematic way in which it was implemented. By the time of the 1981 convention he felt that the party leadership was going off-course in its attitudes to the Castroist current in Cuba. He later found himself in sympathy with the positions taken by the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the National Committee.
Shortly after retiring from his job with a physical disability he suffered a heart attack in 1983. He was on a leave of absence from the Newark branch, but that didn't save him from the axe of the political purge in January 1984, when he was expelled, without a trial he could attend, on fraudulent charges that he was a “splitter” and “secret factionalist.”
Stewart then helped to organize the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and became a member of the editorial board of its journal, the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
We send condolences to Vera Stewart, his wife, and Paul, his son. We will never forget him and the cause to which he devoted most of his life. His example is a source of strength to us who knew him personally. We commend it to others who share his revolutionary proletarian goals.
The following are remarks delivered at the memorial meeting held for Larry Stewart in Maplewood, New Jersey, in December 1984. They were published in the January/February 1985 issue of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
On behalf of Vera and Paul Stewart and Joe Carroll I would like to welcome you here today and thank you for coming.
As you know, a funeral service for Larry was held nearly a month ago. It may seem odd that we are holding this gathering today in addition. But our purpose is quite different. This is a political meeting. We are here to say “thank you” to Larry for the forty-five years he gave to the workers' movement, to recall some of the things we learned from him, and, most importantly, to inspire those who remain to continue the work to which he gave over two-thirds of his life. Joe Hill's last words, “Don't waste time mourning. Organize,” have become something of a cliche in radical circles over the years, but that's really the spirit in which this meeting is being held.
Most of the speakers here today knew Larry Stewart for many years. By comparison to them I did not. In 1975 I was asked by the national office of the Socialist Workers Party to be part of the team sent from New York to reestablish its Newark branch, which had been disbanded quite a few years earlier. Larry had remained in Newark as an at-large member of the party, and of course became a member of the branch as soon as it was chartered by the Political Committee. I first met Larry at that time.
He had not been idle during the years when there was no Newark branch, and he had quite a lot to report to the new branch when we got started. The branch was established to begin to take advantage of new opportunities opening up for the party in the working class and in the Black community, and Larry had been doing exactly that at the Nu-Car Carriers terminal in Port Newark, where he worked. He was working with a number of Black drivers, campaigning for Black rights and union democracy on the job. Their approach was to try to make the Brotherhood of Teamsters more responsive to its members' needs and more attentive to the special concerns of its Black members, while remaining completely loyal to the union. Let me tell anyone who isn't sure—Larry Stewart was one of the strongest believers in trade unionism I ever met. He believed that the unions—not just the Teamsters, but all the unions—needed a lot of changing, but that without the unions working people had nothing to defend their rights and standard of living.
One of the first decisions the new branch made was to nominate Larry Stewart as the 1976 SWP candidate for the House of Representatives in the Tenth District. I served as his campaign treasurer. We saw his campaign as a way to bring the Nu-Car drivers closer to the party and to help them make the connection between the work they were doing as Blacks and trade unionists with the whole political situation. Furthermore, we didn't think it was right that a city composed primarily of Black and Hispanic workers should be represented in Congress by a white lawyer, Peter Rodino. Rodino had gained a false reputation during the Watergate hearings as a campaigner for civil liberties and “clean government,” and he was the most prominent New Jersey politician on the national scene. What an opportunity for the party, the chance to run a Black trade unionist against Peter Rodino!
However, we found out that Larry Stewart was a whole lot more than simply a “Black trade unionist.” He not only knew what was wrong in capitalist society, not only had some good ideas about how to fix what was wrong in capitalist society, but he could explain what was wrong and what should be done to fix it in language that people could understand. And let me tell you, when Larry Stewart spoke, his audience paid attention. His speeches weren't a lot of slogans strung together, nor were they classroom lectures on political science. They were explanations of scientific socialist theory illustrated by the experiences of the drivers of Teamsters Local 560.
One of our campaign events in the summer of 1976 was a Sunday afternoon backyard social at the home of Ford and Betty Sheppard. Some of you will remember that. It was scheduled so that the Nu-Car drivers could attend and meet the comrades of the SWP, talk about politics, and have a good time. In the course of the afternoon, Larry found himself in a conversation with some of the drivers on the sun porch, and he started making a few points. And a few more. And a few more. The next thing any of us knew the whole room became hushed, sort of like that E.F. Hutton commercial on TV—“When E.F. Hutton talks, everybody listens.” Larry had gotten into a stem-winding socialist speech—no prepared text, no notes or anything—but let me tell you a lot of prepared speeches don't compare to that one. I never heard Eugene V. Debs or other pioneer socialists speak, but I was thinking it must have been like this. He wasn't taking examples from the newspapers or from TV or from books—though there's nothing wrong with that. He was illustrating his points with examples from workers' lives.
We talk a lot about the working people, and their interests and concerns. Larry never forgot that's two words. He never forgot that the “people” part is just as important, and that we're not talking about statistical or philosophical concepts. We're talking about people who have many different concerns. Larry's approach was to talk to people on that basis, and to be known not only as a socialist, with particular ideas, but as a person, too, and he wanted to work with others as people, and not just as workers, Blacks, or whatever. He spoke to the concerns that people have, not simply about how much money they earned or the conditions on the job, but also other things: What are your concerns for your children? What are your concerns for your children's future? What is it like to drive a dangerously substandard truck?
Larry was not a young man even then, and he knew that his energy level was not that of a 26-year-old. He was completely conscious of the need to educate and develop a new generation of revolutionary leaders, and I must admit that I did not appreciate this side of Larry until quite recently. I won't discuss the political disagreements which led me to resign from the SWP in 1979; I will only say that in the last half-year of Larry's life I got a lot of new insights from discussions I had with him, about how to do political work in the working class, the importance of the continuity of the revolutionary party, and the enduring foundation that Marxist theory represents as opposed to trends of the moment. And make no mistake: though Larry had been expelled from the SWP he had not given up in his campaign for reinstatement. I asked him if he thought there was anything to gain by this, and this was his response: he said, even if he and those who thought as he did could convince no one it was a matter of principle not to give up on the SWP. Even if a new party at some point had to be built, it could not be built except on a solid programmatic foundation, which could only come from a thorough discussion and debate on the political issues facing the SWP. He never at any time considered the SWP anything but the revolutionary workers' party of the United States. As an educator, Larry will be sorely missed indeed. He had a lot left to give us.
I want to thank everyone for coming here today, for remembering Larry Stewart. I hope that we can go out of here and continue the work for a better society that Larry Stewart fought so long and so hard to achieve.
In early 1984 the Fourth Internationalist Tendency was formed in response to a call, reproduced here, that was signed by Naomi Allen, George Breitman, and George Saunders.
Allen and Saunders—who joined the SWP as student radicals in the 1960s—had worked closely with Breitman at Pathfinder Press, especially in the preparation of the writings of Leon Trotsky. Among other accomplishments, Allen was responsible for editing the three-volume collection of Trotsky's writings of 1923-29, Challenge of the Left Opposition. Saunders has an international reputation as one of the foremost translators of writings by Soviet dissidents.
After the first wave of expulsions in the spring and summer of 1983, an organization of those driven out of the SWP was formed: Socialist Action. There were immediate conflicts, however, over the question of how the new group should relate to the SWP, whether energies should be focused on the political struggle against “Barnesism” or the effort to quickly build a new party to replace the SWP There were also sharp differences regarding the level of centralization appropriate in the new organization, how disagreements should be handled, etc. By the end of 1983, Frank Lovell and Steve Bloom left SA and joined together with some of the new expellees to form the Fourth Internationalist Tendency. The founding platform of the FIT and other relevant material can be found in Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rebuilding the Revolutionary Party.
Unfortunately, the SWP leadership felt sufficiently insecure that it established a policy banning the expelled members from SWP forums and bookstores—as recounted in the letter by Dorothea Breitman, who had been in the Trotskyist movement since the mid-1930s when she joined the Spartacus Youth League. Her poignant letter highlights the FIT commitment to taking seriously the need to reach out to members of the SWP who were mistakenly following the Barnes leadership. Another letter in this section is from Tom Barrett, who joined the Young Socialist Alliance in the late 1960s, then—like many others—left the SWP “for personal reasons” in the late 1970s. His conclusion, finally, was that there had been underlying political reasons for his resignation and that there were important political reasons for rejoining the Trotskyist movement—this time as a member of the FIT.
New York, N.Y
January 17, 1984
To: United Secretariat, Fourth International
Dear Comrades:
(1) The IEC's May 1982 meeting opened a written pre-World Congress discussion in which members as well as leaders of the sections and fraternal parties could participate (IIDB, Volume XVIII, #3, June 1982). A month later, at the initiative of Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell of the Fourth Internationalist Caucus in the National Committee, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) informed the party leadership that they were “announcing the formation of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in order to be able to participate collectively in the international discussion and to advance our views on disputed international questions in an organized and responsible way. In accord with the norms of democratic centralism, we intend to consult in the preparation of documents for the International Internal Discussion Bulletin.” The same statement briefly listed the political basis for the collaboration of the eighteen as an ideological tendency (already published documents on Cuba, Leninism, Iran, and Poland) and asked the SWP leadership to circulate the s